by Aaron Crash
I needed something dramatic. I felt the burning inside me, and unlike before, it was a warmth not a pain. I focused on sending that burning up through my lungs. I exhaled through my big nostrils. I wanted flames. Nope. I got smoke, but having a huge monster snort smoke, and then smile showing fangs like swords?
The Wynnym guards took several big steps back, holding their spears in uncertain hands. Dragons were legend on this world. Not many can face a legend without crapping their pants. For all they knew, I was going to cover them with flames at any minute. If only.
“I don’t want to kill any of you if I don’t have to,” I said. “I only want to know why you arrested us. And I want to make a case for Broomhelga here.”
“Hey, Axel!” Big Red raised a chained hand.
“Hey, Broom.”
“I want my chakram back!” Toil shouted.
I felt Rhee shift on my back. “Sorry, pal. It’s mine. I really like having something I can throw at people besides my witty barbs. I’m figuring it out slowly. It does like Agni magic.”
I again tried to breathe fire, but again, coughed out smoke. It boiled out of me, obscuring the area for a minute. It was distraction enough.
Dryx flew down and drove a foot into Toil. Kicking a centaur in the head won’t do much since most of their body mass is behind them. However, kick them hard enough, and they let out a big pained neigh.
Dryx, in a display of fierce athleticism, swung around and drove a fist into Toole, forcing him to drop the sword. She landed, picked it up, and then drove a foot into Toole’s stomach, knocking him back and making him wheeze. She grabbed the other sword and glanced up at Broom.
The sky warrior paused. I knew what she was thinking. How were we ever going to get Broom up and out of that throne room? She had to weigh three hundred pounds. No, probably four. Not that Broom was fat, but she was eight feet tall, and a warrior besides.
Dryx had her kurrachiyya back, and you could see how much she loved those two thick-bladed short swords. “Unlock this giant woman. And I want the sheaths to these swords.”
The first Gurgaloid landed on the edge of the palace window, then the second, then the third. I wasn’t surprised to see Goremouth there. I thundered up to the king and again exhaled smoke, only this time, there were some flames there. I could feel the concentration ink on my left arm. The tattoo was helping.
King Jimmy scrambled for a sword leaning against the throne. I thumped the ground with the Calcifax staff, and the stone enveloped the blade.
He turned.
Figg shouted from my back, “Ksaat injit!” She was going to be doing some redecorating, Stone Age style.
Jimmy’s eyes went to the window.
I kept my attention focused on him.
The Stallion King gulped. “A man came here, a man from Foulwater, with jewels and information. He said that the demons and dragons were returning, and that you would come, you, and the pirate elf, and the Foulwater sorceress. He said you would destroy the Lore Factories, and you would make the Gurgaloid problem worse. You did, didn’t you?”
“Eggero Khel,” I growled. It would seem that Eggero might have access to Magica Divinatio. He was a dragon after all.
Goremouth came slamming down on the back of the throne. He raised his wings, growing bigger, and flames burst from his eyes. He opened his mouth and blood came draining out to drip down the throne. Through gulps and gagging, his voice was a hissing wet mess. “Demons. Dragons. Dvey’s return. The Pentakorr will rise. We are their creations. We are their handmaidens. We will escort them to victory. Once the true emperor rises again.”
“So why come after me?” I asked Goremouth.
The flames grew bigger. More blood drained out of his gullet. Not sure where he got the blood from. Maybe he was like a soda fountain inside: water, blood, orange-flavored Fanta.
Goremouth choked out a gargling whisper. “Because you are the son of fire. You are of the war. You are of the game.”
That all sounded familiar. It was a lot like what Raagnis Agnaala had said about me.
I laughed. “And you are of the throne.” I slammed the staff down and forced the rock to circle around Goremouth’s legs, trapping him to the throne.
He roared and spat blood from his mouth, and the torrent of gore, laced with bloody icicles, hit me like spears. The first few cracked off my scales, but he was only getting started.
King Jimmy Goodgolde wasn’t going to stick around. He galloped off.
The other Gurgaloids left their perches and came storming in, going for anyone they could claw to death. In seconds, the entire room was chaos.
As for me, I summoned a wall up from the cobblestones, which is about a thousand times easier than raising bedrock from out of the ocean. The entire castle seemed to shake as I pulled the wall up to block Goremouth’s bloody attack.
Dryx flew over the wall with her two swords, and Goremouth screamed in pain. I liked the sound of that.
Figg was up on my back, casting spells, but she didn’t need to cast many because now the city’s soldiers were fighting the last of the Gurgaloids.
I flew into the air. Goremouth was missing an arm and a wing from Dryx’s attack. I ended him with a snap of my tail. His skull exploded in a burst of flame. Both water and blood gushed out of his neck hole.
I flapped my wings and soared around a pillar. The Wynnym below were doing well against the last of the Gurgaloids. More and more, they were turning their arrows toward me. Dryx was already flying toward an exit. I looked for Broom. I found Toole and Toil, and they were fighting gargoyles, but there was no sign of our favorite Wynnym girl warrior. We couldn’t stay, not in the castle, not in the city.
Our business there was done. But leaving Broom felt unfair.
An arrow clattered off my chest. Rhee let out a curse. “Fuck! Axel, we need to go! I’ve been hit!”
That made the decision for me. I turned and sailed out of the window. The castle’s towers were lit by Agni torches and lanterns
Rhee cried out in pain, and Figg cast an Uma heal spell.
I took off over the lake and then banked left to fly over the Lore Factories. Some of the chimneys were leaking smoke but it was nothing like the cube that had floated above the city. The air would clear. Maybe King Jimmy would stop with his experiments. They didn’t need to worry about Dvey’s Palace and the gargoyles anymore.
I turned south and flew over the Mazes. I knew why I wasn’t leaving. I was worried for our red-haired giantess.
Dryx flew close. “Did you free Broom?” I asked.
The white-haired sky warrior frowned. “She is no longer in chains. She told me to tell you that she thanks you. And that she would never leave her city because she is so well liked and respected. And helping you with the mine would be a waste of time. She also said she was too important for any long goodbyes. You didn’t matter to her at all.”
Rhee’s laughter came over the wind of our flight. “That does sound like her.”
I thought about Broom’s weird way of saying the exact opposite of the truth. At first, I’d figured it was because she was rather dim. There was more to it than that. She had an ironic sense of humor and a damaged spirit. That sounded like Mouse all right. Mouse, the petite blonde with the blue eyes and that sardonic wit.
“She’s fine,” I said at the top of my voice. “She knew we couldn’t take her with us. She’ll get to Foulwater.”
Again, Rhee shouted over the wind. “I don’t know, Axel. It’s a long trip, and dangerous. And will she have any supplies?”
“We have to trust that she will,” Figg yelled. “Get us home. We have to prepare our city’s defenses. Please, Axel.”
Dryx flew next to me, waiting for my answer.
“Then let’s get home,” I grumbled.
We took off as the sky was clearing above Sweetleaf for the first time in what might’ve been centuries. I couldn’t help but think about Goremouth’s swampy words.
The true emperor would rise again. That d
idn’t sound like the demon kings. Okay, so who was the true emperor? And why was Eggero Khel walking around Xid talking shit about me?
I didn’t know, but we’d come to Sweetleaf for a reason, and we’d won the day.
Now, to get home so we could win another one.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
WE FLEW SOUTH IN MOONLIGHT—A double shot of moonlight from the two moons lit up the obsidian highway, Dvey’s Road, which was a lot more useful than his palace.
Dryx flew with me, not disappearing like she had on the flight into Sweetleaf. When one of the moons set, the sky grew dark, and I was ready for a break from flying. We found a place in the grass to sleep. I stayed in my dragon form, lying on my side. The three women curled up next to me, and I let them sleep while I kept watch.
Dryx woke before dawn. She approached my head with her hands on the hilts of her swords and her wings outstretched. She nodded at me and spoke in a quiet voice so as not to wake Figg and Rhee.
“You did well back there, Axel. You make me wonder about the nature of dragons. The ancient Jataksha hunted your kind to extinction. I grew up listening to many stories of Lalindra Namenri or Sinaj Pjolin slaying wicked beasts in their caves of gold.”
“There are bad dragons,” I said quietly. “I’m just not one of them.”
Around us, the night breezes swept over the grasses.
The sky warrior looked heroic, with her wings, her swords, and her gleaming white hair. Her homespun tunic didn’t match her grace or her beauty. “This Eggero Khel is a bad dragon. Figg and Rhee spoke of him.”
I exhaled. Smoke rose from my nostrils. I was getting close to dramatically snorting out fire. “Yes, Eggero Khel is a prime example of a dragon who needs to be slain.”
Dryx frowned. She came forward and patted my scales. “Sleep, Axel. I had my rest. You should have your own. I will keep us safe.”
I laid my head down and closed my eyes. I liked the feel of the women on me, and I gently placed my claws near Figg to draw her in close. I was proud of her. She’d gathered another brand, and her power would only grow. I then felt grateful, oddly grateful, that she’d brought me to this strange world.
A night bird’s hoot faded away, and I listened to the grass sway in the night wind. These rolling grasslands reminded me so much of Wyoming. There was something special about Wyoming at night, the ever-present wind, the smell of the sage, the lonely cry of a wolf or the weird gibbering of a coyote.
The feel of the grasslands at night brought back all my memories of Azrack at once.
Jared and I had left for Azrack immediately because a woman had called out for help from that far-away dusty town on that troubled world. And Sabina had heard it. Sabina Gonzales, that was Regina’s mother and our resident psychic. Sabina had grown up a Magician, but she’d finished the rituals to become a Dragonskin. She was blind and used magic to see. Her eyes would glow like emeralds.
Sabina only heard the cries of people when they were truly in need.
I had to go. Jared would go with me, and Regina would join us when she could.
My mother didn’t like me world-hopping, and she really didn’t like me killing the assholes in the universe that needed killing. She’d named me the father of peace, hoping that I wouldn’t follow in my father’s footsteps.
That hope proved to be in vain.
Before Jared and I left, my mother hugged me while the portal of fire spun, showing the daylight of the other world.
She kissed my cheek. “Be so careful, Axel.”
I pulled back.
And it was Mouse, my mom. Of course Mouse was my mother. I’d inherited her sarcasm. I looked more like my father though, and as the son of fire, I got his Drokharis blood.
Mouse couldn’t go with me because there was other trouble she had to attend to, something about an entity called the Creator Destructor. She squeezed my hand and sent me out to fight.
And I fought. I took care of Rattletrap, but not before the cyborg sheriff killed my uncle.
I’d crawled away from that fight. Then my sister Reggie found me, and we went back into town, at high noon, singing our songs and killing anything with metal that moved.
We destroyed that town, but we killed the assholes, and that included Rattletrap.
The words of the song came back to me.
I walked through that town with a soul full of mud
I walked through that town leaving footprints of blood
The hurt in my heart did feel like mud. And we did wade through blood and leave our footprints behind.
I remembered how it felt to breathe fire, ice, poison. It was a delicate interplay between body and soul, and while I didn’t have my old Animus core, I could do the same thing with this shakti stuff. I simply had to keep trying.
A quick glance at the Five Magics Skill Tree showed me I had leveled again and that I could complete the Agni branch of the skill tree. I’d do that tomorrow. For now, I simply wanted to sleep.
A sadness filled me, and it felt so familiar.
Losing Jared had hurt me deeply. My uncle had been an amazing guy. He’d grown up in a wheelchair after losing his dad at an early age. Icharaam’s Orb, this magic item, had fixed his disease, but he’d gone on to become a Dragonskin himself.
Jared Ross became a hero. He helped people, saved people, and we had so many good times together. So many victories. Sometimes helping people was a pain in the ass, but at the end of the day, what good is life if we don’t make the universe a better place in our own small ways?
He'd said that a lot. I tried to think back...what had happened when my sister Reggie and I went to get Jared’s body in that desert cave? Something had happened...
I sighed and shook my head because I couldn’t unlock that memory.
The Gurgaloids were done terrorizing Sweetleaf. The Kankar were nearly gone. And I would take care of this next threat with the merfolk, otherwise known as the Aquaterreb.
And then there was Broomhelga Hurroom. We could give Broom a home. I thought about flying back and looking for her, but Broom would laugh at me. Even when she’d been abandoned by her father, she’d been able to make a life for herself. She could make the walk to Foulwater. Plenty of merchants had done it.
Before I went to sleep, my sadness turned to gratitude. Jared wouldn’t have wanted me feeling bad. He’d want me doing what I was doing: using my strength to protect the weak and to make the assholes wish they weren’t assholes.
I sent a silent prayer to my mom. Sorry, Mom, I can’t be the father of peace. There are just too many wars that need to be fought.
A shadow crossing my closed eyes woke me up. I opened a peeper to see Rhee standing in front of me wearing her hat, which had somehow survived our adventures in Sweetleaf.
She tipped the brim up to show me her blue eyes. “Hey, dragon man, we should get on flying. Figg is smoking and pacing and I can’t handle her nervous fucking energy. And Dryx likes her swords a little too much if you ask me.”
We had a little water left over, but not much. We knew where to find more. We stopped at the fountain in the copse of trees where we’d fought the Kankar. The wall I’d summoned stood west of the trees, and there was our cozy little hut that was mostly just a roof with beds inside. We refilled our water tubes and ate some dried fish. It was midmorning, and the sky was blue and cloudless. It had actually gotten hot, and Dryx was sweating. I didn’t think an angelic warrior like her would sweat so much. Maybe they flew around to cool their bodies.
It was Friday morning, and we were on target to get home that night. We’d have two full days to create our defenses for the merfolk attack on Monday. Or maybe on Monday, we wouldn’t need to face off with the Aquaterreb. Maybe Geeze had figured out a way to call them off, since Illbro Brinnib had lied about the good people of Foulwater stealing any number of fishy families’ treasure. No, Squidbeard had to die. He would’ve sold Dryx to the Stallion King, and that would’ve killed her.
I sat in the shade of our stone shelter
, in a pair of pants that Rhee had found. I was human for the moment, but that would soon change.
Seated on her stone bench, Figg picked at her dried fish. “I thought we’d leave Sweetleaf at the very last minute. I thought we’d be rushing home Sunday night. I’m nervous that we’re doing so well.”
Dryx sat back against her wings. “Do not worry, ugly woman. I will kill the merfolk. They stole me away from my lands. I will get revenge.”
Rhee winced. “Dryx, no one likes to be called ugly. And Figg has a temper.”
My summoner merely shrugged. “I understand Dryx far more now. I don’t much care she thinks I’m ugly.” One of Figg’s rare smiles came out. “I’m just wondering if she knows what my name is.”
“It’s Finniwigg Nightshine,” Dryx said a little arrogantly. Maybe a little hurt? “Of course I know your name. You are a mighty sorceress, a fierce warrior, and you summoned the dragon man.”
That made me laugh. “I’m just glad I got promoted from dragon boy to dragon man.” I stood up. “I want to try something, but I don’t want to light this whole place on fire.”
“What do you want to try?” Figg asked.
I grinned and dropped my pants. “Just watch.”
Dryx’s eyes went to my pinga. “I am enjoying this little exercise. And I will need more of the Quickening before we fly off.”
“That sounds like a good idea to me.” I pulled up the Five Magics Skill Tree and chose the last spell category, Conjure, otherwise known as Yismapana.
I had completed one quarter of the Atvar Vidyala. I still had a lot to learn about the Agni Enchant and Conjure nodes—they could be used to do any number of things.
I shifted into my True Form and walked around the copse of trees to the wall I’d created. The memory of that final fight with Rattletrap hurt. However, it had reminded me I used to unleash my Exhalants with ease.
Dryx, Rhee, and Figg ambled through the trees to see what I was doing. They stood off to the side.
While they watched, I stood on my hind legs, stretched my wings, and gathered up that fire in me. My atma radiated shakti. I felt the ink on my left arm, covered with scales. I didn’t need the verbal component of the spell. The Agni Conjure was so new, so vibrant.