“Will you stop daydreaming your nonsense,” Salanraja said. “We’re almost there.”
I’d been in such a reverie, I’d lost track of what was going on around us. We’d taken a sharp turn away from the tower and were now heading towards a shallow mountain range.
“There,” I heard Initiate Rine call out from Ishtkar’s back on my right. He pointed off into the distance with his staff.
I looked where he was pointing, at a white glow coming up from the horizon. “Is that it?” I called out, struggling to raise my voice over the loudness of the wind.
“Yes,” Salanraja replied. “Now brace yourself. It’s now time to find out what that warlock has in store.”
36
Bone Dragon Battle
We saw the bone dragons first, and this time we didn’t have only one to contend with but a good dozen of them. They were wheeling around in a circle above the ground created from the dried husks of all the demon rats I’d killed. There must have been thousands of them – I never realised I’d killed so many. That then made me wonder how much of my stay in Astravar’s tower I remembered. Maybe the warlock hadn’t needed me to swallow the golem’s crystal for him to take control of my mind. Maybe he’d had dominion over me all along.
Manipulators stood outside of the circle feeding energy into the bone dragons. Each had a dragon of their own, and they slithered around on the ground as they tracked the position of their minions.
Astravar stood in the centre of the circle, with a crystal on a pedestal in front of him. He was bent over this with his arms stretched out wide, and his lips were moving as if chanting a ritual. But we were too far away to hear what he was saying.
The crystal cast a bright light out from the circle, almost as bright as the sun had been before. It seemed to be feeding its energy into a massive oval as tall as a castle. It shimmered white around the edges, and the reflection of our world faded, to display a land full of fire and magma. The Seventh Dimension. It couldn’t be anything else.
There was also something standing next to Astravar, that looked rather feline and slightly overweight. It had red skin, with cracks running down it that looked like they were on fire. Black smoke rose from the beast as it stared up at me with red glowing eyes, as if challenging me to come down and fight it. As Salanraja got closer, I also saw the thing was massive, perhaps four times the size of me. But we were moving so fast I couldn’t quite make out what it was.
My major concern wasn’t the massive beast or the massive portal thingy, anyway. It was the bone dragons that screeched up into the air in unison, and then wheeled around in the sky to face us. One of them was coming at Salanraja head on.
“Hold on…” Salanraja called out in my mind.
“You keep saying that when I’ve got nothing to hold on t—”
Before I knew it, purple flame was spewing out of the bone dragon’s mouth. Some of it brushed against my fur, withering it on touch. Presently, Salanraja performed a barrel roll and swooped out of the way, sending me spinning around in her second rib cage again. All this time, when I’d stood in front of the washing machine in South Wales, watching clothes spin round and round, I never thought I’d end up in one. But at that moment, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the clothes.
I scrambled up Salanraja’s back to stop myself falling off. I reached the top just as Salanraja reached her apex, and all seemed still for a moment. I caught sight of Aleam and Rine flying side by side on their dragons. They had their staffs stuck out in front of them as they headed towards two bone dragons while another three chased them on their tails. Flashes of lightning came out of Aleam’s staff, while Rine tossed out a stream of water that quickly froze and then shattered in the air.
But they only knocked the bone dragons out of the way, which soon corrected themselves and flew back off into the distance, ready to strike again.
Salanraja started to climb again, and I ran back up to her neck, doing everything I could to stay there without falling off. I turned to see that we had another two bone dragons on our tail, but Salanraja veered quickly to the right, to throw them off target.
“What are we going to do, Salanraja?” I asked, as the turning force pushed me into one side of her corridor of spikes.
I felt Salanraja’s back muscles tense underneath my skin. “I’ve already talked to the other dragons about it, who of course have discussed this with their riders.”
“And their conclusion is?”
Another roar came from behind and some purple flame swooped over my head. It wasn’t hot, but rather felt like a spray of concentrated acid. Some of it touched the back of my ears, and it really stung.
Salanraja executed a loop-the-loop, and I cursed as I thought I’d fall right out of the sky. She got on top of the bone dragon that had assailed us, and as I lay on my back pressed against the top of Salanraja’s second ribcage, I wanted to throw up. Then, she came back down, so she was behind the thing, and she opened her mouth and let out a loud roar mixed with a jet of fire. Of course, it didn’t do much damage.
In a way, I didn’t see much point in fighting these things if they couldn’t be defeated without first destroying their Manipulators. But I guess dragons and dragon riders enjoyed making pretty patterns in the sky with their magic.
“Just get down on the ground, and fight,” Salanraja said. “We need Aleam’s and Rine’s magic up here to fight the bone dragons.”
Memories of the battle with the previous bone dragon flashed across my mind. I remembered the thorns, and the sting, and almost dying in my sleep. “I can’t take all the Manipulators,” I pointed out.
“No, don’t stop them. Stop Astravar’s ceremony. Winning this battle is much more important than our own lives.”
Salanraja dived towards the ground, and she jerked into a hover, throwing me towards her tail. Instead of trying to grasp on for my dear life, I submitted and let myself roll down it. I landed on the cold and dusty ground.
I lifted myself up to see that massive beast standing right before me. It opened its mouth and let out a terrible hiss as it displayed a fine set of incredibly sharp teeth.
37
Meet Thy Nemesis
I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. I had never seen one in my life before, even if I knew them to be the king of domesticated cats. I scanned the cavernous, pointed ears that rose high above its head, its menacing glowing eyes set into a flat face, and a mane and beard that extended far below its chin.
It was massive. It was hideous.
I was standing face to face with a Maine Coon. Except this wasn’t a normal Maine Coon, it was a demon Maine Coon, presumably summoned from the Seventh Dimension. So maybe I hadn’t killed as many demon rats as I thought, because this thing looked like it would be great at killing things. Forget about the demon dragon. With this thing at Astravar’s disposal, every cat in this land was doomed.
I could feel the heat coming off of it, as if I was facing a pile of burning embers. If not for the fiery cracks in its skin, the beast would have been a flat charcoal colour. It was also big – I hadn’t gathered the true scale of it from the air. But it was certainly bigger than a lion. Perhaps it was even bigger than Ta’ra had been when she’d knocked the senses out of that serket.
Whiskers, why wasn’t she down here instead of me? Surely that would have been a fairer fight. I glanced upwards to try and catch sight of the Cat Sidhe on the white dragon. But I couldn’t see her and Olan now had four bone dragons on its tail.
The demon cat opened its mouth and yawned. Red slaver run out from its mouth and fell towards the ground. This sizzled when it hit the rock, leaving a black char mark. Around it, the purple gas danced and swayed, and I noticed then that the cat’s eyes weren’t just glowing. They were like windows looking into a raging furnace inside the Maine Coon’s head, as if fire had replaced its brain.
“NO CAT CAN DEFEAT HELLCAT,” it said incredibly loudly, hissing out the cat language that I’d not heard for so long.
It arched its back and circled me, and I followed its path, wondering how I had any chance of taking this thing down. I tried to see behind it, so I could ascertain the position of the crystal. But my enemy blocked any possible path I had through.
So, I arched my back just like him, and hissed back at him. I don’t know what I was thinking, really. It was just natural instinct kicking in, really. But there was another feeling in my gut that was telling me to run, Ben. Get as far from this place as I could and leave the fate of the world in the dragons’ and the dragon riders’ hands.
A roar came from the sky, just as the demon cat crouched down and then leaped at me. I rolled out of the way, feeling the heat from it searing against me. Whiskers, I really didn’t want to touch that thing. But it was quick to turn around, and I was soon facing it again. I thought of charging for the crystal, but I had no time before it pounced again. I lifted myself on my hind paws to parry the blow. It was stupid, because the demon cat caught me by the shoulders and pinned me to the ground.
I wriggled and tried to free myself from the demon’s grasp. My shoulders burned as if I was pinned underneath two red-hot iron pokers. I wanted to cry out in pain, but it was too much for me to even move my mouth. I struggled, and I gasped for breath, and I thought I was going to pass out.
That’s when the Maine Coon suddenly rolled off me along the ground. Salanraja’s skin brushed against my legs, and she took back off into the air. I stood up, and I finally took an opportunity to yowl out my pain.
“You can’t kill it, Ben,” Salanraja said. “Don’t even try. Go for the crystal!”
The demon Maine Coon lifted itself up and spun around to face me again. It opened its mouth and hissed and growled as it looked up at Salanraja, who was now doing a loop-the-loop to avoid a purple flame coming from a bone dragon approaching from her side.
“The crystal, Ben!” Salanraja said.
I turned and looked at the pedestal. Astravar was facing away from me, his arms now stretched above his head. I heard the demon cat scuff the ground behind me, and I took the opportunity to run. I sprinted faster than a greyhound chasing after a lump of steak. Or at least that’s how it seemed at the time.
But the massive demon cat was close on my tail, and I had to dodge to the right to stop it barrelling into me and pinning me back to the ground. I felt the heat from it as it brushed against me, but I had too much adrenaline in me, which propelled me forwards towards my target.
There it was, in front of me, so much white light glowing from the crystal that it almost blinded me. I leapt up onto the pedestal, and I heard Astravar shout out from behind me.
“You!” he screamed.
But he was too late, because I readied a huge swipe and I knocked at the crystal with all my might. It was much steadier on its perch than it looked, and the impact sent a shudder up my paw to my shoulder that was already screaming at me from the burn. So, I used more strength than a cat could possibly have to push the heavy crystal towards the edge, putting my head, shoulder, and back into it. Eventually, it toppled to the floor, making a loud crashing sound.
It shattered, sending up shards of whatever it was made of into the air and filling the sky with a prismatic display of light.
“You did it, Bengie,” Salanraja said, and there came a great bellowing from the sky. The victory cries of not one dragon, but three.
But that’s when I noticed something was wrong. Because Astravar was nowhere to be seen, and the demon Maine Coon was sprinting to a point where a bright white light shone out of the horizon. Around me, the circle of dead demon rats had completely disappeared off the ground.
38
Out of the Portal
The Manipulators tossed their wispy heads into the sky, looking like they wanted to scream out. But they were silent, as their energy leeched out of them, and dissipated into the earth. The bone dragons also withered away in the sky, turning into flakes of what looked like black charcoal. Surprisingly, no crystals dropped out of them, nor did any crystals fall from the Manipulators onto the ground.
The portal had completely vanished as well, almost as if it had never been there at all.
“Gracious demons,” Salanraja said. “We’ve been tricked.”
“What, how?”
“That crystal you knocked out was only summoning an illusion. No time to explain. Follow now!”
Above, Olan was already heading towards that glowing spot on the horizon, and Ishtkar and Salanraja wheeled around in the sky and dived, using gravity to their advantage to catch up with the white dragon. I groaned from deep inside the belly, part of me wanting to turn around and go back to being wild again.
But we all know how that turned out last time. I needed to help my friends.
I could still see the demon Maine Coon, and so I summoned up some remaining threads of energy and sprinted right after him. My legs felt like jelly at first, and my body really wanted to give up. I panted as I went, and I pushed myself so hard that all of my muscles burned.
I arrived at a circle made of the same demon rats that I’d seen before. In fact, everything looked so similar that I realised what I’d just battled must have been a mirror duplicate of this scene. Except that there were no Manipulators. It was just Astravar and the demon Maine Coon.
There was also a massive white portal, just like the first one. Except it now had a fiery red centre to it, which rippled as I moved. It looked almost as if I was staring through a pool of water into another world. Which, in retrospect, I guess I was.
Astravar had a staff in his hand with a dark purple crystal set into the head of it. He pointed this at the crystal on the pedestal, feeding it with purple energy, which turned into white energy that fed the portal proper.
The dragons swooped down as one and tried to flame Astravar. But he just raised his staff into the air and swept it from the floor over his head in one fluid motion. A purple barrier of light blossomed out of him, and the flames met that and didn’t go any further. The dragons continued their dive, and they hit the barrier head on. They ended up bouncing off it, and all three of them struggled to recover in the sky.
Whiskers, I don’t know how the dragon riders managed to stay on their mounts. But then, I guess they had the luxury of being strapped into their saddles.
As the dragons swept around for another pass, Astravar’s voice boomed out so loudly that I thought he had one of those funny shaped devices that humans used in carnivals and the like to amplify their voice. “You are too late,” he said. “The ritual is complete, and the world will soon belong to us.”
That was when there came an intense flash of red light from the portal. It felt like the entire world burned with flame for just a moment, and I thought I was going to get scorched alive. Then, the ground shook underfoot, and a roar ten times louder than thunder filled the sky.
It all happened in less than a second, after which the red light faded, and there was the demon dragon flying out of the portal from its previous world.
It was five times the size of the dragons and had those same cracks in its skin that I’d seen on the demon Maine Coon’s body. The air around it seemed to shimmer, almost as if it was getting sucked into what burned beneath the demon dragon.
“No!” Salanraja screamed out in my head.
The dragons had turned around to face the demon, and they were already charging in once again. But the mighty demon dragon opened its mouth, and the ground trembled so violently I was knocked off of my feet. A spherical pulse of energy shot out of the dragon, looking very much like the surface of a bubble lined with veins of fire. Salanraja, Olan, and Ishtkar flew right into it, and then the energy field swept them away.
It was as if they’d just been hit by a cricket bat the size of a cloud, and soon, all three dragons became lost to sight.
A voice thundered out, so deep it sounded like that man who played the father lion in that cartoon the kid in South Wales used to love to watch. “I AM DEMON DRAGON,” it bellowed. “CONJURATION OF THE
WARLOCK ASTRAVAR. THIS WORLD SHALL SOON BE HIS.”
A little voice inside me wanted to call back, “Big deal, I’m a Bengal, descendant of the great Asian leopard cat.” But an even bigger voice told me that this creature probably wouldn’t be so impressed.
The demon dragon flew off in the direction it had knocked the other three dragons. It wasn’t travelling particularly fast, I noticed. But then it was a great lumbering beast.
I turned to Astravar, now looking down on me with his pale face and lifeless grey eyes. Like in my dream, his skin had taken on a certain blueness and had started to crack a little like an eggshell. This dark magic addiction was changing him in most unnatural ways.
I wanted to approach Astravar and at least scratch him with my long claws and show him how much I hated him. I took a step forward, but his pet demon Maine Coon, my replacement, blocked my path. It raised its back and hissed at me.
Astravar looked down at him and laughed. “Cats will always be cats,” he said. “No matter what realm I summon them from.”
“And humans will always be humans,” I replied. “Who are meant to live in servitude of cats.”
“Not in this world,” Astravar replied. “Although, it would seem that if I let it have its way, then humans would eventually let that happen. But they will never have a chance. Once this world is my own, I shall seize control of all dimensions. I don’t need the other warlocks now. I can do this alone.”
I growled at him. “What do you want of me, Astravar?” I said. “I had a good life, and you had to bring me here. You deserve to die.”
“Maybe I will one day,” Astravar said with a grin that chapped his lips, “and then I shall come back a greater being. I thought of doing the same to you. But I’m not sure you deserve it anymore. It’s a shame. I brought you here thinking you might be interested in becoming one of the most powerful beings across the dimensions. But it looks like you’re not as opportunistic as I first thought.”
A Cat's Guide to Bonding with Dragons Page 16
