To her relief, she sensed him. Skallin was spinning closer and closer to her through the void. He was angry, which she thought was good, but he was also scarred by some glowing wound he'd taken. A wound from something powerful and good.
She rolled her eyes into her head and reached deeper into the void. Once she found him, she drew him nearer.
Darka-Xera, he snarled when his mind found hers. What took you so long? I should crush you for not searching harder for me on this day of days.
His rage reminded her that he was Drar's chosen as much as hers. He was the monster she'd made him, and she'd given him more power that she probably should have. He could kill her, but he wouldn't. Without her to cast the spell, release Drar’s soul from the orb, and perform the ceremony, he would remain as he was, and Drar would be left in his infernal confinement. When he was closer, so close she could pluck him from the void when she was ready, she laughed at him.
"You've not much power in this empty plane." Her voice was callous. The two hovered opposite each other in the black emptiness. "You are covered with the stench of goodness. Those scars reek of righteous power, and Drar might not want you as you are."
"Drar wants me, Darka-Xera." His voice was hesitant at first, but his confidence grew with each word he spoke. "I can feel him. He is waiting to fill me with his power." Skallin growled at her, his voice now angry and insistent. "Bring me to you, bitch, for we must finish this. If you do not hurry, you will be the first I feast on when it is done."
"Not covered in that stench." She laughed and then sent searing orange lightning from each of her hands into his temples. He might have been the father of the child growing inside her, but he'd already done his part in that. She had to keep her emotions at a distance, though, for he would no longer be Skallin after the coming of Drar.
Skallin screamed and shuddered. The glowing white remnants of power clinging to him slowly burned away, and it looked quite painful. She would have made it hurt him worse if his threat of feasting on her first hadn't scared her. Once Drar assumed Skallin, she doubted he would exist anymore, but the chance of his will and Drar's coinciding or melding together, even for a moment, kept her from prolonging his agony.
As soon as all traces of the virtuous power were scorched away, she yanked Skallin out of the void. He appeared right between her and the wheeled cage, causing Darka-Xera's horse to rear up and several of her hooded darka guardians to step between she and Skallin.
Skallin was more than twice the size of a normal man, bigger than the ogres even. His bulging muscles, and the power that had marked him, and then the magic that burned those marks away, had shredded most of his clothing. Mostly naked, and exposed, he made a sweeping backhanded slap that knocked three of the four darka to the ground. The fourth, he caught by the neck, and before Darka-Xera could stop him, he opened his huge mouth and bit off her face, veil and all. He then raised her kicking body up and completely covered one of her heavy breasts with his maw. He had to shake her back and forth to rip his teeth through her leather armor, but he managed it. While he chewed, he threw her twitching form to the ground and watched as the sunlight turned her back into a human.
"Enough!" Darka-Xera shouted. "We've an intruder, no doubt trying to—"
"Enough?" Skallin spat the wad of bloody leather out of his mouth, and then swallowed the rest. "I'm just getting started." He then dug the fingers of one hand into the dying woman's spine and picked her from the ground like a satchel. With his other hand, he tore her leather pants from her body and twisted one of her bare legs until it ripped off at the hip. Between massive bites of thigh flesh, he cocked his head and glared at Darka-Xera. His glossy black eyes were intense. His tiny red pupils were tight and focused, clearly daring her to try and stop him.
"What of this intruder then," he asked after he'd cleaned most of the meat from the woman's leg. "Who dares try and stop the coming of Drar?"
Just then, a huge boulder smashed into the forward ranks of the stalled procession, crushing some of them flat and maiming many others.
Before Darka-Xera could do anything, another boulder landed close behind her, killing as many if not more of her darkon army than the first one had.
She and Skallin saw where the second boulder had been hurled from, and he roared out. She pointed, but telling him what to do wasn't necessary. He raced up the mountain, not on the road, but across the rocky, sometimes wooded slope. He used his supernatural ability and leapt over obstacles, climbed rocky cliff faces, and then parted the trees as if they were stalks of wheat in a field. Darka-Xera found she almost felt sorry for whatever was up there. Merciless, Skallin had grown so large and powerful that she had to pull her mind from the dark lust she felt for him before she could start yelling out orders to those around her.
Chapter Thirty
"Do not hit the cage on wheels," Cryelos spoke in the language of the giants. "Anything but the cage." The two had started to flee when they noticed him, like lions fleeing a mouse, but Cryelos told them those below were coming to take their home. He was as surprised as they were that they understood, and that he understood their responses.
One of them reached back and dug his big fingers into a fissure, breaking a huge chunk of granite from the mountainside that was as big as the wagon. He hurled it, and it landed on top of the first rock he'd thrown, the one that landed in front of the darkons. It broke into several pieces, and to Cryelos's surprise, the crumbled stones looked to have blocked the road completely.
"Something comes," the other giant said.
"What comes?" he asked. He'd seen the big scar-headed thing appear a moment ago. It had attacked at Grey Rock and done something to Braxton. He'd just watched it eat one of the hooded woman alive while speaking to the queen darka, but he missed what happened after that because of the giant pulling pieces of the mountain apart. He could no longer see Scarhead, and figured it was what was coming.
"It will be fierce," he warned the giants. "I will help you fight it."
"You small," one of them laughed. The other looked down over the edge of the road and made a startled sound. The giant went head-first off the ledge, and where he just was, Scarhead came leaping and landed with an angry grunt.
The giant behind Cryelos threw the boulder he was holding at Scarhead. Scarhead punched it before it impacted him, and it shattered into a thousand smaller fragments, doing little if any harm.
"Fierce," the giant said.
Cryelos pointed the staff at Scarhead, and a golden whoosh of energy shot forth. It lifted Scarhead from the ground and carried him a dozen paces back down the road, where he rolled backwards a few times, but ended up on his feet. Without hesitation, he came charging back at them. From his black eyes, string-thin rays shot forth. Cryelos ducked them, but realized they were not intended for him anyway. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that where they touched the giant's skin, deep wounds were being seared into its flesh.
The giant screamed, and then let loose a roar that echoed off the mountain again and again.
Scarhead came right at Cryelos. He wasn't sure what the big, wild-looking man-beast was going to do to him, so he held out the staff and tried to do what he'd just done, again. He was left confused when Scarhead simply vanished and his blast flew down the path and impacted where the road turned. There was an explosion of stones, dirt, and debris, but no Scarhead.
When he turned, Cryelos saw that the giant had fled and he was standing there alone. Then he saw lightning split the sky. The thunder that followed was so loud and concussive that it knocked the air from his lungs and caused him to duck into a defensive crouch. He saw black clouds forming above, and just as he caught his breath, fear filled him. The bright summer morning grew darker and darker by the moment. He looked at the stalled group around the queen darka, and knew it was she who was causing the storm. Just like she had at Grey Rock, she was creating her own darkness so her minions could retake their more powerful darkonian form.
He saw the first few change, and t
hen he saw the orange-eyed witch open the door to the wheeled cage and pull out Princess Trava by the hair. She pointed directly at him, and then hugged the terrified girl tightly. It looked like she was whispering something menacing in her ear.
Lightning crackled again, this time right beside him, and the thunder that exploded emptied his mind and sent him sailing through the air so far that he never felt himself hit the ground.
When Cryelos opened his eyes, it was dark. Not nighttime, he knew, for he didn't think he'd been stunned that long, and through small breaks in the clouds above, the sun's light was fighting through but, otherwise, it was as dark as night. After gathering his bearings, he saw by the illumination thrown by a flash of lightning, that the procession below, the wheeled cage, and those maimed by the giants had been abandoned. The darka and the rest of her minions were nowhere to be seen.
Looking upward, he saw that the lightning giving flickering strobes of illumination to the world was all striking in one specific area.
Panic shot through him. Am I too late? He needed to be at the summit, where the ceremony was taking place. He had to—
In a flash of white tingling power, he was there, at the tomb on the mountaintop. It was just as the tapestry depicted, half-ringed on one side by columns that were so old they were barely standing. The tomb was open, and a deep red glow came from within. Unlike the depiction, Scarhead and the darka were there. Scarhead didn't even notice his appearance and stepped into the rectangular opening. He had something in his mouth, and his chin and neck were covered in slick dark blood.
Several ogres, and a few darkons, ringed around him at a distance, and his heart sank when he saw Princess Trava's bloody corpse lying behind the crypt. Her heart had been ripped out of her chest, no doubt by the orange-eyed queen of the darka, whose hands and arms were drenched in blood up to her elbows. She was holding an orb that drew all the lightning to it and redirected it into the crypt. She laughed when she saw Cryelos, and then nodded toward the open tomb.
"You are too late, elfling," she hissed. "Drar is coming even now."
Cryelos looked just in time to see Scarhead drop down out of sight. He realized that it had to be the princess's heart clutched in his jaws.
Cryelos started to swing the staff at her, but she caused an almost invisible grey cloud of power to appear. Once it enveloped him, he was held completely still. He saw an ogre and a darkon moving in to get him, but just then, something tore open the sky and caused them all to stop and look up.
The queen of the darka saw it, too, and her mouth fell open.
A roughly circular disk the size of a large pond rippled and grew. Through it, Cryelos began to see what he thought was clear blue sky. He recognized the bleak wintry shade of it and was disappointed that rays of sunshine were not stabbing through. Slowly, what was creating the phenomenon shimmered into existence right before their eyes.
Dragons, a dozen or more of them hovered facing each other. They were ringed around the shimmering space. All of them blasted their dragon breath toward the middle. Some sent fire, some sent misty lightning, others gaseous green fog. A white scaled wyrm was spewing ice into the mix, and another, a black, added some awful looking liquid. The combination of all the dragon spew near the center, had formed what Cryelos figured was a hole in the sky, or rather a portal. As they watched, the space of pale blue openness between the great wyrms grew.
The portal was momentarily filled with a massive green scaled dragon, carrying what might have been a huge basket in its claws. Cryelos was shocked that it was Emerald, but found he was now able to move. While the darka, the ogres about to get him, and the rest of her minions all gawked at the spectacle above, Cryelos took two steps forward and jabbed the Staff of Aevilin right into the orange-eyed witch's gut.
She howled, dropping the orb, which shattered into a thousand pieces of thin stuff that sounded like glass as it clattered on the stone floor. Whatever was inside it was sucked into the crypt. She turned with rage burning in her wild eyes, but he'd already drawn his gleaming sword, and before she could do anything else, the blade came arcing around at her neck. It would have taken off her head had she not used her power to freeze it in place just a hair's breadth from her skin. She took a step backwards, letting the Staff of Aevilin pull out of her stomach, and Cryelos saw black blood drip from it.
The Darka started casting some sort of spell, and was about to direct it at him, so Cryelos let go of his sword and swung at her with the staff just like he had at the darkon Hunter had become. The power of the impact surprised her, and she stumbled backwards, tripping over one of Princess Trava's feet. Rolling to use her hands to stop her from hitting face-first, the pulse of yellow orange power she'd intended to kill Cryelos with, exploded, pulping most of the princess's corpse into a fine bloody mist that sprayed against the columns and arches behind the crypt.
She turned to look up at Cryelos, who was about to hit her again. "You’re too late." The darka queen snarled. "Kill him and feast on his flesh," she yelled to her grey-skinned, spike-headed darkons. Then she clutched her stomach and flashed away.
Cryelos felt something shake the whole mountain then, and he heard a great roar coming from inside the tomb. He saw that the ranks of ogres and darkons closing in on him, and he knew Drar was coming.
Chapter Thirty-One
Crylos’s sword clattered to the ground, no longer held in place by the darka’s power. Cryelos spun, swinging the staff around him in a circle. The first ogre Aevilin’s staff hit was hammered by its power into a few others, but the next ogre was smart enough to wait until the weapon passed before darting in. It reached for Cryelos, but the strangest thing happened. A gothican dropped from the sky and drove his sword through the green beast before it got his claws on him. Another gothican, then another, landed, giving Cryelos enough room to look up. What he saw was troublesome and relieving just the same.
The dull red glow coming from the crypt reflected off the ivory-colored scales that ran along Emerald’s underbelly. The mighty wyrm was clutching some construction that resembled a basket, but was as big as six wagon carts or more. From the basket, gothican after gothican leapt over the side and landed around Cryelos. Then Emerald lifted away, and Cryelos realized this was the moment depicted in the tapestry. The revelation was confirmed when he saw the gothicans were forcing back the ogres and darkons to give him room. He then glanced at the crypt and saw two malformed claws gripping the edges of it, and from inside, two angry red eyes stared out, filling him to the core with fear.
He raised the staff, as he had in the tapestry, and felt several bolts of lightning striking it. He felt the wood filling with enough hair-raising power that it tingled through his grip, down his arms, and into his chest.
Directly before him, Drar's hands pulled the sides of the crypt apart, widening the hole. Then its head burst through the opening, and it was clear there was some sort of portal phenomenon happening. The hellish place inside the opening extended beyond where the summit did, out into the open space beside the mountain, and it wasn't just Drar about to emerge.
Drar looked a lot like Scarhead, with dark jagged stripes showing over its pate, and the three black claw marks under each of its bright crimson eyes. It was ten times the size of Scarhead, and its limbs had a mummified look instead of a well-muscled build. Its skin was grey, like that of a withered corpse and it was hungry. The first thing it did was reach out and grab one of the gothicans and the ogre he was fighting. It squeezed them hard enough that Cryelos heard bones crunching, then it lifted its head out of the hole and ate them both. Below Drar, several smaller, but no less intimidating, things vied for the chance to emerge.
Cryelos wasn't sure what to do with the staff now, for the moment had moved past the depiction. His instinct was to smite the monster, so he made a hard, overhead wood-chopper's swing and was surprised when the staff discharged an incredible amount of force directly into the evil thing's head.
An explosion of white yellow energy crackled ac
ross its scalp. Drar roared in pain and let go of its one hand hold, seemingly falling back down into the hole, but as it went, one of the other things shot up and out. It was shaped like a sea manta and appeared to be formed of red glowing molten stone. It was flying, but the way its massive spade shape moved made it look like it was swimming through the sky. When its tail cleared the hole, it snapped across Cryelos's chest, right through his magical armor, opening his skin. It left a residue of stuff that sizzled inside the wound and burned his meat down to the bone.
As he fell backwards, the staff fell from his hands and clattered to the ground beside him. A new fear, greater than that of dying, or letting this evil loose on the world filled him.
Those things he could live with. He could even live with failing here this day, but the unexpected sight of Chureal and Sir Jory riding Cobalt's back, as they came streaking through the sky to chase after the manta thing turned his blood cold. He didn’t know how they’d found him but decided the concentrated lightning had to be visible from a great distance. That creature would destroy them, he knew, and he couldn't live with that. He wouldn't.
Cryelos reached for the staff and found it. It filled him with relief from his physical pain but didn't close the wound. It did respond to his desire to make sure Chureal didn't meet some terrible end. He rose to his feet just as another of the hellish mantas shot up out of the hole. This time, he was wary of its tail. A gothican and an ogre who were locked in combat weren't as fortunate and were whipped off the mountain by it.
Cryelos pointed the staff at the thing that turned to face Chureal and Cobalt. He willed forth a blast like the one he'd taken down Scarhead with. He didn't get to see if it found its mark or did any damage because he was thrown off his feet when Drar tore the hole at the summit open even wider, and after a third hellish manta found the sky, Drar stood, its upper torso in the world, its lower half still in the other plane. Drar didn't attack, though. It leaned forward and grabbed a hold of one of the columns and pulled itself up until a knee and leg were out.
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