by Dante King
“How in the world did it come to exist? How did it come to be here, in the Subterranean Realms, of all places?” one of Jazmyn’s coterie members asked aloud.
“A mystery,” said Jazmyn.
“I’ve always found all things mysterious to be the most beautiful,” Ashrin said distractedly, watching the dragon consume ratfolk body after ratfolk body. “I’ve always been of the opinion that the day you lose your ability to stand and gaze at something in awe, and think to yourself that you really know very little about this world, then that’s the day you die.”
Jazmyn nodded. I noticed that she had adopted a fighter’s stance; feet wide, weight balanced.
“That’s right, Ash,” she said, eyes locked on the dragon. “You might still be breathing. You might still be walking about. But, when you lose the ability to let wonder claim you every now and again, then you’re dead in the mind, if not the body.”
“Despite the fact that it’s g-g-gorily feasting on those rat fiends,” Rupert said, “it is quite a sight. Striking, one might say.”
“It’s pretty,” I conceded.
“It looks pretty fucking pissed to me,” Bjorn growled edgily.
“What should we do?” Renji whispered.
From the far right of the group, Diggens Azee struck a match with his thumbnail.
Instantly, the bronze dragon’s car-sized head snapped up to stare at the twenty of us standing stock-still across the body-filled pond.
“Ah, shit,” I heard the gnoll mutter, as it began to back away, “the bugger’s about to throw a tanty.”
A volcanic rumbling began emanating from the wild dragon’s throat. Golden eyes narrowed, and nostrils the size of trashcan lids flared.
“What should we do?” Renji asked again, her voice perhaps a half octave higher than it had been before.
The dragon roared a challenge. A roar that would have sent the biggest, baddest man-eating lion in Africa scampering under the nearest available cover like a scared kitten.
“Kill it!” Jazmyn cried.
“Stay out of the way all of you!” Ashrin said, shoving me hard in the chest so that I stumbled back a couple of steps.
My squad, more out of habitual practice than conscious thought, gathered about me and bundled me backward, away from the action. Tamsin and Renji pulled their squads back too, though they themselves hung at the front of our retreating pack. I guessed that they were thinking of diving in at a moment’s notice.
Holy hells, but getting man-handled away from that fight was one of the hardest things that I had ever had to put up with. Every instinct in my warrior’s frame and in my fighter’s mind was telling me to throw off the hands that cajoled me backward and run to help Ashrin and Jazmyn.
Regardless of how I felt though, I was savvy enough to know that if I went charging in there and got flambeed, that would be it for Wayne.
Mission over.
He would perish.
I swallowed the bitter words that I wanted to throw at that dragon and, I’ll admit, at Bjorn, Gabby, and Rupert, who were doing everything they could to usher me out of killing range.
The wild dragon was roaring and bellowing its rage at us, ripping up the floor of the cavern with claws as long as glaives. It snorted chrysanthemums of fire out into the air and swung its head from side to side. It was a fearsome display, clearly intended to scare us into backing away from the mound of dead flesh with which we had filled the large subterranean space.
Unfortunately, it was also thrashing its tail and gnashing its dripping fangs on the side of the cavern from which our escape tunnel led.
The two dragonmancers, my two bodyguards, stepped out to meet the ravening, fuming creature.
Ashrin, Bearer of Alzad.
Jazmyn, Bearer of Meoko.
The two women looked at one another and exchanged nods.
Then, in twin shimmering bursts of opalescent light, the two members of the Empress’ Twelve transformed and took the form of their dragons.
It was the first time that I had ever seen the Titan Slot utilized with battle in mind. I’d seen Claire the Seer use the slot on one occasion, months ago, to tell me that Saya and Elenari were about to give birth. But to see the Titan Slot used in battle? It was something that would stick with me for the rest of my days. The sheer prideful energy that filled the chamber was like nothing I had ever experienced. I could practically see the three creature’s wills flashing in the air.
Jazmyn transmogrified into a bright blue-silver dragon, with a horn shaped like a crescent moon on its head. Her scales alternated from shining platinum silver tones to cerulean blue and back again. Her wings were folded down her body and were the color of deep tropical seas.
Ashrin, somewhat predictably, took the form of a neon green dragon, which looked more like an electric eel on legs than the conventional reptilian-looking dragon. It was as different to Elenari’s Emerald Dragon, Gharmon, as Noctis was from Garth, sharing only the similar bright emerald hue. Like a poison arrow frog, Ashrin’s coloring screamed of a creature imbued with a deadly poison. Just looking at her made me feel a little queasy. Almost as if my insides were going to tie themselves in knots and dissolve into a bubbling puddle of acid just from being within twenty yards of her.
The wild dragon looked about as surprised as I imagined it was possible for a dragon to look, confronted suddenly by two of its kin. It was unlikely though, that it was just going to let a group of twenty-one humanoids sneak on by, just because we were backed by a couple of dragons. If anything, the unexpected appearance of Ash and Jaz in dragon form only served to aggravate it even more.
If I had been taught one thing in the time I had shared minds with Noctis, it was that dragons are old, wise, proud, and cruel creatures, not prone to taking kindly to fools or challenges. Dragons respected only one thing: strength.
The wild dragon screeched out a final warning and rushed at Jaz and Ash.
Jaz went left and Ash went right, moving their dragon forms with just as much ease and just as much spatial awareness as they did their own bodies. They were just as massive as the dragon they were facing, but the two of them moved so fluidly you could have been mistaken for thinking that they were already flying.
However, the wild dragon was wily. It had survived down here, in the Subterranean Realms for who knew how long, growing older and more cunning. It had managed to keep its existence a complete secret until now, even while the Empire’s sappers and scouts flushed the things that had called the roots of Galipolas Mountain home out of their holes.
The wild dragon struck out with raking claws at Ash and, simultaneously, swept its tail round to meet Jaz.
I liked to think that I had seen some pretty epic fights in my time—both on Earth in the MMA octagon and in battle. Nothing though, even came close on the scale of impressiveness, to when those three dragons came together.
The impact of their bodies and their magics colliding was like a thunderclap. It sent the members of all the dragonmancer coteries staggering back, but Tamsin, Renji, and I kept our feet.
The wild dragon struck Jazmyn in the flank with its tail and sent her flopping gracelessly into the pile of ratfolk bodies that filled the pond. She smashed down on top of them and skidded a little way, leaving smears of blood and viscera and torn limbs behind her.
The wild dragon flung a clawed foot at Ashrin. She caught it in her mouth, fastened deadly sharp teeth on the scaled forearm and crunched down on it, eliciting a shriek of pain from the unbound dragon.
With an animal snarl of her own, Tamsin stepped forward and flung her spear at the wild dragon’s exposed side.
Her spear was thrown with an accuracy honed by hundreds and hundreds of hours of practice, with a strength that only fellow dragonmancers could match. It flashed through the air like a streak of burning silver and struck the dragon square under the second rib.
The spear pinwheeled away, deflected by the iron scales of the dragon’s side like a toothpick.
Tamsin use
d her magic to retract the spear back into her grip. She looked at the weapon in her hand. The tip was notched.
The wild dragon roared in pain as Ashrin continued to hang onto its forearm like a pitbull. It thrashed its tail and scored a deep rent in the side of the cavern with the spikes that stuck out from the tip of it.
Jazmyn came boosting back into the fight then, plowing into the wild dragon from the side. She managed to get her snout under her adversary’s belly and lever it up onto its two right legs. With Ashrin pulling at its left forearm, the wild dragon was inexorably thrown onto its back.
It thrashed like a landed fish, trying desperately to regain its feet, but Ash held it firm. Jaz took a stinging blow from the tail of the dragon on her azure snout, but she ducked her head and moved in, attempting to pin the overturned dragon.
The wild dragon belched fire, splashing flame across the roof of the cavern and washed us bystanders in eyelash-melting heat.
I was toying with the idea of firing a Shadow Sphere at the wild dragon, but the violent way that it was squirming and the speed at which the battle was being fought was enough to make me think that I might accidentally hit one of my compatriots by mistake. Not to mention that I might destroy some important part of the cavern walls and crush us all.
All I could do, all any of us could do, was watch the madness unfold in front of us.
The wild dragon lashed out with its right foreleg, and Ash pulled her head back to avoid having her throat slashed out. Jazmyn headbutted the wild dragon in the side and received a hard kick to the head in return. It looked, despite being outnumbered by the dragonmancer titans, that the wild dragon might be able to break free.
Another burst of orange fire caused us spectators to throw themselves aside. The rock and soil where we had just been standing bubbled and cracked, parts of it turning to glass from the heat of the wild dragon’s potent flame.
With a roar of fury and a great heave, the wild dragon tore its foreleg free of Ash’s crushing mouth. Dragon scales scattered in all directions; big as dinner plates, harder than tungsten.
With a gargantuan effort the wild righted itself, used its head to smash Ashrin into the side of the cavern and then launched itself with a beat of its wings into the air. It hung in mid-air for one long, glorious moment. Its teeth were bared, its claws extended, as it dived at Jaz, looking to crush her to the ground and rend her apart.
Despite the anxiety I felt for my fellow dragonmancer, I knew that I was witnessing the single most insane and memorable thing I had ever seen in my entire life.
Then, Jaz’s head whipped up, her snaking dragon neck whiplashing her snout up and around as she slipped to one side.
The curving, crescent moon horn sparkled as it plunged into the wild dragon’s vitals. Jaz ripped upward and tore an awful, deep wound in the unbound dragon’s belly.
The wild beast crashed to earth, landing on its side where Jaz had been only a moment before. Not taking any chances, Ashrin launched herself from the wall where she had momentarily snagged, pointed her snout forward, and let loose with a gout of bright green noxious flame right into the fatal open wound that Jazmyn had ripped into their foe’s guts.
The wild dragon bellowed in agony, while Ashrin continued to blast its insides with her gassy, vaporous dragon fire. Without its scales to protect it, the wild dragon was roasted from the inside out. Roasted and poisoned at the same time.
As I watched, equally captivated and horrified at what I was seeing, the wild dragon shone a beautiful translucent bronze and then started to collapse in on itself. Its eyes melted. Its teeth shattered.
Within a matter of moments, it had gone supernova, its body burning so brightly that the coterie members had to shield their eyes and turn away. Less than twenty seconds later, all that remained of the noble and regal wild dragon was a charred, fatty smear upon the ground.
It was a forlorn sight. The few chunks of charcoaled bones, the scattering of bronze scales lying around like a giant’s loose change.
“Do not mourn the fallen,” Noctis’ deep, wizened voice said, echoing in my head. “The fate of that dragon is how all dragons should die. It is a test that we face each time we come together in battle. The one and only test that matters. The ultimate test. Win or die. It is the way of dragonkind.”
This mollified me somewhat.
“Ah!” Diggens exclaimed suddenly, as Ashrin and Jazmyn shrank and morphed and changed back into their normal forms. “Would that be that wisp you were yapping on about yesterday, Dragonmancer Noctis?”
I had spotted the thing at the same time that Diggens had let out his cry.
“That’s it,” I said, my eyes narrowing.
The will-o’-the-wisp hovered over to where the few remains of the wild dragon lay, still smoldering. At the same time, Rupert gave a great gasp of wonder and pushed his way through the gathered coterie members, leaving Ashrin’s squad members smiling bemusedly behind him.
“What is it?” I asked, my eyes flicking from the face of my medic to the wisp still hovering over the smoking dragon ruins.
Rupert moved forward in the dazed fashion of a somnambulist; his eyes glued to the greasy smear that had once been a full-grown dragon.
I followed him and, as I came up behind him, I saw what had caught his attention. Behind a three-foot-long blackened log that might have been a rib, there was a glittering pile of dust.
“What the hell is that?” I asked. The pile of dust, now that it had caught my eye, held it. There was something about it, the glittering pile of fine powder, that called to me. “And how did it survive the incineration of the rest of the beast?”
Rupert did not answer me. He staggered forward and dropped to his knees.
“Rupert…” I said. “This isn’t a crystal, but I think it’s important. I think whatever this is… I’ve got a feeling that maybe… Could it be the very thing that might bring back my potency?”
Without so much as offering any sort of exegesis or answer, Rupert Dyer pulled a stiletto from his boot, scraped a line of the powder toward him, and lowered his face to it.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, partner!” Bjorn shouted. “What the hell are you doing?”
Gabby stepped forward and jabbed pointedly at his own head, indicating, in as economical a way as I had ever seen, that Rupert must be crazy to go shoving some unknown powder from the inside of a smoking dragon corpse into his nose.
Rupert stared at Bjorn and Gabby with the same dreamy expression on his face, but said nothing. Then, before anyone else could say a word, he dropped his face to the greasy black floor and hoovered the line of powder up his nostril. It was as if the tweaked out little man had no choice in the matter.
"No!” Jazmyn yelled. “You stupid dumbass, it could be poisonous!"
Rupert turned and straightened up. His eyes had taken on this crazy glassy look, a wondrous haze filming them over. He got to his feet and spread his hands, a beatific smile lighting up his face. One eyelid twitched. In that fucking Robin Hood hat of his, he looked more than a little deranged.
“Boy oh boy,” Rupert crowed, “that stuff has some kick to it!”
Our entire company burst out laughing at the sight of the little, gangly medic. It did not take a genius to see why.
Rupert was sporting an absolutely enormous erection. Pitching the sort of tent that you might more reasonably expect to see on the great plains of North America during the 1700s.
"I may only be a j-j-journeyman apothecary,” Rupert said over the gales of laughter, “but I know legendary dragondust when I see it. This isn't poisonous. It’s nature’s finest and most heady aphrodisiac!”
Bjorn charged forward, completely forgetting himself in his eagerness to get a nostrilful of the dragondust, but Ashrin clamped an immovable hand on his massive bicep and stopped him in his tracks. She gave him a thin smile and shook her head.
“Let’s get this stuff gathered up,” she said. “We have one item already; one facet of the mission is complete. I can scarcely
believe our luck. Not only have we found it, but we now know where to get it from and how to harvest it in the future.”
“But we still need the crystals,” Jazmyn said, speaking loud enough to be heard by everyone in the company. “Stay bright-eyed! Keep your head on a swivel! This is not over yet!”
I nodded. Jaz was right. We had what I needed to produce more dragons, but we were yet to find a crystal home for Wayne.
I set my jaw. We had been damned lucky to find this dragondust, but we still had a job to do. Finding one crystal was the key goal, but I’d need more if I was going to produce any more dragonlings.
And I sure as shit meant to do that.
The Empire was counting on me.
Chapter 13
After the battle with the wild dragon, Empire soldiers came marching from the Dodge City-like base at the main mine entrance of Galipolas Mountain. They also came from further down in the tunnel system. The sounds of fighting had drawn their attention.
Within half an hour of having recovered the dragondust, we were surrounded by a couple of companies of troopers, each and every one of them looking mildly shell-shocked by the state of the carnage that we had wrought in the chamber.
I doubted it was the sight of the bodies, per se, that shocked them—after all, the Mystocean Empire was a war-like realm surrounded by other war-like realms. What brought many of the seasoned fighting women and men up short, I thought, was the fact that such a slaughter had been enacted by a group of just twenty-one.
As much as it galled me, Jazmyn and Ashrin had ordered us to remain here and not press on. It was a justified order, and not one that I would have disobeyed given their arguments. The two dragonmancers had made the logical argument that, taxing as the fight with the ratfolk and the wild dragon had been, we should gather our wits and fill our stomachs.
“We should take this opportunity to eat and move on only when we’re recovered from the fray,” Ashrin said as we stoked up our campfires and put some of Old Sleazy’s travel rations over the flames to heat.