The Shadow Realm

by James Galloway

  The dragon seemed startled when Tarrin used Druidic power, and it suddenly sucked in its breath.

  Tarrin tried to concentrate on what he was doing, but it seemed like hell itself blasted out of the dragon's open mouth, a withering inferno of intense fire that roared towards him. It could do him no harm, but the sight of it startled him badly, so badly that he lost his concentration. The All, still in touch with him, lost his image and his intent, picking up on the first wild thought that crossed Tarrin's mind. It was the worst thing that a Druid could have happen, to lose concentration and have the All read what was not intended. It often had disastrous results.

  The fire could not hurt him, but the physical force it exerted against him was like trying to stand in the face of a tidal wave. Tarrin was picked up off his feet and hurled backwards. That caused the first wild thought to cross his mind, an attempt to stop himself from falling back into the lava, and the All picked up this thought, puzzled on the lack of image, the lack of direction that usually accompanied a Druid's use of its power, and then simply decided to accomplish the task in a manner of its own choosing.

  Tarrin felt the power of the All blast through him like an avalanche as an enormous amount of energy used him as a conduit to the material world. Behind him, a large patch of the lava lake turned solid in the blink of an eye, a circular area nearly fifty spans across.

  Tarrin landed hard on his back on that newly cooled stone and rolled to a stop, feeling completely drained. That damned clever dragon! It felt him use Druidic magic, and had breathed that fire at him to scare him into losing his concentration! He saw it advancing on him, but the amusement was gone from its face. He felt it touch the All itself, and he realized if he didn't do something fast, it was going to do something very nasty.

  He tried again, trying to ignore the dragon. He closed his eyes, centered himself on his Druidic magic. He reached to it through the Cat, felt it make touch with him. His image was pure thought, pure need, and his intent very simple.

  The Weave is part of the All, he told himself. So I should be able to touch the Weave through the All!

  It was an idea elegant for its simplicity. Tarrin felt the All shudder at his idea, at his command, and for a moment he felt it...crawling. And then he felt it, sensed it, touched it. The power of the Weave roared up through the All like a fountain of life, and he drank it in like a man dying of thirst in the desert. The power of Sorcery filled him, being channeled through a protective sheathe of Druidic power, which insulated it from any attempt to cut him off from it. He filled himself with the power of the Weave, the power of the Goddess, a power that made him suck in his breath as his entire body exploded into Magelight, and then that Magelight formed the four-pointed star that marked a sui'kun holding power near or at his maximum.

  It was like trying to control a hurricane inside him, but he was fully aware that if he did not do something right now, the dragon was going to kill him. He opened his eyes and found that the dragon was taken aback, a look of intense concentration on its face now. He felt it use its power, sensed it as a magical attack of raw power, but of monstrous proportions. This dragon could give Triana lessons in Druidic magic! Tarrin countered with a counterspell of Sorcery, that chaotic weave of Fire, Air, Water, Divine power, and token flows of the other spheres to grant his weave the power of High Sorcery. With a primal scream, an audible declaration that he was not about to lay down and die for its benefit, Tarrin raised his free paw unleashed his weave just as the visible magic erupted from the dragon's outstretched forepaws.

  The power of the All struck the power of Sorcery, and in their meeting came a spectacular explosion of force. A gigantic broiling ball of pure energy expanded between Druid and Sorcerer, and then it detonated like a keg of gunpowder. The entire volcano rocked and shuddered, great blocks of stone dropped from the domed ceiling. Tarrin quickly shielded himself from the wave of magical fire with a shield of Air, felt it eating at the integrity of its protection as he was engulfed in the magical chaos caused by the collision of two such powerful magical forces.

  After it cleared, the air between the dragon and the Were-cat was literally alive with wild magical currents, as the two of them continued to hurl magical power at one another, trying to break the stalemate. Fist clenched so tightly around the sword that Tarrin lost feeling in his fingers, he kept drawing on the Weave through the All, feeling the exertion quickly, struggling against the stress and demands that using two orders of magic simultaneously were placing on him. Tarrin dropped the sword and put both paws out, as if using the other paw would give him more push, teeth tightly clenched as spots danced before his eyes, so fully he committed to the assault. He drew on the power of the Weave faster than the All could siphon it from the Weave, and he realized that it was just too inefficient and exhausting to do what was was doing. If only he could touch the Weave directly! But the spell the dragon placed had not lost its energy yet, and he could do nothing until it consumed its reserves and was exhausted.

  It was winning. It was winning! Tarrin felt its power push against him, crush down on him, forcing him to commit more and more just to holding it back. His concentration began to suffer, and he realized that that was what it was trying to do! It could tell that he was using Druidic magic and Sorcery at the same time, so it was again trying to disrupt his concentration. He had to break this contest, but it took everything he had to keep its power off of him. He couldn't even move!

  A flash of memory, a fight in a domed room, with a book in its center. How similar it was to this, he realized! He remembered that Demon, how it confounded him with its ability to Teleport. It--

  Why, Teleport, of course. How else would we travel?

  In an instant, the echo of how that was done touched him. It was a complicated spell, requiring more power than someone not da'shar could bring to bear.

  With a ragged scream, Tarrin redoubled his efforts and pushed against the dragon's power with all his might. He felt it give ground to him, finger by finger, little by little, until he had actually started turning the tide. But instead of presssing his advantage, Tarrin suddenly withdrew his power from the contest and turned it into the weave of Mind, Divine, Earth, Water, and Air, the flows weaving themselves together around him like a coccoon even as the dragon's power suddenly roared back at him without resistance. Tarrin finished the spell and snapped it down around him. He felt it reach out to his target area, felt tendrils of Air and Earth enclose an area on the other side of the spell--

  --and they exchanged.

  There was no flash, no sense of motion. First he was looking the dragon's power in the face, and then he was standing behind the dragon, still crouched down with his paws out, as if to push the power away. The dragon's power slammed into the rock where he'd been and destroyed it in an angry explosion of fire and flying stone. The dragon didn't sense this sudden shift in his position, and the dust and debris of the explosion would keep its attention off of him for a few critical seconds. The battle of power with the dragon had drained him, weakened him, and he needed time to recover, time for its choking spell to wane so he could touch the Weave without having to go through the All. He couldn't capitalize on his advantage quite yet. He first though to just grab the Firestaff and Teleport back into the tunnel mouth, but he remembered the poem's warning. If he died touching it with that dragon still here, then he would accomplish nothing. Not wanting to risk Summoning his sword and giving away his position, Tarrin turned and ran behind the dragon, towards the Firestaff, and then shapeshifted into cat form and hid under a large rock protrusion. Panting from exertion, he tried to regather himself, tried to buy time. He knew it was a terrible risk to be in cat form right now, for he'd given away his mobility, the only thing that would save him from the dragon's massive forepaws. But it would see him if he stayed in his normal form, and he needed the time.

  He needed time!

  Then, to his horror, the dragon spoke.

  "Clever move," it said in flawless Sha'Kar, an impressed voice
, a voice so deep that it vibrated the rock beneath his paws. "I can smell you in here, invader. Trying to delay the inevitable? Or simply buying time to recover?"

  Tarrin felt the shuddering of the rock under him. The dragon was moving, each monstrous paw coming down and shaking the island with its tremendous weight. The sound of its voice shifted as he realized it was moving its head great distances on that long, serpentine neck. "You're not invisible," it mused. "I would sense your power. You're too large to hide behind a rock. You're da'shar, so you may be hiding in the lava. It can't harm you any more than it can harm me. Yes, that would make sense. But you're also a Druid, and a very clever one at that. I never thought you'd think of something like drawing the Weave through the All. You are a worthy opponent. It's a pity I must kill you."

  The shuddering grew stronger and stronger, and he realized that the dragon had turned around, and was moving in his direction. He fought a Cat-induced impulse to flee in panic, to run and climb high, climb out of its reach. If he moved, it would see him! He hunkered down on his belly, still panting from the exertion as well as from more than a little terror, feeling very small, very vulnerable, and as if it was going to step on him at any moment.

  "Two orders of magic," it mused. "I never thought I'd see that in a biped. You must be Fae-da'Nar. Were, from the look of you, but a type of Were-kin I've never seen before. I know I took alot out of you. Using both of your magical gifts at the same time? I'm impressed you could even manage it. A Were-kin needing time to recover will always revert to his instincts, and I'd say your first instinct was to hide. So, are you cowering in your animal form in here, my worthy adversary?" it asked in a conversational voice. "Trying to recover your strength and challenge me again?"

  Tarrin felt his heart seize. It was as smart as it was powerful!

  "Say, about...here?"

  Tarrin scrambled forward just as the rock over his head was shattered into fine dust by the huge forepaw of the dragon. The shockwave it caused sent him flying, and he shapeshifted back into his base form even as he tumbled through the air. He barely managed to come down on his feet, and was off to the races, trying to get out of reach of that hundred-span long tail, a weapon that gave the dragon a reach that extended almost over the entire ring of rock. He could hear it whistling, he knew that it was coming.

  He knew that it was coming.

  Tarrin scanned both sides of him, and then he saw it. A blur of red, glowing in the light of the lava, coming from his right side. Tarrin swerved quickly to his right and Summoned his sword to him. He could see it now uncoiling, lashing out at him.

  Bracing himself with his feet, digging his claws into the rock beneath him, Tarrin turned his sword before him vertically and braced the tip of the blade against his other arm before him and locked his elbows, presenting a deadly cutting edge to that whipping tail. The dragon didn't react to his sudden change of tactics quickly enough, as it tried to raise its lashing tail over the Were-cat's sword. Tarrin was knocked to the ground with dragon blood sprayed all over him as two spans of his sword dug into the tail as it tried to go over him. The arm bracing the top of the sword was broken from the impact, and as the dragon roared in sudden pain, Tarrin grabbed the arm and wrenched it back into place, feeling a shockwave of pain.

  He grabbed his sword from where it had fallen to the ground and sprinted away, feeling refreshed enough to try to use Sorcery again.

  "Agh, damn clever!" the dragon growled. "Audo mosenthi gratta--"

  Tarrin almost fell down in shock. The dragon was casting a Wizard spell! He knew the sound of those words, he heard Kimmie mutter them all the time!

  "--montho compendus sensi ingratia!"

  Everything turned insane. The floor and the cavern walls began to undulate wildly to his eyes, the floor beneath him buckled and rolled like he was standing on the surface of a churning sea. The scents in his nose went wild as he smelled grass, then rabbits, then humans, then wood, then honey. The bubbling and hissing sounds in the cavern took on a surreal quality as they grew louder and softer, then started sounding like things that made no sense, like pans banging together, then a baby's crying, then the laughter of an old man, then the sound of wind blowing through tree branches and rustling leaves. Tarrin teetered like a drunken sailor trying to cross the deck in a hurricane, staggering this way and that as the floor tried to throw him off his feet. Only by supreme concentration and his Were agility did he keep his feet, but the assault of nonsense to his ears, eyes, and nose distracted and confused the Were-cat, nearly to the point of blind terror. Tarrin was a being completely ruled by his senses, for they defined his reality in a way that no human could comprehend. The Cat roared up into his mind in confusion, unable to make sense of the avalanche of bizarre things it was seeing, hearing, smelling, intefering with his rational mind at the worst possible time. Dimly, Tarrin realized that the dragon's spell wasn't causing reality to go crazy, it was attacking his senses.

  Fighting a wave of sudden panic, Tarrin realized that the dragon was going to use this moment of incapacity to crush him. With a speed born of pure self-preservation, Tarrin reached within, through the Cat, and the instant he felt his connection to the All, he caused it to bring forth the power of Sorcery. He wove that same spell again, Mind, Divine, Air, Water, and Earth, and wrapped it around himself. It exchanged space with an area on the far side of the cavern, to the far side of the ring of rock, so that the rock spire that had the Firestaff atop it was between them.

  A paw to his head, he shook it as he felt the Wizard magic attacking his mind, attacking his senses and feeding them nonsense. What a clever spell! Again in touch with the Weave, Tarrin killed the spell inside him by cutting its connection to the magical energy that fed it. Mercifully, the wild undulation of the ground ceased, his ears and nose cleared, and the rolling nature of what was before his eyes solidified.

  Tarrin took that brief moment to change his strategy. He couldn't fight the dragon with magic, because so long as it used its power to block his and forced him to draw Sorcery the way he was, it simply outpowered him. He couldn't use any sustained spells, like summoning an Elemental or flying or walking on the walls, because the dragon could kill his spells. That limited him to fast spells with immediate effects, things the dragon could only counter by out-thinking him, outguessing his intent. And Tarrin respected this foe enough to grant that it probably could do just that. That meant that he had to attack it physically, and use his magic in a manner that would allow him to get close enough to try to figure out a way to kill something whose vital organs were so far inside its body that his sword would never reach them. He could cut it so much that it bled to death, but that would take hours, and he wouldn't last that long.

  Wait. There was one vital organ he could reach. Its brain. It couldn't be too deep inside that huge head. Either his sword or staff should be able to reach it if he could get in a position to try to stab it in the head. Tarrin drew on his knowledge of Sapphire's anatomy as he watched the dragon's mighty head swivel around the rock spire and lock its eyes on him. Its skull would be too thick on top or in the back. Trying to go through the eye was out, it was too great a distance from the eye through the eye socket to the skull, and it could easily shake him off before he could get a weapon in that far. But if he tried attacking it upward, from inside the mouth...

  That was absolutely insane. But sometimes, crazy works.

  All he had to do was trick the dragon into trying to swallow him, and somehow avoid getting torn apart by those deadly teeth after he ended up in its mouth. Then he could recall his staff from the elsewhere and make his move. It had a greater reach, and since it was wood, Tarrin could charge it with his Druidic power and make it grow, becoming a living spear that would eventually get to its brain. But he had to do it in the thin bone between its palate and its brain, bone the staff's blunt end could penetrate with a good strong thrust. Then grow the staff out, like slowly impaling a victim on a stake, until the staff hit brain and put the dragon down.


  That may work. It was the only thing he could think of, a desperate plan for a desperate situation.

  And desperate times called for desperate actions.

  Reaching within once more, through the Cat, Tarrin came into touch with his Druidic power, joined in communion with the All. He showed it his image and let it read his intent, and it responded.

  The dragon began to slow down, more and more as it waddled along the rock towards him on all fours, until its tail seemed to drift behind it lazily, and every step became a slow ballet of ponderous movement.

  He'd used this spell before. He knew what kind of a toll it was going to take on him, and he knew he could only hold it for a few moments at the very most. He raced towards the dragon with a speed that, to it, would be absolutely unbelievable, a blur of black on the dark stone that moved like living lightning. That would be its perception. To Tarrin, it moved with an almost ridiculous slowness. Bubbles of lava popped languidly, throwing blobs of lava through the air that were almost pretty as they drifted along in the air, slowly changing their shape, and all sound had taken on a deep, basslike quality, a rumbling slowness that his ears had trouble comprehending.

  Tarrin blazed right by the dragon, evading a smashing forepaw with such ridiculous ease that he could have gone down on all fours and crawled out of its path. He raced behind it and picked up his sword, then turned and darted right back at it, as he saw its comprehending expression slowly bloom on its face. It was a Druid, so it probably understood the nature of the spell, and it also probably knew that all it had to do was stall him until the demands of the spell forced him to release it. It tried to back away from him, but now Tarrin had the advantage, slashing at its ankle on its back right leg as it put its weight down on it, trying to sever tendons. The sword caused an eruption of blood that boiled lazily out from between scarlet scales, not spraying out fast enough to touch him as he whizzed by. He turned and bore down on the other back leg, in the air and moving back towards the inner lava pool. The dragon was going to try to get into the pool, where Tarrin's sudden speed and agility would do him no good.