The Paragon rose, standing in an almost human form. His dragon wings, shortened tail, and spike-maned head were still attached to the new bipedal frame. He was as tall as Pyra, and was staring daggers down at them.
Chelda stepped in front of Vanx with the Glaive in one hand, and the hammer in the other. The britches she’d donned from a fallen Trigon soldier ended at her knees, and her huge breasts were about to bust the buttons of the top.
With her in front of him, and Poops hunkering behind him, Vanx almost fell over as he tilted his head to look up at his enemy. Finally, he did take a step back, so that Poops was between his legs. Then he sighed knowing this might cost him all the energy he had left, and cast another Tempus Fist.
The brunt of the blow only staggered the Paragon back a step, and then it threw its arm down, pointing at them. A harsh jag of blue lightning came right at them, and Vanx hadn’t even set a shield yet.
The Paragon was tackled then, by a streaking red dragon. The lightning struck Chelda’s raised sword, but only for an instant. The direction of the sizzling energy was thrown off by Pyra’s attack, and it was then that Zeezle, Pexicon and Master Ruuk reappeared.
As soon as Pyra and the shapeshifter came to a rolling stop, the mighty red dragon leapt up and away.
The Zythians started casting long, arcing strands of magical force across the Paragon’s struggling form. These strands cinched down the struggling shapeshifter like ropes tied to stakes in the ground.
Pyra raised her head and roared, then she looked down and bathed the Paragon in a gout of flame that curled Vanx’s eyebrow hairs. There must have been something special about the bindings the Zythians had put on the raging blue thing, for it seemed unable to change forms now.
Crackling energy was racing all over its scaled hide, and stretched the arcane strands to their limits, but couldn’t break them.
Vanx saw dragons, real dragons, not stunted wyrms, in the sky. Some had survived the battles at the towers, after all, and they looked to be answering Pyra’s call.
The Paragon Dracus broke through the bindings then, and as it shifted into its dragon form, it lurched up and enlarged its head to a size big enough to bite right over Pyra’s. With a shake of that massive spiked mane, the mighty fire queen’s limp neck fell to the side, and her body crumpled from where she’d been perched over the huge bastard.
Vanx almost choked on his own heart.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Dream until you’ve find your way.
But if your sleeping here,
you’ll have to pay
“NOOOOO!” Vanx heard himself screaming.
The lump in his throat was the size of a fist. The Paragon held Pyra’s head in its jaws and tilted back, as if it were waiting for her dying teardrops to fall. It shook the head twice and leaned its elongated neck forward, letting Pyra’s misshapen head tumble from slackened jaws. The crunched skull ended up not far from where Vanx, Poops and Chelda were huddled.
The Paragon looked as if it might be choking for a moment, then a long strand of foamy blue phlegm dripped and dangled from its mouth. When it finally raised up to look around, the first of Pyra’s dragons attacked.
The wyrm was batted away, but three more got claws or teeth into the power-drenched thing. In a matter of moments, the Paragon was stumbling around, batting lazily at the dozen smaller dragons that had come.
The Paragon looked like a man who’d found a hornets’ nest, but he was so stupefied by the teardrops that must have leaked from Pyra’s ducts into his gullet, that he was too slow to defend himself from so many attackers at once. He was moving at a slower rate than the colorful, fluttering, fifteen- to fifty-foot-long wyrms hovering like carrion birds around him. And more of the deadly pure-blooded wyrms were coming by the moment.
The swarming attack looked to be working, so Vanx followed Poops over to Pyra’s head, both of them fighting back tears of their own. Chelda cursed them as she came, as if she couldn’t protect them if they were moving. Vanx didn’t think she could protect them at all. He knew she’d die trying, though, so he slowed up, allowing them to move together.
The Zythians were casting spells at the Paragon now, and more dragons were joining in the ravaging of the monster.
Vanx looked deep into Pyra’s open eye and saw the lack of life. It saddened him to the core, and he almost broke down right there. He might have, for he was starting to fall into despair. But two things happened that changed everything. First, the Paragon began raging. In the glossy reflection of Pyra’s orb, Vanx saw its shape shift into something akin to a porcupine. The dragons around it were shafted with the long spikes that instantly grew out of its skin.
A second later, Pexicon Croyle was flattened by a beaver-tail-like appendage that came slapping down with a wet, crunching smack. Vanx barely saw that, for he was reaching down into the grass at his feet. He dropped to a knee in cautious awe, but stopped. He reached into his vest and took out the Mirror of Portent. He would see what it had to show him before he picked up the last glistening, power-filled teardrop that had fallen from Pyra’s eyes.
He saw himself in the portent, losing that very teardrop to the Paragon. It looked as if he had been feeding it to the bastard, and he cursed the piece of broken glass, but didn’t throw it away like he wanted to.
Vanx grabbed the teardrop anyway. It was all he could do to get his shard of reflective glass back into its case, and in his pocket, before the dour rush overtook him. It carried him into its floating magical sea, and he was immersed in dour magic.
Poops’s insistent barking wouldn’t let him stay adrift, though, which was good, because Zeezle screamed out in either pain or anguish. The sound was enough to hold onto. Vanx had to fight to focus, but as he gathered himself, he saw that the Paragon was coming right for him.
It wanted the teardrop he had in his fist. And if his portent were true, it just might be about to get it. But not without a fight, for Vanx had seen a portent changed before, had just changed one himself, and he was about to change this one, too.
You are now officially dubbed the Mirror of Portents I’m about to change, Vanx thought through the turmoil of emotions roiling inside him.
Vanx cast the Tempus Fist spell right into the Paragon’s now scale-covered, dragon-formed chest. The power of Pyra’s tear nearly stunned him stupid as the force violently impacted the Paragon and sent it stumbling backward through the greenery.
Vanx made the best of the moment and followed his familiar up a rise to get a better visual advantage, and as soon as he was there, he cast the spell again.
To his disappointment, this time the blast was stopped by some invisible shield. This reminded him to cast a protective spell of his own.
Master Ruuk, from a similar perch of overgrown structure, bound one of the Paragon’s legs with more of the magical rope-like strands, and then Zeezle threw hammering pulses of yellow energy at its eyes and face.
They must have been expecting Vanx to do something, but the only thing that came to his mind was forgotten when he looked at Chelda.
She was raging, a dwarven war hammer in one hand, and the tiny Glaive in the other. She wanted to square off with the Paragon, and if she were its size, she’d probably stand a chance on the power of her will alone.
It was then that Vanx understood the portent he’d just seen in the mirror, and he used the power of Pyra’s teardrop, and one of the Hoar Witch’s transformation spells, to make Chelda ten times or more her natural size.
“Ya!” he heard Chelda say gleefully as she dropped the Glaive and grew. “Now that’s the way to use your witchery!” After a moment, she rolled her shoulders and twisted her back side to side, as if loosening up for a sparring session. Vanx couldn’t believe he’d really made her huge, and he hoped he could bring her back to normal when this was done. Fear of Moonsy’s wrath actually overshadowed his fear of the Paragon for a moment, but then Chelda made a move.
She feigned a dart to the right, and then stepped three lon
g strides directly toward the Paragon and cracked it in the side of the head with the massive dwarven hammer. It was a crunching blow, but it only staggered the blue-glowing shapeshifter for a heartbeat. It swung its sword-sized claws around at her wildly, but she rolled forward, crushing new trees as if they were weeds, until she came to her feet out of its range.
Vanx saw that the hill giants were getting to the scene, having run all the way. The smaller dragons that had avoided the Paragon’s quills were already fighting to avoid Chelda’s attack, so the lot of them banked around, like a flock of birds, and tore into the huge, club-wielding dolts.
The Paragon Dracus charged Chelda then, with a flap of its wings, swinging claws as it came. Chelda lunged forward under the attack, and then stood up, dropping the hammer to use both hands to shove her sword up into its gut. It was a move Vanx had seen the gargan warrior execute before on a nasty beast in her mountain village on their quest to Saint Elm’s Deep.
The Paragon was as stunned as everyone else, and stayed still after it crashed into the turf, its belly split wide open.
Vanx thought about the portent then. After remembering what the Paragon was really about, he decided he knew exactly what they had to do.
Gather their tears, he called to Zeezle and Master Ruuk through the ethereal. He indicated where a few of the dragons had landed near Pyra’s head and were shedding tears of sorrow or rage for their dead queen. More were coming, as the hill giants’ lives were ended.
Hurry. Vanx made the urgency clear. Get them to me.
Vanx elevated himself into a hover and floated on the power of Pyra’s teardrop to a place near the Paragon’s head.
It opened its eyes, just as one of the Zythians caused three dragon tears to appear in Vanx’s hands. Vanx dropped them into the Paragon’s slightly opened mouth, and it slowly blinked in confusion as it swallowed them. A moment later, six more teardrops appeared in Vanx’s cradled arms, and he dropped them all into the Paragon’s foam-filled mouth at once.
A third haul of teardrops, and the Paragon closed his eyes and lay still, probably lost in the glorious sea of dour magic forever.
This time when the smaller dragons came to tear it to shreds, it could give no resistance. It didn’t even try.
But Chelda, still as tall as fifteen men, shooed the wyrms away, as if they were crows. She took a wide stance and looked at the mound of vegetation in the distance, the hill that used to be Kelse’s body, and the mound of Pyra’s head, in turn. She gave Vanx a glance, shrugged and then waited for his nod. When it came, she grinned.
With one great overhead swing, a swing that had been perfected splitting wood for more than twenty years in the frigid mountains, she smashed the Paragon’s head flat with the enlarged dwarven hammer.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
When death comes for you,
you may not know.
But rest assured,
‘twas your time to go.
As they stood there recovering, Vanx used the power of Pyra’s teardrop to bring Chelda back down to her normal size, but as soon as he was sure she was safe, he tossed the thing to the side.
The dour rush didn’t leave him immediately. It lingered, like the taste of a fine red wine.
Poops yipped and whined to Vanx until he looked at what the dog wanted him to. There, near where the Paragon’s stomach might have been, was a thick, upward reaching growth. The power of all those undigested dragon tears must have combined with the emerald dust or some such, Vanx thought, at least until Zeezle made the comparison that made it clear.
“It looks like a Heart Tree,” Zeezle said.
“Here.” Vanx threw his friend a rolled-up cloak from the gear they’d collected back on their side of the world. “We’ve seen you naked long enough.”
“Can we go back through the towers?” Vanx asked Master Ruuk.
“Not long after you came through, the tower tops shattered, killing everything in the sky around them,” the Zythian wizard said, while Zeezle nodded slowly.
“That fargin’ changeling couldn’t use them anymore, so he didn’t want anyone else using them,” Chelda guessed.
“The way the tower we came through shattered was frightening.” Master Ruuk’s voice was somber. “I teleported Pexicon and our wyrm away and back, missing the brunt of the blasting pieces of stone, but most of the fae and lesser dragons were shredded when it happened. The dazers were decimated too, though, which is what allowed us—” He looked around and sighed heavily. “It’s what allowed us to escape the overwhelming numbers.”
Vanx realized then that the pixie that had been in his hair was gone. He was so overwrought by Pyra’s death that he couldn’t remember the last time he was there.
“Look,” Chelda exclaimed girlishly. Her flighty tone of voice was strange, since she’d only moments ago killed the Paragon Dracus with a hammer blow, while being as big as a castle. “Look how big.”
Vanx looked up, and then sat down beside his familiar so that he could lay back and take in the wonder.
Leaves the size of baby blankets were falling here and there, drifting back and forth lazily, until they settled on the ground. All around them, trees as big around as houses were reaching into the sky, spreading their limbs, and filling out with buds and greenery.
Vanx understood something then.
“One of those would knock you over, if it drifted into you,” Chelda marveled. “If you made me giant again, I would live under that very Heart Tree and feel right at home.”
“I couldn’t,” Vanx shook his head, and Poops barked his agreement.
“Why not?” Zeezle and Chelda asked at the same time.
“Because I am Vanx Saint Elm, and that is an oak.”
“But the Heart Tree back at Saint Elm’s Deep isn’t an elm,” Zeezle said. “It’s some sort of pine, a white pine, I think.”
“What difference does it make?” asked the crazy wizard, as he snapped into existence a few feet out of everyone’s reach. “Vanx will have to find his own elm, but I think that will be an easy task, for it is no longer a planted tree, but still full of magic and life. And it is waiting for him as we speak.”
There was a pale-feathered great hawk perched on the wizard’s shoulder. Vanx knew immediately that it was the wizard’s familiar, and knew who the wizard was. He’d sung the Ballad of Ornspike a thousand times.
“Are you, you, him?” Vanx’s question was cut off by the ageless human’s raised palm.
“You’ve half the world to travel to get home, and I suggest you go to yon port and seek your ship, for the final bond between the mannish and the dragons has been broken here.
“It will be many years”—he turned to look at Zeezle then, and met the Zythian’s gaze—“before there is another bond beyond Alizarian and I. But there will be, and for that, we should all be thankful.”
Vanx started to ask him again if he was the wizard from the ballads, but he already knew the answer. Of course he was. Who else would have the gall to introduce himself as the greatest wizard who ever lived, but the greatest wizard who ever lived?
“It seems I owe you a favor,” the old master wizard said, “but you will have to find me in Xwarda to claim it.” The bird cawed its agreement as the wizard handed Vanx an ancient leather scroll case. “I deceived you, but the Paragon trapped my familiar, and leveraged his life against my resistance to its cause,” the wizard continued. “You have the bond with Sir Poopsalot. You’d have done the same. So, I knew you would understand in the end. Now that the Paragon and his Trigon have been destroyed, and this glorified rooster is free, we’ll be off to see if our tower is still our tower, and find Alizarian, for it has been a very long time since we’ve been home.”
He and the bird started to fade, but he quickly reappeared as if he’d forgotten something. “I wouldn’t teleport to a point farther than you can see,” he warned. “It was the towers that allowed a man to relocate from a place in his memory. Doing so now will be far less precise.”
&nbs
p; “Some of us are not men,” Master Ruuk said, with no challenge in his tone.
“You are Phenzythian, and a novice at best,” the wizard said flatly. “I knew Phen, the Phen, and the Queen of the High Elves he impregnated to create your kind. I have been alive longer than your entire race, Master Ruuk Yuflaria.”
The sound of his name, knowing he hadn’t introduced himself, was enough to humble, and silence, the Zythian wizard.
“I want to ask you so many things,” Vanx said, as the eons-old man and the hawk started to fade again.
“Then come to Xwarda and find my tower.”
“Maybe I will,” Vanx nodded.
“Was that Falcramahn?” Zeezle asked after the wizard was gone.
“I believe so,” Vanx shook his head in wonder. “I do believe so.”
Vanx only wished the empty place left in his heart that had been torn away when Pyra died hadn’t already swallowed the little spark of hope he’d just been given.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Where there is magic,
there is always adventure and risk.
Inside the scroll case there was another map, and a note. The note explained that the map was to the location of another powerful gemstone. Only, the “X” on the map marked a stronghold on an unnamed land mass in the middle of the sea, not some abandoned mine. Vanx recognized the land though, and where it was in relation to the rest of the continents, because he’d seen it when the old wizard had lit up the Octron’s controller.
Vanx had no real inclination to follow the map. At least not at the moment. He knew he would eventually. He would return home and see Gallarael first. Surely she would want to go with him on a new quest.
The group was gathered along the dock in Port Harthgar—Vanx, Poops, Chelda, Zeezle and Master Ruuk. They were wearing cloaks and had their weapons put away, so no one knew they were the ones who had been battling near the citadel and spelled half the city into a forest.
The Far Side of Creation (The Legend of Vanx Malic Book 7) Page 11