by JD Cole
“Mom, Sorvir!” Kelli cried. She turned back to the King. “What do you want?” her voice quivered.
“I admit,” his deep voice growled, sounding nothing like her father, “I enjoy the endless wars between myself and the sprites. If I can’t erase them from the world, I can take pleasure in causing them pain and sorrow. It makes me smile when their allies suffer.” Slowly, he continued moving toward her. “But this,” he motioned his hand back and forth between himself and Kelli, “is not a game. It is not about pleasure or revenge. It is not personal, it is survival. I felt your rage when you eradicated those insects.”
Kelli had all but forgotten about that. “I didn’t mean to,” she shook her head regretfully.
“But the day will come when you do mean to. You simply cannot be allowed to exist. The birthright does not belong to you.”
“I never asked for it!” Kelli protested.
Ercianodhon stopped, snorted, then began laughing.
“What? What’s so funny?”
“Of all the excuses you could have used,” he shook his head, and began slowly walking forward again. Each step seemed to cause him a great deal of strain.
A long-forgotten memory surfaced for Kelli then, a horrific scene she had witnessed years ago, when this shi’un first began. “You didn’t ask for it, either,” she whispered.
Ercianodhon stopped again. “What did you say?”
“I saw it.” Kelli stared at the ground. “I saw it when you were born. Sorvir told me who your father is. And he told me what they did to you. I understand why you hate—”
“You understand NOTHING!” the King roared. His eyes glowed red, and Kelli screamed as decades of Ercianodhon’s early life were forced into her mind in a split second. The Sprite Queen collapsed, sobbing and shivering uncontrollably, and screaming when she had the breath to.
Tom’s ghost form took in a deep breath, falling backwards and landing on his backside where he remained sitting, obviously drained after casting powerful magic to defeat Kelli’s yet-untrained defenses. He reached up to hold his throbbing head. “Now you understand,” he groaned, “just how little you understand.” He raised his arm, curling his fingers like a claw and twisting, weaving a final curse on her blood. It wouldn’t be long now; the Sprite Queen would die, and the danger would be over.
It’s ironic, he thought as he began poisoning Kelli’s life force with necrotic magic, I’m saving my enemies from their own weapon.
“GYAAAAHH!”
Ercianodhon frowned as he watched the Sprite Queen struggling to rise from where she lay. Her slender arms shook under the effort of pushing herself up, and tears were still streaming from her eyes, but somehow she was defying his attacks. The King tilted his head in curiosity, but concentrated on weaving the curse. A mistake now could undo everything he’d succeeded in so far, and he wasn’t concerned about any defiance on her part. She had no idea how to protect herself from necromancy.
With great effort, Kelli managed to get up on her hands and knees, then planted one of her feet firmly on the “ground”. She looked up at Ercianodhon, racking with shuddering breaths. But her eyes glowed a magnificent jade as she stared at him. “I don’t hate you,” she said, shaking and gasping as she managed to stand, if hunched over.
“I don’t care,” he answered, his fingers continuing to pluck and twist at unseen strings.
“Just please… don’t hurt my dad.”
“It’s much too late for that.”
Kelli’s breath caught in her throat. “Dad?” she whispered.
“He isn’t dead yet, but he will die the moment you do. Perhaps that will give you a measure of comfort.”
Kelli cried out in anguish once more, falling to her hands and knees, shaking her head and trying to clear her mind of the trauma she’d just experienced. Every raw emotion Ercianodhon had felt during his formative years had torn through her soul in a moment. An image from his memory suddenly stunned her, and her gaze shot forward once more, shock plastered on her face. “The Chek’than! You were a Chek’than prisoner!”
Now it was Ercianodhon whose breath caught in his chest, and he only just managed to keep focus on the curse. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the blood strands he’d traced from Tom to Kelli. After what seemed like hours, he was calm enough to respond. “How do you know about… those creatures?”
Kelli was lying on her stomach again, only strong enough to raise herself up on one elbow as her breathing came harder and harder. “They… they took me, too. They tried to kill me to steal the birthright.”
“You… they captured you? They tortured you?”
“Yes…” Kelli whimpered. “How did… how did you escape? How did you get home?”
Ercianodhon blankly stared ahead, remembering. “I ate them.” Shaking his head back into the present, he took stock of the queen. She didn’t have long now, and strangely, he found himself wanting to take advantage of this morbid companionship. He had stolen this shi’un dream from the queen, but could not create one himself; there were many sprite talents that he had not inherited. It was rare that he could talk to someone while being so near to them like this —not through a goblin. In his presence, people mostly just died screaming.
He stood and walked over to her. Kelli struggled to look up at him as he squat down before her. Tom’s hand reached out and stopped, hesitating. Then Ercianodhon gently pressed his palm to her cheek. “You’re so warm,” he said.
Kelli’s sobs had ceased as her strength left her, but a few lazy tears still rolled from her eyes. “Have you ever been able to touch anyone?”
“Of course. But they die and grow cold almost immediately.” His hand stroked her face and her hair. “It’s odd to just feel warmth.”
“Did you really… eat the aliens?”
Ercianodhon sat and gently pulled the Queen up, holding her in his arms. “I did. Would you like to see the day I escaped, and how I got home?” he heard himself ask her.
Weakly, she nodded. The Goblin King also nodded, and spared some of his concentration to remember once more. “This might not work,” the King said. “These memories are not in the earth, they’re only in me.”
Kelli sat in her “dad’s” arms for what seemed an hour as he worked on modifying the shi’un spell when suddenly, she found herself on what could only have been an alien spaceship, in a large surgical-looking room. The image was not clear; various parts of the setting were continually scrambling, fading, and incompletely reforming as the shi’un tried to build scenes based on Ercianodhon’s first-person recollection. Strapped to a table at the far end of the room, the young Goblin King wailed and struggled against his restraints as machines of nightmarish purpose carved and prodded at him. There were bloody stumps on his shoulders where his wings should have been, and his lower jaw was missing. Despite her weakness, Kelli shrieked at the sight, burying her face in Ercianodhon’s chest.
“Please, I don’t want to see this!”
“Is it the gore that bothers you, or my suffering?” he asked.
“Both! Nobody deserves that!”
“The sprites caused this.”
“I know.” She kept her face buried, but could not block out the screaming, or the sick sound of flesh being torn and ripped.
The Goblin King watched his much-younger self being tortured on the table, studied by creatures clearly fascinated by his regenerative powers. For maybe the first time, he found the memory almost tolerable; he could not recall ever thinking of these moments without being overcome by both terror and rage. Somehow, holding the Queen and hearing her voice seemed to keep him calm. It was… pleasant in a way. His hatred for her and her family was in no way softened, but he could appreciate the novelty of this experience.
“Can you ever forgive them?” she asked. “The sprites?”
“I will never forgive them. Or you.”
“I didn’t-”
“You are Moniscii,” he cut her off without raising his voice. “And you are human. You are m
ore than capable of doing that,” he pointed at the torture table, “to me again.”
Kelli shook her head. “Never.”
“Hrmp.”
“But, there’s something you don’t realize.”
“What is that, child?”
“If you kill me, it’s a guarantee that what you fear is totally going to happen to you.”
“Oh? There’s no saving you now, but please, enlighten me.”
Kelli froze for a moment at his words. I’m… I’m gonna die?
More tears managed to escape her eyes, but then she closed them and took a deep breath. No. I am NOT giving up. Too many people need me! So suck it up and stick to the plan!
“Oh!” the Goblin King exclaimed. “This is it! This is the moment I made them pay.”
Kelli watched as one of the Chek’than machines, a four-legged monstrosity with six arms tipped with various instruments, walked over to another, larger machine floating nearby. The floating machine was tubular with a single arm, and had what looked like an open cavity near the top. The legged machine stopped before it, and opened a hatch on its back, where a green cloud began rising and moving toward the opening in the floating machine.
The young Goblin King was being ignored at this moment. His restraints were completely useless as his limbs had all been severed at different points, the pieces taken and stored in containers that had been moved elsewhere. The black half-Dragon flopped off of the table, using one partial-leg and one partial-arm to crawl quickly over to where the Chek’than was changing bodies. Ercianodhon’s disfigured mouth screeched hatred, his eyes blazing red light. The green cloud almost seemed to begin struggling, but with another screech that almost became a roar, the crippled Goblin King somehow pulled the cloud toward himself, inhaling and swallowing the gas. Ercianodhon’s bright red blood suddenly began to glow orange, and an orange mist began surrounding his wounds.
The other two Chek’than machines immediately attacked him. He flipped onto his back, and the empty legged-machine behind him suddenly came to life and launched itself at the other two, viciously carving and stabbing with its appendages.
Kelli’s eyes locked onto the scene. He can control their machines!
Both of the other machines, similar to the first, suffered damage that exposed the chambers housing the Chek’than clouds. Once again, Ercianodhon screamed at them, flipping onto his stomach to crawl into their midst. The vaporous Chek’than began leaking from the punctured machines, pulled toward the Goblin King who sought to devour them as he had their companion.
Moments later it was all over. The scene faded as young Ercianodhon lost consciousness on the floor, his necromancy somehow assimilating the lifeforce of the Chek’than monsters.
“I obviously don’t recall much after this point. There were other creatures on that ship, they must have dumped my body after seeing what I’d done. For some reason they launched me back towards Earth. I know you experienced my memory of what it was like for me to crash back to our world from outer space, after burning down to almost nothing. But consuming those… things… it somehow gave me bits and pieces of their knowledge. I even get flashes in my mind of their home, what their people are like…” he drifted off in thought.
The moment Sorvir and Vanessa had vanished, Kelli had clung to her cousin’s words: Remember what I’ve learned. Shi’un memories may fade when one woke up… but she was still very much present in the dream world, and very much remembered the years of lessons she’d undertaken.
“I didn’t get to finish,” she said.
“Hmm? Oh, yes, my impending doom, a plea to keep me from killing you?”
“When my husband gets home, he’s gonna hate you more than you could ever hate me. I know, because I wouldn’t be able to help myself either, I would hate anyone who killed my Ben, and I’d kill them, even if they were immortal I would kill them over and over again.”
He looked down at her. “Ben? That’s an odd name for a sprite.”
She looked up at him, sadness in her eyes. “He’s a Dragon.”
Ercianodhon frowned. “That’s ridiculous. The sprites would never allow such a union.”
“Ben and I fell in love before we ever knew sprites or Dragons existed. He’s out in space right now, looking for the Chek’than to make sure they can’t hurt me or anyone on Earth again. But someday he’s going to come back. And nothing can help you when he finds out what you’ve done.”
“You’re no sprite. You’re lying. Humans lie.”
“Do you want to see?”
The Goblin King felt her trying to take control of the shi’un. In her state, it would be impossible to defeat his hold on the dream, but he allowed it. Kelli recreated the same scene she’d shown to Sorvir and her mother, but began at an earlier moment. She called up the confrontation between Bennett and Krin Ahgl, where Bennett’s uncle had been angry about Kelli learning of his quest to travel the stars seeking ways to defeat the Chek’than.
Ercianodhon’s eyes widened when Ben assumed his Dragon form. “Daknanyx!”
The shi’un followed Kelli and Ben into the forest, but this time she did not end it, allowing the memory of her first night as Ben’s wife to show Ercianodhon the power of their union. The physical and emotional turmoil she was drowning in made her privacy seem not so important, not when she was trying to make a point. Seeing it for the first time herself, she was surprised at the massive shockwave of clashing magic, and wondered how she hadn’t noticed it back then. She forced all further thoughts about it from her mind, for they only led to Sorvir’s warning: sprites and Dragons cannot be together.
And the creature holding her now made a very powerful case for why.
The Goblin King had been holding her firmly, but his arm was now slack, and the dread on his face could not be hidden. “This… cannot be…”
At that moment, Kelli found the opening she’d been waiting for.
« CHAPTER 22 >>
Dungeons & Mechas
Both teams were ready. Derek’s concealment magic was as good as it was going to get before they launched the rescue, and final preparations were being made. The faery planners were handling most of the logistics, which gave the soldiers all a bit of time to mingle.
“The toughest opponents, huh?” Jezrimeli said. “Skill and experience can make any creature deadly, but without a doubt you’ll need to have your wits about you when vampyres are around.”
Samantha looked over Taryn, who was talking to Lumina. “Like that bloke?”
“Yup. And yeah, a lot of them are that good-looking,” the zerivade winked.
Samantha did not avert her gaze when Taryn noticed her looking. True, the gray skin and pupil-less eyes were kind of weird, but he was by no means unattractive. Besides, by human standards, she herself was weird-looking. The vampyre wizard smiled kindly at her, and Jezrimeli nudged her shoulder.
“Ayayay, wait til after the war, eh?” the sprye chuckled.
Samantha laughed. “Trust me, I’d prefer to focus on surviving first, okay? So, hand-to-hand combat is the standard thing here, not like my world. Maybe we should spar a bit so I can get a feel for what we might face?”
“I’m game, but really I’m not representative what we might be facing,” Jezrimeli said, leading Samantha out to an empty area of the stage. Her sparse armor laid in a pile nearby, but for now she was wearing a loose black tunic over a green and white long-sleeve shirt made of soft leather. Her pants were made of the same leather, but colored black, and she wore a short loinskirt made of thicker leather over it. “If you can hold your own against me, I don’t think we need to worry much about what kind of opponents we meet. My worry is the number of them, and their sorcerers. Well then, shall we?” She spread her arms in challenge, then looked over at the rest of her team. “You guys should probably join in, too, those of you who aren’t mages. If we’re to be a squad, there’s no quicker way to establish a relationship than beating the cidowa out of each other and getting anta-borviz’d afterward.”
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br /> The sprites present frowned and shook their heads at the zerivade’s disgustingly coarse language.
Samantha reached up to her shoulders and pulled the clamps that released her ammo pack. She pulled it free and gingerly placed it on the ground, along with the attached pistols, then stepped into the imaginary ring. The elf rangers and Paladins joined her, all of them discarding their weapons.
Julian scratched his blonde hair. “Is this normal?” he asked Lumina.
“It probably is, for the zerivade.” Lumina rolled his shoulders and cricked his neck, meeting Jezrimeli’s eyes. “I am hoping you expect us to work together against you, rather than make this a free-for-all?” He grinned. “Otherwise I shall forfeit now and watch the youngsters take their beating.”
Jezrimeli responded with only a devilish grin. By now, the members of the assault team had come closer to watch, and the Hood stood with them. “Won’t you join us, Master Hood?” she asked.
“It’s more valuable for me to watch. I might see things the rest of you miss.”
The zerivade shook her head and clucked her tongue. “That just isn’t an option!” With blinding speed she launched past everyone at the vigilante. He parried her fist while simultaneously shooting his knee at her inner thigh, but the sprye deftly curled her leg to deflect him. Three more of her punches and five kicks failed to land, the Hood proving to be almost as nimble as a vyzen soldier. Beyond that first counter-attack, he made no attempt to strike her as she assaulted him for several moments more. Finally catching him in an elbow-lock, she lifted him entirely and tried to flip the Hood onto his back.
At the height of her throw however, where his body was almost level with her head, he slipped his wrist free and managed to clamp his fingers around her wrist, then jammed one foot firmly against her shoulder. He immediately twisted the rest of his body, bringing his other leg around to curl the back of his knee behind her neck, trapping her head between his thigh and his calf. Having captured her, he swept his other foot from her shoulder down toward the ground, changing his trajectory from her throw into something he had more control over.
