Drynn

by Steve Vera

  Jack kept his feet moving, circling the hulking dark lord like a Mako shark around a wounded orca. With milky eyes radar-locked on Jack’s blades, Deos reached down and snapped a thick branch off the birch that was lying in the grass.

  “Crude, yes?” he asked Jack, brandishing his new weapon sprouting leaves and smaller branches. “To be bludgeoned by a tree seems a bit ignominious, Nyx, but…” He shrugged. “It shall be gratifying.”

  At that, the club came swinging at him full strength, trailing scattered leaves. Even with armor, the three-foot-thick tree-club would have splattered Jack like an overripe melon. Of course, it didn’t touch him. Jack floated back, watched the branch sail past his head and then lunged in with his Quaranai, opening yet another gash beneath the other armpit. Deos roared and swung again and again, smashing huge dents in the ground.

  Jack grinned, despite the drool that poured out of his tongueless mouth. You are one slow, ponderous fuck.

  After swinging half a dozen times to no avail, Deos halted, tongue lolling over his large pointed teeth. “You are irritatingly resilient, Juekovelin,” Asmodeous growled through his heavy pants. He threw down his newly acquired club, and the milky film that covered his eyes peeled away. The red slits within the amber orbs pulsed to life, and suddenly the Overlord’s will battered Jack’s mental defenses. Jack had seen that trick before. Deos’s mental assault was like an avalanche of hot ash against the walls of Constantinople.

  Not even on your birthday, asshole.

  After several long moments, Deos pulled back, the coriaceous muscles surrounding his two nostril slits crinkling in a snarl. He bared his fangs, another gesture he didn’t use often, and looked up at the sky. Getting a little nervous?

  “Enough of this toying,” Asmodeous roared and hurled out a ball of lightning as his eyes rippled with amber magic.

  Jack covered up, crossing both blades in front of his face, and though the muscles in his arms squirmed as if they possessed a life of their own, the blast dissipated around them like vapor. His attacks were getting weaker.

  From behind the Overlord, Stavengre rose.

  *

  Everything hurt. Each of his breaths came out as a ragged pant laced in flame, but he was standing. How had we done this before? On a regular basis? Gavin swayed slightly against vertigo, trying to see through a haze of pain and exhaustion that swirled around his vision like static-snow.

  He could hear Deos’s cavernous grumble, thick with threats and promises. At least with exhaustion came the banishment of fear; he was just too damn tired to be afraid. Jack gave him a nearly imperceptible wink.

  All right, Jack Nyx, just you and me. Let’s skewer this bitch and go home. Gavin didn’t even give the Overlord a chance to gloat. He swung his Quaranai as hard as he could at his neck from behind. Halfway through its arc, eyes still on Jack, a spike of red light cracked from Deos’s talons like a long tracer and interrupted the path of his Quaranai, as if he’d been staring into a mirror watching the attack from behind. Gavin blocked it with his own free hand, but at a price. Pain. Lots of it, like blocking a line drive without a mitt. His hand went dead.

  Jack came fast and ferocious from the other side, but Deos twirled and met the onslaught with two taloned hands crackling blood-colored light. The impact lifted Jack off the ground and threw him backward like a sophomore getting drilled by a heavyweight boxer, but not before Jack’s Nai got a piece of his throat. A jet of blood spurted out from the wound, and the Lord of the Underworld staggered, gurgling as he clutched his neck. With his Quaranai leading the way, Gavin launched himself again. Deos tried to turn to spirit but succeeded only in shimmering like a mirage in a desert.

  I got you, Deos, Gavin thought fiercely. Even though his Quaranai no longer poured off light, it still glimmered a thin breath of vaporous sapphire, just enough magic to cut right through the Drynnlord’s ridgebones and amputate his arm. I got you…

  Like a giant linebacker—one hand on gurgling throat—Deos went under Gavin’s charge, barreled his shoulder and folded wing into Gavin’s chest plate and heaved. Gavin flew. Though he tucked himself into a roll, like a trick-shooter hitting a quarter in the air with a revolver, Deos blasted him with a ball of flame. The hood to his cloak saved his face and hair from being charred, but the impact knocked him back like a hammer and sent him careening into one of the sycamores around the pond. Molten pain flashed through his body and from a tunnel far away he heard Amanda screaming. Beyond him, Jack crawled to his knees, tried to get up, failed, plopped over and then crawled to his knees once more.

  Deos reached down and picked up Jack by the hair. Immediately, Jack’s hands went up to the massive arm to keep from getting scalped. Dangling, Jack speared the edge of his foot right into the back of Deos’s other hand, which was covering the hole in his throat. Deos gurgled a scream and flung Jack away, blood squirting through his fingers.

  Gavin tried to get up, shuddering with effort, but remained motionless. There was no air in his lungs. The same irrational panic that a drowning swimmer might feel when being carried out by a riptide seized his mind—the dawning realization that he just might not make it. Somehow, he’d retained his grip around his Quaranai. Slowly, like a computer rebooting, feeling returned to him in the form of white pins through his skin.

  Hold out, Jack, just a little longer…

  Gavin reached with clumsy fingers to the small of his back, beneath the folds of his cloak, and pulled out his last line of defense—the H&K Mark 23 pistol. He closed one eye, aimed and caught Deos right in the cheek.

  Then the Fourth Moon hit its zenith.

  *

  A long rumble of thunder walked across the sky. He could smell it the air, the crisp tang of something monstrous approaching.

  Jack summoned the last of his reserves, stood and stumbled forward into the hard wind that had kicked up suddenly. Deos was bearing down on Stav, abandoning his attack on Jack to reach down and snatch. To take. Deos needed that Quaranai.

  Stav tried to fight him off, but the slash he made at Deos’s arm was slow and weak. Deos batted it aside, leaned down and picked up Stav by the throat, while the other hand wrestled the blade from his hand. They were only about twenty feet away.

  By his fourth step Jack was sprinting.

  *

  He knew Deos wouldn’t kill him; he needed his Quaranai unblackened. But he could do other things. The fingers that strangled the air from his throat were like rock, his face even more hideous up close. In fact, this was as near as he’d ever been to the Overlord. Gavin sent heat to his fingers but nothing more than a gentle stirring bubbled up. The amulet was spent. In the most basic violence from one to another, Asmodeous the Pale wrenched away Gavin’s Quaranai as he flailed helplessly three feet off the ground in the Overlord’s grip.

  “Fret not, valiant cattle. Soon your life will be at an end, and with it your pain. That will be good, yes?” His breath was revolting, like three-day-old roadkill baking in the sun.

  From behind him, Jack charged. Gavin rolled the back of his throat, gathered up as much mucus as he could and then hocked right into Deos’s face. Just as Jack leaped.

  *

  It was all or nothing. Holding his Quaranai in both hands, blade down, burning the last of his reserves in one last charge, Jack sailed nine
feet, burying the instinct to yell at the top of his lungs. The back of his cloak trailed his descending body like a pennant on a lance but before he could strike, before his blade could find its target, Deos flung Stavengre down and spun. In slow motion, with that infamous leer, the Overlord of the Drynn speared out Stavengre’s captured Quaranai like a bayonet and skewered Jack dead through the chest. Jack, who was no stranger to pain, did end up screaming, just not the way he’d wanted to. Consequences of a neutron bomb detonating through his body.

  The stolen Quaranai flashed and crackled as it penetrated the legendary armor of the Shardyn breastplate and crunched into his sternum, eviscerated his lung and came out his back.

  No longer able to breathe, it was all Jack could do to gasp and hang helplessly in the air, an extension of Asmodeous’s outstretched, bleeding arm. Jack’s Quaranai blackened in his hand and then fell from nerveless fingers.

  Asmodeous brought Jack down to face level and forced him to look within his amber orbs. “Goodbye, Sur Juekovelin.”

  The last thing Jack Nyx saw was closing fangs and a gaping maw.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  For a long moment, Gavin couldn’t take it in; what his eyes saw, his mind rejected. Like a sack of rotting lettuce, Asmodeous tossed Jack’s body to the side and bared his arsenal of teeth in a grin.

  “Tastes like swine,” he said, wiping off Gavin’s spit, which oozed off his albino leather cheek. He ripped the Regolith Talisman victoriously from his chest, black metal chain dangling down his forearm, and cast it in the circle of light.

  Somehow, Gavin found the strength to stand, only to watch helplessly as the talisman arced and landed perfectly in the hole in the center.

  The instant it touched the soil, the four elements resting atop the altars combusted, forming a curtain of purple-black light like a membrane within the circle. A faint ripple at first, the membrane of light brightened, harnessing the luminance of the Fourth Moon above, forming a lens over the circular hole the Regolith Talisman was lying in. Brighter and stronger, the lens coalesced and then…the night went black.

  If blood and fire were to spawn, the resulting offspring would be the color of the ray of light that speared down from the sky on the western horizon. A spectacular boom of thunder rolled after it, followed by a crackling that sounded as if cosmic hands had just ripped a sequoia tree in half. Green, blue and magenta lightning shattered the sky.

  “It is time, Annototh!” Deos yelled into a howling wind that came like the exhale of an angry god.

  The hole in the circle where the talisman lay began to fill with soupy light, steadily filling like a basin in a fountain. When the circle was filled, the light thickened into a stew, coagulating until it stopped churning.

  Gavin grit his teeth and pushed against the pain, willed himself to move. He had no weapons; his own sacred blade was still in Deos’s clutches. His pistol was gone, somewhere in the grass. His friends were down or dead, and Asmodeous was about to rekindle the worst war in the history of Mankind. His world would have no warning. It would be a slaughter.

  Huge, ominous clouds billowed around the moon above, as if it were a giant burning coal tossed into a night sea. The clouds were thick, swirling with menace.

  They were small at first, but a network of tiny fissures formed in the now-frozen light within the Circle of Elements. Starting at the center, the cracks worked out toward the perimeter, like a window hit with a BB. The fissures widened and then one at a time, pieces of the earth began to fall away, revealing a roiling veil of darkness beneath, contained within the fiber optic light of the Circle.

  The Veil.

  Unlike the smoky evil that seeped out of Asmodeous’s pores, or the simple darkness of night, this darkness was like black silk atop a stormy sea. It bulged and whipped, stretched and fluttered, forever separating the two worlds. Until now.

  Gavin’s eyes burned with tears. There was only one thing he could do.

  Sorry, Earth. Asmodeous stays here.

  He looked around. Jack’s black Quaranai was lying mere feet away from him. Vaguely, he was aware of Amanda running to him but he waved her off. He didn’t want her to see what he was going to do. In a flash of irony that pinged him on the forehead, Deos would probably keep his word. Amanda would live.

  “Go!” Gavin yelled, but the wind whipped his away words. He used pure gestures, praying she’d listen. “Please,” he yelled, and his voice cracked. “Run!”

  He spun around—there was no time to see if she would—and summoned the last of his strength, dashing across the rain-soaked glass. He slid on one knee like a baseball player stealing second, studiously avoiding looking at Jack’s faceless corpse, and snatched the short-bladed Quaranai that had turned black. Nothing as glamorous or dramatic as Seppuku. He took one breath, held the inert blade in front of his heart…and was blown backward by a ball of crimson electricity.

  “We mustn’t have your blade blacken before the portal is opened,” Asmodeous said from in front of the Veil.

  Gavin gasped and twitched at threads of lightning slowly dissipating from his armor. His muscles were numb. No air entered or exited his lungs, but he couldn’t tell if it was because he’d just suffered a mild electrocution or the simple fact that the worst possible outcome was transpiring in front of his face. And there wasn’t a single thing he could do about it. He willed his arms to yield to his commands.

  Asmodeous watched Gavin’s struggles with a patronizing sneer and then stepped onto the Veil like an emperor, which whipped and billowed beneath his weight. The effect was a perverse vision of him walking on water. He strode to the middle of the circle, where the Regolith Talisman was still being pierced by a crimson-orange beam of moonlight from the horizon, and held Gavin’s Quaranai victoriously over his head.

  “Neesh,” Gavin gasped, and his blade shut down in Deos’s hand, contracting to the size of a long knife. What little Death’s Breath and light that had remained winked out.

  Asmodeous just smiled. Gavin summoned a dart of light to streak into his eyes from his fingertips but the Liquid Crystal Amulet was dead. Asmodeous strolled toward Gavin, reached down and grabbed him by the throat. Gavin tried to fend him off, clutched at the leathery wrist, but it continued to descend until his claw sank into the base of Gavin’s neck. Gavin screamed. Asmodeous smiled some more, its effect more chilling because of the bullet mark right next to the tip of his mouth. It mocked him, as if to say, nice try.

  When Deos took his claw out of Gavin’s flesh, it was glistening with blood. He poured a couple of drops onto the blue diamond housing the shard of moonstone that gave the Quaranai its magic and said, “Efil.”

  It was an abomination uttered by the Lord of the Underworld but unbidden, Gavin’s Quaranai shot up and glinted blue fire, obeying the command of another—of Asmodeous the Pale.

  Laughing, Deos tossed him to the ground and walked back to the circle, grinning as he was bathed in its luminance. With exaggerated motion, Deos reversed his grip on the Shardyn blade, pointed the tip down…and thrust.

  The sky exploded.

  Like an octopus in the middle of the sky, the blood-gorged moon sent tendrils of multicolored lightning through the smoky clouds, shredding them. The Veil flashed blue as it was pierced, and like acid dissolving fabric, a hole formed in the center around the blade, spreading to reveal a window into another reality.

  Sunlight, warm and golden, shined up, as if heaven led down instead of up. Asmodeous dipped his wing into the sunlight and Gavin watched
, horrified, as new life poured into it. The boils receded, stretching taut against his gnarled body.

  Asmodeous laughed, but it faded quickly. His eyes hardened, the red flecks in his eyes glinting. “Now your suffering begins.”

  A foot-long tongue of muzzle-fire erupted from the AK-47 Amanda was holding, joining the lightning pyrotechnics raging around the Bastion as a doorway to another world was opened. The first couple of rounds nailed him square in the chest and neck, but since she was unaccustomed to the recoil, the gun kicked up and sprayed the air above him. Asmodeous’s wings snapped up to protect his face and when the magazine was spent, an angry snarl emerged.

  “That revokes the oath, Annototh,” Deos said and his snarl turned to a smile.

  Gavin’s stomach shriveled at the truth, but a different reaction replaced the gloat. Surprise.

  “What’s this? The dead also rise on this world?”

  Gavin looked behind. Both Tarsy and Noah staggered forward, cloaks whipping in the tempest of wind and rain. Each of them held their lightless Quaranais, and with each step they seemed to grow stronger.

  “This is what makes the flesh of Men so sweet,” Deos said and reached out his hand. Red lightning began to draw together at the tips of his talons. “Valiance. Your woman first, then your friends and then you. Oh, and then your beloved homeland.”

  Valiant, yes. Smart, no. Without magic, they were all going to die.

  Amanda screwed her eyes shut and pulled her head back, but she didn’t move. Gavin had seen hundreds of men, hundreds of warriors run screaming in similar straits. That’s my girl. Her strength, her courage, sent a rush of life to his limbs, and with a pain-filled snarl, Gavin ripped himself from the ground.

  Asmodeous gave his contemptuous, guttural, breathy laugh. “Farewell, cattle.” He raised his arm. The pool of crimson light expanded in his palm, peeking between his thick, taloned fingers—