A voice in the distance, from some other time and place.
Was it speaking to me?
It was.
I think.
Why?
Was the sun already up?
“Noema’lun, we must go. Now is not the time for dreams.”
Oh.
I saw what he’d done there.
Stone dreamer, indeed.
Just because I had a penchant for getting knocked senseless even while in stone form did not mean Lucius could mock my heroic efforts against the demonic hordes.
Okay.
He could.
And it was rather witty.
In a duplicitous, backstabbing, snarky way.
But it was also a compliment.
Which is why it was the best of insults.
I would take the good with the bad.
Even Lucius’s humor at my expense.
“I’m up!”
I popped into the air with the ease and alacrity of a cork pushed underwater and then released.
“Let’s float!”
I wanted to say something with a bit more verve, but, really, how could I make floating sound more gallant?
Let’s hover!
Let’s drift!
Let’s glide!
Lets bob?
I needed to work on my witticisms.
Elementals were not big on catch phrases, but once we encountered some humans, I needed to be ready to impress them with my ready wit and valiant ways if we were to gain allies in our efforts to prevent further demonic incursions.
I was sure the Empyrean Knights had whole phraseologies built around the epic language necessary to describe their heroic deeds against the throngs of Darkness.
I needed to be in their league if I was going to be accepted into it.
Unconcerned by my foibles, Lucius and Company drifted down the slopes around the mangled bodies of slain demons and the shattered remains of fallen elemental brethren.
More demons had been killed than elementals, but, unlike the throngs of Darkness, we did not arise from an endless well.
We could not afford to lose any.
I hated to see any of my protectors fall, especially when, unlike most humans, elementals could still themselves and be almost undetectable by demons, indistinguishable from rocks.
The elementals in our company had given up their safety to help their brethren.
We could not stop to mourn our losses; that would dishonor their sacrifices.
The longer we lingered, the more demons would come.
Even if we did not wait, more demons would come.
Overhead, the sky streaked, a steel-blue wash that mirrored the gray stone blur shifting beneath us as we sped over the rocky escarpments, outcroppings, ledges, and slopes of the Dragon’s Teeth.
The sky was empty of birds, but the occasional unspeakable shadow tore through the heavens, its dark reflection marring even the ground over which it passed.
Thankfully, the demons of the sky left us alone.
I was sure they would come in time. But, for now, we were left to survey the shadows, the crags, the caves, and the gulleys for hellish entities lying in wait for us as we flew toward Noema’jin.
At our current pace, I reckoned we were perhaps just a few days away from the elementals’ home.
Several days was more than enough time to meet whole armies’ worth of demons.
I was not anxious to meet one.
Did my thoughts in and of themselves, without magical invocation, bring reality to life?
I must be far more accomplished in Craft than I had thought.
A terrible scream, the sound of a soul being ripped apart made real, assaulted us mere minutes after my blithe conjecture.
So much for being left alone by the demons of the sky.
Why could I not keep my mind shut?
“Spread out!” Lucius yelled, mostly for my benefit.
Elementals communicated in other, subtler ways.
But not-so-subtle means worked just as well.
As a rock, I could not spread out, but I could take cover.
I found a large leaning boulder, one with enough room in its lee to provide a degree of tactical protection that reassured my inherent concerns over my combat unsavviness.
From that secure position beneath several tons of granite, I could easily work my magic and blast fiery death upon the abomination that was stalking us from the skies.
I ventured a peek around the rock’s formidable protections.
And wished I had not.
How do you describe the bogeyman, the nightmare that makes the thing that goes bump in the night sound like the faintest hint of a breeze before unbridled gale-force winds?
How do you express the fear you feel about the monster that must be under your bed, the thing that has jumped from your nightmares to come and dwell in your room?
How do you express in words what the end of hope feels like, to see your reality crumble and be remade in terror?
Words do not do justice to the monstrosity that descended upon us on wings darker than the gulf within the void that was its soul.
I was too locked in fear to move, pulled inexorably into the well of terror that had the demon situated at its fell heart.
A blast of vile Darkness from its yawning maw, one that seemed to erase the very substance of the rock from existence, the one that had, until now, comforted me, actually saved my life.
The rock’s destruction gave me the impetus to move, breaking my fear.
Its annihilation prevented mine.
I clattered away from the space the stone had occupied for eons with a speed born of desperation.
All around me, elementals darted into the air, tiny, self-propelled ballista launching themselves at the otherdimensional juggernaut.
When I deemed myself relatively safe, which is to say, when I slowed down long enough to see that I had left my allies behind and needed to turn around lest I get separated, I unleashed the masterstroke of my counterattack.
While my butterflies flew into action like the Father’s own shuriken of righteousness, I gathered my will to unleash the fires of Heaven upon the demon birthed in the foulest pits of Hell.
Pulling more energy into myself than my human form would have allowed, I unleashed a flurry of power garnered from the highest echelons of magical esoterica that I had been able to reliably decipher.
A tremendous pop, the sound of Heaven’s own clarion trumpets, reported through the valley, echoing off the mountainsides loud enough to deafen me if I had had ears.
Lucent streamers, the very Light of Heaven itself, the ineffable Essence of the Divine, shot forth from my imagined extended fingertips.
This fury of cosmic destruction enveloped the unholy abomination in writhing tendrils of polychromatic vengeance.
A counter-scream, just as loud as the sound heralding my spell, and far more horrific, ripped from the beast as my awesome magics smashed into its mighty frame in a shower of sparks and light.
And…party favors?
And streamers?
Its abhorrent wings tangled in tons of sparkling streamers, its maw filled with mounds of candies and treats, the demon fell to the earth with the resounding crash of a cosmic missile.
Those elementals not obliterated by its baleful magics swarmed upon the foul duaga like a pack of children denied treats and dessert at an overlong birthday party.
The demon lord never had a chance.
Accoutered in the remnants of tassels and streamers, Lucius roared his approval as he flew toward me to celebrate with what I pretended was an elemental chest bump. “Well done, Noema’lun! Well done!”
The surviving elementals, now roughly half their original number, gathered and rained confetti upon me in celebration of the demon’s fall.
Although I put on a brave facet, I was less than happy with the outcome, for far too much had been lost.
The gleeful exuberance of my butterflies made up for my lack of
festive zeal as we reformed and zipped onward across the landscape, wary of more terrors from the sky.
My heart lifted when I started seeing signs of vegetation.
To my elemental eyes, the world gradually became painted with the vibrant hues and patterns of life, a lush richness that was only truly made apparent by its relative absence in the lands through which we had crossed.
Even now, the landscape was relatively sere and xeric with but occasional stunted grasses, trees, and bushes visible. Hidden between rocks and vegetation, the furtive movements of small animals could sometimes be glimpsed.
The land was different.
Markedly so.
I felt like I was swimming through energy.
Would my spells have greater effect here?
This was something I had not fully considered.
There are many sources of magic—the energies of Creation, the universal Light of the divine, the raw Chaos of primordial potential, and the energies created by living things among many others.
Were magicians in the past more capable than those of today simply because they had ready access to greater sources of energy?
I hoped to find out the answer.
As we flew west and north, the lands grew steadily more verdant.
There were trees!
In the wild!
And there was deep, abiding magic in the land itself, magic that appeared to offer protections in much the same way as the shields Master Nomba had created, albeit in a different, more intrinsic form.
Why was that?
“Lucius, why are these lands protected from the demons? Why have they not fallen to Chaos like those we just crossed?”
Lucius did not stop or slow to answer my question.
But he did answer.
“We near the lands of the dragons. Demons have not been able to touch the heart of their realm in all the centuries of their invasion.
“To the north of these lands, the el’amin have held sway.
“We, too, have resisted Chaos’s onslaught…until now.”
Dragons!
And elementals!
I could learn much from dragons! Perhaps even things that were not in, or yet available to me in, The Big Book of Spells and The Little Book of Knowledge.
From the perspective of understanding and knowing anything of the world’s surviving civilizations, the world outside the Greensward was largely a mystery to me.
And here was one!
Sadly, we would not be able to stop and explore, at least not in the way the region warranted.
And, even if we could, the dragons might have little interest in a butterfly-wreathed, elemental-mimicking wizard.
I was, however, willing to try to convince them.
This desire was a promise for the future.
So, while I pined after missed opportunities, I appreciated the hoary old trees, the moss-strewn valleys, the call of wild creatures, a landscape draped in fog, and the aura of living things that slowly revealed itself to us.
Wondrously, in this land, the only great shadows that were cast from overhead were those of dragons.
They were as majestically grand as the heavens above.
And even more luminous.
Almost Home
Beneath the slowly growing moonlight, flecked by passing clouds, the Greensward was a lustrous gem bisected by the silent Bouras River.
As much as my heart ached for home, we still had a long walk down the mountainside to reach the valley bottom and rest.
How would we be welcomed upon our return?
What had changed in the weeks that had passed in our absence?
If asked, I would say we had left mere minutes ago on our journey, though I knew this was only time viewed in retrospect, its ceaseless movements glossed over by memory.
Would people see me as different?
Would they know how much I had changed?
Though still full of fear, I was just as full of determination.
Perhaps this was as much the purpose of Master Nomba’s excursion as anything else—to light a fire inside me that could not be quenched, no matter how high raged the plumes of self-doubt and recrimination.
On the Trail Again
I liked having Lucius as my wing rock.
We made a great team.
He was fearsome and implacable, a force of nature made manifest.
I was nature without much force, occasionally able to manifest.
On a scale of elemental effectiveness, Lucius was like a painting by a master, one that touched the soul and transcended generations. I was like a crude sketch by a toddler, one that only a mother would appreciate and whose meaning was barely apparent even to the artist himself.
Despite my many faults, Lucius and I still drafted off each other’s slipstreams.
My wake just happened to be a bit choppier.
A cloud of fluttering butterflies will do that to one’s wake.
Or so I hear.
Of course, my butterflies were the least of our wingmen now. Apparently our small flock of elementals was interesting enough to gather a bit of unexpected, awe-inspiring attention.
High above, the sun sparking red, gold, green, and blue off their liquid scales, a flight of dragons banked in the firmament, their vast wings as capable of resounding with the crack of thunder as slipping silently through the updrafts.
Through my elemental eyes, the dragons appeared to be limitless wells of self-sustaining generative energy.
I estimated the dragon flight’s numbers perhaps between ten and fifteen, their tremendous bodies and dazzling essences made counting quite difficult.
And some measures are beyond counting.
The dragons made no effort to alter their course or engage us as we crossed their lands.
As much as I longed for contact and dialogue, ambivalence was better than some other alternatives.
With the wind blowing across my facets, sliding easily across my stony form, I longed for the accompaniment of mood music as we crossed valleys grown full and rife with vegetation.
A full orchestra belting out an imperial war march would suffice.
What child did not dream of flying into battle surrounded by an army of legendary heroes?
Behind me, above me, all around me, elementals arched and soared, the earth alive. Beyond the el’amin, lifting the heavens upon their mighty wings, beating back gravity, dragons, might and magic made manifest, were our scouts and rear guard, our heavy air support.
I felt like a hero in the days of old, flying over the land to come to the rescue.
At least until I imagined what was to come at journey’s end.
Then, I no longer dreamed of flying into battle.
Or rescue.
I just wanted to turn around and go home.
I would let the true heroes carry on without me.
Their wings were strong enough to lift the day without my interference.
Despite this inner voice urging me to turn around, to retreat, to head for home, I continued. I let its debilitating sirensong echo through my mind unanswered.
I might not be a hero on the scale of dragons or elementals, but I could stand up for what I believed.
I could follow through with my intent.
I could see Master Nomba’s vision through.
Master Nomba had believed in me.
I could believe in him.
I could try to make his vision real.
Along the way, maybe I could make his dream even greater than he had believed.
I might not be a hero.
But I could believe.
And I could believe in myself.
So, I flew proudly, surrounded by earthen lords of the mountains and flanked by soaring kings of the sky.
We rushed forward together, not to meet but to make our destinies.
An Idea
We stopped for the day in a fog-draped valley far too verdant to be part of this world.
My mind rebelled against t
he thought of so much greenery.
How could there be so much in one place?
The trees were massive, stretching heavenward so high and thick that the sky itself was but a memory.
The dragons had not left us.
I had thought the wyrms might leave us by now, flying away home to their aeries, or take up roosts high up in the looming peaks that the trees now blocked, their long, sinuous bodies invisible to us, but the dragons took positions in the canopy instead. The trees were so massive, their limbs and trunks so strong, that the dragons entwined themselves within the trees’ structures without event.
There was some rustling and the falling of branches, bark, and debris, but otherwise there was little sign of the dragons’ presence above.
The dragons’ quietude also gave me newfound respect for their abilities as predators.
If creatures as massive as dragons could remain completely silent and undetected in the trees, what else could they do?
This would be a topic for study in The Big Book of Knowledge.
One I would welcome wholeheartedly.
Sadly, my studies had lapsed since I left the Greensward.
A music slowly built within my mind, dancing with the chorus of the sea, building with the strength of winds before a summer storm, echoing with the timber of silence. Within this song, a voice as vast as the sky filled the chambers of my awareness.
This was the voice of a dragon.
The time had come for the building of covenants.
“Elemental brothers, mortal man, our lands are harried and our borders under attack. Despite the Chaos Gate’s fall, these pressures grow daily as demons disperse away from the portal to the Abyss.
“Your lands are falling to Darkness under an invasive tide even as we abide in this glade.”
I sensed the urgency in that voice, its power and majesty, as it beseeched us to band together in common cause.
“We would join with you to beat back the interlopers threatening our lands. With our teeth and claws, our breath and might, we would help fight off these usurpers.
“Success in the lands of your home, those of your primordial ancestors, will only help protect our land and deepen our alliance.
Legacy of the Blade: The Complete Trilogy Page 30