Fire Root, Balur thought in one of his increasingly rare lucid moments, is being the absolute shit. He had heard certain whores discussing the improvements certain herbs and powders could bring to their area of expertise. But, honestly, they were going to have to try mass murder while high on this stuff. This was being absolutely fucking great.
“Whee!” he cried, spinning in a circle, war hammer held out at full stretch, feeling his shoulders take the weight, his heels spinning on the sandy floor, watching the bodies flying through the air. Their blood painted the air in spiraling arcs, glistening like streams of rubies. He could smell it, like a shooting star exploding in the back of his throat.
He hadn’t expected to find guards here. He was unsure what he had expected now. But it hadn’t been them. Not that he was sad about it. Rather, when he had come running out of the woods below the cave and seen them streaming out of the castle gates, he had let out a howl of joy. At his back, the villagers had echoed the sound.
The guards had turned, seen them, charged. The two forces had crashed into each other like newlyweds.
Balur reached out, grabbed someone nearby, bit their face off, and laughed giddily as blood ran down his chin.
This was what he lived for. This moment. This surrender. To say farewell to thought, to morals, to civility. To live beyond the boundaries of culture, and societal norms. This was life at its most pure, its most bestial. This was life without pretenses. All masks removed. Life reduced to meat, and bone, and fury.
He pirouetted, brought his hammer up, clean through the body of… someone. Factions were meaningless at this point in the fight. The head of the hammer glistened above the fray, dripped blood. He brought it down and listened to the meaty crack of impact.
Someone stabbed him. He felt the blade find a spot where his scales met, its tip slide inside him, puncturing muscle. He felt the pain, bright and hot. He laughed again, grabbed the sword blade, and then its owner. The sword wielder’s neck snapped in Balur’s fist.
He descended into a bloody haze. The world was red and wet for a while. When he emerged he was, for a moment, disoriented. He pummeled a man in the face, trying to get his bearings.
People were screaming, running, pushing to get past him. Villagers and guards alike. “Dragon!” they screamed. “Dragon! Mattrax wakes!”
And then Balur saw it, bright and beautiful, blossoming in the back of the cave. Great gouts of fire that sparkled yellow and red in his dilated pupils.
The dragon. That was why he had come here. To show the world that he could defeat a dragon. To make the dragon know his name even as he took its life.
Some small, sobering part of Balur saw that fire and questioned if, just this once, wisdom shouldn’t be prevailing over bravado. A larger, drunker part of his mind shouted at that part to be fucking off. He was totally knowing what he was doing. Why was the other voice always nagging at him with its rational good sense? He was being a warrior, gods’ hex upon it. He was having to do certain things because they were being there. His actions were not having to make sense.
He set his shoulder and charged into the depths of the cave, toward heat, fire, rage, and glory. Bodies bounced off him, scrambling to get away. All around him screams rose.
“The dragon!”
“The dragon!”
“It’s going to kill us all!”
No, thought Balur with a drunken grin. I am.
He rounded the bend in the cave, skidded to a halt.
Quirk stood there.
No, floated there.
The thaumatobiologist’s feet were a clear foot off the floor. Her robes billowed around her, rippling through the heat haze. She held her arms out, palms raised.
And she was beautiful.
Ribbons of fire danced from her hands. They wove together in complex patterns of slaughter. A hapless guard was caught in a stream of liquid flame. He didn’t even have a chance to scream. His blackened body skittered and danced. The dead lay all around her.
She didn’t say anything, didn’t fix her gaze on anyone. She just wove her ribbons of fire back and forth in front of her. Where they struck the floor, explosions bloomed, spattering the bodies with glowing shrapnel.
I, thought Balur, taking the scene in at a glance, would be totally hitting that. Then his eye fell on the dragon beyond her.
Mattrax lay slumped over a vast hoard of gold and jewels, wings splayed in a sloppy half-collapsed pile. Drool was spilling from one corner of his mouth in a thick, ropy stream.
Momentarily, Balur lost the power of speech. All he could utter was a single, guttural roar of hate. Rage. Bloodlust. Desire. He wanted that dragon. He wanted its blood on his skin. Its bone shards stuck into his cheeks.
Waves of rage carried him forward, a misty cloud of hallucinogenic fury. He ducked and darted through Quirk’s tapestry of fiery destruction. Mattrax loomed in his vision, the vast face eclipsing everything else. The dragon was his world. Its death at his hands was as inevitable as the turning of the sun in the heavens. His hammer was above his head. His muscles burned with power, with the churning potential of death.
He brought the hammer down, felt the impact run up his arm, felt the hammer head glance off the scales. He stepped back, slipping in the piles of coin that mired his feet.
For a moment he thought he had achieved nothing. That this was all just a paltry lie, some drug-addled fantasy he had concocted to make himself feel better about the ignominy of his earlier defeat.
But then he saw it. The thin hairline crack that ran down the scale he had struck, the clear fluid seeping out. Mattrax’s hide was not impenetrable. The dragon could be defeated. All that was needed was time.
Balur brought his war hammer down again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again.