If there ever had been a place of evil on Vas, this was it. Like a cancer, the ground around it was shunned even by the forest. Cracks formed and led away from it, widening into the ravines that shattered the plains.
Has anyone ever seen it from here? Tallah let out a long breath that steamed in the chilly air. She took the moment to see all that spread beneath her, before she allowed the horror to seep in.
All of them needed to process what she witnessed then.
The crater… seethed. It overflowed with monsters. The entire thing was a mass of writhing, screaming, bubbling life, all of it trying to climb out and escape the light of day.
“What’s going on?” she found herself asking.
That sight was unbelievable. Some of the nastiest monsters she knew were right there, in the mass of creatures boiling alive in the crater. The portal was likely disgorging them regularly, only for all of them to remain trapped there.
She strained her eyes for more detail. There were the serpents, squirming and cutting the creatures crowding them. Beastmen, their size gargantuan, swam in the flailing sea of flesh, crushing enemies beneath their strokes, were cut down as they struggled. Centipedes roiled and existed between worlds, their forms changing by the heartbeat.
So many. So terrible. Suffering in the light, dying and consuming, fighting and… and what?
Why?
She searched the edges of the crater. Her breath hitched and her heart leapt into her throat.
On the very lip of the crater she found a white-faced daemon with a long, lash. It looked exactly as she remembered it. Tall, humanoid, pitch black save the chalk-white mask that made up its face. Blacks wings beat at the air, throwing blasts of dust and blood towards the monsters.
Ever monster that approached the edges and tried to climb out was whipped to tatters. Every lash tore a creature in two. Some distance away, there was another similar daemon. And another. A whole group of the things encircled the crater and abused the creatures seeking escape. Some of them threw lightning at the larger monsters. Gore exploded into the air and corpses tumbled back, charred, to be consumed by their captive brethren.
No wonder the dragon had climbed this high to show her the scene. It had barely fought one of those daemons, and would have lost without her aid. The whole group of them down there would kill it with ease if the first one was anything to go by.
The siege ceased making any sense.
‘Are those really daemons?’ Christina asked.
Tallah’s enhanced sight snapped off suddenly and she found herself staggering in place, her head threatening to burst. She hadn’t even noticed the strain.
‘That’s enough,’ Anna admonished. ‘When you’ll give me the time, I’ll reform you more permanently. Did you learn what you needed?’
“I sure did,” she grumbled.
The dragon turned its head in her direction, looming above. Yellow eyes as large as her head stared down at her. Smoke rose from its nostrils. Again, the angry, low rumble. If she didn’t know any better, she could have sworn in that moment the beast was worried.
She’d counted ten of the daemons and hadn’t seen the one she’d wounded. Maybe it had healed. Or maybe it had been destroyed. But ten of the things were enough to level the Rock ten times over. They could have destroyed the place whenever they’d pleased. They’d had access all of this time and had simply waited.
And what was with the scene itself? The crater was full of daemons. They were eating one another down there. Soon there would be no more room for them and would overflow in spite of the others’ efforts.
Were the daemons contained?
Or were they being whipped into a frenzy?
It was impossible to know. Questions crowding questions.
Tallah felt her knees grow weak. This wasn’t simply a siege. It couldn’t be. Her mind raced. Christina’s question thundered in her mind. Are those really daemons?
She thought back at the two clashes with the white-faced monster. It hadn’t felt like a daemon. It had spoken normally. Had complained she wasn’t welcomed there, that her mission was a different one.
Why does it say I’m involved? How am I involved?
It had been in the city and had not caused the kind of damage it was clearly capable of. What did that even mean?
And what could the creature be if not a daemon? Walks like a cat, purrs like a cat, slashes your throat open like a cat… it must be a cat.
‘These cats walk on two feet,’ Christina countered.
The dragon rumbled above as she tried to marshal her thoughts. Did it know something more? How could she ask? How could she understand it? The feeling that she must understand the beast became unbearable.
Unbidden, other words came to mind. Two different warnings from two different creatures.
“What did Panacea say?” she asked, trying to remember. “When she was trying to bait me?”
Christina provided, ‘Her exact words were: “You’re tightly bound in a scheme that you have no chance of unravelling without my aid” and “I figured you’d like to know who’s been yanking on your strings”. Do you believe she’s involved?’
Tallah nodded and regarded the dragon. “She’s sent us here. She’s either involved, or wanted me to see or do something.”
The sight below could not be ignored. The dragon could not be ignored if it had deliberately delivered a warning to her. It changed all she knew and believed about the beast, but how was it going to help her?
“Do you understand me?” she asked, heart still thundering. Would it really be as simple as asking?
Its gaze on her did not waver. It did not answer. They regarded each other for the longest time.
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How to communicate? How to enlist its aid? How to understand its purpose?
Stories of dragon riders and tamers were plentiful. They were all only stories and lies, disproved time and again. Faer stories of the beasts talking, serving kings or queens.
Grefe had been a faer story and proved real. Would a similar thing prove with this creature?
Could…
Could Vergil understand it? His head companion did translate everything else she’d ever seen, but would it allow him to speak with the dragon? It seemed like a stretch. Worse yet, the second warning she’d received from the maze guardian came to mind.
“Vergil is involved in things somehow,” she said. “The guardian warned of him. Panacea warned of him.” It was impossible not to think of the first meeting with the white-faced creature, back beneath the Rock. “He froze the first time I was attacked. Strings cut. He never did again or before.”
‘You suspect he’s connected to all this?’ Christina asked. Both their minds worked furiously, searching for answers.
A tendril of blood dripped from Tallah’s finger and prodded at the dragon’s paw. Anna was much too fascinated by the dragon to offer any contribution.
“He’s involved with something, that’s for sure.”
Why wasn’t the dragon doing anything? Was it waiting for her to reason things? To plan? To guide?
Frustration climbed into a frenzy in her mind, a whirlwind of thought that spun in place. How to communicate with the mighty beast?!
‘Luna, maybe?’ Christina suggested.
Anna moved in the back of Tallah’s mind and rose to the surface, ‘I also believe the spider might be of use here. It’s as alien a mind as we know. Its communication is almost telepathy. We hear the creature whenever something happens to it. If it can’t understand this creature, maybe it can at least give it instruction?’
That made sense and offered a modicum of hope. The spiders of Grefe were aethervores, their communication was hybrid, and, as Sil had discovered, they knew many more things than they let on. But that would mean she returned to the Rock with the terrible news first and not finish her journey to the Anvil. Wasting time was dangerous as both options felt equally important now.
“Get Bianca,” she demanded. “I have a plan.”
‘I dread those words when they come from you,’ Anna chided. With a last burst of curiosity at the dragon, the ghost dimmed away.
Tallah pointed up at the sun. The dragon’s slit iris tightened, as if its gaze focused on her exclusively. She slowly showed the arc of the sun across the sky, moving backward, towards sunrise. The dragon followed her movement and, as if to answer, it turned in place and regarded the far distance.
Still pointing towards sunrise with her right, she let go of the claw. Bianca held her in place. With her left hand she pointed to Dragon’s Bone, looming above the Rock. Again, the dragon followed her directions. A thick plume of smoke rose from its nostrils as it rumbled.
Had it understood?
At sunrise, she aimed to meet it on the mountain’s slopes. There were several plateaus there that were openly visible from the sky and which commanded a good view of the rest of the Cauldron. Bianca had her drifting off the beast’s paw, still pointing. The dragon gazed at her one more time, snorted, and allowed itself to drop. It turned in the air, spread out its wings to catch some unseen air current., and glided away
Tallah’s stomach dropped away as Bianca did not tether her to the beast again. Instead she began to fall. Wind roared by her ears.
‘I assume we separate ways here,’ the ghost said. ‘We meet it at sunrise then? With the spider?’
That’s the plan.
‘And until sunrise? Ah, drink an aerum, dear. You’ll need it.’
We have the Anvil to liberate. Tallah slit open a rend and dug inside for the aerum. It was a challenge to drink the thing while falling. If there are people alive there, we need to save them. Now more than ever.
The wind picked up speed as she fell like a stone from the skies, trusting to Bianca’s strength to catch her. She had seconds before her flight would get direction again and they would be heading for a fight.
A pulse of power ignited the shard against her breast, bringing it to life. Another pulse would send them to Sil. But Tallah wasn’t yet ready to admit utter failure.
Three things gelled in her mind. Christina lined them up, the ghost perfectly synced with Tallah’s own ruminations.
‘We need to communicate with the dragon. Either for its aid, or to understand if it knows something more than we’ve seen. That’s one.’
The ghost raised another finger. ‘We need to enlist the Anvil. We can’t take the tunnels. They are thoroughly breached, so all we can do is save whoever’s still alive there.’
If anyone is still alive there, yes. It didn’t make much sense anymore to organise a fighting force. With the density of the creatures in the crater, once the containment there broke there would be no way Tallah alone could stand against the flood.
‘Third, and this I believe is the one thing we must do without fail, is find some of the channellers down there and capture them. Whatever’s going on, those would be the only ones that could have an inkling of what’s actually going on here.’
Agreed.
Her back tightened as she plummeted. It was hard to breathe at this speed but the aerum helped. Bianca’s mind took hers over, the mathematics of forces coating the rest of the world. Her angle shifted. The pull of the earth below twisted, and she found herself accelerating at an arc the closer she came to the ground.
Their flight would take them like a cast stone to the Anvil. That was the day’s goal.
Saving the Twins couldn’t be done. It would be impossible to keep the fortresses.
And it would take dozens of trips from herself or Sil to transport people via the shards. She hoped there were still enough able bodies at the Anvil to give them a chance for the rest of the plan.
‘What are we going to do?’ Christina asked.
We’re saving whoever we can and we get out of this deathtrap. Catharina’s welcome to come and save her realm. The feeling of being a pawn on a game board only intensified.
‘We aim to save others? Aside from the hen and boy?’
That didn’t bear answering. She would save as many as was possible, if for no other reason than because she could.
Whatever Panacea wanted her to see could hang. Lives were at stake, more than anyone else believed.
They came almost parallel to the ground now, their flight at a speed that would turn her to a smear of red jelly if she hit anything.
Her plans for a staging area were up in flames. Reestablishing a status quo would not happen, not with what she’d just seen. The only question was of how many people she could save, and what she could learn.
‘We could just run,’ Bianca interjected as the Anvil’s black walls rose into view. So did the black swarms of flies that covered the surrounding plans.
We could, yes. Tallah ignited fireballs and poured the hybrid illum into them. The heat almost overloaded her gloves’ resistance.
‘We won’t, I assume?’
No.
She wouldn’t run like a whipped dog. Bianca slowly bled their speed away so she wouldn’t overshoot the Anvil. Tallah launched her fireball at the encroaching black mass of insects buzzing with enough noise to signal the end of the world.
The explosion rocked the ground and sent up a mushroom cloud of smoke, flames and ashes, almost as tall as the walls of the Anvil.
It cleared away most of the insects.
Death stank up the approach to the Anvil, a miasma thick and cloying. Illum swirled in red eddies around the fortress, a sign of desperate fighting having taken a high toll. Corpses littered the ground, of men, beasts and worse. The flies were everywhere.
Tallah pressed her face into the crook of her elbow and squeezed her eyes against the horrid stench. Nothing assaulted her from the piles of the dead. Nothing moved aside from the erratic flies.
I am being used, she thought as Bianca curved her flight upward, towards the top of the walls. I am being used and I bloody hate it. Someone’s head will roll for this. Mark my words, ladies.
‘I, for one, look forward to it,’ Bianca answered.
A heavy arrow nearly took Tallah’s head off. “Halt!” a voice called from the above, just as Tallah crested the top of the wall. Dozens of arrows aimed in her direction.
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Who is your favorite character of the mainstays? (I'm just curious and you can pick up to 3)