Dragons' Fall_Tales from the Mirror Worlds

by James Calbraith

  “Do you trust him, Master?” Ennaki asked.

  “Her,” the Knight corrected him. “Not at all. But she’s a greedy one, and that Fairlight Crystal is worth more than all the wealth she’d see in her life.”

  “Why do we need her services at all?”

  “Where we’re going, not even my magic can protect us. Our very essence has to transform.”

  Ennaki had more questions to ask, but a blast of light and shadow from the font interrupted him.

  His body burned with the heat of a thousand suns, and burst with the agony of a million cuts. He watched his limbs elongate, crack and tear apart, and then form back into different, eldritch shapes. He felt his face change shape and texture, and then his eyes and ears burst and all his emotions and senses were filled with black pain.

  He woke up suspended in some unknown medium, thinner than water, but thicker than air. His new body was light and buoyant. Half-floating, half-swimming, he rolled until his new limbs appeared before his eyes, flailing aimlessly. They had many more joints than arms should have, and ended with webbed claws. His vision was narrower and more blurry than normal, but his sense of smell was keener. The air had a strong metallic smell. He shrugged and felt twin protrusions on his shoulder-blades: vestigial wings.

  He looked down. Some thousands of feet below him spread a land formed of the same black, shimmering and undulating substance as the altar. A broad, hilly plain, stretched in all directions, with jagged, spiky mountains at one end, and a raging, angry sea of steaming, foaming, ice-blue liquid at the other.

  Another shape floated into his sight; a large, silvery creature with small wings, narrow eyes, and long, many-jointed limbs. It took Ennaki a long while to realize that this was the Master. A set of membranes along his upper body vibrated.

  “We only have a few months to get this done, before the portal takes us back,” the Master said. “So let’s hurry.”

  “What… what is this place?” Ennaki managed to ask, after several tries with the new mode of speech.

  The Master rolled on his back. He looked comical, with his silver, oblong body and tail flippers, like some lazy seal, and Ennaki wondered how he could think of slaying a dragon in this form. As far as Ennaki could tell, the Master didn’t even bear any weapons.

  “We are on a Far World,” he said.

  If Ennaki’s eyes could open wide, they would. A Far World… a land so distant from the Old Earth, that even the very laws of nature were different here.

  “Our bodies are made of frozen quicksilver,” the Master explained, “and that is a sea of liquid air,” he added, pointing to the raging waves.

  He turned towards the surface and floated downwards, propelling himself with the vestigial wings and a flapping tail.

  “Wait,” Ennaki said, remembering, “aren’t all Far Worlds under the Shadow now?”

  The Master pointed a webbed claw at something below. Ennaki discovered he could adjust his eyesight to a greater precision than before. He saw a long line of small humanoid creatures wrapped in furs, climbing a narrow ledge between deep, steaming fissures in the ground. They were being led in chains and whipped by a troop of Snow Giants.

  “Dwarf slaves,” the Master explained. “Poor sods, they will only survive a few days in the quicksilver mines. That’s life in the Abyss lands.”

  The Abyss! Ennaki stopped in shock. The terrible enemy of all life, the embodiment of Chaos, the Shadow That Devours... Nobody from the lands of Light knew much of the Abyss, but what they knew was enough to strike terror in everyone’s heart.

  And we’re supposed to spend months here? No dragon is worth such risk…

  He looked more carefully at the land below him. Half-way towards the mountains rose black, spiky, warped towers of a city, casting long, twisted shadows across the cracked plain. The towers were shrouded in smoke and purple-blue flame. On a field before the city, a battle raged.

  The Master and Ennaki circled the battlefield like a pair of vultures. Ennaki could make neither head nor tail of what was happening. It looked more like a tavern brawl, on a grand scale, than a set battle. He counted at least four sides fighting; a jumbled mess of armies and monsters, with no leaders or even a smidgen of manoeuvring that he could spot.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked.

  The Master floated over to one edge of the battlefield, to an angle hemmed between what looked like a river of pus and a forest of long-dead, scorched trees. “A ruler of the city must have died recently,” he replied. “They’re fighting for his legacy.” He reached out a tentacle, and a ray of sizzling light shot from its end. It hit a giant turtle-dragon, mid-stomp. The beast exploded in a shower of guts and bones.

  At first, in the chaos of battle, nobody noticed the newcomers. Soon, however, as the Master’s rays began to take their deadly toll, indiscriminately, the armies slowed down, and the warriors, one by one, looked up into the sky. Some of them knelt down in surrender, others cried abuse. One mounted a leaping wyvern and tried to fly towards them, but the Master swept it aside with a swat of a lightning.

  Ennaki studied his own tentacles in wonder. Do I have such power here as well? He aimed at a large spider-like creature, busy sucking bodily fluids out of a paralyzed griffin. It vanished in a cloud of smouldering bile.

  “You must have wondered why I chose such ungainly bodies for us,” the Master said. “But these are in fact the most powerful creatures in this world — the Sky Manatees of Nivar. They are the closest these people have to Gods.”

  He continued the onslaught until he was satisfied with the number of enemy soldiers on all sides bowing before his will.

  “Raw power,” he muttered. “That’s all they understand. Kill enough of them and the rest will follow.”

  He began a slow descent to the surface. Ennaki followed close by.

  “You seem to know a lot about this place, Master,” he said. “Have you been here before?”

  A guttural groan ran through the Master’s gills.

  “I was born here.”

  This wasn’t strictly true. His birth, childhood, family, all was an enigma he had long ago given up on solving. But it was here, in the quicksilver mines of Nivar that he was born again, with the knowledge of the Prophecy and the names of the Twelve Dragons embedded in his head, and a new sense of purpose in his frozen heart.

  It had taken him four long, terrible years just to get out of the deepest levels of the mine, and onto the hostile surface. No slave had survived as long; getting out was unheard of.

  “The creature that got us here,” he explained to Ennaki, “was the Master of Gates on Nivar. She hated it. They all do. It takes a special kind of sadist to enjoy the life on a Far World, and she was just a tiny bit too human. We helped each other, and fled together, jumping from world to world until we got out of the Abyss territory.”

  They were hovering on large, flat, gold-laced pillows in what once must have been a grand hall of some long-ruined palace in the centre of the city of black towers. The walls rose at disturbing angles, meeting high above the cracked floor in shattered, splintered arches supporting an impossibly rippling ceiling, from which slowly oozed globules of thick pitch — Ennaki couldn’t decide if it was a fault of construction or a deliberate decoration.

  One of the skewed, triangular doors swivelled open. A spider-like creature entered on its ten hairy legs. Jumping over cracks filled with purple-glowing lava, it neared the twin pillow-thrones.

  “What news, Chamberlain?” the Master asked.

  The creature spat a sticky white substance from a funnel-like mouth. The substance hardened in the air, forming into words as a response.

  “The Fourth Gate has been closed, as ordered. All the transports from the planet have stopped.”

  The Master rolled around the pillow in glee. “Excellent. Order the entire army to gather around the First Gate and prepare the defences. I shall join you presently.”

  The spider-like Chamberlain hopped away on its springy legs, spit
ting out a cloud of farewells.

  “What’s going to happen now?” asked Ennaki.

  “The Abyss will invade. There will be a great battle. Most of the natives will perish.”

  “You promised no more innocents would die!” Ennaki flapped his arms.

  “There are no innocents here. This is Shadow fighting Shadow. What do you care which side prevails? None of this is our concern. What matters is this:”

  The Master reached out and, with a narrow flame sprouting from the tip of his tentacle he scorched a rough map of Nivar into the pearly-white floor tiles.

  Over the weeks that had passed since their arrival to this world, Ennaki had learned to recognize the characteristic layout of the continents — three roughly triangular ones, meeting in the middle like spokes of a wheel, or petals of a flower, around a circular sea of liquid air; and the fourth one, a hexagonal island of frozen lava on the southern hemisphere, shrouded in poisonous mists, where even the natives of this inhospitable land rarely dared to tread.

  “She’s there,” the Master said, pointing to the hexagon, “I’m sure of it. But I can’t go there myself — I have to defend the Gate until she wakes.”

  “I understand,” Ennaki’s neck shuddered in a bow. “I shall make ready for the journey.”

  This, at least, was familiar; a part of the job. Once again, he was the Master’s herald, a hunter’s hound, a butcher’s apprentice.

  The distance was far too great to simply fly, so he had to use a bulbous, purple dirigible, pulled by winged humanoid slaves from some distant world to reach the fourth continent, and by the time Ennaki arrived, the skies over Nivar were already ablaze with the incoming invasion.

  The clouds of poisonous gases hiding the shattered mountains of the approaching land also glowed from within with blasts of magic energies, as the monster sleeping beneath the rocks stirred from its aeons-long sleep. Ennaki dismissed the winged slaves and the flying carriage, and floated slowly towards the tormented shore.

  A bolt of lightning struck the grey sand on the beach, turning it into muddled glass, then another leapt from the ground into the sky, as if in response. Ennaki knew that bolt well. It was the sign of a waking Great Dragon. He wrapped his tentacle arms before him in a complex shape, generating a field of energy which, he hoped, would be enough to shield him from the first wrath of the monster.

  The earth shook and the sea of liquid air bubbled and frothed, releasing bluish gases into the corrosive atmosphere. The poisonous mists parted, revealing a great heaving mountain, split in two, spewing magma and ash. Above it all, the skies turned into a wreathing mass of lightning, explosions, flame. The punitive expedition of the Abyss was close to breaking through the Barrier between the Worlds.

  For now, everything was going according to the Master’s plan.

  Every dragon Ennaki had found for his Master was larger and more powerful than the previous prey, but the beast on Nivar was in a different league altogether. It easily dwarfed any other dragon Ennaki had seen before.

  “We are moving to the next stage,” the Master had explained before sending Ennaki out to find the fourth continent. “No dragon I have slain before can equal Nivriel. There are only Eight like her in all the Mirror Worlds. Eight Metallic Broodmothers: Gold, Silver, Bronze, Copper, Iron, Tin, Lead, and Azoth.”

  Watching Nivriel in action, Ennaki soon guessed which element formed her body. A river of silver — like that first dragon a long time ago on Ennaki’s homeworld, only immeasurably greater; a ribbon in the wind, smooth, with barely distinguishable features — a trace of a head, a thin line of a maw, a narrowing of the tail, all shimmering and trembling like mercury spilt on glass: the Dragon of Azoth.

  It whizzed past Ennaki at first, not even noticing him — a meaningless speck in the air — writhing in aimless rage at the magic blasts piercing the sky above; at the first steel-grey vessels descending upon the tortured world.

  Nivar was a resource planet; both sides in the war depended on such worlds, far beyond the lines, providing material and recruits for the endless battles, each a bead woven into a dense net of an intricate supply chain, each equally crucial to the martial success of its masters. Few inhabitants of Nivar were even aware of its importance, convinced that their own little battles and quarrels had meaning of their own, rather than serving simply as means to ensure the quality of soldiers sent daily through one of the four Gates for the distant, raging frontline.

  Only one thing mattered to Nivar’s distant masters: the supplies had to flow uninterrupted. The least pause in the stream could disturb the precarious balance of the war, allow the Guardians to pierce the defences of the Abyss, capture a world or two… the consequences were unthinkable. And now, thanks to the Master’s machinations, the unthinkable had happened: he managed to unite Nivar’s ever-quarrelling armies, destroy the Gatemasters, and shut down the entire operation.

  They didn’t have long to wait for the response.

  The dragon’s breath was nigh invisible, a mere ripple through the air, a shower of pale snowflakes; it was almost beautiful. But the effects were more devastating than any other dragon’s power. Most of the enemy craft simply vanished without a trace when touched by its breath; the greater ones erupted in silent fireworks.

  A beam of bright light from one of the vessels pierced the dragon’s silver hide, but it passed as if through water, without harm. Another craft tried to ram the beast, but it, too, disintegrated on impact. The dragon shrugged off any attack, magical or physical alike, its skin smooth, its body untarnished.

  Still more came pouring through the cracks in the barrier. The sky rained ships; iron wedges filled with trolls, orcs, and ogres. Flying creatures, small dragons and wyverns, giant bats, all sorts of winged and wingless monsters, swarmed out of the freshly formed portals, clouding the sky and blotting out the faint suns. The wrath of the Abyss was terrible. If need be, it would turn Nivar into a dead world — again — not as mere punishment, but as an example to anyone else who’d think of rebelling against its might.

  It was all this power that the Master had been counting on; anything less than the full onslaught would not have awoken Nivar’s ageless defender from its slumber. The Master cared nothing for this world and its people, and cared even less for the slight dent his mischief created in the war plans of the generals of the Abyss. Nivriel’s Heart was all he wanted.

  But the Master was at the First Gate, likely, still defending from the main thrust of the invasion hundreds of leagues away. Ennaki had to make sure Nivriel would reach him in time.

  Gathering all the power of his new body into the webbed claws at the ends of his arms, he released the energy in a burst of blinding light with the force of an exploding sun, which, for a moment, turned all the other fires and blazes dark.

  For the first time since his arrival on Nivar he felt exhausted, spent; even the Sky Manatees, it seemed, knew limits to their power. But it was enough. The dragon had noticed him. The shimmering silver drop-shaped head turned to Ennaki.

  “I know where they are coming from,” he shouted at the top of his gills. The dragon’s eyes glanced at him in curious wonder. “Follow me.”

  He started flying back towards the triple continent as fast as his fat, oblong body could fly; he heard a loud, impatient snort, smelled the bitter, metallic odour of mercury, and felt himself snapped by the cold jaws, gently, but firmly.

  “Yes, I suppose it’s faster this way,” he agreed, and pointed north. “Take us there, across the sea.”

  He had done everything as the Master had requested, but Ennaki was full of doubts. Along the way, Nivriel was being attacked constantly by the flying armies of the Abyss, with no discernible result. Instead, the enemy continued suffering terrible losses, and the dragon hadn’t even slowed down. Could the Master really slay such a monster? What impossible trick did he have up his sleeve this time?

  For that matter, was he even still alive? The continent the dragon was passing over was even more of a scorched was
teland than it had been at their arrival. He couldn’t see a single living creature among the rubble of the fierce battle that had ravaged the land, only smouldering ruins and even more blue magma and purple pus pouring from the cracks and craters.

  This is Shadow fighting Shadow, he repeated to himself. Thousands, if not millions, of lives have already been vanquished in this siege. But the Master was right: this need not have been his worry. Death and destruction was an every day affair here on Nivar. The cause mattered little.

  And yet… a certain doubt was stirring inside him again, as the torn, black, lifeless land whizzed underneath.

  A mighty pillar of fire marked the sight of the Master’s stand, at the foot of the First Gate. It took the dragon a full day, flying at the speed of hurricane winds, to reach it. Nivar’s defenders, numbering now no more than a few thousand, stood in a tight circle around the Gate, under a translucent magic shield, while they were battered by an unending barrage of spells and missiles. The army of the Abyss closed in slowly towards the Gate, unstoppable and grim; the shield kept shrinking with their every step, revealing to the enemy another ring of hopelessly outnumbered soldiers.

  Seeing the battlefield below and above, the dragon grunted in annoyance, spat Ennaki out, and threw herself into the fray; a silver river of wrath and destruction. The rear guard of the attackers wavered for a moment, preparing to meet the new threat, but the frontline continued its relentless march.

  Ennaki searched for his Master and found him floating between the black stone pillars of the Gate, his tentacles raised. The magic shield was his doing, of course; a last ditch defence, exhausting all his strength. Would he have enough left to slay the dragon once all this was over? Was this battle ever going to end, with any other result than total annihilation of Nivar and its people?

  As Ennaki studied the battlefield, wondering how he could penetrate the shield and reach his Master without compromising the defences, a concentrated blow of energy pierced the magic bubble and shattered one of the black stone pillars. The shield flickered and vanished; the rubble from the pillar showered down on the heads of the defenders; the Master cried out and collapsed, dropping to the ground with a thud.