Talon sliced at any strip of flesh within reach, biting deep into Mordred’s arms, trying desperately to open an artery in order to give us a moment to catch our breaths before he rose back to life again.
Mordred snarled back at him, and suddenly I saw sparks from Talon’s blows, because Mordred had turned on a flavor of Stone Skin – an old favorite of mine that I hadn’t used in quite some time – temporarily making his skin as hard as rock.
No longer a danger, he gripped Talon by the throat and shoved him off, sending my other best friend straight at me. Talon stared at me with wide eyes, and we both heard the bloom of power behind him as Mordred let loose another blast of his black cord of power.
Chapter 49
I saw a moment of calm clarity wash over Talon’s face as he made some silent decision.
He held up a fist, and his spear was suddenly in it, already twirling. In the chaos of the battle, I’d forgotten he could call it to him at will. He hadn’t been using claws and fangs on Mordred because he’d lost his spear. It just wouldn’t have done him much good in close combat, so he’d chosen his claws.
Talon slammed the butt of his spear into my shoulder, knocking me sideways like I had been clipped by a car. I fell, tumbling and rolling as Mordred’s cord of power ripped right through Talon’s chest, killing him instantly.
I groaned, flinging out a hand with one of my whips as Mordred stared victoriously at Talon, not having yet realized I was no longer in the line of fire. He’d thought he got a two-for-one special again.
My whip wrapped around his legs, and I yanked it so hard that he fell horizontal to head-butt the ground with a sickening, bursting watermelon sound.
It was a shame that he was too dead to feel me yanking the whip back with his feet still attached.
He was down Four Souls, leaving him with Six. Leaving me with Six to contend with, when it had taken all my allies to murder the first Four. Odds weren’t looking good for my chances.
“FOR THE CHANCERY!” I yelled tiredly. Then I scrambled to my feet awkwardly, fighting against the Devourer at my back as Mordred’s Fourth Soul was yanked out of the hole in his head. This Soul also clawed at the ground with metaphysical fingers, some unseen force slowly tugging it out of its host.
My Devourer began to jerk and tug harder than before, and I felt it suddenly break free of the sheath. I lashed out as it zipped towards the Soul like a magnet, my fingers managing to grasp the wood near the base, sending me running after it like some crazy person, refusing to let go for fear of the consequences of ingesting one of Mordred’s souls. Maybe it would bring the Devourer to life in some way, and become Mordred’s to wield, like an extension of himself.
Also, I was pretty sure letting my Devourer consume a Soul when our very environment seemed intent on gobbling down the Souls, wouldn’t be very polite. I didn’t need my spear picking a food fight with the Dueling Grounds, or whatever cosmic power fueled the place.
Because perhaps that might break some major rule, leaving the Dueling Grounds devoid of that unique ability to temporarily grant immortality – meaning that deaths here could become real if I didn’t let the Dueling Grounds get its fair share.
The price to play was to let it eat away.
Mordred had climbed to his feet to see me skipping along behind my Devourer like a human torpedo, or a wizard lawn dart.
Blessedly, the Fourth Soul finally disappeared beneath the surface of the ground – leaving me to stand against Mordred and his Six remaining Souls.
My Devourer abruptly halted with the Soul’s disappearance. And since I hadn’t slowed down, the butt of the spear clocked me in the chin, almost knocking me out cold as my fingers abruptly slid up the haft a foot or more.
I collapsed at Mordred’s feet, seeing stars. He glared down at me, angrier than I’d ever seen a man. He gripped my Devourer in one hand, yanking it from me, but inadvertently helping me to my feet. Too bad for him that I had sharpened my hand into a claw. As I was yanked to my feet, I buried my clawed fist into his gut.
Unfortunately, I missed any vital organs, merely causing him a great deal of discomfort and, dare I say, agony.
He shoved me away, gasping as my fist left his stomach, revealing a hole almost big enough to see through. He still held my Devourer, but he was wheezing from the injury I had given him.
I met his gaze steadily, shaking off the last of my starry vision. “I’ve taken four souls from you, on behalf of the Dragons, the Werewolves, the Vampires, and the Chancery…” I said, loud enough for everyone in the audience to hear. “But I think I’ll take the rest for myself. I am a King, after all… We can call it a tax.”
Mordred grunted, and then slowly began to straighten. I frowned, staring down at his stomach wound, and watched in horror as it began to repair itself. Of course. If given time, he could heal. The only reason the other attacks had worked was because they had been instant kills. But my attack… well, it hadn’t been fatal. Just a last-second, opportunistic reaction on my part.
He still had Six Souls left. Damn it.
Mordred hefted my spear, his wound now almost fully healed. “Let’s make things interesting, Temple.” Before I could respond, he spun, and hurled my Devourer as hard as he could.
If you’re wondering, that was about a few hundred yards.
And straight into the Dark Lands beyond the ring of torches.
Asterion bellowed in outrage, stomping into the ring, leaving a very furious-looking Midas on the sidelines, clenching his fists. I was pretty sure it wasn’t about lost revenue for taking the fight out of the ring where the spectators were. Pretty sure… Almost sure…
Asterion was panting, his shoulders quivering. “The fight stays in the ring. Nothing goes beyond the torches. Worse than death lives out there—”
Mordred grabbed Asterion by the nose-ring and slammed his snout down into his knee with a sickening crunch.
The crowd gasped in disbelief, but I didn’t have time to tattle on him for punching the referee, because Mordred had already grabbed me by the shirt, yanking me close. “I’ll count to ten, and then, ready or not, here I come,” he hissed.
Then he hurled me out into the air like he had with my Devourer, straight into the Dark Lands beyond, and probably just as far away as he had thrown my spear. I heard him cackling uproariously over the confused shouts of the crowd.
And I could also clearly hear each number Mordred cried out as I crossed the demarcation line of torches.
As I crossed that fiery line of safety, my ears abruptly popped, and the air felt thicker – greasier, somehow. The residents were eerily silent, as if waking from a nap. Or acknowledging something even more dangerous waking from a long slumber and giving that thing the first opportunity to welcome the new tourist – me.
After that polite pause, a cacophony erupted. Growls, shrieks, caws, roars, and strange clicking noises of some beings with many legs filled my ears as I watched a smudged, charcoal landscape rise up to meet me.
I wrapped myself up into a ball, encasing myself in Stone Skin, laying it on as thick as possible as I anticipated contact with the Dark Lands. Where Grimm had lived for… he hadn’t ever told me how long, actually. But I was betting it had been quite a while.
Mordred reached ten the moment before I hit the ground. I bounced and rolled off into a set of bushes I couldn’t quite see. I stopped, took a deep breath, and realized I couldn’t see because I’d had my eyes closed.
“READY OR NOT, HERE I COME!” Mordred’s voice boomed, sounding far off, as if heard from underwater.
I jumped to my feet, blinking rapidly. The darkness slowly began to materialize into vague silhouettes, and I let out a sigh of relief. I could see, kind of. Even a little was better than nothing. I needed to move, now. As quietly as I could, I began to jog, cautious to watch out for any low-hanging branches.
Or tentacles, if that was a thing here.
I heard an impact a short distance away and knew the hunt had begun.
Mord
red had landed.
I fingered the coin hanging from my necklace, considering. Last resort, I told myself.
Mordred hadn’t seemed remotely concerned about the necklace, choosing instead to throw my Devourer here into the Dark Lands. Was there a reason? Did he fear my Devourer more than me donning my Horseman’s Mask?
Judging by my trajectory, I couldn’t have landed too far away from my spear. I released the coin, focusing intently as I moved. Objects were beginning to shine with an almost dull, silvery hue. Like a very faint night vision, and I wondered if it was my own power, or if this place was giving me a slim fighting chance.
Because… if the place was as bad as Asterion made it sound, the inhabitants were pretty lonely. And wasting their only opportunity in a while to get in some good, old-fashioned hunting shouldn’t be squandered. Give the prey a fighting chance, let it at least see what was coming to rip off its face before gobbling it down alive.
Yeah, that sounded about right.
And it really didn’t matter why I was beginning to see better. I would use it or I would die. Because out here death was very real, and probably very dreadful. Mordred had evened the playing field. We could both lose our Souls, now.
I stared into the dull, chromatic world, and noticed a faint, red-flicker in the distance. Was that… my Devourer? I swept the land but saw no other source of light. It had to be.
I huddled low, ignoring Mordred’s laughter from behind me, and planned out my route.
Preferably, my route would avoid the three skulking silhouettes of oddly-shaped, bipedal, rhino ostriches bobble-heading in the rocky area about fifty feet away. I still wore my Stone Skin and hoped it would be enough to keep me alive a bit longer. This had the cost of making me louder when I moved, but for now, I would keep it.
Because it might also serve as camouflage if I had to lay down in a pile of boulders, huddled in a badass fetal position.
The area was silent, all the creatures on high alert that the dinner bell had been rung, and it was no longer time to fight each other. It was time to sneak up on fresh prey and get some new flavor of din-dins. And to do that before their neighbors, they needed to hunt and stalk, not roar and charge.
I scooped up a handful of gravel, then another, and hurled one to the left of the creatures. The sound echoed loudly, and the creatures spun, still remaining silent. Then I threw the other, and they promptly darted after it.
Mordred also raced past me, feet pounding as he sought out the source of the sound, which had probably resembled a big, blind idiot scrambling up a gravely hill.
I remembered the time I had cow-tipped Asterion, how I had used a sensory muffling spell to mute the sound of my movements. I did that now, careful to keep an eye out for Mordred. I didn’t want him sensing me using magic and spinning around to notice he had just run past his prey.
But as I heard the bobblehead rhino-ostriches suddenly erupt in ear-piercing squawks, I grinned. Mordred had other things to worry about for now, but I knew with his Six remaining Souls, it wouldn’t hold him back for long.
I thought about using my Fae magic and instantly felt the dull throb of a headache blooming. I changed course, thinking of my usual wizard’s magic, and it faded away. I let out a relieved breath. That would have been the end, having a flashback here. But what other minor wizard’s spell could I use to give me an advantage?
And I recalled the first time I had met Callie Penrose. We’d been breaking into a house and she’d casually shown me a variant of illusion that wasn’t Fae magic. A way to make you appear more like a chromatic smear, like a charcoal smudge.
Which… was exactly like this place. I grunted silently, shaking my head. Again, with the old memories.
They say you never forget your first time. Maybe they were onto something. Whoever they were.
I cast the spell over me, listening to the crashing sounds of Mordred’s confrontation with the locals. Either they were chasing him, or he was chasing them, but it meant he was too busy to notice another quick spell. That was three spells I was trying to maintain simultaneously, and I knew it would drain me very fast. I needed to hurry.
I turned to my right and silently sprinted towards my Devourer flashing in the distance. It was my only shot. Get the Devourer.
Get back to the Dueling Grounds.
Or things would end here, in this cold, forgotten place.
The Dark Lands.
Chapter 50
After ten minutes of no attacks, I was twitching at every sound. I’d been careful, going out of my way anytime I ran across the local predators. I was content to determine they were all horrifyingly deadly, and that I didn’t need to count their scales or check their eye-colors to confirm my hypothesis had been right.
So, every time I saw something with a pulse, I slowly retraced my footsteps, and found a new path onward. Confronting anything would only attract Mordred. Time seemed to move quickly here. Or more slowly, I couldn’t quite tell. Two minutes into my walk, and even though I was covered in Stone Skin, I began to sweat. It was that nasty, muggy, summer heat I was so familiar with in Missouri – feeling like I had strolled into a steam room by mistake, my lungs instantly heavier, the air thicker, pregnant with water, making it harder to breathe.
Then again, random blasts of frigid, subarctic air would often strike out of nowhere as I made my slow, measured walk through the stilted trees and boulders of the Dark Lands. Those cold fronts were so potent they even covered the ground in thick hoarfrost, which made sneaking about difficult. I paid very close attention to my steps, constantly moving, but not running. Tempting fate by crossing directly over a slight incline was now potentially fatal. If one of those frigid blasts struck while I was halfway up, I might find myself suddenly on a slip-and-slide.
This forced me to take the long way around hills, boulders, and rock walls. The land was still smudged charcoal, but other than the locals, it was pretty uneventful. And since I avoided the locals at all costs, it was almost entirely uneventful.
But back to the time thing.
The first minute I’d walked in this place, no distance at all seemed to have changed between me and the crisp red flame marking my Devourer. Then the next two minutes, I was suddenly halfway there. I didn’t spend too much time breaking down these anomalies – analyzing them would only get me killed faster if something found me while I was recording the Scientific Method.
It was Caveman time.
See pretty shiny thing, acquire pretty shiny thing. Use heavy club on anything in my way.
I had finally made my way up to a clearing that I was almost certain held my Devourer, judging by the reddish hue to the surrounding boulders.
Instead of rushing in blindly, I wedged myself into a crevice between a large, split boulder, to debate my next steps. The last hundred feet or so of my walk had been tricky. I hadn’t run into anything, but I’d heard a whole lot. Dozens of predators lurking around me, waiting like spiders near a light fixture outside at dusk. Just waiting for a stupid fly to… go after the shiny thing.
I grunted, rethinking my caveman mentality.
So, I knew this area was being watched, and that the moment I grabbed the Devourer – the only crisp light in this whole place – I may as well be sounding an alarm, letting every monster present know exactly where I was.
I hadn’t heard from Mordred for some time now – ever since he’d learned the error in calling out my name one too many times, and subsequently been attacked by a clicking, boulder-sized monstrosity. The thing had chased him a long way before I heard an unearthly death cry.
It hadn’t sounded human, so I was betting Mordred had won.
I was thankful I’d kept up my spells, but they were taxing me. I wasn’t sure if it was simple exhaustion after the fight in the Dueling Grounds, or if it was something about the place itself draining my magic.
Point was, I couldn’t keep it up for much longer. And I still needed to find my way back before someone killed me to death. I needed to be s
neaky.
I’d momentarily considered making a Gateway or Shadow Walking, but had quickly dismissed it. One, I didn’t know the potential repercussions for opening a Gateway here – if it would be a signal fire for every creature within a mile.
Secondly, I had no idea what I would appear next to. What if I Shadow Walked into a den of monsters?
And magic here was a greasy thing. I could feel a thin layer of grime over each spell, like it was smudging my soul. Making me more like the landscape. I had a very bad feeling that using that level of magic here would do something permanent to me. Something I wouldn’t like. As I thought about it, I’d seen something like the smudged scenery once before.
In Hell. That probably meant something. But Anubis could have scooped us both up if this was his realm. So maybe something about the two places was just similar, yet also different.
They were both big supporters of death and scary things.
I heard something run past, sounding like a galloping horse, but it was going the wrong direction, so I let out a breath. I needed to hurry.
I poked my head out of the rock and finally glanced into the area where I hoped Devourer was. And I almost fell over.
A giant skeleton sat before me, a spear the size of a bus piercing his ribcage where his heart would have been. It had to have been forty feet tall when standing. But the bones were black, and thankfully brittle, implying it had died long ago.
I swept the rest of the area, checking for traps or any signs of life. Nothing but the dead giant and a couple tall, thin tree trunks, all bathed in the smoky red glow of my Devourer’s gem.
I ducked back into my crevice, and briefly imagined Mordred doing the same from the opposite side of the clearing. I almost let out a faint laugh as I visualized us each looking into the clearing when the other was ducking. Instead, I sucked in a breath and stepped out, slowly stalking into the clearing, my eyes alert. The canopy of the two trees slowly materialized into a stork-like body, and a ten-foot-long beak. I almost let out a scream, realizing they weren’t tree trunks, but legs supporting a body that was about five feet over my head.
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