by Cory Herndon
Kos slipped a little when Crix swung her feet around to slow their inevitable descent. She willed the last of the pyromana from the lifts, gritted her teeth, and tightened her grip on the old human’s arm.
The fuel gave out at the end of their arc, and they dropped the last bit, landing in a heap on a rusted hillside.
* * * * *
Twice, the dragons and their riders charged, and twice did the beasts, their breath faltering in clear winds no longer choked with plague and dragon smoke, blast sputtering streams of fire at each other’s wings and flanks. And twice, to Teysa’s alternating relief and frustration, the blasts missed both sets of riders entirely.
“Damn him!” the albino roared.
“You’re too evenly matched,” Golozar said. “Stop trying to burn him. You have claws and teeth. You’re not a cannon, you’re a dragon.”
“And we need to injure him quickly,” Teysa said. “You’re hurt, dragon.”
“I will,” the dragon said, wheezing, “I will survive this. The blue one will not. The machine injured him first, but I won’t let the machine take the credit.” The dragon gasped deeply twice and continued, rasping bitterly. “Yet … I tire,” she admitted. “The fire—I need time to recharge.”
“Tooth and claw,” Teysa said. “There’s no time to rest. I’m sorry.”
“You are in charge,” the albino said with little sincerity. The dragon spread her tattered, scorched wings and brought her forelimbs up, talons exposed like a bird of prey. Hauc’s blue dragon, readying another blast of flame, didn’t see the albino’s change in tactics until it was too late. The silver claws of the albino dragon sank into the neck of the blue one, which screeched and roared in terror and strangled pain. Teysa’s mount closed its claws around the other’s throat and abruptly changed direction. It pulled hard to the left, wrenching the blue dragon’s neck around like a corkscrew with a popping, sickening crunch.
Zomaj Hauc, on the other hand, continued on the blue dragon’s flight path sans dragon, screaming all the way. His journey—and his life—ended with a messy headfirst impact against the side of an iron cliff. Teysa heard him cursing her name the whole way.
One threat down. Very, very down. Her heart burned with bitter, vengeful satisfaction, but there was not time to celebrate. They weren’t out of trouble yet.
“Hauc’s gone,” she shouted to Golozar, and leaned forward to whisper so only he could hear. “The dragons have to go too. Both of them. They’re too dangerous.”
“I know,” Golozar said. “Hold on, I’ll try to cushion our landing as best I can.”
The Gruul might as well have attempted to wrestle a flatland cyclone, for the albino chose that moment to go completely mad, consumed by a blood frenzy. Its silver teeth tore into the dying blue dragon’s flanks and ripped away chunks of flesh that it tossed aside. It clamped its rear set of claws around the blue dragon’s tail and ripped the appendage from its foe’s spine with another snap and pop.
All the while, Teysa felt Golozar, muscles straining to guide their difficult mount, slowly force the dragon to veer as it ripped into the blue, lower and lower. The albino was flying blind, trusting Golozar to steer while it dived headfirst into its kin.
The dragon—neither dragon—saw the jagged mizzium outcrop in time. Teysa herself almost didn’t see it, and, with a hideous pair of harmonic screams, the outcrop skewered both dragons at once.
The next few minutes were a blur. Teysa was pretty sure she blacked out because the next thing she remembered was lying on top of Golozar, who was in turn piled against the twisted, crushed, and bleeding albino dragon. She could feel the slow rise and fall of the Gruul’s chest. He still lived. The blue dragon was almost unrecognizable as anything but a mass of scaly, raw meat.
Teysa felt sadness and relief battling for supremacy in her heart as the albino dragon’s red eye gazed at her with silent accusation, flickered, and went cold.
She returned the stare for a moment, but then her gaze was drawn to something that appeared in the sky over Utvara with a thunderclap. It wasn’t a dragon.
But it did have wings.
* * * * *
Kos blinked. He thought he saw the kuga mot for a moment, and it was crystal clear—not a ghostly ball of light but a solid sphere with bolted windows and a hull forged from brushed, bronze-tinted mizzium.
Then the sphere disappeared and agony returned. The Schism remained. It was bright, brilliantly bright. Brighter than the sun, brighter than he’d ever seen it. It was beautiful, and he felt it pulling at him. Pulling at his spirit.
His heart began to pound, faster and faster, against the inside of his chest. He coughed, and Crix told him they were landing and to hold on. Kos could barely think straight. The pounding drowned out her voice. He struck the ground first, never taking his eyes from the Schism, and skidded before coming to rest against the rubble.
“Kos,” the goblin coughed, “are you all right?”
Kos didn’t answer. He couldn’t feel anything below his waist, and his left arm was screaming for attention. It felt broken, shattered against the stone. In reply he raised his remaining hand and pointed at the Schism.
“Bright,” he whispered. “It’s so bright.”
“What’s bright?” Crix said. “The Schism. Yes, it’s been—Wait, Kos, listen to me. Stay here. Don’t look at it, it’s—”
“It’s beautiful,” Kos said. “I can see her. She’s come back.”
“Who?” Crix said.
The Schism burst apart, shattering like a plate of glass struck by a stone, from the center outward. The dawn sky appeared to fracture as well, but behind the falling glass was the same sky—just clearer, sharper to Kos’s eye.
From the center of the fracture emerged an angel. The sight brought what few tears he had left brimming to the surface.
“It’s her,” Kos said.
The flying figure grew larger, drew closer, and became more and more distinct as she soared toward Kos and the goblin.
Kos waved when Feather came into view, but the pounding of his own heartbeat drowned out even his own voice as he called out his old friend’s name. He waved to her once, but then his arm became far too heavy to lift.
For a moment, the driving drumbeat in his ears ceased, and he reveled in a short eternity of blissful silence as Feather drew closer and called back to him, her voice making no sound. Her angelic eyes were wide with horror, and she was saying something. He could make out the shape of the words. They were “Kos” and “no,” in that order.
Before Feather finished the second word, Agrus Kos was dead.
Here lies Agrus Kos, noted protector and faithful public servant 3 Paujal 9895-3 Cizarm 10012
—Epitaph of Agrus Kos, lieutenant (Ret.), League of Wojek
5 CIZARM 10012 Z.C.
Pivlic didn’t shed tears easily. True, that was mostly because imps didn’t have tear ducts, but even if they had Pivlic wasn’t the kind to weep over the loss of anyone. He’d once run a place where the customers killed and ate each other (after signing appropriate releases absolving the imp of all responsibility) back in the city. Death was no shock to him. Not usually.
But in honor of his friend Kos, he went to the trouble to put in drops that would give his beady, black eyes a touch of sympathetic moisture.
Feather, it seemed, did have tear ducts and had been using them recently from the look of it. The two of them led the two rows of solemn pallbearers, Pivlic holding his hands overhead to support his corner while the angel held up her end by stooping slightly and hooking her long fingers through a handle bolted to the side of the stretcher.
Behind Pivlic walked the ledev guardian Fonn, who had arrived that morning on a private zeppelid with the pallbearer opposite her—the Golgari guildmaster Jarad. They looked far friendlier than he’d last seen them. Affectionate, even. Behind them walked Crix, doing the job much the same way Pivlic was, flanked by a somber Garulsz, who had put on her brightly colored “city clothes” for the process
ion.
Kos’s body lay on a shallow wooden pallet, arms crossed over the insignia on the wojek dress armor Pivlic had found in storage. Baroness Teysa Karlov quietly slipped into the procession at its head, dressed from head to toe in glistening black satin and wearing a shimmering silver veil. Vor Golozar, chief of the surviving Utvar Gruul, stepped to the rear, eyes downcast. Golozar wore the finest ceremonial hides his tribe—reduced in number, but more fiercely proud than ever—could provide. A gleaming new black pin on his collar that signified his unexpected appointment as Teysa’s Minister of Security.
There was no dirge—a short and not-terribly-helpful last will and testament the imp had dug out of Kos’s footlocker had asked for no particular music, so Pivlic had decided silence would be best. The others had agreed.
The long walk, the longest of Pivlic’s long life, ended at a stack of dry, bristly wood and broken timbers. Wood was not easy to come by in Utvara. The pyre had required the help of most everyone in the township and eventually had grown much larger than was needed as more and more grateful denizens added to it.
At the base of the structure, Feather and Garulsz took over. They gently lifted the pallet atop the great pyre.
Before the fire was lit, Feather, who had kept the name Kos gave her decades ago, stepped before the pyre and faced the crowd. Pivlic desperately wanted to know where the angel had been, but Feather refused to answer any questions until Kos’s memorial was finished.
“Agrus Kos,” the angel began, “did not want this memorial. But we who remember him do. And it is my hope that somewhere his ghost, or at least his spirit, will forgive us for bestowing this last honor.”
* * * * *
Miles overhead, a memorial of a different sort took shape, slowly, on a scale of time bordering the geological. Like nearly all the spirits of the dead that had tried to leave Utvara since the creation of the Schism, Hauc failed. He had snagged on the shattered sky amongst a multitude of ghosts then slipped over the edge into the precipice of the void, his spirit stretching out like bread dough. Then the sky broke like a window punctured by a bamshot. The shards of sky fell apart and the still-vibrant Schism effect locked everything in place as his spirit scattered across the heavens.
Hauc had gone to pieces, pieces that mingled sickeningly with raw, terrifyingly reptilian thoughts that comprised the shattered souls of two dead dragons on the disordered edge of the mana-compression singularity bomb’s event horizon. Two dead gods, frozen just as he was in the fractured sky. There were others, too, thousands, Great Dragon, millions of them. None had been “used” or “fed to the dragons,” but they all knew him and knew he was the reason they were there. They repeated his name, all crying at once, a pointless exercise as he could not remember it himself.
HaucHAUChauchaucHAUCHaucHauc.
He did not know it was his name, but he knew the sound was morbid, incessant, and for some reason frightening.
He knew he would escape, of course, even if he couldn’t quite remember that he was called “Hauc.” There was nothing that could possibly destroy him forever, of that he felt curiously confident. It was only a matter of time before he remembered his name, and then the … thing that would let him get … get … over, get … where … get …
Get. First he had to get his scattered thoughts together, which couldn’t possibly take more than a decade or two. Assuming he could find all the pieces.
About the Author
Cory J. Herndon is a freelance writer and editor currently providing content for Xbox.com and the official STAR WARS® RPG web site, among others. He has edited numerous STAR WARS roleplaying game books and is the author of The Fifth Dawn, MAGIC: THE GATHERING Starter Game Strategy Guide, the MAGIC: THE GATHERING Official Encyclopedia Vol. 5, the short story, “Like Spider’s Silk” in The Secrets of Magic anthology, and the STAR WARS roleplaying game title Ultimate Alien Anthology (with co-author).
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