by HDA Roberts
I nodded. "The control creature.”
"Correct. The intelligence, the strategist, the General. Their most potent weapon, but that’s not all. It has a hundred leagues in every direction locked down against Transportation Magic, it was designed that way, to be the perfect weapon against my people, not that it needed to be, we... I did that damage myself, by putting up the Great Barrier. Goddess, we were such fools! I can't believe we hamstrung ourselves like that!"
"Everyone makes mistakes," I replied.
I couldn’t think of anything else to say to her. What can you say to someone carrying that sort of weight on their shoulders?
"Quite,” she replied gruffly. “Evelina is a thousand leagues away from here, but I can get you close; to the edge of the Prime’s disruption. You'll have to get the rest of the way yourself, and you’re the only one that can do it in time. Not even I could get there before it would all be over, one way or another.”
She waved a hand and a huge table appeared in front of her, covered with maps weighed down by intricately carved pieces of metal. She gestured me over.
The map was of the whole Unseelie Realm. To my knowledge, this was something nobody from Earth had ever seen before. If I was reading it right, there was a single medium sized continent in the middle, about the size of Australia, with thousands of smaller lands around it, none much larger than France and most much smaller. It looked like there had once been a single, huge continent that someone had shattered like a pane of glass.
"We're here," Adriata said, pointing at the centre of the big continent, no surprises there, "Evelina is here," she continued, pointing at a vaguely sausage-shaped stretch of land about the size of New Zealand.
She pulled a more detailed map off a stack. Evelina’s island was covered in hills and mountains except for small patches of forest and the cliffs that made up the entirety of the coastline. The marking said Tyr-Sora. Both the land and the fortress named with the same suffix? Saved confusion, I supposed.
I noticed that this new map was stained and warped, like water had fallen on it. Tears, if I had to guess. I could only imagine the despair Adriata must have experienced, having to watch her civilisation fall because she'd closed off her lands from help. It must have been hell. And then to know that your daughter would go the same way, for the same reasons... it was a miracle she was still sane. I'm not sure I would have been.
"Del-Sora is here, on the southern cliffs above the only workable port," she said, pointing out the features I'd seen in my dreams. "I will send you here."
She pointed at a stretch of cliff, about four hundred miles to the west of the fortress, if I understood the scale properly.
"That's a ways off. It'll take me hours to cover that distance," I warned her.
"From what my Scryers have told me, you should have some time, just don't tarry. All you need to do is keep the cliffs beneath you and the sea to your right; you'll find her."
She stood, her expression concerned, "I don't know if you can beat the thing that's besieging her, Graves. It is very powerful, especially with the poor damned souls it's consumed. And even if you can defeat it, I don’t know if you’ll have enough left to stop the Soul-eater army with it."
I smiled, "Don't count me out, your Majesty. I'm highly motivated."
“Yes, I suppose you are. You’d rather have to be to breach a Dimensional Barrier and drop into the middle of a war.”
I shrugged.
“And I didn’t even think you’d survive the soul extraction!” she said with a smile, turning back towards me. “Continue to surprise me, Graves.”
I nodded, "If it's within my power, I'll bring her home safe, I promise."
"I believe you. And I believe you'd die before you failed."
I nodded firmly.
"Good.”
She turned back to the railing and the golden army beyond.
“While you’re away, I suppose I should go and have a word with the flower children. They're largely useless, but the dragons might make a small dent in the enemy."
Her words were crass, but there was true gratitude in her eyes as she surveyed her counterpart's soldiers lining up in large blocks. The dragons shook themselves off and lined up behind the infantry. It was a terrifying force; Fairy Magic was everywhere, saturating the weapons, the armour, the mounts...
Added to Adriata’s own troops, Elora’s army might well turn the tide, especially with their manoeuvrability restored.
Though that was assuming the Prime didn’t arrive and turn the tide right back in the other direction...
Adriata stepped in close to me, drawing my attention back to her.
She looked me right in the eyes.
"I will say this once, and then deny that it ever came out of my mouth, understand?"
I nodded warily.
"Thank you," she said softly.
She touched my shoulder and I vanished.
Chapter 37
I staggered out of her Teleport... and nearly went over a cliff.
I got a sudden rush of vertigo and lurched away from the edge, my heart pounding.
"Jesus!" I cursed after I got my feet back under me.
Damn but that was a long way down!
I imagine I could have caught myself before I hit the bottom, but I did have butter-fingers...
I shuddered at the thought. Oh, how I hated Teleportation. At least with a Portal you got to do your own walking and could look where you were going. Teleports just bent dimensions around you and let you fend for yourself on the other side.
I shook off the momentary jolt and took a brief look around to see if I recognised anything. I didn’t. The landscape desolate, nothing but monolithic cliffs and scattered rocks as far as I could see. It was still beautiful in its untamed way, but would it have killed someone to plant a shrub? The air was cool, almost cold, with the sun just starting to peek over the horizon. The smell of salt in the air was oddly calming, soothing my worries just a little bit.
With little time to waste, I checked my compass one more time and turned eastwards. I paused long enough to think about just how fast I might be able to go, and then I conjured another Shadow Cocoon. It pulled me into the air, and I soon started to pick up speed.
I quickly hit at least a hundred miles an hour.
That was fast, but not fast enough for me. I put more power into my cocoon and soon reached over two hundred... then three and beyond. The air behind me exploded with sound as I breached the sound barrier and still kept accelerating. My cocoon started to shudder under the buffeting of the air, which slowed me down. I linked to the atmosphere around me and parted the air in front of my cocoon with my Will, guiding the flow around my construct. The drag vanished and I pushed myself to ever higher speeds.
I’d been afraid that I’d take hours to arrive, but the fortress appeared as a dot on the horizon no more than half an hour after I’d taken off. I had really underestimated the speeds I could achieve when properly motivated.
I increased my altitude a bit so that I could get a good look at what was going on before deciding what to do.
I let out a sigh of relief as I saw Evelina’s shield still in place, though it was considerably more damaged than I’d expected it to be, just going by what I’d heard Evelina say when she’d cast it. If not quite on the verge of collapse, it was getting there, with maybe an hour or two left before it failed.
The Prime hadn’t moved since I’d seen it in my dream, still generating that dreadful beam, but there were now two massive shards of rock protruding from the ground either side of it. If I’d had to guess, I’d have said they were in position to fall across the chasm and provide makeshift bridges for the Hyde army to cross once the shield was down and a few more sections of wall had been breached.
I was approaching horrifically fast, which gave me only a small window of opportunity to think of something to do with my element of surprise. I couldn’t just orbit while I thought of something clever; the sonic booms I’d generated were r
ight behind me and would give the game away.
My real problem was the Hyde Prime. It was enormously powerful, and I needed to take it out of the running fast, so I could focus on the army without worrying about taking a siege-beam to the back.
I decided on a Shadow Lance. This was a nasty little attack Spell that took a Shadow and turned it into a projectile, Enchanting it so that it burrowed into the target, expanding and creating more Shadows before detonating spectacularly.
Normally I'd use a chunk of Shadow big enough to fit in my hand. Against an unshielded target, that was more than enough to make an explosion roughly comparable to a block of plastic explosive.
But, seeing as how I was dealing with a world-ending monster, I decided to use my whole cocoon.
It didn't take long to finish the cast, a few seconds, but that was all I had left before I was at the edge of the Hyde encampment. The cocoon started to glow and flicker, full of violent power. I slipped out the back, held aloft by my Will, and sent the cocoon firmly on its way even as I started decelerating.
Even with absolutely no warning, no way of knowing that something was coming, that damned monster still managed to dodge a two-metre wide attack Spell.
It skittered to one side at the very last instant, and the cocoon hit the ground a few feet away from it, but without so much as grazing the abomination.
One of the most powerful attack Spells I’d ever cast, backed up by the element of surprise, and I hadn’t even nicked the target.
It still hit the ground, though.
I hadn’t realised the full implications of this before I cast the thing, but the impact damage of an object travelling at about seven hundred miles an hour, packed full of destructive Magic and given pseudo-mass through yet more Magic, was not something that could be as easily avoided as the object itself.
Fifty metres of cliff either side of the impact site disintegrated in a colossal explosion that threw up a great cloud of dust, debris, body parts and shards of still-energetic Shadow. Hundreds of tons of rock collapsed towards the water below, taking the two rock-bridges with them, along with dozens of Hyde monsters... including the Prime.
I felt the Prime’s Magical Signature flaring as it fell, exerting its Will to arrest its descent and fend off the small avalanche that was dragging it down, but it was having real trouble.
Of all the Hyde to be caught in the impact, the Prime was the only one to survive (it just figures...). The rest had been smashed by the shockwave, which had been more than sufficient to kill them all on the spot. Many were simply torn apart, with limbs and chunks of reanimated flesh flying everywhere, but then the scattered shards of the Shadow Lance detonated and the carnage took on another dimension.
That single attack had destroyed the better part of four hundred Hyde. A drop in the ocean when compared to the thirty thousand or so that remained, but it was a good start.
To my great annoyance, though, the Prime had already managed to halt its descent and was angling itself away from the falling debris. It would be back atop the cliffs within moments.
Damn it.
The idea had been to take out the Prime quickly so that it couldn’t interfere with me while I either drove the army away or destroyed it outright, but if I had to actually fight the thing, then the army could be a rather dangerous distraction. It wasn’t that any of them were an actual danger to me, not if I kept out of arm’s reach and a solid set of shields in the way, but if I ended up on the ground somehow, then enough of them piling on might actually make a dent, or hold me in place long enough to take a siege beam to the face.
So, the army would now have to be distracted before I took on the Prime.
And if arranging that distraction could also delay the Prime’s return, so much the better...
That gave me an idea.
I slid to a halt in the air between the Hyde camp and the forest, making sure that I was facing towards where the Prime would come up so that it couldn’t surprise me.
I worked as quickly as I could, painfully aware of how little time I had.
I linked to the air and water above me and started pouring Magic and Will into the atmosphere. It was sloppy work, and messy, but it was fast. Besides, a little less precision was actually better for what I had in mind.
Within seconds there was a great bank of black cloud above my head, flashing and pregnant with lightning.
The world seemed to hold its breath as the last of the energies I’d called gathered themselves...
And then I let them go.
I can barely describe the carnage of those first few moments.
It was like the sky had started to roar in a terrible fury. Lightning smashed into the tightly packed ranks of the Hyde in a horrifying barrage. Dozens, then hundreds of bolts blasted into them, carving craters into the rock below and arching into other Hyde nearby.
Thousands of monsters were blasted off their mismatched feet as great channels of electricity arced from one to another to another in an immense flaring wave of charring death.
That was impressive enough, but it was merely the prelude to the dozen twisters that touched down amid the wreckage of the lightning strikes.
The funnels of air gathered up the smaller creatures into them, swirling them around in among thousands of shards of razor-sharp ice. Any monster that touched the twisters were torn apart, their blood, bones and flesh tossed around the battlefield like grizzly rain; even the large ones couldn’t escape, simply peeled open where they stood, rendered into piles of red and black mush.
I made sure to send a couple of twisters the Prime’s way as well. I didn’t expect them to even scratch the monster, and they didn’t, but they did divert it and bought me time to continue my grim work.
The Hyde started to run, though it wasn’t because they were afraid. The things couldn’t feel emotion, neither could they feel pain. They just understood that they were facing something they had no defence against, and it simply made sense to seek cover and come back later.
I suppose I could have just let them go. I’d done what I’d set out to do, get the army out of the way. But every Hyde I left intact was one that some other poor soul would have to hunt down later.
I checked on the Prime. It was having a bit of trouble evading those twisters, so I had a little extra time.
I decided to use it.
Converting pure Magic into raw energy gave me heat, light and kinetic energy to burn, and I spent it throwing Plasma Balls, Laser Lances and Kinetic Waves into the fleeing masses of Hyde creatures. It wasn’t a battle, it wasn’t even a slaughter; it was a harvest, with every Spell claiming dozens if not hundreds of reanimated monsters.
I played with gravity and crushed their bones, I drew the chemical energy from dozens at a time, leaving them dead husks, and used that to dissolve dozens more... I burned and electrocuted, sliced and slew. I swept hundreds off the cliffs and sent boulders into the few remaining packed formations... it was brutal.
But I couldn’t stop.
And, if I’m honest, I didn’t want to.
Another trick occurred to me, and I gathered all the sound from the rushing wind and the exploding thunder. The world went eerily silent for several long seconds, and then I hurled all that sound at the middle of the largest remaining concentration of monsters, where about a thousand Hyde were clustered around fifty of their giants. They’d gathered for shelter against the wind, hanging on to the bigger ones to avoid being swept away. Half of the giants were already ‘dead’, slumped over and unmoving, but they were still heavy enough to keep the others on the ground.
My Sound Bomb would have happily knocked over a castle. What it did to the packed ranks of Hyde was astonishing... and dreadful. It was like a fountain of gore sprouted in the middle of the plateau between Del-Sora and the woods. It was sickening, and yet fascinating in a macabre sort of way. A passing twister snatched the blood and mangled flesh away and sprayed them over the remaining Hyde as they ran for their un-lives.
It was q
uite the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen in my life, and if I’d eaten anything recently, it would have been heading for the blood-soaked ground even as I prepared my next Spell.
I wanted to stop, now, but I still couldn’t. There were just too many left.
But at least the numbers were low enough that I could probably get rid of the rest in one go, now.
I shuddered and called my Shadows, creating a great, oval wall around the remains of the army. I made sure that it was high enough to keep even the giant Hyde from escaping. When I was sure that it was solid, I nudged the lightning and the twisters towards the middle of the contained area and started driving the surviving Hyde towards the wall.
After everything I’d put the army through, there weren't more than five thousand Hyde left. Some were giants, but most of the survivors were the medium-sized ones. They were either heavy enough to avoid being blown away or strong enough to anchor themselves to the ground. Most of them were injured, more than a third were damaged enough that they would probably have lost their animating energy in short order, but the rest were still combat capable, and could still be dangerous if allowed to escape.
Before long, they’d all gathered at the edge of the barrier I'd created. With a little effort, I added barbs and spikes to the wall, damaging any that were too close, and the rest soon recoiled.
They didn’t get very far, though.
With a deep breath and a sigh of grim resignation, I let that whole, massive, spiked construct fall forward like a hammer. There was what sounded like a single, massive squelchy thump, and the last of the Hyde army was squashed flat, crushed and speared to the ground, destroyed utterly.
I looked around, checking to make sure I'd gotten them all.
There were none left. Not a single active Hyde remained on the plateau. Aside from where my wall had fallen over, there weren’t even that many parts left. That was a small mercy, at least; I hadn’t wanted to see any more of that.
The wind and clouds started to peter out as I released the Magic and I let out a breath as I turned towards the last place I’d seen the Prime.
