Spear of Destiny: Chapter 14

Twenty minutes later, we were in the air and ready to jump back to Dakhdir. I hung on to the saddle without any tie-downs, as relaxed as a surfer kneeling on his board. Suri, who hated flying, was strapped to the saddle with her chin down and her shoulders hunched.

As my dragon beat her wings and gravity pushed down on my shoulders, I felt my breath catch. Karalti had gotten stronger and faster with her last level. She always did, but this time it was like going from a 650cc street bike to a 1000cc road hog. I could feel the magical radiation of her body through the saddle, the incredible muscular power driving each wingbeat. The earth fell away with dizzying speed, giving us a phenomenal view of Kalla Sahasi.

“Ready?” Karalti’s sweet voice broke through my distracted wonder.

I pushed down the visor of my borrowed helmet.“Always, Tidbit.”

My teeth hummed as Karalti summoned her mana. The dragon let out a piercing bellow, straightening out into a gentle glide. That was the sign for me to lock my hands under the saddle grips. I did just that, and braced in anticipation of the frigid darkness that enveloped us as my dragon Teleported.

For several long seconds, we hung in a rushing void of empty space. That was normal. There was always a pause in the game when Karalti jumped. But this time, something about the space around us set my teeth on edge. Normally, the only thing I ever felt was the triple-beat of our hearts, mine and Karalti’s. But as we passed through, it felt like someone – or something – was staring at the back of my neck. Before I could work out what or who it was, we burst out of the cold into a screaming cloud of whirling black sand.

The sandstorm blasted us with such force that Karalti was blown violently to one side, her wings filling with hot air and sand. Suri screamed a warning even as I slipped and crashed against my dragon’s back. Time slowed as I scrabbled along the leather, then activated one of my Mark of Matir abilities, Spider Climb. The Mark flared with cold fire, and just before I tumbled off into the air, I slapped my hands down onto the saddle. They bonded to the rough leather like Velcro.

“Arrgh! What the hell?!” Karalti’s wings flapped like wet laundry, threatening to bend. She gave up trying to beat them after a few seconds of heedless tumbling, rolling with the wind and diving to regain control. “Hold on! We have to break through this!”

With a snarl of effort, I pulled myself up, arm over arm, until I grasped the saddle grips once more. I was so stunned I barely even felt scared. The sand slithering through the cracks in my armor looked like ground pepper, but it was gritty and sharp. And even weirder, the searing heat of the desert was gone. It was cold. Lightning flashed inside of the cloud. An eye-watering metallic smell clung to everything.

[Warning: Extreme Stranged terrain. You are immune to Stranging, but may take damage.]

[Warning: this area is contaminated with nnnnnggghhrrrrrrrrrrvvvvvvvvvvv-]

The HUD’s narration blurred into an error, then abruptly cut.

“Urrgh!” Karalti snarled with effort. “Get in close, guys! I’m going to dive!”

“Roger that.” I flattened down, hooked my feet under some straps, and put my head down. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed Suri bracing with her head between her arms.

Karalti’s wingshoulders pitched us like a rollercoaster as she navigated the crosswinds, weaving through them like a boxer dodging punches. When she found the eye of the storm, she tucked her wings in, curved her body, and dropped into a sharp hairpin dive. The wind drew claws over us, Stranged sand screeching over armor and scales, until finally she burst out underneath the storm and into the open air.

There were only two words for what we saw through the haze of dust and ash.

Holy and Shit.

Withering Rose was still there. The great machine, a magitech mecha the size of a skyscraper, was sprawled on the sands like she’d been gunned down from behind. She had been separated into several pieces, her metal entrails trailing from the edge of her torso. For a thousand feet in every direction, the desert sand had been turned into a hellscape of molten sand and shattered glass. Violently mutated, smoking sandworms were impaled on huge jutting shards of gray crystal, a shattercone of burned and blackened spines that spread away from the wreck of Withering Rose like the petals of a lotus.

“What... what is this?” Karalti’s telepathic voice was breathless, with none of its usual girlishness. “Did Ororgael... did HE do this? Or...?”

“What do you think? Of course he bloody did this! He’s fucked the Warsinger six ways to Sunday and now we’re the proud owners of a fuckin’ thousand-ton paperweight.” Suri briefly forgot her fear of flying, straining against her harness to try and take in the scene below. “FUCK!”

The Mark of Matir was ringing like a bell, jumping and throbbing just under my skin. I was shocked enough that my fingertips, lips and the tip of my nose started buzzing. There was only one weapon on Earth that could cause this kind of wholesale, almost alien destruction. Somehow, some way, Baldr had nuked the fucking desert.

“Hector?” Suri’s voice broke through, startling me. “I know Rose here is basically buggered, but I’m still getting a HUD ping on my gear. We need to go down before we take too much more damage.”

Damage? I glanced at my HP ring, and sure enough, the green bar was painlessly ticking down by one point every few seconds. I glanced over to my HUD and drew the mini-map of the area into focus. Sure enough, there was a small golden dot on Withering Rose’s back. “Yeah. Let’s do a snatch and grab. We can’t stay for long.”

The closer we got, the worse it looked. Not only had her torso been separated from her legs, but her aurum armor was caved in toward the left side of her back. She had a deep, deep hole about the size of a basketball punched through her, like an entry wound. It made me want to see the front of machine’s chest, but between the sandstorm and the wind, there was no way were getting under the chassis.

The dragon struggled to drop into a hover, riding out sharp gusts of air. Once she touched down on Withering Rose, I crawled over to Suri to help her get out of her harness. Once she was free, Karalti squatted to let us off. I jumped down to land lightly on my feet. Suri slid down, grunting as her armor clashed against the metal surface. Her Inventory sack sat neatly on the surface of the Warsinger, unaffected by the storm: an oddly unrealistic video game thing in this otherwise hyper-realistic world.

“Why the hell did he destroy her?” I reached up to grip the top of my helmet, surveying the damage. “To stop us from getting it?”

“Maybe?” Karalti stalked over to the hole in Withering Rose’s armor. “Ugh. Oh gods…aaaack!”

“What?” I left the edge of Withering Rose’s breastplate, jogging over to join my dragon as she reeled back, gagging.

“The smell!” She hacked like a cat about to throw a hairball, tail lashing. “It smells like…I don’t even know what that smell is!”

I approached the hole warily. It was the spot where the black beam Ororgael had called from the sky had hit the Warsinger. It was a deep, smooth entry wound, like the aurum had melted and curved around the incredible force the beam had exerted on it. I couldn’t smell anything, but looking down at the hole made me feel dizzy and strange. Maybe it was my dragonrider vision getting overwhelmed by all of the particles of charred sand in the air, but something about the darkness inside of Withering Rose’s torso seemed... wrong. It seemed to suck the remaining light, expanding outwards until I blinked. I absentmindedly reached up to grip my left shoulder, the shoulder that with the glitched out chunk of dark nothingness where flesh was supposed to be. The Mark of Matir was still prickling.

“You alright?” Suri nudged me in the other arm, startling me out of the trance.

“Uhh... yeah.” I blinked and shook my head, and when I looked back at the hole, it was still the same size as before. “Let’s get out of here. There’s nothing we can do until we bring ships capable of carrying the Warsinger back to Litvy. Maybe we can repair her, and if we can’t-”

My words were cut off by a garbling off-key shriek that seemed to rise up from the desert around us. I clamped my hands over my ears as the keening rose to a painful volume, deepening to a rumbling roar. The Warsinger’s body began to shudder underneath us.

“Okay! Time to go!” Karalti brayed in alarm, beating her wings stiffly by her sides.

I caught Suri’s hand, steadying her on the rocking surface. She had terminally low Dex; I had enough for the both of us. Karalti bowed down so that Suri and I could climb her neck to the edge of her wing, pull ourselves up kicking and scrabbling over the edge, and run - or in Suri’s case, crawl - up along it to her back. I threw the saddle straps into position as another head-splitting shriek echoed over the dunes.

“What the FUCK is THAT?” Suri shouted, throwing herself down. She began connecting straps to one side of her harness, and I took her other side.

“I have no fucking idea, and I really don’t-”

The final words of my sentence were drowned out as a Godzilla-sized sandworm burst out of the charred sands in front of us.