“Captain, Otto is seeing movement – two hundred and three meters ahead,” said Heidi, who had her large goggles pulled down over her face and was using them to somehow scry what the dog-like drone was seeing. “A lot more than seven – and there… it looks like blue light?”
“Undead?” said Bloodmoon, who was lying behind a low piece of debris that she was using as a makeshift barricade half a dozen meters behind Adeena.
Adeena had, after a quick raid of the flaming armoury, retrieved and distributed two dozen aether-rifles to those who were fit enough to hold them, given them a brief lesson in how to use them –use the sights to point them at things that need killing, pull the trigger– and set them up in what cover they could. She’d also dragged the injured behind a large section of the hull, which would hopefully protect them from any stray blasts of magic.
Adeena knew that they wouldn’t be able to hold out long. The rifles would work against the undead, and deter the frog-like monsters, at least a little, but were unlikely to be able to be able to kill them. Creatures of the Unseeming were not like those of ‘real’ flesh and blood: blows that should have crushed or sliced often simply glanced off their skin, chitin, or whatever other hideous material their forms were clad in.
“Vodyanoy must have raised them.” said Adeena, sighting along her own rifle before raising her voice and addressing the rag-tag defenders. “Alright, remember, don’t look the frogs in the eyes; and you see glowing blue? You shoot. Those ghouls aren’t people anymore, their souls are trapped and bound by terrible magic – setting them free is a kindness. We just need to hold until the reinforcements get here.”
She had positioned herself the furthest forward, with Xavier and Heidi back slightly and away from her on either side. In the perhaps inevitable event that the Vodyanoy reached them, it would be up to them to engage and hold the creatures as long as they could.
Had she been at her peak then maybe, maybe she might have been able to hold the line. But even with the first stirrings of her old fire in her heart in nigh on four hundred cycles, she was still relying on skill and experience more than supernatural strength and speed.
There were many sources of mystical power on Ruvera, and more in the six planes beyond: sorcerers tapped and tamed energy with mathematics and logic and symbology; druids and shamans made bargains with the spirits of nature; priests channelled the powers of their gods through ritual and devotion; and many more sects and cults and esoteric practitioners used other, almost infinitely varied methods. Generally, however, these people fell into one of two categories. Those who drew on the power of another greater, sapient being, or those who tapped more natural, mindless forces and powers.
There was, however, another source of power: oneself. All souls had power and strength, although for mortals this was usually difficult to access and channel. Some did it through meditation, some through certain alchemical drugs, and others did it through some kind of powerful conviction, often in the form of some oath made to a God or Goddess. ‘Oathsworn’ was the term given to the latter.
The nature of the Oath changed the ways these powers manifested, but, strictly speaking, there was no reason that an Oath had to be sworn to a God. The most famous order of Oathsworn in the age of the Imperium was arguably the Dragonsworn, who pledged themselves directly to the draconic council, and were granted frightening elemental powers by the strength of their zealotry.
Back when she’d first arrived in Crowncourt, tired and confused and scared by the strangeness all around her, Adeena had also sworn an Oath: not to any God or state or organisation, but to herself. That she would never allow herself to be beholden to anyone every again, and that she would follow her conscience, not laws or edicts or commands. And she’d followed it, for hundreds upon hundreds of cycles.
But then the Razing of Chace had happened, and something had broken inside her. Snapped as she’d watch hundreds of her men and women turned to ash in a matter of minutes. Friends and confidants she had known for cycles upon cycles had been mown down by the overwhelming firepower of the Imperium. That had been the turning point. It hadn’t happened all at once, but slowly, cycle by cycle, her mystical abilities had waned until she couldn’t so much as smite a fly or predict a pea being thrown at her.
There was something deeply ironic that her power had only stirred to defend citizens of the dragon’s empire, including at least one who had taken part in the Razing.
She spotted movement in the gloom, pulling her from her ruminations. Pale blue glinted in the dark, and she pulled the aether rifle’s bolt, activating the weapon and sighting down its scope. The weapon hummed as it powered up, and a few moments later there was a click as tiny small light by her eye turned blue, letting her know the shot was ready.
Her finger brushed the trigger as she centred on one of the shambling shapes. What had once been a tall sea elf man, dressed in an Imperial Postal Service uniform, its eyes a cold, blazing azure. Not a man: a shell, a puppet animated by the foulest of magics.
She pulled the trigger, and the weapon kicked as a pulse of aetheric energy, somehow contained by dragonic genius, shot from the weapon and streaked through space, taking the dead elf in its chest. The force of the shot twisted it around, and it stumbled, but did not fall. Beside her cheek the rifle hissed and clicked, something inside it cycling and beginning to slowly build another charge.
Behind her the others opened fire, Heidi’s fire-based contraption much louder and brighter than the others, and Xavier’s beams of whisper silent starlight standing out from the rest of the barrage. Most of the shots went wide, but a few hit, and one or two of the zombies fell.
The humming of her weapon grew. It clicked again, and the light flickered back on. She fired, this time striking the ghoul she had hit before between the eyes and dropping it in a single moment.
Fire, wait for the recharge, fire. The ghouls continued to advance, and far behind them she saw the first of the Vodyanoy, distinct by their glinting, wet skin, and the horrific eldritch croaks that came from their huge mouths filled with razor sharp teeth.
There was something… off about these ones, however. Adeena had fought the Unseeming creatures before, but she’d never seen ones with metal grafted to the flesh, nor wires sticking out of their faces…
She found herself staring, and turned away. Then she frowned and looked back at the foremost of them. Their eyes. Their eyes were missing. Or rather, they’d had metal grafted over them, which were the sources of most of the wires. They clearly still had some means of sensing Adeena and the others if they had shot the ship down, but from the somewhat stilted way they were walking it seemed that they were not using their sight.
The first ghouls began to approach their defensive line, and after one last shot – this one at a Vodyanoy, which did virtually nothing except make it stagger – she swapped her rifle for her sword.
“Don’t you dare shoot me in the back!” she shouted as she rose from her cover raising her blade and for the first time in what felt like an age taking the fire in her heart and channelling it into her weapon.
She half expected it not to work. That after so long she’d have forgotten how to do it properly, or perhaps that she’d just been imagining the shift within her. But, sure enough, her sword began to shine with golden light, pushing back the darkness and making the closest of the ghouls cringe away from its brilliant aetheric radiance, snarling in pain and holding its hands up to shield its glassy blue eyes.
“That’s right, come on, come on,” said Adeena, waving her blade back and forth as she rushed forward to meet them. “It burns, doesn’t it. Don’t you want to put out the nasty light?”
The closest of the undead, what had been a large orcish woman roared around a slashed windpipe and lunged for her. Adeena swept to the side, dragging her sword up through the undead, not even waiting for the bisected corpse to fall before immediately moving to engage the left.
Blasts of energy whizzed around her as she fought, slowly backtracking in the space she had made herself with her advance. She didn’t get all of them, however, and although many were drawn toward her by their hatred of the radiant energy of her blade, many got past her. She heard Xavier, wearing the form of a bear, roar, and some kind of whirring, revving from what she assumed was the weird chain-sword-thing she’d seen at Heidi’s belt.
And then the Vodyanoy arrived.
A growl of static and a cloying, unnatural feeling was the only warning she got of the incoming spell, it was just reflex honed by long experience that meant she raised her enchanted blade in time to block the worst of it. The worst, but not all of it.
The entropic energy tore at her, and she was sent flying backward, her legs clipping a piece of the cover that the others had been using and pinwheeling the back of her head straight into the ground.
She blacked out for a moment, and when she came to the world around her was ringing with screams and shouts. A ghoul loomed above her, her own sword, no longer aglow, raised. It stabbed the weapon downward, and she barely rolled to the side in time to avoid being skewered. She kicked at its knee, breaking the joint with the force of the blow and sending it staggering.
She jumped back to her feet and ducked its wild follow up, grabbing its wrist and stepping inside its guard, redirecting its momentum and tossing it over her hip. It crashed into the ground at her feet, and she finished it with a vicious stomp to the neck.
Breathing hard she snatched her sword from the stiff grip and looked up to see that they were being overrun, and that almost all of the survivors had dropped their weapons and were routing. Lances of hyper entropic magic from the Vodyanoy were blasting through the meagre cover, burning or freezing or simply erasing parts of the survivors who were struck.
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Exactly as she’d predicted. Exactly what was always going to happen. Why hadn’t she run? She knew better than this. It had been stupid, foolish, a fit of child-like pique.
To her right a ghoul knocked Bloodmoon to the ground, scrabbling and clawing at the ageing goblins’ face. Adeena raised her hand to blast it, but nothing happened: the fire had gone back out.
Bloodmoon thrashed as the larger, human ghoul began to choke her, her green face slowly turning grey.
Futile, utterly futile…
No. No.
The reinforcements might still arrive at any time; her Oathsworn powers had returned because for the first time in a long time she was following her conscience. The others had chosen to make a stand, she had forced no one. This wasn’t her fault, and they weren’t beaten yet.
The fire flickered, and her sword erupted into golden flame as she reversed her grip and raised her blade above her head, imbuing as much of her spiritual strength into it as she could muster. She brought the blade down, tip first, into the ground. Fault lines of radiant energy raced outward, and the ghouls screamed and shied away as they were gripped with a sense of deep, abiding terror. The ghoul strangling Bloodmoon let it go and turned, scrabbling back with its fellows towards its toad-like masters.
The mutilated Vodyanoy turned towards her as one, sensing the anathematic energy pouring off her. The toad-like creatures regarded her cautiously, their malevolent, inscrutable intelligence correctly identifying her as the largest threat present: the radiant energies of her soul the polar opposite of their own eldritch essence.
Adeena released the spell and pulled up her sword, sweat pouring off her. Time was, such a ‘spell’ would have barely winded her, but like a muscle long atrophied she was still weak, diminished.
“Reform the line!” she shouted, gesturing to the survivors. “Reform the line!”
The others moved to obey her, and shots began to ring out again as the survivors stopped routing, downing several more of the ghouls. She saw a blast of lightning from her right crash into one of the Vodyanoy, courtesy of Xavier, which drew its attention, and some kind of weird… projectile sludge that she assumed was from Heidi that tied another up. The remaining five’s attention, however, remained firmly fixed on Adeena, and magic swirled around their hideous, slimy webbed hands.
She knew she wouldn’t win.
She didn’t.
She managed to blunt the worst of their barrage of spells with her first proper shield in untold cycles, and she was able to reach them at a dead sprint, but unlike the mindless ghouls she had cut through with ease, the Vodyanoy were both intelligent and resilient, even against her enchanted blade. They fanned out and surrounded her, and although she managed to cut the arm from one of them, all it took was one good blow from them to send her sword flying from her grip. Bloody and bleeding, she drew her dagger from her boot, and with a defiant scream she forewent any kind of defence and lunged at the nearest one, ramming the blade into its neck. The blade took, and she rode the monster to the ground.
But then the others were on her. Viciously sharp claws and teeth ripped through her enchanted jacket, shredding and sundering and tearing the flesh beneath.
Through a haze of agony she heard someone screaming her name, but then sound and sight and sense faded as the hurricane within her rose for the second time that hour, and had she still had a mouth she would have smiled.
A moment of infinite light, and then searing agony as golden fire exploded from within her, repairing and re-knitting and resting flesh and blood and viscera and igniting everything around her in what Xavier had once dubbed her ‘stupidest manoeuvre.’
But she doubted Vodyanoy who had been devouring her would have agreed as the radiant flames that had restored her consumed them. The peals of pure birdsong drowned out their terrible screams, and by the time that the flames retreated back into her body the five monsters were silent.
Forcing a single eye open was an act of immense will, but she managed a weak chuckle as she saw their charred, twitching forms.
Then she saw movement in the darkness, and heard the wet, slapping sounds several more toad-like feet against the rocky tunnel floor. More. There were more of them. Xavier would be able to handle another, probably, and maybe Heidi could help if she wasn’t already dead, but the hope in her heart died as the movement resolved into half-a-dozen new forms.
They skirted around her warily, unwilling to put themselves at risk of her repeating her strange feat, and despite her best efforts she couldn’t so much as move her arms under her to try and push herself up. She couldn’t even scream for Xavier to run-
Boom!
The world exploded from one moment to the next, and she found herself suddenly flying through the air, smashing painfully into a crystalline formation and rolling for a few moments before coming to a stop, sort of uncomfortably half-propped up against a rock. The position, however, did give her a perfect vantage point to see a pair of Imperial Destroyers come to a screaming stop and swivel on their axises so that they was side-on to Adeena and the Vodyanoy around her.
Great spotlights lit up, and a moment later the ships’ many cannons began to fire, carpeting the area around her in explosions that knocked and buffeted her. The Vodyanoy responded with spells, but honeycomb-like shields flashed into existence in front of warships’ hulls, harmlessly turning aside the energy.
Still, the Vodyanoy were tough, and began coordinating themselves, some summoning their own large barriers and while others continued to launch spells at the destroyers.
Until, that was, that he showed up.
And Adeena knew it was a he, because it was not the first time she had seen the monstrous creature.
Massive scales like dark iron, wagon-sized eyes like burning coals, talons like sharpened ivory battering rams, the dragon must have measured hundreds of meters in length, its sinewy, whippy body undulating this way and that, held aloft by whatever strange, innate magic let his kind defy gravity. A crown of horns adorned his immense head, and each of his teeth were individually larger than she was.
Lord Adamantius, eldest of the Steel Dragons, member of the Draconic Council, Supreme Commander of the Imperium’s armed forces, and the Butcher of Chace. The dragon whose rage had slaughtered a nation. Even the Vodyanoy realised that they were doomed, and a few of them tried to turn and run as lightning crackled in his maw, and a moment later he released the gathered energy in a beam that obliterated everything in his path, consuming the Vodyanoy to her left, and then dragging back behind her and then around, somehow avoiding killing her yet again, but making her entire body tingle and sting as it passed by.
And then it was over. The destroyers continued their search as a third, white medical ship landed and unfolded gangways from its hull. Adeena’s eyes, however, were fixed on the giant dragon, whose form rippled and shifted, compressing and contracting until in the place of a titanic dragon was a tall, pale skinned, steel-haired elf bedecked with a set of horns like his true form and dressed in long, dark black and gold robes. He wafted to the ground like a leaf on a windless day, alighting next to the Vodyanoy that had been destroyed by Adeena’s explosive resurrection. At a gesture one of them floated upward and slowly rotated before him as his burning red eyes studied it, focusing in on the burnt and charred metal pieces around its eyes.
Then he turned his attention to her, and Adeena felt herself tremble as he calmly and purposefully approached her.
“Cambion,” he said, coming to a stop in front of her. His presence was suffocating, even masquerading as an elf, and she found she could not take her burning eyes off his. “You did this? How?”
“Does it matter?” she said.
“Answer,” he said, his voice reverberating and ringing in her mind, bringing with it a powerful, overwhelming compulsion to speak.
She tried to resist the power, but she was weak and exhausted and didn’t even last a second before words came tumbling from her mouth unbidden.
“Yes,” she said. “I have the ability to self-resurrect, it is quite destructive to anything around me – especially creatures of the Unseeming.”
A secret, one she’d only ever told a handful of people – drawn from her lips within a second.
It was called ‘Dragonspeech.’ The eldritch ability that dragons had to compel those around them using nothing more than their words. It could be resisted, to a point, but such a thing was immensely difficult against a dragon as ancient and powerful as Lord Adamantius. The dragons hadn’t built their Imperium on ash and bone alone, they were supernaturally persuasive when they wanted to be, and even those who despised them could easily be brought around to their way of thinking if they weren’t vigilant.
“Interesting,” he said, turning his gaze back to the floating Vodyanoy.
Behind him there was a rush of footsteps, and a steel-haired human man dressed in heavy silver plate armour etched with a red dragon, and a blood red surcoat that fell to the back of his greaves – the armour of a Dragonsworn.
“Lord Adamantius,” he said, saluting, fist over heart. “The survivors are being seen to, and we are attempting to locate the ship’s memorybox.”
“Collect the remains of these creatures,” he said, gesturing to the floating Vodyanoy. “I suspect Althaeaixistria will want what remains of her pets back.”
Pets? Of course, they’d been experiments. That was what the fused metal had been about, the dragons had been playing with the deadly creatures.
“Yes, my Lord,” said the Dragonsworn, bowing his head. “And the Cambion?”
Lord Adamantius studied her for a moment, and Adeena’s heartsbeats grew louder in her ears as her system flooded with adrenaline and she could almost see his ancient mind turning over. There were worse things that could be done to someone than death, she had discovered that long ago. And if this dragon decided that he so desired there were few powers on Ruvera that could stop him from keeping her entrapped for as long as he liked, perhaps killing her over and over and over again to try and figure out how she worked.
He stepped forward and squatted next to her.
“Afraid, little mongrel?” he chuckled in a low voice. “Don’t be. You are fascinating, yes, but I’d prefer a tool of your… resilience watching over my daughter than assuaging my dear Althaeaixistria’s curiosity.”
Adeena looked at him with weary confusion. Daughter?
“So I will keep your secret, for now,” he said, dropping his voice. “But if you fail to protect my daughter, if any harm befalls her, then I will find you, in whatever place or whatever plane you try to hide, and I will deliver you to my mate myself.”
“I don’t… what?” managed Adeena in a confused croak. What was he even talking about?
The ancient steel dragon stood and turned, stalking away without so much as a second glance. “She is injured, is she not? Or, at least, exhausted,” he said to his aide. “Have the medics take her aboard the Mercy. Also, I have changed my mind, have these creature’s remains sent to my personal archive and placed in stasis – there is no be no record or study of them.”
“At once, my lord.”
Adeena slumped, exhaling the breath she had been holding as the Dragonsworn scurried off after his master. The dragon was letting her go, passing up on what she would have assumed had been an irresistible puzzle and instead… had threatened her and told her to protect his daughter? A daughter she had never met, and, considering his age, could probably be dozens of different dragons. And protect her from what? What possible threat could there be to a dragon in the seat of their power? One that she could apparently deal with?
“C-Captain?” came a familiar voice – Heidi. “Vice-Captain Xavier said to- to find your glasses? I have them here…”
“Ah,” said Adeena, smiling weakly at the gnome. The small woman had scrapes and cuts and bruises, but seemed remarkably uninjured. Fan-girl or not, it seemed it had not been a mistake to take her on. “Thank-you.”
“You’re- you’re…” said Hammerschmidt. “I mean, um, here.”
The small gnome carefully put the frames on her face, and Adeena shivered as she felt the glamour roll over her like a bucket of ice-water.
“Thank-you,” she said. “Report, Private Hammerschmidt.”
“Um, yes- yes, ma’am,” said the shaken gnome. “Vice-Captain Xavier’s leg was injured, but, um, not too badly – the medics were taking him aboard the hospital ship. We lost some people, but… but most of them lived…”
She cleared her throat.
“Have you- have you always been a… a half-demon…? I mean, none of the books talk about it…”
“A Cambion? Yes,” said Adeena flatly. “I’d appreciate it if you kept it to yourself.”
“Of- of course!” said Hammerschmidt.
“Now,” said Adeena, closing her eyes again. “If you’d excuse me, I think I am going to pass out.”
“Oh, um, yes, Captain,” said Hammerschmidt. “Um… sleep well?”