RAZZ ZIPPED OUT OF ARCHER’S JACKET. HER EYES WENT huge and focused on the creature, lumbering through the trees.
“We’re going to kill it, Razz,” Archer said. “You can POOF if you need to, but we need to take this thing out.” The paravore snapped a copse of trees with a sudden crush of its foreleg. CRACK! Archer winced and his confidence drained away. That sound . . . reminded him of his father shattering the wishing wells in the basement.
“Archer, please,” she said. “This thing is different. This isn’t all Dream.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“I can’t explain it,” Razz said. “But I’m made of Dream fabric, and I can sense other things. Like you, you’re not Dream stuff. This creature, there’s something weird about it, like it’s made of two places at once. It’s got Dream fabric all over it, but . . . I just can’t tell what the other place is.”
“I promised,” Archer said. “And I’ve got to wake Nick up.”
“I’m not asleep,” Nick said. “Now, cut all this ear-bashing and let’s get to slaying.”
“I’m sorry, Razz,” Archer said. “I have to.”
Razz didn’t argue. She shook her head sadly and vanished.
The creature roared again, blotting out all sound and making the stone towers tremble. “It’s spewing mad now,” Nick said. “It scented me out but doesn’t like the stone here.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve been tracking the paravore for years, mate. Either you learn or you die.”
“So how do we kill it?”
“Can’t pierce the thing’s hide,” Nick said. “I mean to put this carbon steel arrow in its eye.”
“From here?”
“No, not from here, ya goon,” Nick said. “It’s got to get closer, get caught up in the towers here.”
“It doesn’t look like it’s coming in.”
“That’s where you come in, Archer,” Nick said. “You can fly, right? I need you to fly down there and coax him forward. Duck its roar and, whatever you do, stay out of its eye lance.”
“Its what?”
“Eye lance,” he said. “That’s what I call it anyway. The thing’ll sap you, take your strength, sometimes even shut you down, but that’s when it looks directly at you.”
“Sheesh,” Archer said.
“I know!” Nick replied. “It’s a nasty beast.”
The paravore was nasty—of that, Archer had no doubt—but that wasn’t actually what he was thinking about for just that moment. Archer marveled at how self-aware Nick seemed to be. He planned; he reflected; he had emotional reactions—it was like he was in some kind of pre-Dreamtreading state.
“Yo, mate?” Nick said. “You’d better get focused.”
“Sorry,” Archer replied, blinking rapidly. “Okay, duck the roar, avoid the eye lance—got it. Wait, how do I do that? I can’t fly for long.”
“Stay in its peripheral vision, and move around a lot,” Nick said. “But ya gotta keep it from thinkin’ straight. Make it mad, and it’ll follow ya.”
“I’m good at making things mad at me,” Archer said. He stood up and stepped toward the edge of the platform. “Here I go. Don’t miss.”
“I never miss.”
Archer dove from the stone perch, soared out to the creature’s right flank, and decided to start with fire.
The paravore emitted a low gurgling growl that Archer felt as much as he heard. But the creature seemed focused on the pillars of stone. It rubbed its lower jaw tusks along the stone as if sharpening them.
It’s testing the towers, Archer thought as he banked hard back to his left and made straight for the paravore. But why? It toppled bigger trees without a second thought. Was there something about the stone, something the creature didn’t like, didn’t trust?
“Here goes nothing,” Archer said, flexing his will and calling up a glob of molten rock for each hand. He increased his speed and readied the attack. But as he neared the creature, he found himself overwhelmed by the thing’s sheer size. From shoulder to foot, it had to be at least sixty feet. If it turned too swiftly and opened its jaws, it was certain to be able to take Archer in a single mouthful.
Archer drove those thoughts away and steered toward the mid-section. He thought he might come in super low and aim for the paravore’s underbelly. Perhaps it was a weak area. At the last second, though, Archer spotted a fan-shaped projection of flesh laying flat against the side of the paravore’s head. It was ridged and tapered toward a dark cavity.
An ear! Archer thought. Gotta be.
That became the target. Archer swooped up and curled hard, letting loose with the fireballs. The Dreamtreader heaved them both at the creature’s ear but couldn’t stop and watch the impact. He curled away just as a flare of angry orange exploded. The paravore roared again, but the pitch was higher, more frantic. In pain.
Now for the tough part. Archer had to get the creature to see him without directly fixing him with the eye lance attack.
“C’mon, you stupid, thick beast!” Archer yelled, swerving in and out of the paravore’s field of vision. “Yeah, I’m the one who toasted your ear! That’s right—whatcha going to do about it?”
Archer risked looking over his shoulder just in time to see the creature snapping its jaws wildly, seemingly in frustration over the burning sensation in its ear. But its massive head whipped back around.
When the paravore turned, its red eyes flared. Archer couldn’t see the lance attack, but the evidence of its coming was unmistakable. Wherever the paravore’s gaze lined up with a stone tower, flecks of rock blasted outward in little whirling clouds that caught the moonlight.
“Uh-oh,” Archer muttered. He tried to rocket upward, but an invisible wave hit him. Hard. All at once, Archer lost the ability to fly and careened out of the air into the foliage.
SNAP! CRACK! Branch and bough shattered on Archer as he tumbled end over end. He slammed into the mossy turf far below and lay still.
The paravore’s roar startled Archer back into the moment, but he was dazed. His thoughts bumbled around in his head, and he couldn’t focus. Creature. Big. Move. Run.
It was enough to get him stumbling to his feet and hands. He rose up on all fours and clambered like a spider over the ferny terrain. Then he heard it: KERRACK! It was the earsplitting shatter of stone. The paravore had overcome its hesitance to cross into the pillars. Archer rose up and turned in time to see a massive stone tower crashing through the treetops right at him.
He dove and fell into a muddy creek bed. The tower came crushing down to the earth, smashing trees and shrubs alike. It slammed to the ground, bridging the creek, and coming to rest just above Archer’s shoulders.
“Snot-blasting nose nuggets!” he exclaimed, rolling out from under the fallen tower’s shadow, just as a huge section of stone broke loose and fell into the creek bed. It hit the mud and water and sent a gooey spray all over Archer. He blinked and wiped the muck from his face, but he didn’t have time to think about the near miss.
The paravore continued its advance. Each footstep brought a minor earthquake; each roar sent ice slivers careening up Archer’s spine. The Dreamtreader turned toward the creature. It appeared high above the tree canopy like an unstoppable tidal wave, filling his vision with that gnarled, leathery flesh and those beady red eyes.
Archer leaped for the bank of the creek and slipped. He skidded awkwardly like a puppy on a tile floor, gave up, and sprinted up the creek bed. Another stone tower came crashing down just inches away. Archer winced and jumped at the thunderous impact, but there was no more looking up or back. He had to hope and pray that the falling stone wouldn’t just suddenly crush him. He had to keep running.
“Razz, I could really use some help here!” Archer yelled as he ran. “I can’t see above this creek bed. I don’t know where I’m going!” When she didn’t appear, Archer wasn’t exactly surprised, but he was disappointed. Razz tended to stick to her convictions. If she thought a certain course of action was stupid or reckless, she stayed away.
Another stone tower crashed through the forest somewhere to Archer’s right. Reflexively, he bounced to the left, slamming into the creek bank again. The paravore’s roar sounded closer than ever. Archer kept running but risked a look. The monster’s clawed foot slammed into another pillar of stone. The shadow of the great beast loomed above.
Archer stepped on something that wasn’t mud or pebbles. That “something” gave a strange crackling beneath his feet, and then Archer tripped. He went face-first into the gravelly mud, flopped over like a fish out of water, and looked back.
Sitting in an uneven circle around what appeared to be the ruins of a picnic lunch of gigantic steamed crayfish were a crowd of little blue people. Tripols, he thought. Just like Razz said.
With bulbous, angled eyes of blue glass, they glared at Archer and had their floppy, wing-shaped ears pinned back tensely. Archer realized with sudden clarity that he had been the cause of their lunch’s ruin. He hadn’t been looking and had apparently stepped right in the middle of their food.
“Uhm . . . sorry about that!” Archer said, clambering to his feet. “But, uh, you guys might want to get out of here. There’s a really big—”
Archer never finished the sentence. The paravore’s foot came down through the forest canopy and bombed into the space between Archer and the Tripols. He heard a chorus of warbling shrieks and hoped the little guys hadn’t been flattened. Somehow that thought made Archer mad. Boiling mad.
“Enough of this!” he growled, summoning what was left of his will to create. He reached back over his shoulder. His hand came back with his favorite sword, a broad-bladed long sword modeled after the versatile blades used by the Vikings. But Archer’s sword had a little something extra: when he cried out, a blue fire rushed up from the hilt and engulfed the blade.
“I have got to get a name for this sword!” he exclaimed.
He lunged toward the paravore’s foot and thrust the blade into the flesh just behind its nearest talon. The beast shrieked in pain, pulling back. The force of the creature yanking its foot out of the creek bed flung Archer upward into the trees, but the sword was still embedded deep in the monster’s foot.
Somehow the creature’s fury helped crystallize Archer’s thought. Finally, he had enough concentration to go airborne once more. He leaped up out of the tree, blasted through the dense canopy, and almost flew directly into the paravore’s mouth. Archer careened off an upper jaw tusk and cartwheeled twice in the air before regaining flight control enough to swerve out of mouthful distance.
He felt his will dwindling, but he had to stay ahead of the creature enough to find Nick’s tower perch. With the paravore pouncing just behind, Archer moved evasively, darting around and behind the stone towers. He dove skyward to get a look and then plummeted again to avoid the creature’s eye lance.
It was on one of the sudden ascents that he spotted the high stone turret where Nick waited with his bow. The paravore screeched and another stone tower fell. Archer turned and hovered, then launched a series of blazing fireballs at the creature’s already singed ear. The beast reared on its hind legs and searched for Archer.
“I’m only going to have enough left for one more pass,” Archer muttered. “Nick, I hope you’re paying attention!”
Archer positioned himself directly between the beast and Nick’s stone tower. Finally fixing its stare on Archer, the paravore careened through the forest and other turrets. Archer watched the eye lance striking one tower after another—evidenced by bursts of steam and shattered stone—coming at him swiftly. He dodged to his left and sheltered behind the thickest tower remaining. The paravore did not relent. It roared and charged. The jaws gaped wide. Its eye lance swept just over Archer’s head.
The paravore pounced, a red-eyed colossal wrecking ball, coming straight for the stone tower and Archer hiding behind it. Archer had a little will left, but not enough for flying. Not knowing what else to do, he clambered up the stone. With the concussive footfalls and the roars of the beast so near, it felt like climbing a ladder into a thunderstorm. He braced himself for the impact.
There was a sudden, frightening silence. The paravore’s gaping maw thrust out from the other side of the tower behind Archer. The Dreamtreader yelped and tried to clamber away but had nowhere to go. Then the creature’s face went slack, and its head lurched, banging clumsily into the stone a foot from Archer’s clinging hand. The red light in its eyes had gone out and the very last bit of an arrow shaft and its fletching protruded from one dead eye.
The paravore’s face slid down the tower. Its body crumpled near the bottom and crashed sideways onto the forest floor. The creature’s legs twitched for a moment and then went still. Archer clung to his stone turret and heard two very strange sounds: one was a chorus of warbling cheers from the forest below. These apparently belonged to the Tripols. Archer watched as dozens of the little people clambered up onto the dead paravore.
Razz was right, Archer thought. Those Tripols really will eat anything.
The second sound was something that reminded Archer of the old Tarzan jungle scream, an almost operatic yell of triumph and sheer ferocity that ended in “HOOROOO!”