by Ren Ryder
The serpent unhinged its jaw and opened it wide, wider than I was tall. Row upon row of ten inch tall razor sharp fangs glinted in the arena’s light, and I steeled myself against the sudden urge to run.
With a flamboyant gesture, I thrust my hand out and spoke the word that rose in my mind, “Anubis!”
A teeny black ball of crackling energy rose from my hand and flew erratically towards the serpent’s head. It bobbed up, down, left, and right, progressing at a leisurely place that was entirely out of place in the current setting. The serpent’s fangs dominated my vision. I was mere feet away from its jaws when the black ball struck.
The serpent reared back, and its eyes clouded over. Its jaw flapped open and closed, and its tongue lolled out of its mouth. I watched in dark fascination as the serpent’s head and three feet of its body disintegrated. Black flakes peeled off the main body and a mound of dust splashed to the floor all at once.
“I wonder what wyrm tastes like~” I snatched Bell out of the air and stuffed her into the front pocket of my shirt.
An announcer’s tinny voice echoed through the chamber. “Ladies and gentleman, New London’s ghost has— excuse me one moment, please stay in your seats while I confer with our leaders.“
“When did you learn disintegration magic?! That’s one of the most powerful magics there is!”
I was still reeling from seeing the spell’s effects firsthand. “I— I uh, I didn’t. That wasn’t— Koji gave it to me. A talisman, I think it was, crumbled to dust when I used it though.” Shaking my head, I took several deep breaths.
“I want to meet this mage!” Bell was practically overflowing with excitement.
I regained some of my composure. “Even though he’s human?” I teased. “Oh and you, uh, you already did,” I snickered.
“Oh, mommy~” Bell said.
“Hmm? I don’t think Koji is related…”
“Mommy!” Bell screamed, pointing.
My hair stood on end and I backed away from the abyss. A true wyrm slithered out from the depths, eighty feet long with a girth of ten feet. Its black scales sucked in the surrounding light without reflecting it back. The size and scale of the thing sent a shock through me. It was big, too big.
I feel the way an ant feels, right before it’s crushed.
Roaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar.
Even Bell was shaken. “Th-that’s a— a gr-greater wyrm.”
I’m supposed to fight, and win, against that monster?
“Ladies and gentleman, we apologize for any confusion that may have been caused— what you saw was a sneak preview. The house will reset your bets, or let them stand at your preference. Now, the real show begins now.”
The serpent flared its tattered wings wide; it had a wingspan of a hundred feet, easy. A blast of cool air struck my face and pushed me back. The cool reptilian intelligence in the wyrm’s gaze pinned me in place.
My feet turned to stone, and I hesitated just long enough that I blew my dodge. Fangs ripped into the flesh of my right shoulder. The force of the blow tore my cloak off my shoulders and sent me spinning to the ground as the wyrm slithered past.
“Down he goes! Specter doesn’t seem so untouchable anymore!”
I rolled with the blow and came back up on my feet, clutching my bloody shoulder. The muscle was torn to shreds, and bits of my shirt flowed down my shoulder in a growing river of blood.
Drip, drop.
Droplets of blood began to drip off my fingertips and strike the ground as my brain burned into overdrive. I ran around the monster counterclockwise, trying to gain precious seconds to consider my next move.
What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?
“Bell?”
“Do something!”
“What?!”
“Anything!”
I tapped into the wellspring of magic at the core of my being. Wind magic manifested around my body, swirling and whipping about. I felt the pool of mana ebb and flow with my pulse, my life energy. With a graceless, ripping motion, I tore as much mana as I could from my well, bundled it up, condensed it as tight as it would go, and tossed it out into the world. Straight in the wyrm’s face as it slithered around for another pass at me.
My most destructive magic bounced off the wyrm’s jaw and blasted into the crystalline wall. An explosion resounded through the arena as great chunks of crystal rocketed off in every direction. I didn’t stop and stare, dumfounded, though I wanted to.
“That, that’s it?”
“Wow, you are so dead. Hey, when you die, can I have your things?”
“Bell!”
“It’s called planning ahead, geez, one of us should!”
Without thinking too hard on it, I ran as fast and far as I could, putting distance between me and the wyrm. I leapt over a man-sized crystal shard, tripped, and nearly fell into the abyss on my way past it. I ran until I was up against a wall near the gateway I’d come through. I could just barely see a walled-in, translucent enclosure high above me, out of even the wyrm’s extensive reach.
Roaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrr!
It was hard to breathe. My side was on fire, and my shirt and pants were sticky with blood. The stitches had probably torn open when I’d been sent flying by the wyrm’s first blow.
“Not looking good Kal~”
“Can’t you do anything?!”
“Well, I could, but it’d be about as useful as what you just did.”
I was starting to feel a bit dizzy. I pressed my arm to my shoulder, trying to staunch the flow of blood. “Tccchhh— useless.”
“Hey! Take that back!” Bell poked me in the eyeball, a real ticked-off look on her face.
“Did I say use-less? I mean useful, supeeeer useful. Thanks for all your color commentary. Now, can you shut up and let me think?”
“Hmmph!”
Back against the wall, I turned and stared down the wyrm as it slithered towards me. Its pace as it approached was leisurely, almost seductively so. I felt like I was being toyed with, as if it knew I had no chance of escape and that I’d run out of weapons to use against it.
Out of nowhere, a brace of spears tore me out of my tunnel vision. Half of them hit the metal floor tip-first and shattered into a million pieces. The other three bounced off their shafts and went tumbling in every direction. One of them flipped through the air and landed ten paces to my right.
I looked up, tried to discern who had lent me their aid. For some reason, Greaves’s fatherly expression emerged in my mind’s eye.
The greater wyrm opened its mouth to devour me and struck.
Right. Gotta be right.
Without looking or even knowing if the wyrm’s maw was about to close down around me, I threw myself to the side. I rolled over my uninjured shoulder and jumped again to cover the last span, my eyes focused solely on the spear. My hands closed around the shaft just as the serpent’s shadow eclipsed the light above me, casting me in darkness.
Here goes.
“Shu!” I dredged up the remains of my mana and shot off my left foot on a gust of wind.
In a blur I passed through row upon row of wicked fangs and stuck fast at the back of the wyrm’s throat. Before the jaws of the beast could snap closed and crush me, I stuck the spear-tip up and wedged the shaft between two of the wyrm’s back fangs.
“Hahhhh-hahhh—” My breath came heavy and hot. “This’ll— this’ll work, for sure, I think.” I held on tight to the spear’s shaft to keep from falling over.
Roaaaaaaaaaarrrrr.
The wyrm’s jaws snapped closed, sealing its fate as the spear sunk smoothly into the soft flesh of the roof of its mouth and into its brain cavity. Even a monster like the greater wyrm had a weak spot.
Screeeeeech.
First, it was a light twitch. Then the wyrm went into a series of spasms, slithering and sliding across the floor in its death throes. Unfortunately, that meant I was along for the ride. It was all I could do just to hang on to keep from being tossed about and crushed.
I
don’t know how long that went on, but finally, the ride came to a blissful stop, and I fell out of the monster’s maw, tearing my flesh on its fangs along the way. I barely felt anything as I crashed to the metallic earth in a boneless heap. Unable to move a muscle, I laid beside the dark abyss with unseeing eyes.
Time passed. Seconds, minutes, hours, I couldn’t tell the difference anymore. It felt like the world was fading around me, like I was fading from it.
Sammie fell to her knees beside me, crying. “Where were you? Why’d you leave me, why’d you leave me all alone? Just when I’d given up hope… coming back now is too cruel!” I felt a light impact as her body collided with mine, and she wrapped me up in her arms.
I returned the embrace, cold seeping through my back, into the area around my heart. “I’m sorry. I’m here now. I’ll do anything, so what do you want, what you need from me?”
My vision cleared enough to see Sammie’s face, her wicked, twisted expression. “You’re not my brother, you never were. What, you think I’d never find out, if you always kept me in the dark? Well, I don’t need your help or your pity, not anymore. In my eyes, you’re the pitiful one, Kal— all those years, all that effort spent on someone else and you’ve got nothing to show for it.”
“I never—” I choked on my words as Sammie strangled me silent.
Sammie hugged me tight, so tight I couldn’t breathe. “You’re a regular hero, Kal, you know that? Did you think I would bat my eyes and ask you to save me, like some pretty damsel? Get real. I was raised as a Duke’s favored ward, educated at the most prestigious of schools and universities, and given all the luxuries I could ever want. I’m the strongest witch to walk the earth in ten generations, no— a millennia! I sit atop the most feared criminal organization in New London, the city at the forefront of civilization! I have nobility begging, scraping, and pleading for my attention— mine!” Sammie’s words fell on me like hammers.
“What would you presume to think you can do for me?! Save me? From what? What could I possibly need saving from, huh?!”
I gasped, blood dribbling from the corners of my mouth. Tried to speak. “F-From your-yourself. Fr-from the d-dark. Fr-from ha-hatred and loneliness and despair. I’m s-sorry, Sammie, s-sorry I left you a-alone. I wouldn’t have ever done it if I’d known what was going to happen, but what’s pa-passed is p-past. I w-won’t ask you to find it in your heart to f-forgive me. I only want what’s b-best for you, from the b-bottom of my h-heart. Just p-please, please don’t suffer alone.”
Sammie stared at me, stricken. Then, “Do you know what you can do for me, brother?” She gnawed on and twisted the word out of shape before she spat it back out at me. “You’d do anything for me, wouldn’t you? Be the final gravestone that cements my position in the underworld!” Sammie drove the dagger she’d stabbed into my back as deep as it would go.
“I can’t, I can’t hurt her! The contract…” Bell moaned.
“Hahh-hahh—” I was struggling even to breathe. I couldn’t say anything more.
Sammie let me go, stood. Looked down at me for the last time.
Samantha kicked me off the edge and over, into the abyss. As I fell, my thoughts flashed back to the time Sammie and I had spent together, all the happy days and even the hard ones. My memories ended on the exchange with the Duke.
It was… had it all felt like a performance, to trick me? If it had been, it worked. I couldn’t believe that Sammie had the capacity to go dark and betray me, and this is what it had cost me.
I fingered the token granted to me by Queen Titania, and wished upon it. “Take me… take me back, to the Otherworld. I want to go back.” It soaked up the blood on my fingers like a sponge.
Then, in a flash of vibrant green, I was transported away.
I felt my consciousness fade in and out.
Someone was holding me. “Oh, my boy, my poor boy, my little changeling child. I warned you, humans are simply not to be trusted. But you wouldn’t listen, I knew you couldn’t. You had to learn what the humans are capable of firsthand. That’s why I let you go back, despite my reservations.”
“I’m sorry, m’dear, but I cannot let what you just said pass. Did you just claim that child? Surely he isn’t mine, hmmmm? So, which of your dalliances produced this bastard, hmm? Such malformed whelps are meant to be culled before they come of age. But, look what we have here. Disgusting. It seems the time for my intervention has come.”
“O-Oberon?”
THE END
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