The dragon wasn’t the only thing I’d spent time preparing for. A confrontation with Ammun seemed inevitable, and since it would almost certainly be in his demesne, I’d invested some resources into building a few disposables to help even the odds. Unless I managed to fully rebuild my core back to stage nine, however, victory was likely out of my reach. All these trinkets would do was slow Ammun down, maybe long enough to accomplish some other goal and allow me to escape after.

Those were already loaded into my phantom space. They’d been there since the day I’d created them, on the off chance I’d somehow run into the lich anywhere else. I wasn’t expecting it, but I needed to be ready just in case. Of course, when Ammun actually had shown up, he’d stayed for a matter of seconds before retreating again, thus rendering all my preparations moot.

That would not be the case this time. In fact, this was possibly my best chance to get rid of him. We’d be meeting on a sort of neutral ground, neither of us empowered by our demesnes. If there was ever a chance to defeat him, it was now, assuming I wasn’t entirely drained of mana from fighting off his dragon. It was no coincidence he’d recalled his most powerful minion.

Fighting both at the same time was a nonstarter. Even dealing with Averin had been a challenge until I’d managed to take the dragon out of the equation for a minute. Against someone like Ammun, the dragon would be the easier half of the battle. I couldn’t do it, not as I currently was, but if I could get to them one at a time, I thought there was a chance of victory.

Unfortunately, Querit did not have good news for me. They’d mapped out the summit in as thorough detail as I could ask for, and they hadn’t found an access point. Perhaps more importantly, they hadn’t seen Ammun. We could only assume the lich was moving around inside the summit, which struck me as strange. I’d assumed he’d be guarding his ritual circles personally if he was going to be there at all, and where else could possibly be more important?

“Maybe he had to return to his tower to regain his mana,” I said as the three of us peered at the illusion.

“Maybe,” Querit said, but I could tell he wasn’t any more convinced than I was.

It was more likely that the lich was there, using some sort of magic to hide from divinations. I couldn’t afford to assume otherwise. “I’m going now,” I said.

“Do you want help?”

“No.” There was very little Querit could do in this fight. “Keep an eye on things here. Or maybe teleport somewhere else for a little while, just in case things go poorly.”

“Um,” Ashinder said.

“Oh, right,” I added. “And find somewhere to stick our new friend where he won’t get hurt and we can retrieve him later.”

I pulled myself through my demesne and appeared on my teleportation platform. As tempting as it was to stand there discussing strategy and options, I didn’t know how much time I had left. What I did know was that the longer that dragon sat there, the harder it would be to beat when I showed up. I needed to destroy it, then pummel the mountain until I cracked it open, then stop Ammun by virtue of holding him at bay long enough to break all his toys, and finally, I needed to escape with my life.

I focused on the first teleportation beacon in my chain of jumps and let the magic whisk me away.

* * *

The summit looked exactly like it had in my scrying mirror, with the only difference being that the dragon wrapping itself around its peak was looking significantly better. Most of the cracks and spurs in its bones had disappeared, and the animating necrotic net that held its bones together was a rich, vibrant indigo again.

I appeared in the sky four miles away from my target, hopefully out of range of any divination wards Ammun had set up. This was the maximum distance I could get for the spell I was planning on using, so if this didn’t work, my only remaining option would be to get in close and reenact my morning playing with the dragon.

Siege magic wasn’t really my specialty, but I could cast it as well as anyone. One part transmutation, one part conjuration, the spell dragged up huge chunks of raw earth to use as material, reshaped it into something resembling a steel caltrop the size of a house with spikes eight feet long, and launched it a considerable distance to crash into targets at high speeds.

The best part of it was that I could stockpile ammo before I ever flung the first attack, so I spent twenty minutes building shots. By the time I was done, the ground a thousand feet below me was littered with a few dozen of them. The first one rose into the air, guided by my magic, then launched itself across the miles to slam into the dragon with more force than I could have mustered yesterday thanks to my astral body working in concert with me.

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By the time the first one struck, I had six more in the air behind it. Not all of them were going to hit the dragon, not with a flight time of about thirty seconds, but those that didn’t would still bombard the mountain itself. I needed to crack that open anyway, so I didn’t consider it wasted ammunition.

The first star hit the dragon square on one of the wing joints, ripping off the limb and throwing it down the side of the mountain. It also slammed into the dragon’s spine and sent it sprawling. Only the monster’s grip on the mountain peak prevented it from being ripped free to tumble after its wing.

Then the second part of the attack took effect. The steel was actually hollow—which was the only reason I was able to make so many—and as it crumpled, it released the magic captured inside. Explosions bloomed, throwing fire and debris thousands of feet into the air. Among that debris were rocks and bone chunks.

Then the next half a dozen stars slammed into the dragon’s position, creating a deafening cacophony and completely concealing the entire peak of the mountain in billowing clouds of dust. I couldn’t tell if the dragon was still in one piece or not, but I suspected it was. That was why I loaded the next exploding steel star up for firing with the expectation that I’d be trying to hit a moving target. There were probably going to be quite a few misses in the next minute or two.

Siege magic, unfortunately, was not very good at hitting things that weren’t buildings or other stationary targets. Dragons might meet the size requirements, but they were considerably nimbler than the average castle.

When the dragon didn’t appear out of the dust cloud in the next thirty seconds, I resumed my bombardment. Unlike the spells I’d been using this morning, forming my astral body allowed me to really take advantage of concentrated, high-density mana – what was commonly referred to as heavy mana. A stage five mage could survive in areas of heavy mana. A stage seven could thrive in them.

Some spells just weren’t possible to create with normal mana. They needed more mana than their rune structures could hold, and the runes couldn’t be expanded on to provide them without the whole thing destabilizing and collapsing prior to completion of the spell. There were workarounds, usually involving multiple people collaborating to hold everything together manually—that was the whole basis for ritualized siege magic—but nothing worked quite as well as using actual heavy mana.

Exploding star was like star fall in a lot of ways, except that because I’d transmuted actual dirt and stone into metal, I could launch the spell for miles and miles before it impacted its target. The conjuration magic suspended inside would have unraveled in seconds if it hadn’t been forged of heavy mana, long before reaching the target.

There was a drawback, of course. Heavy magic was difficult to use. It sapped my willpower and devastated my mana reserves, but in some situations, it was the best option. I’d rather take a hit to my resources now and take out the dragon quickly than get pulled into a long, drawn-out fight that ended with me dead or fleeing after Ammun joined in.

With that in mind, I started launching more of the stars. If the dragon had moved, it was crawling down the side of the mountain, and I already had scrying spells circling the whole thing. I didn’t see it. With luck, I’d crippled it and left it unable to flee or advance to attack. If not, well, it would take a lot of effort to blow up the side of a mountain.

Star after star landed, so many that my shield ward activated briefly to protect me from the sound of it. At some point, I must have blown up enough layers of stone that I hit the interior wards. That explosion was truly spectacular, cutting through the noise and rising dust to give me my first glimpse of a clear sky beyond the strike zone as a rolling wave of mana expanded outward from the impact.

It also showed me what was left of the dragon. A few scattered bones dotted the mountainside, all of them broken and giving little indication of which part they’d originally been. I briefly spotted a chunk of what I recognized as the dragon’s skull, and a bit of horn wedged into a ravine partway down the side of the mountain, but then a fresh cloud of rising dust obscured it again.

I let out a deep sigh and regarded my final three exploding stars. It might be better to save them to throw at Ammun, but they’d probably be little better than a distraction. Unlike crippled, wingless, skeletal dragons, he could very easily get himself out of the way. The better use of these things was to blow up more of the mountain, hopefully granting me a quick way in and destroying some important infrastructure at the same time.

When the last one was in the air, I spun up a few divinations to investigate the damage. I wasn’t quite through the stone yet, but it looked like I’d broken the wards in that area and they were having a hard time repairing themselves. I doubted I’d drained the ward stone for the mountain, or even that there was only a single one of them, but as long as I moved in right behind the explosions, I could get inside before the wards sealed things back up.

I gave it thirty seconds after the last star exploded to let debris finish falling, then flew directly in. My magic helped me see where I was going once I was blind inside the dust cloud and I easily slipped through the breach. Based on the display Querit had crafted for me, I was somewhere in the southeast corner of the complex, probably bare minutes away from the main silo of ritual chambers. Ammun would show up soon to stop me, or so I assumed.

Considering the bombardment of his mountain, he had to know I was here. His dragon was gone, leaving only himself to defend the weapon. This wasn’t his demesne, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t loaded with wards and traps to give him an advantage anyway.

Except, when I started looking around, I didn’t find anything like that. The outer wards were still trying to repair themselves, but the inner corridors had nothing more than basic light spells threaded through them. I quickly found the portal frame that the diviners had been using, only to see that it had been disconnected from the summit’s mana supply.

Everything was quiet. Nobody was around. The place appeared to be abandoned. There were no traps; Ammun didn’t pop out from behind a corner with death beams shooting from his hands. There was just… nothing.

What the hell was going on here?