Legend of the Iron Flower Box Set (Books 1-4)

by Billy Wong

  As they returned to the wagon the morning of their departure, Rose turned to Finn and demanded, "Why the hell did you talk about my wound?! You know my mom doesn't take hearing about my hurts well."

  "I forgot," he said apologetically. "I'm so proud you survived that wound, and I forgot who I was sharing my pride with. I love your toughness."

  Rose smiled. She knew that Finn worried every bit as much over her injuries as her mother, and his celebration of her resilience was largely a way to reassure himself she would be fine. "It's okay. Just try to remember who you're talking to next time, alright?"

  "Sure. By the way, why is it that whenever I ask you how you're holding up, you always brush my questions off no matter how bad you're obviously hurt?"

  "If I admitted how bad I felt at times, it'd just get you way too worked up."

  "That's probably true... so, how are you feeling?"

  "Absolutely fine!" she answered readily, and began to laugh. It didn't take long for Finn to join her.

  #

  Rose and Finn smiled together as the familiar lush fields outside Gustrone came into view, the blossoming spring land a reflection of their joyful hearts. Finally entering the city, Finn said, "I'd wager half the staff think we're either dead or run away for good."

  "It has been over a month now, hasn't it? That's what we get for you being unable to fly us home. But the rumors about you were well entrenched way before this trip."

  "My fault," he acknowledged. Stopping in front of the Center for Magical Study, Finn hopped down and helped Rose out. "Should I carry you?"

  "I've had plenty of time to heal up. I was even eating spicy food two towns ago, and my guts didn't react too badly. I can definitely walk, even if my feet have grown used to laziness."

  They walked happily arm in arm into the tower. "Master Finn," their greeter exclaimed, "you're finally back! Good morning to you too, Rose."

  "It's a good one indeed. Anything happen while I was gone?"

  "Some ruffians tried to set the place on fire, but luckily stone doesn't burn. Later what we assume to be the same group tried to get in, but got caught. They had masks and swords, and tried to kill the guards who found them out. They won't be bothering us anymore."

  Rose felt happy to hear of the city guard's success in protecting its inhabitants—them—and from his smirk, so did Finn. Smiling, she said, "I bet Derrick's going to be glad to see us. He must be worried sick."

  "He heard you got gutted up in Coblan and was worried you were dead. I didn't buy you'd let something like that happen to you, though."

  Laughing, she shook her head while Finn patted her belly. "Wendy, I did get gutted! I just didn't die from it. My guts were being held together by horsehair for a while there, but you should've seen the other guy."

  "I beat him," Finn pointed out.

  "I could've done it, if not for that stupid chasm. I wasn't in much better shape if at all against the Spelldrinker, and I got it done."

  "A loss is a loss," he declared. "Though I do give you credit for saving my life. But, you wouldn't have had to if you'd won in the first place."

  "If I had, you would still be a dragon."

  Finn grinned widely. "It's a good thing that you didn't, then."

  She loved these little bouts of wordplay, but stopped to ask, "So is Derrick here right now?"

  "He's here," Wendy said. "He's got his own story to tell, from when he went to Resnick and stopped the attacks here at their source."

  Rose exchanged surprised glances with Finn. "You can't say he's useless," she mused, "even if he can be a bit reckless at times."

  "He'd say the same about you, probably."

  She thought about it and decided, "We may be very different, but we're all pretty reckless."

  Finn shook his head. "Reckless is a overly negative word. I think 'daring' suits me better." She poked him, and he said, "You too, of course." Grabbing his hand tightly, she dragged him onward to Derrick's room.

  #

  Derrick lay in bed, wondering how Rose and Finn fared. He'd gotten Rose's last message saying she still lived despite her devastating wound and everything was fine, but it'd been so long after that. Were they having trouble getting back, and if so why when Finn could just fly? She'd strangely avoiding talking about him in her letters, too. Had something happened? Just then his door flew open, and he stared. Rose and Finn—human Finn—stood there.

  "No, you're not seeing things," Rose assured him. "He is actually a man again."

  He could hardly believe it, but hugging his friends proved them both real. "So how bad was that wound really? The rumors made it out to be pretty nasty."

  Rose pulled her shirt up, revealing the terrible scar, and asked with a wink, "What do you think?"

  He hugged her again, and she yelped in surprise when he lifted her a couple inches off the ground. "I hope I didn't hurt my back," he said when he put her down, and rubbed his spine. "Glad to see you're unkillable as ever. So how did you finally become human again, Finn?"

  His friends explained together, arguing a bit over the details, and Rose ended with, "So if Brandon had handled himself a bit better, I would've gotten the kill, and if Finn had been a little more careful, he'd still be a dragon. Which, of course, would be a bad thing. Thanks for messing up, boys."

  Finn nodded as if conceding to her assessment. "And what happened in your adventure, Derrick?"

  "I got a monster who was plotting against us arrested. Nothing like what you two did." Thinking about their description of the underground enemy, Derrick asked, "Do you think that thing you killed was the mother of the monsters we fought at Resnick?"

  Finn frowned. "I don't know. It was so different from those—hell, a lot of the big ones were different from each other, and from the fagres as well. It seemed like they were all different races..."

  "They didn't even use the same kind of attacks," Rose added. "But it did share the skin color of the biggest monster, and they all had the lack of genitalia. But without genitalia, how could it have been the mother? Maybe, it was some outcast relative."

  "Yeah, and the strongest one."

  "Kind of odd that the most powerful would be the outcast," Derrick said.

  Rose hung her head. "Physical power isn't everything, I know that from experience. Can't tell you how often I've felt like an outcast among people I wanted to accept me."

  Finn hugged her shoulders. "Maybe, but we know you're the best. It did seem powerful enough it could've easily brought most of the other monsters under its heel, what with that scream and all. I wish we knew what it was doing in isolated north Coblan, and why it had that pouch. To carry food, yes—but why so much at once?"

  An idea formed in Derrick's head, and while the implications scared him briefly, the realization he had a moment later relieved him. "It might have been a provider for some other being. Without it, that creature will starve and die. If this theory is correct, it probably already has."

  "A breeding creature, a batch of young, or what?" Rose wondered. "At least we don't have to go back. If whatever it was couldn't provide for itself, it must be gone already. But if we ever happen to be in the area, I'd like to check that cave out again. It would be interesting to see what exactly the monster was protecting."

  #

  After the death of its caretaker, the mother had reached out with its mind to its chosen heir, urging it to come quickly before it was too late. Neither male or female in the human sense, but in some way both, it'd awakened in the darkness, crippled and with no memory of what it was or where it came from. All it'd known was what it could do, and what it must do. Then, it'd had only its caretaker to feed it, until it gained enough strength to produce new children. It could shape offspring of immense power, power taken from the very elements of the universe. But its mind had been damaged somehow, making it no longer capable of controlling its own powers of shaping. So its children had mostly been of the basic, inferior type, which it accumulated many hundreds of here beneath the ground. Only o
ne out of scores had been specially gifted, and only through blind luck due to instability in its distribution of energies.

  The caretaker had been hard-pressed to feed it, and though the children were able to farm the underground vegetation for their own food, the mother needed the sustenance of moving creatures. So the caretaker was forced to draw attention to itself by taking whole colonies of food-creatures to feed it, until by luck they'd found a pair of gates to the surface in the underworld. Going out into the world, its children had came back with limitless food which allowed it to bear hundreds, thousands more young. Then the food-creatures began to fight back, and its young returned in fewer and fewer numbers.

  But the mother's greatest boon came next, when a particularly agreeable food-creature accepted it as his master. Seeing a use for the creature's intelligence and knowledge of his world, the mother had spared his life and granted him a portion of its own spirit, and in return that chosen heir had taught its children the use of the deadly missiles with which the food-creatures previously devastated them.

  The food-creature's vision of the mother had been so appealing, it'd accepted it for its own identity, becoming in its own mind the Earth Mother he called it—her. Then the heir had driven all her children, her angels, into battle against the food-creatures, promising that after the defenders among the food had been destroyed, they would be free to harvest at their leisure. But the unthinkable happened; the angels were annihilated, even her strongest child, and the gates sealed by the food-creatures.

  Thus the Earth Mother had been left with only the archangel, the caregiver, to provide for her and her next batch of angels. But after the archangel died too, its new angels starved before they could even begin to grow. Now the Earth Mother was alone and in the last stages of her demise, and her only hopes rested on her heir. She would pass her powers of life onto him so that he might succeed where she had failed, allowing her race to flourish on this new world. And someday, he could do what she was unable to in her infirmity; that is, give birth to a new batch of mothers, which would each create ten, no, a hundred thousand strong angels to lead their kingdom into glory and power.

  #

  Graham finally arrived, and looked with sorrow upon the dying frame of his goddess' avatar. How could such a thing happen? The once perpetually swollen belly had become a flap of flaccid skin, and the rest of its body little more than bones covered by a similarly loose hide. Back when he'd first seen the avatar, immediately after being captured by its angels, he instantly recognized it as the embodiment of his goddess. Now there was nothing left of that magnificent beauty, only the shriveled shell of a dying god. In his eyes, he saw the death of life itself, and rage boiled up inside him at the ones who had killed the archangel that nurtured the giver of life and doomed the Earth Mother's mortal shell. Rose, the same near immortal who'd made him a cripple, reducing him to the use of a hardwood peg for a leg. Finn, who may or may not have been the dragon which had destroyed nearly half of the goddess' angels by himself. Brandon the defender of Resnick, that annoyance. And the other one, the skinny woman who was hardly worth his notice. He'd kill them all, if he had the power.

  He would get the power, he realized when the Earth Mother gave him another vision, stronger than ever before. She touched his forehead with a needle nail and pierced his skull as images of himself being reborn as a god filled his mind, a god both male and female—the embodiment of all life, able to create the most perfect beings, angels of his own design. With each image came more power into him, elemental energies which made him one with the universe, one with life. The old avatar had been a thing of beauty, of natural purity, but also too bound to the natural world to truly utilize its power to the fullest. In him, that power would find the perfect home, his wisdom guiding it to its potential. He opened his eyes and saw the dead shell before him. But he wasn't sad, because the Earth Mother wasn't dead. The visions still filled him, only now they were of his own making. He was the Earth Mother now, and he was life.

  As his mind changed, so too had his body with it. Where only a portion of the Earth Mother's power had been his before, now he could feel her full divine essence flowing through him. His form possessed new mass and roundness, having become perfectly suited to giving life. He reveled in the knowledge he was now truly the goddess' vessel, the most complete living being which existed in this world. Among advanced beings only he now had the power to procreate without a partner, but at his own will alone.

  Then he realized he didn't have the power to create offspring at will, that the goddess' power was limited in the mortal realm. He'd have to take from creatures already on the earth, take back the power the Mother had lent them for his own use. Now their life would serve to change the world into a better place, one where nature would never be destroyed at the whims of man again. He understood too now it hadn't really been hunger which killed the old avatar. Rather, the inability to make offspring brought on by lack of nourishment had done it in, for it was the Earth Mother's purpose and what sustained it to create new life. Leaving the underworld, Graham searched until he found a small group of travelers, and after cutting them down, felt for the first time the joy of drawing out raw life, ready to shape into a new being.

  What should he make? Having seen the destruction of the lesser angels at Fort Resnick, he came to believe that quality would be more important than quantity in the sculpting of his own. So he would store the life of the travelers within him for now, until he'd reaped enough to suit his need. He continued to hunt, taking his fill from more people as he found them. Once he'd gathered up the proper amount of life energy, he began his work. Drawing elemental power from the world around him, he saw his belly swell and grinned. Soon he would shape the mingled energies within him into bodies for his angels, the new Earth Mother's first batch of beautiful children would be born, and he could finally begin to build the kingdom of life he so longed for.

  He knew it'd be difficult to birth the forces needed to secure rule over any sizable area, and that to create the angels needed for an army capable of taking all of Kayland—and beyond—would take many years, even decades. But he smiled as he decided that such grand plans were for the far future. For now, what he needed was to erase the destructive art of magic off the face of the earth, once and for all. And knowing how difficult it would be to attack its chief proponents in their home, he looked to their friends as suitable bait to lure them to his chosen killing grounds.

  Chapter 10

  Finn touched Rose's face as she got up to dash for the washroom. "Are you sure your stomach's doing okay? You've been using the old hole a lot more lately. I'm beginning to get scared that you took some permanent damage back there in Coblan."

  She thought about it and supposed her body hadn't completely recovered from the massive trauma it'd suffered. It wasn't unusual for some trace of her worst injuries to linger even years after she'd healed on the outside, and she did have stomachaches once in a while from older gut wounds. But she assured him, "I'm sure I'll be fine. I've healed everything else passably well, so this should pass. Besides, it's not like it acts up every day, or that I have to go. It's just an urge I feel after eating really hot food, but I can hold it." Saying so, she flopped back into bed, opening her arms to welcome him.

  Finn threw himself on top of her, clearly not worried about crushing her despite his huge frame. After all, she was Rose. Actually, she looked forward to his nearly four hundred pounds pressing her into the soft mattress, surrounding her with comfort on all sides. But her stomach twisted when he landed on her, bellowing, "Avalanche!"

  She let him have his fun, doing her best to hide and resist her own discomfort until he finished. Forcing a smile, she gasped, "Can I go now?"

  "I'm scared for you," he said, face serious as he rolled off. "You're the toughest, I know, but it wouldn't hurt you to get some medicine for the belly."

  Though Rose thought she didn't need it, she nodded. "I'll try some. Wouldn't hurt, I'm sure. But only if I don't recover on m
y own within the next... month or so."

  "Fine. So prideful even after your mortal, uh, almost mortal wound."

  "Hey... I'll learn more discipline overcoming this myself, than with outside help."

  He stared at her horribly scarred bare torso, the great ridge of white skin below her navel only the newest addition to many more overlapping scars made in past battles. "I'd probably be horrified if I could see inside you. You must be scarred there, too."

  Rose wasn't surprised that her love and closest friend worried for her secret hurts, though she rarely discussed such gloomy things. "You're right, but I'm okay. I mean, I'm still stronger than just about anybody, right? I have my little aches and pains, sure, but so do all warriors. As long as you still love me despite my outer ugliness, I'm great."

  Finn laughed. "I don't love you 'despite' your outer ugliness. I don't think you have such a thing! A couple hundred scars can't take away your beautiful womanly shape, your cute face and luscious hair. They just make you look tough—real tough."

  "Brandon said the same thing."

  "Would you have him, if I'd died?"

  Honestly, Rose decided, "Eventually, I probably would have. He is good to me. But he's no threat to you. You're my first, well, second, but still the best."

  "Heh, I know that. You going to gain back the weight you lost?"

  Rose grinned. "I was too big before anyway, never could get rid of enough of that pregnancy fat. I'll try to stay how I am. Two-fifty's more than enough for a girl my height. I think my face looks a little better now, actually—you don't?"

  He studied her for a little while before deciding. "Yeah, I guess you do look prettier. I was just afraid for your health knowing it was because of the wound that you slimmed down. But I'm glad you like it. Say, you've been talking for a pretty long time since you said you needed to go."