Dovak of the Below
Let not the Deeps erode our hearts or steal our future
Within your sheltered lands we dwell in hope
Guardian of the Gates, unfaltering Eternal
This trust we give to you
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Here we are again.
The evening of the fourth day of his new life as a mageblade initiate, Jair stood on the southern wall of Astralla Institute, watching the eastern sky. In the distance, a tiny dark speck could be mistaken for a distant bird or particularly large grain of sand thrown aloft by the wind.
It was neither.
Raina stood beside him, wearing a full suit of Veshin-craft elite armor. Iridescent blue-black, the armor was formed of dozens of mana-imbued ceramic plates overlapping and layering in precise patterns. An additional outer layer of support bands locked around her chest, arms, and head like an exoskeleton of steel halos to provide crushing protection.
Internally powered armor like Veshin’s was the best option for fighting a dragon's innate magic absorption, since the protective layers of material would slow down its ability to drain the power from it, and the interior nature of it resisted the pull. It would still be destroyed in minutes, broken down from outside and in as the integrity crumbled from the dragon's exposure, but those minutes could be invaluable in a combat situation.
Jair’s armor was simple compared to Raina’s, little more than a collection of exorbitantly expensive powered construct shielding added to a standard warrior set. The armor itself, he had inscribed with fire protection, to deal with the physical heat of the dragon’s explosive breath, and the leg and arm plates were linked with momentum and strength augments that would provide a minor boost to mobility. Powering it all, the center plate housed three high-grade mana crystals of the sort used to power cities.
Against any normal creature it would be overkill, but dragons’ magic absorption capabilities meant as soon as any part of its body came in contact with the armor, it would suck the power straight out of the active spell, and take a chunk out of the mana crystals as well. Enough mana to last a year in a volcano could be gone in a moment.
The distant speck of a dragon had become a distant spot of a dragon. Jair himself couldn't make out the shape yet, only that the small hardly moving point had grown larger in size. If he didn't know it for what it was, he'd never have recognized it.
“You’re sure it’s a dragon?” Raina asked, for the hundredth time.
“I’m sure.”
“And we can’t go anywhere to hide until it goes away?”
“It’s coming for you, specifically and inexorably. There’s no hiding, no escaping.”
Transiting from the Institute to a city further from the mountains could delay the engagement, but increased the collateral damage and decreased Raina’s survival time post-engagement to almost nothing.
Transit back and forth between cities or outposts would initially confuse whatever tracking Ryenzo used to follow Raina flawlessly, but the delay was only temporary. What was the use of buying an extra day at the expense of tens of thousands of lives if Raina still died in the end?
As the only way to truly protect Raina was to kill the dragon and hold it away from her long enough for even its manabody to give up and fade away, changing the time or location of the engagement was ultimately pointless unless it changed the outcome.
Though things like luring it to the king’s palace or a particularly annoying noble’s house could be highly entertaining, none of those bought as much time as the Institute itself. Against a normal attack, armies or rogue adventurers, assassins or escaped lunar monsters, the palace would be unquestionably the best place to hole up.
But Astralla Mageblade Institute had one thing the palace didn’t. It had survived centuries of enthusiastic and minimally trained young adults throwing magic around in countless unexpected and potentially destructive ways. Which, ironically enough, meant that the layers upon layers of protections to safeguard the students from each other provided the best fortress Veor had to offer from the destruction wrought by a dragon.
Raina shivered, armor clinking softly as she hugged her arms to her chest. “How do you know all this?”
“Survive the next hour and I’ll tell you everything.”
“You say that like it’s not a guarantee.”
“It’s not.”
“Even with this?” Raina gestured down at herself, the armor that cost more than most noble estates. "What more could you possibly need?"
"Surviving a dragon isn't as simple as 'buy an anti-dragon armor and you're good'. If that were the case, dragons would be either extinct or domesticated by now. The first problem is, even if it can’t crush or burn you, it can still swallow you, and the venom in its saliva will burn through anything given a few minutes. Assuming it doesn't decide to oven-roast you in its mouth, which no amount of insulation will protect you from indefinitely."
"One would generally prefer to avoid ending up in a dragon's mouth under any circumstances, yes."
Jair shrugged. "And how do you prevent that? You can't block it, you can't restrain it. The best you can hope for is to slow it down. Frostvine has been known to work temporarily. Active wards that change the environment physically, thicken the air pressure, play around with gravity, change the wind currents."
Raina glanced down at the walls, now alight with elaborate construct tracings. "Is that what we've been doing?"
“Yes. I’ve amplified what was already there and added new layers to synergize with the existing effects. The second problem is, this particular dragon is insanely focused on killing you specifically. To the extent that it will disregard everything up to and including its own survival if it thinks the alternative is you living.”
“Yeah.” Raina swallowed. “I can see why any reasonable response would be ‘send her out to the desert and let the dragon have her.’ I don’t want anyone else being hurt to save me.” Tears were in her eyes and her voice trembled, but she still stood proudly. “If my mother owes this dragon a life, maybe it’s best to let her take it.”
“Never.”
The distinctly dragon-shaped blob in the sky grew nearer and larger.
“Don’t get yourself killed,” Raina pleaded. “Save yourself, even if you can’t protect me.”
Jair didn’t answer immediately. He’d long wondered what he would do if it came down to a situation where he could take the dragon down in time but would die himself, whether that would be a good enough outcome for him to accept, or if he needed to be present to ensure that she truly outlived the disaster.
“Promise me.”
“I won’t leave you alone. If you’ll promise to live, I’ll keep living too.”
Raina gave a soft chuckle that was almost a sob. “I’ll do my best, but you know I can’t guarantee that.”
“That’s alright. You do your best. I’ll take care of the guarantees.”
The definitely a dragon flapped nearer, a glint of green against the evening sky.
“I don’t understand. My mom’s been gone since as long as I can remember. Why this? Why now?”
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“I wish I knew.”
Raina’s giggle was definitely edging toward hysterical. “So you don’t know everything. And here I was starting to think you did.”
“Breathe. Try to relax.”
“Relax? With a dovak-cursed dragon flying straight at me?”
Jair took hold of her shoulders, squared up to face her directly, keeping his voice even and calm. “Look at me.”
She did, eyes bright with tears that spilled down her cheeks as she blinked, breathing coming too fast in uncontrolled gasps.
“I am going to kill the dragon, and you are going to survive. We’ll both make it through this.”
“How? I don’t—”
“Sssh. It’ll be okay. Slow. Breathe out. I’m right here. You’ve got the best protection money can buy. I’ve got a sword better than money can buy. You just need to go where I told you as fast as you can. As soon as it does its first pass, you go down to the tunnel by the wall as fast as you can. Once it lands, I’ll be able to see what Maelstrom can really do.”
Raina nodded, hiccupping through her tears. “Right. It’s ju—just a dragon. Maelstrom is better.”
“Ryenzo won’t know what hit it.”
“Yeah.”
“Go to the tower. Just inside, out of reach. Be ready to run down as soon as I signal.”
“I don’t know if I can do this.”
“You can.”
“Dovak, I hope so.”
Jair smiled faintly. “Not Aelir today? I don’t think I’ve ever heard you swear by Dovak twice in the same day.”
“You think Aelir is going to be enough to deal with this?”
Jair nodded. “Indeed. Dovak help us both.”
Unwatched, the dragon drew slowly nearer. He didn’t need to see it to know its exact location at every moment. The slant of the light, the hue of the sky, the shape of the clouds, everything to the minutest detail was locked in his memory as harbingers of the coming death.
“How can you be so calm?”
“I’ve prepared as much as can be prepared. Either I win, or I don’t. Losing control won’t improve the outcome.”
By all accounts, by any reasonable calculation, this was an unstoppable calamity. The fact that its attack normally left only the academy half destroyed and less than a third of the students dead made it one of the tamest and least destructive dragon attacks in recorded history.
The specifically focused nature of the dragon's vendetta meant it could be manipulated to an extent. Jair could minimize casualties, but he couldn’t eliminate them entirely.
Guiding the outcome of the fight gave him some measure of control over the fate of hundreds of students and dozens of staff and teachers. It was a responsibility he’d become accustomed to, inured to the weight of it.
If he did nothing, Raina and everyone in the building with her would die. If no one else would step up to save any of them—which he’d definitively proven time and again to be the case—they were surrendering any right to have a say in who lived or died.
And then it was time.
"Go to the tower. I'll watch from here." His thoughts stilled into focus.
Raina stiffened, then nodded and ran to the tower.
Jair stayed on the wall, watching the dragon's approach. His heart never stopped racing, body ready to move.
He couldn’t forget this if he tried, every nuance burned into his memory. Everything else could change, but this moment was always inevitable. The doings of nobles and kings meant nothing to the power of Ryenzo Draconis.
Every flap of distant wings, every flick of the tail, every pushed glide.
Ryenzo wasn’t large by the standard of dragons as a whole—poison dragons were one of the smaller breeds overall—but she was still big enough to swallow the top half of the tower. Jair knew from painful experience that sometimes higher wasn’t better.
Deep green scales covered the head and overly-long neck, thick and impenetrable. The scales thinned out along the chest and shoulders, shifting to a vivid yellow-green as they grew wider and sparser.
Above forelimbs and behind the wings, protected between joints, a slowly inflating bulge showed the venom sac, where the dragon’s breath would be infused with its burning venom before being cast out in an explosive blast.
Three. Two. One.
“Raina, now! Go!”
A blast of green gas bathed the wall, and Jair was already moving. Ryenzo swooped low to ignite the cloud, even as Jair jumped into the center of the blast.
Vivid green flame exploded beneath him, throwing him upward just as the dragon’s tail flicked by.
He slashed out blindly, vision filled with green and yellow, but he had no need to see the dragon to know exactly where it was.
He felt Maelstrom slice into something solid—and stick. The sudden jerk as he started to fall while the dragon’s tail whipped back the opposite direction nearly yanked the sword out of his hand, but he grabbed with his other hand and clung tight.
The dragon roared and crashed into the dome, claws digging into the glass and sending cracks down its side.
Jair was laughing. Nothing he’d ever thrown at the dragon had so much as scratched it. Fully trained adults with reforged weapons could barely scratch it.
He didn’t know how far he’d cut, but if the blade was trapped it had to be deep.
The dragon slashed its tail through the air and slammed Jair into the side of the dome, trying to dislodge him.
His armor clanged against the glass, but Maelstrom stayed firmly embedded in the dragon’s tail and Jair remained stubbornly clinging to his sword.
Ordinarily, he’d be landing on the towertop after his failed slash, then waiting for the dragon to come around again in its flight. Instead he was still hanging off its tail as it repeatedly smashed him into the dome.
This was an entirely new situation, so he had yet to decide what should be his next move.
Then Raina exited the bottom of the tower and Jair’s presence was forgotten. Ryenzo’s terrible roar filled the heavens as the dragon launched itself at Raina.
KILL THE CHILD, BREAK THE MOTHER!
The sounds would be incomprehensible to anyone else present, but in his many attempts to reason with the mad creature Jair had become one of the few humans who could fluently understand Draconic. He couldn’t exactly speak it, not without drastic adjustment to his body and some additional constructs for good measure, but if he could hear it, he’d understand it.
Raina dove into the tunnel just ahead of the grasping claws. The dragon crashed into the wall, getting a handful of sand instead of a crunchy Raina.
Stone crashed as the wall trembled. Whole sections of the wall flared bright as the increased integrity spells tried to draw in enough power to compensate for the drain of the dragon’s direct contact.
Not enough. The section of wall held together physically, only bowing slightly, but that entire patch of spell patterns went dark.
The dragon wasn’t paying attention to the wall or to the man making his way from sword-hold to tail-hold. The dragon burrowed into the ground with claws, snorting poison fog down the hideaway and blasting explosions every other second.
Jair didn’t have long.
He ran up the dragon’s back, located the venom sac, and stabbed down with all his strength.
Maelstrom sliced clean through the thinner scales of its shoulder and pierced into its open gasbag of an organ with such a lack of resistance that Jair nearly toppled over, the sword going fully through to its hilt.
KILL THE CHILD, BREAK THE MOTHER!
There was an awkward moment where nothing happened.
Jair rocked and crouched to maintain his balance and the dragon tried to brush him off against the wall, as though it were flicking away an insect, continuing to burrow toward Raina at full speed.
Maelstrom’s slice was so clean, only the slightest wisp of gas escaped around the misshapen side of its blade.
He needed a spark.
Jair looked down at himself, fully decked out in anti-fire and fire-prevention armor, then over at Maelstrom’s hilt sticking out of the dragon’s shoulder.
He grabbed Maelstrom and drew it out, then slashed it diagonally across the dragon’s scales, but they were nowhere near abrasive enough to strike a spark.
Well, worth a try.
Gas continued to leak out from the dragon’s punctured venom sac, but not quickly enough to distract it from its burrowing.
Next target, chop off the head. Why not? If Maelstrom was this powerful…
Jair ran along the dragon’s bent spine, the way it leaned forward and down providing him a nice smooth arc to its neck.
He raised the weapon above his head and slashed down.
CLANG.
Maelstrom finally met its match. The thicker scales of the dragon’s head and neck stopped it short, leaving only a thin slice, barely visible.
That strike, though, was enough to catch the dragon’s full attention.
Its long neck whipped around. For a single moment, Jair stood staring up into the sinister glow of its poisonous yellow-green eyes, then its neck had twisted snakelike around his body in three full coils. He couldn’t so much as wiggle Maelstrom, the sword trapped against his leg uselessly.
The dragon’s impenetrable neck squeezed down until his armor creaked and bent, mana crystals run through in seconds trying to protect him from its body heat. He distantly heard his bones snapping, just one more noise in the chaos. Then it flung him up, caught in its massive mouth, and swallowed.
No thank you.
He’d died by dissolution enough times to know it was a particularly awful way to go. Maelstrom had fallen from his crushed hand at some point, and his arms no longer moved at his command so he wasn’t sure there was anything he could have done with it if he’d had it.
Jair focused inward, away from the tight burning of the dragon’s stomach, and found his soulspell.
Golden light flared, and he fell backwards through time.
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