Cupricon Hills
Crucible of Life, Aqshy
Tivrain tensed to dive sideways. Without warning, a bolt buried itself in the carnosaur’s right eye. The great beast’s head swung back and forth, an infuriated roar blasting from its open jaws. An instant later, Athelys Grimscar’s aetherwing, Myrmourn, swooped in screaming, raking its sigmarite-hard talons over the predator’s pebbled, leathery skin. As the carnosaur’s head rose up, drawn by the raptor’s vertical climb, Tivrain leapt out of the creature’s path.
Putting her back to a fat, twisted tree trunk, she assessed the situation.
Heldymion, Ibon, Pharena and Tarros were caught in the quick-bog. On the far side of the bog, Ordys struggled to yank a solid length of creeper vine from the nearest tree. But to Tivrain’s horror, the vines were actively defying Ordys’ attempts to slice and splice them, whipping outward like the tendrils of some landlocked kraken.
Barastus and Saran shouted and waved their weapons, trying to herd the bog-bound behemoth forward so that its erratic movements would no longer threaten the half-sunken members of their party.
Where was Rysain? Tivrain searched the wide clearing and the gold-yellow skies above, but there was no sign of their winged Knight-Azyros.
And Ansonnir – there was no sign of him. He still had not come through the gate!
The two monsters now brawling in their midst had to be chased away, and quickly, else they were likely to lose several of their number before their mission was even under way.
Tivrain levelled her Incantor’s staff and unleashed a crackling skein of lightning into the aft end of the behemoth stuck in the bog. The monster trumpeted and suddenly, violently managed to wrench itself free. The moment its rear legs felt solid ground beneath them, the beast lowered its horned head and charged the carnosaur.
The carnosaur, realising it had lost its advantage, spun, tail whipping round with deadly force, and lurched away, the behemoth behind it.
Tivrain looked to the bog. Pharena had managed to make the solid bank and was now trying to yank the others free, using Heldymion’s grandhammer as an extension of her arm.
Tivrain was about to pick out a path around the bog’s edge when, like a bolt from a storm cloud, a form in shining black armour dived swift and true out of the sky.
Rysain, wings spread wide, slowed his descent at the last moment and alighted gently on the moist loam of the jungle. He looked to his companions in the bog.
‘I leave you lot for the briefest of moments,’ he said with a smirk, ‘and look at the trouble I find you in.’
Behind Tivrain, the realmgate shuddered and shimmered. Before she had even turned half around, a large, armoured form came crashing through, hit the stones comprising the gate’s threshold and thumped down over the steps beneath it to the jungle floor.
‘Ansonnir!’
Tivrain dashed to the fallen Knight-Relictor’s side.
The mage-priest lay in a heap, his armour smoking as though it had just passed through the fires of an active volcano. He shook and twitched. When Tivrain slid to the ground at Ansonnir’s side, he would not look up at her, and she was forced to grab a handful of his blond hair and raise his face towards hers.
His eyes had rolled far back in their sockets, showing only whites. He was covered in small, ragged cuts, like the wounds dealt by some daemon’s foul talons. Ansonnir’s tabard and trailing crimson cloak were also torn to shreds.
‘Knight-Relictor!’ Tivrain cried, shaking him, trying to rouse him from the fugue he seemed to be lost in. ‘Ansonnir, speak to me!’
Suddenly, the Knight-Relictor snapped out of it. His green eyes settled upon Tivrain, focused, but he continued to shake – more in shock than truly suffering a seizure any longer.
‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘You said you’d be right behind me!’
‘It attacked again,’ Ansonnir said. ‘I had no choice but to engage it.’
Tivrain studied his bloodied face and ruined armour.
‘You’re all right,’ she said, more for her own edification than his. ‘You’re here now. I see no mortal wounds upon you.’
Ansonnir drew a deep breath. He looked as shaken as Tivrain had ever seen him.
‘I barely escaped its clutches,’ he intoned.
‘We had a narrow escape of our own,’ Barastus said, rounding the bog towards them. He indicated their friends, now extricated from the bog but covered in its effluvium.
Ordys followed close behind Barastus, dead vines clinging to her.
‘I live,’ she said mordantly. ‘Thank you for asking.’
‘We made it, then?’ Tivrain asked no one in particular. ‘This is Aqshy?’
‘Aqshy indeed,’ Rysain said, surveying the clearing around them and his filthy comrades. He pointed. ‘Anvilgard lies that way. A day’s hard march, maybe two or three if the jungle doesn’t cooperate.’
Tivrain nodded. She assumed that the jungle, true to its treacherous nature, would not cooperate.
‘You say the Lord of Change challenged you on your passage through?’ Ibon asked Ansonnir.
The Knight-Relictor nodded. ‘I stepped into the realmgate only moments after Tivrain,’ he said, ‘but the daemon waylaid me in the interim. Perhaps it cannot come through, but it can lie in wait for any who attempt a crossing.’
‘I’d say that’s good news, then,’ Ibon muttered darkly.
Pharena studied the grizzled Liberator-Prime. ‘How is that good news?’
Ibon shrugged slightly. ‘Nobody’s likely to follow, are they?’
Hunter-Prime Athelys Grimscar was the best field surgeon among them, and so she examined them and either dressed their wounds or deemed them negligible. Tivrain, meanwhile, affected a healing spell upon Ansonnir that closed his bleeding cuts, burned out potential infection and restored his vitality. By the time the group was fully recovered and squared away, night was falling, the yellow skies subsiding to fiery orange and crimson.
Tivrain, Ansonnir, Ordys and Ibon held a small council apart from the others, speaking in low tones.
‘I was seen,’ Ansonnir said. ‘When I entered the realmgate.’
‘That compounds the need for haste,’ Ordys said gravely.
‘Aye, that,’ Ibon grumbled. ‘We must assume we shall be followed, daemon or no.’
‘Which means,’ Tivrain said, ‘we need to move – swift and hard, few stops, covering as much ground as possible.’
‘We’re ready when you are,’ Barastus said. He’d been standing nearby, guarding the clearing, but now approached their little conclave with his enormous lightning hammer balanced on one shoulder. ‘Saran and I would welcome a hard march to end all this waiting and watching.’
Saran gave an abrupt grunt of agreement.
Tivrain rose to her feet and addressed them all.
‘We very nearly lost some of our number the moment we passed through that realmgate. Ansonnir himself almost did not make it through. Not one of us fears death – not in the ways that mortals might – but dying here, now, before we’ve reached the end of our journey, does not simply endanger this party, it endangers our mission. I’ll need each and every one of you if we are to have any hope of succeeding in this, and we shall need every advantage that stealth can provide us if we hope to make it to our destination and breach the city to free our companions.’
‘You told us of your way into the city,’ Barastus said, ‘but how do we know which way we’re going once we’re inside? Where our comrades are imprisoned?’
‘That will have to wait until we are closer to the city,’ Tivrain admitted. ‘My thought was that we would try to formalise and strengthen the psychic link between Pyrath Redflame and me. If I can learn where they are being held, that will act as a sort of lodestone to guide us through the Undertunnels.’
‘But none of it matters,’ Vornus interrupted, ‘if we die en route.’
Tivrain nodded. ‘Just so. But we’ve come here to set our comrades free. We’ve risked everything to do that one thing. Fulfilling that one duty, that one promise that we’ve made, may force us to do things that subvert our instincts and impugn our honour.’
‘We must be crafty,’ Ibon said.
‘We must be subtle,’ Athelys Grimscar said.
‘We must be mad,’ Barastus muttered, sighing.
Within minutes, they were under way.