Lights - not just traffic lights, but streetlamps, bedroom lights, even headlights - everything that ran on an electric current was flashing in and out in a storm of erratic power. The lit frames of every window going up towers were blinking in and out in frantic checker patterns that had a dizzying, epileptic effect dancing across the streets. Crackling static rumbled under the streets like a surge of floodwater rushing up through stray cracks and loose manholes. The city was shaking. Richie and little Freyja swayed on their feet and the former grabbed the latter, hugging her in his arms and hunkering down to not fall flat on their faces. Big Freyja was squat and bristling, nose sniffing madly, her eyes rolling. She looked toward the darkening sky where massive black clouds were rumbling in and blocking out the moon. The air was thick and prickly with static charge, and yellow arcs of electricity began to weave in and out of the condensing sky. Richie and Freyja felt their hair stand up on end, as though balloons were being rubbed over their heads.
"Up there!" Richie pointed up.
Thunderclouds folded into each other and poured out of the black backdrop in an oval-shaped pillar, falling like a drop rolling down a stalactite. The great orb of dark cloud detached from the rest of the sky, leaving a sunken pit flowing upward into empty space like the maw of an inverted cyclone. Rain and sleet poured down from the hole in the heavens as the giant oval cloud sunk further down, until it was hanging just over the extremity of the tallest buildings' skyline. Shrieking, hissing lightning cracked and swarmed deep inside the black oval.
"Is it a new kind of hurricane? Ball lightning?" Richie asked, guessing cluelessly, only aware of how uneasy he felt, like there was silent thunder in his gut.
"No. It's an egg." little Freyja said gravely.
Big Freyja was growling and howling up at the giant cloud egg. It was easily a mile in diameter, and it was beginning to tremble.
"Don't tell me it's going to hatch." Richie said, eyes watering.
Cracks, like those spreading through an actual organic shell being pecked at from an eager chick within, raced to the edges of the vessel, outward from the epicenter at the egg's wide equator.
Framing either side of the street were more terraces, and on the balconies, a handful of other kids could be seen and heard gawking at the enormous egg. A black-haired Japanese girl in a thin night shift, sucking on a lollipop, gazed upward stoically, but could not hide the tremor in her fingers. Over and across, a boy with a hunch to his shoulders had his primitive cell phone in a white knuckle grip up to his ears. "Izzy, you seeing this? Just look out your window!"
Just go back inside, guys. Richie begged internally. Oh god, oh jesus, if you see it - if we all see it at the same time… we'll never be able to go back. Oh god, we'll all be in this together now. You can still walk away!
There was a blinding yellow flash, and then the egg split open down the middle, exactly like someone making breakfast had cracked it and pried it open. A massive, dense, scaly shape shrouded in a grim reaper's robe of countless black feathers dropped out of the egg. Tremendous vulture wings, totalling a wingspan of over sixty feet, unfurled and spread out like curtains being pulled on an opera. Scabby, hooked raptor talons clutched an outcropping ledge of a historied cathedral, and the feathered beast leaned against the bell tower that rose from its side. The heavy golden bell was set swaying and knocking, bellowing down a divine decree like a gigantic gong. Wing tips, encircling feathers forming grasping fingers, clutched about the handholds, and from the dissipating shroud of electrified wind and fog, a sharp, toothy beak poked out from the center of the ratty bird's face. The beaks were serrated at the edges, almost crocodilian and biomechanical in appearance. Twin sets of slotted, glowing red eyes were set into the thing's face at the base of its skull plate where beak melded into face, and another pair of glowing skarlet eyes lined the length of the vulture beak itself. From the massive, shadowy wings, something resembling taloned finger tips circled away from the feather padding, separating from the wing structure to become heavily-biceped, muscular humanoid arms who ended in clenched human fists bearing bony spiked knuckles, and whose creepily long fingers shifted into recurved eagle talons. It was a nightmare garuda, or male harpy on steroids, seamlessly melding the imposing image of a Nordic corpse eater bird who commanded the winds, with the imposing, densely-muscled stature of a Herculean classic hero's body.
But the waves of anger and malice coming off of the thunder bird man hybrid were anything but enlightened and peaceful. Its toothy jaws unhinged far greater than they should have physically been able to, ripping open residual strings of flesh flaps about the cheeks trying to keep the jaws from ripping themselves open beyond the point of a grisly avian Glasgow smile. Its newly emerged, heavily muscled avian-human arms, beat at its broad, iron-solid chest, booming great war drum shockwaves outward that foretold its compulsion toward violence, and proved the resiliency of its chest plate and inferred overall pettiness. On sight alone, Richie could see that this giant bird man was leagues above Freyja. That is to say, Freyja the hellhound would be little more than an ankle biter.
Richie and little Freyja would be less than ants thrown into a hurricane.
Great feathered plumes of brilliant scarlet red trailed from the back of the giant vulture's head, trailing longer than even its wing spawn or overall gargantuan size. They struck Richie as a mockery of the dragon whiskers his Seiryu sometimes trailed, like divine koi making their way up the perilous waterfall to full dragonhood. Those silly ribbon trailers were a mark of their resolve.
Big Bird here didn't deserve to flaunt that iconic status symbol.
Its footfall were titanic, indenting the street which each raptor step it took. Its abdomen was triangular shaped, faintly thin at the base waist, devoid of feathers and instead wrapped in a black belt marked with a lightning streak buckle. Gibbeted corpses hung and swayed freely from the belt. Under the scraggly thin patches of its gossamer plumage, deeply chiseled, humanoid abs could be seen sculpted like chiseled stone, yet the sickly color and thinned, stretched sheets of dust bunny skin gave an impression of gaunt emaciation. A crown of curling, thorny torus-like spines rose out of its sickly scalp like a thorny devil's ridge of protective spikes. When it exhaled, its breath was hot, humid, clammy, and stank of death, like it had guzzled thousands upon thousands of lost corpses. Its breath was the fell wind of a subterranean underdark, where death seemed to dwell. Its beady, blood-streaked eyes scanned Station Bay, and it wrinkled its pitted nostrils, sneering in disgust. Those bulky humanoid arms - bouncer's arms, plus curved talons on the ends - flexed and dared opposition. When it screeched to the heavens, blood ran cold, stray beasts and runaway pets ran for the hills, and the clock tower cycled over in fast forward so that the clock struck twelve.
"Hræsvelgr." Little Freyja whimpered. "The Great Eagle."
"Eagle? Get your eyes checked! That thing's a carrion bird of the highest order." Richie trembled.
"Fee-fi-fo-fum." the giant vulture called through a squawk that was simultaneously playful and cold as ice.
Military attack choppers circled the bird man.
"They don't stand a chance." Richie clicked.
Missiles flew by the shotgun burst into the giant buzzard. They exploded pointlessly, less than static shocks on the giant bird man's shielding wings and scaly hide. He turned around deliberately, his foot stomps shaking the ground with each step.
"Jesus, he's easily eighty feet tall!" a pilot said.
"It's an animal, and animals bleed. Animals die!" a commander barked.
"You want to play rough with me, you peanuts?" Hræsvelgr snorted.
His wings lashed out, displacing a hurricane force wind that sent the nearest choppers spiraling out of control. One tailspun-crashed right into the corner of a tower, exploding into a flaming wreck instantly. The burning wreckage fell to the floor, unmourned and forgotten in the chaos of the full-scale bombardment being turned on their heads. Hræsvelgr screeched an ungodly frequency, like the deadly pressure wave of Mount Krakatoa''s apocalyptic eruption, and a solid, projected column of mixed compressed air and killer frequency shot out from its beak. The projected sonic pressure attack blew out the windows of a nearby hospital wing, and collapsed the upper story like a dust-grinding concrete pancake. He twisted his wings, and violent twisting currents of winds were displaced, carrying with them dislodged, harpoon raven feathers with serrated edges about the death perimeter proper. They cleaved through sides of buildings, blew concrete to chunks, and sent vehicles flying, ripped in half by the displacing pressure. Richie and Freyja hunkered behind the shielding big Freyja, standing her ground even as the street was torn up in front of her, chunks of stone being thrown overhead. A sharp wind carrying a diagonal eagle feather plucked the stem of a dented street lamp from its position, and sent it flying at the kids.
"Hit the deck!" Richie slammed Freyja by the back of the skull, whack-a-mole style, under the coming debris as the broadside of the launched steel pole flew over their heads.
Nearly decapitated us.
Big Freyja grew quite sick and tired of this evasive strategy, and decided in that instant to go on the offensive. She ran across the pressing winds to meet the eagle god head on.
Hræsvelgr, for his part, was preoccupied again with the sniveling human trash ineffectually belting him with their primitive little toys. Machine gun fire was less than beebee strikes on a hide of natural Kevlar, and missiles only served to startle him. He took flight again, doing a barrel roll such that the corkscrew suction of his flight created a vortex that drew wayward choppers and stealth bomber planes into his wing tips. He crashed them into each other and out of the sky, cawing laughter as the steel coffins impacted the ground and exploded into mesmerizing flames. One kamikaze flew too close to the sun, and he snapped the plane out of the air in his beak, crushing him alive, whole, and screaming before he gulped him down his gullet.
Blech! - empty calories.
Another volley of missiles pelted his shoulder blades from behind, and the corpse-eater flew off again, cawing indignantly as they laid into him with rotating gun barrels where rockets had failed. There was a bomber to his left wing, and to his right wing. Perfect.
The bird man spread out his full wingspan from tip to tip, catching either aircraft smack dab into the canvas of his outstretched wings, like flies stuck to flypaper he kept gliding like this, the center of his body passing between twin towers. His outstretched wings - and the military craft being carried by them - crashed into and crushed through the towers. In the avalanche of rubble thrown out the other side, only the brief fireballs of blown engines and flying chopper blades bent out of shape alerted Richie that the pilots had been crushed like flies.
They're no match for him… Richie thought, overwhelmed and petrified.
Hræsvelgr flew above a charging copter, firing wildly from the spinning cylindrical gun affixed to its undercarriage, and was little more than an afterthought. Despite the carrion bird's great size and bulk, it was surprisingly swift - swift enough, at least, to create destructive sonic booms when it flew overhead, blowing out windows and kicking up sinister dust devils.
It was above the chopper, clutched it in one avian clawed foot like a fresh caught mackerel to a proud seabird, then dropped out of the sky, curb-stomping the captured, indented helicopter into the ground. It exploded around and up the giant vulture's leg, rings of fire briefly encircling its scaly bare leg.
"Stop this…" Little Freyja began to cry. "Just knock it off!" she called up at the bird man.
It turned deliberately to face her, clucking cold laughter under its beak.
"Come make me." It goaded them, its body shaking up and down with a subdued, sadistic giggle.
Big Freyja looked at the carrion monster as though trying to figure out how to approach it.
But that was pointless conjecture - just go for it.
Big Freyja roared to the heavens, haunches burning, and rushed down the ornithological titan staring her down. She leaped up an incredible distance to bite at the bird's throat. It was soaring at her in an instant, booming like a commercial jet, and the plane wing of its outstretched feathered blade caught Big Freyja under the neck. She was flipped backward and tumbled through the sky, only for the winged beast to catch her by her back paws and fly onward, dragging Freyja through the air behind him. As they lowered altitude, Freyja was dragged alongside the street, road-rashing her face. The beast finally let go when Freyja was dragged into a stop sign, bending it over backward like a broken reed, and tumbled her across the sidewalk.
Richie felt the wind displaced as the bird circled again, leaving Freyja wrung out to dry. She looked up groggily, saw that Hræsvelgr was circling again, and volleyed a trio of explosive fireballs that all missed their target, unable to keep up with the swift eldritch falcon. The burning spheres crashed into the windows and walls of a hospital, setting off a trio of violent hot explosions that blew windows and concrete alike to smoldering chunks.
The bird whirled on them again, lowering its head like a battering ram and flying so low to the ground that its belly skimmed the street like a terrestrial mantaray. A tsunami of dust and debris were pushing along in front of its belly-slide.
"Get on me!" Big Freyja commanded and swept the children onto her back. The sound of wings splitting the sound barrier roared in the children's ears, and they felt a tremendous crash as though the earth had exploded from under them. Big Freyja was sent flying and tumbling, the children pressed safely into her protecting fur by some miracle, and rolled to an exhausted stop on her side. Hræsvelgr stood, ground shaking under his claws, and pressed his wings together. A gale of hurricane winds flew forward, carrying shed, dislodged giant black feathers from its wings. They flew like giant fluted harpoons, blowing the trio away along with chunks of the street broken away and blown off. A parked car was struck by the wall of displaced air and feather flechettes, and it tumbled over as if in a violent roll-over accident into Big Freyja. She braced herself against the impact, carrying the half-ton machine on her cracked, trembling back. The children were crouched beneath her, under the shadow of her belly, their lives a precarious string of twine ready to snap the moment the hellhound's strength gave out.
Another feathered gale flew at them, and where the feathers struck the engine, the car exploded into a ball of fire and steel shrapnel. Big Freyja was blown backward, rolling her young charges with her.
"Easy pickings!" the bird man cawed. His carrion breath was wafting down to them, sickly sweet and noxious. It was the smell of a cocktail of carcass slurries left to bake and stew under the hot desert sun.
Richie clutched at his forehead, fighting through bleary eyes as he sat up and looked around. Little Freyja was facedown, trembling, and Big Freyja was on her side, legs splayed out, drool rolling down her loose lips and jowls. Her eyes, eerily white, were rolled into the back of her head.
“Freyja, Freyja!” Richie cried, cradling the little girl, desperately trying to wake her.
“Richie?” she asked sleepily. “Five more minutes.”
Richie propped her up against a stray tire, something akin to a seat. “You keep your eyes open, ok? Don’t close your eyes no matter what, big brother’s coming back for you!”
Little Freyja shook her head out, clearing the blurry particles in her eyes, and nodded. “Mhm!”
Richie ran back to the sprawled out Big Freyja, one leg weakly kicking as though through a fading dream. A volley of feather darts were lodged in her belly and undercarriage, stuck between her ribs.
“Big Girl, you’ve gotta get up! We’re counting on you!” Richie hugged at the hellhound
The ground was shaking as the giant vulture stomped toward them, fists clenched, feathers at the ends of its great wings bristling with trigger-happy glee. “Don’t waste your breath, hatchling.” it growled, cackling evilly.
“Come on, don’t call it quits now!” Richie smacked the dog by the back of her head.
Small Freyja gasped.
“Blow away!” Hræsvelgr called, and thrust his wings out again, unleashing a hurricane laced with spearing feathers.
Little Freyja covered her eyes and screamed, and Richie leaned into Big Freyja, eyes grit and teeth grinding into each other as he held big tufts of fur as hard as he could.
Big Freyja lunged up and threw Richie aside with her tail, blocking him from a wayward gust and deflecting the point of a flung feather dart. Eyes burning along with her paws, she jumped a short arc into the air and spread her jaws open wide, taking a giant black feather in the face that rocked her head sideways hard enough to spin her body midair.
“She’s hit!” little Freyja shrieked.
No. No she’s not! Richie gave a wide smile.
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The hellhound had caught the deadly feather javelin in her teeth, just like when she had been playing fetch with the stick, and she spun around in another jump, spitting the feather free and chucking it a long ways off. The vulture beast squawked indignant anger and pain as the point end of its own feather projectile buried itself up to the hilt in the side of its long, craned neck. It gnashed its beak and stepped back noticeably, perplexed and agitated.
“Sin Flare!” the wolfen Freyja called, conjuring a far greater, more powerful red fireball in her maw, and launched it with the explosive force of mortar fire.
The hellish ball of unholy fire, easily the size of a great boulder, expanding as it flew, struck the surprised Hræsvelgr full-on in the beak, exploding into a fire tornado of flying embers, sparks, and pyroclastic debris, spread over a billowing curtain of thick black smoke. The awful smell of burning feathers and vaporizing dead skin cells filled the air, along with the smoky fumes that carried a pungent aroma of brimstone, the olfactory equivalent of fire-and-brimstone sermons the religious might expect to get lectured with on sunday mornings by some overzealous preacher.
“You did it!” Richie rushed to Big Freyja and hugged her around the neck, joined by little Freyja, who nuzzled her face into the underside of her counterpart’s warm fur.
The huge hellhound looked back and forth between them, felt the beer-bottle shaped scar running down her back, concealed beneath tufts of fur, begin to cool off and relinquish its omnipresent ache, like guilt made neuropathy.
Then, out of the smoke and embers -
“Did what?” the scratchy voice said, and the remaining flames were instantly dispelled with a rush of wind as the titanic wingspan unfurled again instantly at full mast. Aside from a slight scuff mark on the metallic beak, there wasn’t a scratch or line of soot on the avian beast man. Raising one of its muscled humanoid arms, it clutched the judas feather lodged in its neck, and plucked it free with a sickening pop, crunching it in half with a loud crack, and dropping it to the ruined street below.
"Freyja, get behind me." Richie said, warding little Freyja off.
They passed under the shadow of an overpass bridge, the droning rumble of cars passing overhead fading away into the earthquake steps of the giant apocalypse bird romping their way. Big Freyja too scooted back to join them, keeping herself between the feathered enemy and the vulnerable children. A low growl was still trembling up her throat.
"My turn." Hræsvelgr cawed, and lowered his face toward the trio.
Its neck vibrated rapidly, and its beak parted to reveal a curved, clicking tongue, flexed like a great bicep. The red-ringed tunnel of its seemingly bottomless throat contracted as though trying to push something up, and its feathered chest expanded outward, bulging like a muscular balloon ridged with pectoral lines and abdominal loops. A huge gust was drawn inward, carrying loose newspapers, fallen garbage cans, chunks of rubble - it was inhaling in all the air it could, to full capacity. When it closed its beak again, the drone of the wind snapping off as the chitinous mouth clicked shut, great geyser-like spurts of steam erupted from its pitted nostrils. Its eyes rolled over white, protected by a lengthwise, fully white pair of extra eyelids.
Richie and little Freyja cowered behind the big wolf as she only looked up, panning back and forth, trying to grasp whatever was about to happen.
Then the bird man expelled the static hurricane wave held in his chest all at once, screeching loudly enough to split the skies, a scream twice again louder than mount Krakatoa had been. A plasma-like condensed, spinning column of expelled air representing the rolling tsunami caps of lethal sound waves fired out of the bird titan's mouth. Everything at its sides was pushed away by the sheer air displacement, shockwaves traveling alongside and behind it like a wake before a motorboat. Every window in the immediate radius of the sonic scream's flight path shattered, raining the streets with deadly shrapnel. Under the flying sound shot, a trench was carved out in the street, following like the blast's shadow. If the magnitude of how loud the scream had been was diffuse and scattershot, everything on the block would be dead already, burst from the inside as hollow organ tissues ruptured like oversaturated water balloons jabbed with ice picks. The kids - those on the balconies, and those hiding behind Big Freyja - covered their ears harder than they ever had before, screwing their eyes closed and hunkering down, wailing in pain from the cataclysmic noise - they couldn't hear their own screams over Hræsvelgr's apocalyptic shout.
"Ragna Horn" the beast god echoed.
The cylindrical sonic boom, carrying a punch of 360 decibels, slammed into the side of the overpass above their heads. The concrete bridge shattered to so much falling rubble. The cars that weren't crushed and sent flying by the splash damage of the sound column itself merely collapsed with the pulverized road, one great big urban avalanche. Stone, dust, rebar, and crumpled automobiles rained overhead. The kids screamed, and Big Freyja grunted, leaping over the two of them with her belly, back turned up and exposed to the pressing weight bearing down to crush them.
…
Richie heard ringing in his ears. He felt hot and stifled, like he was covered under a heavy, scratchy blanket. He worked his way out from a tunnel aperture that turned out to be the crux of a gigantic canine limb, folded in a crouch position. His numbed ears couldn't make out much else, but he could still feel another child form - that of little Freyja - extracting herself from the gigantic black-coated airbag that had protected them. Except, it wasn't black anymore, not entirely. As the four-legged figure shifted, drowsily rising and shaking stone dust and chunks of overpass walkway from its crown, back, and shoulders, Richie was astonished to see that the wolf was much broader and heavier-set, fur spread out in blade-like ridges whose tips looked sharper than razors. There was a dark, crimson hue to her once stygian-black fur-coat, and her paws each were so huge that they dwarfed the average sports car - one that had tumbled beside them was haplessly crushed like a tin can under the giant hound's step. Sides heaved, revealing exposed ribs linked by translucent films of skin. Hellish red glow, like a roaring furnace within the beast's core, radiated outward, shining between the curved metallic ribs and through the rubbery skin and sinew. Talons, like great black recurved steak knives, pulled trenches in the street, and boiling drool fell in glob-like droplets from red-hot teeth, each like an enamel stake Vlad the Impaler would see fit to seat political enemies ass-first on the points of. The snout had elongated into a hard, almost crocodile-skull-like shape, eyes glowing brighter than ever, yet pitted black, like the Devil's own eyes. Long, fox-like ears splayed out in orange tufts of fur unfurled from the giant wolf's head, and a huge, bushy tail half-composed of static fire swished about its ankles, as long as the dog itself. Its stout, muscular chest heaved, and distended shoulder blades, almost fins, curved back from behind its neck, cloaked in permanent flames like puck-shaped giant bonfires. A circle of metallic spikes lined its thick corded neck, like a built-in studded dog collar. Volcano smoke rolled from its nostrils and gums.
"Fr...Freyja…?" Richie said, throat dry.
The giant hellhound - she had to be fifty feet long on all fours, not counting her tail - turned a single hot coal eye at him, and she rumbled out of the corner of her mouth.
"I'm Garm now." she said in a reverberating voice that sounded like it vibrated up through Richie's bones
"Good for you, big girl." Richie numbly pat the giant wolfen monster's hindquarter, too well beyond stunned for much other commentary.
Hræsvelgr cawed a bellowing challenge, pounding his feathered chest with his humanoid arms like an enraged gorilla. Garm lifted herself out of the dust, returning a roar that sounded like the mouth of Hell opening to swallow the condemned. She stood briefly on her hind legs, head thrown back, howling to the moon, then slammed her paws back down. The street cratered and fractured, pieces of concrete bouncing up, and Garm charged after the giant bird man. Her paws and Hræsvelgr's taloned hands locked into each other, arm wrestling as they stood against each other's bodies, frames shaking and quivering as muscles tensed and tried to overtake each other. The great eagle lodged its wing tips into either corner of the buildings framing the streets to anchor its position, but Garm just slammed her tail into the sides, crushing the finger hold and throwing the bird off balance. She pounced Hræsvelgr, raking at his chest and torso with her burning claws as he squawked and flapped, beating her with pounding wings. They rolled over each other, tumbling and tussling in the broken street, and Garm was thrown into a corner store, crushing it and driving sharp glass shards and bent metal beams into her back. She rolled around, growling, and flipped back onto her feet, rushing Hræsvelgr and biting his ankle, clamping her jaws down tight like a bear trap. Richie smelled roasting rotisserie chicken, and realized it was the eagle monster's leg cooking through to the bone. Garm's teeth pierced right in between the bones of the leg, punching holes clear through from one side of the skin to the other.
Hræsvelgr lifted his other vulture's foot and planted it on top of Garm's head, squeezing like a nutcracker and digging in with his talons. He ripped her away from his bleeding ankle and lifted her by the head before stomping down, crushing Garm's face through the street again and again. Before she could be stomped a fourth time, Garm planted her paws under her and pushed up with everything she had, tipping Hræsvelgr up and off of her. She clawed a stroke at the bird, leaving silver streaks scraped in his metallic beak. Hræsvelgr raised a leg and kicked down, raking cuts open across Garm's chest. She bit the bird at his wing joint, manipulating his movements on her hind legs as she twisted and thrashed, and slammed him face-first into a bank, collapsing it. The bird flapped her away with a tornado belted out from its wings, and fluttered himself back up onto his feet, throwing a volley of dart-feather-laden gusts at Garm. She lowered her head and charged through, fiery aura expanding and burning off the feathers where they struck her. Her red-hot wolf tail flew up and swiped a diagonal wave of feathers away, setting them aflame and spinning off into the distance. She jumped up like a human, pressing her hind legs together, and drop-kicked Hræsvelgr in the chest, flooring him.
"Incredible…" Richie's lip trembled… "it's like I'm watching a dream…"
"Don't give up!" little Freyja called out to Garm, crying and still cheering the giant demon dog on through her tears.
Richie felt Freyja's resolve bleed into him. He clenched his fists. "Come on, Big Girl… don't let him beat you!"
Freyja wrapped her tail around Hræsvelgr's neck, constricting like a python, choking the bird. He gripped her tail in his talons, and chomped its length down in his serrated beak. Garm shrieked and recoiled, and Hræsvelgr lifted his wing - the underside gleaming like a guillotine blade - and brought it down in a giant chop. Garm bobbed to the side, swatting the falling wing blade to the side of her, and it split the ground deeply enough that the bottom of the trench could not be seen. The rendered ground extended all the way to where Richie and Freyja were, and they hugged each other as the trench opened just to the side of them, exploding up plumes of dust and gravel like hot belches of volcanic gas from an exposed continental rift. Garm extended blazing dewclaws, burning white hot and shaped like scimitars, from the backs of her ankles. Hissing gusts of steam carrying the smell of hot metal burst out from behind her paws as she rammed Hræsvelgr. Swinging wildly, Garm was lost in a feral frenzy of bloodlust. Short towers were sliced and diced to cubes where her dewclaws cleaved through them, like warmed butter. The jenga pieces collapsed to the ground like a fallen china cabinet from on high.
"Keep at it, you've got him in a corner!" Richie punched the air.
Yet, little Freyja looked scared.
Garm had Hræsvelgr gripped around the waist, claws hooked into the ribs, and lifted him high overhead before slamming him back down into the road. The giant hellhound pounced onto the prone enemy, tearing and stamping away at it while its belly was up. A hooked dewclaw rose to take out the bird's throat.
Hræsvelgr shrieked incredibly loudly at point blank range. Garm's vision went dizzy, and her claw stroke whiffed. The bird flew up, as if doing a stomach crunch at super speed, and struck Garm in the forehead directly between the eyes with his steel beak, leaving a cracked bloody divot and stumbling the wolf backward.
"Oh no!" Richie clicked.
"Garm!" Freyja bawled.
Hræsvelgr stood his full height again, towering over the swaying Garm. He clapped his wings together around Garm's head, boxing her ears. The hellhound roared. Finger-like feathers curled out from Hræsvelgr's wing tips, and gripped into Garm's arms and shoulders, hard enough to punch in deep bruises. As he held her with his avian pair of limbs, his humanoid limbs clenched their fists and began rapidly pummeling the restrained Garm in the midsection. Her stomach was pounded mercilessly with blows that traveled straight through the back of her massive body, shockwaves blowing off tufts of fur that rained like red hay bales. Hræsvelgr put Garm in a headlock and started dragging her up the street, turning a corner and running off with her. The kids followed, heard another crash and avalanche of crystalline shrapnel as Garm's face was slammed through the panel of a glass building. Garm weakly threw an uppercut, and whined as vulture claws sank into her wrist, hooking and impaling it.
Hræsvelgr retracted his claws, licking blood from them with his parrot-like tongue.
"Tasty." the bird beast said.
He clamped a taloned hand around Garm's throat, squeezing tight to wring the life out of her, the tips of his claws punching into the skin of her neck. Garm clawed at the hand choking her, tail shaking in a panic. It began to taper off and fall still. Garm frothed at the mouth as her eyes rolled back in her head, and Hræsvelgr threw her like a rag doll. She tumbled over the ground, leaving a light blood trail smearing into the street. The eagle was upon her again, ripping out tufts of fur with some skin still attached to them from her chest in his great big taloned feet. He grabbed her with those feet around the skull, squeezing like a press trying to crush a watermelon. The kids heard disturbing cracking noises. Those great big wings spread out and began flapping powerfully, displacing massive walls of wind, and the both of them achieved lift - Hræsvelgr rising into the air, dragging and carrying the limp Garm with him.
"Stop it! Leave her alone!" Freyja ineffectually wailed and threw rocks - really just pebbles - at the titan bird. They fell far, far short, obviously.
Hræsvelgr carried Garm high above the city, perhaps five miles up. Floating there against the clouds, Hræsvelgr beat his chest, bellowing his war cry. Then he began inhaling a chestful of compressed air again, vocal cords tensing with kinetic energy.
He unclenched his talons, and dropped Garm out of his claws, watching her fall from the sky like an angel cast out of heaven. Her frayed, blood-matted fur fluttered in the high-speed winds as she plummeted, belly-up towards the god of carrion. He aimed his beak down at her.
"Now hear the Ragna Horn!" Hræsvelgr cawed.
He thundered out a huge atmospheric warhead of wind and sky-shattering sound. The king of all sonic booms slammed Garm's gut, and her stomach caved in like a sinkhole visible under a thin sagging tarp. She rocketed back to the earth, and was sledged through the road with an explosion like a small meteor impact. Thick dust, so dark it was almost like black ash, rose high like tsunami crests.
When the dust settled, Garm was out cold, head lulling on her side, flames gone out. She was the centerpiece of a thirty foot deep earthen hole in the ground, lined with scattered fur and rocks. Her sides had stopped heaving, and her eyes were closed. Blood poured endlessly from her left-open jaws, beginning to puddle in the bottom of the crater.
Hræsvelgr circled overhead in the sky, like the vulture or buzzard he resembled, waiting for its meal to kick the bucket. He lowered himself, and perched on the bell tower of a tall gothic cathedral made up of pronounced spires and ledges and lined with protective gargoyle fixtures carved in dark stone. A few loose gray bricks tumbled freely from the time-weathered mortar, shattering on the sidewalk below.
"Hmhmhm!" Hræsvelgr giggled nasally.
"Garm… no…" Richie said, hands falling slack.
He fell to his knees, and now he was crying too, crying at how weak and helpless he was. This was the same wolf he had played with and bonded with, and she was an important part of the little girl beside Richie now too. It was like watching their own limbs being amputated. He had to stop this. He had to help her somehow, had to rouse her.
Garm's hind leg kicked a little, and Hræsvelgr looked down, frowning.
"Don't you know when it's time to throw in the towel?" he growled, and dropped down from the cathedral.
The ground quaked beneath his clawed feet as he started stomping toward Garm.
Freyja beat Richie to the fallen Garm, frantically tugging at her hide and pounding her with little child fists, sobbing for her to get up, get back on her feet, to defend herself or run off and hide.
Richie tugged at Freyja. "Frey, you've gotta get out of here, there's nothing you can do right now!"
"I won't leave her!" Freyja bawled.
"Just do it! I'll wake her up!" Richie clutched his chest, eyes resolute.
The stomps were getting louder, bouncing the kids almost off their feet as Hræsvelgr stalked closer, humming a sinister tune to himself.
Richie ran around to the other side of Garm, standing between her and Hræsvelgr with his arms stretched out wide.
"Back off!" Richie shouted at the great eagle.
Hræsvelgr stopped, crossed his thick arms and chuckled.
"I'll make you pay!" Richie said, shouting through his fear.
What am I doing? There's no way. We're all toast.
He was shaking all over like the proverbial fig leaf. The bird saw that. The bird smelled that. It unleashed a spherical wave of psychic killing intent that made those which came after it - Luchesi's and Chikita's - look like frail bath bubbles.
Richie stood his ground, face framed in tears, arms still thrown wide, spread as far apart as they could go.
He could hear a heartbeat beginning to boom inside Garm's chest.
"You and what army?" Hræsvelgr asked, amused.
Richie's eyes became dragon eyes. Seiryu eyes. They filed to slit pupils radiating primal kinghood. His tattoos began glowing brightly, so blue they were blinding white, like a star.
"I need no army!" Richie said, taking a step forward, at the brink of a jog.
He was no longer a little kid again. He was his seventeen year old self. And as he lunged to sprint after the monstrous bird man, something wondrous happened.
All across the framing balconies and the darkened streets, twelve glowing wells of light faded into existence, the rest of the world darkening away by contrast to make the unfurling auras all the more distinct.
Two of them originated from Richie and little Freyja themselves; the same noble Azure of his dragon tattoos covered Richie, while Freyja's own spotlight was the smoldering orange of campfire embers, or a red-hot crumbling log. Spread across the distance, there were bright spring-green, a cool blue like Arctic waters, a stygian hue that should have been black and indistinguishable from the night but wasn't, a sparkling majestic gold like a King's crown, a pale beige the soft, cheesy yellow-white of bone, blood-red, a plum-purple so dark it was almost black, a lighter shade of violet, violently, obnoxiously hot pink, and streaking, rust-flecked silver.
Richie felt, heard, smelled, and tasted a whirling collage of interlinked senses, as though his mind had become an arthouse music video. He felt warm breaths beside him, smelled the hot casings of spent machine gun rounds, felt dew drops on the tips of grass blades and the cool brackish smell of a river. He felt frigid winds and an aurora borealis, heard it spill fluttering rose petals that tasted sharply of lilac. He felt long shadows, saw the curvature of the earth like a stress ball of deep gravity, and tasted the stars. He smelled heavy exhaust fumes, saw the glint of teeth, guzzled moonshine with his nose. It faded into the antiseptic smell of a cadaver autopsy. He saw a red ball left on a lawn. He smelled cinnamon, hot churros, felt the wagging of Freyja's tail. He smelled iron in rich, flavorful blood, sensed the resolve and spirit contained in that blood which was the currency of the soul. He heard the flaring nostrils of his twin dragons, and felt their trailing whiskers tickle his nose. Sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, body, mind, soul - all came together in a singularity frozen in time as every one of the twelve auras of light overlapped like crossing spotlights.
Silent thunder struck, and a gentle spring drizzle began to fall as time stood still. Richie could watch every individual raindrop fall, and count them. Amidst all this chaos, he felt total tranquility. It wasn't just Garm's heartbeat echoing now, occupying a space inside his chest and overlapping with his own cardiac rhythm. He felt twelve beats - one for each aura light - inside him. His was one of the outlines the disembodied soul lost in the Void had seen as he edged near the threshold, was the font of warmth and hope that that wayward spirit would find freedom. They didn't know what the enemy beyond today was - it didn't end with Hræsvelgr - but they knew they would win.
Can you hear the rain, Garm? Richie thought. Can you hear me, rousing you? Everyone's heartbeats are with you. Feel their hope. Feel their strength! Can't you feel them? Can't you hear me?
…
Nostrils flared.
"I can hear you." Garm said.
The rain unpaused and stopped falling. The auras were gone, along with the cross-sensory overload that had linked Richie's mind with others. Now, there were only two kids - and two giant monsters. Garm threw her head back to the moon and roared - then rammed Hræsvelgr.