by Dante King
As neat a trick as it was, Bearne could not keep it up forever. He was slowing, falling deeper into the roiling mess of ice and snow below him.
I made my move. Pan dived.
“Jump and grab my hand, Hana!” I cried as Pan went whizzing down toward the bearmancer.
Showing commendable faith in me, Hana crouched and sprang high into the air.
It was not a moment too soon.
A grinding iceberg-sized block of snow was flipped up out of the slowing avalanche and toppled over, right toward where Bearne was going to inevitably have to jump to next.
Hana stretched out her hand, legs pumping as she fought to gain purchase on the snow-filled air.
Pan executed a pinpoint inversion in midair, turning upside down with the alacrity and agility of a F-35. Relying only on my dragonmancer strength and reflexes to stop me tumbling into the churning mass of snowy death below, I stretched my arms out and caught hold of the flailing hand of the bearmancer.
“Go!” I hissed through gritted teeth.
“Very good, Father,” Pan replied in my head.
Pan went.
He shot toward the shelter of the castle, rolling back up the right way as he went. Hana, still clutching my hand, was catapulted up and around and landed snuggly behind me. Will, who had still been riding along at the small of my back and was not susceptible, apparently, to such paltry things like the laws of physics, bobbed backward a little so that the bearmancer didn’t sit on him.
As we flew like the breeze out of the immediate killzone of the avalanche, I looked down and saw Bearne vanish just as the massive iceberg toppled over and punched into the mountainside.
“Bearne…” I began to say.
Hana held up her hand and showed me the glowing crystal fastened around her wrist.
I breathed out a sigh of relief.
“Well, thank fuck for that!” I said, leaning down to pat Pan thankfully on the neck. “Great job, kid,” I said to him.
Pan said nothing, but the blazing warmth of his pride filled a part of my head and my heart.
“I won’t lie to you,” I said, turning my head a little so that I could speak to Hana, “that little situation got me sweating a little.”
“You were worried you wouldn’t make it?” Hana asked me.
“I was worried you wouldn’t make it,” I replied.
Hana might have been about to reply, but at that moment, because the universe can be a real, dark-humored son of a bitch sometimes, a burst of icy projectiles sprayed like tracer fire from off to our left and Pan was forced to do some evasive maneuvers.
The whirling combination of the snow falling from the sky and the icy dust from the avalanche was hard to see through, distorting the world around us. The sun had managed to poke through the cloud, and its light turned the swirling ice crystals into countless minute mirrors. The sound of the dying avalanche made it impossible to hear anything else.
“What the fuck was that, Pan?” I asked the Tempest Dragon.
“I’m - I’m not sure, Father,” Pan replied, in his thoughtful, polite voice that reminded me of Noctis. “If I had to guess I would say—”
“Drakes!” Hana cried, gripping at my right arm.
Pan barrel-rolled in the air again, avoiding another spray of icy projectiles that hissed passed us like a swarm of crossbow bolts.
“Out of the fucking frying pan,” I muttered.
“And into the fire!” Hana finished.
Pan rolled and weaved through the air. Now that the avalanche had come to rest at the base of the Frost Dragon-topped castle, it was getting easier to hear and see what was going on around us.
A flash of red and yellow whisked past me: Tamsin on the back of Fyzos.
“Where are the others?” I called to her as she wheeled her mount to come back toward me.
“Scattered around the place, I think,” the hobgoblin called back. “Mike there are—”
Fyzos let out a roar as a stream of the ice crystals sprayed out of the snowy mists and peppered his armored flank. The frosty bolts pinged and rattled off his scales harmlessly, but a bolt perforated one of his black wings.
With a shriek, a wild drake, much smaller than our dragons but still about as big as a deer, dropped out of the frigid fog and attacked.
It might have been smaller than Fyzos or Pan, but the creature had a serious set of cojones on it. It was the whitish-brown color of slushy snow, with bulbous blue eyes and a long snout like that of a gharial—one of those fish-eating crocodiles. Instead of scales, its skin more closely resembled that of a sea lion’s; sleek and tightly furred, all the better for insulating it and allowing it to move with ease through the snow while hunting.
Fyzos retaliated with a burst of almost invisible, pale yellow fire which didn’t burn the drake but instead punched it from the air. It was flung from its course and smashed into an outcrop of rock in an explosion of ice and stone chips.
Before any backslapping could take place, there was a wailing chorus of shrieks from all around.
“Oh good,” Tamsin said, bearing her teeth in a snarl, “here comes the rest of the family.”
The drakes came chattering out of the misty blizzard that shrouded us like a horde of reptilian locusts. There were dozens of the things—scores of them. They emerged shrieking and slavering and shooting out strings of icy bolts, heedless of hitting their own kind in their keenness to blast us out of the air so that they could feed on us.
“Break!” I yelled. Pan banked sharply away from Tamsin and Fyzos even as the Force Dragon let loose with one of his sonic roars and burst apart two drakes that had gotten too close.
Pan was confronted by a handful of the psychotic creatures as he dived and he unloaded a blast of fire—a bright red beam that would have been used to dissect James Bond by one of his villainous foes—which pulverized an entire clump of the smaller creatures, spreading globules of frazzled meat in all directions like bloody confetti.
I moved up onto the neck of my Tempest Dragon like a surfer hops up on their board when catching a wave, struck by a sudden blood lust and a burning desire to destroy these drakes so that we could get on with our damned mission. We needed to end this and end it quickly.
“Mike!” Hana gasped. “Mike, what are you doing?”
There was very little going in our favor at that moment in time. The abandoned wintery castle with its accompanying wild dragon was likely where the relic was hidden. The weather was about as grim and intent on murdering us as any weather I had ever encountered and now. And we were being waylaid by a horde of ravenous mountain drakes.
“I’m fucking taking these little assholes down,” I growled to myself.
Pulling my dagger from my sword belt, I swept it upward as a drake shot past just above us. The drake looked like it was targeting Renji, who I saw out of the corner of my eye lopping apart the smaller beats with her broad-headed war-axe.
My dagger slit the drake from gullet to groin, and its guts rained down to the snow below. Many of its fellow drakes dropped down to feast on the still steaming entrails, giving me and my fellow dragonmancers a little more space to get our shit together.
I couldn’t see what my friends were doing, or how they were faring. Judging by the blood and bodies of the drakes that were lying thicker and thicker on the snow below, they were holding their own just fine.
Deep blue flame burst out of the murk like a withering mushroom. So, Penelope and Glizbe were nearby. The charred bodies of a bunch of drakes tumbled out of the air, broken and twisted by the intensity of the Rooster Dragon fire.
I figured this job called for Noctis, so I dispelled Pan and summoned my Onyx Dragon. There was a moment of disconcerting weightlessness while neither Pan nor Noctis were supporting Hana, Will, and me before Noctis solidified seamlessly under us.
Just as the change occurred, an electric thrill ran through my body. I was dimly aware of Pan crowing with elation from somewhere in the depths of my mind.
It was
a slot opening up, I realized. A new slot in Pan’s crystal itinerary. For the briefest moment, I wondered what it might be and whether or not it might be able to help us win this unexpected battle, but then the present kicked in and I had to shove such speculations from my mind.
“Hey, bud,” I said to Noctis, “how about you cook these fools? I think it’s time we all came in out of the snow.”
Noctis snarled, snapped his wings into a sharper, more attacking formation, and then dove into the nearest cluster of drakes.
Drakes died left, right, and center as Noctis slashed with his claws and ripped with his teeth. Dark drake blood was splashed across the rocks, random limbs tumbled down and stained the snow below a festive pink color. He banked sharply in mid-air so that a hail of ice bolts fired from a trio of drakes rattled harmlessly off his underside, then turned the would-be attackers to charcoal with a stream of rippling fire from his nostrils.
The air was filled with the shrieks and keening wails of the hunting drakes, with the war cries of the dragonmancers and the furious roars of the dragons.
It was complete mayhem. There was the flashing light of the different colored dragon fires, the booming roar of the dragons themselves, the snow in my eyes, and the constant wind gusts that blew powdered ice off the crags all around us and set rainbows to blooming.
I sat, crouched and balanced on my haunches on Noctis’ back, occasionally having to grab a wing joint to stop myself from being thrown into the void, and slashed at any drake that came within range.
Behind me, hanging onto my sword belt as much to keep herself steady as to stop me from falling off Noctis’ back, Hana acted as my RIO—the Goose to my Maverick, if you will—and spotted targets for me.
“Left high!” she yelled, and I swung upward with my dagger, blindly, bracing my arm against the juddering impact as my long knife sliced into a drake and sent it corkscrewing out of the sky.
Blood, fire, and snow.
Snow, fire, and blood.
Time dissolved. I caught only sporadic flashes of my friends as the world tipped and reeled around Noctis, Hana, Will, and me. Blood fountained into the air, splashing Noctis’ flanks, bathing my gauntleted hands. My dagger plunged left and right, upward and occasionally downward.
Noctis and I, under Hana’s helpful guidance, slaughtered those fucking drakes until our muscles burned, but still they came. Even Will played his insubstantial part by glowing so brightly when four drakes piled onto Noctis’ tale that he stunned two of them long enough for Hana to behead them with a single swing of her sword. The other two fled with squawks of terror.
I cut one drake out of the air, booted away another that had latched itself onto the hem of my fur coat, and then reached around and crushed the skull of a third that had almost landed in Hana’s lap when she was not expecting it.
While I looked around, with an animal snarl of challenge on my lips and retribution burning in my eyes, I felt another one of those burning tingles pass through my frontal lobe.
“That was a new slot opening up for me, Mike,” Noctis told me.
I didn’t answer that, instead slashing at another drake as it zipped past. I missed, but with a deft flick of her wrist, Hana managed to fell the beefy little beast with a throwing knife through the eye.
That precipitated a lull in the attack on us. Noctis used the time to circle low, scanning for any sign that any of our friends had fallen to the deluge of smaller wild dragons.
“Go high. Noctis, go high,” I urged the Onyx Dragon. “Let’s get up there and then work our way down, frying any leftover drakes on the way down. Turn some nice wide circles.”
Noctis shot heavenward, his wings beating and pulling at the air.
We passed drakes flying hither and thither as we soared upward. Noctis made a swipe at some of the creatures that got too close, but mostly he ignored the ice bolts fired our way, preferring to weave his way out of range or else let them shatter harmlessly along his scaly sides.
I was expecting us to pop out into something that might have passed for cleaner, less snow-filled air, but that was wishful thinking. The impression was that we were in the middle of some unnatural localized storm that stretched up the edge of space. Whatever was causing it wasn’t about to make things easier for us by allowing us to fly out of it to get a better view.
“All right, all right,” I muttered, searching for any sign of my friends. “Where the hell is everyone? Is everyone okay? Hana, can you spot any—”
A scrum of drakes, gnashing their sharp little teeth in my face, crashed into me as one entity. A couple of the icy missiles grazed my forehead. I felt hot breath on the back of my neck, smelled the putrid stench of rotting meat coming from the maws of the creatures closest to me. Overwhelmed by the sheer weight of numbers, I was piled off the back of Noctis before anyone could react and toppled into the void.
As I fell, I saw that more drakes had congregated on Noctis and Hana. Will was flashing from dark to bright in an effort to scare them away, but it was having little effect. It seemed that the drakes were fueled by a mad desire to feed on all this fresh meat suddenly available to them and nothing was going to get in their way.
Hana was slashing and swinging and stabbing at the drakes, while Noctis was twisting and snapping in midair, all the while trying to stay airborne.
And then I was tumbling through the snowy sky.
Holy hell, that was a surreal moment. Made all the more intense by the fact that I had no point of reference to gauge which way was up, where the mountains were, where the lethal ground was rushing at me from. All was white and rushing wind.
And there was light too, and I perceived that Will was hurtling through the air with me.
“Mike,” Noctis said to me. Miraculously, his telepathic voice inside my head was as calm as it ever was. He sounded as stressed as your average rock.
“What?” I yelled, trying to tap into that calmness.
“The new slot, it’s the Wing slot,” Noctis said.
And I got it. He needed to say no more.
“But what about Hana?” I asked, flipping over and narrowly avoiding a ledge that flashed past me. “As soon as I activate the Wing slot, you’ll vanish and she’ll fall.”
“Give me two seconds to communicate with Gharmon, I’ll have her lock onto my mana signature and come and pick Hana up.”
“Two seconds?” I asked, wondering if the next thing that went through my head was going to be some sort of rock or block of ice.
There was an excruciating pause and then Noctis said, “Now.”
I activated the Wing slot.
The sensation of my wings unfolding could probably best be described as a stretching of muscles—muscles that I didn't know I had. If I’d had the time to think about it at all, I might have thought that sprouting wings would painful. In actual fact, the experience was almost pleasant.
The obsidian, glass-like wings sprouted from my back in a heartbeat, pulsing with Noctis’ mana. It was a case, thank the gods, where no instructions were required. As soon as they were open, the wings felt as comfortable and familiar as my own arms and legs. I righted myself in the air with about as much thought as you might catch yourself stepping off an unexpected curb. It was all reflex. It was all natural. It was fucking epic. Within moments, I was flying like an avenging archangel amongst the tiny hostile wild dragons, stabbing and slicing at them as I went.
With my Leg Slot free, I summoned Cyan into being. The Faerie Dragon, my latest addition, appeared in the blink of an eye. She flew beside me, her insect-like wings beating so rapidly that they were but a blur.
“What would you like me to do, father?” she asked.
“Roast some drakes,” I replied.
In response, Cyan zipped through the air and blasted a cloud of drakes with her dragonfire. It was unlike any dragonfire I had seen thus far: an arching beam with all the colors of the rainbow. When this strange colorful concoction struck the drakes, it settled on them in a multitude of colors
and stuck to them like sticky sap. Unable to keep their wings from flapping, they fell from the sky, tumbling to their deaths.
“Nice!” I said, but before I could join my dragon daughter in a little game of drake annihilation, Will the wisp had appeared in front of me. He pulsated urgently and, somehow, I got the impression that he wished me to follow him, and quickly.
“Lead the way, Will,” I said. I smiled with adrenaline-fueled delight as I flapped my way through the storm, leaving Cyan to continue her game so she could gain some experience.
I followed the wisp, dodging past drakes and my fellow dragonmancers, who did doubletakes as I flew by them.
The wisp led me through the gradually slackening blizzard to the base of a tower, leaning haphazardly against a crumbling section of wall.
The wisp circled the tower base for a few moments in the manner of a dog snuffling around to try and pick up a scent. Upon catching whatever he was searching for, Will began to move up the side of the tower. I followed, having to flap my wings rapidly so that I didn’t lose momentum and fall out of the air.
The two of us made it to the top of the tower, and I landed on the parapet, which disintegrated under my weight and fell down into the snow below.
“Is it close, buddy?” I asked. “Come on, if we can find this relic now, then we can get out of here before we have to face that freaking Frost Dragon. I don’t mind letting a sleeping dragon lie, even if it might not be sleeping per se.”
Speaking of the dragon, I took the opportunity to have a quick look around. There was nothing. No sign of anything long, scaly, and with a penchant for barbecuing people who pissed it off.
I focused my attention back on the wisp. Will was floating in circles, circles that were slowly but surely closing in on a parapet wall to my left. His ghostly form bobbed closer and closer to the mound of snow that heaped up against the parapet, the light from his translucent body becoming brighter and more concentrated as he zoned in on the spot.
“X marks the spot, do you reckon, Will?” I asked, striding over once the wisp had narrowed his focus to a two-yard square patch of snow.
