by Brian Beam
Now, back to me about to learn if there really were gods or not. The ball of fire that had almost made me as bald as the eldrhim as it zoomed past me was about the size of my head. It collided with the lunging eldrhim in midair, exploding and knocking the gods-forsaken creature to the ground.
I turned back to the source of the fireball. I couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of me, but I could easily hear Max’s rasping scream of “Run, you Averinax-blooded lunkhead.” By the way, Averinax is the god of fools and a very fitting one to use in a curse towards someone simply standing beside a stunned eldrhim waiting for it to get up and brutally maul them.
Running blindly through a forest is all twisted ankles and protecting your face from a broken nose or poked out eyes from unseen branches. My footfalls and ragged breathing, and the distant eldrhim calls were all I could hear. The ground started to rise sharply as I apparently had turned into the mountain. I didn’t change course, I just kept pushing on, trying to escape the terrifying sounds behind me. My body was telling me to collapse while my mind was telling my body to shut up and quit being such a wimp. My mind won and my body continued to run despite the pain and shortness of breath.
The slope eventually was too steep for me to run up and I fell to the ground, catching myself on my hands, and started to scramble up the mountain while still clutching my sword. Rocks poking out from the ground stabbed into my hands. My shirt snagged on thorns. My feet fought to find purchase as the rise grew steeper and steeper. Then, as if from nowhere, something was falling down towards me, sending pebbles and dirt into my face. The sparse moonlight filtering through the treetops didn’t illuminate the eldrhim until I was within its reach.
This eldrhim looked more like a bipedal lizard with shiny scales and a long, thin, whipping tail. Its face was reptilian with yellow slitted-pupil eyes that seemed to draw in the moonlight and cast it back out at me. An elongated snout ended with liplessly bared snake-like fangs. Bony spikes outlined its face. It was light in color but the moonlight just made it appear blue. Loranis, Rizear, or whoever else had created this one, was at least more kind in the creature’s symmetry.
Before I could react, a muscular, scaly arm swiped at me, drawing five razor-sharp, claws across my face from cheek to cheek. I tumbled backwards, my sword involuntarily slicing upwards as my arms swung out. In complete luck, I lopped off its left hand as I went into a feet over head backwards roll.
The sound that the eldrhim emitted was the most terrifying sound I had ever heard in my life—and I had heard a dragon roar for Vesteir’s sake!. The screech sounded like it was coming from multiple throats emitting different pitches, from thunder-like lows to squeaky wagon wheel highs. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the sound had the ability to simply stop a heart from beating.
In contrast, my heart beat even faster as I slid to a stop on level ground and jumped to my feet. I’m sure I was in quite a bit of pain from my tumble, but my nerves had kicked in and temporarily numbed my body except for the feel of blood oozing down my cheeks and the burning in my chest. I knew from the first eldrhim I had encountered that there was no way I could outrun the lizard eldrhim, so I drew up my sword in preparation to attack. I had hurt it, even if only by luck. It wasn’t invulnerable.
In the few seconds I had before the eldrhim likely killed me, my mind drifted to blindfolded sparring with Chasus. He had taught me to anticipate an enemy’s moves. With humans, very little effort is needed to predict what they will do. With eldrhims…
An idea struck me like an archer shooting a target. I dropped to my back and held my sword with the blade straight up and the hilt against my chest. A second later, the screeching lizard eldrhim was leaping upon me. My sword sliced smoothly through its belly. I rolled—no easy task with a huge eldrhim on top of me—as the eldrhim’s body slid down the blade and pulled out my sword as I continued to roll off its body. The eldrhim was on its feet in seconds. I guess my idea hadn’t been so good. I was still on the ground and knew there was no way I could get back to my feet before the eldrhim was on me again. Losing a hand and taking a stab to the stomach hadn’t even fazed it.
Out of the night, another fireball zoomed from the lizard eldrhim’s left side and smashed into its head, sending it screaming with the eerie multi-voiced sound to the ground. Max, still on Telis, burst into sight out of the trees.
“I meant run away from the eldrhims, lunkhead.” I was surprised that Max was able to keep Telis from bolting away between his fireball and the downed eldrhim that had just about solved my whole Contract problem for me by taking me out of the equation.
Swiftly, I jumped into the saddle while the eldrhim’s head was still aflame with its hand and handless stump slapping at its face, attempting to put out the fire. I grabbed the reins with my free hand and turned Telis away, charging into the forest away from the eldrhim.
“Thanks for the advice. I’ll try to remember that. Run from eldrhims, not towards them. I never would have thought of that.” I don’t know how effective my sarcasm was seeing as my words came out between gasping breaths. I saw Max’s shadowed form shake its head. Some cats just have no sense of humor. “How’d you manage to get Telis to ride into that mess?”
“You don’t want to know,” Max called back to me. “But you should know that those eldrhims are going to catch up with us in a few seconds, and before they do, I want you to jump off.”
“Jump off. Yeah that sounds about right. They’ll never catch me if I’m not moving.” Was he serious?
“Again, just trust me. Be ready to say your goodbyes to Telis.” That last sentence came out with a grave solemnity.
“What?” What did he mean?
Before Max could respond, the screeching from the three eldrhims cut through the air. “Jump!” he shouted. Without time to even consider it, I leapt from the saddle, letting my sword go as I dropped into a roll to avoid breaking any body parts I may have needed to defend myself. You know, like an arm. Or a neck. I flattened out after a couple rolls, and given that I had jumped off while speeding downhill, I slid, slamming my side into a tree. My breath left my lungs and pain shot from the point of contact throughout my entire chest. Heck, why not add a bruised rib or two to the injury tally for the night?
Still being driven by fear, I pushed myself up against the pain and ran to retrieve my sword which was thankfully visible with reflected moonlight. Max was sitting beside it, sans Telis, looking weary, but doing much better than me with my scrapes, bruises, and claw gashes across my face. “Follow me,” he whispered and started off downhill.
“Where’s Telis?” I asked through gasping breaths as I tried my best to remain close enough to see Max. With his night vision he would be able to avoid trees and rocks that I couldn’t see. If I could just keep directly behind him, I’d hopefully do so too.
“I enraged him with magic,” Max explained. “He’s going to distract those eldrhims while we get away. Now, less talking and more running.”
“Wait just a minute. Telis can’t fight those things.” I didn’t like where this conversation was heading.
“No, but he will fight them with reckless abandon. He will keep them occupied long enough for me to get us nice and hidden.”
“Oh,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. I mean, what can you say when you hear that one of your best friends is charging into their death? Yes, I considered a horse to be one of my best friends. For the last three years of my life, Max and Telis had been the only constants in my life.
As we ran, I could hear fighting between horse and eldrhim with multi-pitched staccato screeching from the eldrhims and Telis’ screams. I tried to shut it out. Those screams were a band tightening around my heart. All I had wanted was to complete a simple Activated Contract. What I got was a life that would never be the same, and Telis was the first to suffer for it. My eyes began to water, the tears threatening to break free down my face. I blinked them away. There’d be time for grief later.
I almost tripped over Max as
he suddenly came to a stop, flattened to the ground, wiggled his back end a couple times, and pounced forward. The action seemed incredibly random, but Max turned back with some sort of animal in his mouth and gestured with his head for me to move towards him. At another gesture I crouched down beside him.
Above Max’s head, a silver spark burst into existence and began expanding outwards. Starting as an azure sphere of light no larger than a child’s toy marble, the borders of the sphere of light expanded to envelop the two of us, feeling like walking under a waterfall as it moved through me. The color faded as it expanded until the sphere was a bright, iridescent white. As soon as it had passed through me, the sounds of the eldrhims battling an enraged Telis were mercifully muted. The transparent sphere stopped just an arm’s length behind me, surrounding us in a glowing hemisphere. As it locked into place with a metallic ring, the magical dome flashed brilliantly, cutting into the dark night, and then disappeared.
“Do not touch…the…barrier,” Max gasped as he collapsed lifelessly to the ground.
“Max!” I screamed, throwing a hand to his chest and desperately feeling for a heartbeat. I felt nothing and his chest was as still as the now dead animal that had fallen from his mouth. This time I couldn’t put the grief on hold. The tears started flowing down my cheeks. “You can’t do this, Max! I can’t do this without you!” I screamed with racking sobs.
I dropped my sword and grabbed his limp body, shaking it violently in grief-stricken anger. “Wake up! You can’t die! Wake up you fur-footed bastard! Wake up!” The screams poured out of me. The world around me disappeared. There was only me and the lifeless body of the only true friend I had ever had. At that moment, the Activated Contract with Galius no longer meant anything. I didn’t care about the Kolarin, the gem, Galius, Menar, the dragon; I didn’t care about anything other than my best friend. “Wake up,” I whispered resignedly as I lowered his limp form back to the ground.
As my tears streaked bloody lines down my claw-slashed face, I dropped my head and let them fall to the ground. I wanted to grab my sword and slice off the heads of all the Loranis-forsaken eldrhims. I wanted to tear out their throats with my bear hands. I wanted them to know fear. Most of all, I just wanted to be numb. I didn’t want to hurt.
The only other true loss I had ever experienced, if it could even be considered one, was being taken away from my parents. As a baby, I didn’t understand what was happening, though. This was different. This was the first loss that made me want to just lie down and die. I felt like I had lost everything.
My thoughts swirled. Had I ever let Max know how much he meant to me? Did he know I thought of him as a brother? My tears dripped onto the blades of grass, the red beads of moisture gleaming in the moonlight. The world was silent inside the dome aside from my sobbing.
Or, it was silent until Max suddenly drew in a gasping breath and his legs started twitching. After several twitches, his body tensed and then went limp again, only this time he fell into the slow and rhythmic breathing of a deep sleep.
I almost burst into laughter. I wanted to sweep him into my arms and apologize for any wrongs I had ever committed against him. Instead I settled for a tearful smile and let him get the rest he deserved. He had almost killed himself from exertion to keep me safe. Even if I couldn’t understand why he would sacrifice so much for my preservation, I knew I would have done the same for him.
I swept back my cloak and dropped onto my rear, drawing my knees to my chest and keeping my sword on the ground within reach. It was then that I first noticed the inky black ichor covering the sword’s tip and running down the blade. I hurriedly wiped the blade off in the grass to get rid of any trace of the vile eldrhim blood from it.
The grass I wiped it on browned and cracked away before my eyes. Apparently eldrhims bled thick, black, toxic sludge. I supposed it was fitting. There was no telling what it would have done to my blade if it had been left on. What if that blood had gotten on me?
I set my cleaned sword on the opposite side of me away from the now dead grass. All I could do was exhale in relief and wait things out while Max rested. I had to assume that the dome he had put around us would protect us until morning. What appeared to be simply a large rat lay dead in front of me. Even though it was only a small creature, to kill it with the use of a single spell meant the barrier spell had to be somewhat powerful and complex. My biggest concern was to stay within the confines of the invisible dome as Max had instructed. It was a stressful proposition when I couldn’t even see the thing.
I tucked my sweaty, blood-soaked hair behind my ears and felt the gashes on my face. They weren’t incredibly deep but they would leave five nasty scars across my face if Max was unable to heal them when he awoke. I didn’t know if I could ask Max to do what now seemed to be such a trivial task after almost killing himself to save me. Besides, I figured the scars may have been just the thing I needed to keep people from calling me “kid.” I was just thankful that I hadn’t had my eyes gouged out or my face ripped off.
Enclosed in what was basically a bubble of silence, it was easy for my heart to return to its normal rhythm and my breathing to slow. Returning to a state of calm also brought with it the pains from the night, but those weren’t enough to keep my head from slowly nodding as my eyelids grew heavy.
****
Chasus, in his chainmail, led me into the stable on his farm and handed me the reins to Telis, clapping me on the back with his other arm. “He’ll never let you down,” Chasus assured me, his dark eyes standing out starkly on his aged face. Abruptly, the stable burst into flames. Chasus and Telis started blackening, charring to ash that blew away into the smoke. “But you can let him down,” his voice chastised as his ashy form drifted into nothingness. The stable door slammed shut, locking me in the brightly burning wreckage.
****
My head jerked up as the world went white for a brief moment with a resounding crash. I must have only nodded off for minutes since the night was still in full effect, the moon doing little to illuminate the area around me through the treetops above.
The crash sounded again from behind me, the dome momentarily becoming visible in the same flash of light that must have woken me up before disappearing. I craned my neck around to see a living nightmare wildly slamming its body into the dome. It was the third eldrhim.
If the first two eldrhims had seemed chilling, this one was mind-numbingly terrifying. Unlike the first two eldrhims, this one was somewhat humanoid in appearance with the exception of a second set of arms below the first. Rotted black flesh peeled away in round patches all over its body to expose the tissue and bone beneath. I almost felt pity for the fact that in place of what would have been his manhood was just a necrotic-rimmed hole dripping dangerous black eldrhim blood. The flashes of light the magical dome emitted from the eldrhim’s assault on it illuminated the non-blackened parts of its skin, revealing it to seemingly be the color and texture of seaweed. Black, gaping voids replaced its eyes on a skeletal head, the seaweed skin pulled taught. Its tipless nose was perched over a mouth displaying a mockery of a toothy smile with the cheeks mostly rotted away.
I had come up to a crouch on my toes and spun to watch the creature’s relentless four-armed assault on the dome. My Vesteir-sigiled sword was gripped tightly in hand. I didn’t anticipate the eldrhrim to give up attacking the magical barrier. Unable to make myself even blink as he pounded away, I knew I was going to get no more sleep before morning.
The eldrhim’s mouth was opening wider than a human mouth would be able to with its lack of facial muscle to limit it. I couldn’t hear the sounds being made through the barrier and was happy for it. Even feeling safe behind the dome’s protection, my body remained tense and my heart attempted to pound itself out of my body as if to run away since I couldn’t. It was a good thing my body wouldn’t relax, though, as that feeling of safety was about to be ripped away.
With another four-handed pounding, the flashing dome revealed a long vertical crack like
a crack in a porcelain dish. Each subsequent attack started to splinter the crack into a spider-webbed pattern. The cracks spread from his point of attack, over the top of the dome and down the sides until the entire dome looked like a child’s wooden picture puzzle. There was no way that this was going to turn out well for me.
Accepting that I was about to have to face the eldrhim head on, I grabbed my sword hilt in a two-handed grasp, ready to spring up and slash at the rotting creature before it could attack me once the barrier was gone. Running was not an option this time. Max had shown that he was willing to sacrifice himself for me and now it was time to return the favor.
With a final crash, the eldrhim slammed its human-like rotting fists against the dome. The dome flashed as brightly as when it was created and then shattered like a delicate ornament dropped to a stone floor. The blinding light forced me to close my eyes, but I didn’t wait until I could open them to strike. I sprang to my feet, slicing my sword upwards with both hands. My sword connected with some portion of the eldrhim and began slicing upwards. And then it stopped.
I opened my eyes to see that my sword had slashed through its stomach, spilling black ichor and rotten viscera to the ground. The eldrhim had caught the blade in a rotting hand, unhindered by the blade slicing the remains of hand flesh down to its bones. Even though the creature didn’t technically have eyes, I was pretty sure the gaping sockets in its skull were directing an evilly angry glare at me. Its mouth opened in its unnaturally large way and let out a screech similar to the first eldrhim with spittle flying into my face.
Now, I’d been scared before. I’d been scared for my life, and I’d been scared for Max’s life. In the past few days I had stood up to more than one attempt on my life. At that moment though, all of that seemed like a child’s game. This was when things had become catastrophic. My plan changed immediately. I screamed like a little girl, released the sword and ran like the wind, grabbing Max’s limp form by the scruff of the neck as I did so. Hey, I’d lost enough pride already. There wasn’t enough left to care about.