The remnants of the flock bore down on me as one, attacking with wild abandon and scant care for their own protection. I could still feel the thrum of the dark magic coursing through them, a discordant vibration at the edge of my hearing.
I managed to sweep my wings out behind me to protect the soft flight membranes, but then they were upon me, squirming and climbing and biting in a frenzied melee. They shrieked piteously all the while that their claws and teeth were ripping and biting into me, heedless of the blood that streamed from their snouts and eyes.
I snapped at any wyvern flesh that came within reach of my mouth, my teeth stabbing through their supple hides and flesh, but they kept fighting even when they should have been dead twice over. A pair found the softer skin under my arms and bit deep, shaking and spinning like swamp lizards taking a gazelle, trying to tear the wounds wide enough to thrust their heads through. I roared in pain and clamped my arm down, holding them steady long enough to bite down on the back of their necks, but even then I had to all but sever their heads before their thrashing ceased.
This took time though, time enough for the others to try to nip under my belly and bite at my groin. With one arm incapacitated by the two half-decapitated creatures that still hung from my ripped flesh, I stumbled backwards then rose up. Enticed by my apparent weakness, the remaining wyverns darted forward, jostling each other as they raced for the softer flesh that was suddenly exposed. I wasted no time and belched a jet of fire bile across them as they grouped together. It ignited when they were mere yards from me, the flash of its detonation scalding even me and robbing them of their senses entirely. Their shrieking ended as they opened their mouths to draw in breath and swallowed the superheated air, cooking their lungs. Magically-induced frenzy or not, it was a mortal wound. They died before they could even turn in my direction again.
I felt the dark magic bleed from them, and hoped that whoever was behind the spell had felt their pain. I pried the remains from under my arm and reluctantly drew on my sorcery to heal the wound, just enough to stop the bleeding and seal the skin. The remaining scratches and bites were largely superficial by my reckoning, and were already scabbing over.
I examined one of the wyverns whose neck I had broken, wrinkling my snout at the residual stink of dark magic that lingered in its flesh. Like the others, it was fine boned and lean to the point of being gaunt, and even in death its features looked feral. Its lipless jaw was disproportionately heavy, and its teeth were close enough together that at first glance it looked to have a beak. I closed its jaw, and the teeth aligned perfectly, just touching. It was no wonder the bites had hurt as much as they did, and I was grateful that I had taken the time to harden my scales, even if they were nowhere near as strong as they had once been. If they’d fallen on me when my skin was still soft and pliable they would have torn pieces off me like a swarm of razor-fish flensing a whale.
I had only seen such perfect teeth on one other creature, and my stomach clenched painfully as that thought sunk in. These were Anakhara’s offspring. She had once thought of them as an abomination, and now she was spawning her own. I stared into the distance, to where the citadel waited, wreathed in its unnatural shadow and, for the first time, the thought of being reunited with her filled me with dread rather than joy.
The smell of the dead wyverns was foul and the touch of their cooling flesh even more so now that I knew their provenance. I threw their bodies aside and scrubbed their blood from my hide with handfuls of sand. As soon as my wounds were knitted together I took to the air once more, snorting the last of their stench from my nostrils.
I didn’t have far left to fly, but the sight that greeted me as I burst through the final ring of mist that surrounded his fortress stole the very breath from my lungs. His castle, once a tall and delicate looking creation of pale towers and hanging gardens, now hung in the air over a huge pit in the heart of the valley, the rock that clung to the underside giving it the appearance of a great, rotten tooth.
I could feel the pull of the dark magic that radiated from it intensify as the mist fell away from me, its touch more caustic than anything Navar had ever brought to bear upon me. I retreated into the mist and felt its power lessen, like the touch of the sun being lost behind a thick cloud. I wasn’t about to go any closer until I had a better sense of what I was dealing with, and so banked in a long turn around the citadel, keeping within the mists as I noted the decrepit state of its physical defences. The battlements that I remembered as being proud and lined with rows of chanting wizards were now fallen into ruin, with a bare handful of towers marking the pitted remnants of the walls. Slowly and carefully I extended my metaphysical senses, probing the magic that pulsed through the air. I fanned my wings out and hovered as I trickle-fed some of my sorcery into my sight, turning what I had felt via my sensory pits into visible images.
The citadel hung there, pulsing like the heart of some terrible god, but instead of arteries and blood, it throbbed with a darkness that swallowed whatever light that it touched. Shadowy tendrils laced the sky around it, weaving and writhing like headless snakes. I looked upon the monstrosity and knew then why I could not feel the Songlines in this place; they had been entirely corrupted, the power and life that they carried now drawn directly into the citadel, where some terrible spell of unspeakable magnitude siphoned the life from them and sent out something poisoned in return. This was what I had feared Navar would attempt at the nodes at Aknak and Falkenburg, but advanced to a far greater scale than I had ever dared to imagine.
It was a chilling and sobering sight, and the anger and hate that I had worn so proudly now seemed meagre and pathetic. To go against such might was beyond folly. Talgoth had nearly defeated me when he’d had but a fraction of the power that now flexed and throbbed in the skies before me, so what chance did I have now, when he commanded a power that could corrupt reality on this scale and harness the power of death itself? I relied on the Songlines for my strength, and he had stripped them away, so how could the strength they gave me prevail? The power that hung in the sky before me had not even been purposefully gathered and was simply the reflection of spells that he had already cast.
If I went against such might in open battle it would take a bare fraction of it to turn me to ash. It would be a grand, but brief and utterly hopeless gesture. It wasn’t despair that made me admit this, but logic. To attack him with tooth and claw was to die, and given his command over death, that was the least of the evils that would be done to me.
Even as I watched, the clouds bubbled and twisted, forming themselves into a face. I didn’t recognise it, but I knew the voice that rolled from it. It had haunted my memories and dreams for half a millennium. Tiberius Talgoth.
‘I can feel your fear, lizard.’ His voice was as monstrous as his lair, and his mocking laughter boomed through the skies like thunder and sent sheets of rocks tumbling down the mountains around me. Twisting chains of dark magic were spreading out from the citadel, branching off again and again, becoming a net as wide as the sky and as black as the emptiness between the stars.
‘I know your true name, Stratus. You cannot defeat me.’
I felt a stab of real fear as he pronounced my name in perfect draconic. And while some part of me had expected it, the sense of betrayal that followed the fear was so powerful and intimate that I nearly fell from the sky there and then. Only Anakhara had known how to truly say my name, and she had given this most intimate of our secrets to him. Despair fought with grief for the opportunity to tear my hearts from me.
I could feel my name reverberating in the dark net that was reaching for me, woven into every unnatural fibre of it, binding me to commands that I would not be able to defy, not when they were attuned to the very core of my existence. Like the staff of my skin that Navar had wielded, it would defy my every defence, turning whatever sorcery I pitched at it back against me, but this time there would be no chance to turn the tables on him. With no viable defences, flying into the source of his power was madness, and worse, stupid.
I pushed back against the sorrow and fear that he was drawing from me like a glutton savouring his next meal. I turned my attention inward, gathering my most precious thoughts, feelings and most powerful memories and locking them away deep inside a corner of my mind, burying it deep, beneath countless layers of meaningless chatter and bodily functions until they were entirely gone from my waking mind. That done, I gritted my teeth and braced for what was to come as the net closed in around me. I could have fled, but to where? Stopping Navar would have slowed the spread of Talgoth’s dominion, but within the walls of that fortress there could be a thousand more like him waiting to do their dark master’s bidding.
A terrible coldness preceded the net, a freezing air that had no place amongst the living. Like the blood-fiends of old, its touch quickly leached the life and vitality from my flesh. I could feel it wriggling its way into me, every tendril of it resonating with my name, a thousand insidious voices commanding me to surrender, to obey, to fall, to succumb. Neither my wards nor my sorcery offered any hope of resistance, and through it I felt an echo of Talgoth’s triumph as it closed around me, trapping me more completely than his original cage of iron and steel ever had.
Then it began to contract, the commands digging into me like barbed hooks as it drew me towards the pulsing depths of the citadel and whatever loathsome fate awaited me.