Dragon Core

by Sain Artwell

  And yet, it was over within the next.

  While Kastalos’ vestiges recharged their strength, Alron chopped off his arms, and Fei his wings. Before Kastalos could recover, Fei’s stolen starsteel blade pierced his guts. To his merit, Kastalos did not accept his fate idly. While the rest of his artifacts deactivated, and the man’s face suddenly drained of all color, a silvery gem-like vestige on one of his many necklaces intensified in its glow.

  An expanding sphere of flames erupted from its core, evaporating the chain-links of his necklaces, Kastalos’ Armor, and his flesh as if ripping through paper. Alron did not recognize the vestige, but realized the danger.

  Fei lunged over his shoulder and clasped the silver flames in her claw. Her flames encased the sphere in an urn of Solid Fire. Silver fire blasted into the sky in a geyser a mile high, incinerating every airborne wyrmkin within a half-mile radius, and illuminating miles of the battlefield with the branching tree-like eruption of death. Known as the Flames of Hazar, these had once been called the Explosive Flames by the warrior sultan who’d ruled the Ascendancy’s predecessor state so long ago, when Dustwing had only recently fallen into silent slumber betwixt Grovemother and the Hungering One.

  Now, the heir of that ancient dynasty collapsed on his knees. Kastalos’ artifacts sloughed off his shoulders. His armor and golden scales were charred. His guts bled, blue blood trickling down the deadly starsteel edge.

  A look of shock faded from his eyes, replaced by a solemn recognition. The man knew his fate, and knew it was sealed.

  “Do it,” he said and closed his eyes.

  Alron spun Apocalypse, idly nullifying several rounds of artillery aimed at their position. His eyes never left Fei. Alron frowned. “I must apologize, Fei.”

  “No…” she hissed, shaking her head, staring murder at Kastalos.

  “This is not as you imagined…” Alron released a portion of Apocalyspe’s stored energy to destroy a colossal crablike dunebeast leading the main army’s charge. However, it was a regenerator and required three more swings to slay. “…we are pressed for time.”

  “I know! I know, I know we are…” Fei groaned, anger flashing in her voice. “Argh! This is not…” She continued to curse.

  “What?” Kastalos stared at them, dumbfounded. He was ignored. Another awakened master who’d charged at them was ganged up on by ten of Fei’s soulfire creations.

  Alron placed a hand on Fei’s shoulder, offering a compassionate frown. “How long do you need?”

  She blinked. “How long do I— But Alron, the army is around us—”

  “Fret not. I know this means much to you, I feel the echo of your wrath. A quick death won’t be enough for what Kastalos has done to you. You would regret granting it, even if it were done so for the sake of our greater ambitions. All I dare promise is a day in my current state. Will you take it?”

  Fei chewed her lip. He knew the turmoil in her mind, the tug-of-war between reason and desire. Truthfully, giving her a day would be trouble, but Alron was prepared to stretch his limits to satisfy Fei’s revenge.

  In the end, her flaming body stepped off of Alron and knelt by Kastalos’ side.

  “Go. The Dreamfire Parade will keep me safe. When you’re ready, come and wake me up.” She became flames and poured into Kastalos’ ears, eyes, nostrils, and mouth.

  The defeated Sovereign’s eyes rolled back as he was engulfed by Fei. Thin strings of solid fire and soulfire burrowed through his flesh, beginning to unravel his body as slowly as possible, and drawing out unmitigated screams of agony. A wave of bitter relief and satisfaction surged through their bond, as Fei set to realizing the daydream she’d nursed for a hundred years.

  Have fun.

  OhyesyesyesSCREAM!

  Kastalos did.

  Alron left Fei to her pleasures. He stepped forward, blocking a salvo of bullets fired from troops rappelling onto the frontline from fortresses built atop massive flying mantadrakes. Surviving Awakened Masters, those who’d not been slain by the recent eruptions of dragonfire, were quickly disengaging Fei’s ghosts and forming a united front with the greater army.

  A bronze horned woman clad in the armor of a general shouted and pointed at Alron. Before the oracles could assault his mind, or the artillery could release their bullets, Alron charged. His mind tuned into the flow of slaughter.

  Time lost meaning, replaced by movement, never halting movement. Alron’s dragon-core growled as he continued drawing vis to his flames and heartstrings, until all he could draw from his source was the slow trickle of his natural recovery. How many were left of his foes? Half-blinded by the constant assault of oracles and surrounded by walls of enemies, Alron could not know. He did not care for the plans and plots of his foes. He narrowed his focus into the infinite moment of the present, and became one with thought and action. Alron stopped using his wings, wrapping them around his arms to reinforce his muscles. He’d reached the limits of his endurance. Logic whispered his demise, for he was one wounded man against two armies. Broken bones, torn muscles, and strained ligaments filled his bleeding skin. All that kept his body together was his dragonized armor of scales. Hah! As if that could stop him. When bullets and dragonfire tore his armor, Alron ripped cloaks and flags off his foes and wrapped it on himself, patching it up. Alron had long since learned to ignore such flimsy things as limits and logic. They had not stopped him a hundred years ago, and they would not stop him now.

  His life dangled on the edge of instincts honed by two lifetimes of war. His muscles broken, Alron moved by sheer force of will and vestiges alone. Apocalypse danced in his hands, as one with him as Mlevanosk had been. Wielding it became his whole world, a delicate balancing act limited solely by Alron’s ability to draw power from the sword. Absorb a blow. Release one tenth and destroy a regiment. Absorb a volley. Absorb to stop the sword from moving, and use it as an anchor. Release two tenths power and break a dragonfire barrier. The blade was an impervious shield, absorbing physical impacts and movement into its core, only to release that energy in devastating blows, which left craters on the landscape and turned wyrmkin into mince and mist.

  Alron barely registered the destruction behind him. His mind was on the brush of bones breaking on the immovable blade of Apocalypse, and the garden of textures of flesh and armor—each different from the last in most minute ways. He learned to differentiate the chorus of sounds with which various dragonfires impacted the flat of his indestructible weapon. He found new scents of burning dunes of black salt and blood drenched metals. He became intimate with the cyclical undulations of the immeasurable energies whirling within the spin-core. These and the hundred other sensations became constants, a background.

  In that trance of war, his sense of self grew muddled.

  Within his armor was the world of broken bones and bruised organs, a drying well of vis, a strained mind, a dragon-core forged of two heartstrings. Fei’s emotions, her hectic thoughts, her darkest impulses flooded to Alron through their bond. They were not his own emotions, but felt as if they were. She was a part of him. So was the bloodsoaked handle of his blade. So was its edge. Apocalypse was Alron. So were the hearts sliced apart by it as well.

  The battlefield itself was Alron. He was not a hopeless little mortal trudging through the world. He was…

  A beast may die to a brood of parasitic worms or a body inflamed by disease. These are both conflicts up close, yet a harmony from afar. Thus too is any conflict, no matter how seemingly trivial or heavy the reasons driving it, part of a greater harmony. In this state of mind, where borders of self and others blurred, he was the world. The world was hi—

  Wrong.

  The world would be made one with him. An urge swelled within his dragon-core, an alien will stirring to awaken, spilling past his flesh and dragonized armor. Vis that had never been part of Alron’s flesh resonated with a spark of something barely out of reach, something intangible, a fleeting spark, a force to which vis submitted. Alron’s dragonsoul spread to the land be
neath his feet, to the air upon his skin, to the flesh he ripped apart, to the outer self, the greater self, which would become his body as a dragongod.

  A vision flooded Alron’s consciousness. A vision of a great vessel—an immortal body with eight wings the size of seas, which could carry him across the vastness of stars, limbs strong enough to rip planets apart, and a body wrought in scarlet scales the size of mountains, and—

  No! His mind reeled to retain sovereignty of itself.

  Yes, rumbled the dragonsoul, its voice an all-drowning resonance. I am the world. Enemies. Lovers. All will be I.

  Ironically, its voice could be heard only here, on the border of self, where all things became one. Only here, on the doorstep of enlightenment, could a dragon-core speak. It was not a consciousness in the same manner a wyrmkin or an awakened beast was. It was a deeper entity, an alternative to traditional thought, an architecture of minds, a greater stage of existence utterly alien in its scope.

  Had Alron not subjected himself to Sorcerer King’s ritual those years ago, he would’ve been ripped apart by the dragonsoul’s voice and ascended on the spot. Had he not spent a century meditating on Carrion Scourge’s memory fragments and the internal tug-of-war of a dragon-god’s mind, he would never have separated dragonsoul’s thoughts from his own. But he had. He saw the infinitesimal seam between two wills in his head, and refused to be tricked. Alron focused deeply on the sole thing powerful enough to drown out the serenity of draconic enlightenment.

  Fei. Her emotions were ablaze, wading through layers of pleasure and resentment as she flayed apart her sworn nemesis from the inside. She was a tangled mass of delusions and insanity and ravenous bloodlust. She was his beacon, his tether to reality.

  With a roar—not entirely unrelated to the physical act of severing heads with Apocalypse’s blade—Alron wrenched himself free from the deepest pits of enlightenment. He thought of Fei’s luscious ass, the silken texture of her thighs, and the supple curve of her breasts. The mound of carnal desires grounded himself. Only barely was he able to hold on to the individual known as Alron.

  Later. Enlightenment once glimpsed, is inevitable. Dragonsoul withdrew back into Alron’s dragon-core, its influence waning. No doubt about it, had he traipsed into this state without Fei, he’d have ascended as a dragongod.

  And yet, as clouds shifted to reveal the turning of moons and the greater cosmos beyond, while Alron laid waste to Kastalos’ army, he couldn’t help but wonder. What difference does it make? The world was already his enemy. If he ascended, his quest for vengeance would be over in an instant. What honor was there in avoiding it? What logic was there in restricting oneself and risking death and defeat? None. Alron could not out argue the lingering doubt left behind by his dragonsoul, but he insisted there had to be a reason, even if he could not grasp the thought firmly enough to address it with words.

  The last warrior fell under the last lingering cloud, and the last cannon broke from the last strike of battle. In the shimmering of the dawn, though he was worn and weary, Alron sat upon a mountain of giant mantadrake corpses, and his body, bloodied and weary, leaned against Apocalypse.

  He’d ended a hundred thousand lives and then some, defeated an army. A feat which should have filled him with a near celestial sense of humility and accomplishment left Alron too weary to feel a thing.

  “Thank you.” Fei hiked up to him, a smile on her lips. In her claws she grasped bloody vestiges torn from Kastalos’ dragon-core. She was satisfied, deeply so.

  Alron returned a faint smile, speaking softly, “I regret you had to manage without a sea gnome.”

  Fei snorted, settling to sit beside him. “I managed. I kept him alive through the night, felt he saw it all. He suffered.”

  “Enough?” Alron asked.

  Fei tilted her head and looked away in thought. She shrugged, satisfied. “Enough for now.”

  “He is dead.”

  “That he is.”

  Alron raised a brow. “Enough for now?”

  “Eh, if we’re lucky, maybe we’ll get Oqhizt to revive him.”

  Alron suppressed a chuckle to be kind to his broken ribs.

  “What happened to no jokes?”

  “The common soldiers deserve respect. Kastalos, Rasdrev, and their ilk… I’ll laugh to them all I like.”

  “Oh good. That’s good, because I was planning on practising Dreamfire Parade a little more by letting my ghosts play kick-the-Kastalos’-vestige with these, and that wouldn’t be nearly as fun if you were frowning over my shoulder.”

  “Hm.” Alron was too tired and wounded to reply.

  Fei seemed to still have vis to spare. Two wyrmkin ghosts of solid fire departed from her back, picked up the vestiges she’d taken, and began juggling them with their feet.

  As dusk grew closer, Alron’s gaze drew to the Blackmetal City. Despite Rasdrev’s death and the annihilation of the majority of its forces, shielded beneath a metal dome, the City persisted.

  In the distance, a group of thin cylindrical volcanoes spewed forth black clouds of salt dust and ash. Iron rain began to fall down a dozen miles left of the City. Metal droplets and the City’s dome glimmered prettily under the rising sun. Wind was the only sound, and it blew mightily across the silent battlefield, tearing at the torn flags and cloaks, howling in Alron’s ears a serene serenade.

  “What next?” Fei asked, having grown bored of desecrating her captor’s corpse, for now.

  “Sit, rest, and find Sofi. Mlevanosk trusted a part of her legacy to her. We will help her do what she needs to do, and then figure out how to revive Oqhizt.”

  Chapter 22 - Deeper Desires

  Rapping of iron rain on the great metal dome above echoed within the pipes, composing a warbling cacophony akin to cries of distant ghosts. Steady white light trapped within bulky ornamental lanterns reflected off of the mirrors, and polished suits of sleek, femininely shaped blackmetal armor sat against the walls of a circular dressing room. Alron sat upon the red leather of a daybed, relaxing.

  Slippery hands traced the stiff contours of his shoulders, burrowing into those all too hardened canyons of his muscled back. Through his skin trickled a wet warmth of vis-imbued fluid. Broken bones and muscles fused together, eliciting euphoric specks of pain as blood and vis of another being merged with Alron’s.

  “Lower,” said Alron.

  The hands ran down his middle back, their touch at once a sensual breeze and a sadistic squeeze. Alron grunted as the fleshbender fused the fractures in his spine.

  “Such an incredible body, Master Alron. I for one wouldn’t mind serving as your personal fleshbender,” cooed the fleshbender—a tall woman with a petite figure of pale gray complexion brightened by tattoos of the crustacean beasts found in the geyser fogs of Abyssmaw’s skull. Her name was Radi-or-Radiyana-something. Beyond her skills in fleshbending and oral pleasuring, she was not a noteworthy member of Mlevanosk’s little cult. Alron ignored the girl’s seductive murmurings, for another woman entered the room and seized his attention.

  “What do you think?” Fei spread open the curtain of a long walk-in-closet, sauntering onto the centre dais. The question, of course, referred to her outfit.

  Dark reflective fabric with a teal shine clutched her curves skin-tight from neck to a spot so high it only just concealed the gap of her thighs. Tasteful regions of gold filigree invited the gaze to pause at her taut stomach and pert breasts, giving an excuse to linger. It was aesthetically pleasing, though nothing spectacular, and Alron told her that.

  “Ah?” Fei cocked a brow, a hint of a grin betraying her faux surprise. “Why, I forgot this one bit, didn’t I…” She removed a brooch from her choker—a turquoise sapphire within which lay unmoving a tiny sculpture of hammer and claw—and spun around. Alron’s appreciation for the seamstress’ vision grew in bounds.

  Fei’s hair was tied up into a bun, revealing the high collar which encircled her neck. All but bare on the backside, the dress was bound to her by straps. Her should
ers, back, and rear protruded through the tight bands. Her modesty, if indeed she was left with any, was maintained by narrow undergarments matching the fabric of the dress. The very design suggested lascivious intentions; a readiness to be taken.

  “What do you think?” she asked again, slower, her voice lower.

  Alron rested his greedy eyes on his woman’s body. “Yet another excellent choice to wear to the Blood Courts.”

  Humming smugly, Fei relished the compliment, arching her back just so. Alron could hear the soft silken swish when she ran her hands down the fabric. “It fits well, doesn’t it? The way it wraps me… it’s as if I’m snugly sheathed. Even down there, the cut is rather tight.”

  Alron half hid his amused huff behind a palm, fucking Fei with his hungry gaze. She noted his erection (hard to miss such a thing when he was nude) and smirked. She tugged on the front of her hem with a claw, dragging a stroke across the nether valley across which the fabric dug the tightest. A damp spot welled within that valley.

  “What do you think, girl?” she asked the fleshbender.

  Radiyana smiled, her caress stiffening for a flicker. “Most ravishing, Mistress Fei.” Fei exchanged a glance with Alron. He could tell she was still feeling playful. There was a briefest pause, which Radiyana took as a prompt to continue. “You have such insatiable vigor. Is it always like this? If you don’t mind me asking.”

  “Oh, little sweetling, not even close,” said Fei, earning a smile from Alron. “If not for other aspirations, we’d be joined at the hip.”

  “Without such indulgences, we’d veer into insanity or worse,” said Alron, his eyes on Fei as she touched herself.