Wings of the Valkyrie

by Charley Case

  Mila and the others stood to one side, watching as Finn dropped to a knee and placed his palm on the ground. After a second, purple energy shot from his hand into the black sand.

  The sound of a huge drum being struck a single blow rang out from below. The percussive note made the top three inches of sand in a half-mile radius leap a couple of feet into the air. Since the sand was fairly damp there was no dust cloud, and when it had all settled back to the ground, it was the same color as the surrounding sand.

  The effect was twofold. First, it buried all the mines under an inch or two of sand, making them invisible to the enemy, and second, it erased all their footprints from setting the mines. Now it looked like they had just arrived and only moved around in the immediate area.

  “What about the bag?” Danica pointed at the empty duffel.

  “Uh,” Finn looked around for somewhere to stash it, but there was nothing that would hide the large bag. He dropped to a knee and dug a hole with his hands, then folded the bag into a flat square and laid it in the hole before shoveling the sand back over it. Then he stood and stomped the loose sand down. “There. It’s gone.”

  “That works.” Danica leaned on her bow and clicked her tongue a few times out of boredom. “What time are we supposed to meet up with hole in the face?”

  “The original battle happened just after six in the morning.” Victoria checked her watch. “Which is in roughly ten minutes. Maybe we should look and see what he’s up to?”

  Mila pulled the cube out of her pocket and channeled magic into it. While it gathered speed in the center of the cube, Mila turned to Victoria. “What was the animal or whatever that the person wanted to bring here?”

  Victoria shuddered. “Bunnycorn.”

  Mila laughed. “Bunnycorn? Like a bunny with a horn on its forehead?”

  “Exactly. Disgustingly dangerous things. More than one empire has tried to exterminate them from the universe, but they all fail.”

  “A bunnycorn? Why would you need a place like this to—”the cube coming to life cut off her question.

  They saw a dark room with a single light hanging from the ceiling over Azoth’s head. Missy stood beside him, and Yaminah was a few steps behind. They waited in silence for some unseen cue.

  Mila noticed Yaminah glance up at where the cube’s view originated and give a slight nod.

  Mila had decided that she would use any help Yaminah could provide, but she wasn’t counting on it for anything. It looked like she would keep her word.

  At some unseen prompt, Missy raised her hand and created a void portal. The same portal ripped open through the translucent edge of the viewing sphere.

  Mila killed the magic to the cube and shoved it in her pocket as Missy stepped through the opening. She gave them all a one-eyed, hate-filled look before stepping to the side.

  Azoth came through, his tentacles slithering him across the sands in an even speed that left his torso unmoving and creating the impression that he was floating.

  The hood swiveled and he took in the group arrayed before him, but focused on Mila when he spoke.

  “You have brought quite a few allies for a simple handoff, child.” While his voice was full of grinding screeching sounds, his sarcasm was still evident. “Perhaps I should bring a few friends of mine?”

  A few dozen portals ripped open in a circle around them. Then more portals opened behind those. And more beyond those. Within seconds, there were thousands of portals spaced out over the entire sand field.

  “Why don’t you say hello to a few of my closest friends?” Azoth’s smugness made Mila feel like she needed a shower.

  Mila left the portals to her team. She only had Azoth to deal with.

  She locked her eyes on the tall Drude, narrowed them, and put her hands in her jacket pockets. Then Mila took the device in her left hand and began the short but complicated series of touchpoints to activate it. At each finger press, she left a small pool of magic as the device tried to suck it from her fingers.

  “Hey, fuckface.” Mila stepped close to the towering creature. “Do you like apples?

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Penny knew she was asleep. At least, it was something like sleep. She was aware of some things, but others seemed like they were on the other side of the universe.

  She knew someone had teleported her to Rebecca’s and Lance’s, along with her hoard and eggs, but she had no idea who had done it. She could sometimes hear voices of people talking to her, but she didn’t understand the words, as if they had all started speaking a new language while she was sleeping.

  The only thing Penny was fully aware of was the sky-blue void she inhabited while in her coma-like state. She didn’t have a body in the void, but that didn’t matter to her. The void was for things beyond her body.

  Spiraling out from the never-ending blue nothing were tendrils of her person. Not the physical parts, but the parts that made up who she was as a person. Each of the tendrils reached out to connect to one of her trusted family members.

  She had collected her family with care, although most would say she had left it up to luck. The only member of her family that she had actively sought out was Finn. The moment she had met him, she knew he was exactly what she was looking for. Unwavering, confident, and sure of who he was and his place in the universe, Finn was the ideal person to connect her to the outside world away from her kind.

  Penny differed from most dragons. Dragons as a race are micro-managers—they want control of every aspect of whatever they’re doing. But Penny quickly realized that if she wanted to get ahead, she had two choices—learn how to do everything on her own, or find people that could do those things better than her while she focused on what she was good at.

  That’s where Finn came in. She found him because she knew he would never settle for anyone less than ideal for himself. A person who was ideal for him would be a perfect member of her family.

  It took far longer than she thought it would, but sure enough, he found Mila, and through Mila, Danica.

  The three of them covered all the ground she needed to finally give birth to her eggs.

  And now, she watched as the tendrils reached out to the three of them, feeding them the part of her that she viewed as most important to raising her children.

  Faerie dragons were unlike all other dragons in that they were small and vulnerable if caught sleeping. Her kind evolved to sleep less than others to mitigate danger and learned to convert food into magic so they could use it to power spells while they were unconscious. They evolved in a million little ways, but the one that set them apart the most was how they incubated their eggs.

  Inevitably, they had to lay there for a time, feeding their eggs. During this time, they were more vulnerable than at any other point in their lives. Not only were they forced to sleep for long periods, but their magic was solely devoted to enriching and growing their babies, so they had nothing left for defense. Early on, many young faerie dragons were killed before their eggs could hatch, leading to a sharp decline in their numbers they never recovered from.

  As a solution, they gathered treasure that had to contain the hopes and dreams of those who tried to own it. Those feelings of hope and freedom became infused in the treasure itself, and the faerie dragons used it as power to supplement their limited magical stores. It also served a second purpose as an emergency magical fund that would allow the eggs to mature over time, even if the parent were to die halfway through the process.

  If a parent happened to not be there when their babies hatched, then the babies became nothing more than wild animals. To solve this, the parent connected themselves to the eggs with one of those tendrils of self—intelligence. Upon their death, that intelligence would transfer to the child, allowing them to retain sentience without imprinting.

  But that left the problem of baby dragons without parents, which was where the tendrils leading to Finn, Danica, and Mila came in. Penny had come to know and love them and knew beyond a shadow of a doub
t that they would raise her children as theirs if need be. So Penny had selected the three things she viewed as most important for a dragon to be raised properly.

  To Finn, she connected her protective self, the part of her that would kill without hesitation to save her children.

  To Danica, she connected her love and forgiveness and penitence, which turned out to be all the same thing to one degree or another.

  She gave the hardest one to Mila by connecting her motherhood to the Valkyrie. Mila would become her children’s guiding light if Penny were to die during the process. This had other complications, like feeling all the things Penny had felt as her body grew the eggs inside her. She would be moody and more than likely feel ill occasionally, but it was the most important of the tendrils, and she wanted Mila to be their mother if she could not.

  She hoped Mila would understand when she explained it later. It was a great honor.

  Penny became aware of her magic running dry. She would soon wake to feed before coming back. Sometimes, Penny wished she could channel magic like Peabrains. The thought of unlimited power was tempting, but that part where they had a max flow was the real kicker. If she needed to use everything she had in one massive go, she could. There was power in the ability to be reckless.

  A thought occurred to her that seemed strange and out of place at first, but then she caught a memory of Mila talking to her about the device. Something about finding flaws in it.

  Not having anything else to do but wait for her magic to drain enough that she woke up to feed, Penny started going over the plans for the device. She had studied each part when they were building it, and at the time it looked perfectly capable of doing what Gregory had said it should, but Penny’s thought about the limited flow of Peabrain magic was sticking in her head.

  She went over the parts again, putting the device together in her blue void. On the third time reassembling the device, she caught what was bothering her. The passage the magic flowed through was large compared to the flow that a witch or a Peabrain would need, but for someone like Penny or Mila, who could expend enormous amounts of power at the drop of a hat, it was rather limiting.

  In fact, it was so limiting that Penny was more than sure that a Drude at full strength could easily convert the flow coming out of the device to infernal magic . The device would become less of a weapon against a Drude, and more like a battery for it.

  Penny considered a few design changes and was sure she could fix the problem. It would be a shame, because Mila and Victoria would have to start over with the charging process, although with her new design they could cut their charging time to seconds, not minutes.

  Penny felt her magic finally run dry, and she was pulled out of her subconscious and groggily shoved back into the waking world.

  Yawning and stretching, Penny’s last thought before hopping off the hoard and heading for the kitchen was, “It’s a good thing Mila doesn’t plan to use the device any time soon.”

  Rebecca was trying not to bite her nails while she sat at the dining table and stared out at the deck, waiting for her friends to return. Her leg couldn’t stop bouncing with nervous energy and while her leg distracted her, she started biting her thumbnail.

  Something blue and about the size of a cat jumped up on the table right beside her, making her scream bloody murder and fall out of the chair. In the blink of an eye, she was back on her feet with a wand in each hand pointed at Penny.

  Rebecca let out the breath she’d been holding and holstered her wands in the thigh sheaths. “You scared the bejesus out of me! What are you doing up? Don’t you have to incubate your eggs?”

  In answer, Penny tiredly pointed at her open mouth with a talon.

  Understanding immediately, Rebecca grabbed a banana from the fruit bowl on the island and handed it to Penny who nodded and sat on her haunches, peeled the banana and had half of it gone before Rebecca could open the fridge to find a high-calorie snack for Penny while the witch made her a proper meal. She pulled out a plate of cold shrimp scampi from the other night and held it up for Penny to see.

  “How about shrimp?”

  Penny nodded while swallowing the last of the banana and reaching for the plate.

  “I can heat them up if you want.”

  Penny gave her a deadpan look, then puffed a flame from her nostril.

  “Oh, right.” Rebecca came back to the table, set the plate in front of Penny, and retook her seat.

  Penny munched on shrimp and became more with it with each tail she piled on the table. She finally took a break from stuffing her face and spoke, making Rebecca snap out of her worried haze. “Shir?”

  Rebecca gave her a “what are you talking about” look. “What do you mean, where is everyone? They’re facing off with Azoth.”

  The next shrimp stopped halfway to Penny’s mouth. “Chi?”

  “Yeah, with the device. How else are they supposed to do it?”

  The shrimp fell to the table as Penny charged forward. The little dragon grabbed two handfuls of Rebecca’s shirt and shook her with everything she had. One long jet of flame shot from her left nostril, accompanied by a wild-eyed look.

  “Wait a minute! You’re telling me that not only will the device not work on a Drude, it’ll make him stronger?” Rebecca went white with fear before pulling out one of her wands and forming a teleport bubble.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Mila hit the last spot on the device and felt it hum with power. Dumping as much of her magic into her body as she dared, Mila increased her strength, speed, and endurance to superhuman levels.

  As fast as she could, Mila stepped close to Azoth and withdrew the brass ball of vibrating power from her pocket, then slammed it into the void he called a face.

  “How do you like them apples?” she shouted while dancing back and pulling Gram with one hand and the Ivar with the other.

  Azoth’s hands went to the opening of his hood as he screamed and stumbled back.

  Taking quick aim, Mila blasted the shocked Missy in the chest with the pistol as she whispered Gram’s power word, followed by the word for her chainmail armor. The sword folded open, and the armor flowed up out of her skin, covering her torso in cool fine-mesh Mythril.

  The Ivar bolt caught Missy flatfooted and exploded against her collarbone. She tumbled backward across the black sand.

  The area clear, Mila turned to Azoth and stepped close. “Do it, Finn!”

  No sooner had the words left her mouth when four giant triangular slabs of dark gray stone shot out of the ground at a forty-five-degree angle, quickly covering Mila and Azoth in a stone pyramid that cut off the sun and the sounds of thousands charging out of void portals.

  Azoth was still screaming, tearing at his hood, and backpedaling in an erratic panicked shuffle of tentacles. It took a second for Mila’s dark vision to kick in, but it was so dark in the stone structure that even with it, she was having trouble keeping track of her target.

  The chamber lit up like the sun, making Mila turn her face away. Looking from the corner of her eye, Mila could barely pick out the tall robed figure, his arms hanging at his side and face upturned. A long screeching wail spilled from him along with a golden light that blasted out of the void where his face should be.

  As Mila’s eyes adjusted to the bright light, she got a better look at what was happening.

  The device hadn’t fallen into his face forever, like Mila half-thought it would. Instead, it seemed lodged in the center of the black void, hanging there despite not touching anything physical. The device’s many lines glowed with celestial light, making it look like it was having trouble containing the power and threatening to burst at its many seams.

  It was working. The power was overwhelming him. Now, it was only a matter of time.

  Finn pulled his hand from the sand and inspected the structure he’d forced out of the ground. At a twenty-foot base, it took up a fair amount of the open space of their perimeter mines, but they still had room to move.

&n
bsp; As he’d erected the pyramid, Azoth’s army poured out of the portals. Within seconds, there were thousands of men and women charging toward them, but Finn had told them what to expect and was glad to see they were keeping their heads.

  The masses kept pouring from the black rips in space-time, but anyone outside the perimeter was of little concern. It was the half-dozen portals inside the perimeter that were the real worry. Luckily, the closest ones seemed to be for the Rougarou and thralls, leaving the bewitched charging for the stasis mines.

  “Danica, pick a portal and focus on it. Remmy, watch her back and take anything that gets past me.” Finn looked at the dozens of minions coming out of the closest portals. “Victoria, you and I are the heavy hitters. Cause enough damage that they focus on us,” he shouted before bellowing a dwarven war cry and sprinting for the closest cluster of enemies.

  While sliding across the last five feet of sand, Finn slashed Fragar through the three thralls who were still getting their bearings. Several runes etched into the blade flashed with purple dwarven magic. One made the axe five times as heavy as normal for a split second, increasing its momentum. Another rune blasted high pressure air from the back of the single hooked blade, increasing the speed of the swing. And the final rune replaced the razor-sharp edge of the blade with the exact same blade from the moment before it sliced into the first thrall.

  The effect was undeniable, and a prime example of why dwarven-made weapons were sought across the universe. Fragar had sliced three people clean in half in one swing while not slowing down and came out the other side as sharp as it had been before the strike happened.

  There was a reason Finn had traded a literal moon for it. And not one of those barren pockmarked bastards—this was a full-on livable planet-type moon. Think Endor, minus the teddy bears.