The Demigod Proving

by S. James Nelson

  What more, blood stained the jagged walls, mounds of gold, and even the ceiling. How in the name of the scaella could Krack have gotten blood on the ceiling? Didn’t he know to kill his prey outside of the den?

  No. He’d always lived in squalor. She’d just never really noticed. She’d been too focused on saving Cuchorack.

  Krack had turned nineteen years old, lived nineteen winters. Leenda grated that she’d thought of his age in human terms: years as opposed to winters. In his fifth winter, two winters after Athanaric had stolen Cuchorack and the winter Leenda assumed the body of a human, Krack had started living with a greatly aged draegon named Weicketable. While she had functioned as Krack’s guardian, her frail body had kept her from caring for him properly. He’d practically raised himself.

  No wonder he’d become so sloppy.

  Leenda had come to him as often as she could. During those first years, when she’d lived as a child in the lower valleys of Locaran, she hadn’t come at all. But once she became mobile, around age three, she’d come to check on him once or twice a year. Over time, Weicketable had grown frailer and less able to raise or discipline him.

  Taking a deep breath and shuddering at the reek of the cave, she stepped forward. Krack was probably out hunting, but a sweaty smell lingered with the stench of raw meat. He most likely hadn’t taken a bath in years.

  Coins of every metal and type lay scattered around the cavern, mixed with treasures: jewelry, gemstones, plates, armor, goblets, weapons, and even raw precious metals—nuggets of gold or silver. Anything vaguely shiny, whether crafted by humans, draegons, scaella, or any other creature, could lay somewhere in the treasure. As she always did when she walked among the piles of skeletons and mounds of treasure, she felt small.

  She hadn’t always, though. When she’d been a draegon—inhabited a draegon’s body; she was still a draegon even in a human body—she’d towered over these plies. They’d seemed small and inadequate then, hardly enough for two draegons to share. Cuchorack had always teased her about coveting gold with unreasonable determination.

  Now the piles seemed so grand. So magnificent. And she felt so small. As she examined a mound of silver coins while walking, she kicked a wolf skull and started in surprise as it skittered across the floor. The sound of her breathing echoed off of the ceiling. She resisted the urge to wait outside.

  She was Krack’s mother. She’d lived in this cave for dozens of years. She wouldn’t let her human size and fears get to her.

  When she and Cuchorack had found the home fifty years before, most of the treasure had already been there; over thousands of years many draegons had lived here. It was a good cave, high in the mountains, far away from any human settlement.

  Four days had passed since the banquet, and Leenda had used a great deal of Flux and Thew to arrive so fast. A human would have given up halfway down the mountain. It had taken Athanaric more than a thousand years to find the cave, and even then he’d only come when hunting. As far as she knew, Athanaric hadn’t returned since capturing Cuchorack.

  Krack arrived as Leenda stood in the back of the cavern on the pedestal, looking at the ribcage nest. The cave dimmed as he landed with a thump in the dirt at the cavern mouth. He stood there on his hind legs, reared up and wings spread, limned by the light. In his fore claws, a pair of mountain goats wriggled and bleated. He beat his wings twice and tossed the goats into the cavern. They screamed as they rolled across the floor and crashed into the base of a pile of bones and coins. Skulls and treasure scattered.

  With a huff bordering on laughter, Krack dropped to all four feet and loped into the cavern. The pounding of his paws on the packed dirt echoed from the walls and ceiling like heartbeats. One of the goats found its feet and darted away. The other also stood, bleating in pain. It had a broken foreleg, and limped on three limbs. Blood matted the white fur on its back.

  Leenda hid behind the bone nest and leaned around to watch. How did her son act when alone?

  He ran past the injured goat, knocking it aside with one foreleg, and wound his weasel-like body around the piles of bones and gold as he pursued the other goat. The creature blathered in terror and darted away, but Krack whipped his tail at it, wrapping the tip around two of its legs and pulling its feet out from beneath it. It collapsed, then stood back up and began to run. Huffing with delight, Krack followed.

  As he passed the injured goat, he extended a retractable claw of a front paw to cut across the goat’s flanks. Innards and fluids spilled out. Still wailing, the goat continued to try and escape. Fear glinted in its eyes as it tripped over its guts. Krack grunted—the draegon equivalent of chuckling.

  Leenda’s fists trembled and she clenched her jaw. Her son’s goodness had degraded more than she’d feared. Unable to stop herself, she stepped out from behind the nest.

  “Stop torturing your food.”

  Krack turned, reared up on his hind legs, and spread his wings wide with a snap. He roared once, long and loud, and, as he cocked his head to one side and looked in Leenda’s general direction, spoke in a throaty voice, in the draegon’s tongue.

  “Who’s there?”

  Leenda’s ears rang from the roar. She gasped at his size. He was so big. Absolutely monstrous. His wings nearly reached the side walls. His red fur, matted with blood and grime, mostly stood on end, making his body appear jagged and larger than it actually was.

  When had he grown up? She always thought of him as the little draegon pup who’d nearly failed at his first attempt at flying—saved from a permanently broken wing by Cuchorack’s quick intervention. That pup had disappeared and become a monster that could swallow her simply by inhaling hard and fast.

  But she was his mother. And he needed scolding. So she stepped to the edge of the ledge upon which the nest sat.

  “It’s your mother,” she said in the human tongue. She understood draegonspeak, but didn’t have the right shaped mouth for it. “And shame on you.”

  Growling, Krack fell to all fours and brought his face down next to her body. He narrowed his eyes and sniffed at her, his dog-like nostrils flaring. She still wore the yellow dress—although it had become ragged and dirty in the past few days—and its tattered hem fluttered at his sniffing.

  She pointed down at the writhing goat. “Kill it. Don’t let it suffer.”

  “You smell different,” Krack said. “You’re not the same as you were last time you came.”

  “Kill the goat.”

  The uninjured goat scrambled out of the cavern’s mouth, bleating in panic.

  With a growl, Krack turned his body toward the eviscerated goat and brought a paw down on it, crushing it with a squish and crack. He twisted the paw, grinding the head into the dirt. He looked back at Leenda, cocking his head to one side in the draegon equivalent of rolling one’s eyes.

  She shook her head. “What’s wrong with you? This is no way for a draegon to act.”

  He turned back to her and lay down in the ground, crossing his forelegs before him and lifting his head on his long neck. Once again, he brought his head level with hers, where she stood on the pedestal next to the ribcage nest, and spoke in the draegon’s tongue. It was a guttural language, consisting of grunts and growls, pops and tongue clicks.

  “I wouldn’t know how a draegon should act,” he said. “I’ve never been taught.”

  She took a long, slow breath, and told herself not to feel too guilty.

  He considered her quest to reclaim his father as abandonment. And why shouldn’t he? From the moment Cuchorack had been taken from her, she’d thought only on regaining him. She’d left the lair, taking Krack with her, teaching him how to use Spirit Ichor so when they found a suitable human couple he could perform the procedure. She couldn’t do it, after all. Someone else had to place her spirit into the body of a fetus.

  In the plains to the north, they’d found a human ready to give birth, and informed her that they needed the body. The woman and her husband couldn’t do anything against a fully grown dr
aegon, and so Krack had transferred Leenda’s soul into the fetus. He did it fast enough that her memories didn’t drain out.

  That was the difference between her and Wrend. His soul had stayed out of the draegon body long enough that his memories slipped out, and he couldn’t remember his life as a draegon. Without a brain to retain memories, the spirit lost them at a rapid pace, starting with the most recent, eventually becoming non-sentient. Over time, as the spirit learned to work with the new human body, Wrend’s consciousness had returned, but without any recollection of being a draegon.

  Krack, however, had kept Leenda’s soul out of a physical body for only a few seconds; she’d lost only a few days’ worth of memories and entered the fetus fully aware of what transpired. She preferred not to think about living in the womb of a woman or the painful process of birth.

  Following the birth, she and Krack lived with her human parents for just a short time, until she finished nursing; then Krack took her back south, over the mountains, into the nation of Locaran. There they found a suitable family, and he left her on the doorstep. He was age six at the time, and returned to his high mountain home to live with Weicketable. Now she’d been dead for two years, after nearly a year of significant senility.

  Given all of that, how would Krack ever have known the proper way for a draegon to live or act?

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right. How would you know?”

  “You should just leave.”

  “It’s time to rescue your father. I know who he is.”

  Krack grunted and rolled his head from side to side; a human would’ve shaken his head. “You can do it without me.”

  “This isn’t optional, Krack. You’re coming with me.”

  “Why do you need me? You haven’t for fifteen years.”

  “You travel faster than I do. Plus, if I’m unable to convince your father of the truth, we might have to force him to come with us. I need you for that.”

  “I don’t care about him.” He reached over with one paw and slid the goat corpse across the dirt. The guts and brains collected a fair amount of dust. “And you have no just cause to make me do something I don’t want to do. I’ve decided not to help you. Why should I put myself at risk for a mother and father I don’t know?”

  With an extended claw, he picked at the innards and tossed them into his mouth like a human might eat almonds. With each organ, he snapped his jaw shut with a crack.

  Leenda clenched her fists. She couldn’t handle the emotions her human body thrust on her. Anger at his insolence. Guilt at the truth of his statement. Fear at his sheer size and threats. Revulsion at his eating habits. Tears came to her eyes. She wanted to scream, and only barely kept her voice civil.

  “Goat guts, Krack—I am your mother. You will do as I say.”

  “And what if I don’t?”

  He lifted one end of the intestines to his mouth, closed his lips around it, and began to suck it in like a human slurping up pasta. Blood and other substances splattered on Leenda, but she didn’t flinch.

  She had no good comeback to his challenge. She couldn’t force him to do anything. She didn’t have the advantage of size as human mothers had with their little children. Besides, as she’d often seen, once human children grew to be about as large as their parents, they generally did whatever they wanted unless the parent could hold something over them—such as food, shelter, or clothing. So, how did a parent get a child to do something he didn’t want to do?

  Guilt seemed like a reasonable option.

  “Krack, I’m your mother. I risked my life by giving birth to you. It’s your responsibility to obey me.”

  He stared at her, a last bit of guts hanging out from between his closed lips. “I don’t have to do this.”

  “But you should. It’s your father we’re talking about.”

  “All he ever did for me was get captured.”

  “He did that to protect you. If he hadn’t done that, Athanaric would’ve taken you and raised you in captivity. Your father’s gone so you could be here.”

  She didn’t like laying the guilt on so thickly, but didn’t see that she had another option.

  He paused again. His black eyes glistened as they examined her. She had the distinct impression that he was deciding between obeying her and eating her. She prepared to leap away by binding Thew and Flux to her legs, and held her breath.

  He glanced back down at his goat, and picked some meat off of the bones with a claw. “I won’t put my life at risk.”

  It was probably as much of an agreement as she would get from him. She breathed again, and released the Ichor.

  “I need you as a mount. And I need to show you to your father. I’m not asking you to risk your life.”

  “Fine. I’ll come. Why do you smell different?”

  She shrugged and covered her little breasts with her hands. “It has something to do with these. I’m sure of it.”

  “Silly things.”

  She nodded, but greater worries pressed her mind: she needed to teach Krack how a proper draegon acted and lived. Plus, she needed to figure out how to convince Wrend that he was a draegon. She would speak with him the first opportunity she could, and that would require traveling to the caravan far to the south.

  Chapter 25: A second chance

  Athanaric must cull his brood by necessity, but his biggest mistake is not giving his children more than one chance. Surely the best children—the most passionate and action-oriented ones—die simply because Athanaric doesn't give them a second chance.

  -Wester

  On the sixth morning out from the Seraglio, Wrend had trouble sleeping. He dreamed of someone entering his tent and waiting for him to rise.

  He awoke in the chilly predawn, when neither darkness nor light dominated his tent. For several minutes he tossed on his cot, beneath his blankets, but couldn’t get back to sleep; his thoughts had turned too quickly to talking with the Master. Resolved to no more sleep, he decided to get dressed. He sat up and threw his covers off to the cold morning air.

  And noticed the figure standing near the door of his tent.

  His heartbeat hastened. “Who are you?”

  The figure wore the white half-jacket of a priest beneath an open cloak, with a hood over his head. The shadows and dim light concealed his face. He raised a finger to his lips to quiet Wrend.

  “What are you doing in here? How long have you been there?”

  “You talk in your sleep.”

  Wester. Wrend had only spoken with him once, but recognized the voice. His heartbeat accelerated even more; the night before he’d heard of the demigods killed back in their towns.

  Sitting up with the covers over his legs, not wearing a shirt, he turned and reached under his pillow for his sacrificial knife.

  “Wrend, I only ask that you listen to me."

  “I want nothing to do with you.”

  He unsheathed the knife and kicked his covers off. He wore long sleeping pants. He rolled off of his cot, so it provided a buffer between him and Wester. He had no plan other than protecting himself, but if he thought hard, maybe he could find a way to kill or capture Wester.

  “I only want to present facts. Then let you decide.”

  “I’ve already decided.”

  Wrend had paladin guards outside his tent. He could call them for help. He began to shout, but Wester had already begun to move so fast that barely a squeak left Wrend’s mouth before Wester had hurdled the cot, grabbed his wrist in one hand, and covered his mouth with the other. He twisted Wrend’s arm, so that he had to let go of the sacrificial knife. It thudded to the carpeted floor.

  Wrend imagined the paladins would discover his corpse later. He struggled to back away, and shouted against Wester’s hand, but Wester pulled him by the arm, preventing him from moving backward, and pressed his hand tighter against Wrend’s face. He squeezed so that Wrend couldn’t get free.

  “It’s no way to live, Wrend." He leaned in close, his eyes intense. The hood
had fallen from his head when he’d leapt the cot. “Under the thumb of a father who could kill you any second—and who will kill you when you reach age fifty.”

  Wrend shook his head as best he could. His jaw and wrist ached from Wester’s Ichor-strengthened grip.

  “And the people live in subjugation to him. How many does he kill each year—or how many do the priests kill for slight infractions, small mistakes? Innocent errors.”

  Wrend didn’t know the answer. It didn’t matter to him.

  Or did it? All his life, he’d only learned what the priests, mothers, and the Master had taught him. Wester offered a different point of view. Did it have worth, even though it went against everything Wrend had learned his whole life?

  How could it? God was god. His will was law. He determined right and wrong.

  “Wrend, you can help the country be free and live in peace. Without fear. You know the fear. You’ve lived with it every day. Every person in the country feels it.”

  Wrend relaxed, hoping Wester would loosen his grip.

  “I’ll come back in a few days,” Wester said. “Think on it. Look for signs that I speak the truth. Make the good choice.”

  He looked at Wrend with solemn eyes. His grip loosened just a little, enough for Wrend to pull his head away with a jerk.

  “Guards, I’m under attack!”

  Wester snarled and gripped Wrend’s mouth, again. He twisted Wrend’s arm nearly to the breaking point.