The Puppet King

by Doug Niles

  And finally all the elves were running, stumbling through the undergrowth, fleeing in mindless panic through the dark, haunted woods.

  Dawn broke as Porthios was still following at the rear of the band. He had no idea how many of his elves had been lost to the horror, though he took some minimal comfort from the observation that the shadows were not vigorous in their pursuit. Samar now fought beside the prince, the two of them forming a rear guard as the rest of the elves had crossed the stream and made their desperate way through the woods. The Silvanesti’s dragonlance, like Porthios’s sword, had proven to be lethal against the dark and insubstantial attackers.

  Finally they pulled away, leaving the shadows lingering in the deep woods as the elves gathered around the far side of the Splintered Rock bluff. The sun was up, the heat already pressing downward like a sweltering blanket. Amid the milling band of wailing, crying elves Porthios found his wife clutching Silvanoshei. The baby was squalling loudly. The elven prince tried to think, but the shrieks of his son were driving daggers through his mind.

  “Can’t you make him stop crying?” he asked, fear and helplessness boiling over.

  “He’s terrified!” Alhana snapped back. “And so am I—so are we all!”

  “I’m sorry. Here, let me hold him,” Porthios said softly. “We’re safe here, at least for a while.”

  “Do—do you think so?” she asked, trying bravely to conquer the quaver in her voice.

  The baby fussed and twisted in his arms, and Porthios couldn’t lie to her. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know what attacked us, where they came from, or what they want.”

  All around him, elves were gasping for breath, lying in various states of exhaustion around the tree trunks and rocks at the base of the mountain. Somehow they had made their way here through the darkness, but now he had no idea of where to go, of what to do next. And through this panicky confusion, his son’s distressed wails had pierced his awareness like a knife cutting through soft flesh.

  “How many of us got away? And what about the others? They’re just … gone.”

  Alhana spoke numbly, but Porthios knew what she meant. He remembered acts of bravery, bold warriors lifting steel to stand against the shadowy attackers that had emerged so silently from the woods. But when he tried to recall individual battles, the last fights of brave elves, some of them warriors who had fought under his command for two decades, there was simply nothing there.

  Desperately he tried to remember a name, to picture the stalwart face of a loyal lieutenant. It was as though the shadows, having killed an elf’s body, had also sapped away any memory of his existence, any legacy he might have left behind.

  The griffons, too, had fought the attackers valiantly. Many had perished during the battle, vanishing into space like the bodies of the elves who had been touched by shadow. The others had finally flown away, seeking the safety of the skies when the entire camp had been overrun. Now a few of them had returned to light on the upper slopes of the craggy bluff. Though Porthios looked upward, scrutinizing the heights for a sign of Stallyar, he had seen no indication of the familiar silver-feathered wings.

  “My lord Porthios!” cried an elf, gliding low on the back of a griffon. Porthios recognized Darrian, a courageous and skilled archer and a veteran of the Silvanesti campaign.

  “Here!” he shouted, waving from the ground.

  The griffon came to rest on the forest floor, and Darrian leaped from the saddle and came stumbling toward him. The warrior looked haggard, his skin scratched and torn by brambles, though he didn’t seem to be otherwise wounded. Indeed, Porthios reflected grimly, the shadowy attackers didn’t seem to have injured any of his elves. Either the outlaws had escaped, terror-stricken but whole, or they had been touched by those chill tendrils and vanished utterly.

  “What? Are we attacked again?” asked the leader of the ragged band.

  “No, but soon! The shadows are coming around the bluff, blocking our flight. They’ll hit us from the other side within the hour.”

  “How close?”

  “A mile, no more. They move slowly, but deliberately. They don’t seem to stop for anything!”

  Porthios looked at Darrian’s empty quiver. “Did you damage them, do any harm at all, with your arrows?”

  The warrior shook his head. “Not at all—save once, when I used an arrow given to me by your father, the Speaker of the Sun.”

  “Was that missile unique?”

  Now the elf nodded. “My king told me that its head was of purest steel and that the shaft had been blessed by Paladine himself.”

  “And what happened when you used it?”

  “I shot into a mass of shadows, lord, and it seemed as though they were all torn, ripped into scraps of darkness. They made a hideous screeching, and then they vanished.”

  Porthios described the small success he had had with his own sword, and Samar with his dragonlance. “And those, too, are weapons blessed by the gods, imbued with powerful magic. As to the rest, even the keenest of elven steel seems useless against them.”

  The sun remained high, as if it was going to stay at zenith forever, and as the rays drove downward through the leaves, the forest grew hotter and hotter. Insects droned, and the sounds of grief and despair wailed even louder within the elven prince’s mind.

  “What are we going to do?” Alhana, who had been listening anxiously, asked.

  “They’ve cut us off from the east and west,” Samar noted. “We have the lake to our north and the mountain to our south. Do we stay and fight them here?”

  “We’ll have to climb the bluff,” Porthios declared, instantly making up his mind. “I don’t know how we’ll stop these things, but we’ll roll rocks down onto them if nothing else.”

  The stronger elves helped the weaker, and slowly the band of outlaws made its way up the steep, jagged boulders that lay scattered in profusion on the slope of Splintered Rock. As they gained altitude, they could look across the canopy of the forest, and they saw many places where smoke billowed up from the distant trees. The sun was a fiery orb, a searing spot of red in the white sky, and it blazed with merciless force onto the trapped elves.

  By midday, the surviving outlaws had all gathered near the jagged summit, and Porthios wasted no time in appointing lookouts to hold stations around the entire perimeter. The deadly shadows seemed to move up the rocks behind them, though they came only very slowly, creeping a dozen paces over the course of an hour. Still, from the top of the bluff, the elves could see that it was only a matter of time before they were overwhelmed.

  Dallatar, who had wielded an axe of legendary power against the shadows, found Porthios and reported that every ravine, every gully down the slopes seemed to be guarded by the slowly climbing shadows.

  “There would seem to be no escape from here,” he concluded grimly.

  “Then we’ll fight them,” the prince replied with more determination than he felt.

  “At least we will die as warriors … but still, I would prefer not to die at all, at least not yet,” noted the wild elf, with a shake of his head.

  “We can use the griffons to escape,” Samar suggested. “There are at least a hundred of them up here, and maybe four times that many elves. Over the course of half a day, they could carry all of us to safety, set us down somewhere in the woods where we can gather again.”

  “But who knows what we’ll find there?” Porthios asked in despair. “We’d leave part of our band hopelessly exposed while the rest are being moved!” His mind quailed at the thought of Alhana and Silvanoshei exposed to these horrible attackers while he was off with another group, unable to protect them, to do anything to save them.

  “The griffons in the High Kharolis!” his wife said suddenly. “You were talking about them just a little while ago—where they gathered after they left Qualinesti. You should fly there immediately, ask them—beg them if you have to, for help! If they came to our rescue, we could all fly at once, stay together, fly away from th
e shadows if they try to come after us in the forest.”

  “It’s our only chance!” Samar agreed. “I saw where they laired when we flew here from Silvanesti. I can describe the spot to you.”

  “It’s a chance, I admit,” Porthios said. At the same time, he was thinking about this wonderful elf woman and about the son they had brought into the world. He remembered especially the long years in Silvanesti, while she had worked in Qualinesti, doing the work that was really his own legacy. How much of their current troubles had arisen because he had been willing to leave her for so long?

  “But I can’t go,” he said firmly.

  “Why?” demanded the Silvanesti warrior-mage.

  “Too often I have neglected my wife for matters of state and leadership. Now we are in our worst danger, and I will not abandon her.”

  “But you’d be coming back!” Alhana tried to persuade him.

  “No … because I won’t be going.” The prince turned to Samar. “You’ll have to go in my stead. You know where the griffons are, and Stallyar will take you.”

  Samar looked at Alhana, then nodded slowly to Porthios.

  “I understand … and I will do this, my prince,” pledged the warrior-mage.

  And the shadows crept closer from below.

  “So it was you who flew to the High Kharolis?” Aerensianic asked.

  Samar nodded. “I went on this quest with heavy heart, for I truly believed that I would never see my queen again.”

  Dragon War

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Aerensianic roared again, fury somehow overcoming his terror as he hurled himself toward the imminent collision with his blazing pursuer. He didn’t look away, only hoped that Toxyria was winging with all speed toward the coast. Below him, the gray sea spread flat and metallic, and then the blazing image of the fire dragon filled his view.

  Wyrms of fire and poison collided in a hissing tangle of green smoke and red fire, talons ripping, fangs slashing, and powerful wings driving the monsters together with headlong speed. Aeren felt his nostrils burning, sensed the scales ripped away from his flesh under the onslaught of that awful heat. But at the same time, he realized that the fire dragon was falling, that its flames sizzled and died within the billowing ball of the green’s lethal exhalation. He expelled another cloud of deadly vapor, then plunged onto the still-burning back of the fire dragon, tearing with his claws, ignoring the heat that burned his mouth as he bit down on the other serpent’s spine.

  He tore into the fiery flesh, biting deep, driving his fangs with hissing fury into scalding flesh. With convulsive force, he ripped away a piece of the monster’s backbone, spitting the smoking flesh to the side. At the same time, he felt a reflexive quiver in the great body beneath his talons, a shudder that convinced him that the other wyrm was dead. Spreading his wings, he felt those massive membranes crackle and strain where they had been scalded. Nevertheless, they bore his weight, pulling him away from the now lifeless hulk that tumbled toward the sea.

  Aerensianic spun toward the fire dragon’s two companions, both of whom dived toward him with widespread jaws and wings that left trails of smoke and sparks in the air. The green dragon knew he couldn’t avoid the twin attackers, and so he spread his own jaws and belched a massive cloud of gas straight into the path of the nearest fire dragon. His wings cracked and blistered from the heat as he strained to hold himself aloft. Inwardly he quailed at the prospect of another clash with the unnatural monsters. Still, he held firm to his course, ready to fight and even prepared to die.

  He was vaguely aware of another cloud of gas, a churning mist of green that enveloped the second fire dragon, and then Toxy was slashing into the fight. She screamed in pain as flames charred her body, but she bit and clawed and rent before belching another massive cloud of lethal gas. The supple body collided with his own, and then the two greens pushed off of each other, wheeling and snarling back into the fight.

  The four mighty serpents whirled and dived and banked through the skies, surrounded by mixed clouds of fire and lethal gas. Teeth and talons tore at flesh of scale and fire, while cries of pain mingled with roars of fury. It seemed to Aerensianic as though the world was tilting on its axis, that the sun might have been standing still in the sky. The gray seascape was like a sheet of cold steel, as hard and firm and unforgiving as any metal shield.

  Hellish heat blistered him, while chaotic sounds merged into a cacophony of fury and pain. Cries of his own agony were mingled with bellows of ultimate fury. Numbed to the hurt of his own burns, Aeren slashed and whirled through the melee with howls of pure hatred, latching on to his enemy’s fiery flesh, pressing and crushing with killing force. Ignoring the blistering heat, the agony that shivered through every portion of his being, he slashed another fire dragon to ribbons. Nearby, Toxy did the same to the last of the chaotic beings, and finally two more corpses plummeted into the gray sea.

  The pair of green dragons, singed and scarred but alive, spread their wings and glided painfully toward their coast. Behind them, sizzling plumes of steam rose from the sea, while overhead sunlight slashed downward, cruel and blistering. Despite the heat, Aeren shivered, and he saw that Toxy was trembling beside him. He sensed intuitively, and knew that she shared his awareness, that something about their world had utterly, fundamentally changed.

  Though Toxyria was even more badly burned than Aeren, she was able to make it back to the coastline, landing with a barely controlled crash before the sea cave that served as the green dragons’ lair. Aerensianic, ignoring the pain of his own wounds, circled over the crashing surf, watching anxiously as his companion slithered out of sight, vanishing into the shady coolness of the cavern.

  Only then did he lift his head, seeking through the air, looking to all horizons to see if there was any sign of more fire dragons. Only the sun shared the sky with him, and once again he had that eerie thought—the blazing orb remained directly overhead, stubbornly refusing to move from the zenith. Finally he too landed, creeping into the lair to curl up in a dark, moist alcove of the cave. Gently Aeren licked at the horrible wounds that scarred Toxy’s flanks, while she lowered her head and breathed out a mournful sigh.

  At last they slept, for how long Aeren couldn’t tell. He awakened with a groggy return to consciousness, aching in every nerve. Despite the pain, he crawled to the entrance to peer outside. The sunlight still beat straight down outside the cave, though he found it hard to believe that they had slumbered through a full day. Still, he felt a little stronger, and the pain in his neck and wings had diminished considerably with the rest.

  “Stay here,” he whispered as his companion moaned.

  She shook her head in reply, lifting her sinuous neck.

  “We have to get help,” she said. “This is a danger that is greater any we have ever seen, greater by far than the threats of metal dragons or of the lances that pierce and kill.”

  “What should we do?” Aeren asked.

  “You go north … seek more greens, and the blues, too, if you can find them. Tell them of these fire dragons and bring them here.”

  “And you?”

  “I will go south … there, too, I hope to find greens. And beyond that, there may be white dragons living in the realms of ice. I will bring them, and in all our numbers, we will fly against the Storms of Chaos.”

  Aeren wanted nothing more than to hide, to wait inside his lair and hope that the awful storm would pass. But somehow now, confronted by Toxyria’s strength and determination, he couldn’t allow himself to cower away from the world. The pain of his burns was a chorus of agony, seeming to penetrate everywhere through his body. Fear numbed, almost paralyzed him, but he would force himself to be strong for her.

  “This is a good plan,” Aeren agreed. “But be careful. Now that I have found you, I should grieve to lose you.”

  She blinked, leather lids drooping over her slitted eyes in a touching gesture of affection. “I will be careful—and you do the same, won’t you?”

  Aere
n nodded and gently nuzzled the female’s long snout. Finally the two dragons took to the air, soaring over the forests of Qualinesti. Toxyria disappeared, following the coastline south, and Aeren flew in the opposite direction. His goal was specific: He had seen the blue dragons rising from an encampment to the north, and now he went to seek them. Though they had not been in the sky recently, they could certainly have been waiting, hiding on the ground. Distrustful and admittedly afraid of his kin-dragons, he had not been bold enough to check as far as their lair.

  Now, for Toxy, he would.

  All the while the sun stood high in the sky, red and implacable, shining downward with radiation of powerful, unforgiving heat. The vault of the heavens was an expanse of deathlike pallor, white, hot, and dead. The pain in Aeren’s burned limbs soon returned, but he ignored the discomfort, emboldened by the knowledge that Toxy, who had been hurt even worse than he, had somehow found the courage to fly forth.

  At times the green dragon bellowed aloud, braying the distress call of a chromatic dragon, a cry that should have brought any of his kin-dragons in earshot flying to the rescue. But he saw no sign of scale nor wing, nothing to disturb the relentless sameness of the forest. In the distance, plumes of smoke rose from the woodland and seemed to promise that elsewhere, too, there were attackers of chaos and fire wreaking their destruction upon the helpless world. Once, far away, he saw a conical mountain, spires of jagged rock rising from the steep slopes, while a curious swath of darkness seemed to seethe and writhe around its base. The place had an eerie sense of menace, and he circled wide, giving it a broad berth as he continued his search.

  He found several camps of the blue dragons, but these were abandoned and—judging from the dried droppings the green dragon inspected—looked to have been vacated several days earlier. Of the human knights who had brought these dragons here, there was no sign, and Aeren concluded that the dragons and their riders had all departed in response to some command from their distant and unknown masters. They had gone, leaving this part of the world to the mercies of the Chaos storm. It seemed obvious that if this forest was to survive, Aeren himself would have to play a large role in protecting it.