by Dante King
“Dajis!” Kegohr yelled in terror.
“Don’t use fire techniques!” Vesma added.
The salamander scrambled over the body of its brother and landed next to me. I slashed at it, but it blocked the blow with a claw and opened its mouth.
I flung up my hand and shot thorns into one of the creature’s eyes. It screeched in pain and flung its head wildly about. While it was distracted, I closed my eyes and dug deeper into the power of wood. I summoned a series of Plank Pillars all around the salamander. It hacked at them with its claws and battered its head against them. A gap appeared in the pillars after the giant lizard broke through, and it started smashing its head against the hole. As it leaned in close, I thrust my sword through the gap and into the creature’s brain. A ripple of satisfying lava bubbled out from the wound. The ripplet became a spray as I removed my blade, and the monster fell dead with a thud.
The pillar disintegrated as I turned and sprinted across the room toward where Kegohr and Vesma were facing the other salamander. A band of Ember Sprites stood in my way, their arms raised as flames flickered from their hands. The flames broke off from their hands, rose to swirl in a circle in the air, and blocked my way.
I skidded to a halt and stared, amazed at the sight. I’d never seen Ember Sprites use fire before, and especially not in an intelligent manner like this.
Then, I noticed the Dajis. They were moving their heads in time to the floating flames. As I watched, one of them pointed its snout toward another Ember Sprite, and the fire flew from the sprite’s hands before rising to join the circle in front of me.
The foxes were controlling the flames.
I couldn’t fight the fire, but I could battle its source. I cut down the sprites in front of me with precise aims of my weapon, and their coal-like bodies fell to the ground. The burning wall didn’t vanish, though, so I guessed the Dajis could still use the stolen fire even after the creatures they’d taken it from were dead.
While Kegohr kept the salamander busy, Vesma jumped up onto its back. She swung her spear back and forth like a reaper with a scythe as she tried to cut through the creature’s armored neck. Scales flew as she sliced away at the lizard.
The salamander jerked, almost throwing Vesma off its back. Kegohr hit it in the jaw with his mace and knocked it aside just as it breathed a gout of flame. Once again, the foxes took hold of the fire and made it dance in the air above them.
Vesma’s spear rose and fell one last time as she buried the tip deep in the salamander’s neck. The creature reared and raised a leg to try to hit her. Kegohr brought his mace down in the middle of the creature’s forehead, and it finally went limp.
Two dozen Ember Sprites swarmed past the foxes and raced toward me. Fire flew from their hands, but the foxes snatched it away. I’d never seen so many sprites in a coordinated attack like this, and I figured the Dajis were enhancing not only their fire abilities, but also the minds of the creatures around them. As the swarm came for me, they suddenly changed direction and descended upon Vesma.
“Argh!” she cried out as they latched onto her.
One grabbed hold of her leg and buried its teeth in her thigh. Another leapfrogged off its companion and came flying at her face. She batted it away with a swing of her spear, but by then, the rest were on her.
I rushed to help her and started tearing them away. They weren’t happy with losing, and they squealed as I pulled them from Vesma. The little bastards clawed, gouged, and bit as they tried to remain clamped onto her body. Sweat drenched Vesma’s face, and her dark hair was soaked in it. The sprites were causing her body to overheat and—
“They’re draining my Vigor!” Vesma yelled.
I’d never seen them do that before, either. Those Dajis were becoming a real pain in the ass.
Vesma’s knees buckled, and she sank to the ground as a sprite climbed over her face. They held tight as I flailed at them with my fists. I would have used Augmentation or my sword, but I didn’t want to risk harming Vesma. Kegohr joined me by her side and started crushing sprite necks in a single hand. I peeled the last sprite from Vesma’s face, and she gasped a mouthful of air. The sprite in my hands snarled and opened its jaws, and I slammed my hand directly into its mouth. The little teeth gnawed at my arm as I shot a thorn into its insides. It croaked and went limp.
Wood didn’t beat fire, but a thorn down the throat of an Ember Sprite worked just fine.
At last, the sprites were done. It was just us and the Dajis now.
The foxes stood in a cluster at the edge of the pit and looked straight at us. Their heads swayed in eerie unison as they directed the flames that were now circling us and drew them closer and closer. Those flames formed a ring on the floor of the cave and rose from there almost to the ceiling. My skin prickled at the heat, and the air tasted of ashes.
I slashed at the fire with my sword to test whether it would dissipate around the blade, but it remained strong.
“Could we jump through?” Kegohr asked.
“Not a good idea,” I said. “The heat’s intensifying.”
I shot a thorn into the flames, and it burst instantly into a fierce glow. The wooden spike was nothing but ash before it even reached the far side.
“What can we do?” Vesma asked.
We backed up together and Kegohr’s shoulder knocked my bag.
My bag! I opened it and pulled out a waterskin. It didn’t hold enough to put out all these flames, but maybe…
“I’m going to make a gap,” I said. “I need you to go through before they can close it. Ready?”
The others hefted their weapons.
“Ready!” they replied.
I pulled the stopper from the waterskin and flung the contents at the base of the nearest flames. After a gout of steam, a hole three feet across and 10 feet high formed in the burning wall. I jumped through the hole first, and Vesma followed immediately after. The hole was quickly closing, and Kegohr was too big to fit. The flames closed over the gap with a whoosh, and Kegohr was trapped on the other side.
“Shit!” I commented as I turned to Vesma. “We’re going to need him. Scatter the Dajis. Stop them from working together.”
I ran into the center of the Dajis and swiped at them, but they easily evaded my blade. Vesma took a running start, jumped, and struck a fox with a flying kick. It yelped and staggered, and I immediately positioned myself between the other two monsters. With a series of hacking motions, I forced them to concentrate on me, and the flaming wall flickered and trembled. Vesma cornered the other fox while I continued breaking their focus by harassing them with my sword.
I nicked a Daji’s nose with the tip of my sword, and a drop of lava trailed down its snout. It snarled and pounced at me. Immediately, the wall of flame came down into separate, roaming fires.
“It’s about time,” Kegohr said as he darted between the fires and joined the fray. His mighty, two-handed mace clobbered a Daji in the abdomen, and the sound of steel and flesh connecting was like a thunderclap. The fox slid across the cavern flow, but it shook its head before returning to face its attacker.
I knew my fire techniques were ineffective against creatures in the Cavern, but they would distract the foxes, so I produced an Untamed Torch that curved around one of the Dajis. The light from the flames blinded the creature for a second before it slashed at the attack. The fox used the flame I’d produced and sent it flying back toward me in a beam of intense heat. I jumped over the firebeam and twisted in midair, a Vigor-filled move I’d practiced a hundred times while sparring in the yard.
My sword lashed out and cut the beast across the stomach, but it twisted at the last moment, and I couldn’t complete the stroke. The blade should have gutted the creature; instead, it only produced a deep laceration.
Lava dripped from the wound and splashed onto the ground as my target shook its head. The lava bleeding from the cut suddenly hardened and turned to something like volcanic stone.
I risked a glance at my friends and saw
their foxes bearing similar battle scars.
“They heal!” Kegohr called out.
Without any fire to manipulate, it was teeth and claws against muscle and steel. The Daji had much bigger teeth than me and had talons for fingernails, but I’d already killed dozens of Ember Cavern monsters. This fox would fall before my blade like all the others.
“There’s one thing they can’t heal from,” I said.
My Daji sprung forward, and I summoned a Plank Pillar that shot me 20 feet into the air. I pirouetted as I fell and delivered a spinning slice that carved through the fox’s neck. The beast’s head rolled across the ground as I landed.
Yes, it seemed Dajis couldn’t heal from decapitation.
“Cut off their heads!” I yelled as I ran to Vesma.
She swiped a fox, and it hopped aside. She rotated her spear and stabbed the spiked end into its skull. The fox snapped at her, but she drove the weapon deeper into its brain. The beast yelped before it grunted and collapsed in a bundle of limbs.
“Two things they can’t heal from,” Vesma said as she heaved the spike from the fox.
We both gathered around Kegohr and the final fox. The fur on his right shoulder was singed, and he had nasty burns all over his face.
“They manipulate fire,” he said with a grunt. “I can’t turn my fire off. It burns through my veins.”
The last fox snorted, and I noticed two deep amber lines running along its snout to the back of its head. They weren’t wounds but a kind of marking. From the superior size and more intelligent glean in its eyes, I suspected this was an alpha Daji.
As if it wanted to prove my conclusion, two streams of fire erupted from its nostrils. I summoned a Plank Pillar in front of the blast, and the wooden wall barely gave us enough time to dodge. I produced another pillar, this one beneath the fox’s paws, but the wood burned up before it even had a chance to rise up from the ground.
“Get back!” I yelled, and my friends took cover behind me.
I hauled pillar after pillar out of the floor to protect us from the Daji’s waves of flame. My Vigor was quickly depleting, so we only had a few seconds to come up with a plan.
“You’re fueling it,” Vesma said to Kegohr. “Can’t you stop?”
“You know I can’t,” he snapped at her. I’d never seen him like this before, and I worried about the despair gathering in his eyes.
“Flame Shields,” I said as I recalled what Rutmonlir had done inside Nydarth’s Shrine. “You must be able to project them.”
“Uh, I haven’t done it before, but I’m willing to try.” Vesma gave me a single, determined nod.
“Won’t the fox just use them? I don’t want my fire to kill you.”
I put a hand on Kegohr’s left shoulder. “It won’t.” I summoned another wooden pillar and realized I didn’t have a lot of Vigor left in the tank. My wood reserves were running low. I still had a lot of fire channels primed with Vigor, but fire was completely useless against these foxes.
“Put your Flame Shields around me,” I told my friends as I forced another protective wall into being. “Give them as Vigor much as you can. The Daji won’t be able to control your combined energies.”
“How do you know that?” Vesma cried out as the beast destroyed my last pillar.
“Come!” Kegohr grabbed her, and they both took refuge near the wall. There was nowhere to take cover, but they wouldn’t need it.
I planned to be the fox’s only target.
Flames surrounded me, but not those produced by the other initiates. The heat intensified, and I felt like I was encased inside a roaring furnace. Then, a coolness washed over me as a different kind of flame enveloped me. I could see it grow weaker, then stronger, then weaker again as the final monster drank it in. The force of its attacks slowed my progress, but I was getting closer to it. Kegohr and Vesma were giving it all they had, but the Daji was able to take every last ounce of Vigor and use it against me.
As I came to the fox, I swung my sword through the air. My arms could only move an inch at a time, and it felt like my weapon was passing through a thick soup. I clenched my teeth and forced the blade onward as the heat around me started to rise. When my blade touched the fox’s head, I doubted I would even have the strength to pierce its skin, let alone chop its head off. But it was so focused on manipulating my friends’ Fire Shields that it wasn’t even bothering to move out of the way. Its eyes rolled to the back of its head as though it was living a dream of pure ecstacy.
Then I realized my hunch had been correct.
I dropped my sword, and it clattered to the ground. My muscles cramped from the effort of pressing against an onslaught of fire, but I raised my hand and shot a fireball at point-blank range. The fire evaporated on the beast’s skin as soon as it left my hand, but I wasn’t trying to kill it with my attack. I wanted to feed it. I continued releasing Untamed Torch until my fire channels were almost completely dry of Vigor. The fox suddenly yelped, and the fire from its nostrils vanished.
“Did it work?” Vesma called out.
The beast toppled onto one side with its legs dangling. I reached down and picked up my sword. The fox’s stomach was bloated like some kind of bullfrog, and it snarled at me as I approached. I took my weapon in two hands, raised it up, and brought it down with all the force of an executioner.
Kegohr walked over to me and looked down at the headless corpse. “I think decapitation is the best means of killing. It’s the most civilized.”
“Skewering brains takes more skill,” Vesma said as she approached.
“Well, that’s two kills for me,” I said. “Who gets the cores?”
“Let’s eat first. You bring anything?” She rose up on her tiptoes and pulled at the flap on my pack.
I laughed as I evaded her attempts to peer at my provisions. “I did. Would you like some? You want to ask nicely?”
“Would you two quit playing?” Kegohr said. “My stomach is growling, and it’ll be worse than a Daji if I don’t feed it.”
After we sat at the side of the chamber, I rummaged in my bag again, pulled out some dried beef, and passed it to the others.
“Reckon we ‘burned’ through a lot of calories there,” I said.
“A lot of what now?” Kegohr asked.
“Like Vigor, but for the body instead of magic.”
“Then, yeah, I reckon you’re right.”
Next, I took out the bandages and herbs. None of my wounds were very deep, and the heat of our attackers had seared them all shut, but Kegohr’s burn looked nasty.
“I don’t need that,” he said as I held up the herbs.
“Idiot.” Vesma punched him on the shoulder. “He let us help. You let him.”
“Fine,” Kegohr said. “Just to make you happy.”
Without water, it was hard to clean the wound, but I did my best using some moss from my bag. The moss also had an anaesthetic quality, and by the time I was done, Kegohr was grimacing a lot less. I chewed some other herbs into a paste and smeared them on the wound, then bandaged it.
“That should do,” I said. “At least until you can see a proper healer.”
Kegohr wasn’t paying attention; he was too busy looking out across the cave. “That’s a lot of cores,” he said.
“Then, we should harvest them.” I drew my knife, ready for the grisly work. “What can we get from absorbing Daji cores?”
“Flame Empowerment.” Vesma drew her own knife. “It lets you increase the power of an existing flame, making it hotter or larger.”
“We can’t enhance the abilities of other things?” I asked as I recalled what the foxes had done to the sprites.
“Not right away.” Vesma pried a core from a sprite corpse. “That’ll take a lot of training. But maybe at some point.”
“Shouldn’t take too much effort, now that we know how to change our channels,” I said. “The world is our… whatever the equivalent of an oyster is here.”
“An oyster is an oyster.” Kegohr ripped o
pen an Ember Sprite with his bare hands. “Did that Daji fry something inside your brain?”
As we gathered the cores, I was struck by how many there were and how powerful some of the creatures had been. As we went deeper into the cavern, there might be even more potent beasts. I wondered if I should go back and try this again when I’d had more time to prepare. But if I did that, this cavern might refill with more beasts. The pain and struggle we’d faced tonight would go to waste. And the longer I left it, the longer Nydarth would be a prisoner of the Ember Cavern.
To work the magic that had brought me to the Seven Realms, I needed Nydarth. That meant I needed to stay on the path. And now, while I had help, seemed like a good time for it.
Still, I didn’t want to lead my friends into a kind of danger they weren’t ready for. “Are you sure you want to keep going?” I asked them as we gathered the cores. “It’ll only get more dangerous.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Kegohr said. “I’m sure.”
“Yes,” Vesma agreed.
“You haven’t known me all that long,” I said. “It’s not like you owe me anything, and this is a lot to risk, even for a friend.”
They exchanged a look I’d seen before.
“I had a dream,” Kegohr said.
“Me too,” said Vesma.
“That dragon spirit you talked about,” Kegohr continued. “It came to both of us in those dreams. Told us we should help you here. A dragon coming to you in a dream, that’s not something you see every day. That’s something you listen to.”
“You came here for a dream?” I tried, and failed, to keep the incredulity from my voice. “Did these dreams feature a woman in see-through robes with—” I waved my hands over my chest, and Kegohr’s eyes widened.
Vesma rolled her eyes. “No, they didn’t. She was clothed in robes fitting her status as a dragon spirit. Why you would ever imagine her in such a—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Kegohr said, saving me the trouble of defending myself. “We’ve all had the dream, and we’re here now.”
