Warrior of the Void

by M. R. Mathias

  With a quick sweeping backhand, it cleared half the gothicans, ogres, and darkons from the summit, and then gained its feet. It was mannish in form, save for a tail that barely reached the ground, and it resembled Scarhead in its withered, yet stringily muscled form, but that is where the similarities ended. Drar was covered in grey skin that looked to be thick and pocked all over. Green streaks of energy, like tiny forking strands of lightning, came and went all over it, and its glowing eyes were like the queen of the darka's had been, only a few shades to the side of red. With a throwing gesture, it reached back, its empty palm filling with a growing ball of green. The crackling energy racing across its skin jagged and forked its way up his arm to join the rest. When the mass filled his whole fist, it then threw it at the ring of dragons who'd opened the portal in the sky.

  Cryelos watched as the green sphere warbled and flew. Just before it hit, more dragons came streaking from the clear blue sky into the stormy darkness. One was halfway through the shimmering passageway when several of the wyrms forming the ring were decimated by Drar's destructive creation.

  By either heat or erosion, or maybe both, the green stuff melted several of the wyrms, and enough of the wings or bodies of a few others. Their portal flashed away, and the affected ones tumbled from the sky. The others were left in the storm, no longer in the clear blue where they'd just been.

  From the now cleared hole before him, more hellish mantas came, and then a swarm of gargoyle-like things that were man-sized but flying on shimmering wings that looked as thin as parchment.

  Cryelos searched the sky from his back and saw that Chureal and Cobalt were not injured, but were now being chased by the thing he'd tried to kill, or maybe a different one. Then Cryelos was scooped up by Drar's grey-skinned claw. The monster opened its jagged toothed mouth and threw Cryelos toward its deep gullet as if he were nothing more than a peanut.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Braxton hadn't chosen a dragon yet, simply because there were too many to pick from. He'd woken in Narvoza among a score of wyrms, all huddled protectively around his prone form. They'd kept him from freezing to death and helped his body and mind recover. He understood he needed a dragon, but at that moment, making sure Emerald or one of these others got the gothicans to the other side of the world to aid Cryelos was far more important.

  He'd thought he could use the void to take he and Emerald and the gothican carrier he'd had the dwarves build, just as he'd teleported himself to Narvoza, but the dragons all agreed there was a better way. They were right, for using the portal they created with their conflagration of breath allowed almost all of them to get to Mount Preal, and just in the nick of time.

  Emerald had boasted of how his seed had quickened inside the broken winged blue on the Isle of Jolin, and that his offspring should be the dragon Braxton chose, not only because it would be Cobalt's half-sibling, but because Emerald would be able to train it from the moment of hatching, to be the perfect dragon for a Warrior of the Void. Braxton wasn't sure he could wait that long. At the moment, he was clinging to the neck of a powerful fire drake that was at the peak of its existence, in both age and ability.

  Torch was the nickname he'd given the red wyrm. Torch had little interest in being his bond wyrm, but he did want to destroy Drar and show his power over the other dragons that had answered the summoning. It was his nature as a fire drake to establish his dominance over all of his kind, and anything else for that matter.

  Braxton remembered seeing Cobalt's mother kill a red dragon in the sky over the Isle of Jolin. He knew now that she'd gotten extremely lucky that night. The red wyrm she defeated hadn't been near fully grown, and still managed to ruin one of her wings. Had she come across a red as formidable as Torch, Cobalt would have surely been left motherless, for Torch was huge, and lean, and faster than any of the others.

  It saddened Braxton to see Drar's hurled mass of power kill or maim some of the dragons he'd called to duty. They knew the risk of creating the portal, and that they would have to hover and hold their position unprotected to sustain it, though. He didn't let his emotions get control of his focus. He couldn’t. He was half-in, half-out of the void, a state he found best to be in when on dragon back, for he could use all of his senses this way. It was because of this state that he saw Cryelos's predicament, and with a thought, he urged his determined mount right at the Drar's head.

  Torch tucked his wings and dove out of the sky so fast that it was all Braxton could do to hold on. When they were close, the red wyrm spewed a gout of flaming breath that enveloped Drar's whole open-mouthed head. With a twitch of his wings, he put Braxton and his back toward the evil thing's now flaming maw and somehow snatched Cryelos into one of his claws.

  It was Braxton's turn then. He reached deep into the power of the medallion and sent a blast of raw energy directly into Drar's face. Torch twisted through the sky and came up under the molten looking flying creature that was about to attack Chureal and Cobalt. Torch snapped his jaws closed over half of the thing, and even though Braxton felt his skin being blistered from the heat coming off the creature, he knew Torch was a fire wyrm and wasn't being burned like he was.

  The creature's heat somehow fortified Torch, and when the red dragon tossed it to the side, it fell from the sky, no longer looking cherry hot and molten, but black and hard like cold lava-rock. When it impacted the mountainside, it broke apart in a dusty explosion of ashy chunks. Not far away, Drar was tumbling down the mountain. Braxton's blow had knocked it from its feet and off the summit.

  Knowing there were a dozen or more gothicans up there, Braxton called to Chureal through the void and told her to go and help Cobalt protect them, but only from the sky. Then he had Torch land and set Cryelos down.

  "Well met, Lord Braxton," the elf called from the ground. "Let's finish this."

  They both saw Drar gather itself and stand. It was as big as the statue of the Ancestor’s Dream had been back in Narvoza.

  "We have more help com—" Braxton held his words when he saw a mid-sized blue wyrm try to sweep past Drar and attack as they had. Drar wasn’t injured by the liquid lightning the dragon spewed. In fact, it seemed to absorb the stuff. Drar deftly snatched the dragon’s tail and roared as he swung the dragon around him. Using its own speed and momentum. When it came back around, he let it go, hurling it into the next nearest wyrm. The two dragons collided in the sky. As they fell toward the ground, both broken and terribly wounded, Drar flexed his wiry muscles. The streaks of energy tracing all over its skin changed from their random pattern and all raced over his shoulders and down his arms. Between his open palms, a far larger swirl of the destructive green energy began to form. This blast he sent into the ground at his feet, and when it hit, a ripple of tremendous proportion was sent outward like the splash from a boulder dropped in a lake. Turf and trees were turned over and crushed in the churning wave. Right behind the expanding crest, a cloud of green fog roiled outward. Everything it passed over was killed or left gagging, save for the darkons and ogres. To them it was invigorating and seemed to give them more strength and purpose. Here and there, in the wake left behind, dark thorny growths and black leaved trees that resembled twisted skeletal hands, reached out of the earth.

  Torch grabbed Cryelos just before the wave rolled under them. The powerful dragon carried them all above the expanding ring of destruction and the green fog that followed it.

  Order one of the other wyrms to come carry the elf, Braxton spoke to Torch in the void.

  "A dragon is coming to carry you," Braxton said down to Cryelos.

  Torch pounded his wings, increasing their speed and momentum. Braxton threw his head forward and kept his chin tucked. He'd learned the hard way that his neck would get whipped backwards if he didn't. As they climbed, he told Torch to warn the rest of the dragons to fight the beast from a distance.

  Braxton tried to tell Chureal the same, but she and Cobalt had ignored his command for them to stay aloft. They'd landed near the gaping hole leading int
o the nether plane. Braxton saw he didn't have to tell her anything else, for she was using the power of her medallion to crumble the pillars and arches left on the summit in an attempt to block the opening so that nothing else could come out of it. Sir Jory, without his armor, but still amazingly formidable looking, was fighting with alongside the bigger gothicans to keep some of the swarming gargoyle-like things away from Cobalt and his determined rider. Cobalt himself whipped and snapped them away with his tail.

  With the darkons and ogres near the summit not sure what to do, the area around Chureal seemed clear of a ground threat, but then Braxton saw something sneaking out of the hole. It was a long thin arm, with a three-fingered claw at the end of it. A fourth claw acted like a thumb when it got ahold of Cobalt's hind leg. It was then that panic got the better of him. Braxton urged Torch down to help them.

  Torch flipped Cryelos up, and he sailed through the air only to land right onto the back of a smaller fire wyrm. Then Torch dove for the summit. Neither Braxton or the dragon saw that they turned right into the path of another mass of foul destruction Drar had just hurled.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Braxton saw a white dragon come to a hover near Chureal and start spewing her icy breath over the gargoyles and the crumble Chureal was making. He also saw Cobalt yanked toward the uncovered portion of the hole so hard that Chureal almost fell from his back. Another dragon, a smaller silvery scaled grey wyrm, landed near them and sank its teeth into the claw that had hold of Cobalt, but Braxton didn't see what happened next for he smelled something nauseating and was then jarred from Torch's back. The mass of foul green energy exploded, and then corroded into Torch's side, melting away scales and flesh until his guts were falling and his exposed bones started turning yellow black. Braxton was in a cloud himself, but his medallion's protective magic encompassed his form, and though he was falling, he wasn't being eaten alive by the acidy stuff as Torch was.

  He didn't even think about his own impact as he watched the mighty red fall into two separate pieces. One spun in crazy circles as a skewed wing whirled slowly toward the desolate looking ground. The other half fell just ahead of Braxton. When he saw the tops of some tall pines that had managed to remain upright coming up at him like giant spikes, he gathered himself, but before he could act, he disappeared from inside his own protective magic and appeared, held still in a hover.

  He had to shake his head to get his mind to take in what it was seeing. A golden scaled wyrm with a large rider armored in shining gold and silver looked at him through the slots of a helmet that had a piece extending down from the brow to cover his nose.

  It was Zyken-whay, he recognized, and he was as relieved as he was confused about him being there. "I thought you were fighting at the cusp, where evil is bulging the boundary and trying to break through?" asked Braxton, trying not to think about the grim fate of the noble dragon he'd just been riding.

  "The boundary was broken through, fool." Zyken half-laughed and pointed at the summit. "Drar's ring of infection is growing as it races away from here. Already Grey Rock and Kingsport have been consumed, and the sea doesn't seem to stop it. The aquatic life is being boiled alive. Soon, the whole world will be scorched and scarred. I think killing it will stop the devastation from getting worse, so we must get it done before the whole world is consumed."

  Zyken pointed at the hole leading into the place Drar had just come from. His expression changed to one of great worry. Braxton was suddenly consumed with concern for Chureal and Cobalt. Before he looked to see what had struck Zyken-Whay so, he saw the eldest warrior close his eyes and slip fully into the void.

  Below, the form of Zyken-Whay appeared. With his massive sword drawn, he shimmered into place and chopped at the claw the silver wyrm was holding onto. Out of the corner of his eye, Braxton saw that Zyken was still sitting on his dragon Daisy, but his form had gone misty, like Braxton's did when he used to assume the form of the white falcon. The man, or whatever Zyken was, was now in two places at once.

  The clawed appendage was severed by the blow, and the silver wyrm slung the portion in its mouth away the second its grip on Cobalt relaxed.

  "Find another ride, Braxton Bray," Zyken-Whay said, now fully back inside himself on his dragon's back. Braxton wondered just how much more powerful the older void warrior was than he. "Once you do, we must triangulate around that fargin' thing and—"

  They both turned to see what was making a sudden, loud screeching sound. One of the cherry glowing creatures had lashed a green dragon's neck with its tail while crashing into a blue wyrm. It had wrapped its fin-like wings around it. The green's head fell away from its floundering body, and the blue wyrm was making the noise while it smoked and smoldered and was charred to a husk and consumed by the hellish creature.

  "We must position ourselves in a roughly even spread around it, and then use all three of our medallions at once." Zyken glanced at Chureal, who looked back at them, nodding from the distance. "Here comes your new mount now." Braxton turned where Zyken was looking but didn't see anything. Then he was falling.

  He never hit the ground, and he didn't fall far. Instead, his legs were stretched wide and his groin thumped into the spinal plate of a black-scaled wyrm that was not quite as large as Torch had been, but still large enough that his thighs felt as if he'd been yanked by his feet in two different directions around its wider neck.

  Above him, three dragons swooped in on one of the two remaining manta beasts. He didn't have a chance to see the outcome of their battle. Partly because the wyrm he was on was turning, and partly because the sky had grown black instead of gray. The portal the dragons had formed had been destroyed by, so most of the light now illuminating everything was coming from two huge patches of burning mountain forest, the occasional jag of lightning, the blast of colorful dragon breath, or the stuff arcing all over the Drar’s skin and his red eyes. There was another source of light coming from low in the sky now, too. Unlike the others, this light was pure and wholesome.

  Braxton saw Cryelos's staff glowing bright yellow-white as the elf clung to a smaller red wyrm that circled the peak, chasing darkons and ogres away from the white and silver wyrms trying to close the rip in the boundary at the summit. Every time Cryelos passed one of the flying gargoyles, a streak of jagged lightning arced out of the staff and sizzled it into a flailing bit of char.

  If he hadn't known the whole of the Green Sea had been turned black and lifeless, and all those living on this continent and beyond were now dead or dying, and if the ground wasn't littered with dead dragons, he might have laughed.

  The staff's light was small, but it was turning the darkons back into humans as if it was sunlight, and the ogres, with no one left to order them about, fled like roaches startled by the glare of a flaming brand.

  Not seeing Cobalt or Chureal on the summit wasn't alarming, for he knew she heard Zyken-Whay's message and was somewhere trying to get around Drar, just as he and his black scaled mount were doing. But Braxton figured that Cryelos and his wyrm and several of the other dragons would need to be warned away, otherwise they might get caught up in whatever Zyken-Whay intended.

  He took a deep breath and settled himself half-in and half-out of the void, and tried to reach out to the black wyrm, but was distracted by Chureal's scream. He heard it from across the sky, and when his eyes found her, he saw that she was fine, but she was pointing at Zyken-Whay. When Braxton saw that the elder void warrior was engulfed in a fresh mass of Drar's foul green muck, his heart fell, and real panic shot through him. The last thing he wanted to see was the life of Zyken’s golden wyrm melted away.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Braxton didn't have to worry long. Not only was Zyken-Whay unharmed by the passing blast thrown from the Drar, his dragon was still there, as well. Braxton grasped the notion that if he’d been bonded with Torch, the power of the jewel would have protected them both, but that wasn't the case. He had to let go of the memory of the red being corroded away like a sand castle by
water and focus, for the three of them were now positioned as Zyken-Whay intended.

  Drar was first angered by the fact that his power did nothing to the golden dragon or its rider. Then a look of worry flashed across its visage. It gave a snort of what might have been disdain and started to shimmer away, his form becoming translucent.

  Zyken didn't wait, and Braxton saw that Cryelos and at least half a dozen dragons were still in the area between the three of them. He could do nothing, though, for Zyken-Way’s voice filled his head with words he didn’t understand, then he heard himself, as well as Chureal’s voice speaking them. The medallion at his neck exploded with an extreme amount of power. It was like nothing he'd ever felt before. First, a searing line of magical force formed between him and Chureal, then another shot out of his medallion at Zyken-Whay. A third line appeared beyond Drar, connecting Chureal and Zyken's medallion's completing the circuit.

  It was then that Braxton felt the true power of the medallions and the jewels mounted in them. Drar fought to teleport away from them but couldn't. Braxton felt it pulling at their magic, resisting it, trying break free of the hold they now had on its evil core. Then even more power surged through Braxton. A field of pristine, razor thin energy spread out between the three lines their jewels had created. He wasn’t sure what was happening at first, but then he saw that it sheared Drar in half, at the chest. Through the translucent plane Braxton saw the bottom half of the evil monster falling away, but its shoulders and head were still there between them. The roar that started to erupt from it was cut off in a fading gurgle, and then Drar's upper body went slack and started sliding off their magically formed blade, toward Chureal, probably because Cobalt was the smallest dragon supporting the triangle of power and the weight was causing him to drop lower, and lower in the sky.