Summoner 6

by Eric Vall

  The other guy quickly learned from that mistake, however, and used his brain. He ran from the roosa, and I smirked confidently as we chased him down. The closer we kept to him, the less likely he would be able to get off a shot with his crossbow, not that it was a threat.

  I had actually considered letting him use it just so he could have a less embarrassing end, but I was tired and not feeling all that generous. Hired help or not, they worked for the true enemy of Mistral, and I wasn’t in the mood to hear excuses as to why.

  I backed the roosa off slightly with a gentle touch of my hand, and it heeded my order without question. We allowed the henchmen to get far enough away to shoot off his arrow and continue running without looking to see if it landed. My shoulders sagged, and I rolled my eyes as I crossed my arms.

  “Just take him out,” I sighed, bored with this fight.

  As the arrow drew nearer, the roosa reached a pincer up and plucked it out of the air, effectively snapping it in half. It then drew both pincers back, and I watched with a bit of shock and awe as the kalgori absorbed the venom in the roosa’s body before it sent them all catapulting through the air. Moments later, the majority of the venom ridden kalgori landed exactly on target, right in the back of the henchmen.

  If a hundred little knives in his back hadn’t killed him before he hit the ground, the venom certainly had. He twitched once in the dirt, but I had no doubt he was dead, and I left him as such as the kalgori returned to the roosa’s pincers. Then I rode the roosa back to where I left Varleth and the woman he’d been fighting.

  When he came into view and I saw the woman lying at his feet, I grinned.

  “See, you didn’t even need me,” I teased.

  “Need you?” Varleth repeated with a scowl. “You almost killed me.”

  I barked out a laugh. “What?”

  “You, riding by on that … what the hell is that?” he chuckled as he sheathed his sword at his side.

  “Well, you know the kalgori,” I said as I recalled them back into the crystal. “And this here is a roosa. Caught him in Ortych Sands over the summer.”

  “Impressive,” he whistled, “but I expect you to ride into every single battle like that now.”

  “No promises,” I snickered, but then I realized Erin and Ashla weren’t with Varleth.

  Had something happened?

  As though on cue, Ashla and Erin ran up seconds later with flustered expressions.

  “Well, don’t just stand there,” Ashla commanded, “there’s a whole other side of the volcano that needs to have the lava contained.

  “I thought that was what you were doing?” Varleth did a double take as they trotted beside him, and he cocked an eyebrow.

  “Looks like we’ve got a straggler,” Varleth growled as he pointed to the top of the volcano.

  I squinted my eyes as I looked for anything suspicious. How Varleth was able to see anything through the smoke was a wonder, but I did eventually spot what he was referring to.

  Just outside the smoke was a black hooded figure standing on the edge of the volcano.

  “What the … ?” I trailed off.

  “Think they’re friendly?” Erin asked hopefully.

  “Doubt it,” Varleth replied quietly. “There’s something … ”

  “Not right,” I finished for him. “Is he animandu?”

  “It’s possible,” Varleth shrugged, “though I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

  “I think animandu pass their darkness powers from one person to the next, whoever is in line for it receives it after the person before them dies,” I explained my theory, which seemed more sound now than it had while I was chasing the henchmen. “They don’t all seem to have the power Antoine did. I think Antoine was the one moving all of them around in the Narufey. One of the men we took down just ran from me, which would be incredibly stupid if he did have those dark teleportation powers. ”

  “That’s not a bad assumption,” Ashla agreed. “You should be on your guard, though.”

  “You two go put out the fires,” I told Ashla and Erin. “I’m going up there.”

  “How?” Varleth asked.

  “I’m going to fly, duh.” I smirked as I hopped off my roosa and recalled it back to its crystal.

  “Oh, now you want to use the pyrewyrm?” Varleth rolled his eyes, and I kicked dirt at him.

  “Nope,” I replied, and then I took two of my speed slugs back out of their crystals. Like I had in the Narufey, I attached one to the nape of my neck, and one to my lower back. My body tingled and vibrated with the amount of energy pumping through my veins as I took out my rhin dagger.

  “Do what you can to help Erin and Ashla,” I told Varleth. “I’ll be back.”

  I vaguely heard him call out to me again before I tossed my rhin dagger and warped to it with the super speed boost my slugs gave me. Again, I traversed the mountainside, only this time, my feet never touched the ground. As long as I kept my focus on where I was going, I simply had to throw my dagger in the direction I wanted to go, and I warped right to that spot. It was an interesting sensation, and definitely a technique I wanted to improve upon, because it was awesome.

  As I zipped past the ice wall Ashla and Erin had made, I noted it actually held better than expected. The surface ice wasn’t as thick as it had been, but that meant the lava was cooling and turning hard, which was a good thing.

  I only hoped they could save the other side the same way.

  The whole time I warped up to them, the hooded figure never moved. The stranger simply stood with their arms crossed, as though they had expected me to come to them.

  Well, I was nearly there.

  I stopped warping and landed about an arm’s length away from the stranger on the lip of the volcano. I expected there to be an altercation as soon as I touched the ground, or even before that. There was nothing, though. The stranger didn’t say or do anything. I tried to look under the hood that covered their face, but it was no use.

  Their gaze, it seemed, drifted to my hip, specifically where I kept my father’s dagger. Then they held out their hand, as though they were silently asking permission to see it. Maybe they weren’t in league with Miriam and the animandu. Maybe they weren’t hostile at all.

  But who the fuck were they?

  I didn’t know why, but I pulled out my father’s dagger and carefully placed it in the hands of the stranger. It was like I was compelled to do it. I had a weird feeling about them, like they were familiar, though I was certain I’d never met anyone this ominous in my life.

  “Where did you get this?” a sexy, feminine voice demanded.

  “It was my father’s,” I explained as I reeled back a little.

  “Hmmm … this changes everything,” the woman purred. Her black gloved fingers curled around the hilt, and she held it up to her face, as though she were examining every inch of it. She even ran the tip of her finger along the blade gently.

  Then she suddenly tossed it back to me, and I barely caught it without getting stabbed.

  “Hey, careful wi--”

  “You will live today, summoner,” she growled as she slinked closer to me and ran her fingers along my jaw, “but next time you won’t be so lucky.”

  I opened my mouth to ask what she meant, but she disappeared through a portal that appeared behind her. I reached out, but she faded from my grasp like smoke.

  She was gone.

  I shook my head as I tried to wrap my mind around what just happened, and I’d been so caught up in this weird interaction I’d completely forgotten about my friends down below until I heard Erin desperately screaming my name.

  “Gryff! It’s too much! We can’t stop it all!” she wailed, though it sounded faint from all the way up here.

  “Shit,” I gasped, and I used the vantage point I had atop the volcano to get a better look at what was going on below. The lava was significantly worse on the opposite side of where we’d been, though I couldn’t say why. The mountain itself wasn’t uneven that I
could tell, and there wasn’t anything provoking the lava one way or the other.

  I needed to do something.

  Ashla and Erin looked exhausted, and Varleth had been rendered more or less useless in this situation because he lacked the magic to support them. All he could do was give them any potions or tonics that were on him, but it looked as though those had already been expended, perhaps in their fight earlier while Ashla and I were inside of the volcano.

  Something. Anything. What could I do?

  And then it hit me.

  I still had the ice bomb Doc gave me in my pocket.

  I fished it out as quickly as I could, and then I tossed it down into the mouth of the volcano. A moment later, it was too far for me to see. I remembered what Doc had said about there needing to be enough of an impact to set it off. I only hoped that being this high up would be enough.

  I waited, and my stomach was in knots as second after agonizing second ticked by on the proverbial clock.

  Then white smoke began to billow from the top of the volcano, and the mountain started to glitter in the rising sun as ice crystals quickly coated and cooled the ground, which effectively stopped the encroaching lava from making any further advancements.

  It was done. We had accomplished the mission.

  I warped back down the mountain, and as soon as my feet hit the ground, I fell to my knees.

  I sat and caught my breath as I allowed the chill of the ground to numb my legs. Honestly, it felt nice after running from lava all night and nearly being swallowed by a volcano. Then I heard the stampede of footfalls as Ashla, Erin, and Varleth caught up to me.

  “You okay?” Varleth asked as he skidded to a stop in front of me. “That was incredible!”

  Erin rummaged through my bag and handed me an elixir, which I happily took. I drank it down and wiped my mouth with the back of the glove I was still wearing.

  “I’m okay,” I lied. Well, it wasn’t a total lie. We did succeed, and I was thankful for that, but I couldn’t shake what the woman in black had said to me.

  What did she know about me and my dagger?

  I fished the cipher out from the same pouch Erin’s had been in, and I gripped it tight.

  “All of this for a piece of rock with some letters on it,” I laughed dryly as I turned it around in my hands. It looked exactly like the others, aside from the markings being different, obviously, but there was one little thing I hadn’t noticed on any of the others before.

  Three little words.

  “Gryff?” Ashla peered over my shoulder.

  I guess she had seen it, too, because she looked as confused as I did.

  “That isn’t on the others,” I said.

  “What does it say?” Erin asked, and I could tell her, because it was written in the common language, our language.

  “The Beastmaker Prophecy,” I read aloud.

  “What is that?” Varleth asked curiously, and I shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “What I do know is we now have all of the pieces to decode everything, and that our journey is just getting started.

  Varleth helped me up, and I looked out at the airship as the sun crested over the horizon.

  Who was that stranger? Were they in league with Miriam? Were the others okay?

  I had a million and one questions, and this little piece of rock was about to open the door to many more.

  As long as I had my friends at my side, though, I knew I could take on anything, and I was ready to answer every single question.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “Ralor’s Stead awaits.”

  End of book 6.

  End Notes

  Thank you for reading Summoner 6! If you enjoyed the book, please leave a review right here!

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Eric Vall