Zah watched in amazement as the ground itself settled away, leaving the other two Dragoneers standing normally. Then the earth almost instantly rose up in a large encircling ring that surrounded the alien like a bowl.
Zahrellion focused her teardrop, and she hoped that their combined might would end the alien nightmare.
She started to let it all flow out of her, but all of a sudden two strange ivory-antlered stags bearing wild-looking, metallic-haired riders came racing over the lip of the newly formed bowl from the north. They were calling out and waving their arms, and pointing up at the alien erratically.
Zahrellion couldn’t believe her eyes, for there was Lemmy running up and pointing alongside the fabled full-blooded elves. Then Lemmy let out a harmonic howling scream that blew them all away.
“KILL IT NOW!” the mute yelled in a voice that was at least three voices, if not more.
Zahrellion was still in control of her emotions, but barely. Jenka was swallowed! Jade too. If the Dou hadn’t been inside her, she would be pulling her hair out, but now she thought there still might be a chance for the boy she loved so dearly.
Lemmy and the elves let loose terrible blue-tinted flows of magic at the thing. Their powers intertwined into a thick hissing braid of energy. Zahrellion’s eyes met Aikira’s wide whites, then Marcherion’s harsh glowing orbs. It was pandemonium as they, too, let loose an untold magnitude of power into the munching alien full bore.
Chapter 30
The alien was taking terrible damage, but it began retaliating by sending forth reaching tentacles that were easily long enough to grab any of its attackers. One of the appendages almost took Marcherion, who was standing next to Aikira on the rim of the bowl. March didn’t even see the thing. He couldn’t see what was right there because hot cherry pulses were flaring out of his eye sockets into the alien. Luckily for March, Aikira was as quick with her blade as she was with her wizardly magic. She lopped a length of the member off and the rest retracted swiftly.
The loss of her added magic, while she saved her fellow Dragoneer with her blade, was enough to allow it to begin emitting some sort of shielding.
Pores opened up all over the alien. It was suddenly pocked with them. A steamy gas radiated out and then began to glow a pale shade of green.
The effect of the Dragoneers and the elves’ magic was nullified when it met the weird glowing mist that now shrouded the alien. It gurgled out what might have been a laugh then, and let loose a deep, undulating sound that forced the earth to open underneath it. It sent out a bright static pulse that momentarily shocked everyone around it, and then began burrowing into the ground with a purpose.
When the now badgerish-looking thing was suddenly slinging water up with its thrusts of dislocated earth, it stopped in confusion. The idea of a water level underground had never crossed its complex mind. They had come a long way out of the hills since it had been pulled underground before. It could hear the waves rolling, it could sense the saline in the air, but now the hole was beginning to fill. Somehow the water table was beginning to rise.
This time, the shocking wave the alien emitted was stunning. And in the still pause after, it snatched up one of the elvish and its white stag and crunched them in its maw.
Crimzon was in more pain than he’d ever experienced, save for the day Clover was petrified by the wizard Xaffer and his Soulstone. Rikky was about to fall off of the huge saddle-less fire wyrm. Crimzon had taken injury when the alien tossed him and he’d raced back toward Delton to find Rikky Camille the healer. After spelling the boy awake, Crimzon talked him through the restoration he needed to stay aflight this day. His wing muscles might be ruined for good, he’d swiftly explained, but if they ended that thing, the sacrifice would be worth it.
Fivess Dragoneers against it, snot fours, the big red said after the healing was done. He then lifted the groggy Rikky and sat him in place on Clover’s ages-old saddle. The flight was excruciating, but they’d spotted the Nightshade and the new king, both badly skinned and corroded from the digestion process, but both intently flying toward the confliction, too.
The scene they found when they arrived was daunting. Andoal had moved the earth and then left it formed into a deep bowl. The Mountonian had carved a deep ravine from the sea and was filling the hole with ocean water. In the pool, the alien was thrashing around, waving tentacles and emitting ever weakening pulses of harsh electric static.
Around the rim there were several people: Lemmy, near a stag-mounted, golden-haired elf; Aikira and Marcherion, both tactfully attacking the creature while trying to avoid its limbs; and there was Zah, on the rim beside Rikky’s wyrm, hunched over and vomiting.
It was King Richard who took command, but it was the Nightshade’s awful shrill voice that gave his orders.
“Fight it, Zahrellion!” he commanded. “All at once now, all of us!”
Crimzon roared and Rikky cast forth what little remained of his teardrop’s power. The red dragon’s Dour combined with Rikky’s. Lemmy and the stricken elf who had just lost its life mate cast forth spells, too.
Now came Marcherion’s huge vomit of power, and Richard and the Nightshade added their potent gray flow as well.
“Now Aikira!” King Richard commanded. “I hope Vax taught you well.”
“Did,” she sounded through gnashed teeth as she cast the one spell that Vax Noffa always told her never to cast.
In an almost perfect pentagonal strike, five different forms of magic converged on the alien. Not one of them was potent enough to pass the thing’s shielding mist, though.
King Richard and Lemmy both nearly faltered with discouragement, but then a sizzling line of power reached around the rim and connected the five. This new connection quantified the force and the alien was suddenly going mad. Its tentacles were thrashing wildly. And the heroes were being forced to concentrate to avoid them.
The powerful effect began to falter and die away. The terrible alien was only mildly harmed by the full attack. It snatched out and knocked Marcherion to his knees, then a tentacle found Lemmy’s leg. The power of the flows wavered and lessened. The creature was growing even larger now, but then something happened. Deep inside the thing another glow began to emit. Reaching out like red hot wires as thick as tree trunks, flaming cords of power shot out from within the creature.
Like a white-hot flaming star of magical force, the Dour traced the spans between the casters and then shot back into the middle from all five points.
It seemed to know then; the alien’s huge blue-orange eyes filled with some sort of resolve. The teardrops were drawing back the power the alien had drained. They were evaporating its otherworldly essence, but they weren’t killing it. The alien knew it was about to be defeated, but it was smart. It could still shift forms and it did so. Just before it was blasted into a score of smaller chunks, it morphed into a long, blobby swimming creature. When it was exploded apart, all the pieces took on a similar shape and fell, like a net full of ship-sized fish into the seawater-filled bowl. It was like seeing a roiling school of gargantuan krill swimming all over each other in a barrel, at least until one of them found the Mountonian’s water channel and began swimming out toward the sea.
Zahrellion searched the area but could find no sign of Jenka. She was empty of emotion, but she made to blast at the first fleeing creature she saw. Like the delphin she’d seen on her journeys to King’s Island, and the big blue wave-makers that leap and crash into the water to make the tides, this thing rose partly out of the sea and trumpeted a geyser into the sky before drawing in a breath and re-submerging.
Jenka was dead. The idea of it filled her with rage, and she screamed out in anguish.
She took a step and started to unleash her frustration on the creature, but Lemmy was running at her around the rim and pointing back into the bowl frantically.
Zahrellion turned and looked at what he was trying to get her to see. What she saw was as heart-lifting as it was amazing.
There was Jenka
, mounted proudly in Jade’s saddle, both of them rising up out of the schooling alien fish on an island that Andoal was lifting. Both rider and dragon were shimmering, as if filmed over by the alien’s strange protective mist. When Jenka’s gaze met Zah’s, she fainted. His eyes were glowing a soft radiant green.
He was Jenka, but he wasn’t the same.
Chapter 31
“There’s no need to harm them,” Jenka said into the ethereal and aloud. It was clear he was speaking to them all. In one hand he held the sword Mysterian had forged for him; in the other he held Clover’s fist-sized dragon tear. When he spoke, a sizzling rope-like strand of bright green energy flashed between the two teardrops in his possession. “Its parts will forever need both the air and sea to sustain existence. Its call will only carry beneath the waves. The elementals have made it so.”
With Lemmy’s help, Zahrellion was getting to her feet.
“What’s he become?” she whispered through tears born of knowing deep down that her love might well be lost to her. She was so confused that she was digging her nails into Lemmy’s arm.
I know not, Lemmy answered with his mind. He hugged her and ignored her grip.
The Nightshade let out a shriek to gather attention. It and its rider were partly corroded; at least their outer skin and some muscle had been digested by the thing, but neither showed any sign of the incredible pain they had to be feeling. Zahrellion watched as King Richard held his own sword high and yelled, “I’ll not relinquish the islands, nor the territory behind the wall. Out here, beyond the barrier, is Jenka’s kingdom to command. His father, our father, was the king. Jenka was born to rule the Frontier. He was born in the hills. As brothers, I hope that we can move forward and forge this realm in peace.”
“I’ll not be ruling anyone, brother.” Jenka’s voice chimed like tinkling glass. “I’m not… I’m not…” His eyes found Zahrellion again and he faltered. “I’m not the same anymore, Zahrellion.” His fantastic voice cracked as a coral-green teardrop began to form in his eye.
Below them all, in the earth-made bowl, the newly formed creatures were breaching the water’s surface, spewing spray, and grabbing breath. They were also finding their way out of the confinement through the long, wide channel Andoal had made.
“There is something I have vowed to do,” Jenka whispered across the distance. “Please understand.” The green droplet fell from his eye. It landed at his feet like a dropped emerald pebble. Before he could tear up any further, he sighed and closed his eyes. It was as if his lids were moving in slow motion. It was like he was in some other place, and only appearing to them in a vision.
“If you need me, call for me.” Jenka’s tone was sad, yet hopeful. “I will come, if I can.” With a nod of respect toward Rikky, then Marcherion and Aikira, Jenka had Jade leap into the sky. The dragon lifted in a single powerful leap. Behind them, like an impossible blur, trailed the misty green stuff they were coated with. Zahrellion choked back a sob and still marveled at the emerald rider who was now lifting high into the air. She heard Aikira sing a sweet, regretful goodbye, then Jenka and Jade were but specks in the sky.
Zahrellion’s surge of grief was so overwhelming that it consumed her.
Epilogue
In the months that followed the final battle with the master alien, the people of the Outlands and the Frontier cities stiffened their backs and began to rise up out of the ruin. Many of the people whom King Richard had evacuated to the islands returned to start anew. The Dragoneers, without their leader, worked hard helping them. Jenka hadn’t just disappeared, though. Before he went away he visited Herald at Clover’s castle and used his newfound power to repair his old friend’s body.
He did as best he could, but it was only a mediocre job. Herald walked with a pronounced limp and wore a patch over his one empty eye-socket, but he was alive and as ornery as ever. When he was being healed, Herald heard words from Jenka that made him believe wholeheartedly that the strange green-eyed boy was going to return soon and maybe even take the throne.
“Said he had to undo a wrong,” Herald told them. “Said it had to do with Clover. He said when it was done, he would try to come home. If you can find that infernal dragon Crimzon, he’ll tell you. He’s off with them, I believe.”
A certain gleam was missing from the old man’s eyes, though. Mysterian’s death hit him hard. He’d fallen in love with the old witch, and as irritating as she was, he missed her company. In true King’s Ranger fashion, he buried his sorrow in hard work. He was training new foresters to be Queen’s Rangers, for it was deemed by King Richard that by all rights Zahrellion was Jenka’s chosen wife. That made her the queen of the lands outside the wall. There hadn’t been a ceremony between the two of them, but none would ever question the way they’d loved each other. None but the Dragoneers would dare question King Richard’s decree that made her queen.
It didn’t matter much that Zah hated the idea and denied the position vehemently. Herald went about every conversation he had with her as if he were talking to Queen Alvazina. This only served to infuriate Zahrellion even further. All the pomp and excessive bowing was just too much for her. This caused Herald to smile, despite his gloom. She would make a grand queen, he decided, with or without Jenka at her side.
He was certain, though, that she would always be a Dragoneer first.
They all missed Jenka. Rikky was sad, and he spent some of his time hunting Sarax and ‘horn-heads’ with March. The two Dragoneers were deadly in their saddles, with custom longbows and shafts tipped with the spider venom Linux had been extracting from the hills. The Dragoneers stayed busy chasing and killing the things in between long trips to carry rebuilding supplies from one place to the next. There were more cocoons opening every day.
Rikky also spent a lot of time helping the rebuilders work on the taller structures. Silva’s smaller size allowed her to be able to maneuver better than the larger, bulkier wyrms.
While gathering bundles of lumber donated from the Farwal woodsmen, Rikky came across a person who had been missing quite a while. Stick, the thin kaffee-skinned forester had been recruited by the eastern Walguard after fleeing Three Forks during the battle with Gravelbone.
Stick didn’t seem surprised that Rikky was one of the Dragoneers. Stick had helped Rikky get his peg-leg built and was the one who put him on the wagon out of the sacked stronghold that terrible night so long ago.
Stick told Rikky that when word went around about a one-legged dragon rider, he’d figured it was him. They laughed and talked and drank themselves silly while telling of the things that had happened. Then, as they were leaving the tavern full of men who had been listening to their tales, they got caught up in the most hopeful thing Rikky could remember. A procession of bridesmaids scooped them into the parade. Rikky found himself spinning on his peg with an eastern girl named Bonna’Lea. After that night, his trips to Farwal to get lumber increased in frequency tenfold.
On a trip to Pvurn to carry messages for the few Hazeltine witches that remained, Aikira came across a group of travelers walking toward Delton. To her elated surprise, there was Weldon Gimmerwick, but her heart sank as she saw he was helping along a woman and what appeared to be her young son. Aikira wanted to land and hold him, and ask him about her parents, and his, but she didn’t. She lifted away before the small caravan could see her clearly. She didn’t let Weldon’s new situation get her down, though. Her Weldon was alive, and maybe he had a chance at starting a life with a new family. She was a Dragoneer now, heart and soul. She knew their life together was never meant to be, and she left him behind.
Golden flew swiftly through the clouds so that her teardrops were blown away before they had a chance to fall.
When not attending Zahrellion at New Three Forks, or carrying messages for the Outland councils, Aikira spent time in the foothills watching Herald train the men, some of whom used to be Outland road wardens. She knew Zahrellion would announce her pregnancy soon. She was starting to show and wouldn’t be
able to hide it much longer. What remained of the Outland councils all agreed that, until Indale and Delton were rebuilt, they would work with the new queen of the Frontier. It was a peaceful and well-functioning alliance, especially because Zah let the councilmen do as they would. Only once did Aikira have to intervene when there was talk of banning ogres from the limits of the coastal cities.
Aikira wanted the Dragoneers all to return to Clover’s castle. That place felt like home to her. It wasn’t meant to be, though. Zahrellion’s presence was needed to keep the spirits of the people lifted. King Richard had put Queen Alvazina in charge of the Mainland Peninsula and she had her own people to tend to. But inspiration was hard to come by, and when Zahrellion and Crystal lifted into the sky, the people all cheered and momentarily forgot their losses.
Aikira didn’t envy her white-haired sister at all. Her heartache had been tempered with time. Zahrellion’s hurt was fresh and unfair. There was no choice that could make it better for her. The situation was out of their control. She hoped Jenka would return soon. If only so that Zahrellion might feel less pain.
Marcherion had always been a hunter at heart and he relished the job of killing ‘horn-heads’ and the few Sarax that hadn’t yet cocooned. He hoped that someday soon he might be able to return home to the land of Kar and check on Brendly Tuck. He doubted there would be time in the next few years. He would only make the grueling journey after he was sure the other Dragoneers were safe and well. This meant that he might have to wait for Jenka to return.
He was the oldest of them and felt he had to set an example for the others. Going home amid all the destruction and confusion just didn’t seem right. Besides, someone had to hang around and explain the strange, sometimes maddening nature of girls to young Rikky. If he didn’t, then Aikira and Zah would brainwash him into lush.
The Confliction (Book Three of the Dragoneers Saga) (Dragoneer Saga) Page 14