Chapter 42
Luna lay under the corpses, eyes open, breathing through her mouth because her nose had given up. Too much blood. The hit on the wall after Verathras re-shifted almost got her.
The bodies above her smelled of burnt hair and cooked meat and something chemical she didn’t want to identify. Fire burned on the top layer, the heat creeping downward through cloth and dead flesh, slow but inevitable.
Alsen lay pressed against her, barely breathing.
His skin radiated cold from the inside, the residual chill of whatever he’d pulled from the Pellicle still bleeding through him.
At the same time, the ambient heat from Verathras’s last breath cooked the air around them.
Freezing and burning at once. She could feel his heartbeat through his ribs. It was too slow.
The lightning that struck the dome’s center formed into a man.
The bracelet didn’t vibrate anymore.
She’d taken it from Savnoj’s wrist after she tore out his heart, back at the guild hall. A death-warning bracelet sounded useful.
It turned out to be extremely useful, as it vibrated both as they saw the inner sanctum, and then after they killed Verathras.
Through a gap between two bodies, she saw the man.
Tall, at least seven feet, built like Verathras’s human form but different in every way.
Where Verathras had been crimson, this one was cold.
Azure scales lay in thin films across his skin, translucent at the edges, catching light like insect wings.
His skin beneath was bluish, the color of the sky.
White hair hung past his shoulders, straight and fine, stirring faintly from residual static.
He wore armor and robes at once. Layered plate over his chest and shoulders, ceremonial cloth beneath, the whole arrangement giving the impression of royalty. A glaive was slung across his back, its blade long and curved, faintly crackling with energy.
Luna held her breath. She pressed her hand over Alsen’s mouth, gently, just in case he wasn’t out yet, and made no sound.
The man surveyed the dome. His gaze swept the destruction with unhurried patience. The melted stone. The burning corpses. The collapsed sections of the wall. The hole in the sky.
Then his eyes fixed on Verathras.
The dragon’s head and neck occupied half of the hall, the body gone, annihilated, the claws still caught on the dome’s rim. Blood had pooled and dried in streaks across the stone. Dislodged scales lay scattered around the dome like shed petals.
The man walked to the head.
He stood over it for a long moment. Then he sighed.
“You always preferred your hoard to your duty, Brother,” he said.
His voice was quiet, but the dome’s acoustics carried it everywhere.
“I told you a dozen times. I told you. You cannot sit on a pile of metal and pretend the world will never change.”
He stopped beside the head. One hand rested on the ridge of scales, the gesture almost gentle.
“No matter how many temples we destroyed, how many followers we wiped out, how many wards you abolish, the gods never die. I told you they’d try to have their revenge.” He paused. “You were too comfortable. Too slow. Nothing kills our kind like comfort and sloth.”
Silence. The fire crackled somewhere in the corpse pile. A section of melted wall shifted, settling.
“We aren’t immortal, Brother.” His voice dropped. “You knew that. You knew that before I did. The gods sleep, diminish, but they do not die. Faith survives for as long as the deity exists. Thirty years of silence didn’t mean the danger had passed.”
He removed his hand from the scales and wiped his face with his fingers.
“You were the strongest, once, my dear brother. But strength doesn’t last when it isn’t maintained.” He sighed. “I told you.”
One more pause. Longer than the others. He walked to the edge of the corpse pile and picked up a burning hand, which tore from the body with ease.
Luna’s heart slammed against her ribs. She didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. And she prayed Alsen didn’t start coughing.
The dragon returned to Verathras’s head and threw the hand at it. “May the fire light your way.”
His entire form turned into lightning and streaked back up into the sky.
Thunder rolled through the dome, echoing off the melted walls, fading into the open sky above.
Luna counted heartbeats. Twenty. Forty. Sixty.
Nothing. The bracelet also remained calm.
She shoved a corpse off her. The body rolled to the side, its clothes catching flame as it tumbled. She pushed another one off, and another, digging herself out of the pile.
The air hit her face. It was still brutally hot, but after the pile, it felt almost fresh. Whatever Alsen had done once they got into the pile had cooled her off nicely. She felt like her brain was going to melt inside her head before that.
She dug out Alsen.
He was barely conscious. His skin was the wrong color, pale with a bluish tint that had nothing to do with the lighting. Frost clung to his eyebrows and the roots of his hair, while his clothes were hot enough to sting her hands. His eyes were open, but they stared at nothing.
She pulled him out by the arms, dragged him to the edge of the dome where a section of wall still stood, and propped him against it. His head lolled to the side. She corrected it, leaning it back against the stone.
“Hey,” she said, sitting down next to him. “Still in there?”
His eyes found her. Slowly. Like a man surfacing from deep water. “How did you know?”
Of course, he asked about that. “That’s how things go with dragons. There are always some that can move really fast, and they know when one of them dies. Don’t ask me how.”
Everything hurt. Her skin was raw and red from the heat, cracked and bleeding in places. The inside of her mouth tasted like copper. Her ears rang, her vision still slightly blurry.
She looked out over the dome. Half of it was gone. The sky above was a deep, clear blue. The mountain’s peak framed the opening like a broken crown.
“We killed a dragon,” she said.
Alsen managed a snort. “You really need to put running away on the list of possible actions.”
Nah. The reaper didn’t need to run. Everyone else did, or the reaper ate their heart.
Alsen’s breathing steadied. His color didn’t improve, but his eyes cleared up. “Well, we probably can’t go back to Vellhorn, now.”
“Not that there’s anyone we know by name alive in there, anyway.”
God. He rubbed his face with his palm. And whose fault was that, huh?
Well, theirs.
They sure did leave their mark on the world around them.
Perhaps not in the way he had originally intended, but, but they did leave an impact.
And, at the very least, the sustainability directive that had people sacrifice newborn children because it didn’t fit into the dragon quota was about to end. “Might as well go to Theopolis now.”
“Did you manage to remember the map?”
“Saw it twice. I’ll redraw it into my spellbook when I can move precisely enough. I need a while to rest, though.”
“I cannot see why.” She chuckled. “We’re going to be here for a while, anyway. This one’s going to take a while to carve.”
“To carve?”
“Yep.” She motioned at the base of Verathras’s neck. “I really need the dragon hide shoes, and the best tissue for that is in the neck, so I’ll have to carve through that. Then, we could probably get like raincoats or something from the softer tissue.”
Right. These weren’t materials they could just buy. Not that they had the gold for that, anyway.
“Then, I might as well try to make myself a set of armor. And robes for you, possibly, if I find a suitable hide in the deeper layers. And then there’s the gem in the head. It’s going to be a real pain to get to, though.”
He raised an eyebrow. “The gem?”
“Yep. Every dragon has a gem that is imbued with their power or gives them power or something like that. I remember once reading a scroll with a discussion of whether the gem grows in their head or if they are made from that gem. It doesn’t really matter to me, though, because every big dragon has a really magically potent gem inside their skull.
They make an awesome base for magical items.”
Like a staff or an amulet, depending on its size. He really needed to get into the whole magical-items thing. “I’ll blast the head open once I recover. I should be able to cast a lance in an hour or so.”
“The Supremely Divine Lance of Complete Annihilation?” she asked, chuckling a bit.
“Not that one.” He could never tell her that he, in the end, called the spell that in his mind. He tried to get up. Nope. Bad idea. Pain fired through him, especially from the left arm. “Maybe two hours.”
“I’ll need half a day to work through the neck, anyway.” She got up, drawing a long, curved dagger from one of her sheaths. “I’d better start, anyway. It’s easier before the insects catch on.”
Alsen could imagine. He rested against the stone. He could have a little rest.