by Simon Archer
Shikun turned us around to see the center of the crater where Karkaros stood, still laughing triumphantly. The stone beneath him cracked, sending twisted lines of fissured rock outward. A great clawed hand broke out of the ground next to Karkaros, flinging shards around him like meteors, some of them flying towards the houses on the walls. The hand dripped with molten lava, draining onto the volcano floor as it cooled back to heated rock. Then the claw slapped the earth as it dug deep into it, pulling up the mighty body of the great creature. The shell of stone that coated it split and fell from its body with every movement, every flexed muscle, as it moved for the first time in ages.
Another clawed hand burst forth, and with it, a mighty dragon’s head rose from the lava pool left in the wake of the destroyed arena. The great dragon’s body lifted from the volcano’s depths, the molten rock pouring off it to reveal a pair of wings cocooned in volcanic rock. The hardened lava ruptured as they unfurled, its wings stretching out to almost the width of the entire volcano. Its back legs finally stepped out of the pool of lava as it shook off the remaining molten stone, showing its blue and grey patterned scaley hide in its full glory. Tharnox rolled its shoulders as it woke itself up, yawning a breath of heat that rippled the air in front of him a good fifteen feet.
“I think this is cheating,” I said to Shikun to try to lift up our spirits. “You shouldn’t allow pets into a sacred rite of combat.”
“Maybe you’re only allowed pets into the arena,” Shikun said, forcing a giggle in spite of the circumstances. “Maybe they think you’re my pet.” She was trying to keep up the appearance of happy, even now.
“You know, that’s hurtful,” I said to her jokingly. “I take away your Wingless curse, and this is how you thank me?”
“We’ve yet to see if that actually worked,” Shikun said with a little poison in her voice, keeping her eyes on the giant dragon. She wasn’t angry at me, but I felt that she could sense my ritual was fake.
After the immense beast settled, Karkaros flew up to the top of Tharnox’s head, placing himself next to one of the beast’s giant horns. He stuck a blade into Tharnox’s skin, using it to hold himself steady, and pointed with the other blade at us. The draconian let out another roar from his throat, and Tharnox unleashed a kaiju screech in response that rang in my ears like it shouted right into both of them.
“That’s our cue to hoof it!” I told Shikun. She bolted into the air, flying above the volcano. She climbed higher as she flew, creating as much distance between them and us as she possibly could.
I surveyed the sky around the volcano. With all of the crazy storm winds surrounding the mountainside, it looked like the only stable airspace was the heated air above the volcano. While it was a fair amount of space to fly in, there wasn’t a whole lot to work with besides the volcano itself. We couldn’t lose them in the mountains, for example, and we had no consistent long-range attacks beside Shikun’s fire. Who knows how well that’d do against Tharnox’s body, considering the thing was lounging in molten lava?
If only I had Reggie’s gun. Of course, that’d probably just piss Tharnox off at best.
From what I could tell, Tharnox took orders from Karkaros. Which meant if I could get in close to him, I could distract Karkaros while Shikun dealt with Tharnox. Or, Shikun could separate Karkaros from Tharnox, and I could deal with Tharnox myself. Either way, we had to separate them if we wanted to win.
Both plans required me to hold on to a flying thing for dear life. Oh, joy.
The worst part about this entire situation? If we did any permanent damage, it means we couldn’t use them in the upcoming fight against the drones, so we had to win by subduing them and forcing these die-hard battle-hardened warriors to forfeit the challenge. That seemed especially daunting when I considered that Karkaros personally volunteered for this battle when he could have sent any other warrior to participate in the deathmatch. That meant he was willing to die to protect his people from the ‘Wingless’ curse.
Oh, I was going to need to get blackout drunk after this one.
And, to top it all off, this dragon was probably completely immune to Libritas’ Branding, no matter how hot she got--
Wait, that gave me an idea. How much control did Libritas have over her temperature? Could Libritas, instead of glowing hotter, do the opposite and keep growing colder?
“I’ve never tried it,” Libritas told me. “More often than not, the heated strike is sufficient for most foes. I’d never even considered having to turn cold. Plus, Shikun was branded with powers similar to mine. Would that not work on Karkaros?”
“That’s the magical mind-bending brand, and I don’t plan to use that on either of them,” I told her. “The heated brand didn’t work on the owlbear’s feathers, so I’m sure that this super-draconian will ignore it, too. But I bet, even if he could warm himself up in the cold, neither of them would like an icy jab to the ribs. Can you whip me up a freeze?”
“I can certainly try,” Libritas said, and I instantly felt her handle chill to my touch. Maybe we could win this, after all.
Our moment of planning was up as Tharnox’s wings drew him upwards, slowly raising him from the volcano. Karkaros had his eyes locked onto us, taking care to keep us in the line of sight at all times.
Shikun kept backing up towards the swirling winds that kept us caged inside this fight. “Do you have any ideas, William?”
“I’ll tell you as soon as I have a good one,” I said to her. “For now, we just need to separate the two of them somehow. If we can take one of them out of the picture, we can team up on the other.”
“Okay,” Shikun said. She had stifled as much of the dread in her voice as she could, but it still shook with fear. “Which one do you want?”
“I’ll take the dragon,” I told her. “You just keep Karkaros away from it, so he can’t give it orders.”
“Please don’t die, William.” Shikun charged towards the gargantuan drake as it rose toward us. “I can’t do this alone.”
“I haven’t, yet,” I said as I prepared to be dropped like a stealth bomber’s payload.
Shikun and I sped towards the dynamic dragon duo, my draconian flyer keeping her flight pattern erratic and evasive. Karkaros pulled a deep breath of air in, preparing to let out a blast of volcanic ash like before. Shikun spun in the air, with me flipping around her like a windsock. When Karkaros’s mouth burst with his deadly ashen breath, Shikun dropped me beneath the blast, and I rolled onto the dragon’s head, nearly sliding off the side of its wide snout.
Shikun managed to circle around the ash cloud, and as she went, she pulled her club out from behind her and slammed it against Karkaros’s stomach. The impact was like a thunderbolt echoing across the arena. At the same time, I stuck the honeysteel blade into Tharnox’s head. Though the sword didn’t do much real damage to the massive beast, it served as a grip for me to swing down, aiming Libritas’ newly frozen Brand at Tharnox’s right eye.
As I thrust the Brand into the giant fleshy marble, Tharnox wretched and squirmed, bumping Karkaros up just as Shikun made contact with the club, tearing his grip free from his sword handle as she slammed him into the air. Though the Great Dragon caught his ascent with flared wings, Shikun didn’t give him a chance to get back to his perch, pushing him as far away as she could with a flurry of swings.
Meanwhile, Tharnox continued to thrash in, forcing me to hold on for dear life. He spewed molten magma from his mouth as he squirmed, throwing drops of hot death in every direction. The two clashing draconians flew off from my sight, clashing their oversized weapons.
Good news: The Cold Brand is a smashing success. Bad news: Holding on for dear life was going to be a pattern in this battle.
One of Tharnox’s head thrashes threw me into the air, my fingers slipping free from my sword’s hilt save for my thumb and leaving me suspended in nothing. I swung around a few times before landing down, hopefully with all of my bones and sockets intact. With all the thrashing, it took me a while t
o be able to stand, but I finally found a small window where Tharnox wasn’t flailing about.
As I got to my feet, I took the opportunity to stick Libritas into Tharnox’s head again, giving me a better sense of balance. Tharnox groaned as the cold pierced into it, and like a kid’s tongue to a frozen sign pole, I wasn’t going anywhere. I cinched my grip on my honeysteel weapon, ripped it free, then jammed it down again, using both of my weapons to crawl over to the dragon’s other eye. My only saving grace was that Tharnox was so immense that he really couldn’t reach the top of his head well, especially in flight, his giant claws swinging over my head as I ducked underneath them.
Clumsy, he might have been, but it turned out that the dragon wasn’t stupid. Just then, the colossal dragon flipped itself over, flying upside down. Fortunately, I cinched down on the grips on my weapons, and all those hours of free climbing paid off. I fell up to a handstand over my weapons, still holding fast to the beast. Now jabbing upwards, I stuck each weapon into the thick hide as I kept inching over to my destination.
You know how, when you work out, and you complain about doing pull-ups, and your trainer tells you that when you’re hanging on the edge of a cliff, you’re going to want to be able to do at least one more? Well, I found my one pull-up more as I hung below Tharnox’s eye, lifting myself with one arm to reach the eye with Libritas in the other. The Brand connected, and the icy touch of the Brand froze the liquids in its eye as the dragon snapped the lid closed. As the mighty dragon roared and thrashed in pain, I stuck Libritas into the first spot in Tharnox’s hide that I could, desperately trying to keep my grip.
The huge beast was blind now, which was great, except now it was heading straight for the storm winds just outside the volcano airspace. And if I were having trouble holding on before, I’d be falling to my death out there in a second. I tried to turn down Libritas’ temperature to make her even colder, thinking of a frozen tundra as I did. Maybe it would turn in the direction of the pain, and we could keep inside the safer space. Even when ice began to form around Libritas’ Brand, the lumbering dragon kept flying towards the deadly winds. If I didn’t act now, I was very dead.
I then had one of the stupidest ideas I’ve ever thought up, but if it worked, I’d live. If it didn’t, I was dead either way.
Quickly crawling with my sword and Brand, I noodled my way up to the tip of Tharnox’s snout, just reaching one of his nostrils. The dragon kept barrelling blindly towards my doom, and I positioned my blade just over the lip of the dragon, right next to its sword-like teeth. And that wasn’t even the stupid part, yet.
When Tharnox roared in pain again, I flipped under the teeth like a reverse-pole-vault and stuck Libritas to the inside of the dragon’s mouth. The frozen-pole-tongue trick worked even better with the softer tissues inside Tharnox’s mouth. Then, in one smooth motion, I took out the sword and stuck it against Tharnox’s inner gums, both my Brand and my sword keeping me pinned to the roof of the mouth.
Yeah, like I said, very stupid. But I was desperate. Now all I had to do was survive and come up with a better plan.
Easy, right?
Inside the mouth, I was safe from the chaotic winds battering me off of the side of the dragon. But that created a whole new host of obvious problems, like trying not to get eaten. The slimy ridges of the dragon’s gums did not make for good footholds. My only rest was on my sword, which I found a way to position below me like I was Batman on a gargoyle. With only the light coming from Tharnox’s open mouth to see, I kept my balance and waited for a better plan than this to come to me.
Already, I could feel the mountain’s storm winds trying to break into Tharnox’s mouth, churning and turning inside of him as he flew through the mountains. With my sword perch, I was perfectly safe from it, but I noticed a new problem as I sat there: Tharnox’s tongue.
The blob of muscle and flesh stretched out and pressed against the roof of the mouth as it felt around for me. I must have been like that irritating bit of potato chip that broke off and stuck in your gums. When the tongue slid towards me, I jabbed at it with Libritas, sending it reeling back. It knew where I was now and frantically slobbered over me, trying to dislodge me from my spot. At every meaty stab, Libritas was there to keep it from reaching me, covering the tongue in little circles of frostbite.
The tongue rested for a moment, and that gave me the opportunity to see a glimpse out of the dragon’s mouth and the mountain it hurtled towards. That definitely wasn’t good. I stuck Libritas to Tharnox’s mouth to give myself as much of an anchor as possible for when it hit.
As it turned out, it was barely enough. With a booming jolt, Tharnox crashed against the side of the peak, throwing me around wildly. Although I used every ounce of strength I had in my hands, the one holding the sword gave way, and I slapped against every part of Tharnox’s mouth within my range of motion while still attached to Libritas.
I screamed as my fingers burned in the intense heat Libritas gave off, searing my hands to her handle. Even if I wanted to let go, which I didn’t, it felt like my skin had practically melted to Libritas’ metal. If I weren’t in so much pain, I’d have thanked her for saving me.
“You’re welcome, William,” she cooed in my ear. “We’re not out of this yet. Hold on!”
Tharnox tumbled downward, lifting me up to the top of the mouth. In the state of freefall, I grabbed my sword from its beefy pedestal, tore it free, then swung it into the nearest place I could reach. The blade squelched as I drove it as far down as I could.
All the good that did. I still found both the sword and Libritas dislodging from their spots as I landed directly onto the tongue, bouncing off of its surprisingly spongy form. As I rolled towards the front of the mouth, I slammed against the bottom jaw before the top closed down, encasing me in complete darkness.
Neither the tongue, the mouth, or the rest of Tharnox seemed to move. I took the time to catch my breath, stretch, revel in the sweet moment of not dying. But a moment of not dying was a moment for preparing. So, I got back up and lit Libritas’ Brand so that I could see inside the living cave I found myself in.
I could feel myself cooking inside the dragon’s mouth, it was like a sauna in overdrive in here, and I knew that I couldn’t stick around here for much longer. There had to be a way out. I could wake the dragon back up, but that would have undone several aching-muscles-worth of work I put into knocking the thing out. That would be my emergency option if I were about to die.
“You got any ideas, Lib?” I asked her, probing for more options.
“Our choices do seem limited,” Libritas said. “In any other creature, you could try to… move through its digestive system and escape that way. But the dragon’s magma would kill you as you made it to the stomach.”
“You know, I just thought up another insane idea,” I said to her, scratching my chin. “You’re not going to like it, though.”
“I already know, and yes, I don’t like it,” Libritas said, annoyed the situation called for such drastic measures. “But things are desperate. We’ll have to try something.”
“At the very least, it’ll make the air here more livable.”
With that, I placed Libritas down upon the tongue. Drawing on all of my willpower, I focused on the coldest thing I could think of, the deepest parts of space, and channeled it into Libritas. As she dimmed her light, the mouth became black as pitch. The chill bit my nose, and I could hear the popping and cracking of ice forming. I put on the pressure, focusing on Tharnox’s stomach as I imagined a frozen hand reaching down, dipping into the lava itself and turning it back to stone. If this was going to have any chance of working and not just getting me drowned in hot molten rock, I had to freeze all of it and force it to try to reignite its own heat at the nearest intense source: the draconian’s volcano. If that worked, I could then move on to the second part of the plan.
The dragon opened its mouth as it tried to expel all of the cold air out of itself, flooding light back in. The beast’s breath was
nasty, like rotten eggs and dirt mixed together, brushing through my hair as it passed me by. The one thing it wasn’t, though, was scalding hot like it was being cooked by lava. The tongue in front of me lay flat, a solid ice sculpture in the shape of itself.
Libritas’ Cold Branding found its way down to Tharnox’s stomach. Finally, some good news.
As soon as Tharnox stopped exhaling, the cold winds of the Solanna mountains tore through, cooling the already cold mouth to deadly freezing. I brought Libritas close to me to keep me warm as her shaft glowed.
This all must have roused the dragon to some degree. It picked up its head, lifting me with it, and I peered between the open teeth and looked out at the snowy valley we found ourselves in. It turned its head around, looking back to where we both had just come from. I could see the avalanche of snow and rock left behind from our tumble into the mountainside.
Like an interactive Imax movie, I watched as the beast began to move out, and that’s when I did my best to situate myself for flight. Tharnox thumped its wings down, kicking up the snow around us as it slowly rose up. Tharnox’s breathing was heavy and labored as it climbed into the air. I had blinded it, so it could only be traveling by instinct and feeling at this point, moving slowly to avoid crashing again.
The snow whipping around blurred most of my vision, but I was still able to pick out the silver shine of Shikun’s wings as she clashed with Karkaros. When Tharnox finally breached the volcano airspace and left the terrible winds behind, I saw more clearly how Karkaros’s armor had been nearly stripped to bare as Shikun slammed her club down on top of his head, throwing him far below before he caught himself with his wings. With the sound of the dragon’s return, Shikun hovered in the air and looked at Tharnox, distracted as she searched for me. Karkaros took the opportunity to rise up from underneath and plunge his sword upward at her. She snapped back to her enemy, barely catching the flat of the blade against her club as she deflected it.