Creation Mage 6

by Dante King

  The drop in temperature was quite noticeable now. The breath of all three of us smoked in the air. I shivered as goosebumps erupted on the back of my neck and hands. The shadows seemed to deepen and lengthen, though no discernable change came over the sun slanting into the courtyard.

  “Would you look at that,” Leah said. “It’s kind of fetching.”

  I looked where she was pointing. Hoarfrost crept up the nearest statue. Pretty patterns of ice crawling slowly along the stonework.

  My eyes moved down.

  Rivulets of ice snaked out from the liderc’s dead body, which was now coated in a thick frost. The entire courtyard was getting a fine covering of rime. There was a soft crackling sound from all around as frozen water found its way into nooks and crannies and expanded.

  “Now this is what the poets would describe as not boding well,” Leah said lightly. She drew one of her black cigarettes out from behind her ear. The fact that she could not have concealed one of the clove-scented smokes behind her ear never seemed to bother her or the universe.

  The huge corpse of the liderc burst with a sound like the mother of all eggs breaking open combined with a hill of dry leaves being suddenly set ablaze. Ribs and collarbones snapped and crackled and popped as the monster’s headless corpse opened like the most ghastly and macabre flower imaginable.

  “There, I believe, is our demon,” Mallory said. Her eyes were fever bright, and dark bags hung from under them. I was fairly certain that Leah and I would most likely not be relying too heavily on our Holy Mage companion. Not for a while at least.

  Well, shit, it looked like we would have to deal with the liderc’s demonic form with only two mages.

  Chapter 17

  The demon pulled itself from the shattered, tangled mess of the monster that had been playing host to it. It was a creature of shadow and lightning; alien, even in a world like Avalonia, which still hosted centaurs, trolls, and giant flying bulls.

  It looked like a naked bird. A giant vulture that had been roasted clean of feather and flesh in one of the underworld’s most fearsome boiling tarpits, and then animated with undistilled malice and pure, unadulterated evil. It was cloaked in darkness, ice running over its diseased marrow. In its bottomless eye sockets, there burned a flame fed by a boundless contempt for anything that was not it. The demon was not as big as the liderc had been, but it gave off an infinitely more sinister vibe.

  “Yuck,” said Leah.

  The demon ripped itself free of the dead body like some vile grub coming out of a cocoon. It looked more like a pterodactyl now that it was clear of the liderc’s corpse. While it walked on four legs, the front two legs were connected to the body, from the wrists, by stretched pinion. This was not skin that formed these wings, but shadow made solid.

  “I hope that’s not what I think it is,” Mallory said.

  The demon looked unconcernedly over at the three of us. We had backed away from the apparition as it had torn itself out of the liderc’s body, and we now stood about sixty yards away.

  With a choking screech, the demon began to hawk up something from deep inside itself. Its skeletal avian head leaned back on its spindly neck and began jerking backward and forward.

  “Please be allergic to oxygen,” I muttered.

  With spasmodic jerks, the vulture-like head bobbed forward a couple of times. A ball of burning blue light, wreathed in black flame, spewed out of its mouth and landed with a thud on top of the corpse it had just crawled out of.

  I didn’t know how, but I got the impression that the ball of blue light was so cold that touching it would have burned me in reverse. I didn’t know how to explain that feeling to myself, but I was almost positive that would be the case. It reminded me, somehow, of a black hole.

  “Oh no,” Mallory said flatly.

  “Bad news?” I asked.

  “Some of the worst,” Mallory replied.

  The blue burning ball instantly consumed the body of the liderc, reducing it to sable ashes before drawing it into itself and expanding from the size of a beach ball to a La-Z-Boy.

  “The very worst,” Mallory said, her eyes fixed on the blue ball of dense light.

  “You’ve opened up the can, honeybunny,” Leah said, her pale face aglow with sapphire light, “why not spill those beans?”

  “It’s a Doomsday Demon,” the Holy Mage said, her head drooping a little as she spoke.

  “Sounds promising,” I said drily.

  I watched as the expanding ball of blue and black magic or energy, or whatever the fuck it was, continued to expand, shriveling solid rock like it was cardboard and consuming it.

  “And what’s with the pretty light?” Leah asked.

  “That,” Mallory said wearily, “is an Armageddon Sphere.”

  I laughed. Sometimes that’s all you can do. It’s either that or run off screaming with your arms flailing over your head.

  “And that will, I presume, bring about some localized end of world event?” I guessed.

  Mallory nodded. “That’s right, Justin, it will burst when it reaches its optimal size and obliterate and consume all matter within its radius.”

  “I don’t suppose Armageddon Sphere is one of those ironic names, is it?” Leah asked airily.

  “What?” Mallory asked.

  “One of those, you know, names that means its opposite. Like, this is the Armageddon Sphere because when it explodes it just destroys, say, something as big as a pig?”

  Mallory blinked. I guessed she was too exhausted to even roll her eyes.

  “I would speculate, from what I have read in texts back in the Celestial Realm, that this blue Armageddon Sphere, when it has reached approximately the same size and mass as a wagon, will detonate and consume an area roughly the size of this castle. It might even take out a decent chunk of Manafell too.”

  My jaw dropped. “Why would this be part of the test for someone who is after the third relic?”

  “Honestly,” Mallory said, “I don’t think it is. It is something more sinister.”

  “Fuck it,” I said. “I’m going to try and take it down then.”

  “Tread carefully, Creation Mage,” Mallory cautioned me. “This demon is unlike any foe that you would have faced before. It is no monster. This is something more. This is something of the endless night.”

  “Ominous words,” I said, smiling tightly. “My favorite kind. You coming?” This last sentence was shot at Leah.

  “Duh,” the female Chaosbane said. “Wouldn’t miss this show for the world.”

  Leah and I converged on the malignant Doomsday Demon firing spells like we were Old West gunslingers. There was no point in pussy-footing around. The thing knew we were there, it just seemed not to care.

  I aimed to make it care.

  Leah hit it with reams of Chaos Magic that spiraled out of her long-fingered hands. At the same time, my staff was pointing at the demon and emitting Blazing Bolt after Blazing Bolt.

  The spells splashed against the demon’s shadowy black hide like pebbles plopping into water, disappearing without leaving even the slightest mark behind.

  The Doomsday Demon cawed in harsh condescension at our efforts, obviously mocking us even though we could not hope to understand its tongue.

  “What the hell?” I said to Leah in frustrated disbelief as we both ducked behind a statue to have a quick head-to-head. “Magic doesn’t hurt it? What the fuck are we supposed to do about that?”

  Leah, for once, looked genuinely puzzled. There was a slight frown in the middle of her dark eyes.

  “Hand-to-hand?” she said, but her tone told me that she was far from convinced that this was a good idea.

  I slinked behind the statue, my back against the cold stone. The demon glared at me, while it crouched over the Armageddon Sphere.

  “It doesn’t even look like it’s going to attack us,” I said.

  “If I was impervious to magic and was fighting mages,” Leah said with a kind of detached thoughtfulness, “I wouldn’t
stir my ass to fight either. I’d just wait for that glowing egg thing to go off and—pop! Everyone dies.”

  That was what it was doing, wasn’t it? Goddamn it, it was just waiting us out, while we ran around like a couple of idiots trying to kill it with magic that could do it no harm.

  “It’s a head-scratcher,” Leah said mildly. “How do you kill something that is more myth than living being?”

  “I’ve got a plan. Sort of,” I said.

  I darted out of hiding and stood my ground in the middle of the destruction that had been caused by the fight with the liderc. Using my rapidly depleting mana, I summoned my Lightning Skink and a pack of Undead Wolverines. I followed it up with a Rain of Toads spell, hoping that an onslaught of amphibians of plague-like proportions would cover my summoned monsters.

  “Go!” I ordered my magical allies, pointing my black crystal staff at the Doomsday Demon. “Go and do your worst, fellas!”

  As toads started to fall from the sky and drop onto the Doomsday Demon, the Undead Wolverines bounded away, but the Lighting Skink took the lead. The slick, sinuous thaumaturgical beast shot forward, blue lines of energy running along its gleaming flanks and its glassy teeth bared. It closed on the demon like a cheetah and leapt straight for its throat, claws slashing as it propelled itself through the air.

  It hit the Doomsday Demon and froze. It spasmed violently, glitching in and out of existence as smoke rose from its predatory body.

  “Shit!” I cursed.

  The Undead Wolverines dived into the flank of the Doomsday Demon, like a bunch of overzealous NHL defensemen piling onto an opposition center. They too froze as soon as they came into contact with their foe. They started twitching, their undead flesh smoldering.

  It was obvious that the Doomsday Demon was surrounded by some demonic aura that melted flesh and magic alike. The body of the Lightning Skink was sucked into the Armageddon Sphere in the form of ectoplasmic goo. The Undead Wolverines did the same. Along with every last toad that fell from the sky.

  “Fuck!” I yelled.

  The blue light from the sphere was glowing brighter and brighter. I imagined it would not be long before some poor guards from the Castle of Ascendance came up here to investigate, like a bunch of hot blondes inadvisably exploring the basement in your typical B-grade horror flick. I guessed that their initial reaction would be to try and kill this Doomsday Demon with conventional weapons. They’d be wiped out as easily as one, two, splat.

  “Leah!” I yelled. “Can you rig up a bit of magic on the door that will stop anyone stumbling in here and getting themselves killed?”

  Leah gave me a thumbs-up and a wink and headed for the door, taking the circuitous route around the Doomsday Demon.

  “You’re not going to say anything? No empty words of good luck?” I called after her.

  Leah turned. “I was going to make a joke about your luck and life,” she said, “but life beat me to the punch!”

  She had a point there.

  “Great, Justin, very selfless, you’ve taken care of the potential collateral damage like a good boy,” I said to myself, “but those good intentions are going to come to the square root of absolutely fucking nothing if that Armageddon Sphere goes off! Now, think, man, think!”

  Leah was back in no time at all. She fired ribbons of sparkling Chaos Magic at the Doomsday Demon as she ran toward me, but her spells were absorbed by the hellish entity just as easily as they had been before.

  “Well, I’m out of ideas,” she said with resignation as she pressed her back to the statue of a fat Orc that we were sheltering behind. “I wonder what it’s going to be like to be blown into dust and then compressed into a single atom—if that’s what’s going to happen.”

  “Wait—be quiet a second,” I said.

  Something that Leah said to me a few minutes before had only just sunk into my brain.

  “How do you kill something that is more myth than living being?”

  “...something more myth than living being…”

  “...more myth…”

  You fought fire with fire, didn’t you?

  Maybe you had to fight myth with myth.

  We needed a myth of our own.

  And I just so happened to have one dangling at my belt.

  Time was of the essence, and only time would prove whether this theory of mine held any credence.

  I stepped out from behind the statue, ripped the wooden capture orb from my belt, and threw it toward the Doomsday Demon.

  “Fuck it,” I said, “let there be dragons!”

  The dragon I had captured expanded into being in the blink of an eye.

  It was as long as two buses, amber in color, with a pair of eyes that were completely black except for the vertical amber pupils.

  It looked regal, it looked legendary.

  It looked like the embodiment of light, the very antithesis of the Doomsday Demon.

  “Go get it, big boy,” I growled.

  The dragon might have been old—ancient, in fact—but he had lost none of his zest for a good fight. Dragons, so I had learned since defeating this one in a battle of wills, fought until they died. There was no such thing as defeat for a dragon. They either won or they gave up the ghost.

  The dragon lumbered toward the Doomsday Demon, which regarded it with the same frosty contempt that it had reserved for Leah, Mallory, and I. It looked scornful right up until the dragon hit it with a burst of the gelatinous amber spray that it spewed instead of fire.

  Mallory had once told me that the reason that Amber Dragons fired this amber goo instead of fire was because they preferred to eat their meat live. They encased their prey in porous amber, trapping it. It allowed the captured prey to still breathe through the dense, glutinous substance, but rendered them completely incapable of moving. When the dragon wanted to feed, it simply chewed up its victim and released all the blood and juices from the amber casing, which it then digested along with the victim.

  I had no idea how this skill would translate to something like the Doomsday Demon, but I was sure as hell happy to find out.

  The fact that the gelatinous amber affected the Doomsday Demon at all was a promising start. Whether it was because the spray of liquid amber was issued from a creature that was just as much part of the mythology of the multiverse as it was part of the physical world of Avalonia, I could not say for sure. All I knew was that the deluge hit the Doomsday Demon across the flank and knocked it over.

  The dragon roared with glee, knocking aside the Armageddon Sphere with apparent impunity so it could jump on the shocked Doomsday Demon.

  It was a true clash of the titans, the coming together of those two big, magical entities. Stone cracked and the hoarfrost that covered basically everything dissolved under the Amber Dragon’s hot scales.

  As the two huge creatures wrestled and batted at one another, making the courtyard tremble and shake with every blow, Leah came to join me in the metaphorical front row.

  “What did you do about the door?” I asked, not taking my eyes off the epic contest taking place in front of us.

  “Set up a portal,” Leah said absently. She winced as the Doomsday Demon lashed out with a cold skeletal hand and scored the dragon three long black gashes across its snout. The wounds smoked with the fervor of liquid nitrogen, and the Amber Dragon bellowed in pain.

  “A portal?” I asked as the dragon tail-whipped the Doomsday Demon and sent it crashing through a series of quite fresh-looking statues. “Where does the portal take them?”

  “Back to the bottom of the stairs,” she said.

  I snorted. “Annoying.”

  “Very,” Leah agreed.

  The Doomsday Demon flapped upward, but it could barely manage because of the amber goo clinging to its skeletal insubstantial sides. The dragon reared up on its hind legs, following it, while the Doomsday Demon beat at its head with claws and wings.

  The Amber Dragon, staunch and smelling victory, ignored the blows. It grabbed the slightly small
er nightmare creature and pulled it back down to earth. The move, the grapple, looked slow and ponderous because the two beasts were so big. However, the impact when they hit the courtyard was so massive that it knocked Leah and me off our feet.

  Rolling over and squinting against the cataclysmic dust cloud that was pushed out by the collision of such huge bodies hitting the deck, I saw that the dragon had the Doomsday Demon pinned under his vast bulk.

  “Go on, finish him!” I managed to choke out, through a mouth that was full of dust.

  The dragon reared its neck, opened its mouth, and spewed a torrent of amber slush all over the Doomsday Demon. The awful, skeletal creature flapped and struggled, but whatever power it had left and whatever its demonic flesh was knit from, it could not stand up to the raw power and unconquerable pride of the ancient dragon.

  The amber goo was piled on and, even while it was covering its prey, the dragon began to rend and crush the Doomsday Demon under its massive body and powerful claws.

  It was amazing to watch—something of such potent fear and terrible potential reduced to wisps of nothing. I figured that was the thing about nightmares; they were terrifying and paralyzingly real right up until they weren’t.

  Within minutes, the dragon had completely destroyed the Doomsday Demon, as well as most of the courtyard.

  I took a deep breath and hauled myself out of the rubble that I had been unaware I had been lying in, so engrossed had I been in the fight. I reached down and helped Leah to her feet.

  “It’s not over yet,” I said before Leah could say a word to me.

  “No,” the Chaos Mage said. “We’ve still got to go and dump the trash.”

  The Armageddon Sphere was still glowing bright blue. Black flames flickered over its bulging surface, which was no longer a steady cobalt but pulsated.

  I had hoped the object would vanish along with the demon that had created it, but I guess that would have been too much to ask for.

  “Go and get Mallory,” I said. “Then meet me back here.”

  Leah hurried off. There was, or so I had heard, a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted. There was also a time for smart-ass comments, but this, seemingly, was not that time.