Crowned in Black: Chapter 49

Solnetsi's body charged with electricity, and lightning snapped across the ground around her, coiling like whips. Even if Lucien hadn't been a coward, he wasn't getting near her - but he was, in fact, still a goddamned bitch.

"Get away from me!” Lucien screamed and bolted for the other side of the room, holding the sword up the way a priest would hold a vampire with a cross. “Get away!"

I wasn't waiting around. Solnetsi had a very large HP ring, lined in red. She was hostile. There was a symbol beside her tag that I'd never seen before, but as I focused in on it, my HUD told me exactly what it meant. [Undefeatable].

Without a word, I Danced away and started to run: head down, arms pumping, a full-blown sprint. A shadow fell over me as I reached the door - Solnetsi's razor-edged tail, which smashed just behind me as I teleported just underneath it. Even with Shadow Dance VI, I took fractional damage if I was hit. The impact threw me forward: I hit the ramp with my face. My visor cracked as I slid down the slime and broken glass, stunned. I could taste blood. When I staggered to hands and knees, I saw my HP was down to 15 lousy points.

"I'll kill you!" Lucien shrieked from inside the chamber. "I'll kill you all! I'LL be a god! I'M THE GOD, GODDAM-!"

His next incoherent scream of rage was drowned out by a ripply BOOOOOM that caused all the bones in my body to vibrate, and dropped my HP another five points. From behind me, there was a garbled scream - then nothing. I coughed blood, not even sure how I'd taken so much damage.

"Holy fuck." Gasping, I chugged a healing potion, and while it was refilling my bar, fast-equipped my spellglove and cast Caduceus as I stumbled away. Solnetsi roared, and the lights of the hallway flickered as the air sucked back toward her. I threw myself out the door and to the side as lightning lanced out of it, blowing a cloud of slagged metal out into the room. The room trembled warningly as I ran to Karalti. She had been healing herself - still hobbling on one foot and her hands, but no longer bleeding.

"Get ready to warp out of here!" I gasped, swarming up her body to the saddle. I grasped a loop with one hand as an explosion tore through the Dragon Gate, then another. More liquid metal and stone blew from the door, and then a high, pure soprano note filled the air: beautiful, at first, and then painfully, rendingly sharp. Karalti screeched in pain, dropping down as the sound built around us, as sharp as the blades on Solnetsi's armor. It was the goddess’s Queensong.

"Karalti! Get us out of here!" I shouted at her telepathically, clutching the sides of my head as the room around us began to crack.

Karalti and I both struggled against a powerful, crushing gravity as Solnetsi's Queensong began to tear the Dragon Gate apart. As she sang, the note - and the emotion behind it - became increasingly discordant, insane, piercing my ears like blades. I felt an eardrum rupture as Karalti finally enacted the teleport spell, warping us out of the crystal chamber as it began to crack and shatter above our heads.

We reappeared over the entry to Cham Garai. Even here, the Queensong tore the air. Karalti stroked her wings to avoid careening into the swamp full of writhing eels, gaining altitude to spiral up and around the twisted ruins of the merged cities. I chugged another potion, unable to hear my own cursing due to my busted ear. We watched in disbelief as a pillar of light burst through the core of Cham Garai, shattering it... and then the pieces of stone and crystal lifted into the sky instead of falling as the whole underside of the city opened up into a giant crater. Solnetsi was rising from it in a great cloud of lightning, her brilliant white eyes smoking into the air, her wings shimmering with power. She was easily three times the size of Karalti, and even as we watched, the broken shards of crystal gathered to the goddess's body, forming a train of floating whip-like tendrils, and a halo that encircled the back of her head.

“ALL WHO SLAVED MY CHILDREN WILL PERISH.” Solnetsi’s telepathic voice ripped through the entire valley. “ALL YOU WHO WERE COMPLICIT WILL FACE JUSTICE. ALL YOU HUMANS. ALL YOU FAITHLESS DRONES.”

"Did I ever tell you I love you?"Karalti almost-joked, as she wheeled up into the air ahead of this monster. "Because I think we're kinda screwed."

I ground my teeth together, struggling with the leaden sense of failure. Undefeatable. As in, no way to win. "You're going to buff your speed, do a Shadow Copy fly-by, and then you're going to run. Do not fucking argue with me. I'm going to jump at her and keep her distracted for another minute: long enough for you to get away."

"Hector-"

"I can't lose you, okay? If she kills me, I’ll just respawn. Hopefully." Determination settled over me like a mantle. I didn't care how many times Solnetsi tore me apart, or how much it hurt, or how fucked up I got from dying over and over. In that moment, I knew I would do anything - anything - to keep my dragon safe.

"We can't fight her," Karalti replied, even as she followed my order and cast Haste on herself. Her wings began to stroke the air at speed, air rippling along the crazed and dented surface of my helmet. "But Matir can."

"You won't have enough mana to teleport!" I punched the saddle in frustration. "Karalti!"

"I will, just. The ritual takes two minutes." Karalti's voice was equally determined - and as mature and steady as I'd ever heard it. A woman's voice. "And if I can't fly us around her, even for a second, I'll do what you ask. But these are my brothers and sisters, Hector. My mother is in the Eyrie, in chains. I can't leave them to die!"

Her strength and her will and her love radiated over the Bond. She wasn't defying me so much as trusting us.

I locked my teeth together, squeezing them until they creaked. The light of the valley was drawing to Solnetsi as she hung in the air - and suddenly, her Queensong suddenly shifted into a scream of pure rage. Without her saying a word, I knew this dragon - the oldest and greatest of the matriarchs of Erruku - had been tormented by nightmares for millenia. She was not sane. And even if we ran... she'd destroy the Eyrie, then Ilia, then the world.

Clouds were forming over the valley, rumbling with thunder. With a snarl of frustration, I grabbed the saddle straps and buckled them into my rarely-used flight harness. I always wore it over my gear - it formed the base of the bandolier for the Spear and my quick-bar potions - but hardly ever used it for its intended purpose. Once I was tied down to the saddle, I brought the Spear around and began to chant in Tuun, resonant and deep. "Oo adu eda'gaakh, Tenger, Dalai, bi channeh akh'berut-"

'Oh great healer, lord of the darkness of the sky and sea and earth, I am your brother-' the words of a long-lost prayer to Darkness itself: an elemental force older than Matir, older than the Solonkratsu, older even than my own Earth, rolled off my tongue with instinctive ease. My hand suddenly locked onto the Spear as the black star sapphire in the haft began to spill a cloud of dark power. It wound up my arm like smoke, trailing behind us as I continued to speak in the mother-tongue of the Tuun. My people, now as real to me as the UNAC or Korea had been. "I am your brother, formed of the Words of Life, formed in the darkness of the womb, of the unseen creatures of the soil and water-!"

Everything depended on Karalti now. She streaked around Solnetsi, cutting a wide berth around the furious greater dragon as she called lightning down from the whirling tempest that now sucked at the ruins of the city below. Now that she had Parabolic Mastery, Karalti's wings were strong enough to be capable of incredible feats in the air - as lightning exploded from the clouds around us, she folded one in and threw the other back, rolling all the way over to dodge before snapping both wings out and surging away from the next bolt. Karalti's mind hummed with the exultant focus of a dancer as she tore in, ripping a line of white fire across Solnetsi's swinging bladed tail before barreling away from it as it lashed toward us. Her breath weapon did nothing - it didn't even drop Solnetsi's health by a single point - but the goddess swung her head around toward us instead of the Eyrie.

"ALL HUMANS WILL ANSWER FOR WHAT WAS DONE." Solnetsi's voice rolled over us like a thunderhead as she whirled in the air. Great bolts of electricity gathered along both wings, crackling over her body before forming a fan-shaped barrier around her. The lightning traveled down the floating crystalline whips she'd created, turning the cores of them incandescent just before they lashed out at us.

Karalti's mana pool was draining fast as I continued to chant the summoning rite, gripping the saddle around the haft of the Spear with both hands as my dragon's back lurched and rolled. We dropped suddenly, plunging a hundred feet with enough speed that I thought my stomach would hit my throat - but I had never felt so calm, so focused in my entire life. Matir's Rite of Summoning rolled from my tongue smoothly, and as Karalti barreled out of the way of a lunging, smoking whip longer than she was, I closed my eyes and relaxed into the ritual.

"Lady! Listen to me! We are not your enemy!" Karalti's telepathic voice was dim and distant, masked by the drone of my own voice in my ears.

"BLOOD TRAITOR!" Solnetsi's rage grew in proportion to the thunderhead above us, which suddenly split with massive bolts of lighting. They hit the ruins of Cham Garai and caved them in. Any water they struck electrified and flashed, killing everything inside. Karalti screeched as lightning hit one of her wings, and suddenly, we were spiraling down at rapid speed - a death spiral that would soon reach terminal velocity.

[Karalti has taken 2216 damage! Karalti's starboard wing is disabled: heal 150 points of damage to regain control!]

The last part of the summoning spell was familiar to me. It had been written on the tomb of an ancient Tuun warrior, my first clue to the true history of the Dauntan humans who had arrived with the dragons from Erruku. “In darkness you were conceived! To the darkness you were sworn! In the darkness you found your peace, and through darkness shall you be reborn! MATIR!”

I spat the last words of the summoning rite, then planted both hands against Karalti's back and cast healing magic from my gauntlet's own mana pool. Even as I pumped positive energy into her, my dragon shuddered in exhaustion as her mana drew up into the Spear - and then, to my shock, into me. Suddenly, I was flying: my body dissolving, leaving the straps of the saddle flapping loosely as I shot into the air. For a second, I panicked - until I felt myself expanding, growing to a monstrous size. Power flooded me as a ball of crackling darkness filled the valley around us, pushing back the brilliance of Solnetsi's presence. And then I realized.

"Hail, Herald. I did not expect to be summoned to you so soon." Matir had no physical body. He was using mine as the base to recreate himself, drawing on Karalti's mana and my physical presence. As Matir stroked his wings on the air, they were OUR wings. As he pulled out of the tempest of dark energy, it was OUR throat that roared, our claws that flexed as we dove at Solnetsi - now only slightly larger than we were. Matir slammed into her with furious force, grappling in the air. Lightning discharged over us, again and again, but Matir tanked the hits and blasted her in the face with piercingly cold blackfire. The goddess shrieked as we tumbled, spinning in an aerial waltz that ended when her back slammed into the sharp-edged ripples of the impact crater. Dust blacked out everything as we snapped jaws down around her throat, shaking it.

"Karalti!? Where are you?!" Sitting in the co-pilot's seat of my body, it was all I could do to yell for her.

"I'm okay!" Karalti sounded exhausted, but alive. "I healed in time... I'm trying to stay out of the way, because holy shit."

"BROTHER! WHY DO YOU FIGHT FOR THEM?!" Solnetsi squealed, claws raking my - Matir's - belly. I felt them pierce scale and flesh and tear gaseous mana free from our body. "SLAVERS... CRIMINALS... I FELT HER DIE...!"

Matir wasn't trying to kill her. As Solnetsi bellowed and raged under her brother's bulk, he clung to her with claws and jaws, restraining her from hurting him more as we rolled across the shattered landscape. Matir snarled in frustration as Solnetsi blasted him with a radiant burst of light that ripped a long, sparkling gash down the side of his neck and one wingshoulder. The summoned Matir had no blood.

"Hector... I am going to eject you with a teleportation spell to Karalti, and hold my sister here. Solnetsi is more machine than dragon - time has not weakened her like it did me. Not having you incorporated into the summoned body will lessen me tremendously, make me less real, but you must go to the Eyrie, now." Matir's voice was firm. "You will be able to call me again, but even with your body and soul, I cannot hold her from the tower for long. Minutes, perhaps. Usta is calling her daughter - can you hear her, Karalti?"

"I can." I didn't know Karalti had been on the line, so to speak, but she replied with certainty.

"Take the dragons. Let Solnetsi burn her wrath on the Eyrie, and be free. She will come to her senses, but-"Matir grunted as Solnetsi screeched loudly enough that the walls of the impact crater rumbled, and a bolt of lightning hit the shield of darkness that encapsulated our draconic body. Matir healed faster than was possible, his blue flesh knitting back into muscle and ebony scale with each wound, but every time he had to heal, the timer on his summon went down. He'd started with thirty minutes: there were only twenty left. "Go!"

Just as quickly as I'd incorporated into the summoned dragon, I was myself again. I formed out of a cloud of energy just above Karalti's saddle, falling awkwardly onto her back. Disorientated, I grasped the saddle with one hand and the Spear with the other, and looked past my dragon's shoulder to see the two titans rolling across the ground in a cloud of dust and mana: tails and wings lashing, jaws snapping as they roared and screeched. Anything they collided with was destroyed by their sheer size. As I was gaping at the kaiju battle, a thin whisper pierced the exhausted buzzing in my brain.

"Herald, daughter... come to me."Usta's voice, struggling on every word, broke through the sounds of clashing demi-gods. "Please. The Eyrie trembles with the screams of dragons seeking their Queen. I am too weak. Please, before my daughters begin the slaughter of succession."

Karalti tensed underneath me, then threw herself skyward with a sluggish downstroke that belied her exhaustion. I bent down low to minimize drag, casting one look back as Solnetsi gained the upper hand, driving huge blasts of wind with her wings as she climbed on top of Matir's semi-translucent, weakened shade. She began to slap and rake his muzzle with her metal claws as he struggled beneath her.

Minutes. We had minutes before the Eyrie, and all its Bonded dragons, were destroyed.