Life

by Rosie Scott

  My eyes searched the area for the bodies of my friends. I'd been so close to many of them, and now I feared for their lives. Shiny black and yellow Sentinel armor caught my gaze from beneath the rubble. Under a head full of thick brown hair, Cyrus's light blue eyes were staring blankly at the battlefield.

  Nausea rose into my throat. I stood from the ground, my eyes on my friend as panic rose within me at the thought that he was dead. I started to hurry to him, but in mere seconds I was sprawled over the ground.

  Confusion cluttered my mind before I searched my body for injuries. My left leg laid out over the grass at a sickening angle. I hadn't felt the injury through my high.

  My leg is broken. Cyrus is dead.

  I turned over onto my stomach, my eyes on Cyrus's body. Instead of healing my leg, I crawled toward the Sentinel on both arms, the unresponsive leg trailing behind. Memories of Nyx after her falling injury during the battle with Mantus swarmed my mind. Her eyes had been open but blank with shock. I pleaded for that to be the case here. If it was, I didn't have much time to save him. My broken leg could wait to be mended. If Cyrus still clung to life, his injuries were much more severe.

  I pulled my body through matted red grasses, a mixture of determination and adrenaline driving me. Screams of terror and pain were so prevalent in the air that they threatened to cloud my mind.

  One thing at a time. One thing at a time.

  Cyrus didn't blink the entire time I crawled to him. I refused to give into fear. As I finally reached his body, I used alleviate like it was the only spell I knew, throwing the energy into the stone blocks on his back. Once they were a fraction of their former weight, I shoved the bricks from my friend and summoned life energy in a palm to seek his injuries.

  Please work. I was bombarded with thoughts of trying to heal Jakan and Anto while the energy refused to cooperate because they were dead. One of my greatest fears was that happening again.

  The energy was warm beneath my palm as it pulled my attention to Cyrus's back, where the boulders had put a monumental weight on his spine. I put two fingers beneath Cyrus's jawbone. He had a pulse, but his heartbeat was extremely slow.

  “Cyrus!” Uriel's voice was hoarse with panic. The healer ran toward us after coming out to the battlefield via the gate. With some relief, I found Cerin and Azazel not far behind him.

  “Uriel. Listen to me,” I breathed, my own voice sounding muffled. My ears were still ringing from the explosion. At this point, I doubted that would go away for days.

  Uriel came to a stop beside us. His light gray eyes were on me as if looking at Cyrus right now would break him.

  “Cyrus is alive,” I told him, “but he is in neurogenic shock. His injuries could still kill him.”

  Uriel nodded rapidly as he understood my words. “I know how to treat it. But—the hospital is so far away. And our alchemists—”

  “Azazel.” When I said his name, he walked forward, eager to help. “Cyrus needs many tonics right now. His blood pressure is too low. He has severe nerve damage in his back. He needs fluids. If these things aren't fixed soon, he will die.”

  Azazel nodded. I'd put the weight of the world on his shoulders again like in Quellden when I'd asked him to kill Vallen out of mercy. Right now, Cyrus's fate was in his hands.

  Uriel stared desperately over at Azazel. “Help me carry him back into the city. We can save him.”

  Azazel only responded by dipping low to delicately pull Cyrus up from the ground. Uriel took the Sentinel's other side, and the two started to hurry back to the gate.

  Cerin wasted no time in pulling me upright so I was sitting on the grass, my broken limb out before me. My lover put one hand on each side of the break of my tibia and then stared over at me.

  “Use your illusion magic,” Cerin requested.

  “I have a high. I won't feel it,” I replied. Cerin snapped the bone into alignment, and a wave of sharp pain traveled up through my body. I hissed through my teeth and muttered a curse.

  “You said you wouldn't feel it,” Cerin protested, sinking life magic into the wound as the cannons in the forest fired once more.

  “I must have used more magic getting Cyrus out from under that rubble than I thought,” I said as an excuse.

  “They should have listened to you,” Cerin said, his brow furrowed as he healed me. “Altan and Kirek. They just rushed out there with no thought to your concerns.”

  “It doesn't matter either way,” I said, closing my eyes as my leg warmed with healing and itched as the marrow reconnected. “We had no time. The cannons aren't targeting them. The dwarves won't risk hitting their own people. There's something different about those cannons, Cerin. The wall shouldn't collapse so easily. The giants just rebuilt it to be twice as strong.”

  “They're a new invention,” my lover replied.

  “How do you know?”

  “I don't for sure, but the dwarves don't seem to know what the hell they're doing with them like this is the first time they've ever used them.” Cerin pointed toward the city. “Many of the cannonballs missed the wall the first time they were shot. You should see the city, Kai. Crumbled buildings, broken streets. Some of the cannonballs are hitting the mountain. The mountain.”

  “So not only do these cannons have a hell of a range, the dwarves are destroying their own city trying to use them,” I surmised.

  Cerin nodded. “And their own people. A rebellion broke out in the streets as soon as the wall was bombarded, but by the time I came down to come to you, many of the people were running and hiding. Nowhere in the city is safe.”

  As if to prove his words correct, the cannons fired again. Many places on the wall were hit, but blasts from multiple areas in Olympia rattled out into the air. The ground had been shaking for so long with the resulting vibrations of falling infrastructure and explosions that my butt and hands felt numb as I waited for Cerin to complete his healing.

  Then came the screaming. I'd been so used to the cries of battle that I was surprised to have noticed it, but this screaming was different. Soldiers of both armies were in fear because their yells were those of alarm and panic. My eyes traveled out over the grasslands, where many people had simply stopped fighting. The soldiers looked to the skies above Olympia, and fingers were pointed.

  I turned to see what they were looking at, but the broken rubble of the city wall behind me blocked my view. My heart pounded in my chest as I asked my lover, “What is it?”

  Cerin's jaw tensed, and he shook his head. “Don't know yet.”

  My ears were still ringing, so when the battlefield fell into silence, I wasn't sure whether to attribute that to my injuries or a reaction both armies were having to the skies. The troops on the field before me started to scatter, dwarves and Vhiri and giants alike fleeing from the open grasslands.

  An ear-shattering roar pierced the skies above. It sounded as if our new arrival was a beast with a rough voice that had to travel over shards of broken glass on its way out to the air. The voice was tortured, omniscient in scope, and very, very angry. A shadow swooped over the grass just before the creature passed through the skies above the wall, revealing itself.

  It had the shape of a wyvern, but it was many times the size. Its shadow consumed the plains before the Griswald Forest, leaving the sun to hold back its rays and fume about the loss of land in envy. Each of its scales was the size of a shield, and they rippled with the beast's movements in shades of opalescent metals. When the creature first passed, it looked to be silver. But as it flew over the battlefield just to circle over the forest ahead, it shimmered in shades of bronze, copper, and even gold.

  Two enormous wings kept its body afloat with sounds of crackling. Bits and pieces of old scales fell from the creature as it observed us with two cold, silver reptilian eyes. Whatever this beast was, and wherever it came from, it had been in slumber for a great many years. Perhaps the bombardment of dwarven cannons over the mountainside had pulled it from its hibernation.

  Its head alon
e was massive. Saliva oozed down the length of teeth the size of men as it calculated its next move. Spikes and knobs of bone stuck out around its elongated face from the back of its giant skull. Unlike the wyvern, this beast had the muscle to match its size. Its body was thick and bulky, and each of its limbs had enough muscle to outweigh dozens if not hundreds of seasoned warriors.

  Each of its limbs. My golden eyes settled on the legs which hung beneath its gargantuan body, each one ending with razor-sharp talons which were curled with age.

  “Four legs,” I murmured, my voice so low that I was surprised when Cerin turned to me and nodded, his own eyes wide with shock. He remembered our conversation together in the wyvern's lair a decade prior. Neither one of us had ever faced one of these ancient beasts, and based on the echoes of panic coming from all over the battlefield, this was a new experience for thousands of us.

  Dragon.

  Twenty-six

  The dragon glided through the air toward the Border Mounts, bypassing the plains entirely. Cerin hurried to finish healing my leg because we both knew the beast hadn't come out of its slumber just to look pretty as the sun reflected off of its metallic scales. My mind scrambled for solutions. I couldn't strategize well if I didn't know what kind of dragon we were working with.

  Magic was a rare weapon for the beasts of Arrayis to wield because it required intelligence of its caster and usually hands for summoning. The harpies in Eteri had cast spells from their wings, but only when they were brought forward past their feathered chests. Wyverns and dragons summoned magic straight out of their cores. It was this that made them unique, for one was vastly different from the next due to their varied anatomies. The wyvern near Whispermere had summoned ice, so its body was built to withstand freezing temperatures and the expulsion of sharp objects from its core. Given this dragon's bulky body, thick hide, and metallic scales, I figured it to fancy the element of earth.

  Cerin yanked my leg armor down over the newly healed wound, before standing and holding a pale hand out to me. The ring I'd had made for him weeks ago shone silver in the sunlight as he helped me up. The metallic dragon altered its course just before the northernmost mountain and soared toward the armies in the plains. It had flown around to adjust its course so its magic could reach the most victims in the horizontal field between the forest and city. Though it was a beast, it was intelligent.

  “Uriel would know what to do,” Cerin murmured, pulling me with him as he backed up toward the wall of rubble, getting out of the dragon's targeted zone. My lover's words made me connect the image of the dragon coming toward us with the giant tooth the healer had in his home in Mistral. If this was the same type of dragon, we were in for a gory treat.

  “Uriel is not here,” I said, funneling excess energy into life shields for the two of us. The white magic was more robust than usual as it bubbled around our bodies. Across the battlefield, Vhiri life mages offered protection to allies, and the dwarves decided to angle their remaining siege weapons at the beast as it neared.

  A deep, gritty rumbling echoed from the skies, and the dragon opened its mouth as it swooped so close to the ground that the grass beneath its feet waved in greeting. Yellowed teeth shone with thick saliva as the beast kept its jaws parted in wait of using its magic.

  With the sound of breaking glass, thousands of jagged metal shards spewed forth into the masses. The battlefield was one of silver and red as Vhiri and dwarf alike were caught under an onslaught of sharp metal. One mage was partially decapitated after a fragment sliced cleanly through her head at the nose. When she fell, the gray matter of the lower half of her brain was smooth within her broken skull as if the hit was surgically precise. Multiple soldiers were left without arms or legs to the point that matching the bodies to broken limbs on the field would have been impossible. Most mages with life shields were safe, though the momentum of the shards caused many to fall or tumble back. Many of the dwarves blocked hits with heavy shields, and some of them were safe due to their thicker armor alone.

  As the dragon tore through the air above the battle, ballistae and onagers were fired at it from both sides. Some of the ballista darts crashed into its hide before falling harmlessly to the ground, but others caused enough trauma that bits and pieces of metallic scales showered the grasses below.

  Clay balls burst into the dragon's sides, dousing it with color. Smoke rose from its left side, where acid ate through its scales, filling the air with an obnoxious odor. On its right side, Maggie's team managed to cover its haunch and wing with a transparent gray liquid. At first, it seemed to do nothing but dull the shininess of its scales, but as the dragon soared onward, it started to favor its right side before it lost all control of its wing. The beast crashed to the ground in the plains just south of the easternmost Griswald Forest, leaving a trail of flattened grasses and broken earth.

  Cerin and I hurried to follow, running over the battlefield and passing thousands of casualties along the way. Closer to the forest, Kirek was still directing her soldiers to fight the dwarves rather than the beast, but she was the only one to do so. Altan and Marcus commanded their men to surround the dragon. As we neared it, Calder and his beastmen surged forth after stampeding out of Olympia's front gate. The dragon was so large that we surrounded it with hundreds of men on the frontlines and still had wiggle room.

  All of the necromancers started leeching. While I focused on turning that energy into new shields for allies, Cerin and Calder both leeched until the power pulsed through their veins. It was immediately prevalent when Calder got a high, for he launched himself at the dragon's right wing, clutching to it and ripping and tearing at its scales with teeth and talons in a frenetic fury. Cerin funneled his own energy into raw melee power, swinging his scythe into the side of the beast's massive chest to start chipping away at its exterior and get to the heart.

  Or hearts. Some beasts were too large to survive on only one of the organs. I could imagine this battle taking all day.

  “Kai!” Azazel's voice sounded out behind me, and I turned while leeching to find him and Uriel coming back to the fight.

  “How is Cyrus?” I asked him, wincing as an abundance of power ached dully throughout my skull.

  “As comfortable as he can be right now,” Azazel replied, pulling both karambits from his belt. “High?” He requested, noticing my grimace from the headache.

  As I continued to leech from the dragon with one hand, I built the life spell in the other. I waited until it drained most of my reserves before I passed the energy to the archer.

  Azazel immediately acted with renewed strength, lashing his arms forward and hooking both curved blades over the same scale. With a grunt of effort, he yanked it back, tearing the majority of the scale entirely off and exposing torn and bleeding flesh. Azazel went to work ripping through the wound until it was nothing more than a gash harboring frayed ligaments.

  Uriel watched the archer fighting in the same frenzied state as the necromancers and gave me a perplexed look as he stabbed his spear up into the dragon's lame wing. Spurts of blood escaped new wounds, splattering across his pale face in a sharp contrast of red.

  “I feel like I'm missing something,” the Sentinel said, grunting as he jerked his weapon back, stepping aside as more blood leaked from the wound, uninhibited. “Wasn't that life magic?”

  “It was,” I admitted, stealing the dragon's life force with both hands.

  “And?” The healer prodded. “It's like you made him stronger.”

  “How curious are you?” I asked him.

  “Pretty curious,” Uriel replied, before an uncertain chuckle.

  “I'll use it on you if you can wait to speak of it with me in privacy.” When I glanced over at the Sentinel for an answer, one of his pale eyebrows raised. A new high started to reach its agonizing fingers into my brain, so I asked, “Do you trust me?”

  Uriel did not wait to give me an answer to that. “I do.”

  I summoned the charged life spell. As the white magic grew i
n strength until it was opaque, Uriel watched with insatiable curiosity. I sent the charged energy into the Sentinel's chest, and he appeared uneasy on his feet before rapidly blinking as he came under its effects. Uriel stared down at his own arms for a few tense seconds as if trying to see the new power he could feel.

  Over the years of teaching necromancy in this war, I'd learned that everyone reacted differently to their first high. Some became overwhelmed with a hunger for power, like Cerin and I had. Some were fearful of the new feelings they'd never known before and were apt to panic. No matter the different reactions, everyone who experienced one was inundated with a need to expend the excess energy in bursts of adrenaline. Though Uriel was relatively quiet compared to most, he still reacted with great power.

  The Sentinel's spear plunged upward to the dragon's wing, its bladed points sinking deep into the trio of injuries he'd made earlier. Instead of just deepening the wound, he ripped the spear to the side, tearing scales and flesh alike away from the dragon's body with a massive effort. An entire flap of metallic tissue was hanging from the wing when he was finished before the spear was thrust upward again.

  “Back! Get back!” Altan's order was so out of character that we all listened to it, scattering out around the dragon as it looked to flee. The poisons which had once numbed its right side had evidently lost their effect. The dragon started to flap its wings to gain air, and only when I saw a smidgen of blue still on its wing did I realize Calder was still on it.

  “Calder!” I yelled, even as the dragon's four feet left the ground. “Get down!”

  Either Calder couldn't hear me, or he was ignoring me. As the dragon flew forward to escape, it barely noticed the weight of the lizard-kin clinging to its wing.