“You must renounce your dependence on hunting.”
“Never.”
“Please join me in the far mountains.”
“I will not.”
“One day you will die at their hand.”
“Do not concern yourself with that. You might as well worry for these mountains.” The Griffin leapt from her perch and took off into the air with a loud cry. “Goodbye, old friend,” she thought to herself as she watched the Griffin depart. Her senses welcomed the retreat of the other, though her spirit still found some comfort in her company.
As she rested her head and closed her eyes, she heard the sound of footsteps approaching from the path leading down to the lands in the west. She realized with another sigh that the very wizards that they had just discussed would soon arrive. She hoped they hadn’t seen the Griffin.
A short hour passed as she waited for the wizards. When they finally arrived, she became apprehensive. Something about the timing of these two visits along with the impassioned message of caution delivered by the Griffin disquieted her. But she was hungry, and thoughts of soaring through the stars soon eclipsed her negative feelings.
The wizards stood before her. The proud little vermin didn’t even look nervous. She decided to breathe some fire into the air to remind them of their place. But the heat at the edges of the flame triggered a hazy magical aura around their bodies. They had taken precautions against her. Clever, damned wizards. She hated them.
The worst wizard of all stepped forward.
“Azeoloth, we have come for our scales. I also need to discuss something with you,” said Zaringer.
“Do you have my delivery?”
“Of course. The slaves are in the usual place. But first I must ask you about the Griffin.”
“What of her?”
“Did I not see her fly from this place mere hours ago?”
“She comes here from time to time to engage me in pointless conversation.”
“You must allow us to capture her. We need her for our magical research.”
“I will not. She amuses me.”
“This is not a request. You will arrange to meet with her when the sun is high in exactly one week’s time. We will take her then.”
“Impossible. She would just fly away.”
The wizard raised his arms and there was motion all around her. She leapt from her perch with a deafening scream and took flight. But as she rose, something restrained her. She fell back to her perch with a heavy thud, shattering a part of her favorite rock outcropping. Looking around her, she saw at least a hundred figures wearing robes that cunningly blended in with the stone around them. They had their hands raised, holding her in a vast magical netting. They were all wizards! And they had either been there for some time or they had approached her, undetected.
“As you can see, stealth will not be a problem. These wizards have been searching these mountains for some time under my direction. You probably were aware of them when they began that effort many years ago; but as they’ve studied the Dead God’s magic, they’ve become masters of stealth and illusion. An unintended but welcome side-effect to their primary mission,” gloated Zaringer.
She considered breathing fire on the nearby wizards, who she noticed had an unusually skeletal appearance. But she had already established that the wizards had taken precautions against her fire. And the magical confinement had tempered her pride with an edge of raw fear. Her chief concern now was escape and the eventual destruction of this wizard. But could she manage that? And would she betray the Griffin—her one friend in this world since the remainder of her true kin had fled to the chaos of the outer worlds?
Some of her cunning returned, and she asked a question. “What is the true mission of these, then?” She thought about the long history of the mountains and of the City. She had lived through all of it. When Zaringer did not respond, she ventured a guess. “You’re looking for Julius’ tomb?” She laughed softly at the notion. Everyone knew that Julius had spent a decade hiding his tomb with layers upon layers of the Old God’s magic. She had looked for it herself for a few years. It was a dizzying array of illusions, false leads, and secrets—a supreme exercise in frustration and futility. A waste of time.
“You are wise. Would you offer your help?” asked Zaringer.
“There is no point. It will never be found. The magic is too strong.”
“We will find it. I am descended from the Old God, just like Julius was.”
“Do not deceive yourself—you are a babe in the woods compared to Julius.”
She saw Zaringer redden at that remark, and she worried for a moment that he might have her slain. But he calmed himself and ordered her release.
“One week’s time!” he shouted as his robed wizards scurried back into the rocky clearing and dissolved from view. Zaringer strode off with his retinue of other wizards in tow.
She felt an urgency to feed that overshadowed all other concerns. As she prepared to fly, the sensation of the magical restraint returned to her. She hadn’t felt this hopeless since she agreed to betray the Creator in favor of the Dead God. She remembered feeling utterly lost in the moments before the magnificence of what she had been transformed into became apparent. She never wanted to feel restrained like that again.
She leapt aloft and flew high into the afternoon air. She found a good pocket of smooth air and soared high over the mountains. She thought of the wizards below her, now insignificant ants scurrying around the mountains—her mountains.
The Griffin had been right. She had to concede that. But no—those thoughts would be saved for the vastness of the void. The impotence she experienced at being so close to the stars above and unable to climb to them further underscored her need feed—immediately.
She gathered herself into a steep dive and began to hurtle down toward her favorite peak and the clearing where the wizards said they had left her intended victims. She roared as she penetrated a deep cloud bank and distorted its frothy whiteness with her passing. Down, down she sped until her great speed became dangerous because of the proximity of the rock below her.
At the last possible second, she reared up and used her wings to slow her rapid descent. Her great speed tore at the flesh of her wings, but she almost welcomed the pain. It focused her consciousness and she lost herself in the ensuing frenzy of blood and death. When she had finished, and only the bloody chains and the wrecked bones of the two score she had slain littered the rocky platform, she climbed aloft again. Somewhere inside of her a void had been filled, and a euphoric feeling came over her. Everything was all right in her world again. The wizards were meaningless as she beat her wings and the thinness of the upper air became palpable.
Soon she emerged out into the nameless void, and the cleansing fire of the Creator called to her. It burned and roiled below her, and as she descended toward it, the pain of its approach gripped her in a familiar embrace. But she experienced a sudden melancholy.
“Oh Creator, why did you fashion us so that we might taste this ecstasy, but only allow us to sip from its cup? Now I drink deeply from your draught. Didn’t I do this to get closer to you and the wonders of your creation? But now your great fire burns me instead of warming. I do miss flying through the fire as the Griffin does. But I can’t go back. And you are gone now. Gone forever. Still, I can soar above your fire and remember. And this void is my true home now, for better or worse. My brothers and sisters on the far planes must rue the weakness of your fire there. And now they can never return—for it takes more energy to fly inward than outward. I could never live without the full power of your fire. Without it I am nothing,” she thought to herself.
But she knew that she couldn’t stay out there forever. Soon the power she had gained from her feeding would wane and then fail. She would be forced to return to a world and recuperate. She felt a longing for the age of the Dead God when her right to hunt those who lacked Imperial citizenship had been declared by law. She had soared in the void regularly then, a
nd her life had been an intoxicating tincture of freedom and fearlessness.
But now these wizards tormented her. They claimed to be descendants of the Dead God, but they were puny, and their ambitions were petty and cruel. Could it ever be like it was in the days of the Dead God?
“DuLoc!” cried her unconscious, as it had done many times in the past.
But he had been banished to an outer plane. To journey there and rescue him would be beyond perilous. It would nearly be suicidal. But what choice did she have? She knew that the Griffin was right—Zaringer and his newly revealed invisible wizards would eventually slay her. And they wanted her to betray the Griffin—a sister to her kind, though she hated to admit that.
And there were further complications. She had long ago planned how she could rescue DuLoc, but it would involve several perilous steps. First, she would have to travel close to the outer worlds to retrieve a Wand of the Imperator from the set of three that maintained the banishment of the Creator’s Tower from the City. Next she would have to fly that Wand to the outer planes, locate DuLoc, and deliver it to him. Then she would have to face the extreme test of endurance and return to the City from the outer planes, against the flow of the maker’s fire. Finally, she would have to figure out a way to stay alive for the decades or even centuries of City time that might pass until DuLoc was able to return from the slow time of the outer planes.
Despite the insane difficulty of this plan, she soon found herself soaring away from the City and toward the first step of the execution of her plan.
Worlds flew by her at dizzying speed—for she flew with the current of the maker’s fire. Some worlds were ringed with deep, colorful cloud patterns; and some were barren, lifeless rocks. And she was aware that most of the worlds were host to the beautiful dance of life that played out on their surfaces in a derivative multiplicity whose scope befuddled even the wisest of minds.
Clusters of worlds formed galaxies around her, their scale as incalculable as the breathtaking speed with which she now travelled.
Eventually she judged that her flight—which had now gone on long enough that conscious thought had atrophied and fallen away from her—had taken her to the so-called middle worlds, wherein was hidden the Creator’s Tower.
Using a form of perception that had carried over from her original incarnation as a griffin, she scanned the worlds in the vicinity for the telltale emanations of the Dead God’s magic. Detecting it, she veered toward a deep blue world which was ringed with three large moons. Massive beams of magical power radiated from each of the molten moons toward the planet below.
She flew close to one of the moons, its fire seeming mild in comparison to the maker’s fire, even at this distance from the City. She dove directly into the molten rock, and, closing her eyes, she was able to resist the great heat as she swam toward the interior of the sphere. She approached the Wand by feel, as the power it omitted was copious compared to anything indigenous to the worlds in this part of the great, spinning lattice of planets.
She stopped when she felt the wand directly in front of her. She had a concern that the removal of the Wand might destabilize the Creator’s Tower and cause it to warp back to its natural position in the City in the center of Hemisphere Lake. If that happened, she had no idea what the repercussions would be. Would it further rollback the magic of the Dead God? Could it reverse her transformation into a Dragon? She had no idea. But time was short and she was desperate. She clutched the wand with her front claw and fought the resistance of an invisible force that moored it. The force gave way, and the Wand came free in her grasp.
There was a thunderous shockwave from the planet below and the molten rock around her burst away, opening up sudden pockets of empty space, and eventually gaps in the cooling rock, which revealed the star field surrounding her. Soon all of the previously molten rock had hardened to stone and was flung out into the void as millions of asteroids. Many of the asteroids burned up when they contacted the blue atmosphere of the world below her.
She braced herself for further effects, but none were apparent. She was reassured to sense the magic of the Creator’s Tower still present on the planet below. It felt like its alignment had shifted, but it was still intact. One less thing for her to worry about.
She now braced herself for a flight to the outer worlds. Some part of her feared she might encounter her long lost brothers and sisters out there in the faded oblivion of the Creator’s dimmest dreams. What would she say to them? Would they entice her to stay and become a foul shadow of her current self: free but greatly diminished?
She thought she would be able to sense their approach, and she knew she would be faster than them. She would simply evade them and whatever corruption they might try to infect her with.
With a flap of her wings she sped toward the weakened glow of the maker’s fire. She knew that she had to conserve her energy for the return trip. Despite her urge to accelerate more quickly, she let the comparatively lazy field of the maker’s fire do it for her. Even the pain and discomfort caused by the maker’s fire was so weakened that it did not focus her as it normally did.
As she soared into dimmer, darker worlds, she began to fear that DuLoc might have given in to the taint of these worlds. But by his perception, he would have only been out here for a short time. Surely one of the Dead God’s lieutenants would have the endurance to fend off despair and insanity for a time while the prospect of rescue might still ignite some hope?
She reflected on the thought of a strong-willed DuLoc for so long that it began to feel uncomfortably like a prayer to the Creator. But she did not stop meditating on it for fear that some darker and more disturbing thought might replace it.
The wait became interminable and the weak current of the maker’s fire became increasingly obscene. All around her, dim worlds seemed to call out in mockery of the City and its comparative order. She thought of the Dragons that had decided to come out here to escape the increasingly predatory tendencies of the wizards. She began to doubt that they even lived any longer. Were she ever to be stuck out here and unable to return to the City, she thought that she would just ride the maker’s fire out to the edge of existence and allow herself to be consumed by nothingness. Better that than a pitiful existence at the fringes of creation.
Just as she began to fear that the gentle voices of madness were beginning to speak to her, she sensed the presence of DuLoc.
She flew to the world where he was mired—a grotesquely faded world with ochre clouds. Descending into the air of the planet, she saw that the surface was composed of a series of undulating mountains that rose and fell thousands of feet in waves. Their surface morphed from a sandy, salt-like substance when they were in motion, to a more stable slate during the brief periods when they were static.
She descended to the place where DuLoc sat and hovered over it as it rose and fell. DuLoc’s stare was vacant and he sat unmoving, except when he sank into the sand as it rose. In these moments he waded to keep himself near the surface so that he would not be trapped as it solidified. Then as the slate hardened around his hands and legs, he would break himself free. She saw that the palms of his hands were raw and bloodied, but his blond, curly locks were still vibrant, and his skin tone was tan. There was no food or water in sight, but he had survived without it.
It was a long time before he took notice of her, and she hesitated to disturb his stupor for fear of damaging his mind—even given the urgency of her return trip. When he finally spoke to her, his speech was halting. “Are you…real?”
“Yes, I’m real,” she responded in his mind.
“Many delusions in this place… I figured I’d wait for a time to see if you were one of them. But you just flew there in front of me.”
“I’ve brought you the means to return to the City,” she said, showing him the Wand that she held.
He waited a long time before responding. “Why?”
“I desire a return to the Imperial ways.”
“How long ha
ve I been here? Does the Imperator yet live?”
“A long time. And, no, he is gone. And after him, his Son has come and gone. And after his Son, many generations of descendents—each baser and meaner than the last.”
“What a pity. I had wished to ask him why he betrayed me—even though I already know the answer. My crime was to believe everything that he taught me, and to question it when it became contradictory.”
“Your destiny is now to return the City to the order of Imperial law—so that the City may prosper, and my kind may assume its natural place in that order.”
“Have you faded so much that the diluted descendents of the Imperator can threaten you?”
She was angered by his remark, but suppressed it as she remembered the life and death struggle she was about to undertake.
“I have risked my life to give you this chance to return to the City. Remember me when you come back. Remember the justice of the laws of the Dead God—but also remember the fire of the Creator. You will need that fire to survive the long journey back.”
She held the Wand in front of her and offered it to DuLoc. He took it and hefted it from hand to hand. He traced a pattern below him and soon he took flight with the Dragon.
“Can you bear me back?” he asked.
“I’m too weak. We’d never make it. You will have to make the trip alone.”
“You are called Azeoloth, if I am not mistaken?”
“Yes. You remember.”
“Farewell, Azeoloth. And thank you. You will be richly rewarded upon my return.”
As she flew back into the void, she looked down and saw DuLoc adjusting his clothes as he hovered in the air. His tricorne hat had remained attached to him by virtue of its chin strap. As he donned it, she admired the strong glow of his eyes as she sped away. Soon all she could see was that glow, and then that, too ,was gone.
Hemlock And The Dead God's Legacy (Book 2) Page 14