by Dante King
“Say something to me!” I yelled at Rami-Xayon. Not hearing my own voice was a little disconcerting at first, as well as hearing the monotonous roar of wind in my ears, despite not being able to feel even the slightest ripple of a breeze on my body.
Rami-Xayon’s lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear a thing. I repeated my request, bellowing at full volume. From the movement of her lips, I could tell she was yelling, but I could still hear nothing but the howl of the wind in my ears. Grinning, I pulled the helm off, only to have my eardrums split by Rami-Xayon’s full-volume shriek.
“I said I’m not deaf, Vance, stop yelling at me!” she screamed.
“Okay, okay, the test is over and the results are in,” I said, chuckling. “These helms work perfectly. The harpy shrieks won’t sound like anything more than annoying flies buzzing around our heads.”
Once everyone was outfitted with a Death-Wind helm and a Death enchanted bow or crossbow, we split up into small groups, with three people to a boat. Percy and his crew wished us luck as they lowered the boats down onto the choppy sea. The swirling cloud of harpies was closer now, and Castle Island was in view. I saw that plenty of harpies were perched on the rocks of Castle Island, and I realized that whether we wanted to or not, we would have had to fight the harpies to even get onto the island anyway.
With me on my boat were Yumo-Rezu and Anna-Lucielle. Because of the whole sibling-goddess rivalry thing, Yumo-Rezu hadn’t wanted to be anywhere near Rami-Xayon. I still had to try and get to the bottom of this weird feud, but that would have to wait. As for Anna-Lucielle, she was the least competent member of the party in terms of combat, and she said she would only feel safe alongside me. I’d given her a Death-enchanted bow, and I knew the slim, jaw-droppingly beautiful Charm Goddess knew how to shoot, since she’d been an excellent shot with a bow back in her tomboy days, but I didn’t expect to her bring down any harpies.
I was armed with my Death longbow, and had taken bets with both Yumo-Rezu and Rami-Xayon—who were excellent shots due to their enjarta training—on who would be able to bring down the most harpies.
As we rowed our respective boats in the direction of Castle Island, we fanned out our formation. The more spread out we were, the more enticing we’d be as targets for the harpies, and the more they’d have to spread out when they inevitably attacked us.
It didn’t take long for the harpies to notice our approach. They were perhaps a mile away when the first of them saw us, but even at that distance their terrible shrieks resounded across the water, and felt like sharp rapiers being stabbed through our ears into our brains.
“It’s even worse than I imagined!” Anna-Lucielle gasped. “And they’re still so far away!”
“One roar from a dragon would silence this whole flock of shrieking vermin,” Yumo-Rezu said scornfully. “These ugly beasts think they own the skies now, with the dragons’ demise, but the soul of dragons still burns its eternal fire in my heart, and I’m about to show these sky-rats that dragons are still the undisputed lords of the heavens!”
“Helmets on,” I said grimly, “it’s all visual communication from this point on.”
We all slipped our Death-Wind helms on, and immediately the distant shrieks, the lapping of the ocean waves at the sides of the boat, and all other sounds vanished, replaced by the deep, unending roar of a hurricane wind. Scores of harpies began wheeling away from the black mass of the flock and heading straight for us, but while their fanged mouths were wide open as they belted out their shrieks at us, I could hear nothing but the wind in my ears. I picked up a green flag and waved it, signaling to everyone in the other boats, and Percy and his pirates on deck, that the battle was starting.
Everyone got their helms on, nocked arrows to bowstrings and loaded crossbows, and lined up their targets as the sky grew black with charging harpies. I got a harpy in the sights of my bow and pulled the string back, but before I could release the arrow, a streak of black, barely visible, zipped through the sky and punched a barrel sized hole through the harpy’s chest, from over half a mile away.
As the dead harpy dropped into the ocean with a huge splash, I turned to look behind me at the ship. I saw Percy, at the controls of a ballista, punching a triumphant fist into the air; he’d made the first kill of the battle.
Enraged to see one of their own killed, the harpies shrieked with fury and beat their huge wings, organizing themselves into aerial formations; it seemed that they were more intelligent and organized than perhaps we’d given them credit for.
More ballista spears streaked through the air as Percy’s pirates started firing at the harpies, and more of them dropped out of the sky, plummeting into the ocean with massive holes blasted through their torsos. The beasts were not intimidated at all, though; if anything, the sight of our ballistae dropping them like flies enraged them and made them charge in with even greater fury.
Eager to possess a large force of undead harpies, I started shooting out threads of black energy, resurrecting the harpies as my own undead minions as they fell from the sky. I soon started resurrecting them with such precision and rapidity that they were flying again as undead creatures before they even hit the water.
A group of over two dozen screaming harpies made a beeline for our boat, arranging themselves into an arrowhead formation as they flew. As they approached, they flew higher and higher, staying frustratingly out of bowshot reach. I couldn’t hear what Yumo-Rezu was saying, but from the scowl on her face, it was plain to see that she was pissed that she wasn’t able to shoot down any harpies.
Then, when they were directly overhead, right above our boat, I realized what they were hoping to do. They circled us in their arrowhead formation, so high above the boat that they were visible only as black specks in the sky. The lead harpy tucked her wings in and dived, dropping from the heavens like a boulder. The other harpies did the same thing, plummeting down toward us like meteors flung to earth from the stars.
They picked up speed at an incredible rate, and I knew that if they hit our boat they would smash it to splinters, and pulverize us into a mash of blood and guts—and impact would be in a few short seconds. Yumo-Rezu and Anna-Lucielle began loosing arrows at the diving harpies, but even the enjarta was nowhere near rapid enough to take out enough of the beasts to prevent us being flattened. I had to act fast to save us, so I loosed my own arrow in a precise shot that skewered the lead harpy right through her skull, and then, the instant I turned her plummeting corpse into one of my undead creatures, I flung my spirit into it.
Controlling the undead harpy with the expert finesse of a master puppeteer, I swooped in a broad arc, smashing the other diving harpies side-on and lowing through their formation and sending a number of them into a chaotic mid-air tumble. Realizing that one of their number had turned against them, the remaining half pulled up out of their dive to begin attacking the undead traitor. The others continued hurtling toward us, however, their course unwavering.
Yumo-Rezu picked two out of the sky, which I hastily turned into undead creatures, and to my surprise Anna-Lucielle plugged a cool, well-timed arrow right into another harpy’s heart, while I shot down another three in quick succession. It was too late though, for the harpies’ dive was so fast that they looked like a blur of blue; gigantic crossbow bolts fired directly at us from the sky.
“Abandon ship!” I roared, forgetting that neither of the goddesses could hear my voice over the roar of the Death-Wind helms.
The order was unnecessary, though; both of them had seen that a catastrophic impact was imminent, and they leaped out of the boat into the ocean when I did, just in time to avoid being turned into splatters of tenderized meat and splintered bone by the immense momentum of the harpies.
Now, floundering in the water, we were sitting ducks for the harpies, whose dive had taken them a few yards down underwater after plowing through our boat. I wasn’t about to let them take us, though, and gripping the bow in my left hand, I drew my Dragon Sword with my right. The moment one
of the harpies’ heads broke the surface of the waves, I lopped it off. I swung around and decapitated another harpy as it tried to surface, and then waited for the others to come up so I could hack their heads off too.
My sixth sense buzzed, however, telling me that something was up behind me, and I spun around just in time to see one of the surfacing harpies pluck Anna-Lucielle out of the water. The snarling beast beat her huge wings and raced upward, with Anna-Lucielle gripped firmly in her claws. Neither I nor Yumo-Rezu could shoot the harpy down, because we couldn’t use our bows while treading water.
I’d heard that harpies often used a method similar to eagles when it came to killing larger prey—they would drop them from a great height onto rocks. The harpy holding Anna-Lucielle was flying higher and higher, and heading straight for the rock-strewn Castle Island, and a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach told me that this was exactly what the harpy intended to do with Anna-Lucielle.
Nobody could take a shot at the harpy without risking hitting Anna-Lucielle either, so I knew it was up to me to save her, and to do this I would have to get up into the air to battle the beast. I called down Talon, who’d been fighting harpies in the skies, and she swooped down and plucked me out of the water. I sent another undead harpy to pick up Yumo-Rezu too.
Now, gripped in Talon’s claws, while Yumo-Rezu was likewise gripped by her armored shoulders by an undead harpy, the two of us soared upward in pursuit of Anna-Lucielle, getting hundreds of feet above the ocean in mere seconds. As we flew through the sky, wheeling harpies screamed and dived at us, like eagles fighting in mid-flight, but we dropped them from the skies with well-placed arrows, and I used my growing force of undead harpies to fight them off as they dived at us with claws outstretched.
Controlling Talon directly, I felt as if I was the one flying rather than her. I’d had plenty of practice with flight over the long time in which Talon had been one of my creatures, and ducking, rising, diving, and swooping came as naturally to me as jumping, ducking, vaulting, and rolling on a land-based obstacle course.
Even so, racing through the huge flock of harpies in pursuit of Anna-Lucielle was unlike any battle I’d ever fought. Even in the most chaotic battles on land, you only had opponents coming at you from the sides—all sides, from 360 degrees sometimes, but from the sides nonetheless. Now, in this aerial battle, enemies were not only diving and charging me from all sides, they were coming from above and below too.
Yumo-Rezu and me were both expert archers, and we could loose multiple arrows at multiple targets in a matter of seconds, but even so, the rate at which we were being attacked by the harpies was overwhelming. I shot left, then right, then would have to aim directly above my head the next second. Before that arrow even slammed into its target, I would be taking hasty aim at a shrieking harpy coming at me from directly below.
I had to think fast, and keep the attacking harpies at bay with not only my arrows, but also other harpies; the instant I killed one I would turn it, sending it wheeling through the air to smash into one of the harpies on our tail and wrangle mid-air with its enemy in mortal combat. In addition to the harpies coming at us from all angles, arrows, crossbow bolts and ballista spears from below were streaking through the air in a reverse rain from below. My comrades were trying to keep their missiles from coming near us, but our erratic flight path and the speed at which we were tearing through the sky meant that often the friendly fire from below would zip dangerously close past us.
Finally, we broke through the flock, and now it was just me and Yumo-Rezu pursuing the harpy that had Anna-Lucielle in its clutches. The ocean was racing by at a tremendous speed far below us, and the wind resistance was battering my body like a hurricane wind as I pushed Talon to her full flying speed.
The harpy was climbing higher, and had almost reached Castle Island. The unyielding gray rocks seemed to cry out with silent hunger for a victim, and with the lead the harpy had on us, it looked like they were going to get one.
The harpy circled the island once, easily two miles up in the air, and then, positioned directly over the most jagged rocks, released Anna-Lucielle from its claws. She dropped like a stone, and I knew that I had to dive at once to save her. Just as I’d seen the harpies do when they’d destroyed our boat, I tucked Talon’s wings in and crouched her body into a dive.
The acceleration in this position was monstrous. In the blink of an eye, I was hurtling toward the rocks of Castle Island like a boulder flung from a trebuchet. The air rushing at me was pressing with such force against me that my helm and shoulder pauldrons started heating up. Breathing was impossible; I simply had to hold my breath.
Anna-Lucielle was tumbling through the air, screaming—but I couldn’t hear those cries over the roar of the wind in my helm, both from the Wind enchantment and the rush of air from the tremendous speed at which I was traveling.
“Come on, faster, faster!” I growled into the ceaseless roar, angling downward to try to increase my speed.
Anna-Lucielle was a few hundred yards from the rocks and falling fast, while I was coming in at a steep angle. I didn’t know if I was going to make it before she hit the rocks, but I did know that I would never forgive myself if I allowed her to die like this—and die she certainly would when she hit them. I could bring her back if she was stabbed through the heart or something, but if her body literally exploded like a dropped egg then not even I could help her cheat that kind of gruesome death.
I contracted all of the muscles in both my body and Talon’s, trying to tuck us both in more compactly, doing my utmost to gather even more speed. It was a matter of seconds now. She was tumbling closer to her doom—fifty yards, forty, thirty, twenty, ten, nine, eight…
We collided a yard above the rough gray rocks of Castle Island, and I snatched her in mid-air from her fall of death. The moment she was in my arms, I threw out Talon’s wings, trying to brake in the air and pull up from the near-suicidal dive, but the speed we were traveling at was far too great. We carried on racing through the air at a trajectory that was slightly more downward than flat, and my knees and elbows clipped the surface of a couple rocks before we cleared the island, raced for a hundred or so yards across the ocean in the space of a mere second, skimming the waves, before plunging into the water in a heavy splash that knocked the wind out of me and made me feel as if I’d been dropkicked by a Jotunn.
For a few chaotic seconds, I tumbled around, dazed and disoriented, under the water. I pulled a boost of Death magic into my body to enhance my strength and vitality, then I swam up to the surface, sucking in a greedy gulp of air when I finally broke through the water.
I looked around for Anna-Lucielle, and saw her bobbing in the waves a few yards away, looking out of breath and somewhat bedraggled, but otherwise okay. Her helmet had come off, and I figured we were far away enough from the harpies that I could take mine off too. I pulled it off and swam over to her.
“Vance,” she gasped, throwing her arms around me and covering me with kisses, “I was inches from death, literally! I’ve never been so terrified in my whole life! You saved me! I don’t know how you did it, but you saved me!”
“It was one hell of a close shave,” I said, “but you’re okay. Wait, you are okay, right? No broken bones or anything?”
“I feel like a couple cave trolls just used my body as a practice dummy,” she said, “but I’m sure nothing is broken.”
I lifted up my arm, and showed her where my elbow had skimmed over the rock. A huge chunk of the steel armor had been sheared off.
“Good thing that wasn’t your flesh,” she said, staring with horror at the twisted steel.
“Like I said, it was really close. But since you’re okay, I need to get back to the battle.”
To get a sense of what was going on, I hurled my spirit into one of the many undead harpies I’d created who were in the thick of the fighting. I was pleasantly surprised to find that, aside from a few fleeing stragglers, the battle was clearly won and most of the harp
y flock was dead, or undead.
I turned the remaining dead harpies into my own creatures, and then got Talon to carry me and Anna-Lucielle back to the ship, where I raised the gray flag of victory. Everyone took their helms off and cheered, and rowed their boats back to the warship.
Nobody had taken any serious injuries, and while two of the boats had been destroyed by the harpies’ attacks, we didn’t exactly need them anymore, now that we were within sight of Prand.
“Excellent work everyone!” I roared once my whole party was gathered on deck. “Now, on to Prand, where we smash the Blood God once and for all, demolish the Blood Pyramid and rip Elandriel’s filthy guts out! Let’s do this!”
Chapter Twelve
“I suppose there’s no need to go through the Black Passage now that we’ve got an army of undead harpies, Lord Vance,” Rollar said, staring at the distant cliffs beyond Castle Island. Here, the continent of Prand looked as if it had been snapped in half by some planet-sized titan, with the missing half cast carelessly into the depths of the ocean. The jagged cliffs, jutting up almost a mile from the crashing ocean waves, presented a formidable barrier—one that we would now be able to overcome with ease thanks to my new undead flying division.
“That was another reason I wanted to tackle the harpies before the other two challenges. Don’t get me wrong, part of me was very excited about navigating an underwater cave labyrinth with only one way through it—that was a challenge my old crypt-diving self would have absolutely relished—but flight is definitely a more efficient way to get my forces back onto Prandish soil.”
I looked up at my flying army of harpies. I had them flying in formation in a slow circle, spinning lazily around the ship. It was a magnificent sight, and every few minutes they would block out the sun over the ship completely, throwing us into deep shadow.
“What about the dragon bones?” Yumo-Rezu asked, looking somewhat anxious. Over the course of the voyage, she’d become very attached to the dragon skeleton, almost as if it was a living creature, and seemed to be very worried about being separated from the bones.
