Spear of Destiny: Chapter 7

The pair clashed chest to chest, foreclaws locked as they strained against each other. Karalti began to pump her wings, using the draft generated by the huge membranes to drive her and her enemy forward along the ground. Claws shrieked and sparked against stone as she pushed the slavering, mutated dragon back toward the wall, and bodily rammed her into another of the bulging lava domes.

The stone shattered under the impact, and magma spurted out around the Sporemaiden's shoulders. The Sporemaiden let out an unearthly scream, like rusted gears grinding against one another, and struggled pitifully as Karalti pushed it back into the spray of lava and held it there like she was trying to drown it. Magma splattered my dragon's heat-resistant scales. The first droplets bounced away, but as the molten stone kept flowing, the smoldering particles began to stick. She snarled with pain, tanking the damage until she could no longer stand it. But as she let go, the yellow Sporemaiden’s head darted forward, belching another cloud of spores right into Karalti's face.

“NO!” My fear for my dragon overrode everything else. My pulse pounded in my temples as I slowly, haltingly strained against the Rotmother's grip. My HP began to trickle away as my joints popped and my ribs groaned, but I shoved the pain from my consciousness and fought with everything I had. I felt my fingernails distend, and my sharp teeth grow out into a double row of serrated fangs... and when my struggles proved futile, I howled and began to bite, rip and tear into anything I could reach. The Mark of Matir turned icy cold.

[You activated Mortal Grudge!]

[Speed increased by 25% for 60 seconds. 2.5 Adrenaline Point regen for 60 seconds!]

[You have been struck with a Death Sentence! Countdown: 60 seconds]

[Sporemaiden has died! Karalti gains 966 EXP!]

Cold power crawled through my limbs, as I shredded the tentacle gripping my arm. The one around my waist slackened, and I pulled myself free and Jumped, boiling with rage, and slammed weapon-first into the underbelly of the diseased Queen. The bulk of the dragon shuddered as the flaming Spear gouged into it, dealing blow after blow of raw force.

[You deal 8662 Damage to Rotmother! 13,449/28,773]

Tentacles flailed at me as I fell amongst the rain of burning fungus. Fangs bared, I hit Shadow Dance and dashed back up into the air. Once, twice... and then boosted out of it like a black meteor to land another Umbra Burst right in the dragon's gaping ribcage maw. Shards of black ice burst out of her body like a gruesome flower.

[Umbra Burst deals 1990 damage!]

[Sporemother is Frozen!]

[Death Sentence: 32 seconds.]

Frigid steam erupted from the crackling tissue, letting out a shrill, scream-like whistle... and then the Dragonrot fibers meshing the queen’s corpse to the ceiling began to give way. The Rotmother’s body slumped, then roll-sagged to one side. I caught one of her protruding ribs, hanging on with one arm. “Karalti! Look out!”

Karalti pressed herself to a wall as the hundred-ton corpse pulled away from the ceiling and collapsed. I Shadow Dashed away just before it hit the floor. And boy, did it hit the floor: the Rotmother smashed open the thin veneer of stone between it and the lava that gurgled underneath. Magma splashed everywhere, and then the dead queen began to sink. Tentacles lashed out, smashing into everything within reach. Karalti tanked the blows, crying out through gritted jaws. I blew another 20 HP to Shadow Dance out of range. The fungus-infected flesh of the Rotmother shriveled black before catching alight, and soon the cavern was full of choking smoke. All we had to do was avoid the flailing and smashing as the lava disintegrated her, dealing upwards of three thousand damage a second until my HUD’s victory chime rang through the cavern.

[You have defeated Rotmother and Sporemaidens!]

[Your Death Sentance is cured!]

[You gain 2012 EXP! Karalti gains 966 EXP!]

I landed on top of the Rotmother's corpse and bounced. I was not expecting to bounce. The spongy landing pad threw me back up into the air, head over ass, and sent me careening toward the nearest wall. I braced for impact - but Karalti's head darted out from my right, and she delicately snatched me out of the air in her jaws.

“Thanks.” I sagged in her teeth, and coughed as the smoke haze began to build down from the roof of the cavern, then groaned as a glowing blue ring jumped up in my HUD. “Oh, for fuck's sake.”

[You are suffering from Mana Poisoning! -1 HP per second!]

“I know it's kind of obvious, but we really need to get out of here.” Karalti dropped me down. Anxiety and stress vibrated through our Bond. “I'm sure I breathed in some of those spores... I don't know if I'm sick...”

“Don't worry. We can sort that out once we're out of here.” I stumbled around the cooling waves of magma, coughing as the Queen's corpse continued to belch clouds of mana-laced smoke into the cave. “Can you loot the bodies?”

“Uhh... okay?” Karalti seemed slightly taken aback. She was immune to mana poisoning and could hold her breath a lot longer than I could, though, so she turned to do just that. “I just want to get out of here.”

“I’m working on it, but if we don't get some decent loot from this dungeon, I'm going to kick a baby dolphin into the sun.”  I chugged a potion and stored the bottle just before I reached the door. At a loss for how to remove the Star of Endless Night from the Spear of Nine Spheres, I just mashed the flat of the blade against the socket.

The hole drew the weapon against it like a magnet, locking the stone into place. A blue-black web of energy shot out from it across the surface of the metal. Gears groaned and clunked from inside the walls as the doors began to winch apart with painful slowness. The halves made it about a foot to either side before the mana lines sputtered, and the whole thing lurched to a lop-sided halt with an earsplitting squeal.

“Ow.” Karalti paced back to me, her tail and wings drooping. “Great. Just as well I can polymorph.”

“Right?” I glanced back at her. “No loot, huh?”

“I got some gross mushrooms?” She winced. “You know, if you ever feel like killing me.”

Sighing, I reached up to squeeze a handful of my hair. It had been a while since I'd washed, and the braided mohawk that ran from the top of my skull to the nape of my neck was a frizzled mess. “Come on, Tidbit. Let's keep on going. We have to find grandma's house before this fucking place kills us both.”

***

Karalti had to polymorph down to her human form to fit through the small crack in the door. We crept through into the dark, following a dry, hot corridor that wound for half a mile into the mountains before opening up into an airy obsidian hall lined with six dragon-sized biers. The massive skeletons of Lahati’s Queensguard lay on them. The dragons were surrounded by heaps of treasure, curled as if in sleep. The polished stone around us reflected their image - and ours - up and down to infinity.

“Wow...” Karalti craned her head, looking around. “I think we’re nearly there.”

“I'd say so. And I'm pretty sure I know what's through that gateway.” I broke into a jog, and my dragon followed at an easy run.

“You know...” Karalti drew up beside me, matching my pace. “Other than the dragons we fought at the Prezyemi Line, I've never seen another living dragon before. And they were so warped with Void energy that they hardly count.”

“Now you mention it, yeah.” I thought back, keeping an eye on my stamina bar. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Just sad.” Karalti glanced at one of the biers as we passed it by. “After this... after I gain the Path of Royalty... will we go back to Ilia? To save the others?”

“If we can, Tidbit.” I nodded, brows furrowing. “Believe me. That's something that's been on my mind ever since I left the Eyrie.”

I could still remember the first time I laid eyes on the Knight-Commander of the Order, Skyr Arnaud, and his white dragon, Talenth. The rider-dragon pair and a couple other Knights of St. Grigori had rescued me and the Lysian sorceress Rutha from the wreck of a slave ship on its way to the far north of Artana. Talenth had been breathtaking. Regal. And even more than that… from the moment I saw him, I knew that I was looking at more than just a programmed NPC, or an animal. Talenth was majestic. Regal. And he had a mind – an intelligence as real as my own.

As soon as my feet left the ground, my fate was sealed. I would become a dragon rider, so I ran off to dragon school to do just that. But I'd been there only a few days before I started to sense something was rotten in the Eyrie. Something was wrong with the Knight-Commander, and even the dragons themselves. My tutor, Skyr Tymos, tried to warn me... but he - like everyone else there other than Arnaud - was physically unable to reveal the dark secret at the heart of the Order. It was Karalti's mother, straining against the restrictions of the powerful magical geas that bound her and everyone else to silence, who led me to the truth. The dragons in the Eyrie were slaves, blood-bound to the will of the Knight-Commander. And because the dragons were bound to the geas, their riders were, too.

It was only after months of living with a dragon, studying her species, and talking to people like Rutha and Rin that I understood how unnatural and warped the Eyrie really was. Solonkratsu were a civilized species, with their own social order, mating rituals, family bonds, religion, even architecture. In the Order, all of that was suppressed. If Karalti had hatched in the Eyrie, the Knights would have turned her into a flightless broodmare, just like her mother.

That thought had haunted me ever since Karalti and I had Bonded. To save her, I'd had to leave her mother behind, chained deep underground. The most fucked up thing about it? According to Rin, her suffering - and the geas itself - were non-canonical. The ethical shitstorm in the Eyrie only existed thanks to Archemi's Number One Control Freak: Michael Pratt, the digital ghost otherwise known as Ororgael.

“Soo… What do you think the Heart of Memory recorded?” Karalti asked. “About, you know...?”

I startled back to the present. “Huh? Oh, Baldr. Honestly, I have no idea. We'll find out once we're back in Kalla Sahasi.”

“I wonder if he really beat you?”

“I’m pretty sure he beat my ass like a red-headed stepchild. Given he cheated to Level 9000 somehow, I’m not going to give myself too much shit for losing a duel.”

Neither of us even spared a glance at the treasure heaped around the bodies of the dead. We passed them by, taking the stairs that led to the gate at the end. The huge black doors swung in ahead of us on silent hinges, opening into a familiar chamber.

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