by Ren Ryder
“Bell!”
Bell whipped up a shockwave of wind that dispersed the black miasma. “He assimilated the djinn’s powers, didn’t he?”
Neil rose back to his feet, shaking his head like he was waking up from a deep sleep. “What was that, some kind of mental attack?"
I nodded, lips set into a grim line. “He’s still getting used to his new body. Once he figures out how to control it, we’re goners,” I said.
A distinct change in the air prompted me to look around. Along the outskirts of the temple, the barrier wavered and snapped, then shattered to pieces. Wind rushed into the space, blowing leaves and detritus across the temple.
Risen to his full height, the Duke was an eight-foot tall monstrosity of pure muscle and bone. His tail whipped behind him as he tasted the air with his forked tongue, revealing a vampire’s sharp fangs.
The Duke clenched all four of his fists, then raised his arms to the sky and basked in the light of the full moon. “How kind of you to stick around. Just what I needed, some test dummies,” Maddox said, eyeing us.
“Get ready, he’s coming,” I warned, raising my sword one-handed.
The marble beneath his feet shattered as the Duke charged our position. In the blink of an eye, the monster slapped Neil with an open-hand, sending him flying through the air and crashing into a stone column. The sub-captain fell to the floor, unmoving.
I shivered.
Regulus held his four hands in front of his face, laughing. “Yes. This is it. Unmatched strength and power beyond mortal ken. With this, the crown of the empire, no, the world will be mine!” The Duke roared at the sky, his voice reverberating across the estate. “Come, my pets. Together we will take New London for our own.”
It was then I noticed the Duke wore the same winged chimera pendant around his neck that Sammie had during her attack on the Grand Library. Its eyes glowed yellow as the pendant activated, summoning the horde of monsters under the Duke’s command.
Maddox turned around to face me, moving slow as molasses. “I’m going to rip you limb from limb, Specter.”
“Kal, what’re you doing? Don’t just stand there!” Bell said.
I was terrified, not of losing my life, but for fear of what would happen after I did. Somehow I had to not only stay alive, but stop this monster in its tracks.
How am I supposed to beat this monster?
Maddox moved, shattering the floor and sending marble shrapnel flying. I twisted and slid beneath all four of his reaching arms, then jumped up behind him to slash my sword across the monster’s back. My sword cut a thin line across the dark flesh before it got caught in a bone thorn and skittered off course into the air.
“Bell!”
With earth-shattering speed the Duke spun around, throwing his arms out to grab me out of the air. Bell summoned a flurry of wind daggers and shot them off into the monster’s chest. Regulus reeled back, and I drove my sword straight into his unprotected chest. My sword sunk a few inches into the monster’s chest, then stopped cold.
“Got you,” the Duke said.
Four underhanded blows landed on my torso with the force of a falling mountain. I doubled up under the blows as the force of them flung me into the sky, over the temple columns to crash to the earth. My crash landing made a shallow furrow in the ground for the ten feet it took for my momentum to disperse.
Still holding my sword in a white-knuckled grip, I tottered back onto my feet, swaying back and forth. Stars flashed in my vision and an odd sucking sound came from my lungs with each wheezing breath I took. Staggering towards the temple, a chorus of howls and cries made me stop in my tracks.
In the distance, vampires, chimeras, and patchwork humanoids loped across the estate from the direction of the mansion, closing in on the temple. In addition to the manticore and cerebus, there was a pack of winged hounds, an army of patchwork humans with too many arms and legs, and what looked like a griffin.
The contingent of battlemages and imperial guards were nowhere to be seen. Had they been wiped out? I gritted my teeth and shook my head in denial.
I’m not strong enough. Is this the end of the road for me?
I punched myself in the back of my skull. “Fight, fight fight!”
Tearing at my source, I pulled and pulled and pulled at the depths of my source. Bright power seeped out of my pours, filling my aura to bursting. I surpassed the limits of what I thought my body could contain, then went beyond them.
Mana flooded my body, and I struggled to circulate the unruly power through my mana channels. I pushed at the dense mana flows, forcing them to bend to my will. With stubborn persistence, I dug deeper into the well of my source, fighting to bring more to the fore.
I broke out in hot and cold flashes, and my body was wracked by spasms. I felt like I was being crushed under the weight of my own power. With stubborn persistence, I filled the sigil on my chest with a massive wad of energy, lighting myself up with a silver glow. Waves of energy flattened the earth in a circle around me.
Moving at top speed, I flashed across the bare earth into the temple, locking onto the monstrous form of the Duke. Burying the hilt of my sword in my chest, I held tight to the pommel as I rammed straight into the monster. My sword speared through the tough flesh and pierced deep inside the Duke’s torso.
“Kal!”
Regulus roared as he belatedly recognized my arrival. “You should have stayed down, vermin.”
I flooded my sword with mana, and a cyclone of wind ripped into the Duke’s guts. Regulus stumbled back, ripping my sword from his flesh as he stomped away. Black ichor splashed to the ground, oozing unnaturally slow from the gaping hole in the monster’s torso. Maddox slapped a free hand over the wound and howled like a wild animal.
Grinning, I said, “Looks like you can be hurt after all.”
I ran like the wind, running circles around the gigantic monster to keep it wondering where I would strike next. I was moving so fast that the Duke’s wild blows seemed to move in slow-motion.
The Duke roared again, and an explosion of dark miasma covered the temple grounds once more. Steeling my mind against the uncoordinated mental attack, I activated the force ring on my pointer finger. Whiplike tendrils of pure force lashed out from my ring at Duke Maddox, constricting around his limbs and throat.
I followed in behind my force construct, sharpening the wind working around my sword into a sharp blade. Hacking inelegantly, I lopped off the Duke’s top left arm while he struggled to free himself. Black sludge poured out of the stump. The appendage thunked to the marble and flopped around.
“My arm!” The Duke picked his arm off the ground, lined it up with the stump, and, to my amazement, reattached the limb. “There, all better,” Maddox said, swinging the arm around as if it were good as new.
“You can’t be serious,” I said.
“That’s cheating!” Bell said.
“My turn,” Regulus said.
A massive amount of dark mana erupted out of the Duke. With an expression of intense concentration, Maddox wrapped together strands of black mana, fusing them into dense cords that attached to spots all over his body. The Duke’s cords whipped about, turning sections of columns and floor to ash.
“Dodge these if you can!” Duke Maddox challenged.
I slipped under a dark cord of power and nearly ran straight into another whip-like tendril that I hopped over awkwardly. Stumbling, I reset myself and danced through the lashing cords of death-touched mana, knowing a single misstep could kill.
“Bell!” I called out to my sylph companion. “A whole horde of monsters is about to bear down on us. Get Neil someplace safe.”
“What about you?” Bell asked.
“Worry—” I slid underneath a falling cord, “worry about me when you get back.”
“Fine, but you better not die before I do!” Bell yelled.
Bell summoned a cushion of wind and lifted the unconscious sub-captain into the air. She air-lifted Neil out of the area, receding
into the background as the thundering sound of pounding feet drew near.
I was starting to get the feel for the way the cords moved, independent of one another but in a detectable pattern. Gripping my sword tight, I prepped myself to land a lethal blow on the Duke when the earth shook beneath my feet, making me lose my footing, and then almost my head.
Three cords converged on my location, striking in their first coordinated attack. I spun and leapt through a gap between the snakelike appendages into the sky above. Tapping into Bell’s sigil, I conjured a platform of wind to support myself ten meters off the ground, well out of reach of the Duke’s lashing death cords.
A stampede of vampires and chimeras demolished the temple proper, tearing through columns and sending up a flurry of dust and debris that obscured the area below. It was hard to get an accurate count, but the monsters easily numbered in the hundreds. I had reservations about killing them, but the traps I prepared wouldn’t find a better use.
“Fehu. Isa. Hagalaz.”
Fire, ice, and force runes exploded one after the other in a chain reaction, ripping up the remains of the temple. Columns of ice, fire, and pure force tore into the monster horde. Screams of pain and rage filtered into my ears from my safe spot on my midair wind platform.
With a piercing cry, the griffin burst out of the cloud of debris on its black wings, ripping my platform of wind to pieces and catching my torso between its jaws. An instant later its sharp beak began to close around my chest, slicing through muscle and splintering bone.
I swung my sword in a wild arc at the griffin’s head, slashing a zig-zag pattern across its face, an eye, then beak. The griffin squawked and jerked its head, tossing me into the air like discarded prey. Like a shooting star I began to plummet towards the earth, bleeding and broken.
The Duke shot out of the debris cloud, pushing himself up into the sky like a spider on innumerable legs fashioned from his dense cords of death mana. Flying in pursuit of him were the remains of the pack of winged hounds ridden by battered vamps.
“You failed,” Duke Regulus Maddox whispered as he collided with me.
Regulus slammed into me with the full force of our combined momentum, his four fists landing like meteors. Reversing course, I was flung back into the sky spitting blood and hanging onto consciousness by a thread. My eyes fluttered open and closed as I tried to pull a wind working together to break my fall.
Wisps of wind collected around me as I reached the zenith of my arc and started to plummet towards the surface. Falling like a rock, I thumbed the ring of shadows on my left thumb, hoping to awaken the sleeping djinn inside. Flashing in and out of consciousness, I sheltered my broken body inside a wind working riddled with flaws.
I crashed into the earth at terminal velocity, leaving a human-sized crater at my impact site. My wind working broke apart, sending eddying gusts of wind out in all directions. My head smacked against the hard ground, knocking me out cold.
Chapter Eighteen
“Kal, Kal!” Bell slapped me back to life. “Get up, why aren’t you getting up? Come on, this isn’t funny. You can’t— you can’t die here.”
My body felt, crunchy. Purplish-black blood bubbled out the wounds left by the griffin’s beak, streaming off my body to pool in the crater. Pain flooded my brain, making it hard to think, or even to breathe. My ears rang like tolling church-bells, making it almost impossible to make out Bell’s words.
“Mmphf,” I said through a mouthful of gargled blood.
Bell grabbed me by the throat and slapped me again. “Kal, get up. You have to stand up! The Duke is heading towards the Royal Quarter with the rest of his monsters in tow.”
My vision swam with stars eclipsed by a black void falling over me like a smothering curtain. Pain began to recede from my senses, swept away by a shocking cold. I tried to twitch my fingers and toes, but wasn’t sure if they moved. I sensed it wouldn’t be long before I couldn’t feel anything at all.
I tried to say some consoling words to my sylph familiar.
“What, what is it?” Bell put her ear to my mouth.
I choked on a lungful of viscous liquid, unable to express myself.
I messed up.
I stretched my lips into a bloody smile. Feeling like I was drowning, I convulsed, hacking blood out from my lungs. My eyes fluttered closed as the black curtain swept over me, wiping away my frustrations and regrets to replace them with the comfort of nothingness.
Bell manipulated my eyelids to make me see. “You’ve gotta keep your eyes open, Kal. Just hold on, your healing factor will save you. Just hold on,” Bell pleaded.
A figure with a glowing black-and-green aura stepped up to the edge of the crater to gaze down on my broken body. “To think you would be beaten by some transfigured human before I could kill you myself. How shameful, but then I shouldn’t have expected so much from the halfling that stole the mantle of king from me.”
“Get— get away from Kal!” Bell’s claws pinged off Ailill’s shield, not even leaving a scratch.
Wheezing, I spat a globule of blood at the feet of the pureblood fae.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk.” Ailill produced a finger-length splinter of wood from the thick fur robes he wore. “You really shouldn’t have left a splintered staff covered in your blood at the scene of our last fight— made tracking you down a simple affair. Oberon had quite the proposition for me, and many others, you know. Kill the new Seven Year King and claim the mantle for ourself. Quite the prize, don’t you think?"
Ailill crouched down and ran his long fingers about my waist until he found what he was looking for. He snatched his wand from its holster, turning the black-and-green length of wood over in his hands. “What a shame. I can’t possibly allow you to die like this. My reputation would never recover from such a disgrace.”
“Keep your filthy hands off him!” Bell screamed.
“As you wish, little sylph.” Ailill kicked me over onto my side, and I vomited a stream of brackish blood.
Ailill mac Máta, the most powerful life mage to walk the earth, raised his wand and directed a blast of energy straight into me.
“I won’t let you!” Bell conjured a gust of wind to sweep Ailill away, but his shield kept it from even ruffling his hair.
A wave of black-and-green mana wrapped my broken body up in a warm embrace. My skin broke out in pins and needles as feeling started to return to me. The pooling blood around me reversed flow, forcing its way underneath my skin.
I broke out into convulsions; my fingers and toes twitched. My shattered ribcage writhed like serpents as they reconnected to one another. The flesh all over my body knitted back together, leaving me hale and whole.
Bell’s eyes were huge. “What— what’d you do? Why?”
“Tch, this is too rich— healing my rival. Just so you know, when you’re finished with this insignificant squabble of yours, I plan to kill you myself.”
Ailill had pulled back the black curtain of death hanging over me, robbing it of my life. I forced myself into a sitting position, staring at the fae standing over what should have been my shallow grave. I took in Ailill’s elegant curling horns, golden eyes, flowing silver hair, his perfectly-proportioned features— I gritted my teeth.
I really do hate this guy.
Ailill held out a long-fingered hand to me. “You’re very lucky I showed up first. Anyone else would have killed you on the spot.”
I grabbed onto his offered hand and let the pureblood fae pull me onto my feet. “You should’ve just finished me off and claimed you killed me,” I said.
Ailill looked aghast at my proposition. “And besmirch my honor? I would never. I’ll kill you myself in a fair duel when you’ve had a chance to recover your full strength.”
“What a dummy,” Bell said.
I agreed.
I picked my sword up off the ground and rammed it home into its sheathe. ”Whatever your reasons, thanks.”
Ailill furrowed his brows at the casual way I handled what used to be
his sword. “I’ll want that back, too.”
I snorted.
“We fly,” a voice not my own reverberated through my mind.
Without warning, shadows exploded out of the ring on my thumb to form a gigantic pair of wings. Black tendrils coiled up my left forearm to my bicep, wrapping tight around the limb. The ring’s shadowy wings flapped once, twice, pulling me a few feet off the ground.
Bell winged her way to my side. “You can fly? I can’t believe you’ve been holding out on me! You’re not a worthless landlubber after all!”
“I can’t fly,” I said. “Whoa! Hold your horses!”
Pulled along against my will, my ring of shadows took to the skies, dragging me along with it. A sharp jerk as we gained altitude made my shoulder pop in and out of its socket. Moving like the wind we soared over the treetops, cleared the Duke’s estate and raced towards the Royal Quarter.
We followed the trail of destruction left by the Duke and the remainder of his monster army. Maddox had carved straight through the Upper Quarter, his legs of death mana turning buildings to ash. Those unlucky enough to survive the Duke’s careless passage were eaten alive, their bodies left for the crows.
We arrived at the Royal Quarter to find a five-meter section of wall had been blown inwards, the bodies of imperial guards scattered on the ruined walkway. Flying to the palace on the hill, we passed by untold dead. Servants and masters alike had been slain as the monsters passed through.
I gritted my teeth, burning the scene into my memory. “If I wasn’t so weak, I could’ve averted this disaster.”
Bell landed on my shoulder so she could speak into my ear. “You didn’t do this, the Duke did.”
I shook my head. “If I was stronger, I could have stopped him.”
My wings of shadow caught an updraft and glided into place over the top of the palace. From a few hundred feet above the surface, I got a birds-eye view as we circled the compound.
