by Cara Violet
“What will do?”
“What do you mean, what will that do? It will distract them so I can blast this lovely mass of rock here and send them down this lovely cave. See?”
Cuki nodded and Dersji ran from him.
The Daem-Raal arrived: Cuki could barely move the rock, but bravely pushed and made a small avalanche of falling pebbles. That got the attention of his comrades. Their orange eyes were more than angry and unexpectedly they were looking at him like prey.
“Der—” Cuki gulped, let go of the rock and ran as quickly as he could. He heard from behind him a loud bang and cries from the Daem-Raal. One by one, they fell through the hole Dersji had created. “Ya—ow!” Cuki couldn’t finish his cheer—a Daem-Raal collided into him and sent them both down the mountain.
Almost on cue, Kaianan began to feel the braking pace of the moment. She had been here already. She knew where this was going, to the seconds before she left her Gorgon body to meet Boku Jove in the Euclidean Vector. This time she was prepared. The words split through her ears, both sets, Gorgon and preform alike: By the stroke of bright light the sacrifice will be revealed.
She gritted her teeth but kept her feet. Everything about the next few minutes held uncertainty, but somehow, she held a self-confidence—it was time to be the sacrifice her parents wanted her to be. It was time to die. She raced for the platform.
Arlise seized Adrel before she fell down the mountain. He recognised Caidus and an injured girl further away, heading in the opposite direction. And further from them, Dersji was piling Daem-Raal into a hole of some sort.
“Quickly,” Arlise said, shoving Adrel forward onto Rook Mountain and racing to the platform. He ran to the top with her behind him and somehow Dersji was there, tackling Levon, and Gorgon Kaianan was slashing her blade at Humkar, all the while the Daem-Raal were chanting and staring at the middle of the platform, toward the fighting. What was going on?
Dersji had noticed Arlise appear to the left of him with—wait—who was that? The Shiek girl? Then after a back-and-forth blade show with the Sprite, something sparked underneath his feet. Determined not to be blown up, Dersji leapt up and ‘ported to higher ground to get a better line of sight.
“If you’re trying to win this on your own, Liege Brikin, you’re either extraordinarily brave or exceedingly foolish.” Levon said up to him.
“It’s noteworthy how often those two traits coincide,” Dersji said, flipping himself onto another rock as Levon darted after him.
However, as soon as he placed one foot on the rock an ear-splitting noise sounded and Dersji fell forward in pain, slipping down the boulder. His chest tightened when he hit the rock surface and he wheezed out in discomfort. Then his hands slapped his ears in anguish—what was this noise? Through squinting eyes, he turned back to the sparks in the middle of the platform. A streaking white light sprayed out of the rock floor, up into the sky.
Déjà vu. Kaianan had made it halfway up the mountain when the noise hit. She increased her pace, running past the ill-fated Daem-Raal, no longer chanting but curled up in feeble balls. She saw the light streaming up to the sky when she arrived to the platform. Surrounding the light were Humkar and Dersji and Levon and—her—her in ten-foot, serpent headed, Gorgon form.
But it was what stood inside the light that halted her. She could make out the silhouette of a man. He was draped in beige robes, and he was old. Yes, very old. White hair, white beard … then he revolved on the spot and his blue eyes graced her—
“Boku Jove!” Kaianan shouted and drew her blade to remove a few half-standing Daem-Raal from around her feet. “Just stay down.”
“Kaianan. You’re here,” he said.
“Boku Jove, what are you doing? Why are you here?”
“I have meddled, and I should not have: I have failed. Giliou the Wise will forsake my erroneous ways. It is now indeed up to you, my Queen. You must make a choice, Kaianan.”
“What are you talking about? Get away from that light!”
“Kaianan, listen to me, before the portal opens,” he said panting.
Kaianan gulped. If it wasn’t for all the half-conscious bodies on the ground wriggling around in agony from the piercing sound, she would have deserted this place and left with Chituma. Why didn’t she? Was this being brave or downright foolish? And why was Boku Jove here, in a blinding artificial light? “What portal?” she finally said.
“Listen! Make a choice, who do you want to be, Gorgon or Felrin?”
“What?”
“Choose, I said! Make a choice. Gorgon or Felrin?”
Her mind reeled. A choice? Gorgon or Felrin; was that what she was limited to? What was he talking about? Surely there was more to her? And why did this just suddenly seem so terrible to her? To make such a choice.
“Make up your mind Kaianan; it is now or never!”
In that split moment, she heard a swish of air as an arrow flew past her. Then Boku Jove was clutching his stomach, falling to his knees.
“NO! Boku Jove!” she screamed, staring at the arrow that was embedded deep in his abdomen. She looked over her shoulder to Levon’s smiling face on the ground as he collapsed his head against his bow.
The foreseer’s body began disintegrating into the light.
“For you, my Queen,” he said, and the sky poured another streaming white beam straight through him. The white sparks dispersed through his body and, as he disappeared with a grin, the noise finally subsided.
Kaianan kept shielding her eyes to the light, not sure what the holom was happening, and before the silence could settle, deformed, barely humanoid creatures emerged, flying from the thunderous whirl of smoke that rose from the light.
Her eyes bulged.
The half-dead, dislocated souls screamed into the Croone ether and the planet’s life instantly withered. Heart racing, Kaianan could see their torn skin, and rotting flesh. Half-zombie, half-preform, she saw the humanoid side of one of them spit through the Siliou.
“The Pernicious … the slaves of holom,” she heard a crumpled voice say, below her. She glanced down to Dersji, who, as the trail of dirt behind him indicated, had crawled his way to her. Then Kaianan’s preform body unexpectedly dropped to join him.
“They’re poisoning the damned Siliou,” Dersji said, easing his fingers in and out with difficulty. “They are bloody paralysing us.”
As if it couldn’t get worse, she was stuck next to Dersji in complete immobility. She could turn her eyes though, and trying to settle her disbelief, went searching for—wait—what was that? Her Gorgon body remain on its tail, slithering toward the Pernicious, and throwing her blade out at them, aggressively attacking.
“No, I’m not paralysed.” She said to Dersji. “Not I: look.” The Pernicious circled the towering Gorgon Queen and Kaianan noticed the Queen held the Silver Rapier, just like the one in her—preform Kaianan’s—hand. There were now two Rapiers.
The Pernicious drew close to the Gorgon Queen, close enough that, one by one, her serpents’ tiny fangs lashed out to pierce the flying, rotting creatures. Within a few moments, she had sliced several of them in half.
“She’s winning,” Kaianan said to herself. I’m winning, she thought. The light blinded her again. She saw the portal opening—is it really opened? Holom’s Door? She squirmed in the dirt and took no comfort knowing that laying hopelessly next to her was Dersji Brikin.
“Boku Jove was the sacrifice?” she muttered, trying to put it altogether. “How can that be?”
“You’re quick today,” he said.
“But he is the foreseer? Giliou the Wise wouldn’t have placed him here to be sacrificed?”
Dersji looked at her sternly. “Everything is predetermined, Kaianan.”
“You’re wrong. We have a choice, it’s me who decides; he chose this, and my parents had chosen me.”
“Then Boku Jove has decided,” he whispered, assertively.
“Because I didn’t save someone? Or am I meant to save him? Dersji, he tol
d me I had to save lives!”
“Aye, but you already did, both your own.”
Kaianan creased her forehead in confusion. Saved her own? How?
He mulled over her expression. “You journeyed Kaianan, you had decisions to make to get you to this moment. You have arrived and both your bodies made it. You saved yourself by living—”
A loud vicious roar echo around them. Kaianan watched Dersji’s face pale.
“I think we have a problem,” he said.
“What problem?”
“I think the Defeated King is angry.”
“What are you talking about?! He’s dead!”
“Your Gorgon form should be ready to take the beast down. He’s been waiting a thousand years to get out. By the Sarinese Gods the Felrin have really screwed this one up …”
Dersji kept talking, Kaianan, one, didn’t believe him, and two, had stopped listening; she felt paralysed—yet a deeper pain was building inside her, she looked down to her chest and saw the blood drip from under her orchid chestplate. She gently pushed one hand inside her armour, against her chest, and cupped a handful of blood.
“How could this be?” she stared at the dark liquid staining her palm as she brought it back out in front of her, trying not to take Dersji’s shocked face and gaping jaw as any type of validation that she had a hole in her chest and was dying.
Sweat dripped down her green scaled skin and Gorgon Kaianan was unsure how long she could keep fighting the airborne, spitting Pernicious. Attack after attack she swung her blade against the feral flying zombie creatures until she’d killed over a dozen.
The Pernicious had stopped coming at her. A deafening, beastly roar, echoed again across the landscape as they backed away. Kaianan shifted her huge Gorgon tail around.
Fiery, intermittent red sparks danced through the foundation of the bright portal, coming up and out of the light from the actual rock itself. As the red sparks kept emerging, Rook Mountain was cast in an eerie shadow, polluting the dawn’s glow, and drawing down perpetual darkness.
The whole mountain began vibrating underneath her. Kaianan’s heart raced, she licked the salty sweat off her lips, and with perspiring hands, she grasped her Silver Rapier and demanded: “Show yourself!”
It felt like an eternity. Gradually, a colossal shadow rose up and out of the portal, surrounded by red flamed aura.
Kaianan could feel what it was. This was the Silkri aura, this was an aura that was sucking up nearly all the Siliou around them.
There was a second bestial growl and Kaianan blinked in fear. Pure adrenaline and trepidation filled her when the shadow became solid.
Directly in front of her was a huge, half-human, half-dragon creature, just risen from the smouldering chasm—an immense man-beast with elongated frills running from the base of his skull around his head in a protective shield to his neck.
Kaianan took in the spiky bulges surrounding his huge mouth and the hornlike spike jutting out between his nostrils. The black dragon form did not continue down through the rest of his body though. Instead, it merged into a bare grey torso with large forearm armour cuffs, and tight red pants and boots fit his lower half. If what Dersji was saying was true, this was a grey body of what was previously a King of the Necromancers. In his grey human-like hand he held his black blade, and the other hand reached his long-tapered dragon nose and softly felt the tip, wiping off sweat.
The scariest part was, she’d seen him before, in her nightmares, that had become more frequent and disturbing. The nightmares where he burned her alive.
He tilted his head to one side, staring at her with those familiar bright, flaming yellow eyes. The new night chill turned his sharp exhalations to smoke.
Anxiety had spread through her as she contemplated who was before her. Risen out of the chasm of the Croone portal was the Defeated King.
Chapter Thirty-One: Help at Hand
Trees and mountains graced the two escapees; landing behind the Forsda Palace. The backdrop centred on the levitating Felrin cruiser in the sky. Xandou leant Jahzara against the exterior door jamb of a closed storage room of the Palace. No movement from any location had his breath steadying.
“Are you okay?” He said to her.
“MAYA!”
A female voice sounded. He recognised it.
“Yasminx,” Jahzara breathed out confirming Xandou’s worst fears.
“Where?” he said inquisitively to her hapless eyes. “She’s here?”
“Heads up,” was all Jahzara got out.
It took one flash of the vengeful face of Metrix hunting for him from the north to realise there was no more compassion in her—she would kill him right now given the chance.
“Master Xandou!” A young boy called. But Metrix had him tightly in her grasp as she flung him up and sent her fist into him multiple times before releasing him to the ground.
When the battered faced boy she had just bashed in rolled sideways in the dirt to face Xandou, the Giliou growled. Young Ryar spat blood.
Why had he come back? And how did Metrix escape Ferak Jarryd?
When Metrix raised her chin, her steely blue eyes met Xandou’s as a complete stranger. Her mouth opened wide and it looked like she was screaming but no sound was audible. She fired up so brightly in her Giliou aura, burning sizeable blue sparks, Xandou thought she was possessed.
And when her palm swirled, and she sent her aura straight for him, he knew she was.
“Move!” Xandou kept yelling, sliding Jahzara away from the door and throwing his robe over her.
The door buckled under her beam, breaking off their hinges and falling apart in pieces to the exposed tiles. Bits of shrapnel flew about but they were unharmed by it. Beneath him, he heard Jahzara spluttering for air.
Hastily, he retrieved his soot covered robe from over her and checked over the gatekeeper.
“I am fine,” she responded, at last catching her breath through the settling dust.
Loud bellows of his name bounced around him, the malevolence with which it was being called was enough to make rise to his feet.
As the dust completely cleared, Xandou scowled. Metrix was stalking towards them with a maddening face of rage. He moved Jahzara further along the wall and unsheathed his blade.
Ferak’s hungry eyes levitated on the dark skinned Giliou woman pushing past the courtyard crowd before them.
“MAYA!” The heated woman said again.
Ferak felt his skin crawl. Was she like him? He sniffed the air to find out. Stale.
“Go after the others,” Maya hissed at him.
Ferak snorted, completely unbothered by the escape of not only Xandou and Jahzara but Metrix and Nake. The Giliou Guards failing about searching could clean up their own mess. He was thoroughly intrigued by the woman in front of him.
“Yasminx,” Maya began, her nose lifting in the air in disdain, “have you come to bear yourself to the consequences of your actions? Leaving your home and people in peril?”
“I come to negotiation on behalf of the Layos Manor.”
“Haha!” Maya said in a laughing scold.
“Let’s hear it,” Ferak piped up, taking a few steps down toward the Giliou.
“Let’s not,” Maya interrupted, “you’re obviously weak and feeble, its obvious General Tafen’s men and our Giliou our faltering.”
“Let her speak,” Ferak said again, more crisply, and Maya snarled at him.
“We’ve come to work out an arrangement,” she began, “for security—"
“Yasminx, you grovel to the Giliou for security?” Maya said surprisingly.
“I said I come for negotiations.”
Ferak flinched at her untruths. “About what?”
“About what the Layos people need to survive.”
“And what is that? What are the commands of General Tafen?” he pressed her, scouring her facial expression to locate a resemblance to anything about her that linked her to him.
“We may need Forsda.”
&
nbsp; The Queen lifted her skirt up in glee. “Oh, how you are acknowledging defeat. Layos at the hands of Forsda. Finally, General Tafen must be at his wit’s end! How fitting it is.”
Something wasn’t right. Ferak felt his Kan’Ging splitting through him.
“Are you going to answer us about General Tafen’s assertions or not?” Ferak said indignantly.
“Time’s up.” Yasminx slowly unsheathed her blade. “It seems we are all at our wits end.”
“What in Giliou’s name?” Maya said as another scream of Xandou’s name and a loud cascading blast went off.
“They’re after the Cruiser!” A guard’s voice ricocheted behind the Queen and Liege Jarryd. Streaming down the Palace steps, he bellowed again, “They’re taking Liege Jarryd’s Cruiser!”
Ferak was glowering beside the confused Maya; Yasminx held steady.
“Alas, Yasminx,” Ferak had begun, shaking his head, pulsing his aura in violent lavender sparks in a few metres in circumference, pitied by the time he could not share with her, “I’m needed elsewhere.”
“Guards, seize Yasminx, now,” Maya ordered whilst Liege Jarryd retreated inside the Palace and the Queen turned flippantly and trailed him.
The sweat poured from Desrix’s hair line, down his face to his neck, and it wasn’t just because he was throwing blows about against Nake. All in the name of trying to save Xandou, trying to reinstate their leader, their real King. The three of them had risked their lives for this and their Ryar was, unconscious on the ground below Metrix’s feet. The beautiful Palace he once called home was haunting with him with wickedness: something else lingering.
Something was happening. He could feel a force within the Siliou pressing against him. Was this the moment Boku Jove told him to be ready for? He had done everything the foreseer had asked of him. But Xandou wasn’t safe yet.