by Aaron Crash
One of the statues was familiar, the Elf Queen they’d seen before. The other was a Homo Draconis, tall and proud, with a nobility to him. Unlike the elf, who had been chiseled out of granite, the dragon man had been fashioned out of a polished black stone. Both statues had their hands out in front of them, as if they were gripping swords.
Tessa used a bit of her waning energy to cast a Divination spell. Hey, I have to be careful not to run out of air, and if my Animus gets low you might need to give me refill. You up for that?
I am, he sent back. I think the statues want to hold Aria’s daggers.
Heck yes! It’s a good thing we knew the torch could be split into two knife hilts or we’d be scratching our butts here. Tessa motioned for Aria.
The Indian woman knew what she had to do. She swam around to the statue that was more dragon than man and set one of daggers into his hands. The knife erupted with flames. The writhing orange fire boiled the water upward. Steven swam over and felt the warm water cut through the chill and enjoyed it for a minute. Yet he kept his eyes peeled.
Aria set the second dagger into the fist of the Elf Queen. Again, the knife flashed fire into existence. Bubbles rose in columns. Steven was reminded of video footage he’d seen of underwater volcanoes. It had that same vicious reaction.
Fire leapt from the top of one of the monoliths, then another, until all twelve columns had flames bubbling over them. It was beautiful, ghostly, to see that much light and bubbles and fire at the bottom of the lake.
Steven instinctively knew what was coming.
Flames rippled to life at the top of each monolith. The lake erupted in bubbles rising above them.
The ground underneath trembled as a circle of something rose from the mud. No, it was a pocket of air, rising to the surface. When the line of air rose to catch her, Tessa fell to the mud of the lake and sank up to her knees. Aria followed her. Both glanced around, eyes wide.
The pocket of air rose to the level of the flaming daggers. The flames turned into crackling knives of electricity, spitting and crackling, lighting everything up like it was daylight. The water level rose until there was a perfect dome of oxygen surrounding the monoliths. The flames at the top of the monoliths winked off.
Zoey swam low and came out of the wall of water to walk down on the ground, but she hadn’t taken two steps before her huge body sank to her belly in the muck.
Steven turned into his partial form and swam down, between two monoliths. It was an odd feeling, reaching through the water and feeling air. He paused. This didn’t feel right.
Sabina didn’t stop. She left the water and wiggled through the dome, until she too was up to her green-scaled knees in the mud. The crackling of the lightning daggers made them all squint.
Steven pushed his way out of the water to drop down on a monolith to cling there.
“Wow, talk about magic, this is crazy,” Tessa gasped. “And I bet you my boots are gone. If I try and pull them out of this mud, that’ll be the end of them.”
The Elf Queen’s statue moved. Her arms came loose from her body as the dagger spun electricity around her. Her stone eyes moved in her face and her lips parted. It was a ten-foot-tall rock woman, down to her gown, which shifted on her body like it had been carved to move.
The Homo Draconis came alive next. He flicked his polished black stone tail. He roared, showing a mouthful of fangs. He too waved his dagger, sending blinding light flashing around the place. The two didn’t sink into the mud but floated over it.
“Who has come? Who comes seeking Icharaam’s gift?” The voice came from the Elf Queen while the Homo Draconis leapt to a monolith. He dug his claws into the stone, and Steven saw he was a mirror image of that statue. It was odd, like looking into a mirror for a minute.
Tessa answered the Elf Queen. “Don’t start with me! Yo, Galadriel, you didn’t think too much of me in Bali, and that was just a prologue to this action.”
Aria waved her hands. “I am the thirteenth Dragonknight. I wield the Animus daggers. I have come to find a weapon to fight the Zothoric!”
“Foolishness,” the Elf Queen hissed. “For the shadows of teeth and talon cannot be fought. They can only be endured. If you are a knight, then prove yourself!”
The obsidian Draconis leapt at Aria.
Tessa cast a shield spell, but it flickered away. Sabina cast her Impetim fireworks, but her green sparks also fizzled.
Aria tried to turn into her True Form to fight the huge statue, but she couldn’t shift. She stayed stuck in her Homo Draconis state. If she couldn’t move, she couldn’t fight. Zoey provided the solution. The bear flung herself onto her side. Aria slithered up onto the bear’s body. She dodged a vicious slash of the electric knives and then brought her tail to smash into the statue’s face. She put a crack in the perfect obsidian face.
Instead of falling to the mud, he flew to another monolith, gripping it. Aria did the same, across from him. When he flung himself up at her, she somersaulted over him and landed on his back. With one claw dug into his shoulder, she ripped the dagger from his hand, then rammed it into his back and through his chest.
She flipped off him to land on another monolith. As for the stone Draconis, he smacked into the mud, stiffening, half buried, and returned to being an inanimate object.
The Elf Queen drifted into the center of the circle. “You have some skill, and I see that you have been marked by the Dragonknights. Thirteen, you are worthy. But is the lost son here?”
“I’m here!” Steven shouted. “I don’t know if I’m worthy, but I’m not going to live in fear.”
Tessa raised an uncertain hand. “Merlin’s daughter is here.”
The Elf Queen reached out an empty hand. Aria’s daggers were wrenched out of her grip. They flew to the statue who held both knives, bright energy crackling out of their hilts. The light reminded Steven of ChromaticFury.
That light flickered off the monoliths, which changed right before his eyes. They went from simple stone to golden-framed mirrors that reflected the light of the daggers.
Steven leapt off his mirror to land on the half-submerged statue Aria had stabbed through the heart.
Each mirror showed him an impossible sight. At first Steven couldn’t quite understand what he was seeing. Each of the twelve mirrors held a woman he knew. Aria, Sabina, and Zoey had all vanished from the underwater temple. Only Tessa remained, trapped in the mud.
Zoey stood in a monolith, arms wrapped her around herself, pale and shaking.
Aria was on her left, in another mirror, in her partial form, growling and showing her fangs. Sabina stood serenely in another monolith, motionless.
And it wasn’t just the women he’d swum down with.
Uchiko crouched low, becoming as small as possible. Where she was, there were no shadows, no place for her to hide.
Chazzie and Pru were next to each other, frowning and trying to figure out their new prison. Mouse wasn’t going to go gently into that dark night. No, she bashed into the mirror, over and over, with the Slayer Blade. She was clearly scared out of her mind.
The Five Widows had also been pulled into the mirror monoliths: Skylar, Teegan, Pretty, Michaela, and Abby Free. There had been twelve Dragonknights, and he had twelve wives.
Somehow, this Elf Queen had pulled his people out of reality and trapped them in the mirror.
Tessa pulled her Peacekeepers. “Okay, bitch, you’re dicking with our magic and transformation abilities, but I’m thinking you’re not bulletproof. You’re going to let our friends out, or I’m going to put a bunch of bullets in your stony butt.”
Chapter Eighteen
THE MURKY LAKE WATER swirled outside the dome of air.
The Elf Queen turned her eyes on Tessa, trapped in the mud. “Careful, Slayer. I know who you’ve been, I know who you are, and I know who you could be.”
The statue floated above them, the lightning knives crackling around her stone fists. Around them, the women in the mirrors watched.
Steven reached out with his mind using AnimusChain. Tessa’s raging core flashed pink and then the darkest of reds. She hadn’t needed to be afraid of using all her energy. She had plenty.
The Elf Queen’s statue glowed with magical energy from Enchantrix magic, and yet there was a shimmering aura of Animus around the statue. The Elf Queen was in the lake temple in some very real way. This wasn’t a recording. This was more like a phone call.
“Please,” Steven said. “We won’t use Icharaam’s gift for our own selfish desires. And I won’t destroy this world in the war against the Zothoric. Please, trust us.” Steven didn’t call it the Holy Grail. Instead he used the Elf Queen’s term. He had the idea that no one else on Earth knew that the Grail was actually a gift.
And it was interesting that the Grail was actually a final treasure from the dragon who’d been murdered by his brothers. No wonder dragons had been searching for it for millennia. It was probably tens of thousands of years old, a weapon Icharaam wanted to use against the Zothoric before his brothers betrayed him.
Energy, unimaginable cosmic energy, buzzed around the Elf Queen as she lowered her gaze on him. “Merlin said something similar, but when he came here, he came here alone. I told him to bring back his friends, and that was when his Guinevere was murdered. And he, in turn, became a murderer.”
Tessa gasped. “What does that mean? What are you talking about? Who killed his wife?”
The Elf Queen ignored the interruption. “I cannot trust your blood, Slayer, but the lost son has promise. You both have a choice. Choose one of your friends to die, and I will show you the way to Icharaam’s gift.”
“Me!” Tessa cried out. She turned to look at Steven. Fear painted her face.
Steven wasn’t going to let that happen. “No deal. We won’t sacrifice anyone. In the end, I’d rather fight the Zothoric without Icharaam’s gift than lose a single one of my wives.”
“Wives?” The Elf Queen scoffed. “I see no rings, Dragonlord, and I sense none of the Alpherian magic connecting you to them. They are not wives to you.”
“Yeah, but I love them anyway,” he insisted.
“Screw this! Incanto!” Tessa dispelled the magic that had stopped them from shifting and casting spells. Freed, she called out, “Divinatio!” Fountains of pink exploded from her eyes.
“What are you doing?” the Elf Queen demanded. “You cannot hope to defeat me!”
The statue of the Homo Draconis rose from the mud, upending Steven. He leapt back, worked his wings to keep him afloat, and then turned into a full dragon. He came down behind the monoliths, splaying his toes to keep from sinking. He had a lot of surface area to his feet. He fanned his huge wings back. Half of him was in the dome of air while the other half was in the water.
The stone statue, dripping lake mud, leapt for him. Steven bathed him in dragon fire, melting the stone, until an arm dropped away and his face had become a mask of cooling lava, the features gone.
“Defensio!” Steven threw a shield spell into the statue, cracking him further and driving him back.
Tessa’s eyes continued to glow. She wasn’t firing her guns like she’d promised. She was delving deep into her Divination spell.
The Elf Queen lowered a knife and sent a spear of electricity at Steven. It struck his body, the awful shock taking away all conscious thought. She aimed the second dagger and blasted him again. Being half submerged was not helping his situation. Water conducted electricity.
“Defensio!” he thundered again and blocked the lightning with his shield. He jumped over the monoliths, careful not to step on Tessa. He pulled the Elf Queen down with one hand while smacking away the Animus daggers. They went spinning away to the lake bottom. The energy winked out.
The mirrors glowed, giving them light, and yet the dome seemed to be shrinking.
The Elf Queen had become a hunk of stone again, not animated, and yet he couldn’t help but feel the real presence behind the statue.
“Steven,” Tessa said in a weepy voice. “Cast Divination with me. I see him. I see Merlin, and he’s crying.”
“Divinatio!” His consciousness left the underwater temple as he joined Tessa in her vision.
The pair stood next to each other, in the rain of another land, green and wide, where hills fell to a wave-swept ocean.
A small stone house lay in ruins, the rocks still smoldering. The stink of the smoke was stifling. A man wept over a woman who started unblinking up at a sky closed in by heavy gray clouds. The woman was dead. Steven recognized Merlin’s black beard, his gray robes, the Slayer Blade at his side. His staff lay next to him.
They were seeing Merlin holding his dead Guinevere. Huge footprints lay in the heath, dragon claw marks. The place had been ravaged by Dragonsouls. Merlin raised his face. A scratch cut down his face, and his robes were blackened and torn. Steven pieced it together. He’d arrived at his humble little home after Guinevere had been killed. He’d caught the murderers. He’d fought them. But they had escaped his fury.
Tessa took his hand. “Why does Merlin have the Slayer Blade? Who killed his wife?”
For a second, Steven thought Merlin might look up at them, but like in his other visions, Steven was simply being shown the past.
The grieving Magician reached into the ground and took out a fistful of dirt. He put it on his dead wife’s face and whispered, “Incanto,” a simple enough spell.
The dirt turned into a white mask, a perfect replica of the fallen woman’s face.
Tessa choked and nearly fell.
Merlin set it on his face and whispered another spell. His clothes mended themselves and turned black. “When I slay them, when I slay all of the Dragonsouls, your face is the last thing they will ever see.”
Merlin was the Dragon Slayer.
Tessa threw herself into Steven’s arms. She sobbed into his chest.
The rain continued to pour down on the pair. A gentle hand touched Steven’s shoulder. He turned, and a tall, willowy woman with flawless skin stood there. The tips of her pointed ears rose from the golden tangles of her hair. Like them, the rain didn’t touch her. A blue gown fell from her shoulders. Everything about her was beautiful, ethereal, perfect, so much so, she didn’t seem human.
“No more theatrics,” the Elf Queen said. “I am Quinnestri, and I see that you are worthy and that your love is strong. You really would forsake Icharaam’s gift if only to save your friends. Thirteen of them. And a thousand years ago, there were thirteen. Merlin was the thirteenth.”
“Where are you, Quinnestri?” Steven asked. “You’re alive, I know you are, but you’re not really here, and your Animus wasn’t in the statue.”
Tessa stood awkwardly off to the side, tear tracks on her face, her eyes red and puffy. She wasn’t making Tolkien jokes. That was worrisome.
Quinnestri dropped her hands. The rain stopped. The sun broke through. The stone house, Merlin, Guinevere’s body, all were gone. Below them, a Coca-Cola truck rumbled past on an asphalt road. Modern-day houses were visible below them. “I will not tell you where I am, Steven Drokharis, for you are a true Drokharis. Did you ever stop to consider why your lineage is so powerful?”
“Just lucky I guess?” Steven grinned.
Quinnestri frowned. “It’s not luck. It’s in your body. It’s in your very soul.”
Tessa found a smile and a joke. “Quinny here is at a 7-Eleven in Rockford, Illinois. She doesn’t want to tell us because she’s afraid we’ll bogart all the blueberry Slurpee.”
The look the Elf Queen had on her face was priceless. It was so Aria, not understanding a word. “No, that is not true,” the elf said carefully. Then she shook off the interruption. “If you fail in your fight against the shadows of teeth and talon, I do not want them finding me and my world. I have kept my people safe through countless generations, and I will not risk them. I swore an oath to Icharaam to guard his treasures, and I have kept that oath, until now.” She smiled at Tessa. “You struggled against me. Your power is very strong, and
your love for your man and his Escort is admirable. I hope that love will not destroy you as it did your ancestor.”
Steven was still having a hard time wrapping his head around what he had seen.
Merlin, driven insane with the loss of his wife, had become the Dragon Slayer. He’d murdered, he’d tortured, and he’d caused such horror. Why would the Dragonknights turn on Merlin? Was it Arthur? Steven wasn’t sure, but that didn’t feel right. They’d been such good friends.
Tessa soldiered on. “You said no more theatrics. Will you tell us where the Holy Grail is? Uh, that’s what we call Icharaam’s gift. It kind of got Christianified.”
Quinnestri began to fade. “The answer will be in three very special Eyes, forged by Icharaam himself. Three places on the water, free from wind, sleeping in stone. When all three open, they will show you the location of Icharaam’s tomb. There you will find what you seek.”
She vanished. An instant later, Steven and Tessa were back at the bottom of the lake, staring into each other’s eyes. Both were painted by the light of the mirrors. The mud was gone, replaced by a polished marble. The Elf Queen and Icharaam were back in their places, but now a table with an eye sat between them. They weren’t reaching out as if to hold torches, but were holding hands over the Ever-Seeing Eye.
Steven noticed that, yes, but what he wanted to keep his attention on was Tessa. She had never seemed more beautiful than when she raised her weepy eyes to meet his. “Steven, I get it now. This Slayer part of me, it’s part bloodlust, yeah, but it’s also fear. If I lost you, if you died, I would do what Merlin did. I would kill everything and everyone. It’s why I’m having trouble...” She lowered her face.
He cupped her chin and lifted her face. “It’s why you’re having trouble with the marriage thing? I get it. Believe me, if it weren’t for the Wayne twins pushing for this, we wouldn’t be talking about marriage.”