Game of Throbs Complete Series (Books 1-3)

by Piquette Fontaine

1

  The sky was black and shrouded with clouds. From a distance an eerie stillness seemed to engulf the forest, with little sign of life or activity to be found. The terrestrial creatures of the woods remained hidden, aware that this was not genuinely the case, and blanching every few moments as the distant echoes of violence reverberated across the ground.

  If one looked carefully, they could manage to spot the intermittent bursts of fire that lit up the night sky, red and blue and solid white, for mere fractions of an instant before going dark once again.

  All signs of a struggle that had been going on for ages, and one that seemed highly unlikely to come to its conclusion any time soon...

  The wyvern dragon beat its mighty wings as it made its way upwards toward the darkened heavens above, guided only by instinct and by the occasional bursts of light far off in the distance. His heart thundered intensely, his senses piqued, aware as he was that at any moment he could come under siege, from any direction.

  He needed to be ready...

  He crested to a satisfying height, at which point he slowed, and hovered in space, casting his eyes around. From up here, he had the best chance of examining the battle below, figuring out where the action was taking place and where he needed to go. He looked to the east, and noticed a place where several plumes of blue flame poured through the air, retaliated feebly against by a mere three or four orange blasts in self-defense.

  Some of his own were clearly in trouble...

  With a loud roar he bolted forward, thundering across the sky in the direction of the cacophony, ready to assist his people in whatever way he could manage. No sooner had he taken off, however, when out of nowhere- WHAM!

  He cried out in equal parts pain and terror, his body veering across the sky as the pain came surging through him, practically blinding him. He could feel blood pouring from his side, and the pounding of a skull up against him, not relenting despite already having incurred a mighty blow.

  A kirin shifter, he knew...

  He began to thrash at the end of the beasts great and mighty horn, fearful lest the penetration deepen further into his body, and puncture something vital within him. As things stood it was still a minor wound, easily healed (he hoped anyway,) and he would do everything within his power to ensure that it remained that way.

  He began to swing his massive barbed tail wildly about through the air, and after several passes felt it make hard, violent contact with the skull of his attacker. He heard its roar of pain, and the sudden tearing of its bony horn from his wound hurt like all hell. Still, though, he had managed to extricate himself, which had been his intended aim.

  He fell back through the sky, beating his wings, eyes glowing and focusing in the darkness as he tried to get a good look at his attacker.

  The kirin was shaking off the pain as a dog might shake itself off after having been immersed in the river. Its body seemed to suspend itself in midair as though by magic, without the incessant beating of wings required by the wyvern to remain airborne. A flowing, blue-green main strobed around the creatures body on all sides, clearly darkened with blood here in there, and its hoofed feet beat wildly through the air as the pathetic creature tried to stabilize itself, its head still ringing from concussion. All of this was in contrast to the wyvern floating mere feet away, with his red, scaly reptilian body, his huge batlike wings, its vicious claws, and its massive, serpentine tail.

  He hovered in the air, watching, waiting, almost feeling sympathy for the creature that had just pierced his own body, and trying to figure out his next move.

  This seeking of virtue, of common ground between himself and the enemy, proved to be a vital error on his part. As before he had the chance to react the kirin was opening his jaws wide, and ejaculating a massive blue plume of fire through the air, sending it barreling in the direction of the wyvern's helpless face.

  The wyvern hurried to evade him, dodging to one side just in time for the beam of fire to go shooting past his head into the sky, dissipating into nothingness and bathing the two of them in blackness once more. The wyvern's vision was momentarily distorted once the fire had stopped coming, a yellow tinge blinding him from the intensity of the fire. However, the enemy kirin had no interest in remaining patient for his foe to recover, and before the wyvern knew it another ball of flames was plummeting through the air toward him.

  This time he managed to retaliate, opening his jaws and responding with a cone of orange fire back in the direction of the kirin. The fireballs collided in midair, knocking the wyvern back several feet upon contact. Initially, the kirin's flame overpowered that of his foe, having had more time to charge up his powers. So great were the fury and pain of the wyvern, however, that he quickly regained his composure, amplifying his attack so that its force became even with that of the kirin enemy.

  The two creatures held their locked beams for several long moments, and began to spin around through the air, corkscrewing their bodies upward toward the clouds as the heat of their blasts intensified. It began to rain as they made their way upwards, water colliding with their ever growing blasts and steaming upward toward the sky. The light from so much energy began to grow more and more incredible, the distinct orange and blue tones of their blasts becoming a pure white glow that lit up the canopy of clouds above their heads.

  With a sudden flash of lightning, and a crack of thunder, both parties found themselves growing winded simultaneously. They broke apart their flames, and separated themselves, both immediately dashing off to the side to avoid an ambush attack while their guard was down.

  The kirin panted with exhaustion, its nostrils flaring as its wild mane blew across its face, obscuring its vision. It didn't let its guard down for a moment, knowing as it did that any brief respite from the battle was an opportunity for its foe to retaliate, to strike back at the crucial opportunity. Its head was still ringing from that awful strike against its cranium, however, and its thoughts were just enough out of focus for it to remain oblivious when that powerful barbed tail came thundering down once again.

  CRACK!

  A roar of pain as it felt one of its ribs break, its body twisting around through the air in mortal agony. Yet as intense as the sensations were, it knew it couldn't give in, couldn't let the blinding hurt of the injury distract him from the fury of its attacker. Immediately it was blowing vicious blue flames at the kirin, the effort like hell on its lungs in its present condition, but its hope that it might somehow ward off the attacking wyvern long enough to elude the creature and seek necessary medical attention.

  The wyvern, however, was not about to be deterred. That sneak attack against it as it had been scouting the night sky had infuriated it to the point that mercy was no longer an option- it would see this son of a bitch dead, or else die trying.

  It responded to the blast by shooting its own orange plumes of fire right back in the kirin's direction, and coupling them with violent, wild swinging of its massive, powerful tail. This time it was reckless in its attack, caring little about the possibility of its own bodily harm, just as long as injury was done to the kirin on the other end of the flame.

  In this regard, the kirin was at a major disadvantage- while the wyvern could use both its flame and its tail simultaneously, the kirin possessed no such ability. Its tail was like that of a horse, and though it did have a set of vicious horns to compensate for this absence, there was no possible way it could employ them against its foe without running the risk of being burned alive by the billowing flames being fired at it.

  All it could do was wait, and hope for a miracle that might even the playing field before the pain it experienced caused it to lose consciousness.

  And then, that miracle came...

  Quite unexpectedly, and without warning, a massive bolt of lightning came shooting across the heavens, pouring down from the clouds and making contact with the wyvern before it even had time to notice or prepare itself. The thunder came shortly after, as the wyvern's smoking body twisted and writhed through the
air, and plummeted like a meteor toward the earth below.

  It let out a desperate roar, hoping for its own miracle, and struggling its damnedest to beat its wings and remain airborne. Yet it seemed to be of no use whatsoever, as the ground beneath it came hurtling upward at an alarming speed.

  With a loud crash its form was buried in the undergrowth, sliding across the forest floor and smashing into trees, the pain throbbing across its body and nearly robbing it of consciousness.

  By the time it came to rest, it was no longer a dragon any longer- but a man.

  His body shifted back to its human state, he sat up in the grass as much as he could, clutching his bloody body in pain, his heart beating at an almost violent rate.

  He needed to get the hell out of here as promptly as possible, yet in his current state he could scarcely move.

  And now, it was too late...

  The kirin came to a landing mere feet away from the poor creature on the ground, appearing ready to complete the final act of cruelty against its foe. It rose up onto its hind legs, and before the human's eyes took on the form of a man as well, beaten and bloody, yet unmistakably the victor over his foe. He stepped forward menacingly, the rain water streaming down along his naked body, the flashes of lightning from the sky above intermittently lighting him up in a way that could only be described as ominous.

  This was it, the man on the ground knew. There was no escaping the imminent death that awaited him...

  As the kirin stepped closer and closer to his fallen opponent, however, he began to clutch his broken rib, to grunt with pain, and to look on the sheer verge of collapse himself. By the time he made it up to the fallen wyvern, he appeared nearly too weak to stand, much less to murder a fellow human being with his bare hands.

  The wyvern waited, and waited, not sure what he should expect or when. But at last, with a leap of his heart in his chest, he heard a loud sound echoing across the horizon- a call from the kirin shifters, which he knew to represent a signal to retreat.

  The enemy had been overpowered by the efforts of the wyvern, against all possible odds...

  His heart beating faster, he now turned his attention to the man hovering over him, his body wracked with pain, and his eyes seeming to flash with a predictable dilemma- whether to retreat as instructed, or whether to finish what he'd started.

  He stood there for quite some time, an expanse that felt like hours by the time he was finished, before at last slowly turning, hating himself for the decision all the while. He was just too weak to kill this wretched soul, both physically and morally. He may come to regret the decision, but for now it was the only decision he could make.

  The man watched feebly from the ground as his would-be killer shifted back into his kirin form, and turned from the spot without giving his prey a second glance. He lifted off with some effort into the sky, his body clearly struggling to perform its necessary functions as it moved.

  The man on the ground breathed a heavy sigh of relief, and laid back in the undergrowth, trying to overcome the pain just enough to be able to rise back onto his feet and make his departure.

  2

  “God, Emelda, you really are a life saver,” sighed Gylvan, as the medicine woman's withered hands applied a healing tonic to the raw crimson wounds now decorating his torso, from where that wretched kirin had dug its horns into him.

  She smiled warmly at him, with kindness in her eyes. “You should be thanking the forest, rather than me. I'm simply the medium by which the natural world operates.”

  Gylvan shrugged. As often as he found himself rejuvenated by the powers of the natural world, he'd never quite surrendered to the mystical notion that it deserved to be thanked for its contributions. “Either way,” he said, “you've pulled our people out of the fire more times than I can count by now. You really are a wise and powerful healer.”

  She smiled, a little bit more feebly now, some sort of reservation quite visible in her expression. Gylvan raised an eyebrow at her.

  “What is it?” he asked, concerned.

  “Perhaps this isn't my place,” she said. “But maybe if our people didn't repeatedly go dancing voluntarily into that fire, I wouldn't need to keep pulling you out of it.”

  “Excuse me?” He felt suddenly defensive, yet the healer's tone was so calm and gentle that his tone came across as unduly aggressive toward her.

  “This cycle has been going on, unbroken, for centuries, and it has driven our people to the brink of extinction. Not to mention their own. My powers of restoring us from this brink can only go so far. Sooner or later, some of the burden will be on us as far as breaking the cycle of violence is concerned. The wyvern are not quite so different from our kirin brother as we may care to think at times...”

  “Excuse me,” said Gylvan, now genuinely feeling assaulted by her words. “But what do you expect us to do? Lie down and surrender to the kirin scum, who try to overtake our land? We fight, because we cannot on agree on boundaries between our two people that we believe have been established ages ago. Boundaries that they seem to insist are unfair. And in attempting to violate those boundaries, they've killed so many of our own that our current population struggles to survive and replenish itself. Even our ability to produce viable offspring has been thwarted in these past decades, so that as our men and women are killed on the battlefield, no new generation has been sired to replace those that have been lost. They're quite literally driving us to the brink of extinction, and you expect us to lie down and take it?”

  Emelda closed her eyes, and breathed in deep, displaying a kind of gentle, long suffering patience. This small gesture seemed to indicate to him that he'd misunderstood her completely.

  “I claim no particular power to see into the future,” she said sagely. “But I have been watching the stars, and they tell me that the course which our people now follow is now one that can only lead us to destruction. There is no love to be found at the end of this road, nor salvation. But there is a path which may be taken that can reroute all of this, and succeed in redirecting us from our present course.”

  Gylvan looked at her blankly, feeling equal parts skeptical and intrigued at such a suggestion.

  “Yes?” he asked, impatient.

  She breathed in deep yet again. “Gylvan,” she said patiently. “I look into your eyes and see that you are lonely. That your heart is pained. You believe that you are alone in the world, that fighting for your people will be the only role you ever know in life, and that because of our people's infertility, you will never know the fulfillment of a natural life- of child rearing, and passing on your essence to another generation. But you are incorrect in all these assumptions. There is someone out there who can change all of this. A woman, who I've seen among the stars, who can help you overcome your own limitations- as well as those of our people. A human woman...”

  At this, Gylvan's eyes truly grew wide with astonishment. He sat back abruptly, disbelieving that which he was being told, and had to clutch at his side in pain, practically having forgotten about his injury.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” he asked. “Humans are nearly as bad as the kirin when it comes to threatening our people. Worse, actually, since they're the ones who forced us into hiding in the first place, and are the root cause for our disputes over territory. And now you're telling me of some... Some prophecy, telling me that I need to mate with a human to find happiness?”

  “Like the kirin,” Emelda said calmly, “I think you will find that the humans are not as different from the wyvern as we like to imagine them.”

  “And just how am I supposed to find this imaginary woman of yours?” he said, nearly outraged at this kind and feeble soul.

  “All you must do is seek her out,” she said patiently. “That's all the further information I can give you. You will know, otherwise, when you find her.”

  Gylvan, at this point, had heard enough.

  “Alright,” he said, rising to his feet, and slipping back into his shirt. “I'm so
rry, but I have no patience for this nonsense. I thank you for your service, Emelda, but there is too much work to be done to go around indulging in your wild fantasies. If it's all the same to you, I think I would like to be on my way.”

  “Of course,” she said, retaining the same calm civility she'd exercised the entire time, even as Gylvan had lost all patience with her. The contrast in their demeanors made him feel incredibly guilty, which in turn left him even angrier about the situation. “I would advise you, however, not to close the door on your destiny. You may find that you have far more to lose in its pursuit than you do in avoiding it.”

  “I'll try to keep that in mind,” he said, as he exited the door of her hut, trying his best to put the whole conversation behind him.

  Emelda watched dreamily after him, concerned, but with a slight smile spread across her withered lips.

  3

  Gylvan was wandering through the forest, trying, more than anything, just to clear his head, when he first heard her angelic voice.