by Deck Davis
When he tried to gather his mana inside him, he felt nothing. Not even a whisper of it.
And that was because way above him, becoming a dot in the distance, Crosseyes had made it to the uppermost tip of the sky, his galleon silhouetted by the clouds. He had Larynk’s sphere, and with it, were Charlie’s powers. His mana, his spells…his taming.
This was the end. Serpens would get his sphere. The dragon would shrug Charlie off eventually, and he’d fall to his death. His friends would be killed.
He’d failed them all.
It was only a rush of air on his face that brought him out of it. He looked to his left, where he saw another dragon.
This one was smaller than the rest, with an almost sad look in its crocodile -like eyes. He could have sworn it seemed scared; as though it didn’t want to be here, stuck amidst the chaos.
He knew this dragon. It was the one he’d freed from the pirate camp, back when Mia had first offered her deal to Charlie. The longer he looked at it, the surer he was.
He felt something now. When he looked into its eyes, he felt himself going deeper, almost into its consciousness. There was something between them, a bond that Charlie had already forged when he helped it escape, and even without his mana it was still there, an invisible link, but a link all the same.
Serpens’ dragon darted sharply to the left, taking the turn so quick that Charlie lost his grip. Panic shook him, it froze his chest, and he was ashamed to say that he cried out now, yelling as he realized he couldn’t keep hold of the spike, shouting as he fell into the air and felt it rush around him.
As he plummeted to the tower, he stared up at the dragon’s eyes, at how pathetic they looked, at how smaller it was than its brethren.
You don’t want to be here, do you?
His plummet seemed to last a billion years. It was as though time slowed as he looked into the beast’s eyes.
Then I’ll help you leave. But save me.
A force gathered inside him. Not mana, but something else. Something that competed with the rushing wind caused by his plummet, numbing him.
Save me, he commanded.
The dragon tipped its head, comprehending his command, apparently shocked at the voice in its head. It rushed down at him.
Time regained its speed, and the shock of his fall hit him anew, and images flashed in his head, thousands of them, not just of his life but something else; a medley of emotions, sounds, memories, terror.
He smashed into something solid, but it wasn’t the ground. He wasn’t hurt, he wasn’t dead. Instead, he scrambled onto his stomach, and found he was on the scaled-back of the tamed dragon, and that it was swooping toward the tower now.
When the highest platform of the tower was just six feet away he jumped off and rolled, and he spread his palms on the dragonstone, never as thankful to feel something solid beneath him.
A voice shook fear back into him.
“You have made the biggest mistake of your mortal life.”
He sat up to see Serpens standing thirty feet away from him on the other end of the platform. The god sphere was on the ground to Charlie’s right.
His instincts flared, a spark of energy that forced him to his feet. Before Serpens could react, Charlie ran toward the sphere and he kicked it off the platform, sending it hurtling to the level below.
Serpens’ face flared in anger. Sweat covered his muscle chest like oil, and he held a gigantic great sword in his dragon hands.
“Sphere or not, I will still destroy you,” he said.
Charlie knew he was right.
Chapter Twenty
He’d never been alone at the top of a dragon tower, faced with a furious and insane God of Dragons before. Another item to tick off his bucket list.
His friends were below him fighting pirates, and Crosseyes had left them, taking his chances and managing to make it through the Dragyuren skies.
Even without his power sphere Serpens was still a god, and a hulking, muscled, dragon-armed god at that. He held a sword made not of metal but of black dragon stone, each jagged edge a threat, each spike sharp enough to cleave through Charlie with one hit.
What was he supposed to do? His powers were gone and he was alone.
“There’s an aura around you,” said Serpens, striding forward. “Didn’t I say it? I don’t like it, mortal. But at least I know where it is from now.”
“What aura?”
“Yes, I remember now. You seemed familiar to me; not your face. You mortals all look alike to me. But the energy surrounding you. I have seen it before. Many of the gods have.”
Charlie glanced around. His only escape was the slope to his right, but he’d have to get past Serpens to get to it. Other than that, he could always leap off the edge behind him, but that was a surer way to die than meeting Serpen’s jagged dragon sword.
From behind him, he heard the sounds of battle on the plateau below. People crying out; it could have been the pirates, it could have been his friends. He just didn’t know, and that worried him. Even now, faced with a demented dragon god, he couldn’t think about himself.
As Serpens strode forward, Charlie backed away a little, all too aware of the edge behind him. He looked around for his newly-tamed dragon, but it was gone.
“I knew your mother, you know,” said Serpens.
If there was anything that would take the breath out of his lungs, it was that. “My mother? How?”
Serpens laughed. It was a demented one, edged with his growing insanity.
“You don’t know a thing, do you? Poor mortal. Larynk has brought you into this without a care for you. He hasn’t told you anything, has he?”
“I know about the demi-gods. I know you’re planning to hand Larynk over to them so you can save your own skin.”
“I am, mortal. And you’ll help me.”
“Why the hell would I do that?”
“Because I can tell you where your mother is.”
A shock of ice gripped him. “She’s dead.”
Another laugh, and even more insanity twisted into the god’s features. “You think the gods would let her die? You pathetic mortals. Your mother isn’t dead.”
“You’re trying to mess with my head.”
Serpens shook his head. “Your mother is alive, mortal. And if you assist me in capturing Larynk, I won’t only let you live…I’ll take you to her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your mother was Eleanor Naylor, is she not?”
The ice spread even colder in him. “Yes, but that’s not exactly a secret.”
“She is Eleanor Isabella Naylor. A mortal, yes, but a mortal with a talent. Or, should I say…a demi-god with a talent, as is her present situation.”
“You’re talking shit, Serpens.”
“Your mother was a sphere maker. A mortal with a talent that vexed even the most powerful of gods. Do you think we conjure our spheres out of the air? That our power is unchecked? No. Every god’s sphere must come from somewhere. Or someone.”
“My mother sold insurance. She worked in an office on Maple drive, she left the house in the morning and got home in time for dinner. You’re telling me that she led another life? That when she wasn’t selling policies, she was creating god damn power spheres? What a hobby to have. You’re a riot, Serpens. You’ll say anything, you crazy son of a bitch.”
A heat began to spread through him, casting away the cold in his chest. It seemed to emanate from his left hip, as though a hot coal was pressed against him. When he touched his side, he felt nothing.
Serpens took another giant step, closing the gap between them. “Believe what you like,” he said. “It doesn’t change my bargain. Work with me. Larynk trusts you, such is his weakness. Mortals mean something to him. Bring him to me. Tell him whatever you want to do it, I don’t care. But bring him to me.”
“And you’ll let me go? Just like that?”
“I will take you to Eleanor.”
“I don’t believe a word of
it.”
“Your thinking time is almost over, Charlie. Will you let your cynical mind lead to your death?”
How could Serpens know his mother? How could she be a damn sphere maker? It just wasn’t possible. Growing up, she’d been like any other mom. She went to work every day, and when she wasn’t working, they’d all spend time together. It wasn’t like she disappeared every night to the garden shed to create god spheres, or something. It didn’t make any sense.
Then a thought froze him to the spot.
Wait. She used to go on trips, didn’t she? She’d be gone for a week at a time, travelling around the country. But those were work trips. She was meeting clients, closing deals, not making power balls for insane gods.
His hip burned again. He stuck in hand in his pocket, and felt warmth emanate from the golf ball-sized sphere in his pocket.
Serpens too another step. He was close enough to strike now, and Charlie had nowhere to go.
Should he jump? Should he try to fight Serpens? Or should he accept his bargain, betray his friends, and trust the crazy god to stick to his word?
A part of him wanted to risk it all. A tiny, tiny shred of him ached to know if what Serpens said was true, if somehow his mother was caught up in everything too, that she knew the gods, and that she crafted their almighty spheres.
“This is your last chance, mortal.”
No. Even if he helped Serpens get Larynk, the god wouldn’t spare him. There wasn’t an honest bone in him, and even if there was, he was teetering over a chasm of chaos, dancing on the tightrope of sanity. He was paranoid, and he was terrified of the demi-gods. He wouldn’t let Charlie live. If Charlie accepted his offer, he’d have betrayed his friends, betrayed himself in making the deal, and that’s how he would die; a betrayer.
It was death either way. And if he was to die, he’d do it being the person he wanted to be, not with his soul stained.
So, he faced Serpens. He took the sphere from his pocket and gripped it in his right hand. He didn’t even begin to know how to use it, but he felt reassured by its warmth. On his left wrist, he flicked Lifedrinker into place on his bladeswitcher.
He’d die fighting a god. At least he could say that much.
Serpens shook his head. “Pathetic.”
He swung his sword. Charlie tried to move to his right, but the dragonstone seared across his chest, slashing through his coat and his shirt, and a blaze of utter agony scorched through him, the pain more than anything he’d felt in his life. His blood spurted from him, and bile rose in his throat, and his chest burned and burned.
He collapsed onto the ground, on his back. His vision blurred, and darkness peeled at the sides. Serpens loomed over him, the tip of his dragon sword aligned with Charlie’s chest.
He plunged it down, and Charlie cried out as the sword cut through his ribs, cracking bones, grinding deep into his body, the spikes tearing flesh and blood vessels and ripping through his soft insides.
His cry died in his throat, and darkness covered everything. Silence, and darkness, and an utter numbness.
Chapter Twenty-One
When he woke, he wasn’t on the dragon tower. He was inside a circular room, a kind of globe like a hamster wheel, except it was filled with a darkness that was broken only by the twinkling and winking of stars, ones that burst into light in intervals, sending rain-like showers of green and red and blue and purple around.
He looked at his chest and saw a horrific wound zigzagged across his chest, blood welting at fleshy edges where his raw insides showed. His ribcage was broken and splintered, the whites of his bones stained by his own blood. He put his hand to his throat and felt the rough edges of another wound.
There was no pain. Nothing but a numbness, one that seemed intensified by the darkness around him.
Was he dead? Was this heaven? No, not heaven, but an afterlife. If gods existed, then at least one of humanity’s yearning questions was answered. The mind, the soul, and the body still existed once your mortal coil unwrapped, and it took you to a lonely place, a miniature universal globe where your stood remote against the birth and death of stars.
“You’re not dead, Charlie,” said a voice.
That voice! He knew it. It sounded deep in his skull, it tweaked at his memories, in threatened to unleash waves of nostalgia and sadness.
“Mum?” he said, his voice choked with disbelief.
“My boy. But you’re not a boy now, are you? You’re a man, and I missed it.”
“Is that really you?”
He turned in a circle, and as he did, his globe entrapment turned with him, the minute universe spinning to show the multi-coloured spray of galaxies and cosmos spreading out to infinity. There was no sign of his mum, though. He couldn’t see her and her thickset body, her luscious curly hair. He only heard her voice.
“Where are you?” he said.
“I’m not here. I’m…you wouldn’t understand.”
“What happened to you? With the storm? We looked for you for years. Dad never gave up. It made him ill.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, sadness weighing heavily in her voice. “There isn’t time to explain it. I wish I could, but we don’t have long.”
“Serpens said you worked with the gods. What the hell?”
It was strange, but he could feel himself regressing in his mother’s presence, like he wasn’t a man anymore but a boy.
“He was right,” she told him. “Everything he said was right.”
“You…you made god spheres?”
“I did, Charlie. And I know how many questions you have. Believe me, if I could, I would answer them to eternity. I’d ask you ones of my own, about how things were after I went…about your father…but no. There is no time, my darling.”
“Where are we?”
“You were headed to where mortal souls go when they die, but you stopped yourself. Do you know how?”
“How? No. I don’t…where are you? Why can’t I see you?”
“Ah, and there’s the boy I knew. You are a man, but you sound just like you did.”
“What do you mean?”
“Fear has that effect, Charlie. It strips a person of their years. You’re scared, aren’t you?”
He didn’t like admitting it. Men were supposed to be men. But yeah, he was scared, alright. He was terrified.
“What’s going to happen to me?” he said.
“You held the god sphere before Serpens struck you,” she said. Her voice sounded galaxies away, and each word was strained, as though every syllable came at a great cost. “I made that sphere. Not for you…for another god. But that doesn’t matter. You touched it, and the sphere is a part of me, Charlie. Something innate that allowed me to make god spheres, and it seems you have it too.”
“What does this mean?”
As he spoke the words, the dark globe surrounding him shrunk.
“We’re running out of time,” she said. “Listen to me. You can use this sphere, but you have to do it as soon as you leave here.”
“How do I use it?”
“You-”
Before his mother could finish her words, the globe shrunk again, warping around the edges, drawing close and close to him like a flame flickering in the air. It was drawn to him, or rather, to the sphere in his hand, the golf ball-sized god sphere that was glowing gold now, sucking in the darkness of the globe until it became smaller and smaller.
“Mum?” said Charlie. “No! You can’t leave yet.”
There was no answer.
She was gone. The globe was gone. Light blinked into his eyes, and he saw the sky, and he saw dragons.
Chapter Twenty-Two
He felt surprisingly good for a dead man.
He was back on the dragon tower. The wind whipped around him, and he felt it blow against his jagged chest wound, but he didn’t feel any pain. The only thing he felt was the god sphere, the ball glowing against his palm, golden in colour but with patches of darkness inside it that looked like continents.
Dragons swirled in the sky above, their wings silhouetted against the sun. They roared, they rushed through clouds, and they rained fire down on the lower levels of the tower.
His friends.
He listened, but the sound of battle was gone now. He couldn’t hear the pirates, Flink, Larynk. Nothing.