It rose before him. A mountain of flesh. A cliff face of rage. It roared and slashed. It breathed gouts of flame into its attackers. It sent a score to their graves with each exhalation. A few soldiers clung to its back, hacking desperately at the thick scales.
Balur put his head down, doubled his pace. Every part of him thrummed with the certainty of his movements. Every part of him moved with absolute alignment to his purpose.
Above him the dragon jerked its head, sighted on him, inhaled.
Balur threw himself to the right, rolled. Fire engulfed the world behind him. Heat tore at him. But he was on his feet, running.
“Come on!” he roared. “Be coming on, you fat motherfucker. You small-pricked excuse for an iguana!”
There was no way for the dragon to hear him above the press of battle, above the screams of dying men, the army desperately trying to press in. But he knew: The dragon heard him.
He ran into a roar like a solid wall of sound. It was not the first wall he had smashed through. He kept running. He kept his grip upon the clock arm.
The dragon lowered its head, roared, opened its jaws to greet him.
Lette was dead.
Dragons were dead.
And Balur did not give one single fuck.
It slashed a claw at him. He rolled, jabbed with the clock hand, felt it lodge between two scales. He was hoisted off his feet by the brutal force of the dragon’s blow. His body snapped like a whip in the air, but he didn’t loosen his grip on the lodged clock hand.
He crashed to earth, was dragged with violence through mud and muck and half-baked bodies. Still he held on, feeling the blade tremble and shake, still wedged in between the toes of the massive dragon, slowly working its way deeper. The dragon raised its foot. Balur dangled from it, pistoning his body, wrenching the clock hand from side to side, trying to saw his way deeper, to the meat of this beast. It would know his name.
The dragon prepared to stomp.
With a snap the clock hand tore through the scales and bit deep into the flesh of the dragon. It squealed, jerked its foot instinctively away from the ground. Balur’s body flipped like a top. He twisted on the blade desperately, trying to wedge it deeper, but then it came free, and he was sailing, somersaulting through the air.
He landed upside down, feeling his jaw snap tight, tasting blood, feeling his spine creak and groan.
The dragon’s severed toe landed beside him.
Together, both Balur and the dragon roared.
The dragon opened its mouth and the world filled with fire.
Balur rolled backward, desperate, almost hopeless. There was nowhere to go. The churned, blood-soaked mud of the battlefield saved him. He was coated in the sodden stuff, it caked onto him as he rolled, not fully absorbing the furnace heat of the dragon’s flame, but taking the lethal edge from it. He was left half-baked in a hard shell of earth.
He burst free, snarling in pain and rage. That it would try to cook him. As if he were being nothing more than some sacrificial meal brought before it. As if he had not sawed flesh from flesh. As if for all its days it would not remember him at every step. Now there would be being no days for remembering. Now there would be no mercy. He would rip its heart out with his teeth even if he had to claw his way down its gullet to do so.
The dragon hesitated, startled at Balur’s survival, his ferocity. If not dead, he should be a shuddering mass of wretched wounds, not this whirling dervish of hate. Balur took full advantage, ran flat out, hurled himself at the dragon’s injured leg, held defensively beneath its body. The dragon jerked back, but Balur launched himself into the air, sank a hand into the exposed meat of the injury. The dragon screamed, flailed, but Balur, brimming over with hatred, clung on. Desperately he hauled himself up. He clutched the dragon’s ankle. It kicked. He still held on.
All around, men and women of the human army were starting to stare. Their attacks faltered. Everything was coming down to this absurd, outmatched battle. They stared at the severed toe in the dirt, a totem of the impossible ferocity of Balur, and the impossibility of his task. He simply could not hack the beast apart into piecemeal chunks.
Could he?
Neither combatant seemed to care. Balur had managed to find purchase, braced against the talons and ankle of the dragon, and was hacking determinedly away at its calf. Sparks flared off the dragon’s scales with each blow. The dragon scratched and clawed, and flailed, but Balur wormed his way deeper, out of range.
With a howl, the dragon shook its whole body and launched itself into the air. Balur felt the ground dropping away as an abstract thing. He was too focused on his task. He would be ending this monster. It would be knowing his name. Everyone would be knowing his name. Even the gods. Just as soon as he hacked its cursed leg off.
The creature jackknifed beneath him, and for a horrifying moment he felt his grip loosen. Freed from the need of supporting its own weight, the dragon no longer held its foot in a way that braced Balur so tightly. He clutched desperately at the limb, the blood haze of battle fighting against his deeply ingrained desire for self-preservation. He satisfied himself by biting at the wound he had been gashing in the dragon’s leg. He would gnaw his way through this tree trunk of flesh if he had to.
The world spun around him as the dragon lurched and flailed. Balur’s legs shook free from their perch, flapped in the air. He redoubled the strength of his grip. He dug his jaws deeper, felt a scale crack beneath the pressure of his teeth.
Blood burst into his mouth, hot, stinging. He gagged and spat. Fucking dragon even tasted like piss. He licked at the air whirling about his head, but all he could taste was gore. Grimacing he took another bite. He would not be forgotten.
The contorted dragon finally managed to fold itself almost in half in the sky. It scrabbled at Balur with its hind legs. He felt its claw score a deep gash down his back. His arms spasmed and for a moment he was in free fall before he caught himself, clinging desperately to the dragon’s ankle.
The battlefield whirled beneath him, a dizzying blur of faces. An arrow lanced past his ear, clattered off a scale near his arm.
“Be stopping your shooting at your prophet, you imbeciles!” he yelled into the whirling wind. He doubted it had much effect.
He strained to pull himself higher against the bucking whirling of the dragon. His fingers were slipping, arms finally tiring. He should let the clock hand go, use the hand to get a better grip, and yet if he did, then what was the point of being up here? He needed the sharpened slap of metal to ram into the dragon’s skull and scramble its brains. So he held stubbornly on, fighting to get a leg up, to gain a foothold.
Which is why, finally, he lost his grip, and was sent tumbling into the night sky.