74. VERY BAD TIMING

Kihrin’s story

Just outside the Blight

Just after Xaltorath crashed the party

“Vol Karoth!” Khored bellowed. If anyone besides myself heard him, they were too distracted with their own issues to pay attention. The God of Destruction pointed his red glass sword at me and launched a blast of seething red tenyé in my direction.

He was at his strongest. Just as his draconic brother, Morios, was made stronger by violence, Khored was empowered by destruction.

The Korthaen Blight had just seen a lot of destruction.

Which is also why I don’t think Khored was really trying. He hadn’t thrown that attack my way in order to hurt me; he’d done it to send a bright red bolt of magic across the sky to catch Tya’s and Ompher’s attention and remind them I was still around. I easily absorbed the strike; it didn’t do much more than make my skin tingle.

“Help Ompher!” I screamed at him.

I didn’t expect Khored to listen, and he didn’t disappoint. Why would he? I was the bad guy. I couldn’t even blame him for believing the rumors, paying attention to hearsay and myth; I’d killed him once. Pretty difficult to let go of the “villain” label under such circumstances.

He had every reason to want to kick my ass. Not so long ago, the Korthaen Blight would have been the perfect place to have this confrontation.

Ompher’s little trick changed things, though. Now, the Korthaen Blight wasn’t a safe place. If Tya took a stray shot, the chaos below would boil out and cause untold damage to neighboring lands: Khorvesh, the Manol, the Kulma Swamp. I needed to take this fight somewhere else.

I didn’t wait for Khored to close with me. Instead, I flew down and to the side. I used the same tenyé Khored had so graciously gifted me to unleash a torrent of kinetic energy at Ompher and Xaltorath both.

Solid hits. I truly think that if my targets had been anyone else, I’d have killed at least one of them, caused serious, crippling injuries.

Instead, I just knocked them both away from the Blight.

I followed them. I didn’t turn back to look, but I knew Khored was chasing after me. I hoped that Tya wasn’t. With as much tenyé as she was throwing into maintaining two different magical barriers, she was already too vulnerable.

Ompher lifted himself from the ground, looking slightly singed but about as unharmed as I would expect for a Guardian. He spotted me first, his eyes wide with outrage and shock.

“Impossible!” Ompher said. “There’s no way you survived that. I broke the planet to kill you!”

“If it makes you feel better, you succeeded.” But I really couldn’t stop to chat. Instead, I flew right past the Guardian and slammed into Xaltorath.

I grabbed the demon queen; bits of claw, scales, and tentacle-stingers began to flake away to ash under my grip. Now here was someone I was only too glad to kill.

Pretty sure when Xaltorath had attacked me on the streets of the Capital all those years ago, this hadn’t been the outcome she’d expected.

I did some damage. Unfortunately, Xaltorath’s physical form had always been more suggestion than fact. Xaltorath vanished out of my hands and reappeared several yards away. The ground at her feet iced over as she drew every bit of available heat up into her body to heal the damage.

***WHY ARE YOU OPPOSING ME, IDIOT-GOD OF ANNIHILATION?*** Xaltorath sounded genuinely perplexed. ***WE SEEK THE SAME THING. WE SHOULD WORK TOGETHER. HERE: YOU KILL ENTROPY, AND I WILL FINISH DEVOURING THIS ONE.***

The unintended reminder that Khored was also in this battle was well timed. A second red blast of energy passed through the space I’d occupied a second earlier. This one had meant business. It dissolved giant chunks of the ground behind me.

Xaltorath hadn’t waited for my reply. The demon queen instead leaped on Ompher, rending and devouring.

Ompher retaliated by attempting to turn Xaltorath’s personal gravity inward, to make the demon implode. Clever. I liked it; I was glad he hadn’t tried it on me. The trick might have worked against another demon too, but this one had eaten gods, had eaten Galava. The amount of energy necessary to overload Xaltorath’s defenses would have taken everything Ompher had to give and then some. I’m sure Ompher didn’t think it was worth it, since I was still in the fight.

My survival must have shaken the hell out of him. It had taken millennia for Ompher and the other Guardians to resurrect after I’d destroyed their bodies. Even then, they hadn’t been able to manage it on their own. Ompher must have expected me to obey the same rules. And yet here I was, back after only seconds.

Which meant he’d killed a lot of people for nothing.

I turned back to face Khored. “Damn it, Mithros, stop! I’m not your enemy! Would you stop being such a damn flamingo?” I kept waiting for one of the Guardians to comment on the fact that I was talking, reacting, responding to them like a rational, intelligent being. But then I remembered that I’d been perfectly capable of speech that first time too. That time when I’d murdered them all. They’d never encountered the mentally amputated version of me.

All the same, though, I was a lot chattier this time around.

Eventually, Khored noticed, although he wasn’t ready to pronounce me his friend again. “Not my enemy?” Khored pointed up. “Then explain that.”

That was exactly one step removed from shouting, “Look, air!” at someone so they’d glance away at a crucial moment. Which was cute and funny under different circumstances, but I wasn’t in the mood. I teleported three hundred feet to the side and in a random direction so I could see whatever Khored meant before I had to return my attention to him.

It wasn’t air. Instead, it was this: a flowing cloud, headed in our direction, dark and wispy as it rode the inferno-hot winds gushing out of the Blight. Bits of the cloud at the edges seemed to ignite, burn, and flake away.

I sharpened my vision.

It wasn’t a cloud either, which made sense considering its extremely uncloud-like behavior. Rather, it was a flock of birds, thousands strong.

No. I revised my estimate immediately. Millions strong. So many birds I could only guess at the numbers. All different species and sizes, many of them so physically damaged that they shouldn’t have been capable of flight.

Coincidentally, they were also all dead.

The shadow of a much larger winged creature—gigantic, skeletal—flew in the center of that giant, decomposing flock.

Rol’amar the dragon had re-formed—and was flying our way.1

I supposed it was possible that the dragon had been drawn to the area by the giant, glowing magic wall that could be seen by half the planet. But that wouldn’t explain why he was heading toward us. Toward me.

It occurred to me that the dragons—all the dragons—might have noticed that uncomfortable cycle of deaths and resurrections that I’d “enjoyed” inside the Blight. Irony: Rol’amar might have been flying over to help me.

I thought about telepathically contacting the dragon and forcing it away, but if Relos Var had noticed the deaths too, he might be paying more attention than normal. I didn’t know how strong Relos Var’s links to the other dragons were. Certainly, when I—when Vol Karoth—had been imprisoned, Relos Var’s control had been much stronger, even as Vol Karoth whispered hate and revenge from the shadows. Now I had more control, but that didn’t mean Relos Var wouldn’t be able to hear me if I started shouting orders. Too much had already gone wrong.

I couldn’t risk it.

“Shit,” I cursed as the cloud dove at us.

I held up my hand and summoned up a barrier of energy around myself. Although energy was the wrong word for it. It was the opposite of that. Anything that hit the field disintegrated, with the energy released flowing back into myself even as black flakes floated in the air.

It was unnecessary; the birds came nowhere near me. They instead flew directly at Khored, attempting to claw and pick at his flesh in a hundred places as they flew past in a never-ending flow of feather, bone, and exposed muscle. Khored, though, was more like Vol Karoth than the man would ever admit; the shield that Khored erected was remarkably similar to my own. Birds who ventured too close were annihilated, turned to nothing but clouds of ash tossed by the winds.

If only Rol’amar himself were so easily cast aside. The undead dragon slapped Khored as he flew past. Part of the tail disintegrated, but the dragon was too massive—and too quickly regenerating—for that to prove more than a momentary inconvenience. Enough of the tail survived to send the God of Destruction flying, snapping him backward with enough force to kill a mortal. Khored caught himself, using magic to slow his flight. He came to rest thirty feet from the lava, annoyed.

I suspected my odds of convincing Khored that I wasn’t on the opposing side were growing narrower with each passing second. This was a problem for multiple reasons, not least of which was, again, I didn’t want Khored to die here. Or at all. In fact, I really needed Khored to not die here, given my plans for later. I just had to hope that since he’d always been a master tactician, not to mention one of the most skilled soldiers I’d ever known, the man would be capable of holding his own against a crazed dragon for at least a few minutes.

No, the bigger problem was Ompher, who was merely “very talented” when it came to combat rather than qualifying as “one of the best that had ever lived.” Unfortunately, he was facing off against an opponent who had lifetimes in which to practice playing different versions of this conflict in endless repetition. Xaltorath knew all Ompher’s strengths and weaknesses—as well, if not better, than the god himself. Understandably, Ompher was having a rough time of things. I wasn’t sure how much longer he could last. If Ompher was going to survive, he would need an unexpected variable. Something like me.

I launched myself at the demon queen. Again, the demon simply teleported away rather than allow me to move close enough to touch her. That bought Ompher time; he was bleeding from a dozen wounds that he hadn’t managed to heal, and he was visibly weakening. Rarely had it been quite as obvious that the seemingly infinite power of the Guardians did in fact have limits.

Even as I drove off Xaltorath, a wave of lava rose from the ground and attempted to crash over me.

I glanced back at Ompher. “Would you stop that?” I muttered after dodging to the side. It was an empty request, obviously. Ompher wouldn’t.

So I couldn’t do much else except try to avoid Ompher as best I could and concentrate on Xaltorath, moving to siphon tenyé off the demon the same way another demon might. I managed to freeze one of her hands, but she immediately whirled around and summoned up Khored’s red glass sword to fire off a beam of pure entropy in my direction. Simultaneously, three of her other arms also threw spells in my direction—with powers originally owned by several of the other Guardians. That blast almost knocked me back into the magical wall of force that Tya had set up around the Blight. Heat carried over from the firestorm inside kept the rock closest to the wall molten and cherry red.

Khored looked torn on who he should be attacking first, since either way he’d be helping an enemy. Ompher had no such reservations: he focused on Xaltorath.

We had little warning that yet another enemy had joined our midst other than a sudden gust of wind and drop in temperature. My gut clenched. I knew who that was.

The sky had grown brighter as Rol’amar’s vast flight of dead birds dwindled and fell from the sky, but now it darkened again—this time with clouds. The storm had only incompletely covered the sky when the clouds parted again like the lightest and most delicate of silk curtains to reveal the gargantuan serpentine shape of Aeyan’arric the Ice Dragon, Lady of Storms.

Also, my daughter. Not in Kihrin’s “sort of, in a past life, if you look at it sideways” fashion. No, since I was now running around in S’arric’s body, that meant Aeyan’arric was my biological daughter. It was … I was trying not to think about it.

Unfortunately, I was out of luck in that regard, mostly because of my unexpected visceral reaction to seeing her—pure, violent fury. It caught me off guard. The anger of her betrayal hurt so much more than the others. I had to remind myself that I didn’t know—had never known—what her motives had been. There was every chance that her uncle Rev’arric had lied to her about what the ritual was designed to do.

How I hoped so.

Aeyan’arric attacked Khored, extending her jaw to breathe out a long stream of razor-sharp ice shards. The ice blast was strong enough and fast enough to send lava spraying, creating a giant wall of blinding steam.

That didn’t bother me. What bothered me much more was why Aeyan’arric was there at all. She shouldn’t have been. Her preferred territory was thousands of miles to the north, in the icy wastes of Yor. I could understand why Rol’amar had wandered over. In theory, Rol’amar would have been somewhere near the Blight and thus in a fantastic position to respond to this catastrophe. But Aeyan’arric? She wouldn’t have flown down without a very good reason.

What were the odds all the dragons had felt me die?

And what were the odds that all the dragons were now on their way?

I checked through that link that always hovered in the back of my mind, that many-threaded connection to nine other identities. Two of those minds were closed to me, but that wasn’t unexpected. Relos Var had always been careful to erect a barrier to keep out Vol Karoth’s thoughts, and now that Drehemia was sane again, the same was true of her. But for the dragon minds that remained, all snarling, yowling seven of them, well.

They’d all responded. Great.

The temperature of the air plummeted lower, until any creatures who needed to breathe or hadn’t cast some kind of spell rendering it unnecessary found themselves exhaling little, white clouds with every breath. Cracking sounds filled the air as the ground under their feet turned to obsidian and basalt.

I studied the ground. I couldn’t cool the lava because that wasn’t how my power worked. I’d destroy it in the attempt. But an ice dragon was a different story.

“Aeyanie!” I shouted. “Leave him alone! Don’t bother with the storm. Freeze the ground! I want you to freeze the lava!”

Relos Var might be able to sense if I telepathically gave the dragons orders, but the link didn’t allow the wizard to eavesdrop on what I was physically saying. I knew that for a fact and would have known it even if we hadn’t asked the Name of All Things for confirmation.² Thus, I was perfectly capable of giving audible orders.

I just didn’t know if any of the dragons would listen to audible orders.

But Aeyan’arric broke off breathing at Khored and turned her head to the side to gaze at me. It was a much less angry look than I’d seen the last time we’d met. The last time had been the hateful stare of a tiger about to leap at its prey. This time, it was hard to shake the impression that she’d perked up like a dog that had just received a new command from her master.

She circled around in the air and switched her target to the ground. Aeyan’arric didn’t breathe again, but the land under her flight path began to freeze in large swaths, billowing more vapor into the air while simultaneously hardening the lava. Even if she’d stopped actively summoning up a blizzard (and she probably had), she was still sending enough water into the air to make the arrival of a storm imminent.

“S’arric?” Khored said.

I turned back. Xaltorath and Ompher were back to fighting, and that wasn’t a situation Ompher was going to survive for long. But I couldn’t go do anything about that as long as I had to fight Khored too.

But the look on Khored’s face made me pause. His expression was marked with wistful bemusement, laced with equal parts suspicion and hope. It was the look of a man who desperately wished the world would give him some happy news, even though he knew in his heart that it wouldn’t.

“We have to get Ompher out of here or Xaltorath will kill him!” I knew Khored hadn’t meant the question that way, but I answered it as though he’d asked me what we were going to do next.

Because I could remember a thousand times when Khored had meant it that way, when he’d followed every order I gave him.

I swear Khored started to follow my orders this time too.

But a scream rang out. It wasn’t a physical scream. Rather it was a scream that reached out from the tenyé itself, vibrating painfully through all of existence.

I remember hearing once that when Tya had given birth to Janel, her cries had deafened every mage for three days.

“Tya,” I said. If anything happened to her …

I had to pick a priority. Saving Tya—and keeping that wall intact around the Korthaen Blight—easily trumped any plans to save Ompher’s life. Whatever spell, effect, or item Ompher had somehow used to keep me spiked to one location until he could drop a comet on my head was gone. I could only assume it had lost its grip on me during the many, many, way-too-many times I’d died and self-resurrected while trying to escape the enormous, churning firestorm.

So I left the others behind. I hoped that they’d do the sensible thing and gang up on Xaltorath instead of following me. Then I teleported to Tya’s location.

If I hadn’t already been in a war footing, I might have been caught unaware by the swarm of metal shards falling like rain on my position. I knew the attack hadn’t been meant for me, nor that my attacker had any way to know where I’d be in advance. It was just coincidence because I’d shown up right next to Tya.

And two dragons—Morios and Sharanakal—were trying to kill her.