by Eddie Patin
But it wasn't the mini-rex.
It was Nargog; very clearly Nargog.
The alpha minotaur stood at the edge of the trees, just outside the shadows of the woods with his shaggy black fur lit up by the daylight. His massive rack of glossy black horns—four feet across from tip to tip—gleamed in the sunshine. Nargog was eight feet of towering, iron muscle covered in thick, heavy fur that must have been very hot on this dinosaur world. The alpha minotaur that Jason had spared from death was watching him—not attempting to hide at all—while holding a massive, deadly-but-primitive bone cudgel brimming with flint shards and wrapped in leather. The weapon was as long as Jason was tall. It was probably made from the T-Rex femur that Nargog had torn off of the huge corpse when he'd left the wyvern's cave initially back before the Reality Rifters went on the golem heart bounty. From here, Jason could also see white bits all over Nargog's black chest. The alpha minotaur was decorated with bones.
Jason stared at Nargog across the distance, buzzing with fear and suspense and wondering why the hell that monster was just standing there, watching him...
Nargog stared back. One of his big, black ears flicked at a fly.
Jason lowered the muzzle of his rifle and raised a hand to cautiously wave.
Then, Nargog turned and walked slowly back into the forest, branches and deadfall snapping under and around his girth and weight.
"Holy shit," Jason said.
If that big minotaur came for him—tried to attack him—then he'd have to drop it into lava.
Jason felt certain that he could, if need be.
The idea made him feel stronger.
Wincing from the pain in his left leg, Jason turned and limped slowly back up the slope to the cave mouth, leaning on his cane as much as he could. He paused twice to look behind him—watching for both for the mini-rexes and the alpha minotaur—but nothing followed him.
Chapter 16
Through deep darkness, Gliath ran from the giant along shifting marble corridors.
The harpies pursued him.
Already, Gliath could hear their songs slipping through the blustering wind of the dying black storm like oil sliding across dark waters. The leopardwere pounded the carpeted floor that gradually tilted to the right as if the entire corridor was rotating. He eyed a section of wall that was floating away like a monolithic marble cube, dropped down to all fours to pick up speed, then leapt over an expanding void before him in a move that only an accomplished Deathhand could perform.
Gliath landed on the hovering island of marble, immediately confused by the fact that the floor under his feet was a beautiful wooden wall with paintings turning around on their wire-mounts and dead torches in golden brackets facing the wrong direction.
He heard the frantic fluttering of wings coming in after him, so spun around to face his pursuers.
One harpy descended on him with the long talons of her feet spread wide. Her face was twisted into anger as she tried to snatch at him; her long, ragged blue feathers ruffled in a dive. Gliath immediately tumbled to one side, drew his Blessed Warblade quicker than the creature could react, and lashed out with his long reach. He lopped off one of her pale, naked legs at the thigh. The taloned limb hit the tilting wall-floor with a thud and tumbled down the increasing slope until it disappeared into a yawning void.
The harpy shrieked; a sound overshadowing the now-oppressive noise of the entire castle shifting and moving and grinding all around Gliath. She crashed into the place where the leopardwere had previously been and struggled to right herself. Her feathers splayed out all around her wounded form.
Gliath was on her the next instant.
With his superior strength, the leopardwere seized the harpy by one bony shoulder and ripped her around. Then, he buried the blade of his weapon into the creature's quivering chest between her pointed breasts, put his weight into it, and cracked open her sternum with a tremendous snap that made the harpy shudder and rattle. She collapsed to the tilting floor.
The scent of the creature's blood flooded Gliath's senses and his stomach demanded meat, but there wasn't time.
As the Krulax left the harpy behind, her corpse slid down the floor that was dangerously close to becoming a wall again. He ran on, relying on his senses and reflexes to save him, desperate to find solid ground again as the harpies' siren song wove into his mind.
Gliath saw a huge mass of the castle rotating in toward him and clambered over the edge of the big, rotating cube as it finished turning over. He was now on an upside-down ceiling with limp, thrashing chandeliers that didn't take well to rolling around on what had become a floor. There was a window—what must have been a sky light at some point—made from stained glass that was now broken. Gliath didn't have time to think about it. He saw that huge mass of castle heading his way to lock up against the surface he was running across now...
The crazy environment began connecting together and slowing down.
Tremendous crashes sounded all around him.
When Gliath made it to the edge of the room-sized cube—he could see two more harpies carefully navigating the deadly labyrinth behind him in pursuit—he sighted a closed-up hall of some kind solidifying on the level below him. He slipped over the edge onto a sheer marble surface, slid down the side, then half-dropped half-fell through space until landing down there.
The leopardwere looked up to see if the harpies could make it through behind him.
One of them did, diving through the closing gap between castle segments just before two massive planes connected with a resounding crash.
Gliath straightened, feeling the grip of his Blessed Warblade firm in his right hand. He felt his tail whip from one side to the other.
The room was vast and dark and quiet, but the rest of the castle beyond this calm chamber's walls were still grinding, clunking, and smashing together.
Twenty feet from him, the lone harpy nimbly landed on the floor of the dark, empty room. She folded in her wings and clicked the marble floor with her talons.
Click, click, click.
Then, she began to sing.
The blade is me, and I am its edge, Gliath thought, steeling himself against whatever effects may come; whatever may surprise him.
The Krulax was curious.
He felt the creature's magic start to worm its way into his head as the strange, ethereal warbling haunted the black air of the room. It was a large room, and the harpy's song drifted lazily to its far walls like a warm, pink cloud filling all crevices and caressing the leopardwere's taut muscles and sleek fur. It was something invasive but weak—nothing at all like the majestic power demonstrated by the blue giant in the courtyard.
Gliath was unconcerned.
She walked forward slowly as he straightened, Blessed Warblade blade lowered at his side, feeling his eyelids grow heavy as his powerful arms and legs became warm and began to buzz. Gliath allowed himself to let out a great yawn, stretching out his jaws and tongue.
The harpy smiled. In the dim light of the dark room, Gliath saw that her face was fairly human-looking, but her features were a little too stretched; a little too sharp. The creature paused her song to speak with a venomous, high-pitched voice like a knife's edge, but the leopardwere didn't understand her words.
He allowed her to reach him.
She was far shorter than he was and drew in close to Gliath's legs and armor, rubbing her naked flesh against his fur. The harpy smiled up at him and scratched at his armor harness with her claws.
Gliath knew exactly what she wanted. She wanted to confuse him then consume him, but that was not going to happen. He figured that such approach might have worked on a human like Jason Leaper 934 or another—even Ranaja, perhaps—but he'd fought harpies before and knew about their magic. The song of the creatures may warp the minds of men, but Gliath was no man. He was Krulax.
The harpy slithered against him for a moment longer, cooing something in her murderous voice before looking up with puzzlement in her dark, glittery eyes. Sh
e mustn't have liked what she saw in Gliath's own eyes and face, because she immediately shrank back in horror.
Gliath grabbed her.
When she shrieked and bared her teeth and brought up her claws, the leopardwere raised his Blessed Warblade with great speed and chopped through her stiff, sinewy form until the creature stopped screaming and fell to the marble floor in a mess of blood.
Then, Gliath fed.
He ate quickly, looking around him as he did, searching through the dim and massive dark hall for a way out. There were no windows or doors. The leopardwere felt his explosive strength returning with each slippery bite of the monster's long muscles and tough flesh.
Find Ranaja, he thought.
Gliath thought the words over and over.
He figured that the castle would change again soon. The walls and floor and ceiling around him were a bizarre patchwork of various different rooms and surfaces, complete with furnishings and decorations. A painting attached to the floor a short distance away—askew as if permanently attached to a wall but tilted after the shifting of the castle—portrayed a strange abstract of a star-filled sky with a burst of molten earth and fire spiraling out from its center. A huge, iron chest hung sideways, bolted onto a floor that was currently a wall. A statue of a man—the size of Gliath's warrior form—majestically manipulating a stone sphere in his hands was affixed to a wall that was currently part of the floor. Dormant torches hung at varying angles on the ceiling as if originally bracketed to walls of different orientations.
When Gliath couldn't find any more decent meat on the harpy's bones, and he'd eaten all of the organs he desired, he began plucking the long, wiry blue 'flight feathers' from her arms, stuffing them into a dump pouch so that the team could hopefully sell them later.
He waited.
A few minutes later, Gliath heard grinding and the colliding of massive things through the walls again, so he stood, ready to spring if the floor under him suddenly folded away...
The room broke apart. The castle wasn't made of blocks of the same size and shape. Its pieces were all random. They ranged from chunks the size of Jason Leaper 934's long garage, to oblong and L-shaped, to massive, flat sections the size of an Earth house or larger!
He knew that he had to make his way up to reach the courtyard, so when the hall began to separate—the spaces and voids in between filled with the furious black vapors of the maelstroms that raged outside from time to time—Gliath began to run. He eyed a section of wall that was rotating away, then leapt up to catch its edge, riding the big cube as high as he dared before bounding to another spinning peninsula of marble and wood that rotated away while tilting even higher.
The Krulax didn't stop to contemplate how bizarre and downright insane such a moving castle was. He was determined to keep his entire mental faculty dedicated to his reflexes and finding his way back to the courtyard ... if it still existed as it did before.
Back to Ranaja...
Once, Gliath narrowly dodged out of the way of a many-ton slab of stone passing too close to him. Then he kept running, climbing, descending, and leapt up to catch another drifting edge with a long, ornate set of shelves emptied of its books.
After a while, the storm passed, and the roar of the blistering wind that had been constant in Gliath's senses died down again. The violent black fog that seeped through voids and tore at the leopardwere's eyes when he passed through the spaces in between dwindled. Gliath climbed and climbed. He knew that it would be over soon, just like before. Then, he fled the shattering sounds of grinding and smashing shapes of marble and stone.
He found himself running along a ledge that yawned over the swamp hundreds of feet below. The changing space that he was sprinting through was closing up into a proper corridor of marble with a wood-paneled ceiling. There was an intact window ahead, with daylight shining through from the other side! It was segmented like stained glass, but clear and without color. The lines of gilded gold between glass panels gleamed in the light pouring through.
When the building around Gliath slammed shut on itself and locked together, he stopped at the window. He looked around himself almost in a panic, suddenly worried that he would be crushed between two unyielding walls.
The castle quieted down.
Gliath shook the fear from his prickled skin, calmed himself, then looked through the window.
Below him was the courtyard. It was just like before—massive and circular with towering walls extending up in all directions, open to the sky above. He was inside that wall, looking down. Gliath could see the many rows of strange, alien trees, the open space in the center paved with smooth, polished marble, and dozens of glittering eight-by-eight glass cubes suspended at various heights in the air ... all below him.
The leopardwere stared through the glass at the many cubes, scrutinizing their prisoners as best he could.
He saw shadows in all—one in each cube—of other people and creatures, but he was too far away to tell which one was Ranaja. Gliath recalled his good friend being imprisoned in a cube nearly thirty feet high; higher than the many strange and colorful trees down below. All of the cubes were too high for him to access from the courtyard floor, ranging from around fifteen feet high and partly concealed in the canopies of the alien trees up to thirty feet; just the right height for the terrible giant to reach up to access comfortably.
Gliath searched the grounds for the giant. He didn't see him. If the awesome being was hiding or resting down there, it would be hard to miss detecting him. The giant had been covered with elemental fire of all colors, and he radiated great power, demanding fear and awe without asking for it.
The Krulax searched the window's edges for a way to open it. There were no latches; no hinges.
After one final look for a quieter way through, Gliath shattered the glass with the pommel of his Blessed Warblade, hoping that he could reach Ranaja and Morgana Soloster before the giant discovered him. He cleared out all of the broken glass around the window's edge, waited a moment for all of the falling shards to settle on the ground below, then sheathed his weapon and swung out to grasp the wall and descend.
Just like before, the walls were composed of huge and smooth marble blocks half Gliath's size. He strived to catch the edges and cracks with the claws of his hands and feet. Barely able to hang on, the nimble Krulax climbed down the wall quickly, making it about forty feet down at a dangerous pace before dropping through the final twenty feet to the thick, soft grass surrounding the trees. Gliath landed slightly off, hurting his left ankle, but he regenerated the damage quickly and checked his surroundings for the giant or more harpies.
The coast was clear for the moment.
Rushing through the strange trees that filled his nostrils with a plethora of bizarre, new scents, Gliath looked up at the high glass cubes, searching for Ranaja or Morgana Soloster. Closer now, he could tell what he was looking at, peering up at the still forms of various creatures and humanoids sprawled and still on the clear cubes' floors.
There were many strange creatures and animals in the cubes, but Gliath didn't care and didn't think of them. He searched for Ranaja, feeling a tense nervousness creep into his fiery blood. As he passed underneath one cube after another, Gliath felt a cold dread building up inside his stomach full of harpy meat.
The creatures within the cubes were all dead.
At last, he recognized Ranaja's hellhound-hide duster jacket splayed out across the clear floor of a high cube. He spotted the shifting boots of his friend changing position, sitting inside.
"Ranaja!" Gliath shouted from below. His low voice rumbled out more loudly than he expected it would.
His friend didn't react. Ranaja merely sat with his back against one glass wall.
Gliath rapidly climbed the nearest tree into its upper bounds, then leapt over to land on the top of one of the lower cubes. When he did, his feet and hands slid over its surface—it was like ice!—and the leopardwere narrowly avoided slipping off of the other side and falling ba
ck down to the courtyard.
Looking up, closer now, Gliath called out again: "Ranaja!"
There was no response. Gliath looked down into the cube he was standing on. Inside, there was a bipedal non-human with dark green skin, wearing Merc armor. The creature was stone dead, lying on its back and staring into the sky high above the courtyard with four eyes like black marbles. His dead hands were empty at his sides, and a pistol of some kind lay on the floor next to the corpse.
Looking up at Ranaja's cube again, Gliath searched for other cubes that he could use to get up to him, but it was no use. He wouldn't be able to reach him; not without a rope or other gear. Jason Leaper 934 surely had a rope—the human was resourceful—but he was also not here.
Ranaja was strong; as strong as a Krulax or stronger because of his cybernetic parts, Gliath knew. Why hadn't he broken out of his cube with his great strength? Was Ranaja weakened somehow? Or was the glass too strong? Ranaja probably had his blaster, still, even if he was without his Earth slug gun...
Gliath looked down at the glass at his feet, then raised his fists together and bashed them both on the cube below him with a tremendous surge of strength. He smashed the glass ceiling as hard as he could, and felt a resounding impact shudder through his body and up his feet, but the surface held.
With a bellowing roar and another explosive bash, Gliath tried once again to break the glass.
It wasn't even marred.
He shook out his mane in annoyance then stared back up at Ranaja's cube. After another quick look around to make sure that the giant or his harpies weren't coming for him, Gliath pulled his Earth slug pistol—the Glock 21 that Ranaja had bought for him—and aimed carefully at the cube's corner well above and away from his friend's reclining form.
Gliath fired. The pistol barked loudly and bucked in his big hands. The slug struck the glass cube with a smack and a zing sound. The lead and copper projectile flew off into the unknown.
