Chapter 41 A Climax of Villains and Main Characters
Em’s Subtitle: I Ruin an Ancient Prophecy
No, fuck! No!” Em reached to check her pocket, a sharp shard digging into her thigh. She winced past the pain, already knowing what had happened. Her secret weapon.
Crushed.
“You thought you could outsmart me?” Kriqir’s cackle rang through her throbbing head.
He pulled his sword away and yanked at her arm to pull her upright.
Something in her shoulders popped. Em’s shriek rang through her ears long after it escaped her.
She struggled, the necromancer’s gloved hands digging into her biceps as he dragged her deeper into his dungeon.
Kriqir twisted her wrist against her back. Em resisted and locked her arm to push against him. They stumbled, their balance haywire as she fought him for her freedom.
Shards of glass flicked across the stone floor, pouring from her skirt pockets. Drops of her blood followed, creating thin streams down her legs and soaking into her torn skirts. She whimpered as agony from the splinters of glass crushed into her thighs pinched.
She could only hope some of the powder was still left within her pocket and not totally drowned in her blood. When she’d fallen, the vial Ming had lent her shattered into her legs, and now all her plans relied on what remained of the crushed, secret weapon in her torn pocket.
“Stand down!” Kriqir’s booming order instantly silenced the raging orcs outside the doorway of his lair.
Em strained her neck to look over her tender shoulders past her frizzy hair.
In the edges of her vision, she saw the stumbling forms of Gair and Roden run into the necromancer’s office, their gory weapons raised.
Their horrified expressions locked on her, and the distress twisting over their faces stole a whimper from her.
Everything was falling apart quicker than Em could react.
“None of that now, gentlemen.” Kriqir let Em go. She collapsed to the ground with a gasp, clutching at her pocket and praying to Stephanie that some of the powder was still safe inside. Without it, the prophecy was over, and her risky move had failed in the damnable wish for originality.
The necromancer flicked his hands toward her friends. Both dropped under a blast of green magic as the forceful mist swept through the chamber. Their dropped blades clattered, and they groaned as their skulls slammed into the ground.
Kriqir’s sneer grew more amused. He turned towards Em again, smirking wickedly. “Seems we meet again, foolish princess.”
Em winced past the glass, stabbing through her legs, shifting on the cold floor to maintain the space between her and the antagonist. She reached for Destiny’s Song at her hip—her last chance.
“Fight me, Kriqir,” she challenged. “Main Character to villain. Let’s give this fucking prophecy the shitty climax it deserves and see who the real hero of this quest is.”
Kriqir’s eyebrows raised beneath his mask, and he scoffed, rolling his silvery eyes.
“Please, fool. Don’t humor me. Let’s cut to the chase, and you tell me what nonsense you’ve deemed reasonable enough to try to defeat me.
You didn’t disappear from this dissension over the FOURTH WALL and return without that pen unless you unlocked some secret magic or gained a blessing from the heartless Great Authors. ”
Em sniffed, stumbling onto her feet as the warm hum of her prophecy’s sword swelled energy back into her aching body. Still, she staggered, the glass embedded in her legs biting in protesting pain to the motion.
“No secret magic, that’s cliché,” she smirked at the villain.
“Ah, so you really haven’t changed at all.” Kriqir twirled a ball of greenish magic between his hands, pupils darkening. “Pity. I was beginning to like the evil version of you.”
Em gestured to the shattered vial and her blood on the ground between them, the streams of red trickling down her knees to her ankles. “This isn’t how I planned for any of this to go.”
Kriqir hesitated, surveying the mess.
“Em, now!” Gair shouted as he pushed himself onto all fours, spitting and coughing on his blood.
Roden still lay limp beside the dragon mutant, wings and arms sprawled over him so Em couldn’t see if he was even alive.
She swallowed back the worries for her love interests, trying to fully focus on her enemy.
“Throw the relic at him!” Gair ordered.
“I can’t,” she said.
“What do you mean you can’t?” Gair demanded. “Throw Brolzross’ relic at him and end the prophecy!”
Em slipped her hand into her pocket, sharp fragments of the shattered vial cutting into her hand.
She hissed past the numbing pain and grinned as her fingertips found powder in the deepest cavity of her pocket.
A sliver of warmth surged through her veins at its touch, the last bits of its magic still there.
Secretly, she scooped some of it into her palm, then drew it out for everyone to see.
“I can’t,” Em repeated. The greenish shimmer of the crushed stone reflected in the glow of Kriqir’s magic. “I destroyed it.”
“What?” the necromancer blurted, his incantation sizzling out.
“You win, Kriqir,” she confessed. “Brolzross the Nocturnal’s relic has been destroyed. Nothing can kill you now, and the prophecy is over. Novella is yours.”
A sob escaped Em.
“You won,” she said.