“He seems to be doing well for someone who used to be dead,” Trinity whispers, genuinely impressed.
“Are you going to help me or not?” growls Kalam, gently landing behind Trinity. He drops a pair of dead townsfolk and licks his mouth clean. “Talos has arrived and is making short work of my zombies. Hurry up and do your job, your majesty.”
“Of course, sir. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time,” the chaos elf happily coos, creating a spinning disk of green energy on the back of each hand. “I’ve lost sleep over dreaming about this battle.”
“You serve me well, milady. I will overlook your previous transgressions once you kill this girl,” the vampire promises.
Trinity lets a wicked smile ripple across her face before she dashes at Nyx. The razor sharp discs of magic grow large enough to touch the ground, propelling her faster than the half-elf expected. Nyx dives between the disks, but Trinity is able to deliver a quick kick to the back of her head. The strike knocks Nyx to the ground where several decaying, disembodied hands grab her. She struggles against the severed hands as they merge their wrists with the ground. They flip her onto her back, so she can watch Trinity approach her.
“Apprentice of Rainbow Tower, you are nothing more than a harmless maggot in my path,” Kalam gloats with excitement. He chokes on his laughter when Trinity’s magical discs slice through all of the severed hands, allowing Nyx to get to her feet. The chaos elf queen hurls the disks into the air where they explode in a dazzling display.
“Well, I’ve had my fun,” Trinity announces, a playful grin appearing on her lips.
“What are you doing, traitor?” Kalam angrily snarls.
“I said I was willing to follow you to the fight, old fool. I never said that I was going to get involved,” Trinity answers with a taunting curtsey. “Our alliance has been dissolved and my true master has decided that you are a loose end. I leave you in the capable hands of Lady Nyx since you are not worth any more of my time.”
“You assume that he’s worth my time,” Nyx says, eyeing Kalam with disdain.
“Consider him a gift, my little playmate,” the chaos elf retorts with a cocky grin. “Better yet, consider him a table scrap that your superior doesn’t want to bother with. That is what dogs like you eat, right?”
Nyx cautiously watches her rival, her hand briefly falling to her crossbow. “I really don’t understand you.”
“Don’t get the wrong idea, Nyx. I really do hate you with every fiber of my being,” Trinity swears, her voice holding no trace of malice.
“Enough of this banter!” Kalam roars, lashing out with a blast of raw, bone-chilling magic. Nyx and Trinity put up shields around themselves, sending the black magic swarming over them.
Trinity continues talking as if nothing happened. “I can’t wait for the day that I destroy you, but I want it to be done right. I have seen what thoughtless rage and frustration have done to Kalam and I refuse to be like him. My war with you will be one of prolonged thrills and excitement. You will never know when my true intention will be to kill you. All you know is that this is not that day. Today, I need you to remove this waste of magic.”
“It saves you the trouble of getting your hands dirty,” Nyx points out.
“You know me better than you think. Ta-ta.” Trinity slowly fades away into a fog of black, which is cleared by a strong wind.
“She leaves a child to fight me? That queen must be a foo-” begins Kalam before a battering ram of force knocks him back.
“Idiot! You had so many chances to really attack us,” Nyx declares. Kalam hurls a fireball, which Nyx effortlessly bats away with her bare hand. “I can see why she didn’t want to waste her time. You’re nothing more than a pompous fossil.”
Kalam rises into the air and begins hurling black lightning from his jagged fingernails. They stab into the ground where Nyx used to be standing. Several Nyx’s split off in different directions with lightning following all of them. Three of the decoys explode into swarms of violet butterflies the moment they are struck. A surge of heat comes from behind Kalam and he turns to calmly transform the blazing spiral of fire into a poisonous cloud. The toxic cloud billows back toward Nyx who is unable to escape. The vampire drools in anticipation upon hearing the half-elf cough and gasp desperately within the cloud. As she stumbles out of the poison cloud, Nyx is impaled in the forehead by a tube that erupts from Kalam’s belly. Her face turns pale and her eyes roll back into her head while the tube sucks her blood and brains out of her skull.
“Wow. You killed me pretty nicely,” Nyx mentions as the swarms of violet butterflies merge and transform into her. Kalam roars, retracting the tube from the dying Nyx who turns back into a halfling zombie. The vampire has a horrid taste in his mouth before coughing up the rancid blood and brains.
“You fight me with parlor tricks,” he growls.
Nyx grows fiery armor around her body and leaps at Kalam. She catches his ankle, which burns at her touch. Kalam can’t stop himself from laughing as she flips onto his back. The armor folds off her body, becoming a tight, super-heated prison around Kalam. The smell of burning scales fills her nose for a brief instant. With a sudden look of disappointment on her face, Nyx drops to the ground and walks a few yards away. She turns to watch Kalam inhale her spell and chew it up.
“If my brother couldn’t defeat me then you have no chance,” Kalam states with a bored smile.
“I can beat you,” Nyx calmly swears.
“Unlike my brother, you don’t understand the truth of magic. You don’t know how it really works,” Kalam says, hitting Nyx with a blast of wind that spins her off her feet.
Nyx feels herself hover helplessly in the air before a sudden force pushes her to her hands and knees. At the same time, she feels another spell try to pull her body toward the sky. Her mind falls into panic as the opposing spells threaten to tear her in half. Through her fear, Nyx realizes why Kalam is stronger than her. The vampire has spent years honing his spellcasting instincts, rarely dwelling on a spell’s form. Unlike Nyx, he has no qualms about unleashing his full power and succumbing to his reflexes. The instances that she takes to think of a spell are all Kalam has needed to toy with her before delivering a final, crushing defeat.
Pain pulses through Nyx’s body, breaking her thoughts and forcing a stream of tears from her eyes. She begins to clench her teeth in agony, which is suddenly devoured by a surge of primal, instinctual rage. In this moment of fury, a simple phrase comes to Nyx’s mind. It is a phrase that feels familiar and empowering to the half-elf, though she swears she has never heard it before. Repeating the phrase in her mind, Nyx can feel her power grow and boil under her skin.
“I am magic,” Nyx whispers under her breath, her eyes opening with a flame of defiance.
Kalam floats over to Nyx, so he can speak into her ear. “This is disappointing. I had hoped my brother would arrive to give me a real challenge. Instead, I am left with an apprentice.”
“I’m more dangerous than your brother,” the half-elf hisses through her clenched teeth.
“Don’t delude yourself in your final moments,” he says. His spell starts yanking on her limbs with increased force.
“You think tearing my limbs off will stop me? I can still cast a few spells before I bleed to death,” Nyx declares with a brave attempt at smiling. “It does mean that my rich, thick, magic-infused blood will spill out of me onto the grass where your minions can get at it. Though, a noble vampire like you wouldn’t be interested in draining a bitter girl like me.”
“Is this where I say that you are wrong and I bite into you?” Kalam asks with mild contempt.
“Only if you want to,” the half-elf replies, worry slipping into her voice.
“I have a better idea than a bite,” Kalam says, a hungry grin revealing his fangs. “You will become my new toy. I will make you an empty husk for me to merge with a wandering spirit of my choosing. You will be the perfect concubine, empty and willing. All I need to do is drain you of
your blood and organs.”
“Organs? Vampires don’t eat organs,” Nyx snaps in a sudden burst of panic.
“Normal vampires don’t,” Kalam admits, licking his lips. “I modified myself with the tubes of an ethereal leech to get at more . . . delectable meals. The taste of blood gets boring after a few decades.”
Nyx is about to saying something when forty orange tubes erupt from the vampire’s stomach. They viciously stab into Nyx pinning her against the ground. The dull pain from the impact is quickly forgotten once the tubes begin to drain her body. Nyx struggles to think of a spell when the top half of a goblin zombie lands next to her. She stares at the lifeless body, which jogs her memories of the last time she was about to die. With very little effort, a spell with enough power to end hundreds of lives at once had come to her. All she needed was the catalyst of fear and the primal instinct to survive at all costs. The forbidden spell had wiped out her magic for days, but that was when she did it by accident. Now, Nyx finds that she is keenly aware of the true power that she can unleash. This time she knows that she can maintain her control and deliver what could be her final spell.
“You know why Isaiah never killed you?” Nyx asks, using her magic to hold her organs in.
“Do tell,” Kalam burps.
“Because you’re his brother and he loves you,” Nyx states, a grin appearing on her pained face. “I don’t have that problem. To me, you’re nothing more than an evil monster.” She suddenly turns into a being of mist, causing Kalam’s tubes to strike into the dirt.
“A simple mist form spell is nothing for me to be impressed by,” Kalam scoffs, his draining tubes weaving through the mist.
The mist twitches and throbs amid the matted grass before it begins flowing into the draining tubes. Kalam feels caution seep into his bones, but he finds that he can’t retract the tubes until the mist, that was once Nyx, is completely absorbed. The battlefield around Kalam becomes eerily silent as a burning sensation runs through his veins. Without warning, his right eye explodes into a cloud of crimson dust. Moments later, several scales on his chest painfully twist and launch into a nearby zombie. His left arm melts into a super-heated puddle of white ooze, leaving the vampire trembling in fear and rage.
“What did you . . . ghark,” Kalam chokes, his throat melting and seeping into his lungs.
“You killed my best friend. You tortured and abused my childhood friend . . . Did you just try to gurgle something?” Nyx whispers directly into his eardrums. “Oh, revenge. No. This isn’t revenge for them. I just wanted to point out that even though you hurt them, Luke and Sari could never make your dying moments as painful as I can.” His ears suddenly explode, the sides of the necrocaster’s head sending a shower of searing, white flame into the sky.
Nyx’s trembling voice echoes in his head one last time. “I should stop this torture. I’m starting to enjoy myself.”
Kalam feels a surge of nerve-shredding heat rush through his body before he explodes in a pillar of gore and flame. The pillar rages around Nyx while she recomposes her body. Stumbling out of the fire, her body aches and trembles due to the immense amount of power she used. A feeling of nausea passes over her without any warning, forcing her to her knees. Tears of horror stream down her face from remembering her invasion of Kalam’s body, using his nerves to ignite tiny fireballs around his body. It is a memory that she knows will plague her dreams for a long time. The worst part is that she can sense a part of her that wants to do it again, only better. It’s this exhilarated part of Nyx that helps her recover her senses and realize that there is still a battle going on around her.
Nyx is getting to her feet when the earth shakes from a sudden impact. A deafening roar makes her forget about what she did to Kalam. She can hear Aedyn scream for everyone to run while Luke taunts whatever landed in the clearing. It takes all of her courage to turn toward the source of the roaring and stomping. For an instant, she sees the narrow, silver body and flawless gold wings of the Sword Dragon. It is in this instance that Talos’s unconscious body is hurled in her direction. She laughs nervously at the absurd accident that is about to befall her. The elf slams into her, sending them crashing through several thick trees before they stop. She lays in the dirt with Talos’s wheezing body awkwardly draped over her. Her eyes begin to close against her will and she loses consciousness with an amused smile across her face.
*****
Silence covers the battlefield when a tower of flame and chunks of what used to be Kalam stretch to the sky. Luke breathes a sigh of relief while he watches the remaining zombies shudder and fall apart. He is about to run over to Nyx, who is on her knees, when a form in the sky catches his attention. It is a large form with wide wings of gold and a long, narrow body of silver that can’t be more than two feet wide. A bright red light in the center of what Luke thinks is the beast’s head temporarily mesmerizes him as the creature gets closer. Luke’s heart sinks when the beast swoops toward the clearing with alarming speed. He desperately yells and waves his swords at the beast, but the elegant Sword Dragon lands behind Talos. The elf is barely able to raise his swords before a metallic paw viciously bats him out of the dragon’s way. Luke watches as his grandfather slams into Nyx, both of them disappearing into the forest with a crash.
“We have to get out of here!” Aedyn shouts.
“No! We keep this beast here!” Luke yells back.
“Talos and Nyx were the only ones who had even a remote chance of beating this thing, Luke,” Aedyn argues, watching the dragon’s eyes scan the clearing. “It does not even see a reason to immediately attack us. It is taking its time choosing which of us to eat first.”
“I’d rather it eat me first than to watch it tear Haven apart before my eyes,” Luke defiantly growls.
The forest tracker charges at the enormous beast, which begins spitting balls of fiery metal into the air. Luke barely notices that Sari is stepping in front of him before he crashes into her. The wind is knocked out of his lungs, but Sari doesn’t move an inch. Sari tackles the stunned half-elf out of the path of a chunk of fiery metal that is barreling toward them. The beast sweeps one of its wings at the tangled pair, leaving a deep gouge in the ground. Luke rolls out of the way with Sari clutching him tightly.
“You’re too stupid to realize when you’re outmatched,” Sari mutters. She scrambles to her feet and dives away from another slash of the beast’s wing.
“I thought I had backup,” Luke admits. He spins away from another wing slash, grabbing Sari by the waist to pull her away from an incoming flaming, metal orb. They continue dodging and flipping away from the large beast, every attack coming heart-wrenchingly close to hitting them.
“It’s like we’re dancing,” Sari laughs, excitement erasing her fear.
“I prefer my partners to be a little smaller,” Luke says, barely avoiding the dragon’s paw.
“Are you saying I’m fat?” Sari asks. A metal chunk skims her arm and leaves a stinging burn on her skin.
“I was talking about the dragon,” Luke replies apologetically. He dives at Sari and spins her away from the dragon’s mouth. The sword-like teeth gnash together where the juicy gypsy once stood.
“Oh,” Sari says, looking back at the beast’s maw.
The Sword Dragon roars at the sky, rearing up on its hind legs to stomp on the quick-footed pair. Sari squeaks in surprise as a clawed paw strikes the ground a few inches in front of her, the rush of air and force knocking her down. Luke is only slightly better off, stabbing his sabers into the incoming paw with all of his strength. At first they scratch along the smooth, metal hide, but they eventually hit a barely visible groove and slip between the plates of the paw. The dragon’s momentary surprise at feeling pain gives Luke enough time to free his sabers and sprint to safety. The paw slams against the ground and immediately lashes out at Luke, grazing his leg.
“This thing is getting too close,” Luke nervously says. “Eventually, my mind is going to be too exhausted to keep my body ahead of its
attacks.”
“My muscles are already killing me,” Sari complains, wheezing and gasping for air. “Too much time in a damn dungeon hasn’t left me in the best shape. I’m surprised I made it this far.”
“Get to Haven and hide. I’ll handle this.”
“One lucky shot doesn’t mean you can kill it.”
Without warning, the dragon launches itself into the air and whips the ground with its tail. Luke and Sari scramble to get away from the flurry of destruction, but Sari trips over the remains of an orc zombie. A swarm of flaming metal orbs hurtle toward the gypsy who uses the last of her energy to flip, leap, and roll to safety. Sari makes a desperate leap, her right ankle bending the wrong way upon landing. She staggers a few steps before falling to one knee, gritting her teeth in pain. She can feel the hungry stare of the dragon, eyeing her like a helpless snack. A terrifying shriek of victory ripples through the air and the dragon’s neck stretches to gobble Sari whole.
The world slows down as Sari watches the approaching beast, which seems almost too surreal to comprehend. She barely notices Luke slide in front of her with his sabers glistening in the sunlight. The dragon stops abruptly without Luke putting his swords up to block. At first, Sari can’t understand why the dragon froze just short of the forest tracker. She sees Luke’s shoulders and arms loose their tension, but she is unable to see his face. Sari grunts in pain as she stands up and looks around Luke. Standing in the open maw of the dragon is Aedyn whose wooden staff is straining against the massive jaws. The priest winces at the pain from a tooth piercing his shoulder and another passing through his right leg. The dragon rears back and leaps into the air where it thrashes in an attempt to dislodge the priest.
Legends of Windemere: 03 - Allure of the Gypsies Page 42
