by Billy Wright
He needed metal from the Light Realm.
He looked at the head of his axe.
His only weapon.
Had it yet been corrupted by the Dark? First wiping away the blood of the dwarfish smiths, he ran his fingers over the runes inscribed in the steel.
It remained pure.
With only a moment’s regret, he used a hammer and chisel to remove the head from the haft. Then he found a crucible big enough for the axe head and threw it in. Around the smithy, he found dwarf-sized leather aprons, most of them ratty and discarded but better than nothing. He tied several of them around himself, fashioned two of them into makeshift mittens, then found a long-handled pair of tongs to lift the crucible into the furnace.
While he waited for the axe head to melt, he pulled out the lump of moist clay he’d brought from the Light Realm and began to sculpt the mold for the key. His mind knew its shape, and his concentration focused his fingers into recreating its exact size and shape. At first his fingers felt fat and clumsy, rubbed raw and blistered by stone and heat, but the more he focused, the more they obeyed his intuitions. He didn’t know how long he worked the clay, but when he reached its final shape, it was correct in every detail as if summoned straight from his memory. The shape of it was more than a foot long, with a shank as thick as his thumb, a bow as broad as his palm, half an inch thick, and a bit as long as his middle finger, a thicket of barbs and spines. The finished product would be a hefty chunk of steel. This clay mold he placed into a kiln to harden. While he waited for his materials, he located a sand bed suitable for casting the key.
Then it was time to check his axe head, reduced now to a white-hot puddle in the bottom of his crucible.
So lost was he in his work, he almost failed to notice the sounds of scratching at the door. Something was outside.
The clay mold was not fully hardened, but it would have to do. He pulled it from the kiln and pressed it into the bed of sand, creating a negative impression of the key. Sweat poured down his face. He was feeling light-headed. Could it be heatstroke?
Then he removed the original and prepared to pour his molten metal into the mold. This was the trickiest, most dangerous part of the process. If he didn’t get it just right, he would have to start over, and he doubted his increasingly insistent visitors were willing to give him the time.
Gripping the crucible in a pair of heavy tongs, he tipped the liquid metal into the mold. In his exhaustion, he almost fumbled the crucible and spilled molten steel down his legs and feet, splashing sparks and tiny gobbets in all directions.
Then he realized something was missing.
The axe head’s steel was still pure from the Light Realm, but the Queen had told him it needed to be infused with pure love, and he doubted the touch of his hands and intention alone were enough. Sticky with the blood of the dwarven smiths, his hands were hardly pure anymore.
Around his left ring finger gleamed a golden band.
His breath caught.
He could never have afforded a wedding ring of solid gold, so this one was just gold-plated, but there was no purer symbol of love he could call his.
Tears misted his vision.
The pounding on the door intensified.
The love of his life was gone. He was never going to see Liz again.
And she would not have hesitated for this.
He twisted the ring free of his finger, leaving the pale groove of skin that hadn’t seen the light of day since their wedding.
Then he dropped the ring into the molten shape of the key. The yellow-hot liquid metal darkened around the ring as it sank in, losing its rigidity.
The door shuddered under a rain of powerful blows. Pebbles and grit fell from the ceiling.
Then, abruptly, the ring liquefied and flowed into the molten steel. He wasn’t sure those two metals would behave that way on Earth; perhaps it had been his magical intention guiding the metallurgical process. All he knew was that now he had the key he needed.
As a last step to the casting process, he pulled the vial of oil he’d gotten from Claude—so many decades ago, it seemed—oil that would guarantee the final purity of the key. He pulled the stopper and poured the oil over the liquescent surface of the casting. The oil sizzled and smoked and released a scent like summer mornings and dewy sage, pristine lakes and sun-dappled pines, cinnamon, cardamom and cloves. Sparkles stroked the surface of the semi-molten steel.
He didn’t dare throw water on the key to hurry the process, or else it might turn brittle and shatter under the stresses of cooling.
Waiting for it to cool, to solidify, while something very large and very insistent was beating on the door, was the longest few minutes of Stewart’s life. He braced all the bars and plates of steel and iron he could find against the door. Whatever was out there, it was big.
He pulled the baseball out of his satchel. Would it work at all? It was just a baseball. If it could stop time, how wide would the effect be? Whatever he hit with it? Ten feet? A mile? The entire Metropolis? He had no way of knowing.
Claude was right; this baseball had, in many ways, defined the first half of his life. It was his, in the way of an old, favorite shirt or a worn pair of sneakers or a treasured regret.
A metal spike jammed between the door and the jamb, and like a four-foot crowbar began to worry at the gap. Metal squeaked and groaned.
And he no longer had a weapon.
Or perhaps magic would be his weapon.
Hunter had conjured a flaming katana from a hunting knife, and there were plenty of chunks of metal around here that could serve as an improvised weapon.
By the time the key cooled to orange-hot, it had solidified. With a pair of tongs, he eased it out of its sandy bed and lowered it into a bucket of black water. The sizzle and hiss raised an acrid stench, but he didn’t think it was from the key itself, rather the tainted water coming into contact with the oil.
Another spike stabbed through the crack in the lower half of the door, and both were now prying.
“Stout door,” he mused with a parched throat, cracked lips, and swollen tongue.
The pounding at the door echoed inside his head, throbbing in his temples. He took the key to a grinding wheel, where he smoothed and polished its rough corners and flashing, breathing deeply to keep his hands from shaking. Sweat poured down his face.
Amid the polishing, the gold of his wedding ring emerged, amalgamated with the steel.
The door exploded inward, blasting an iron table out of its path.
A massive head filled the opening, too large to be fully visible.
The huge reptilian snout was either made from or sheathed in dull iron. Fangs as long as his hand chewed at the door jamb. Its scorching breath stank of brimstone and acid, hot enough to set paper afire.
An eye the size of a volleyball glowed like an orange coal, peering in at him.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Stewart stared at the enormous beast trying to chew its way through the rock to get to him. His limbs turned to nerveless goo and his blood to ice water.
He clutched the key in his left hand, and the baseball in his right.
He wouldn’t get another chance.
Winding up for the throw, he waited for the creature’s eye to peer in at him again. Like a rat gnawing at a hole, it ripped away chunks of rock from the doorway. Soon it would be able to get its head through. The depths of its throat glowed furnace-orange. Could it breathe fire? Perhaps not, or it would have reduced him to charcoal by now. It was such a merging of flesh and machine, he wasn’t sure if the creature was biological or mechanical.
Then it wormed its head through the hole, jaws agape and belching heat, reaching for him.
He threw the baseball with all his strength.
It struck the beast squarely in the eye.
All sound ceased, as if Stewart had suddenly gone deaf.
The dragon stopped like a paused video.
Sparks trailing from its nose held their place in midair.
“Holy crud, it worked!” Stewart croaked.
But for how long? A strange thought, considering he had just stopped time itself.
He hurried around the massive head, but took the chance to study the thing. It was indeed the merger of both a living thing and a machine, a kind of cyborg dragon. As he scooched around the armor-plated neck through the door, he noticed that he no longer felt the heat of the furnace or of this dragon, as if all transfer of heat had stopped. The key no longer felt warm in his hand.
He could hardly bear to touch the dragon’s coarse, steel neck, but he had to wriggle out into the tunnel.
In the tunnel, he found a contingent of armored dark elves like the one he’d fought, as well as a dozen or so dwarven smiths, all waiting to rush in after him.
The urge welled up to steal one of their weapons and kill them all while they were helpless, or put out the dragon’s eyes. But again, he didn’t know how much time he’d stolen.
Without a backward glance, he ran, pulling out his compass as he went.
The air itself felt dead, unmoving, thicker somehow as if resisting his passage. And he could hear nothing, not even the sound of his own footsteps or his breath. The maze of subterranean tunnels engulfed him. When he encountered a fork or an intersection, the compass needle swiveled to lead him on. He hoped it wasn’t leading him in circles.
Then the air grew warm again, and the sound of his footsteps returned. How far he had managed to travel away from the cyber-dragon, he could not guess in the warren of passageways. That beast couldn’t follow him down these narrow passages in any case. But the dark elves and dwarves could. Would they be able to find him? Could they sense his location? He wouldn’t wait around to find out.
An orange glow drew him forward, along with a low, burbling, slurping sound. The source proved to be a river of lava crossing a cavern the size of a baseball field. Waves of heat rippled up from the orange flow. He paused at the tunnel mouth long enough to ascertain the cavern was empty of life, but the balconies and mezzanines along the walls and ceiling suggested this was a well-trafficked area.
He hurried to cross the stone bridge over the slow-moving river, checked his compass, and darted into the next passageway.
As he went, he gathered a sense that his path started to slope upward. The walls of the passageways grew uncomfortably warm to the touch and underfoot. Endless black pipes and conduits radiated heat, leaving him perpetually drenched in sweat. His head swam to the point of dizziness.
Then a thought punched through the haze of confusion. Perhaps with magic he could defend himself from this heat before he died of heatstroke.
He drew in a deep draught of crimson barbs and formed them into an invisible shield around him. At its edges, heat waves rippled and danced, but he no longer felt the heat. Sweat cooled on his skin.
The thunderous screech of a cyber-dragon echoed down endless tunnels from behind him.
The march of hundreds of armored feet rose and fell in the distance.
Then a fluttering rush sounded from up ahead, a cacophony of squeaks and wings.
He knew what a swarm of bats sounded like, and it was coming this way. There was nowhere for him to run. They would be upon him in seconds. What manner of bats might exist in such a place as this?
If there was anything plentiful here for him to use, it was Dark Source. So he drew in another scathing draught, hardened his protective shield, and expanded it like a balloon to fill the tunnel, creating an invisible barrier. Then he gathered all the heat from the area around him, collecting it, channeling it into his shield.
The air grew so chill he could suddenly see his breath.
An immense swarm of leathery wings and beady red eyes and tiny fangs exploded from around a bend in the passage, racing toward him. They were the biggest bats he had ever seen, larger than fruit bats and flying foxes. And like the dragon, they were augmented with razored steel claws and metal plating.
But there was no way for a single bat to alter its course in the narrow passageways. When they splatted against Stewart’s barrier of focused heat, hundreds of them, they exploded into sprays of sparks, gobbets of molten metal, and smoking pellets of flash-cooked flesh, choking him with the stench of seared hair and meat. Every single one of them.
As the embers of the last one drifted over his face, he smiled grimly, shuffled through the blackened, calf-deep remains, and hurried onward, ignoring the increasing wooziness in his step. Turning the shield into a heat-weapon took too much power for him to sustain, so he let the shield return to its original state.
Perhaps those bats had been searching for him, spies or messengers for the Dark Lord. If so, the Dark Lord might now know exactly where he was.
He spurred himself into a run again, key in one hand, compass in the other.
The shield kept the increasing heat away from him, but he could still sense its presence, like knowing something bad is on the other side of a door, taxing him both mentally and magically. Every time he drew in another gust of Dark Source, the pain was worse and lasted longer.
And then, after what seemed endless hours of tunnels and searching, he entered another large chamber, this one much less finished in construction.
In the center of the chamber stood a half-spheroid block of obsidian, like an overturned bowl thirty feet high. The cavern walls were of shiny, half-melted stone, as if this were the inside of a bubble of once-molten rock. At the same time, the half-spheroid didn’t look like obsidian, because the facets were moving, shifting, throbbing. His vision seemed to slide away from the facets, as if matter and solidity had no meaning for what they were.
The compass needle pointed straight toward it.
It was, however, surrounded by a moat of flowing lava.
The roar of a cyber-dragon echoed in pursuit.
The air in the chamber rippled with heat. Dark-streaked orange lava bubbled and slurped, catching the facets of the obsidian globe like slivers of flame.
This was it.
This was what he’d come all this way to do.
The rock around the banks of the lava river felt thin and looked brittle, ready to crack like an eggshell underfoot. If he leaped over a rivulet of lava, he half-expected his feet to break through the crust on the far side and plunge his legs into molten rock. His heat shield would not protect him from that.
So he summoned his will, and drew in a deep, scalding, raking breath of Dark Source. The pain staggered him and he sank to his knees, waiting for it to subside. Tears streamed down his cheeks. The pain was like having his lungs and organs shredded by shards of glass.
When he could bear to open his eyes and focus externally, the sounds of pursuit were closer. Dark elf voices. Dwarf voices. The subsonic dragon-rumble.
The Princess had to be in that sphere.
But first he had to get across the moat.
For him, magic seemed to work best when he could use it to manipulate something that already existed.
Like a physical form.
He closed his eyes and let his imagination play.
So infused was he with Dark essence that the transformation happened immediately.
Great, black, feathery wings sprang from his back to a span of at least thirty feet. He flexed and extended them a few times until they felt just as natural as if he’d had them all his life, as normal as his arms.
With two great flaps, he was aloft, lifting his feet and flying over the lethal lava flows.
The heat formed great updrafts that boosted him higher, and from the air he could see a landing on one side of the sphere, as if there once had been a bridge. But there was no entrance.
The landing was about a ten-foot square of smooth dark stone. He landed there, folding his wings carefully to keep from dipping his feathers into the lava moat.
But he could find nothing resembling a keyhole. There was no opening at all, just irregular mirrors of shifting black glass, distorting his appearance.
Catching a glimpse of himself
, he looked away. He couldn’t bear his appearance now, haggard, emaciated, a ghost with red-rimmed eyes and a ferocious mouth. Would his family even recognize him now?
It didn’t matter. They were gone. Better that they never saw him this way.
Strange lights glowed within the obsidian depths. Perhaps lava glowing within? Or something else?
Then one of the lights took shape and formed an image. Stewart as a teenager.
The image took life and movement, showing Stewart stuffing a sandwich in his pocket in a Mesa Roja supermarket. An old lady, who’d seen him do it, gave him a withering look. He fled the supermarket. When he ate the sandwich, it didn’t fill the hollowness inside.
Other lights glowed from within nearby facets.
One showed him sitting up in bed, crying. It was the night he’d lost the baseball game. But he hadn’t remembered crying about it for so long until just this moment. Nevertheless, the sadness and shame were like a fresh punch in the gut.
Another facet showed him throwing rocks through the windows of several houses late one night. No one had ever proven he’d done it, but one of his foster mothers had beaten him for it anyway.
There was the time at the quarry, when he’d wanted to push his foster brother into the deep water and watch him drown for being so awful.
There was the time he’d pushed the class Fat Kid off the hayrack ride at the county fair, just like the older kids had done to Stewart twice already that night. Everyone laughed with thoughtless glee, but the kid was too overweight to catch up. Stewart couldn’t remember the boy’s name, only that he sounded like he was gasping out his last breath a quarter-mile later, when the driver finally realized one of the kids was missing and stopped to wait for him to catch up. Stewart had felt awful and tried to apologize, but the Fat Kid never spoke to him again.
The time he’d tried to kiss Nancy Ellis at the eighth-grade dance, and she’d laughed at him like it was a joke and not an expression of his undying love.