Inalia
Running through the rain, the wind and the mud is a far more exhausting endeavour than Inalia first imagined as she set off home. Though she has always been quite light on her feet, holding her hood down to her head to stop it from blowing off and exposing her to the downpour means she can’t really swing her arms, and the waterlogged ground sucks at her boots and seems desperate to drag her down.
Combined with the ordeal of trying to awaken her magic she doesn’t have the energy nor the stomach to run all the way back home, even though it means she’ll be caught out in the storm even longer. It is a miserable state of affairs that makes her just want to lie down and hope it all passes her by, but she at least realises that wouldn’t solve anything even if it is tempting.
So she slows down to a fast walk, steeling herself for the rest of the journey back. She can’t even think how she’d have managed if Vindaruil hadn’t dried her off before leaving her, the thought of enduring an hour or so long trek in wet undergarments is a frightful one.
She hopes he’s going to be ok, the suddenness of his departure does strike her as odd, and she doesn’t think he’d just abandon her like that without good reason. Then again, he didn’t seem too worried so maybe she shouldn’t be either.
At that thought, just as she skids down a sharp incline, nearly losing her balance and faceplanting straight into a muddy puddle, she feels that strange tingling and a sudden urge to turn around.
Not because she believes Vindaruil has turned around and caught up, or really any other reason she can think of. It is sort of like that same urge she oftentimes gets to check under her bed and in her wardrobes at night before going to sleep, except she can tell this time that it isn’t just her own unhelpful imagination conjuring up phantoms but more like someone tapping her on the shoulder and pointing it out.
She doesn’t question it for even a single moment, for why should she? Looking over her shoulder her gaze is met by a bedraggled silhouette of a man she thinks she might recognise looming at the top of the incline.
Inalia doesn’t need to wonder why a stranger is standing behind her in the middle of a thunderstorm, or try to piece together where she knows him from, because her eyes are drawn to the glinting dagger in his hand. Growing up in Athaca she learnt early on that when you see someone with a weapon you don’t know you don’t stop to ask questions, you just run.
Her less fortunate friends who grew up on the streets had plenty of horror stories to tell about those who didn’t.
And so she does, with a sharp squeal of terror at the shock she turns and bolts through the rain, hearing a string of curses muttered in her wake. All of a sudden, with her heartbeat racing in her ears and her breaths coming shallow and fast, she doesn’t feel quite so tired anymore.
With fresh energy borne by panic she shoots off through the trees, no longer bothering to hold up her hood as stinging rain pelts her face and hair.
She risks a glance backwards to find that her pursuer, though seemingly mired by the mud and visibly struggling to lift his feet with any pace where she comparatively skips through it, is keeping up if only by the extra length in his legs and the sheer grit visible on his dirt-speckled face.
More than even the knife, that look scares her. It is not the look of some crazed, manic lunatic caught up in some rage or delusion, it is a look of icy determination focused on only a single thing; her.
It is with a sort of cognitive dissonance that she finally places the man as the messenger with the wrong address from yesterday. Though his features are the same, she cannot reconcile that the polite, if boring and forgettable, man she met so briefly and this terrifyingly grim figure now chasing her are one and the same.
She cannot fathom how or why this is happening, though she has a single guess. But Inalia, like most children, is used to not knowing the hows and whys of the things that go on around her, and she has far more important things to worry about at that moment.
Namely, the knife raised in his hand rearing back like he’s throwing a ball and the sudden out-of-body itchy feeling she gets from it.
Struck momentarily dumb by the sight, she stumbles in her stride. And though her moment of distraction almost buys her a face full of mud, it also very likely saves her life as she feels that itchiness shoot forward and then sees the knife, twirling end over end, pass just overhead.
Then, rather than continuing on and falling into the mud as it should, it stops momentarily mid-air, still spinning but frozen in place. Inalia has barely an instant to let out a choked scream and duck back down before it whizzes back the way it came.
Not daring to look back a second time, she recovers from her stumble with no more cost than a pair of muddied palms and a splash of filth across the front of her coat and continues her desperate flight.
There are no taunts or japes from her pursuer like those in the stories or as her friends would do playing tag on the playground, no monologue or explanation as to who he is or why he is doing this. He just tried to kill her, that at least she knows for certain, and he did so without a single word or warning.
It is not exhilarating or exciting as she might have thought from the tales of heroes and heroines being pursued by their foes, it is absolutely, bone-shakingly terrifying and even if she wanted to she couldn’t think of a single thing to say or do other than frantically trying to scramble back home.
She runs ahead, and she knows without any doubt that the man is hot on her heels, knife in hand. She at least maintains the presence of mind, despite her wild terror, to keep a metaphorical eye on the itch she knows to be the knife, or at least whatever magic propels it, for whenever it is thrown again.
Which is not even a minute later in their chase. She can at least tell, before the throw, that the man hasn’t managed to close the distance to any significant extent. But she has a split-second to realise that he isn’t going to miss a second time and fully commits to a dive behind the closest tree.
Inalia’s scream of pain echoes out even over the constant din of the downpour as she feels a lance of red-hot pain score across her lower leg just as she crashes down into the cold mud and the wind is knocked out of her.
Tentatively, she looks down to see a tear in her trousers and a blooming of red against her frightfully pale skin, quickly being washed away and revealing a cut across the muscle below her left knee. Never having really been cut before, she can hardly tell if it's deep or not, but beyond the initial sharp pain anything that might have followed is drowned out beneath the roar of her heart in her ears and the fire coursing through her blood.
Scrambling against the mud that tries to pull her down Inalia tries to push herself to her feet, not having time to worry whether or not her leg can hold her weight before she is hopping away and she finds it can.
Stepping out from behind the tree, however, she realises how much time she spent on the ground that was time not spent running, and it is just in time for her to catch the vaguely human-sized brown mass charging out from behind the bark in the corner of her eye.
Inalia feels a weight strike her midsection like a kick from a horse, immediately driving all the breath from her body and throwing her down into the mud with force enough that her head slams back into the soggy ground and her vision suddenly goes black.
----------------------------------------
You
It is with some surprise that you note the dragon’s thunderous wingbeats, audible even over the furious storm, come to a stop rather than tearing a path straight to you, and you allow yourself to slow back to a walk. With a frown on your face, you consider that this particular beast has hardly been a shining stereotype of her kind thus far and she seems on track to continue that trend. It is enough to give you pause, for you recall the pride her kind had taken in their perceived natural superiority in all things, which despite their abilities and intelligence would lead them to conclude their baser instincts were a thing to be prized and held in glory rather than overcome. Even Ngrakken had not strayed from that doctrine, and it had resulted in his end.
Perhaps this will prove an interesting challenge after all.
You hold out an arm as a short while later your black-feathered minions fly back through the storm, only one of them, the elder, actually manages to stick the landing whilst the other misses and plummets into the mud at your feet.
The thunderstorm does much to obscure your more mundane senses from such a distance, enough that their input is unfortunately actually quite valuable.
Ignoring the bird flailing on the ground trying to right itself, you turn an unimpressed look to the one on your arm.
“Speak,” you command, and so does Fenrick stutter out the vaguest and least helpful scouting report you have ever heard. Almost no specifics, far too many ‘I think’s and ‘maybe’s, but in the end at least it is still useable intel that confirms many of your suspicious about this odd dragon you are facing.
A dragon, using a weapon. How peculiar. How fascinating.
“Remind me to teach you how to give a proper report,” you mutter to Fenrick, though he is fortunate you are distracted with thoughts of what lies ahead instead of his and his brother’s incompetence. “Leave.”
The birds don’t need to be told twice, hopping away into the cover of a tree rather than taking flight once more and hiding from the rain.
You drop the human disguise with a contemptuous shrug as you consider how best to approach. Whatever trap the dragon intends to spring won’t work, not if you don’t let it. You could bring the heavens crashing down upon whatever scheme she’s cooking and lay it all to waste. Perhaps she might even survive, but on its own a juvenile dragon is not much of a challenge.
Of course, your previous scuffle with this particular specimen is not indicative of the fight to come. In such a humanoid form she likely had a much easier time with working the arcane, but it left her vulnerable and devoid of her magic-resistant scales that would have interfered with such workings. An odd thing for a dragon to do, though not entirely unprecedented. Her scales would be stronger than steel and cover her from head to tail, like a suit of armour that little can pierce, and there is no doubt that it is one she will be wearing in the battle to come.
But steel can be sundered, and resistance is not immunity, not like what Arma possesses. The hardest part about fighting any dragon, at least for you, is catching it. If she takes flight and attempts to flee it will be tricky to stop her, and once she has some distance catching up will be nearly impossible.
The dragons of your age, however, were prone to taunts and insults. Even if they feared for their life, few would choose to turn tail when their pride was questioned. Of course, the more intelligent would choose to live to enact their vengeance another day, and this current foe of yours strikes you as the type.
And a foe plotting in the shadows is a far more dangerous one than on the battlefield. Ever it is the unseen threat that is the greatest, so you do not intend on allowing the dragon to flee. Not that you really worry about such a thing biting you in the bottom later down the line, you are beyond anything this dragon could do even in a thousand years of scheming, but it is the principle of the thing.
You already made an exception once, the first time you let her live for the entertainment she might provide upon maturing into a more formidable opponent, but twice is stretching your sensibilities too far.
So no, she will not escape this time, and if to ensure that you have to spring her trap then so be it. Whatever it is, it will not be enough, for the same reason a lion does not fear a mousetrap.
And, if you are honest with yourself, the caution and paranoia that has kept you alive for so very long has grown dull and stale. Boring. You got a taste of how life used to feel, how vivid and alive everything was, in your earlier dreams and it has made reality feel so much more grey by comparison.
Before the last few days, perhaps, you would have condemned such thoughts as the height of foolishness. Recklessness for its own sake, a truly contemptible state of being.
But right now, right here, you can’t muster the energy to truly care.
Let this dragon take her best shot, and if by some miracle it lands… well.
Would that really be so bad?
You pointedly allow that question to go unanswered in your mind and quickly move on, setting off at a walk once more towards your awaiting foe, enjoying the feeling of your once again bare feet against the cold mud.
As you do, you allow your mace to slip out from the dimensional pocket and fall down from your sleeve, catching its haft in a manoeuvre practised a million times before.
Bringing its head up to your eyes you behold the weapon. Forged from black mithril oh so long ago by your own hand, totally covered in microscopic scrawl invoking arcane powers far beyond the ken of most. It would sap the life force of any who tasted its bite and transfer it to you, sustaining you even in the most prolonged of battles. With some force, the impossibly sharp edges of its teeth would slice through dragon scale like regular flesh without even the aid of its magic, and though the scales would crack and it would pierce into the flesh beneath against the sheer size of a dragon it would physically be akin to a mere pinprick. But a single cut, a lone drop of blood, is all it needed to sap the strength of even the most monstrous of beings, and the resistance of a dragon’s scales would be of no use to it there.
Not only that, but it could also amplify the already impressive force you impart with your swings a hundredfold if you desired it, which truly would crush the bones of even an adult dragon, turning organs into mush.
Truly, it is a weapon that could topple entire armies and still hunger for more, and indeed it did. After tasting oceans of blood, even against your prodigious efforts it has developed a rudimentary intelligence. You once heard a human say that ‘life finds a way’, and though you do not think they meant it quite in this fashion it does amuse you how truly it rings for those artefacts of yours that you really did try to keep from achieving sentience.
Held in your palm, it welcomes the familiar presence of its master and inquires about the next slaughter at hand. Albeit not quite so politely. You do not engage with it, not wanting to foster the juvenile mind any more than you already have, but as you ignore it you feel it try to reach into your own mind and stir up feelings of bloodlust and rage.
Ruthlessly, you crush its attempt and deliver a kick of pure mental anguish back at it in retaliation. You hear its screams in your mind and grit your teeth in frustration.
This is exactly why you hate sentient creations. They are tools, nothing more, and tools should embody only the mind of their wielders, not their own.
Reaching out to it, you dismantle the intelligence piece by piece, tearing it asunder violently like a rabid dog does a rat. It will be back, it always comes back, seemingly more tenacious and stubborn and somehow faster every time. But the blissful silence is worth the effort nonetheless. You only didn’t do it last time because it proved remarkably quiet when tasting the blood of a dragon after so long.
But soon it shall again, even if it won’t be able to appreciate it this time. You pick up the pace, gliding over the water-logged ground with ease and cutting through the wind and rain as though it were not there.
Peals of thunder ring out, like a roar from the heavens proclaiming their furious attention on the clash to come, as lighting arcs in the dark clouds above and strikes the ground elsewhere in the forest.
It is a natural formation, or at least so you conclude. Such storms you have known to spontaneously erupt about you in your moments of terrible fury, but you have since mellowed from the times they were a regular occurrence. Still, you find it a fitting backdrop to your first true battle in this new age whether summoned or not. There is just something about the violence and chaos of such phenomena that resonates with you.
Not long is it before you stand at the top of the valley looking down upon the sight described to you by the crows. The armoured humans, the same ones you had passed by in Ismuth, are spread out and hunkering down behind trees and rocks with their halberds, crossbows and swords at the ready.
Enough that a single, explosive spell would be unlikely to take out more than one or two in one go. Well, such a spell from your average mage, if you wanted you could probably detonate the entire valley with some effort. But, again, such an attack would be weathered by the dragon with relative ease.
Said dragon is lying opposite you on the other side of the valley, half obscured by the trees and the downpour but there is no doubt that you both see one another. At the age you placed her at she is quite small for a red-scaled dragon, typically the largest of their kind, but with a strong colouration and very few visible scars. Which means she is either prodigiously successful, exceptionally green or just adept at avoiding fights she can’t win.
And then, of course, there is the peculiar device your minions mentioned, sitting at the bottom of the valley in the centre of the formation of soldiers. At a glance you sense from it only a very minor explosive rune, barely enough you suspect to rupture the odd material of its container. Otherwise it is totally dead to your arcane senses, inert and apparently non-magical.
You frown as you behold it, something about the thing not striking you as quite right. There is a wrongness to it, an inconsistency about its existence that part of you recognises but doesn’t seem to want to reveal its findings outright.
“Elf,” the impossibly deep baritone of a dragon attempting to form words in the language of humans echoes out over the valley before you can perform any further diagnostics.
She rises up over the trees, splaying her wings in challenge and releasing a deafening roar in time with another flash of lightning somewhere behind her.
“My apologies if I am intruding on your business,” you say, not feeling the need to raise your voice but knowing the dragon hears you all the same. “I had expected retribution, but I see you have found gainful employment as a beast of burden to recover your loss instead. Quite the coincidence that I happened nearby, is it not?”
As you speak you are weaving a spell, attempting to further divine the nature of the device and having your efforts strangely rebuffed without any apparent will or ward opposing you.
There is another furious roar in response, drowning out the din of the rain, but that is the summation of the rise you get from her. Not unsurprising, given her odd behaviour thus far, but you have goaded older dragons with less.
“You know why I am here!” thunders the dragon, unable to keep still in her obvious rage she topples trees and storms along the rim of the valley towards you, though not nearly as fast as she could.
Matching her pace, you walk in the opposite direction as you begin to circle one another around the circumference of the valley.
“I had thought so, and yet you stopped so short. A failure of confidence, perhaps?” you continue to taunt as your spells reveal frustratingly little.
“I knew you would come!” she roars, flickers of blue flame firing from her maw as she struggles to contain her choler.
The more you learn about this particular dragon the more your interest grows. That she would even try to contain her rage at all is so very un-draconic as to be unthinkable to her ancestors of old.
“And how, pray tell, could you know such a thing? Often do you encounter those of my kind seeking to test themselves against you? If so, then perhaps I underestimated my kin in this age.” You say, your question quite genuine.
It is obvious she seeks to draw you into her trap, and though you are inclined to let her to ensure she has no opportunity of escape it is unclear why she would ever believe you would do so in any circumstance except complete confidence in your ability to survive it. Which, of course, would make such a trap obsolete.
Unless, on second thought, she is counting on your arrogance such that you merely believe you can survive it whilst she has complete confidence in the efficacy of said trap. A dangerous game, when she surely cannot know any more about you than you know of her.
But, unlike you, she will know what her little device does. Making this whole display little more than a game not dissimilar to one you know the humans to be fond of; chicken, they called it.
“I saw into your soul; I see the fire that burns within. You would not turn down a challenge.” As ever, it is hard to tell with dragons whether they mean what they say. Even after living so long and meeting so many their facial expressions are too alien to decipher. But truly it matters little whether she speaks truthfully or not, for you are there all the same.
“A bold assumption, little dragon, that you offer anything approaching a challenge.” You say tauntingly as you come to a halt. None of your spells have returned anything of value on the device and you do not believe any further investigation will turn up much more. It seems to stubbornly reject any spell that attempts to breach its surface, which itself tells you something about the device.
A function of some extremely subtle wards, perhaps, ones far beyond the skill you observed of the dragon. Or, possibly…
Your thoughts are interrupted by another echoing roar from across the valley as the dragon takes a step down and rears up, her wings splayed out to their full glory. “Enough talk! Face me!”
The initiative is yours to take. You could leave, negate this little trap of hers, perhaps obliterate it from afar. But if for a moment the dragon thinks the trap won’t work you no longer doubt that she will strike to the skies and flee. If that is the case you will get perhaps one shot before she flies beyond your reach, and even in your expansive repertoire you have few spells that can take down a dragon in a single strike.
Well, ones you can cast in mere seconds at least, and you lack the components for most of them. You could probably do it, but ‘probably’ is the keyword there. Even the slightest chance that your quarry, already condemned in your eyes, escapes is not one worth taking. More so than even the risks to your own self.
Rolling your shoulders and flexing the wrist that holds your mace, you step down towards the bottom of the valley.
“Very well, little dragon. But we need not an audience.” You say softly as you begin a silent working on your descent with your free hand, and it begins to crackle with static electricity.
One of the closest humans jumps out from behind a tree from where he believed himself to be hiding, crossbow in hand and aimed straight at you. With a twitch of his finger the bolt is sent careening forward only to be batted aside by your mace with contemptuous ease.
You don’t acknowledge him with so much as a glance, continuing in your walk and building your spell as he frantically reloads and you sense the others taking aim at you as well.
But they are not offered the chance to pull their triggers. You raise your free hand as it is wreathed in arcing energy and reach out to the well of potential just sitting there for the taking.
You are blinded by searing white light and deafened by point-blank thunder as lightning descends from the clouds in a sustained bolt and strikes your waiting hand. Then, needing neither sight nor sound, you flex your will and direct the lightning outwards, arcing first to the nearest soldier and then to his comrade and so on and so forth until the entire valley is lit brightly by a chain of lightning.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
The screams of men writhing and cooking in their armour are drowned out by the cacophony it creates in its wake, and you are forced to protect your ears lest the sound ruptures your sensitive eardrums.
It is over quickly enough, though the seconds you channelled the lightning were longer than any natural bolt. More than enough to ensure every one of the humans died in agony. As you open your eyes and release the protection on your ears it is to find an angry dragon, its towering red form set narrowly in an aggressive dive, its maw open wide revealing rows of wicked teeth and its eyes fixed solely upon you, plummeting towards you from behind.
So often do those who find themselves fighting the beasts see their prodigious size and forget just how ridiculously fast they are.
But you are no such fool, and the move is entirely too predictable. Your mace is already swinging, just in time to slam its jaw shut and rattle its skull, very much reminiscent of your first encounter with this dragon. Amplifying your already enhanced strength the blow turns away the seemingly unstoppable momentum of the dragon in flight, crushing scales and bone and sending teeth flying through the air.
Drawing blood, you feel the dragon’s vigour fill you just in time for its tail to whip around faster than sound itself, cracking as shockwaves are formed around its tip and giving you no time to do anything other than throw up a telekinetic barrier and brace yourself.
You efforts catch the razor-sharp thagomizer before it can skewer you, but the force nevertheless propagates through your barrier and sends you flying through the air at speeds which would have shattered the spine of a weaker being.
Not so easily discombobulated even by the wild somersaults you are thrown into; you catch yourself in a telekinetic cushion before you slam into the incline near the base of the valley. Landing deftly on your feet you nevertheless slide through and splash yourself with an unfortunate amount of mud.
You see the dragon shaking off its own disorientation, its impressive healing factor already repairing the shattered bones though no doubt doing little to compensate for the lifeforce you stole and the loss of vigour it brings with it.
Its head snaps up at the same time as its jaw clicks back into place, and you see the hatred and the calamitous fury raging behind its eyes, no different from any others of its kind in that regard. But in those glowing crimson depths, you see something else, something totally undeserved and yet present anyway; triumph.
Your head pans over to the device, half-buried in the waterlogged ground not ten paces from you. The small explosive rune detonates and, fast as you are, you cannot outrun the shockwave of the far greater and calamitous explosion that follows near instantly, far in excess of what the rune should have been capable of.
All you can do is throw up another shield, one more than capable of stopping a charging dragon never mind a mere explosion, and expect the blast to part around you as you have seen so many like it do before.
But instead the shield disintegrates instantaneously the very moment the blast wave hits and in that moment you finally realise what it was you were sensing with almost comical lateness.
Magic is in all things, its signature present in even the most inert of materials, even within the void beyond the clouds. It radiates out in a way that can be felt, contributing to the ocean of magic that pervades and sustains the realms. But in this device that signature had been absent, literally suggesting that only the surface even existed when it had been so clear to your eyes by the way it sat in the mud that it was not hollow.
You have no time to vocally express your surprise, or your fascination, before the wave of the explosion reaches you a mere fraction of a second later.
And, for the first time in millennia, you are consumed by agony as your very flesh is stripped away and your vision goes dark.
----------------------------------------
Inalia
Inalia doesn’t really notice the half second or so she is unconscious, instead noting the strange and jarring break in time from something violently ramming into her side one moment and the panicked wheezing she is forced to undergo just to try and fill her lungs with air the next as she looks directly up at the dark, thunderous clouds above.
Spluttering and coughing for the breath that was knocked out of her, tears well in her eyes and are washed away by the falling rain at the sudden, biting pain she feels in her side with every convulsion. It feels like something grating at her insides, shifting and moving that which should not be moved, and the horror is worse than the pain.
It takes a moment, then, for her to realise there is a weight straddling her lap and pinning her down to the ground as she writhes in agony. Blinking furiously, it is another few seconds before her eyes focus on the figure of the man, the grim look in his eyes replaced by something far more unreadable though the wicked knife remains raised in his grip.
Inalia screams in terror and shock only for a freezing, filthy hand to quickly cover her mouth and silence her cries.
“You aren’t making this any easier.” The man mutters, not mockingly or tauntingly, not even really talking to her. The knife shakes in his hand, in a white-knuckled reverse grip as it hovers dangerously an arm's length away from her chest.
There is a brief moment in which Inalia is just frozen, unable to move or even try to make any noise, totally trapped by the thought that she is about to die. Here, alone, killed by someone she doesn’t know for a reason she can’t comprehend.
Hers will be a terribly short story with an abrupt ending and nothing worth celebrating, she somehow manages to think. Some heroine she has proven to be.
But the thought doesn’t last long, as despite all evidence that it should have the knife doesn’t fall and she continues struggling to breathe. For some reason that she simply cannot even begin to understand this makes her utterly, outrageously angry.
She renews her struggles, writhing and wriggling as she tries fruitlessly to buck the fully grown man, or at least pull herself out from her grip. Her hands come up to try tearing his hand from her mouth, fail to find any purchase against the mud and rain and instead begin to flail against his arm and chest wildly.
The movements bring fresh pain to her side, but against the fear and the rage it becomes almost trivial to ignore.
The man responds by pushing down harder on her face, sinking her hair and ears deeply into the mud as everything but the sounds of her struggles become muted and dull. Still, the knife does not come.
With little else she really can do, and suddenly terrified at the thought of being drowned in the mud of all things, Inalia opens her mouth and bites down on the hand, finding purchase in the flesh as her jaw clamps shut.
The response is immediate and visceral, the man letting out a cry of pain of his own as he violently pulls back his hand. But Inalia doesn’t let go, she grasps onto his cries as though they are her only hope and bites down harder, feeling hot and coppery blood filling her mouth. Even as she retches in disgust and is forced to swallow, she doesn’t release her teeth, glaring up at the obviously panicking man with utter defiance.
Then her eyes widen as, naturally, the man brings the knife slamming down to still the source of his pain.
But the blade never reaches its target, as a head-sized hoof flashes out from the corner of her vision, striking his hand and sending the knife spinning through the air and out into the mud.
Perhaps in pain or shock, or maybe just due to the sheer force of the kick, the man breaks his hold on Inalia the moment she releases her bite giving her the opportunity to scramble away on her hands and knees.
It is only then that she lays eyes on Arma, the horse’s, or unicorn’s, coat still a pristine white even in the midst of the storm. Towering not only the prone form of Inalia but of her attacker as well, who stares up at the enormous horse with wide eyes.
Then he begins to laugh. Not one of humour or mocking, but the sort of crazed cackle of someone lamenting their own misfortune. Inalia can only stop and stare for a moment at the odd and haunting scene as Arma rears up over him and he makes not a single move to throw himself aside, instead simply laughing harder.
But as her hoof comes crashing down into his stomach, winding him as he had Inalia, the laugh finally devolves into pained wheezing. Far more massive than the mere man, Arma holds him down with relative ease, although he makes little obvious attempt to wriggle free.
On shaky legs Inalia climbs to her feet, looking over at Arma in wordless thanks as her jaw refuses to do anything other than shake. Barely able to stand as a sudden wave of exhaustion washes over her and teaches her the true meaning of the word, she finds can’t run even if she wants to. Holding her side in pain and favouring her right leg, she fruitlessly tries wiping some of the dirt from her face and ear as Arma levels her with a look that Inalia can only interpret as pity.
“Inalia! Inalia!” she suddenly hears from behind her, and turns in shock to find her mum sprinting through the rain towards her, eyes alight with panic and concern.
The agony Inalia feels becomes trivial as her mum bounds forward and wraps her up in her warm embrace. There are no words either of them can say, and Inalia just melts into her arms and allows everything else to fade away as she relishes in the feeling of safety that just moments ago seemed impossible.
Painful sobs tear from her body as her mum strokes her hair and picks off the mud from her face and ears. “It’s okay, songbird, it's ok.”
Then suddenly, off in the distance somewhere, there is not just a crack but a sustained roar of thunder close and loud enough to make both of them flinch. Inalia hugs her mum even tighter, whimpering at the noise.
Her mum reciprocates, until a few moments later when she all of a sudden tenses beneath Inalia. Sensing something is off, Inalia whips her head around to find Arma nowhere to be seen and her still prone but now free attacker staring back at her.
His eyes flick off to the side to where his dagger was flung before returning to the two of them. Gone is the laughter and the wheezing, replaced once more with the icy cold determination of someone to whom giving up is simply not an option.
Both he and her mother move at the same instant, the former scrambling up through the mud in a desperate gambit to throw himself over towards the weapon and the latter pushing her daughter aside to do the same.
Barely catching her balance, Inalia’s wide eyes behold a terrible scene. It looks obvious at a glance that the man is going to reach the knife first, he had been several paces closer, and his fingers graze the handle just as her mum tackles him to the side, sending both of them crashing back down into the mud.
Frozen to the spot and utterly spent, it is all she can do to watch as the pair of them wrestle and scramble for the knife, like two rabid animals fighting over a scrap of meat. Never has Inalia witnesses her mum do anything like the violence now on display, and she is not holding back in the slightest. Biting, scratching, gouging, headbutting and everything in between.
The man is bigger than her, and almost certainly stronger, but in their attempts to grapple one another her mum actually appears to have the upper hand. Slipping out from under his arms and weaving her way out of his punches and strikes. After what seems like an endless scuffle, but is really only a few tense moments, both are bloodied and totally covered in filth but it is the man who appears trapped beneath her mum’s legs as she holds him still and pulls violently on his arm from his side.
Even over the din of the storm Inalia hears the pop and watches as the man’s elbow turns inside out and he releases a throat-wrenching scream of agony.
“Run, Inalia!” her mum shouts out between the man’s cries, but Inalia remains rooted to the spot, unable to move even though she wants to.
She manages to snap out of it only as she sees the man’s flailing free arm land right on the knife.
“Look out!” she screams desperately, and watches as her mum quickly snaps her attention back to him just in time for his knife to sink deep into her chest.
Immediately going limp, the man doesn’t hesitate in pulling free his knife and pushing her off him. The world seems to go in slow motion for Inalia as he climbs to his feet and slowly hobbles over to her, one arm hanging limply by his side and his bloodied knife clasped in the other.
She doesn’t even try to run, she can’t even lift her eyes from the body of her mum to behold her soon-to-be killer as she sinks to her knees with a silent, choking scream.
“I know it’s not worth anything to you,” the man says breathlessly, still heaving in exertion with his face bloodied and mishappen, “but I truly am sorry about this.”
His words seem to re-ignite that spark of anger that had arisen from nowhere before, only this time it is no spark but a conflagration. Her eyes lift from the body of her mother and rise to meet his own as he looms over her. The rage boils in her blood, sets her gut aflame and burns at her heart as she lets out an ear-splitting scream of sheer fury and grief as all she wants at that moment is for the man to die.
Then that fury explodes forth from her in a blinding display in which all she can see is the man’s shocked and suddenly terrified face before he is consumed by the searing radiance like everything else.
Inalia’s world fades to white as the last of her strength abandons her and she collapses once more into the mud.
----------------------------------------
You
Awareness dawns slowly on you, and it is not a pleasant experience. You feel it vividly as nerves are regrown, bones knitted back together and flesh restored. Faster than should ever have naturally been possible, but slow enough that you get to feel every bit of it in excruciating detail.
A side effect of that is you become intimately familiar with the injuries you have suffered. Both arms stripped to the bone and nearly disintegrated entirely, your jaw almost torn straight from your skull, your ribcage pulverized, your spine shattered in three separate places, punctured lungs, extreme burns along the majority of your body and perhaps most concerningly a fractured skull.
But it is not enough to kill you, not with all the potency of your enhanced constitution and especially not with the lifeforce of a dragon flowing through you from the grip you still miraculously maintain on your mace.
You feel odd, though. More than the pain, which is familiar enough to you at this point, you sense an… emptiness within you that you cannot recall ever having felt the like of. Not an emotional or physical emptiness, but rather one of the soul.
However, if the blast didn’t kill you then you still have a beyond furious dragon attempting to finish the job somewhere, so you can hardly take the time to figure out what else is wrong with you.
You cannot see, though whether this is because your eyes haven’t properly healed or because they are obstructed is uncertain. All you hear is a skull-splitting ringing and when you reach out for your arcane sense all you get is… a tingling echo and nothing more.
Mere seconds have passed now since you regained consciousness and you try to move yourself with what minimal musculature has regrown on your arms. There is the agony, of course, and you do feel yourself shift slightly but the movement brings down a wave of vertigo and disorientation that immediately removes any progress you may have made.
It takes precious more seconds for you to slowly grow aware of the sensation of something cold and wet surrounding your face and much of your body. The conclusion that you are currently lying face down in the mud is not a dignified one, but it is better than some of the alternatives to explain why you can’t currently breathe.
Then your hearing all of sudden pops back into place, and the constant din of rain and thunder returns to your awareness. Focusing on it, you can hear firstly that your own heart is indeed still beating, a relief certainly, but then you not only hear the thumping of something massive lumbering along the ground but feel the vibrations of such a thing through the mud.
The dragon. She is injured, you quickly note, her gait irregular suggesting a limp. Evidently she has fared better than you in the explosion, however, if she is able to approach on her feet so soon.
With your inner ear now recovered you make another attempt to move yourself, grunting in effort and pain as you push yourself up from the sucking mud that tries to keep you down. Even with your injuries, still quickly regrowing as they are, you feel weaker than you should.
Reaching out to hasten the healing process along with your magic, you finally realise what is missing. That bottomless well of power that has accompanied you all your life, though not always at the prodigious scale you achieved in your later years, is now little more than a pathetic shallow puddle.
Not gone, such a thing could never be entirely gone whilst you still live and breathe, but it might as well be.
Strangely, your reaction is… muted to this. You never really desired the power you possessed for its own sake, you were born with it and then grew it over the millennia to fulfil a purpose, to enable you to achieve all that you sought to. But that drive, those ambitions and oaths of vengeance that led you to such heights and depths abandoned you somewhere along the way, leaving but an automaton simply going through the motions because it knew nothing else.
So you find you do not grieve its loss, nor balk at the implications. So much has happened to you in your long life that it is just… another thing. Another wound inflicted on a being torn apart so many times that little of the original creature even still exists at all. Another obstacle in your way that must be overcome, different in form and presentation from the many that came before it but when one has surpassed such things time and again the nature of the obstacle pales before the knowledge that, with time and effort and will, it too will be overcome.
A confidence borne of millennia and bolstered by apathy that strangles anything approaching despair. Too old and experienced are you to let such a thing get in your way, the only real question is can you even be bothered to try?
Instinct has you pushing yourself up from the dirt regardless, tightening your grip on your weapon and preparing to face down a dragon without the oppressive power of your magic, but you are wondering why you make the effort.
You knew this was a possibility when you sprung the dragon’s trap so recklessly, and yet you did not baulk at it. It would be an ignominious end for so momentous a being as yourself, slain in the mud by an upstart dragon barely centuries old to a trick you saw coming but believed yourself beyond.
It is so ridiculous and anticlimactic after the life you have led that it is almost funny, and you don’t even begrudge the dragon for the attempt as you have only yourself to blame.
And you let it happen because, you realise, you no longer cling to life as you once did. The hate and the rage that sustained you for so long are revealed to you now as little more than a hollow act, grown brittle in time but not truly tested until this moment when it snaps and reveals how weak its hold on you has become.
In its sudden absence, however, you feel a sort of freedom. A lightness to your soul that you have not felt since you were a child. From a time when you didn’t need a reason to justify your existence, you simply were.
As you open your eyes, having lifted yourself to your knees, you see a sight that inflicts you with no great emotion one way or another. The dragon looms over you, one wing and an entire side of her body’s scales scored away and in the agonizing process of being regrown, slowed by the loss of the lifeforce you stole from her. Much more massive than you, her injuries are not so quickly defeated with what remains.
Her maw lies open, revealing rows of teeth illuminated by a growing, flickering blue light from the depths behind them. You see in her crimson eyes a look of immense pride and total triumph, and you realise perhaps she is not so different from her kin after all.
As the flames within grow brighter and loom closer to spitting forth and incinerating what remains you are left with a choice, one that is suddenly all too easy to make.
Your own pain seems so distant and insignificant at the moment, and you wonder if this… lightness is what the dead feel. A void of purpose, responsibility and struggle that fills you instead with… peace. At least you think it is peace, for you do not know if you ever truly got the chance to experience it in your adult life.
Allowing the mace to slip through your fingers, the prodigious regeneration of your flesh grinds to a halt though its work it's already mostly done, you close your eyes and embrace the end.
… only the end doesn’t come, because it is interrupted by the familiar scent of Armageddon suddenly appearing in your vicinity. Your eyes shoot open to witness the two-hoofed kick to the jaw that the gleaming not-horse delivers to the dragon, snapping it shut and sending teeth larger than fingers flying into the mud.
Arma… cannot fly, not really. Sustained flight is a catastrophically intensive endeavour for any being lacking the natural implements to do so, and despite Arma’s many virtues she does not possess wings. But she can tear holes through space and reality virtually at will, a feat far more impressive than mere flight, and when she does not need to accommodate… passengers, such as you, she can do so with far less fanfare and ceremony. Thus she needs no glowing silver portals as she blinks about the dragon in short hops, delivering thunderous kicks up and down the extremely confused and disoriented beast’s body.
Though stronger than her form would suggest, Arma’s strength does not lie in her physical body. Immune to magic she may be, but her muscles and hide are not half as tough as those of a dragon, and though she provides an excellent distraction and nuisance her ability to actually physically combat even a juvenile dragon is non-existent.
When she gets her bearings the dragon will realise this, and all it will take is one well-timed bite to shear through Arma’s physical form. Not the end for a creature such as her, but a one-way trip back into her former master’s grip that is not a fate any better after fleeing him the first time.
You could tell her to leave, to abandon you to your fate as you have already done yourself, but you know she will not listen. It is not in her nature to shy from a fight, even one she cannot win.
Unwilling to allow your ally, your… friend, to suffer such consequences, you take up your mace from the mud as thunder once more echoes out over the valley.
The lifeforce within fills you once more and heals the last of your physical injuries in mere moments as you rise to your feet.
Though you may have been the greatest mage this realm, and all the others, have ever seen, you are also a warrior, a veteran of a thousand battles fought across Mortus and beyond. And, even without most of the arcane enhancements imbued in your body, your grace is unmatched by any other creature in existence.
Throwing yourself forward in the fray, the dragon sees you despite the distraction Arma is making of herself and whips out her tail once more to impale you. But you see it coming, knowing the move the dragon will make before even she does, because with so much experience with her kind there is no move she can possibly make that can surprise you.
Sliding beneath it, the spikes of the thagomizer missing you by a hair's breadth in a calculated display, you shoot up from the mud in a leap towards the dragon's uninjured wing that is now bared before you.
Even without the magic to channel into its enchantments, the black mithril is more than enough to pierce dragonscale as you bring the implement of destruction older than the dragon itself thundering down on the joint where the wing meets the body.
You feel the bone beneath crack, made brittle by the lifeforce that is suddenly pulled from the beast and fed into you, making you faster and stronger by what is now a significant degree.
There is no question that the dragon will fall. Assuming she knew of what her weapon was capable, she knew it would strip from you your magic, and presumably from herself in the process. So she had believed that you would be far easier prey in a physical confrontation, which is not entirely untrue. Her mistake lied in the assumption that she would be a match for you even at your very weakest, an assumption you are now proving categorically false.
Unable to flee with both her wings out of commission, and having the very life sapped from her with every blow you land even though the damage you inflict is far from fatal, there is nothing the dragon can do to save herself.
Alone you could have managed it, but with Arma the battle approaches triviality as with every strike you grow stronger and the dragon weaker until finally, less than a minute from when Arma arrived, the dragon slumps down to the dirt, unable to so much as raise her head in defiance or open her jaw to spit flames.
Arma blinks to your side as you loom over the fallen dragon, smaller in size than even her head but far greater in stature. You share a glance with the not-horse and see the furious disapproval there, but this moment is not the time to face her ire.
That will come later, you are certain, but for now you turn back to look down at the dragon’s crimson gaze, dimmed and faltering but clinging to life for the time being.
Though it is not usually in your nature, you find the urge to speak to your fallen foe. Not to taunt, you are not so crass when doing so serves no obvious purpose, but instead to inform her of a fact you find most amusing.
“I find I must congratulate you, little dragon, for your efforts. Though you have been felled, take comfort in knowing in your last moments that you came closer to bringing about my end than even the great Amethyst King, Ngrakken, himself.” You say softly, and see her eyes widen in sudden and horrified recognition. But, indeed, there is that same note of fiery pride as before that tells you your words hit their mark.
“Do me this one favour, little dragon. When your soul arrives amongst your ancestors in whatever place that may be, boast of this. Proclaim to all, roar to the crowd of souls I sent there, that you alone crippled and held in your claws the life of Maugoroth the Dread King, First Archmage of Orur-Silgoth, Slayer of Angels, Bane of Dragons, Twilight of the Gods and Destroyer of the World. I should like for them to know.” The fire in the dragon’s eyes grows even brighter at the mention of the name that razed Mortus to the ground before you bring down your mace one final time and it disappears entirely.
Taking a deep breath, you raise your head to the pouring rain and allow the mud and blood to wash away with the icy water. As you do, however, your arcane senses, though entirely dulled, are not none existent. And even blind, deaf and dumb as you feel to magic right now in comparison to mere moments before you cannot fail to notice the violent flare in the arcane from back in the direction of Hartonville.
You turn to Arma with a frown, unable to piece together its origin or really anything other than its existence for the brief moment it appears. The look she gives you in reply tells a story not easily deciphered but one you can at least guess at.
There is no need for words as she opens up a silvery portal to elsewhere in the forest and you both step through. The sight that awaits you is… confusing. The half-breed lies prone in a blackened crater of mud quickly filling with rain, smoke rising from her nevertheless living form, uninjured barring a cut on her leg and what you sense might be some broken ribs.
Across from her lies her mother, still alive albeit suffocating from a stab wound to her lung and otherwise bleeding out. You see the evidence of a prolonged scuffle, and notice the offending knife lying in the mud between them, but there is no sign of their assailant. Literally, you hear no evidence of a third human in the vicinity and the trail of his scent goes suddenly cold in a place where he is clearly not. Not even a pile of ashes remain, if indeed the flare of magic you sensed is how he met his end.
You share another meaningful glance over at Arma before you quickly stroll over to the form of Endrea whilst she tends to the girl. Kneeling down beside the dying, unconscious woman, it is unclear what compels you to act. You owe this woman absolutely nothing, she is irrelevant to your schemes and even though the hatred you felt for her kind has faded to an echo after recent events you hardly hold any love for them either.
Nevertheless, you feel yourself begin to act with purpose. Your power may have fled you, but your knowledge has not. Magic is still magic, and there are other ways of utilizing it. Blood magic is a… tricky discipline, one you only rarely use with the recent exception of forging your newest minions into crows. It is a dirty and inefficient magic with too many unseemly caveats and components, but it has the, now incredibly relevant, benefit of being mostly self-sustaining with only an initial, small injection of energy. An injection that you should still be capable of despite the vastness of your loss. That you have anything left to use at all is perhaps a reflection of just how incredibly powerful you were.
Tearing off her coat and top to reveal the canvas of her bare skin, you summon forth a ritual dagger from your robes designed specifically for such workings as this. At least, you attempt to summon one. Your robes repaired themselves as quickly as your flesh after the explosion, but after a quick inspection you note the enchantments must have suffered some irreparable damage. To what extent is impossible to tell as you can’t actually sense the workings with any great clarity, but after a moment or two you find at least one of your pockets is still linked to the dimensional space and reaching in your arm you manually root around for the dagger.
Pulling it forth costs precious seconds that the woman does not have, and you immediately begin carving the necessary runes into her chest, working with skill and precision honed over millennia of practice, even if you are a little rusty on this particular type of ritual.
As you work, it brings a certain clarity to your mind and you finally twig why it is you feel so strongly about saving this woman. A soul-bond and their daughter, half a world away from one another, two of them dying or in pain whilst the third knows not that it is even happening.
What would you have given to have someone there to help your wife and your daughter in their time of need?
The parallels resonate painfully strongly, especially after your dreams that morning, and you renew your efforts with greater vigour. Not because you necessarily feel any kinship with this ‘Lithandar’, but because in acting you can pretend for at least a moment that things could have gone differently for those you loved.
Were Endrea awake, it is likely she would be screaming in agony as you cut into her skin, so it is fortunate she remains unconscious. You cannot afford the distraction.
You are essentially coming up with the ritual on the fly, adjusting what you know and applying it to what you need, anything less than a master of the arcane would find such a feat impossible. Still, you are left stumped by the final piece of the puzzle. Blood magic has always been second fiddle to regular healing magic when it comes to repairing the body, inferior in most aspects barring its self-sustaining nature and the lack of any required empathy. But what all such rituals require is a sacrifice, a source of external power that it can draw from. Usually, this is the lifeblood of one or several living beings, which in great numbers can allow even a weak mage to perform extraordinary feats of magic, but in this case you don’t have the time to acquire such a sacrifice.
You sense the woman slipping away and know that you have to act now or she will be lost. Even at the height of your power it would have been nearly impossible to bring her back from death, and even then you would have had only moments to do so.
So, inspired by your recent battle and the rampaging lifeforce of the recently slain dragon still flowing through your veins you finish the work, placing your own blood as the sacrifice. Not a solution without consequences, especially as you are going to be still alive after the fact, but really the only one open to you.
Slicing open your palm without delay, you bring to bear your now miserable reserves and light the spark on the ritual. As it alights with crimson light it hungrily sucks in your blood, very quickly healing not only the stab wound but also the runes carved into her skin leaving behind only scars.
The whole thing takes only a couple of seconds before she takes in a deep, shaky breath. She remains unconscious as you cover her back up and lean back against a nearby tree in an exhaustion borne not simply from the lifeforce just drawn from you to keep the woman alive.
You look over to see that Arma has managed to get the limp form of Inalia up on her back and is slowly trotting up to you.
Stopping an arm's length away, she gives you a pointed look and huffs meaningfully.
“I know, Arma,” you say with a deep sigh, lifting your head once more to the rain as lightning arcs and rumbles above you, “I know.”