by Dante King
Yumo-Rezu shot her sister a glare but didn’t say anything.
“It’s not going to be a cold wind,” I said, drawing the Dragon Sword.
A light of understanding came across Rami-Xayon’s face as she realized what I was about to do. She called up a wind. With the Dragon Sword, the glowing images of a white tornado, representing Wind magic, and the yellow sun, the image of Light power, materialized in front of me. I used the sword’s alchemical magic to blend both powers, adding heat from the Light power to the Wind magic, Thus, I created a hot, dry wind that rippled with pleasant warmth against our soaked armor and clothing, drying us all off in minutes.
“All right everyone,” I said, “now that we’re all dry and ready, it’s about time to head into the caverns and find some wyrms.”
“I hope you have a solid plan to deal with these monsters, Vance,” Isu said to me as we set off into the darkness. “I feel like you may be underestimating the deadly might of the wyrms.”
“Of course, they are no equal to dragons,” Yumo-Rezu said, “but if any beasts could be such an equal, wyrms are it.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve got a plan,” I said. “And it should be coming out of the water … right about now.”
I looked behind me and saw Fang and the direbear emerge. “Rollar, Drok, get the wolf’s head weapons out of the barrels, along with the gray powder and red balls. Make sure they’re dry and ready to fire. We’re going to be needing them before long.”
“Will do, Lord Vance,” Rollar said. He and Drok got busy with the barrels on Fang and the direbear.
Once they’d unloaded a few of the weapons and munitions, we headed off into the darkness of the tunnels. The glowing purple dagger lit our way, and the ghostly trail of the scent of dead cave trolls guided me through the darkness.
The various scents of death were far more familiar to me here, now that I was back on—or, rather, under—Prandish soil, but this place had a strange and unearthly feel about it. The caverns were enormous. The initial maze of tunnels we traveled through was quite similar to the Black Passage. However, this soon opened out into eerie spaces that were almost cathedral-like in their vastness, full of strange looking stalactites and stalagmites. Soaring ceilings of rock that in some places were over a hundred feet high. It was almost like we had entered a secret world, one that had existed all along beneath our feet.
“It’s good to be back in Prand,” Isu remarked.
“It doesn’t really feel like we’re back, though,” Elyse said. “I feel like we’ve entered another world, one even more alien to me than Yeng.”
“I quite like these caverns,” Layna said, looking up at the ceilings, which were riddled with stalactites of all sizes. “I could just picture cobwebs in all these corners. My war spiders would love it down here, and these stalactites would be perfect for hanging cocooned prey…”
Elyse shuddered, and a look of disgust came across her face. She had learned to accept and tolerate a great many things during her time with me. Although she had never been able to get over the fact that the Arachne ate people after they wrapped them up in spider cocoons.
“Aye, it’s quite eerie down here, isn’t it?” Rollar remarked, looking around. “If the ancient gods ever fashioned their own cathedrals, before men arrived in Prand and learned to construct buildings of stone and wood, I’d imagine they would look something like this.”
“There is some sort of ancient power humming silently in these walls.” Friya stared around her in wonder. “I do not know what it is, but I feel as if I have visited this place in my dreams, long ago.”
“And were they dreams … or were they nightmares?” Isu asked, a dark light glinting in her eyes.
“Shh!” Anna-Lucielle hissed, stopping dead in her tracks. “Everyone, quiet! I think I heard something.”
“What did you hear?” Elyse asked.
“Something moving underground, a rumble beneath my feet.”
“We’re already underground, in case you haven’t noticed,” Isu remarked drily.
Anna-Lucielle flashed her a glare with daggers in her eyes. “I’m not an idiot, Isu.”
While the women were arguing, my eyes drifted over to Drok. He had gotten down onto his hands and knees and had pressed his ear to the ground, and he was listening intently. His coarse-featured face was scrunched into an expression of intense concentration, but this gave way to a snarl of aggression after a few moments. He sprang back and whipped out his double-bladed battle ax, shifting into a combat stance.
“What’s going on, Drok?” I asked.
“Wyrm coming,” he growled.
And then the floor of the cavern exploded upward in a gigantic plume of shattered rocks and billowing dust.
Chapter Fourteen
The wyrm was spectacular, in a terrifying way. We’d all talked about how huge and powerful these creatures were, but since none of us had ever seen one in the flesh, we had all had to imagine what they looked like. I didn’t think the pictures we conjured up in our imaginations came close to reality.
I first got a good look at the wyrm a few seconds after the dust from the explosion had cleared. It was a brief look, however, since the monster moved way faster than anything that massive had a right to.
The wyrm looked, in a way, like a living stone grain silo like the peasants in the fields of Brakith used, except with a monstrous spiky head on top. It had no eyes, ears or nose—just a huge, gaping mouth riddled with multiple jagged rows of the biggest fangs I’d ever seen. I’d known that the beast’s circular mouth had to be big since it snacked on cave trolls, but I was impressed, to say the least, to see that not only could it have effortlessly swallowed a cave troll whole, it could have gulped down a wine wagon without too much trouble. Illuminated by the bright violet glow of the enchanted dagger, it looked even more freakish and otherworldly.
I guessed I’d been expecting it to look like a snake, or maybe something like a dragon, but it looked like neither. That was why the image of a grain silo popped into my head before either a snake or a dragon: the beast looked like a long stone cylinder—a flexible one, of course, since it was able to move like a snake even if it didn’t look like one. I’d pictured it as being a scaled beast, but its body was covered in what looked like armored stone.
I didn’t have much time to really analyze how the wyrm looked, of course, since it came surging toward me at a terrifying speed.
“Rollar, Drok, get the wolf’s heads ready!” I yelled. “I’ll distract it!” I jumped onto Fang’s saddle; I would need his speed and his ability to climb vertical walls to defeat the wyrm.
Rami-Xayon and Yumi-Rezu, the enjarta sisters, were already loosing rapid-fire arrows at the wyrm. As powerful as their enchanted bows and arrows were, the projectiles shattered harmlessly against the wyrm’s stone-armored hide. In fact, the massive beast didn’t seem to even notice that it was being attacked by them.
It was, instead, focused on me and Fang.
We were racing along across the open floor of the cavern in a bid to get its attention, which we definitely seemed to be succeeding in doing.
“I’m going up the walls!” I yelled. “Hit its underbelly with the wolf’s heads!”
During our time at sea, my party had practiced with the Yengish wolf’s head weapons. They had all become quite proficient in their use. After much practice, they were able to shoot them with accuracy and reload them in quick time. I was hoping that the tremendous power of these weapons, with their explosive ammunition, would be enough to take down the wyrm. We would just have to score a few critical hits in its vulnerable areas.
I urged Fang up a vertical wall, with the wyrm racing along behind me and gaining on us alarmingly quickly. When I glanced over my shoulder, I saw that taking the beast out might prove more difficult than I had anticipated. I’d imagined it as a reptilian kind of creature, guessing that it had a weak underbelly. In reality, the stony armor of the wyrm’s underbelly looked just as tough as it was anywhere else on t
he creature’s body.
Behind me, a series of deep, booming explosions rang out as my party fired the wolf’s heads. Accompanying them were thunderous fireball explosions along the wyrm’s side. The beast bellowed out an ear-shattering shriek, and chunks of stone and plumes of dust billowed out from where the red balls had struck its body and exploded. Where it should have been blown apart, it was by no means seriously damaged.
When the smoke and dust cleared, I saw that the red balls had put some cracks in its stone armor and taken out a few chunks of rock—the wyrm’s armor was made of living rock, it seemed. No blood flowed from the wounds. If anything, the wyrm appeared to be far more angry than hurt.
The massive monster ceased its pursuit of me, reared its head up like a cobra preparing to strike, and blasted out a deafening roar. The ear-splitting sound made my brain feel like it was about to boil, my skull as though it was going to shatter into splinters.
“Aim at its mouth!” I yelled at my party. “Try to get a shot inside its mouth; it’s the wyrm’s only vulnerable spot!”
Then the wyrm raced toward my party, who were desperately trying to reload the wolf’s head weapons. I whipped out my Death bow and loosed a few arrows at the charging wyrm, but they did nothing but chip some chunks out of its stone hide.
Rami-Xayon dropped her bow and called up a mighty tornado, hurling its full force at the wyrm. The wind was powerful enough to have bowled over a division of Jotunn warriors, but it barely slowed the wyrm down. It did, however, give my party enough time to fire the wolf’s heads again. This time, they aimed the projectiles at the wyrm’s head, trying to place a shot inside its mouth, as I’d instructed them.
A series of explosions rocked the walls of the huge cavern, and fireballs detonated all around the wyrm’s head, but none actually hit inside its mouth. The creature seemed to have no organs on its head except for its mouth, so the potent explosions of the red balls did nothing but take a bit of its armor off …
And piss it off even more.
With another ear-splitting bellow, it surged toward my party. There was no time for them to even think of reloading. Instead, they had to scatter and flee.
Rami-Xayon and Isu worked together, combining their powers in an attempt to hurt or at least slow the wyrm down. Isu called up her corrosive acidic Death mist while Rami-Xayon summoned her Wind power to blow the cloud of acid mist directly into the wyrm’s mouth. The blind beast sucked in the noxious green cloud, and it did have some effect, buying us a little time.
The wym roared and writhed, obviously experiencing some sort of pain and discomfort, but in a few seconds, it was back at full strength, roaring and aggressive as ever.
I realized that short of a perfectly timed, perfectly aimed shot of a red ball, direct hits of even our most powerful weapons wouldn’t do much except piss it off more. The only location on the beast that might be susceptible to damage was through its open mouth and down its throat. Given how fast the creature moved and how much it writhed and snaked around, getting such a shot in with the wolf’s heads would be very unlikely.
I had to attack the beast with a different strategy.
Some of the stalactites on the ceiling were monstrously huge; conical rocks that were easily the size of houses that had to weigh hundreds of tons. An idea hit me like an assassin’s arrow out of the shadows: I could use the stalactites against the wyrm.
Fang and I raced across the floor of the cavern, and I loosed a rapid-fire volley of arrows at the wyrm’s head as we ran.
“Aim the wolf’s heads at the base of that stalactite!” I yelled, pointing to the biggest stalactite on the ceiling, a monstrous chunk of rock that was the size of a huge cathedral spire. “Fire ‘em all at once when I give the command!”
I now needed to get the wyrm’s attention and lure it across the floor of the cavern to attack me. And to do that, I needed to hurt it—to cause monumentally more significant damage than anything we’d done to it thus far.
I tossed my Death bow aside and drew the Dragon Sword. This enchanted blade was supposed to be strong and sharp enough to cut through any substance in existence, and I had to assume that that included wyrm armor.
“All right Fang, let’s do this.” I spurred on Fang to charge straight at the wyrm’s side.
My mighty lizard thundered across the cavern floor. As soon as he did, the wyrm spun its eyeless head around to face us. I’d been wondering how the beast knew where we were, seeing as it seemed to possess no sensory organs at all, being deaf, blind, and unable to smell. Now, though, I knew how it sensed where its prey was: through vibrations in the ground. It made perfect sense for a creature that lived underground where there was no light or sound and little air.
With this realization in my mind, I pulled Fang up to a sudden stop. “Everyone, freeze!” I yelled. “Don’t move at all!”
“Have you lost your mind?!” Yumo-Rezu yelled back.
“Just do it, dammit!” I shouted back. “Nobody move a fucking muscle! Don’t even breathe!”
As counterintuitive as it was, everyone obeyed me and froze up … and the moment we stopped moving, the wyrm skidded to a halt in the center of the cavern. It raised its huge head peering around—if one could say that an eyeless thing could peer—in what seemed to be confusion.
The monster blasted out a thunderous, skull-cracking roar of anger and frustration before it lunged forward a few yards, snapping its drawbridge-sized mouth shut a few times in the hope of scoring a lucky hit. It ended up biting nothing but air, and I grinned triumphantly.
My theory was correct. If we didn’t move, it couldn’t sense where we were.
The wyrm wasn’t in position yet, not for what I wanted. I would have to move again to get it to come after me and set it up for my trap … if my trap even worked.
I knew the wolf’s head weapons were powerful, but were they powerful enough to dislodge the enormous stalactite from the ceiling?
There was only one way to find out.
“Remember, you all need to fire those wolf’s heads at the base of the stalactite exactly when I tell you to,” I whispered to my party, hoping the vibrations caused by my talking weren’t strong enough for the wyrm to sense them. The monster didn’t move, so I figured I was right.
Rollar took my lead and whispered in return, “We’re ready, Lord Vance. Just give us your signal and we’ll blast the hell out of that rock.”
“It’s now or never,” I whispered to Fang. “Let’s take this big lump of living stone out with a big-ass chunk of dead fucking stone. Death always wins…”
I commanded Fang to charge forward. The instant my huge undead lizard started to race across the cavern floor, the wyrm roared out in aggressive fury and surged forward in pursuit.
I veered in a wide arc, keeping an eye on the wyrm as we raced our deadly race. With the monster in pursuit, I hastily performed a series of calculations in my mind. The numbers rattled in my head as I tried to figure out the timing, to get it just right.
One second off, and the plan would fail. The timing had to be utterly perfect.
As I’d predicted, the wyrm cut in a diagonal path across the cavern toward us, cutting its pursuit of us down to the shortest and most direct route.
It was a ruthlessly efficient predator indeed. This was just what I wanted, of course, for its route of pursuit put it directly below the massive stalactite.
It was gaining on us rapidly, closing in with magnificently brutal speed.
Out here in the open, there was no way we could outrun it. If this gamble failed to pay off, me and Fang would be inside the wyrm’s jaws in seconds.
Could I survive being swallowed up by fortifying my armor with Death power, and hack my way out of the beast from the inside?
I figured it might be possible, but I didn’t want to have to find out.
The wyrm plowed through barriers of stalagmites, which created rows of imposing walls that divided up the interior of the cavern like hedges across a field. The beast’s g
igantic mouth and multiple rows of razor-sharp teeth simply obliterated the rocks, smashing them to dust as it pursued us with relentless speed.
I glanced over my shoulder as I raced along. The wyrm was almost in position.
I counted down in my mind, hastily making calculations of speed and distance.
“All right,” I said to myself, watching the wyrm barreling toward us. “Three, two, one … fire!”
With a collective boom that shook the walls and every stalactite and stalagmite in the cavern, my party fired all the wolf’s head weapons at once. Multiple explosions rocked the base of the gigantic stalactite as the wyrm surged beneath it, oblivious to the danger coming from above.
The simultaneous impacts did their job, severing the stalactite’s connection to the ceiling of the cavern. With a mighty crack, the huge chunk of rock plummeted earthward, falling like an arrowhead shot down from the skies by a titan.
My timing was perfect. Just as the wyrm’s head snaked forward, the house-sized chunk of rock smashed into it from above.
I sensed the wyrm’s death before I saw it, for the stalactite exploded into a shower of rock fragments and a blooming cloud of dust upon impact. The dust billowed through the cavern, filling up the entire space. Soon, we were all coughing and choking on it.
Rami-Xayon called up a strong wind to blow the dust away. When it finally cleared, we saw the huge wyrm lying dead on the cavern floor, its head buried beneath the enormous pile of boulders that used to be the stalactite.
“You did it, Vance!” Yumo-Rezu exclaimed. “You killed the wyrm!”
“We killed it,” I said. “If you all hadn’t fired those wolf’s heads exactly when I told you to, this ugly thing would be digesting me and Fang about now. It’s dead now, but it won’t be for long.”
I closed my eyes and sent a portion of my life force into the wyrm’s limp corpse, seeking out the beast’s heart. Its organs were arranged in a simple and almost crude manner; this thing seemed to be a much more ancient and basic lifeform than any other I’d encountered.
