Life

by Rosie Scott

  I caught a glimpse of movement within the shadow of the tunnel entrance to the underground section of the city. Sure enough, the majority of the dwarven army was in wait. Even though we'd overcome so much just to reach the top, we still had most of the fight ahead of us.

  I tugged the war horn from my belt and turned to the armies still waiting behind the wall.

  HUUURRRNNNNN!

  Even before the horn was tied back to my belt, I saw Azazel leading the rest of the Seran Renegades through the gate first. Cerin released death magic at his feet, and the resulting tendrils dug themselves into recent casualties, Vhiri and dwarf alike. Maggie clutched her war hammer. Azazel and Holter both held their bows, and Nyx was still moving forward with the other assassins above the streets. Behind them, Cyrus and the other Sentinels followed.

  Phew!

  My hair waved by in the breeze of a ballista dart. I spun back around. The remaining dwarves on the rooftops still couldn't see me due to my invisibility, but the war horn had alerted them to my general direction. I threw black orbs across the street at them, and as their energy returned to me, another foe angled his repeater crossbow in my direction.

  Schew-schew-schew-schew!

  I rushed across the rooftop, jumping over the alleyway and landing so hard on the next building that my teeth ached from clenching at the pressure. Bolts whizzed past, spitting through the air after me as if the dwarf knew just where I was. This foe either had better eyes than most, or he was just frustrated and spraying the ammo across the skies while praying one hit.

  Shik!

  The crossbow ceased firing, and the dwarf behind it collapsed in a heap, bleeding from one black arrow to the eye. I glanced down at Azazel in thanks, but he wouldn't look in my direction, unwilling to give our foes any indication to my whereabouts.

  There were still dwarves on the rooftops. Some of them were hopping over alleyways to team up on the remaining siege weapons. Now that my friends were vulnerable, I sought to call attention to myself and protect them.

  Arc a meta. Metal shards clanged off of each other as they swirled above my palms. One of the foes noticed the metal hovering in thin air and pointed, screaming warnings to his comrades. Before any of the siege weapons could be turned to fire, I forced the earth magic across the rooftops.

  With the sound of shattering glass, the metal rippled outward like thousands of tiny knives. Dozens of the remaining dwarves were impaled, leaving man-sized gaps in the ever-widening arc of metal. The spell finally ran out of energy near the intersection at Griswald's peak, the leftover shards stopping in mid-air and falling to the streets like heavy rain.

  Azazel and Holter picked off the remaining foes on the rooftops with arrows. Far behind me, Nyx and the other assassins were moving back down to the road. I finally dispelled my invisibility and ran across a few more buildings until I found another ladder. When I reached the bottom, Cerin was waiting for me.

  “How are you feeling?” He asked, his silver eyes searching intensely in mine for clearheadedness.

  “Better,” I replied, motioning knowingly toward one of the buildings collapsed by a meteor.

  Cerin chuckled and said, “I'm beginning to think that your rages are simply excuses to expend mass energy.”

  I lifted one eyebrow at him. “It gives me a rush, my love.”

  A wave of attraction flooded through his eyes. “Me too.”

  I huffed in amusement. “It gives you a rush to expend lots of energy, or when you see me do it?”

  Cerin gave me a charming half-smile. “Both.”

  Nyx grinned at us as we made it back to the main road to march forward, having heard the last remnants of our exchange. “You two are going to have so much sex tonight.”

  “That's one hell of an incentive to finish this battle by nightfall,” Cerin mused, glancing up at the late afternoon skies.

  The tunnel entrance to underground Griswald became clearer as we neared it, inviting our eyes to feast on an architectural wonder. The two main roads of the outer city met just at its entrance, forming one wide path which descended into the depths of the mountain. Unlike in Olympia, there were no mazes of tunnels and inner pathways here. Instead, Griswald was set up much like an Alderi city of the underground. The mountain served as the city's walls and ceilings like the dwarves had merely dug through its rock whenever they looked to expand.

  Entire neighborhoods of elaborate stone and metal buildings were clustered on side streets off the main road, lit up by the natural firelight of lamps and braziers well-fed with wood and oil. Most of the structures here were homes, apartment buildings, and family-owned shops and businesses which survived on selling the necessities of life to the local populace. Griswald clearly favored making and using stained glass, because the majority of the windows throughout the city were a myriad of colors in a variety of designs. Due to the interior lights glowing through different hues, the city itself was luminous with pigments.

  Though the neighborhoods continued on the downgrade, we could see no more of the city's depths from here. Griswald's central fighting force crowded the main street like a horde of blue and gold. Crossbowmen were perched on roofs, balconies, and overhangs. Though some of the dwarves held transportable repeater crossbows, it appeared all of their larger siege weapons were now behind us.

  The Hammerton Army prepared their charge, generals shouting words of encouragement to thousands of bloodthirsty men and women. Because my Renegades were the first to reach the summit, we were the first to attack.

  As if in prior agreement of the plan, Cerin, Holter, Calder, and I all shot death bombs into the dwarven frontlines. Masses of them fell, cutting their general's speeches of bravado short. A few of the necromancer soldiers in the ranks behind us followed suit, collecting as much energy as they could before using the spell risked hitting allies. When my eyes watered with the pain of a mighty high, I passed the energy to Azazel and regenerated. Cerin decided to do the same, handing his power off to Uriel.

  I glanced back behind me as the dwarves charged, unwilling to risk more casualties before the major battle could begin. Cyrus, Kirek, and Zephyr were all on the frontlines with us, their armies a mass in the streets beyond. It was evident by the look in their eyes that all three of the Sentinels had seen Cerin and I transfer our energy, for Cyrus was intrigued, and Kirek and Zephyr appeared baffled to see Uriel and Azazel as energetic as the necromancers.

  The secret was out. Even if the two unknowing Sentinels didn't quite understand what had just transpired, they would be seeking more information about it soon. I could have been worried about those future conversations, but I only felt relieved.

  “Cy,” I said, the word strained with pain as I charged the life spell in my palm as he watched. “It's now or never.”

  Cyrus took a deep breath and nodded. “You have my permission, Kai.”

  The white energy sunk into his chest, causing Cyrus to waver on his feet as his eyes sparkled with new power. Zephyr's concerned questions about what was happening to him were muffled in my mind as I sent more death bombs into the oncoming masses to regenerate my energy. Just before our armies came to clash, Cyrus strode past me, orbs of pure water hovering above his palms.

  Pssh!

  Cyrus screamed with exertion as an arc of water shot out from his hands, knocking back lines of foes with its power and lambasting them with water. After building a new spell, he walked straight up to the edge of the sopping wet stone and turned water to ice.

  The water that sat in puddles around the main road turned slick and solid. The energy spread outward from Cyrus's casting, ice crystals crackling as they formed throughout the water on the street and up the sopping wet armor and flesh of dwarves. The army's charge was slowed and in many cases completely stopped as men and women became stiff with cold and encased in ice. The rapid freezing coaxed skin to darken with the onset of hypothermia. Many of the dwarves lost consciousness, only kept standing by prisons of ice. When Cyrus sent an ice arc through the frontlines n
ext, it proved to be too cold for the already frozen bodies. Dwarves collapsed to the ground like ice cubes themselves, so frozen that the stone was littered with fingers as they detached and fell off.

  Cyrus's ice spells were so powerful that when we ran through the area to face the next ranks, it was freezing as if we were in the midst of Dark Star. When my boots started to slip on sheets of ice, I sent a heat wave of air magic through the area, stabilizing the temperature and melting the ice in a circumference around myself. The power of the hot winds made a few of my allies stumble back, but they were otherwise unharmed. The air became thick with the stench of moist decay as the frozen and mummified bodies melted and softened.

  With some of his excess energy spent, Cyrus's initial rampage was over. The Sentinel grabbed both katars from his belt and went head-first into melee battle. Just feet away in his beast form, Calder was tackling soldiers and snapping necks with his powerful jaws. Kirek had rushed far ahead and was surrounded by dwarves but holding her own. Not long after our fight moved into the mountain, Altan's boisterous battle lust bounced off of the stone walls, alerting me to the fact that the other half of our army had finally caught up to us.

  Fighting the Hammerton Army in Griswald was like slowly unraveling a complicated knot, for it was a blockade on the main road, and no matter how we tried to circumvent it by utilizing side streets, it proved tough to untangle. The dwarven army was massive, but so was ours. The battle quickly turned into one of close quarters attrition.

  It was impossible to tell how long we fought, for the deeper into the mountain we went, the less natural light met our location from the tunnel to outside. Lower Griswald was a beautiful mixture of the underground environment and the complicated architecture of the dwarves. Firelight still gave the city a mostly orange glow, but clusters of bioluminescent fungi started to appear in the cracks of stone walls and ceilings, growing more and more prevalent the farther down we went.

  The main road eventually split into two, each path circling around either side of a massive cave-in. Hundreds of meters below, the underground lake Than had once told us about glimmered in the teal and blue light of surrounding fungi. The soft glow of underwater plants gave away the lake's secrets, for various shadowed shapes of fallen debris revealed itself beneath its depths. The lake was enormous, taking up every inch of the next level down as far as I could see. That made sense; on the map of the underground, the great lake was even larger than the city of Thanati.

  The dwarves had clearly been expanding the main path when they caused the cave-in because they'd kept building around it as if it were merely an inconvenience. Homes and apartment buildings sprouted up along the edges of the hole, many towering so tall in the cavern that their highest floors surely made its occupants feel as if they were floating in thin air. Monumental stone bridges crisscrossed over the lake, the largest curving outward from the farthest reaches of one side of the cave-in to the other. Not only was it a convenient avenue of travel between both lower halves of the city, but it allowed the dwarves a magnificent view of the cavern and its lake at such a height. It even appeared that the bridge was large enough to hold some forms of recreation. There were wooden shop stalls set up on the overpass and an array of tables and seating, all of which were currently unoccupied.

  Even the stone walls of the cavern had been utilized for architecture. Clear and stained-glass windows glowed from the dark rock just below the bridges, where the dwarves had continued building their city into the land itself. Somehow, the masterful engineers had even extended their buildings out over the lake, using a variety of metal supports to hold up entire rooms and houses where there had once only been a drop into the depths.

  Tunnels revealed themselves in the cavern walls peeking between neighborhoods and monuments, most likely leading to mines and Griswald's Hall of the Dead. Like the rest of the city's pathways, these were empty and clear of the civilians frequently traveling through them. Some civilians watched the battle through windows and the cracks of open doors, many of them overpopulated in the underground homes since they'd been pulled back from the outside.

  The necromancers were our best soldiers in this claustrophobic fight. The dwarves fought extraordinarily well in close quarters melee, and their armor was often more substantial than the protections of the Vhiri. In addition, it was hard for many mages to utilize widespread magical attacks when our armies were so intertwined. Thus, the majority of the fighting in the underground was melee versus melee, and the dwarves were often stronger and hardier in such warfare. The necromancers were relied upon not only to raise the dead to swarm our foes, but their leeching highs guaranteed extra vigor which allowed them to succeed against even the strongest melee fighters.

  Calder and his army of beastmen were consistently on the frontlines, paving a path for the rest of us with brute force and acts of savagery. Hours into the battle, the beastmen found themselves in a bloody brawl on the gigantic curved bridge over the lake. The Seran Renegades rushed to catch up to them, for their energetic bloodlust meant they were far ahead from the battle still raging on the split paths. As usual, I had fought on the frontlines, so most of our army was still behind me. I left the remaining dwarven troops to them as I hurried to aid Calder during the last stand of the dwarves of Griswald.

  “I do not have time for this!” Maggie exclaimed, swiping her bloody war hammer across the path before us. Three different dwarves flew back from the hit, faces smushed and bruised. Their bodies knocked down some of their comrades as they fell.

  “Sure you do!” Nyx retorted playfully as she dodged a few hammer swings of a foe. “You didn't have any plans tonight!”

  Maggie chuckled tiredly and used her war hammer as a thrusting weapon, shoving a dwarven woman back so hard that she must have been knocked unconscious, for she fell and did not rise. “My arms are achy, love! I could use a hot bath or a massage from a couple a' beauties right about now.”

  “If you want energy, I've got it,” Cerin replied, before grunting with effort as his scythe swung into the side of a heavy dwarven helmet with a clunk. The armor was too thick to be pierced, but the immense power behind the hit bent it and must have cracked the man's spine since he fell like paralyzed dead weight.

  “One a' those spells that makes people all crazy-like?” Maggie questioned.

  “Aye,” Cerin replied, using the engineer's dialect in jest.

  Maggie chuckled. “Sure, love! I'll take it off your hands. Ya got a limitless supply, anyway.” Her big blue eyes watched over the hordes still pooling out of the bridge.

  Cerin passed his high to the engineer, and she blinked rapidly as she came under its effects. I was intensely curious to watch Maggie's first high, for neither the dwarves or giants were magical races so I wondered if it would work the same way on her. Though she appeared renewed with energy, she didn't seem to experience a high.

  “Aww, that ain't so bad,” Maggie finally commented. “It's refreshing, but I certainly don't feel like goin' crazy or nothin'.”

  I thought of the camazotz and the dragon. They were both extremely hardy and large creatures, and using enervat against them hadn't immediately killed them due to their exceedingly strong life force. If it took more work to kill something, perhaps it took more energy to give it a high. It was possible Maggie was the same way because of her giant blood. I leeched until it was agonizing and passed the excess on to her, bombarding her with the strength of a high that would have left me or Cerin passed out.

  My theory was correct. Maggie's big eyes teared up with the immediate power, and where she had once just been refreshed, she was now a bundle of energy. She clutched her war hammer with both hands, lifting the giant weapon above her head while shouting, “Oh, hell yes!”

  Nyx was laughing at the engineer's exclamation even before the hammer was brought down in the midst of a crowd. One soldier was left in a pile of gory mush, his blood filling in the cracks that Maggie's tremendous strength left in solid stone. A number of his friends were kno
cked back from the hit as its vibrations rippled outward. Even before they landed, Maggie swept the hammer forward and up, throwing a handful of dwarves back from the path like they were nothing more than drops of water. Many of the soldiers flew over the bridge's stone railing, their screams rising in urgency as they fell hundreds of meters to the lake below.

  Thanks to Maggie's sweeping moves, we finally reached the curved bridge of Griswald. Though it was a magnificent and wide overpass with sturdy side barriers, just one look over to the lake gave me an intense feeling of vertigo that left me swaying on my feet. Ever the attentive protector, Azazel kept himself between me and the railing, and I felt his hand at the small of my back to stabilize me when I got a little too tipsy.

  The roars, hisses, and squeals of the beasts in the midst of battle reverberated roughly across the stone cavern walls, amplifying their volume and range. Dwarves were being lifted up and thrown over the bridge by many of the beastmen who could. Even Mirrikh was depositing foes over the railing after impaling them with his stinger.

  Across the massive gap from the bridge to the main road we'd come from, the Sentinels were gaining the advantage, pushing the remaining dwarves back until they had nowhere else to go. We'd sustained many casualties, but thousands of the dead fought alongside the living. Victory was near.

  Then, like a rough and shrill alarm, a ghastly roar sounded from the depths of the Griswald mines across the chasm. The dwarves in the midst of battle at the split started to retreat, leaving the Vhiri baffled as they pursued the foes. Whatever was in the tunnels, the dwarves wanted no part in fighting it. Perhaps they meant to flee the fight much like they had in Olympia to use Hammerton's hardy creatures as unexpected secret weapons against the Eteri Army.