Dark Lord's Wedding

by A. E. Marling

  “A kiss completes the ritual,” Guile said.

  Tethiel’s lips had already met hers. Gasps and shouts crashed over them, the Talon’s the loudest. Cheers from the guests rang in her ears. Her lips tingled; her face buzzed; her body throbbed. Dreams ignited with her.

  She opened her mouth to finish the pact. Their blood mingled in the kiss. His tasted of sharpened iron and burnt coffee. The warmth of it surprised her. Excellent! She could anticipate most anything but still be astounded. Their tongues brushed, and a jolt surged down Hiresha’s neck, all the way through her spinal vertebrae to her tailbone. She shifted in a manner some might call squirming, yet none would see it beneath her armor.

  “I now pronounce you partners.” Guile spoke the words then disappeared.

  Tethiel broke away. They had kissed too long, and the time had been too short. He tapped the dawnstone on his breastplate. “Why should I fear this? To wed is always to risk dying of happiness.”

  “Not until I say so, Tethiel. I will include you in my every plan.”

  He grasped her hand, and their gauntlets fit together, claw fingers jutting to either side. “Hiresha, you’ve fulfilled my greatest nightmares.”

  Bits of the broken seals pattered around them. The guests were throwing the clay crumbs and whooping. They stomped and leaped over the corsair as it drifted around the tower. The blood moon slid away, and now above the spire glowed a new redness. It shimmered from the north, brighter than any star.

  Hiresha’s body thudded with heat. The smallest blood vessels in her hands were bursting with the power rushing inside her. She couldn’t waste a second. She needed to channel the momentum of the marriage.

  “Bring me my lotus seeds,” she said.

  Hiresha willed the dragon to fly the ship over the river, further from the new light in the north. The fog hid all sight of the Gargantuan, yet it would be due southwest of this tower.

  Servants presented a chest emblazoned with lotus seeds pods. It opened at her touch. Inside glittered amethyst dust she had added for effect along with dark seeds. They pooled into her cupped hands.

  “We celebrate our marriage by spreading new life.” Hiresha hurled the seeds off the corsair. They dropped into the opacity of the mists. “The purple lotus will bloom across all the lands.”

  Tethiel threw fistfuls after hers.

  “It will spread until all the world knows of our union. As the purple lotus flourishes in waterways, it will kill off leeches. The pests’ sleeping sickness will go extinct, and people will rejoice.”

  How remarkable to consider the degree of change which would come from one chest of seeds, along with months of design, and a lifetime of expertise. A new heat spread over the back of her neck. She threw the last handful of seeds. When Tethiel reached in, he pulled out a brooch of an amethyst lotus.

  Hiresha plucked the jewelry from his hands and turned to the guests. “The purple lotus will benefit your people, and this commemorative jewelry will aid one of you in particular. Its enchantment will grant eternal life.”

  The Mimic bowed his head against the deck before her. “It’d be an honor to serve you to the end of time.”

  Hiresha tsked and waved him back. “All of you, stand together. I’ll throw and give everyone a fair chance at the catch.”

  The guests eyed each other’s sharpened blades, venomous claws, and crushing fangs. They edged closer.

  “Ha ha! As if I’d leave any decision to chance.” Hiresha wagged the brooch at them. “No, of course I’ll choose who most deserves to wear the First Lotus.”

  The amethyst petals hid a green sapphire, in which was locked the richness of the enchantment’s complexity. It pulsed within, while the exterior of the jewelry reflected two spots of light, one from the moon, one from the north. Above the horizon arched something that resembled a red comet, only it wriggled closer.

  This could bode ill.

  Hiresha anticipated she had little time. She strode past the razor feathers of Celaise and lifted the jewel to the Green Blood philosopher. “I present the First Lotus to Saul, for their assistance in developing poisons to inhibit the common leech.”

  The purple jewelry was most becoming clasped in their emerald-hued fingers. Saul said, “The true reward is a content soul.”

  “And your soul will live longer in this body because of your worthy actions.” Hiresha glanced at the new light and had to squint. It outshone the moon.

  “Pah!” Ix spat a glob of fluorescence onto the deck. “Saul still can’t outlive me.”

  “Then you must earn the First Lotus next year,” Hiresha said. Sweat streamed underneath her armor. “Every anniversary, I’ll award it to whoever pleases me best. Endeavors made for me will never age you.”

  “The Lotus should’ve gone to me,” Elbe said. She clapped her hand over her mouth, and she blinked off one of her butterfly lashes. The Purest had astonished herself as well as Hiresha. Elbe had spoken in haste. Half of her face was tinted red from the incoming brightness.

  Elbe began turning toward the light. She slid one foot, and then she leaped around, all poise deserting her. Gone was her composure. She even panted.

  Hiresha did too. Her chest heaved in and out in time with the pulse of the northern light. It came with a growing rumble, a nearing growl of wings, and a rolling thunder. Thrum! Thrum!

  The sky blazed to the north. This was not the sun Hiresha knew.

  Thrum! Thrum!

  “He comes.” The Talon stumbled forward, stabbing himself with every step. Blood trailed from his knife as he spread his arms wide in welcome. “He’s scented our sacrifices, heard our screams. The dawn of dawns, the Winged Flame.”

  PART

  IV

  “He is Abandon.” The Talon jumped onto the railing. He teetered as the corsair banked from the Winged Flame.

  Thrum! Thrum!

  The dragon god burned away the mists. The whiteness parted over the city. Shouts rang out. Trapdoors banged open, and people carried firefly lanterns up to their roofs. Hiresha couldn’t imagine anyone needed the light. The red luster of the blue dragon reflected to an impossible degree. Even squinting at it started a sparkstorm in Hiresha’s head. Her heart pounded at headache speed.

  “I have contingency plans,” Hiresha said. “We fly upriver. Dress the sails.”

  A few of the servers tugged at the ropes. More had thrown themselves to their knees. The Talon was yelling at them to bleed themselves. His jaw locked at Hiresha’s command.

  “Quiet. Now, the sails.”

  The servers jumped to help, yet they pulled all the wrong ropes. They jostled into each other, started shoving and punching. Blood streamed from a broken nose. Fos pushed the men apart and stopped the fight.

  “I’ll do it myself,” she said.

  Hiresha whisked around the corsair. She would tilt the port and starboard sails to best catch the updrafts rising off the river. Her spells traced out from her and wandered away. They had missed. She had miscalculated somehow. The sails slackened. Her amethyst dragon skipped a wing beat. The corsair lurched as her Lightening powers failed.

  She was trying to do too much. Her focus smoldered at the edges.

  Her amethyst dragon, she decided that was what she would control. Its wings scooped gales by themselves. Her construct towed them further from the city.

  “Hiresha,” Tethiel said, “how foolish is it to hope?”

  “There’s a chance the god only came for the city.”

  The Winged Flame snaked through the air above the red-lit buildings. He left blinding afterimages as he flicked around the towers. The god swatted a water tower in passing, and it exploded in a deluge that sprayed across a block of rooftops.

  “Take me back,” Elbe said. “I mustn’t leave my city.”

  “What good do you imagine you’d do?” Hiresha asked.

  The god’s light traced bright patterns over Elbe’s eyes. “Take me back.”

  “Pointless,” Hiresha said. “As you can see, he’s pursuing u
s.”

  “Let us be caught,” the Talon said, “in the wings of our god.”

  “That choice has been taken from us.” Hiresha couldn’t tow the corsair any faster. By her calculation, the god would overtake them in thirty-five seconds.

  The Winged Flame didn’t fly so much as sidewind through the air. The helix motion shouldn’t have been an efficient method of pursuit, yet the lands seemed to tumble by beneath him. The power required for such velocity astounded Hiresha.

  The god didn’t have wide wings such as her amethyst construct but many smaller ones. The feathered pinions rippled down his length. Beneath him, the river waters brightened from muddy dark to molten sapphire.

  “Don your armor.” Hiresha waved Fos and the other guests toward their gifts of invulnerability. The bronze plating stayed still on their stands even in the toss and pitch of the deck.

  Fos fumbled at a shoulder guard. He wasn’t finding the latch. The guests would need expert help donning their armor. He pushed himself away and swung out his sword. “Don’t have time for a puzzle.”

  No, they didn’t. Hiresha couldn’t fathom why she had even suggested it. “Leave the armor. Everyone, to the prow.”

  Fos didn’t seem to hear her. He strode away across the deck, sword high, toward the nearing rush of the god. Fos muttered. Though only half his words could be caught over the screams and running feet, Hiresha recognized it as his prophecy. “… Fate will be bright … finish all his fights.…”

  “Fos!” Hiresha called to him again. “Focus.”

  He broke his gaze from the Winged Flame and came back to her. She Attracted the emergency boots of greater leaping from the ship’s hull. Passing them to Fos brought a blank stare. He started turning back toward the god.

  She clapped her hands in front of his face. “The boots, Fos,” she said, “they’re enchanted for you. Put them on.”

  “Oh right. Ha! Was thinking of throwing them, but that wouldn’t help so much.”

  “We shouldn’t welcome the god with swords,” Tethiel said. “The Winged Flame might not mean harm.”

  “He means chaos, which is worse,” Hiresha said.

  The heat of the Winged Flame smoldered more in the mind than on the skin. The god had already singed Hiresha’s plans. The balance of her dream inversion whirled around her, all tilting, all skewing. If her concentration broke, if she woke, she might discover this all was a dream.

  “If he is rude enough to interfere, we must move the party,” Hiresha said. “All onto my dragon.”

  She pushed Fos over the prow. The corsair bumped into the amethyst construct, and Fos fell onto its scaled back. Celaise had already fled as far as the spiked shoulders. Jerani scrambled after her. One Bright Palm carried the other. Elbe fell in a gasp of pain. She must’ve sprained her ankle dropping onto the scales, yet that was a small matter. The jaguar knight gripped the nape of her neck and pulled her to safety.

  The god came in a spiral river of feathers. The torrent coiled around the corsair. The sails caught fire, though not from the Winged Flame himself. Servers had reached into the brazier to toss coals at the sails for no reason Hiresha could discern. Now the idiots danced and clapped their burnt hands together.

  Only a few people remained on deck. The assassins crouched, still bound to the crystal. Hiresha released them and yanked them toward the prow. They slid past the Talon, who was groveling in a pool of his own blood. Hiresha whipped him toward her as well.

  She shouldn’t have done that, overpowered a priest within view of his god. Though she knew she should stop, dragging the man toward her was too easy, too pleasing. She tossed the Talon on the dragon with the others. Hiresha could do as she wished, and death to anyone or anything that tried to restrict her vision of the future.

  Her constellation of jellyfish ringed her with protection. The wraiths formed up in a phantasmal wall. On the other side she took Tethiel by the arm and pointed up at the god.

  “This wedding was invitation only.”

  The god oscillated to gaze at her with one carmine eye then another. Thousands of wings thrummed down his sides. He resembled a flying millipede.

  A translucent fume squirmed hissing from between his hook teeth. The god’s exhalation wriggled toward Hiresha and Tethiel.

  “Don’t breathe,” Tethiel said. “And resist the temptation of drinking the god’s blood.”

  “Very sage,” Hiresha said.

  Two servers ran past her, carrying the brazier and giggling. Hiresha predicted they meant to toss the rest of the coals onto her dragon’s wings. Her jellyfish stung them into paralysis. The men dropped the brazier onto themselves and began to burn alive. Good riddance.

  “I sacrificed to you,” Hiresha said to the Winged Flame, “and you thank me by disrupting my wedding? Leave us.”

  The god wormed around the corsair and slid his jaws closer. His breathe seethed. Those gases would penetrate her armor. Her face was only shielded from projectiles. As strong as her enchanted plates were, she acknowledged they might not save her mind. The god was scaled with feathers, and each one pulsed with mesmeric rhythm.

  “I’m not your slave,” Hiresha said. Her crystal dragon wheeled upward.

  The corsair plunged the other way. She had released its Lightening enchantments. The full weight of plate crystal and the ballast hoard returned. The god slid around it, and she Attracted him to the falling ship. It would crush him to the river bottom.

  The god flew free. There hadn’t even been a struggle. Her enchantments had no power over him. The storm of his wings caused the river to froth. Then the water erupted from the ship’s impact.

  The mast snapped with a crack of crystal. She could tell she was losing control. That’s why her enchantments hadn’t held the Winged Flame. Hiresha was trying to do too much; she wanted to keep too many things in the air. She had to focus on killing the god.

  No, on saving her guests. If they all died, the wedding could never be a success.

  She commanded her crystal dragon from its head. Tethiel was beside her and they each gripped an amethyst spike.

  “To the east?” Tethiel asked. “The true dawn will come soon.”

  They flew toward the sea’s horizon. Now her construct could reach its true speed. Even if some of the finesse of moving its complexity of scales escaped her at the moment, she was free of the corsair’s encumbrance.

  The Winged Flame blocked the way. The moon had started losing its red tint. Now it was eclipsed anew by the god’s coils.

  Hiresha turned to the other direction. They would hide in the jungle wilderness. The Green Bloods would feel at home beneath the dripping canopy.

  The god blocked them.

  “You maddening glutton!” Hiresha willed her jellyfish to fly into the god’s mouth.

  They didn’t maneuver themselves into the correct positions. The Winged Flame smashed through. He shattered them. Shards of brilliance tinkled into the treetops and were lost.

  A woman shrieked. The voice had some similarities to Hiresha’s own, yet she had never let loose such a guttural outburst. The cry lacked any words or meaning. It must’ve come from a wraith.

  She and her dragon fled to the south.

  The Winged Flame blocked them.

  Tethiel beckoned to the wraiths. They screeched toward the god. Their needle fingers and wispy swords would gouge out his eyes.

  They vaporized against the blue blaze of his feathers.

  Hiresha tried flying straight up. Even the stars were blocked. She dove, and the Winged Flame was already there.

  Only one way lay open to her, back to the city. It was in uproar; everyone mobbed in the streets. Many rooftops had been set alight.

  “I will Feast.” Tethiel lifted a hand, and it shadowed the city. “And gain the power to scare him off.”

  “No,” Hiresha said. “You promised to cease Feasting after marriage.”

  “And you swore not to fight gods before our honeymoon.”

  “I hardly am.”

/>   “You fear you’ll have to.”

  “Do I have a choice?” Hiresha swerved toward the god. She extended her gauntlet claws and her dragon’s in the same motion. They would smash into the god and crumple his weak flesh.

  She gasped. This, she couldn’t do. The Dominion would never forgive her for killing their god. It wasn’t too late to change course.

  With a boom of wings, she careened away from the collision. A server tumbled off the dragon. She had no reason to save him from splattering into a distant street. She flapped her way up to her rented tower. Her dragon settled on the top, only crumbling a few bricks onto the crowds below.

  Hiresha simply needed to catch her breath and to repair her calm. Yes, she could still form a plan, even if the Talon was screaming nearby.

  “He demands sacrifice.” The Talon lifted her gold razor over Alyla’s heart.

  Hiresha pulled him backward by the enchantment in the blade and pinned him against the amethyst scales. She had thought of what to do. “Celaise must Feast and drive off the Winged Flame.”

  “She won’t,” Tethiel said.

  “She must. Her specialty is cowing senseless beasts, is it not?”

  “The Winged Flame isn’t that. He’s her greatest fear.”

  Hiresha would talk sense in the girl, except Celaise wasn’t on dragon’s back, not even in sight atop the tower. Jerani was sprinting down the stairs. He must have glimpsed her running away.

  The bridesmaid had fled from the bridal party.

  The god would see her. Celaise knew he would. He would catch her. The Winged Flame had more than two eyes.

  Celaise flew downstairs. She spiraled around and around in the tower. Shadows leaped out of her way then shivered in the corners. Redness filled the rooms of every story. Each window was full of the Winged Flame.

  The god was endless. He filled the day sky. He went before and came behind. She could travel to no land where he would not blaze. No remote village could hide her, no cave or crawlspace. She would never get away. He had returned to ruin her.