Spear of Destiny: Chapter 4

My first stop was the sacrificial well. Karalti hung back while I hopped up onto the altar, then sprung onto the edge and held a torch out over the abyss. Like the well I’d used to get into Lahati’s Tomb a month or so ago, it looked to be bottomless.

“Jumping into one of these worked last time,” I said aloud. “Maybe you can polymorph, and we can try it again?”

“Uhh…”But before Karalti could meaningfully reply, we felt the room exhale around us.

“Herald, no. Do not jump. You cannot reach me this way.” A sweet, sad voice slithered on the breeze, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere. “This sacred well was corrupted a long time ago, contaminated by creatures of the Void, and Matir holds no sway over it. You must come to me through the gauntlet my handmaidens built…and for that, I am sorry.”

Karalti shivered. “Matriarch?”

“Yes, child.” Lahati replied. “I wish I could convey your birthright here, but I cannot. You must thwart the traps and defeat the guardians who protect my tomb. And you must hurry. The song of the Caul of Souls grows louder with every passing day. Reach my resting place, and I will give you the last of my power before I move on.”

“I understand, Matriarch.” Karalti bowed her head.

“Beware, both of you. The protections and magic laid into my resting place have begun to decay with time. As the Caul’s magic has waned, so has my own. They are tied together,” Lahati said. “I will see you soon… I hope.”

The breeze withdrew back into the fathomless darkness ahead, taking Lahati’s unseen presence with it. I dropped from the edge of the well to the floor, frowning. Karalti was breathing hard, her pupils so wide her eyes looked black. I went to her, and lay a hand on her wrist.

“You okay?” I asked.

Her crests lifted at my touch, and then she shuddered, shaking out her wings. “Yeah. It’s just…”

“Just what?”

Karalti arched her neck and looked down. “That’s… the first time I’ve spoken to any of my blood kin. Lahati is the closest thing to a mother I have.”

I nodded, letting the silence hang for a moment.

“We have to go to her burial chamber, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Is she…”she trailed off again. “Does she…look really super dead?”

“No,” I replied. “She looks… well, to borrow a cliché, it’s kind of like she’s sleeping. Why?”

Karalti let out a tense breath, snorting through her nostrils.

“It’s hard enough knowing she’s dead.” My dragon crouched down, extending a wing for me to climb. “That hole looks big enough to fly in.”

“Let’s walk first,” I said. “Tomb traps are no joke. And if this place has traps meant to take down dragons, or Drachan, they’re going to be brutal.”

Karalti rumbled as she paced forward into the cave, her wings flicking impatiently along her flanks. I held the torch up, but the rippling flame barely even pierced the darkness. I stubbed it out on a passing stalagmite, then folded it back into my inventory and equipped one of my newer arcane items, the Bangle of the Master Thief. It gave +5 to Dex, +15 to lockpicking and safecracking skills, and - most importantly - Darkvision. To gain Darkvision, I had to charge it with high-grade liquid mana. I searched my Inventory for it, and frowned when I only turned up one small vial.

“Weird,” I said. “I’m sure I had more mana than this.”

“Did you leave it at the castle, maybe?” Karalti stepped carefully, following her nose in the absence of sight.

“Must have.” I scanned my inventory a second time, and noticed something I’d missed in the first pass. Not the mana: it was another artifact. The Heart of Memory, a device Rin had made for me that was intended to preserve some of my memories when or if I died. The ruby mana core glowed with a pulsing red light.

“Huh.” I frowned. “That gadget Rin gave me took a recording when I died.”

“Ooh.” Karalti craned her head back. “What’s on it?”

“Dunno. It might have recorded what happened with Baldr just before I died. But we’ll have to wait until we get back to Kalla Sahasi to watch the playback.” I uncapped my only vial of mana and attached the vacuum-sealed end to the spigot on the bracelet. The artifact sucked the liquid out of the vial with a small hiss, lighting up with a pale blue light. Suddenly, I was able to see. The cavern depths expanded out like a sonar pulse, revealing the interior of the cavern for the next fifty feet or so.

“We've got darkvision for an hour. Let's make the best of it.” I stood up on the saddle to look past her neck. “It looks like maybe the floor stops up ahead, and... oh jeez.”

The cavern ahead of us narrowed into a dragon’s nightmare: A tunnel, barely wide enough to permit a dragon to open her wings. It was lined with countless rings of massive spines, huge angled columns of lethally sharp crystal that pointed away from us into the darkness. It reminded me of a fish trap. Fish could go in, but they couldn’t get out.

“Don't worry,” Karalti said, firmly. “Like you just said: we're the best dragonrider team in Archemi. This tunnel's made for dragons bigger than me. We can do this.”

“We're going to have to time your wingbeats just right,” I said. “Push back and build up some speed. We don't know what the rest of the obstacle course looks like.”

“Right.” She lowered her chest down, lifted her tail, and put her hands down to walk backwards the way we'd come.

“Can you get a visual on the tunnel through the Bond?”I asked.

“Yeah. As long as your eyes are open.” She stood up straight and weaved her head like a falcon, tuning her internal gyroscope. “Hold on... and stare straight forward.”

Karalti spread her wings and beat them stiffly, loosening her shoulders. I felt her second heart kick into gear and fall into sync. Dragons had two hearts: one that pumped blood like a normal heart, and a larger one that drove the mana-infused lymphatic fluid that magically lightened her body and pressurized her limbs. It was my cue to kneel down and brace.

The dragon roared a challenge as she broke into a lumbering charge. She built speed, almost a run, and launched herself from the very edge of the ravine. I ducked as the spines grew uncomfortably close. There was barely ten feet of clearance on all sides, a gap which narrowed sharply up ahead.

“Burst flight!” I thought.

Karalti read my mind - or maybe I read hers. She brought her wings in toward her flanks, teetering as the tunnel narrowed into a one-way squeeze chute just barely big enough to permit a dragon's body to pass. She shot forward like a missile. Just past the choke was a space for her to gain a single wingbeat, and then she had to do it again.

“There's no room to gain lift!” She struggled to keep a smooth trajectory as entropy set in, jostling the air around us.

The hair on my arms stood on end as my stomach rose, and I had to cling with all four limbs as her body curved into a high-speed dive: right towards the spikes. “Just hold on and don't stall out! There's a wing space just past this choke!”

I could see cored out sections of rock to either side. The connection between Karalti's mind and mine intensified, as powerful as I'd ever felt. Karalti's concentration was absolute as she shot into the open space, snapped her wings out, and drove herself forward and up. There was only room for two wingbeats before she had to swallow-dive again.

“There's another space ahead!” Adrenaline pounded through my bloodstream. My mouth was dry, hands sweaty, eyes tearing up as I forced them to stay open. “One, two, now!”

Gasping for breath, Karalti beat her wings in the small gap, barely keeping herself out of terminal velocity... and then the roof opened up and the tunnel curved sharply to the right. The dragon threw her wings open and used her tail to swing into a fast, soaring arc around the corner. Gravity bore down on my back, crushing the air from my lungs before she swung back, and we burst out of the gauntlet into a massive lava chamber.

“We did it!” She cried. Even her telepathic voice was breathless. “But there's nowhere to land!”

There sure wasn't. Titanic streams of magma seethed below us, belching from the walls into a great river of molten rock. Six monolithic statues were carved out of the walls to either side of the rumbling lava. Dragons, each one standing with their hands cupped around a different item. At the other end of the canyon was the entry to a cave, sealed by a great metal portal.

[Warning: Temperature is dangerously high!]

[You are overheating!]

My dragonrider mutations gave me resilience to extremes of temperature: up to fifty degrees Celsius, which was about a hundred- and twenty-degrees Fahrenheit. My HUD showed the temperature in this cavern: 93 degrees c, enough to cook a normal human alive. Even as that wonderful thought passed through my mind, a Hyperthermia ring jumped up in my display: blank, at first, but slowly filling with red.

“We've got about five minutes to figure this out,”I said as sweat began to pour down my face. “No pressure.”

The bumpy thermals twirling up from the lava were a pleasure cruise compared to the spiny tunnel, the heat lifting Karalti's wings with hardly any effort on her part. As she glided past the door, I twisted to keep it in my line of sight. There were six carved runes engraved on the surface, with hollow channels waiting to receive mana.

“Can you read those symbols?” I asked her. “They might be Solonkratsu.”

Karalti winged over and flew back, pulling into a slow glide as we passed by again. “Yeah, kind of! They're words of power. But they all say the same thing.”

“Which is?”

“'Breath'. It's different Words for the same little-w word. Breath.”

“Hold steady.” I craned my head and zoomed my vision in on one of the flanking statues. The stone dragon had his wings folded in, head bowed. He presented an ornate goblet in his clawed hands - a goblet with a metal wick. “It's a statue puzzle. We have to light these statues with your breath weapon.”

“All six statues? That'll use up half my charges!”

“I know, but the alternative is a lava bath.” My hyperthermia ring was already a quarter of the way full, and I was starting to shiver from the heat. “I don't know if we have to do them in some kind of order. Let's try one and see if it stays lit.”

Karalti flicked a wingtip and coasted toward the statue with the goblet. Her chest swelled against the saddle, and she let out a thin, controlled plume of brilliant white flames. The sticky Ghost Fire lashed over the goblet and the statue's chest, kindling the wick to life. The statue's blank crystal eyes lit up - and so did one of the runes on the door.

“I don't think it matters,” I said, hooking my feet under the saddle straps. “Let's do a circuit, and make it fast.”

“Gotcha!” The dragon swooped forward, trusting me to hold on as she slingshot along the line of statues. She blasted them, lighting wicks on a lantern, a crystal, and a knife. She swung back around at the end of the canyon, torching the last pair of statues - and the door slid out of its frame and began to slowly roll sidewards into the wall.

“That... was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Which immediately makes me kind of suspicious.” I was trembling now, panting from the heat that crawled between my skin and the surface of my armor. I leaned with Karalti as she banked and winged over, soaring toward the opening door. It was lit from behind, revealing a glittering white tunnel. “What the fuck is that?”

“I dunno, but I sure hope I can land on it. You're boiling and I'm exhausted.” Even though we'd only flown a short distance, Karalti's stamina had dropped sharply between her hunger and the stressful, intricate maneuvers she'd had to perform to get us this far.

I zoomed in on the rapidly approaching tunnel - and winced. “No. You have to stay in the air. That's web. And I'm pretty sure that whatever spun it is big enough to eat a dragon.”

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