Aerendir stood, throwing off his cloak to reveal a bright white blade on his back. Siegyrd stood as he glanced backward toward the noise and said a small prayer, “Swiftly take them hence.”
Aerendir shouted in his booming bass, “Ozymandias, Sovereign of Sovereigns, we seek an audience!” There was a slight movement of the gargantuan dragon’s eyes as it sped straight toward the cliff and then arched its back to fly upward. Its giant chest nearly scraped the cliff’s face as the dragon burst upward, clearing the edge where Aerendir and Siegyrd stood. It wheeled high in the sky in a long, lazy arc before it settled itself back in front of the cliff. Small zephyrs of magically controlled winds played at the edges all around its wings and twirled small vortices of fire which cascaded off the dragon’s form in many-colored waves of heat.
The dragon’s voice shook the skies. “None know that name. None live that know. Who taught it you? Speak!”
Siegyrd and Aerendir both felt the last word with the force of compulsion as it ripped a reply from their throats like a tree uprooted by a twister. They spoke in unison, “Ossian, our father.”
“Ossian!” The dragon’s voice was more rage than melody, with a note of envy. He breathed and the fire of his nostrils consumed the brush and stone around the brothers’ feet until they stood in char and ash. The dragon cocked its giant head sideways. One large eye, with a diamond iris large enough to be a portal for Aerendir to walk through, narrowed on the elder brother’s sword. “Nothung – Thandravok!” His voice was threaded taut with unrestrained fury.
The dragon swept his wings and shifted backward away from the edge, eyes narrowing on the brothers who both drew their blades and sang. They moved quickly spreading away from one another along the cliff face splitting the gargantuan creature’s attention. The lightning shaped markings on the dragon’s chest burned, and the space between its scales burst with white hot fire. He drew in his breath as if sucking in the sky. The dragon snapped its mouth shut with the sound of two armies striking shield walls, and then there was a quick hiss followed by a piercing whine. He lowered his head, swung it toward Aerendir and exhaled in an explosion of directed fire thirty paces wide that moved with the crackling jaunt of a lightning strike. The shifting conflagration swallowed Aerendir in its ravenous maw, but the dragon did not stop. He swung his head across the whole top of the cliff exploding trees and melting stone in a destructive path toward a sprinting Siegyrd.
#
Silas’ scream was drowned out in the purging cacophony as the dragon flames burst over his head. The wizard Mareth raised his clubstaff in a flash of arcane energy that shielded them. Even here at the edge of the flame his shield bent and bowed like a tree branch beneath too much weight. He yelled against the force of it.
“Quick, boy, get down into the next valley!” Mareth’s voice was strained.
Silas cried, but obeyed, running in a stumbling scramble, keeping his head low and using his hands and feet together. Alexei sprinted out in front of both, bolting as quick as his lion paws would carry him away from danger.
The blast faded, and Mareth sighed heavily as he ran after the boy and the lion. He glanced back and witnessed in the sky above where they had left the colossal form of the dragon wreathed in red-white blaze. Its wings and head were visible above the horizon line, and he tripped, rolled, and regained himself. “No hiding that.” He shook his head and yelled after the boy through air that hung heavy with the smell of ozone. “As fast as you can, Silas!”
#
Just as the light of the fire was about to reach him, Siegyrd finished his song, swung his twin songblades and jumped from the cliff out toward the lake. A powerful wind cradled his legs and then rocketed him outward in an instant of devastating speed which sounded with a loud boom like thunder. He was behind the dragon, and somewhat above, holding out his blades with his feet pressed against the sky.
The dragon turned ungainly slow. He swiped his wing outward toward Siegyrd who twisted in the air and then let himself fall toward the dragon with a whirling, tumbling series of strikes down the dragon’s wings which opened tears and made the creature roar in pain. The dragon twisted to try to snap out its giant maw beneath its wounded wing.
Aerendir burst out of the dust and debris of the breath, covered in soot. His face was partially burned away, and one arm hung limp and charred at his side. In his strong hand he held Balmung, glyphs etched across the whole of the blade in winding scripts of power that flickered with purple lightning.
Aerendir leaped straight for the dragon’s neck, sword poised to strike, but the creature swept his head to the side and batted Aerendir away forcing the blade to clatter across the scales harmlessly. Aerendir fell toward the lake. He spoke a series of arcane words and sang a single note as he fell looking up toward the dragon’s underbelly. He wheeled back with his one good arm and threw the blade with all his strength upward as he fell.
Siegyrd kicked off the sky and aimed his face downward, flying toward Aerendir, body tucked streamline. The dragon wheeled to snap at Siegyrd, but missed by a narrow margin, jaws snapping shut over fearful air. He flapped upward, then Aerendir’s blade struck true into the center of the dragon’s belly. The roar that echoed through the valley sent waves of force in all directions, and Siegyrd was knocked off his path as he reached out for Aerendir. He yelled, “Transform!”
Aerendir shook his head, instead tucking himself into a ball and then transitioning his weight into an awkward one-armed dive that pierced the lake beneath. The dragon above thrashed against the relentless sky in his agony as purple lightning shot out from where the blade had struck and pulsed and cascaded around the dragon’s form crackling and muting the fires of his hide. From beneath, Siegyrd, now standing at an odd angle on a patch of sky could see the dragon above flicker. Aerendir’s blade fell from the dragon’s belly, and the dragon was gone. A tall, heavily muscled, raven-haired man with golden shattered eyes stood hovering on a wind of fire. Deep purple liquid streamed from a wound in his stomach, and he twitched with the fragments of the arcing magic as they chased each other across his copper-gold skin and danced around his dark breastplate before dissipating on the edges of his scarlet robe.
Balmung fell in a spinning arc toward the lake, its white blade clean of etchings and dancing like starlight in the day. Siegyrd watched as it spun in its fall blade over hilt. Just as it was about to reach the water, Aerendir’s arm broke the surface and brandished it, and his face came out of the water sputtering. He breathed out onto the water in front of him in a wave of glacial blue and white. A platform more than fifty paces long froze into solid ice out to the edge where the dark boat sat stable in the water. He pulled himself up and then drove the blade into the ice and chanted between panting breaths.
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Siegyrd caught the shattered orbs of Ozymandias’ eyes, and there was hatred there and pain and loss that made the younger look away. Ozymandias roared again, and a flame of pure night burst from his hand and he held it to his wound cauterizing it into a wicked scar. Siegyrd spun on the sky and pounced brandishing both blades as he rocketed upward toward the flaming figure. The whistling song of his swords passing through the air sent a keening chill. Fog trail contrails rolled off his blades as he rose. The cold pulled at the flames that sought to fill that void beneath them, and the vacuum pulled the raven-haired man toward Siegyrd.
Ozymandias smiled wickedly and reached out into the air next to him. From it he drew a black-bladed polearm from the expanse of sky and aimed it to meet Siegyrd’s strikes right at their intersection stopping both blades with a single stroke. There was a momentary pause on contact before a blackflame edged with crackling white lightning exploded into an inverted twister carrying Siegyrd toward the lake. Siegyrd crashed into the water right next to the boat now enveloped on three sides with solid ice. The force of Ozymandias’ blow drove Siegyrd straight to the bottom of the lake.
The ravening heat warred against the cold he wrapped himself in, and the searing pain of the twisting lightning struck his whole body with pinprick pains of agony. The water held him under, his breath blown from his lungs, his eyes drowning in the murky waters mixed with bubbling steam. Fickle electricity played around him making him twitch as he tried once to rise and was pulled back under by the massive vortex of displaced water on its return. He held his breath and tried to steady himself. He blew out, very slowly, the tiny amount of air he had left. He turned his body and felt his boots hit the mud at the base of the lake, and something else stuck in the mud.
An odd calm came over him then mixed with a deep foreboding as he looked down and saw the crystal flute. It was held to the bottom of the lake by the ghosts of many hands that seemed to claw at it and fight with one another over it. The drowned spirits were fragmented, and he pulled it from their weakened grasp with ease. They clawed at him with feeble force. He tucked the flute into his belt. His chest was an inferno of rage at the void of breath. He kicked hard off the bottom of the lake and shot toward the light of the surface.
Aerendir’s platform was unmoved, the ice reaching its roots to the very base of the lake. He glanced up as Siegyrd fell some distance from him and clenched his jaw and then finished his chant. Another series of etchings flashed golden upon Aerendir’s blade and beamed with supernatural radiance as if sourced from celestial realms. When he drew the sword with his good arm, he could barely stand.
Ozymandias shot down after Siegyrd, but his eye caught what Aerendir was doing, so he twisted in his downward flight and breathed a rocketing scarlet flame with lightning that was a fraction of the size of the previous toward Aerendir who twisted and rolled out of the way entirely. The beam continued over the ice searing a watery pathway through it and then turned the surface of the lake beneath it to steam on its way toward the cliffs where it collapsed large portions of rock.
The raven-haired man reeled in flight, the flaming vortex beneath his feet carrying him toward Aerendir. He set his polearm like the great lance of a rider and sung a low chant as he made way to Aerendir. The elder brother stood calmly, his left arm limp at his side, his face burned with one eye shut. He held Balmung lightly in his right hand, the tip of the blade resting in the ice at his feet. Ozymandias’ blade crackled with dark energy expanding into a shifting shadowy flame around his whole form as he closed with Aerendir, skimming the top of the water and then the ice. Aerendir shifted his weight and brought Balmung up to parry, and as he did he looked past the man where Siegyrd’s form breached the surface of the water and shot skyward.
Ozymandias heard it as well, and his focus was split, Aerendir in front and Siegyrd behind, which set his blade just wide of a killing stroke. Still as he passed by Aerendir, the parry was not perfect. The darkblade in its shadowflame cut across Aerendir’s left side, missing his hearts by a fraction as it cut out a section of rib and tore through Aerendir’s back muscles. Ozymandias turned his head and looked at Siegyrd. He saw the flute and stopped dead. Siegyrd threw the flute upward and swung both swords toward it. They struck a shifting radiant shield and rebounded.
Ozymandias screamed and shifted his weight, tracing in the sky the fire of his being as he rocketed toward Siegyrd. With a herculean effort, Aerendir threw Balmung toward Siegyrd and called out with all his strength, “Brother!”
The blade moved in a flash of light that Ozymandias barely registered in his mad flight toward Siegyrd. The flute still hung there in the air, a magic of its own holding it suspended. The slightest breeze washed over it, and it whistled woefully as Siegyrd dropped his swords and caught Balmung with both hands, spun with the force of its throw and then twisted to strike at the flute. The same radiance burst outward, but Balmung flashed with purest white and severed the rainbow glow striking the flute just beneath the mouth piece. The golden white purity of the glyphs on Balmung grew to a blinding flash that engulfed Siegyrd and the flute and the approaching Ozymandias. A sound like the splitting of the sky tore through the valley. A single thin crack formed in the crystal flute beneath Balmung’s blow, and from the crack a devouring shadow poured outward and swallowed all the light. Siegyrd felt himself pulled inexorably into a gravity he could not escape. His body felt like it was being stretched apart, pulled in every direction at impossible speed and hammered into endless destruction. He tried to scream, but nothing came out.
Aerendir saw the flash of light, then the devouring shadow, and at the edge of the shadow Ozymandias fought with all his strength to escape its pull. Aerendir stumbled forward one step, coughed blood and sunk to his knees. The shadows clawed at Ozymandias’ form, and the dragonman tried to transform, his dragon form bursting outward in a gargantuan size that was siphoned away by the grasping dark. Something like the shadow of the dragon was pulled away from his form, and he grew smaller before the shadows snapped shut. The crystal flute quivered a single broken note and fell back into the water with Aerendir’s blade still buried in it. In the lake, ghostly hands drew it down beneath.
