by Deck Davis
Were they dead? Had the sphere brought him back just so he could see his friends die? No. His mum would have told him. She would have warned him. She wouldn’t let him come back to this, so there had to be something else.
Serpens was ahead of him with his back turned, striding along the plateau, his dragon sword in his hand. Blood dripped down the dragon stone, and chunks of flesh were stuck to the jagged edges. Serpens’ muscled back was covered in sweat, and the scales of his dragon arms seemed to glisten when sunlight caught them right.
Fury boiled in Charlie. There was no reason for it to be like this. Ever since they’d crashed here, things had gone wrong, and it was all down to this lunatic of a god. He could have just let them fix their ship and leave, but no. He was too paranoid for that. He’d kept them here, and he’d made a deal with the demi-gods, trading everyone’s lives for his own safety.
“Serpens,” he growled.
The god turned. Incredulity crossed his godly features. He was speechless, and instead just stared at Charlie.
Charlie strode forward, the sphere glowing in his palm. He didn’t know what he was going to do, didn’t know how he was going to use it, but he remembered his mum’s words, and he used them as fuel for the fire in his ruined chest.
“You’re going to answer to the demi-gods,” said Charlie. He didn’t know what he meant by this, didn’t know how he would make him answer, but the words felt right.
“There’s even more to you than I thought, mortal,” said Serpens.
Charlie charged at the god now, fury boiling hot inside him. As he neared the god, a roar boomed in his ears, and a shadow covered him. Wind lapped at his face so strongly that he fell to his knees.
It was the dragon, the scaled behemoth, its scales glowing green, mists of heat seeping from it.
Faced with Serpens and his dragon, Charlie stopped. He might have come back from death, but this sight rooted him, and the pain in his chest came back. Was it real, or just phantom pain? He didn’t know, but he knew he wouldn’t survive another stab of Serpen’s sword, or a scorch of fire from his dragon.
Wait. It wasn’t just his dragon, was it? It was his Alter. Every god had one, every god trusted a part of his own life to it.
The sphere glowed warmer now, and golden light buzzed around it. Charlie felt it tremble though his hands and into his arms, rushing through him like mana but stronger, thicker, more natural to him than the blood in his veins, almost like it was a part of him.
He felt it speak to him as a soothing voice, whispers of words he’d heard before. Words from his mother, but not to him, exactly; they were the words she’d spoken when she made the sphere, he realized.
He understood it now. He understood how Larynk’s sphere worked, he knew how all gods spheres worked. The power in them, it was finite, but it was fluid, something they could alter and bend at their will, fuelled by legacy and worship.
This sphere was full. It was small, but full. Whatever god had once held it, had filed it before it was taken from them.
Serpens held his sword upright. His dragon opened its mouth, and a sphere of fire crackled to life in its throat.
Charlie held the sphere up, showing it to Serpens. The god gasped, and for a second, his insanity wore away, and Charlie felt like he was seeing the true god, the one who Larynk had once known.
“You can use that? No…it can’t be,” he said.
Before Charlie could answer, the dragon roared, and a stream of fire burst out toward him.
He pictured a barrier around himself, an invisible field of energy that no fire could penetrate, and he let power seep out of him.
The flame crashed into it, and even with the power trembling inside him, Charlie braced for the agony of being scorched. It didn’t come. The flames bounced harmlessly in front of him, repelled by a barrier he couldn’t see.
The sphere glowed less now, and its light, though still golden, dimmed. The sphere was strong, and it burned with the powers of a god, but it was too small to hold much power. One more use; that was all he had.
Serpens held his dragon sword aloft and charged at him, his muscles rippling as he ran, the insanity back on his expression and wrenched deep into it.
Charlie gathered the power in his arms and, as Serpens reached him, he let it whoosh out. But he didn’t aim it at the god; instead, the golden sphere power went beyond him, and it wrapped around his dragon, it poured into its eye, its nostrils, its mouth, it swirled around its skull.
The dragon snapped its gaze toward Charlie, and when their eyes met, Charlie could hear it in his mind. He heard it speak in an ancient tongue and he didn’t understand it as words but as pictures, as patterns, as emotions.
He cast patterns of his own back to it, a series of color and shapes, patterns of what he wanted it to do.
Defend me.
As Serpens struck his sword at Charlie, the dragon lashed out with its tail, whipping the god’s chest and sending him flying back across the plateau. Charlie sent more patterns to it. The dragon took four booming steps, until it towered over Serpens, over its master, over its maker.
The god grinned. “Settle down, Dragyuren,” he told it.
And Charlie fed it another pattern.
In one motion, barely a blink, the dragon rushed at the god, its mouth open and fire burning in its throat. Serpens screamed, but the dragon closed its mouth around his head and tore, ripping his neck from his shoulders.
The sphere went cold. An aching tiredness washed over Charlie, and his legs buckled from under him. He fell back onto the ground, still clutching the sphere in his hand.
He had no time to be tired, because ahead of him, the dragon roared. The green glows in the cracks of its scales grew brighter and spread across its body, getting larger and larger.
He understood what was happening now. The dragon was Serpens’ Alter, and Charlie had used an Alter to kill its own god. An Alter was supposed to save Serpens if his godly form died, but what if the Alter killed its own god? Was Serpens killing himself?
That was it. Serpens and his Alter were forever linked, and an Alter couldn’t exist when it itself had destroyed that which made it.
It thrashed again now, its tail swiping left to right as if it could shake away the pain of the burning glows. Charlie watched, his empathy welling in his chest like a great weight, more painful than anything he’d ever seen, more agonizing than having his chest carved open by a sword.
The dragon exploded in a stream of green light, one that whooshed from the tower in a wave, spanning beyond it and into the distance, travelling across the plains of Dragyuren and then fading, disappearing, until nothing from it was left.
Chapter Twenty-Three
He left the uppermost plateau and staggered toward the lower level, following a winding path down the tower. Every step became harder than the last, but not just because he was tired. He was scared about what he’d find when he rounded the corner. The silence on the tower terrified him; he’d have given anything to hear Flink shout or hear Larynk say something. Instead, there was nothing but quiet. Even the dragons in the sky were silent as they flopped down toward the tower and landed, circling around their fallen god.
He should have been scared, but he wasn’t. After glancing at them once he turned his back on them, because he knew something now. The dragon hostility had been Serpens’, not theirs. They didn’t care about Charlie, about Flink, Longtooth. They didn’t even care about the god. They cared only about the planet, and about their own lives.
As he rounded the corner, he steeled himself for what he’d find. He tried to hold back his emotions so they didn’t spill out of him when he found his friends dead.
But he didn’t see that. Instead he saw Apollo tearing across the plateau, with blood splattered across his dark fur. Behind him was Flink and Larynk, and even Papa Gully hobbled toward him.
Apollo reached him first and was going to pounce, but he stopped. His stared at Charlie’s chest with his wide chimera eyes, glassy and bloodshot. He howle
d. It was a pitiful howl, one full of sadness.
Flink paused. When she saw Charlie up close, she dropped her spear. “Newchie…your chest...”
“Nothing one of your potions won’t fix,” he said, but he knew it wasn’t true. These mortal wounds would be with him forever. He didn’t know what he was now – was he alive? Dead? Somewhere in between? His mother had faded before she could give him the answers.
“Where’s Mia?” he said.
“Gone. Her crew are dead, but we couldn’t find her.”
“What happened to you?” said Larynk.
His marble face was cracked even more now, and the cracks spread to his chest. Bullet holes dotted his face. There was no blood; Charlie guessed that gods didn’t bleed. He held Serpens’ sphere in his hands. He must have gotten it when Charlie kicked it off the upper level.
“It’s a long story,” said Charlie. “A hell of a long story.”
“Serpens is dead, isn’t he?”
Charlie nodded. “I killed him,” he said, almost not believing the words himself.
Larynk’s jaw dropped open. “You killed him…how the hell…”
Charlie showed him his sphere. “I found this on Crosseyes’s ship. He had a cargo hold full of them, and I took this one to show you. But when I was up there with Serpens it started glowing, and then he hit me, and I saw my mother, and then I woke and I had all of this power inside me…”
“Woah. Slow down a second. Let me see it.”
He handed the sphere to Larynk. The god held it up to his marble eye like a cynical auctioneer valuing a stolen gold ring. He turned it in his palm, blew on it, then rubbed it. Finally, he stopped squinting. He gripped the sphere, wound his arm, and then threw the sphere off the tower.
Charlie watched it sail through the air, every inch of its arc away from the tower filling him with fury. That was his sphere. His power. Finally, after everything, he’d gotten some power of his own, and Larynk had just throw it like a cricket ball.
He wanted to slug him, but he held back. He’d done that once already, back when Larynk had appeared to him as a statue, and he remembered how much his knuckles had stung afterwards.
“What the hell?” he said.
Larynk shrugged. “It was a dud.”
“What do you mean? I used it.”
“Trust me, Charlie. I’m a god, I know these things. That wasn’t a god sphere. It looked like one, it certainly reacted like one when I touched it, but there was no power in it. It was like a pistol that only fires blanks; good to threaten someone with, but useless in a gun fight.”
He couldn’t get his mind to accept that, and he still yearned for the sphere even though it was way below them now, nestled somewhere along the blade grass. Part of him wanted to run down and get it.
But then he thought about it. He tried to calm himself, to get things straight in his head. Did Larynk have a reason to lie to him about it? Maybe. He might not want Charlie to have power of his own. Then again, he always thought the worst of Larynk, even though it was Crosseyes who had betrayed them, and it was Larynk who was still here, sticking by them.
One thing stood out, though. If the sphere was a phony, the power he’d used certainly wasn’t. The barrier he’d conjured to protect himself against dragon flames, the way he’d tamed the humongous beast. That had been real…unless Charlie had final gone completely, utterly crazy.
So if the power was real and the sphere was a dud…then it was the placebo effect. Mum, he told himself. You’ve done it again.
Just like when she’d helped him when he lost his sprinting confidence, she’d attached importance and power to the sphere, and her words were so convincing that they had brought out whatever power Charlie had in him. His taming failures, his inability to learn real magic, she’d shattered those beliefs.
He suddenly felt hot. It was too much to take in, that he had this ability inside him, that he could use it without relying on Larynk. His body reacted by pouring sweat from him. He took off his coat and let the breeze lap around him.
“Newchie,” said Flink. “What’s that on your arm?”
On his wrist, just below where his blue veins bulged, there was a mark. It was brown around the edges and red in the middle, shaped in the silhouette of a beast or some kind.
A rune. Like Papa Gully’s spells.
“That’s a tamer’s rune,” said Gully. “But this isn’t right. Not after…how long has it been?”
“I don’t know either,” said Charlie. “Larynk, can you explain it? There was something I was wondering earlier. When we left Chummilk’s planet, I lost my powers. You said it was because Chummilk designed them – fine. But if the magic system belonged to his planet, and I lost my powers when I left it, why did Gully keep his?”
Larynk sighed. “You didn’t lose your powers, Charlie.”
“But when I tried to use them, before you bound them to your sphere…”
“I shut them off. Okay? I needed you focussed on my sphere, for all the good that did us.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Magic doesn’t belong to a planet, and it sure as hell doesn’t belong to the gods. Magic, it’s a…an energy. It’s everywhere. Every planet, every world, has it. It’s not created by gods. All we do is manipulate it, create systems for its use, and every god does it differently. Chummilk’s magic system was designed around killing things to get stronger, and he had another separate system based on runes. Other planets do it differently. Take Earth, for instance.”
“There’s magic on earth?”
“Some. The earth gods don’t like it, so they hardly let it be used. The only magic present on Earth is conjured through rituals of belief, and only a few people know, and can even say, the words to summon it.”
“No. I can’t believe that. There’s never been any magic on Earth. I’d have heard about it, it’d be on the internet, or something.”
“You don’t believe it? Really? How do you explain David Blaine? The guy can do anything.”
“I can’t get my head around this.”
“That doesn’t matter right now. We’ll talk about this at another time. Maybe when the demi-gods aren’t coming.”
He pointed at the sky, where the blue had gone now, and instead black clouds gathered, darker than anything Charlie had ever seen. It was as though space itself was leaking into the planet, gushing into the atmosphere like black blood.
Charlie stared at the sky, but there was no sign of Crosseyes and his ship now. Behind Larynk was Mia’s ship, but there were two gaping holes in its side, and parts of the decking were charred black. It wasn’t going anywhere.
“We don’t have a ship, and there’s no portal. How are we going to…” A thought struck him, one he couldn’t shake off. “Wait – where’s Longtooth?”
Flink looked at the ground for a second. When she faced him again, tears brimmed in her eyes. “He came back,” she said. “When we attacked the pirates, one of knocked me to the ground, and I thought I was going to die. But Longtooth came back.”
“Where is he?”
“I’ll show you,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.
She led him across the plateau and to where the pirates lay dead. Among them, laying on the ground, was Longtooth. His once-white fur was smothered red, and a long, raw cut ran along his right side. A puddle of blood surrounded him.
Charlie felt himself weaken as he stared at his friend. Way above them, the dark clouds gathered and he saw the bows of ships enter the planet’s atmosphere. It was the demis, and they wouldn’t care about his dead friend. Longtooth was like Charlie; he was caught up in the games in the gods, and he’d paid the ultimate price for it.
Where would his friend be now? Had he gone to the place Charlie went after Serpens killed him? Longtooth was an orphan like him, so did that mean he’d go to the globe-shape room, where he’d hear his dead parents speak to him?
Caught up in the games of the gods, and with nothing to show for it. People, animals, ever
ything…they were all just toys for these bastards.
A hand touched his shoulder. It was cold and firm, and Charlie turned to see Larynk stood over him.
“I’m sorry,” said Larynk, with genuine emotion, “But we have to go. They’ll be here soon.”
“Go? Go where? Crosseyes took his ship, and Mia’s is ruined.”
“We’ll use the sphere.”
“How? Crosseyes took your sphere when he left.”
Larynk nodded. “He did, and he’s going to try to sphere gaze, no doubt. He’s going to see what my Alter is, but there’s nothing I can do about that right now. We’ll use this.” He held Serpen’s sphere out.