90. The Battle of Eight Dragons

90. THE BATTLE OF EIGHT DRAGONS

Sheloran was glad that both Galen and Qown had been tapped to be on the Guardian list. A part of her would’ve liked to have been there too. She couldn’t deny that she’d thought about raising a hand when suggestions were being tossed around. But if Galen was going to become immortal, at least Qown would be too.

Anyway, if one of the three of them would end up eventually becoming a god-king, it would be her. She considered this motivation.1

If holding Skyfire was what it felt like to be a god, she could see the appeal. Using Skyfire was like waking up in the morning to watch the sunrise on a day so full of potential that anything might happen. She floated in a warm sea of tenyé—as much as she wanted, hers for the asking.

Which was good, because about five seconds into the battle, she decided that she hated Morios’s stupid metal guts.

The war dragon loved sending literal tons of shrapnel screaming through the air to impale her friends. Even for someone of her skill set—so good at metal-warping that she likely would have already been House D’Talus’s chief Red Man if women had previously been allowed to hold that position, wielding an artifact that gave her unlimited energy—stopping all that metal was difficult.

And he wasn’t the only dragon trying to kill them.

She found it curious that the dragons proved selective in their hatred. If there was a choice between pursuing Sheloran or chasing Qown—who wasn’t attacking anyone—they’d pick Qown every time. Or any of the Immortals. Janel, Sheloran, Mithros, and Irisia had an easier time, simply because they were ignored as primary targets. This was even true in cases where the dragons had a personal connection.

Where had Valathea gone?

Sheloran didn’t have time to search. She was concentrating as hard as she could on taking care of one dragon while simultaneously dodging the collateral damage caused by the others.

Just as she was having that thought, an enormous crack opened in the ground next to her. She jumped to one side to avoid the fountaining lava spilling up from it.

When the lava hit air, it turned hard and glossy like black onyx. Then the lava continued to grow, branching up in delicate crystal spires larger than the Rose Palace until they wrapped around Baelosh’s tail. He yowled as the stone spikes snapped shut around his lower body, halting his fight.

That was Thurvishar’s work. He might’ve been new to being Ompher, but he’d always been good with earth magic. This was just the deadly gilding on a skill he already possessed.²

She stepped around where Baelosh writhed and continued to focus on Morios.

Teraeth’s story

Raenora Valley

Fighting Sharanakal

Teraeth threw a dagger. It tumbled end over end and hit a huge, round, red eye smack in the center, blade first. It didn’t even give Sharanakal a mild itch, but it caught his attention.

“Hey, big brother!” Teraeth yelled. “Remember how you wanted to keep Kihrin on the island, but then you accidentally killed him? Only you didn’t kill him, he just escaped right from under your nose? Yeah, that was all me, you big dumb—whoa!”

The vané assassin threw himself to the side to avoid a burst of lava from the Old Man. Evidently, the dragon didn’t consider him a real threat; he was saving his more impressive attacks for someone worthier.

Teraeth felt insulted by that.

“Hey, magma brain, I’m talking to you!” he yelled, following it up with a blast of pure annihilation, tenyé tinted with the entropic forces of Khored. It singed off one of Sharanakal’s nostril horns, and the dragon bellowed in rage and pain. “There we go,” Teraeth said. “That got your attention.”

Which it had, so Teraeth ran.

He threw up a wall of energy to stop the flow of superheated gas and ash headed his way. He hadn’t blocked all of it, but the grit that flowed around him was no worse than the sand in a Khorveshan breeze.

He glanced to the side and saw Janel beside him, hands outstretched as she fed on the heat that bled through his shield. “Thanks for having my back,” he said.

“Your turn,” she said in response.

Teraeth noticed the dragon’s attention had been diverted; the Old Man must have assumed that his pyroclastic flow would kill Teraeth and had proceeded to focus on opening fissures at Sheloran.

“You should really stop ignoring me,” Teraeth said, drawing in as much tenyé as he could hold and then unleashing it in a twin strike. With his left hand, he gathered a stream of Morios’s flying needles and redirected it at Sharanakal’s wings, while with his right he unleashed another blast of destructive chaos at his brother’s head, hoping to injure it in the same place again.

There were advantages to having the memories of one of the most powerful emperors in Quur’s history—namely, the ability to cope with suddenly having massive amounts of power.

The chaos blast scored another strike, just above the first. Half of a nostril crisped and shattered like so much pumice hit with a sledgehammer. The daggers did better than he’d expected; he’d meant them as a feint for the other attack, but a handful of them must have caused some damage when they pierced the Old Man’s right wing. It was moving slightly slower than his left. The dragon took a deep breath. The red-hot cracks in Sharanakal’s skin glowed brighter and hotter. The rest of Morios’s metal fléchettes melted.

Janel picked Teraeth up without the slightest warning and started running, narrowly avoiding them both being crushed by a giant slab of ice. Why was there a giant slab of ice in the mountains? Oh yes, Aeyan’arric. Unfortunately, it seemed that Sharanakal’s and Aeyan’arric’s powers didn’t necessarily cancel each other out. Because the magma didn’t cool and turn to glossy black stone as it hit the ice.

Instead, it exploded.

A wall of earth stopped the magma bombs from smacking them.

“Thanks,” Teraeth said as Janel set him down. “This seems like a good tactic: I’ll play hand-slapping games with my big brother, you watch the rest of the battle and make sure we don’t get squished by whatever the hell that is.” He pointed at a giant whale with dragonfly wings the size of a mountain. Gorokai, he assumed.

“Gladly,” Janel said as they both raced around the big block of obsidian to keep Sharanakal in their sight.

“I just hope he doesn’t … Oh damn. He has,” Teraeth said. For Sharanakal stood on his haunches, his torso thrust upward into the air. With both forelegs (arms?), he made slow lifting motions, and the ground trembled beneath their feet.

“He has what?” Janel asked.

“He remembered that he can trigger volcanic eruptions. Fighting him on a mountain is less than ideal, honestly,” Teraeth said. He launched another bolt of chaos, but his brother was ready for it this time and whipped his head aside. “Fuck.”

Just then, a voice started singing. Loudly, but not straining. Magic was clearly involved in projecting the melody over the roaring of the battle and the howling of winds at this point.

The tune was oddly familiar.

Let me tell you a tale of

Four brothers strong,

Red, yellow, violet, and indigo.

To whom all the land and

Sea once did belong,

Red, yellow, violet, and indigo …

Teraeth started laughing. He didn’t recognize the voice; how could he? He’d never hard S’arric sing before. But both he and Sharanakal recognized Kihrin in the song choice all the same.

The dragon paused in his efforts to build up magma pressure and make the mountain explode. He turned his head toward the black silhouette hanging in the sky, man-shaped and from whence the music issued.

“What is happening?” Janel asked. “Why is … Oh right. Well, go on, while he’s distracted…”

Kihrin launched into the second verse, Sharanakal distracted by a new target. Teraeth rolled onto the balls of his feet and sneaked forward. He reached within twenty feet or so of the dragon, practically under his head. Teraeth gathered more tenyé; more than that previous assault, more than he thought he could handle. He kept drawing it in, from every fight, every squabble, every argument currently happening in the world. Teraeth drew it from the lightning-cracked dead trees in forests succumbing to rot, from the brush fires in eastern Doltar and every chunk of rock eroded by wind or water on the Yoran coast. He drew it from this very conflict, and in that moment, he truly understood why Morios could never be defeated by violence. He drew in and in and in until he was positively bursting at the seams; his every nerve screamed in agony, his heart labored to beat within his chest, his ears rang with the untapped potential of it all. He molded it, willed it to flow and form the shape of his desire, and then with a release that was very nearly orgasmic in its intensity, he directed it all into Sharanakal’s head from below.3

A sinuous serpent of roiling entropy flew up from where Teraeth stood and crashed into the Old Man’s lower jaw. The stonelike armor powdered and flaked into dust. Magma blood cooled, congealed, and turned to ash. The serpent continued to issue forth from Teraeth, coiling ever up and up, disintegrating the upper palate, filling the sinus cavity, smashing through the upper jaw, and finally reaching the head. Disintegrating lava flowed from the Old Man’s eyes, nose, and the gaping hole where his mouth used to be. The body twitched for a second, then solidified, turning to stone as the heart ceased to pump and the blood cooled to volcanic stone.

Sharanakal was, for the moment, dead.