Chapter 40 #2
Verathras spread his wings. They were absurd on the human frame, too wide, too crimson, casting the whole hoard into a sudden red shade. He did not comment. With a single beat, he bolted toward the sky, coins spraying outward in a bright explosion.
“North,” his voice called down from the air. “To the dungeon. Keep pace.”
Xiir launched. Vress launched half a beat after. The hoard fell away underneath them, and Vellhorn shrank into its familiar patchwork of crooked rooftops, and Alsen felt the wind pull the moisture from his eyes and the ache from his shoulders in equal measure.
The other two guardian drakes flew after them, maintaining a noticeable distance, as if to make sure Luna didn’t accidentally want to mount them instead.
The city soon vanished behind them.
The wind smelled like stone and cold pine, and Alsen’s left shoulder was trying to murder him one wingbeat at a time.
He clung to the ridge between Vress’s shoulder blades with his good hand, broken arm strapped tight against his chest in Arleria’s sling, feeling every beat of the drake’s wings travel up through his ribs and into joints that were still pretending to heal.
Every time Vress banked, something in Alsen’s elbow moved in a way Alsen strongly suspected elbows were not supposed to move.
He did not comment. There was no one to complain to.
Verathras flew hundreds of yards ahead, wings too wide, too crimson, knifing through the sky with the kind of effortless authority that made the rest of the sky look like a borrowed room.
The two guard drakes trailed somewhere above and behind, keeping a distance that was, transparently, a Luna-avoidance perimeter.
That left Xiir, mounted by Luna.
“Faster,” Luna was saying, conversationally. “I’m lighter than Alsen, so you should be flying faster, not lagging behind. And don’t even dare to tell me I’m too heavy.”
“There’s no reason to fly faster,” Xiir hissed through clenched teeth, “and my brother is not being actively ridden by a lunatic.”
“Oh, you say the sweetest things when you’re trying to impress me.”
“Luna,” Alsen said. “Stop bullying him.” He’d long ago stopped expecting her to respond to his voice with anything resembling compliance. It was more of a ceremonial gesture at this point, a light tap on the brakes of a wagon that was going to crash anyway.
“I’m being nice!” Luna shouted back over the wind. “Look at him. He’s doing great. Aren’t you doing great, Xiir?”
“I am,” Xiir said in a tone meant to convey that he was imagining her death in vivid detail, “performing my duty.”
Vress, under Alsen, made a short, dry noise that felt like a chuckle.
Xiir whipped his head around mid-flight. “Do not.”
“I said nothing,” Vress said.
“You thought it.”
“You cannot hear thoughts.”
“I can hear yours.”
Luna laughed delightedly, slapping the flat of her hand against the side of Xiir’s neck. “See, I like him. The quiet one. The quiet one gets it.”
Below them, the country was changing.
The cultivated lowlands around Vellhorn had long since been replaced by rough, folded hills, and the hills by the dark green spine of pines that ran up into the first real peaks.
The farms thinned. Then stopped. Then there were no roads at all, only the shapes of old ones, faint paw-prints of civilization fading in the grass.
It still amazed Alsen how thoroughly the world simply ended a certain distance from the dragon. No one lived out here. Anywhere.
He spent most of the flight pondering the feasibility of reinforcing his omnidirectional shield against fire and heat.
The most likely scenario was that they would find something in the temple he wouldn’t want Verathras to know.
So, he was going to destroy it, and then they were going to have to run.
And running away from a fire dragon would be a lot easier with an anti-fire shield.
Now, he could summon elements, so summoning anti-elemental energies couldn’t be all that different. Obviously, he couldn’t start flashing his shield mid-flight, so he mostly worked through the concept in his mind, sneaking, forming tiny sparks of the required energy in his usable hand.
Verathras started banking.
The drakes followed, and Alsen braced himself for the landing.
The valley opened beneath them like a bowl cupped between two shoulders of the range. Dark pine at the rim, paler meadow at the floor, a thread of silver stream slipping through the middle.
No sign of any civilization.
They came down in a long, tight spiral. Verathras first, the drakes after. Alsen gripped the ridge with everything he had when Vress flared his wings to brake.
To his credit, Vress landed softly as a held breath. Alsen, dismounting one-handed, landed less well and pretended he’d meant to stagger.
Luna slid off Xiir in a single unhurried motion, patted him on the ass, saying, “Good boy.”
He glowered at her, clearly struggling with the urge to bite her head off.
Verathras walked to the base of the slope to the north. The last two drakes landed at least twenty paces behind them.
Luna joined Alsen, almost annoyingly relaxed.
There was nothing there, as far as Alsen could see. Just a mountain slope.
Verathras raised his hand. A pillar of flame burst into the sky, releasing an intense heat wave.
The fire tightened, compressed into a giant spear.
He flung his hand down, the spear drilling into the slope. Even more heat burst out, together with disintegrating dust. The flame spear took about three seconds before it vanished in a white fiery blaze.
A part of the mountain’s slope vanished with it, disintegrated to nothing. Only scorch marks on stones that lay to the side were proof that something ever was here.
The disintegrated area revealed an arch of stone, thirty feet tall, with a large spiral carved at its top, the face of it blackened but intact.
Luna tilted her head to the side, her eyes on Verathras.
The dragon motioned to the arch. “Xiir and Vress come with us. The rest guard the entrance.” He stepped toward the archway.
Alsen naturally included himself with us and headed after him. So did Luna.
Xiir and Vress looked ready to file their resignation. Very, very reluctantly, they inched forward, folding their wings tightly to their backs.
The two guard drakes bowed in unison, with evident relief. Don’t follow me into the dark hole was, from a drake’s perspective, the optimal set of orders.
Alsen summoned a light orb. Small, warm, the cheapest version he could make that still carried any distance. Luna, at his elbow, was already taking the spear from behind her backpack.
They went in.
The arch led them into a long corridor that sloped down past the arch. The air was unmistakable, metallic, thin, a little cold, with an undertone of something older layered beneath it.
He couldn’t tell what, but something remained active down here. Perhaps a ward, or maybe the artifact that once served as a core for this world’s spiritual barrier.
Verathras, striding ahead, did not appear to notice. Or, if he did, he did not care. He walked the way he flew, as if the corridor had been built for him, and was supposed to be grateful that he was passing through.
Alsen’s orb pushed the dark back twenty feet.
The carvings crawled along the walls in dense, repeating bands.
Geometric at first, then spirals, then the interlocked script he couldn’t read while walking, then spirals again.
He looked over the text, and it looked similar to the texts in the previous temple.
Prayers, legends, depictions of the goddess.
Luna walked behind him, positioned between Alsen and Vress. She made no sound, though it was probably because the noise of the drakes covered her.
Those sounded like proper monsters trying to squeeze through the tunnels. Their claws raked the stone floor, their spinal ridges scratched the ceiling whenever they couldn’t really fit in.
The corridor opened.
The first chamber was round, domed, and the floor worn into a shallow dish by the feet of the dead. Carvings ringed the walls. In the center, on a dais, stood what had once been a statue and was now a suggestion of one, draped in a fall of dust.
Constructs came out of the walls.
Four moving statues, their stone gray, joints made of rusted metal, purple lines shining through them as they moved. Void-animated guardians. They were bigger than the ones in the first temple, though they looked older, and moved more slowly.
Alsen held his orb higher and did absolutely nothing else.
Verathras didn’t even slow down his step. He raised his hand, flame orbs forming around him. One for each statue.
Alsen pushed out an experimental shield, a thin omnidirectional shield made of four different sections, each of them slightly customized to block fire and heat, just in a different way.
The orbs burst forth. Each statue received a direct impact, the orbs exploding into a mountain-shaking explosion. The statues blew up. The shockwave pressed against Alsen’s shield, the heat trying to bleed through.
Section three of the shield blocked the heat the best.
Progress. Nice.
He glanced after Luna.
She came out from behind Xiir, whom she used for a shield. She patted him on his side, just as he glared at her.
He bared his fangs, too, but had already gotten away from the drake.
Verathras kept walking ahead, straight into the next corridor.
Alsen paused, his chest tightening. No experience. That meant the system didn’t recognize them as a party. Whatever reason might be behind it, it wasn’t a good one.
The descent stretched.