Vaegon was certain, that at any moment, the pain of the injury would cause Loudin to let go and fall back to the earth. He grabbed up the ax, intending to take a swipe at the beast, but by then, the only things low enough for him to possibly hit, were Loudin’s dangling feet. A wing beat later, even they were up and out of the elf’s range.
A different type of roar, higher in pitch and more avian, came from where the wyvern was swooping back down at Mikahl’s prone body.
Talon was fluttering about it, slashing, and clawing at the beast’s horny, black-scaled head, trying to take it off its intended course. Vaegon charged across the clearing towards them, raising the ax over his head as he went. Apparently, Talon got a claw into the wyvern’s eye, because it forgot Mikahl for a moment, and thrashed its head about in agony while hovering a few feet off the ground. Through some warning from Talon, Mikahl managed to roll his half-dazed self out from under the angry beast. Vaegon saw the opportunity, and heaved the ax at the creature, just like he had at the hellcat. Talon barely managed to flap clear of the heavy wooden handle, as it came whooshing by. Vaegon had thrown it so hard, that Mikahl heard the powerful “WHOOMP! WHOOMP! WHOOMP!” of it spinning through the air.
The blade hit the wyvern in its face with a sickening crunch, sending it flailing into the ground, where it landed hard on its side. The splatters of blood that sprayed both Talon and Mikahl, began to sizzle and burn through feather and flesh. Instinctually, the hawkling made for water. The stream was close for the bird, whose tiny, hollow bones and body would be devastated, if the hot, acidy stuff got through its layers of feathers.
On the ground, the wyvern wheezed, sputtered, and managed to slink a few feet away, before finally falling still. All around it, everything, even the grass, was being eaten away by its corrosive blood.
Loudin’s horrifying scream filled the air, and echoed off of the hard surfaces around the valley’s rim. Mikahl rolled to his feet and followed Vaegon’s gaze with a knot of dread growing inside him. It was an awful sight to look upon, and seeing it, broke something inside Mikahl.
Loudin’s intestines had gotten hung in the branches of a tree. A few yards of guts had been pulled out of him, yet, he still hung onto the sword with both arms, as the powerful wings of the hellcat pulled, and the beast twisted and yanked, trying to get free of him and the tangle. Another cry of anguish, and pain erupted from the Seawardsman, and chilled Mikahl to the bone.
“Let it go, old man,” Mikahl whispered under his breath, but he knew in his heart that Loudin wouldn’t do it. He felt the sizzling pain of the wyvern’s blood burning his face and arms, but he ignored it. At the moment, there was no room in him to feel such trivial discomfort. He would rather lose the sword, and live his whole life in the shame of doing so, than to see his friend die this way. His very soul cried out for Loudin to let go. Tears welled in his eyes and he started to look away.
Loudin screamed again. This time, it was cut off, as another few feet of his intestines were yanked out of him. Like some macabre kite, he hung there, suspended in midair. One arm came loose from over the sheathed blade, and it looked as if the hunter was about to fall, but his other arm was crooked over the sword, and he refused to let it go.
Loudin was beyond pain now. He felt the pull against his insides, and he felt the raw, cold mountain air touching places inside him that were never meant to be exposed. He felt the tearing when the hellcat lurched, and tore more of his guts loose. Something ruptured that time, and the world was growing fuzzy and gray, and yet he still refused to let go. He tried to scream again, but only a hot whoosh of air came bubbling out of him from somewhere besides his throat. This was it then, he conceded. It was over.
Better to die for a friend, than to rot away in some woodsy cabin all alone anyway.
He was done for, but as futile as all his effort seemed to be at the moment, Loudin still thought he could beat the beast.
“You fargin, flying, panther-horse hell-born bitch,” he tried to yell, but no audible sound came. “You’ll not have Mik’s sword!” he finished anyway. With the last bit of his strength, he reached out with his free hand, and grabbed Ironspike’s leather wrapped hilt, and started sliding it out of its scabbard.
Mikahl hadn’t been able to watch. His carelessness had not only cost him King Balton’s sword, but had cost his friend his life. He had failed his father and King. He had let Lord Gregory’s death be in vain. He had wasted the Giant King’s time, and on top of it all, he had killed Loudin.
What a fool he had been to have even entertained the notion that he might be a king of some sort. A King’s bastard born fool is all he was, a squire who had grown too big for his britches, and had carelessly thrown away his honor, and a dear friend’s life, on a whim. He had failed. He wasn’t worthy to be called King. He was just a fool.
Vaegon’s sudden gasp carried a tinge of hope in it. Just enough to bring Mikahl out of his shame, to look up and see what it could possibly be that mocked him so. What he saw, made his own breath catch, and drew him stumbling forward. First one step, then another, and then he was running. Ironspike was flying through the air. Its mirror smooth blade reflected the pastel colors of the morning in sparkling turns as it came spinning towards the ground. It landed blade down, sinking two thirds of its length into the earth from the momentum. Mikahl stopped and stared at it. It wavered there a moment, and then stilled. It looked more like a glimmering, jeweled cross, than a sword. He turned away from it just in time to see Loudin’s body fall crashing into the trees.
The old hunter didn’t even grunt, as his body slammed, and broke, over the heavy limbs. Mikahl prayed that his friend had died with an inner peace. Loudin’s valiant death had saved Mikahl a lifetime of shame. The man could have easily let go long ago, and died somewhat intact, and without so much excruciating pain. Mikahl swore then and there that he would never give up. Neither Loudin’s, nor Lord Gregory’s, sacrifice would be in vain.
The angry roar of the hellcat, as it circled around and dove back towards him, made Mikahl’s blood boil with rage and vengeful anger. As he pulled the sword free of the earth, he welcomed the beast’s approach. Loudin’s death couldn’t be avenged this day, Mikahl told himself. This beast was just a weapon, or a tool sent by another, but he could send a message to whomever it was that wanted Ironspike so badly, a message that was plain and clear.
Ironspike’s blade lit the clearing, like a star, and a symphony of magic filled Mikahl’s ears. The hellcat lowered its hind claws, and at a blinding speed, came swooping down on Mikahl. The surge of static heat that filled Mikahl then was tremendous. A dozen different voices sang into his brain, each one a separate melody that added to the angelic chorus in his mind. Each voice represented a different means of magical attack, and all of this, somehow, became crystal clear to him in that moment. He knew he could access them with a thought, but he knew he didn’t need them for this. He felt the time around him slow, as if the whole world, save for him, was moving through molasses. That effect, and the heat of his rage was more than enough to mark this dark thing.
The hellcat was on him now, and even though the world had slowed, the beast was coming in hard and fast. As Mikahl leapt, and spun in the air, the blue glow of his blade went through all the shades of lavender and purple, until its glow was a deep, bloody red. His head came up under the creature, and he twisted in his spin, so that its dagger-like fore claws missed his shoulders, and its hind legs swept past him. Only then, did he complete the now white-hot blade’s blinding arc.
Vaegon watched in fearful awe as Mikahl pulled the sword free of the ground, and strode forward to meet the streaking approach of the beast. The sword was bright, radiant, and quickly became the cherry color of forge heated steal. Mikahl leapt into the air, his acrobatic movement so swift, that all Vaegon could make out, was a furious blur. It was all happening so quickly, that it made the elf’s head spin.
One second, it looked as if the hellcat would grab onto the boy and carry him off, like it had done Lord Gregory. A fraction of a heartbeat later, Mikahl was behind the beast, his sword sweeping like a white-hot sheer through the creature’s rear thighs as if they were nothing more than butter. As the beast’s hind legs tumbled to the ground, free of its body, the would-be bloody stumps sizzled and smoked. The intense heat of the white-hot blade had cauterized them cleanly. A third piece of the hellcat spun smoking through the air, like a half-embered piece of firewood. Later, Vaegon would find out that it was the spiked tip of the beast’s tail, the very thing that had gouged his eye out of his face and ruined his elven sight.
The creature was ten feet past Mikahl, raising its bulk up on its wings, so that it might clear the trees, and come around again, when it realized what had happened to its hind-legs and tail. The primal shriek of terror and pain that it let out was earsplitting. It was all the legless hellcat could do to stay aloft, as it fled howling over the trees and out of the valley.
Mikahl felt no pride or joy in the rush of emotion that came to him after the beast had gone. Instead, he fell into a crumbling heap of sorrow, and cried out for the loss of his friend.
The tattoo covered Seawardsman, who would be forever immortalized in the histories of both elves and men as, “Loudin of the Reyhall,” was dead.
Vaegon watched over Mikahl until Hyden finally returned from the ravine. Both the humans were exhausted, so the elf took on the task of cutting Loudin’s body down out of the trees.
It took most of the day, and as horrible as the work was, he knew he was the best one for it. Not only did he know the trees, and have a way with them, as all elves did, but the fact that he wasn’t human, made the death of the hunter a thing he could accept more peaceably than his two companions might.
Once the body was on the ground and intact, Vaegon rolled it up in a woolen blanket, and set an old elven warding around it that would protect it for the night. Mikahl would need to take part in the burial, but only after he had rested. Where elves might let their dead decompose back into the ecosystem, Vaegon understood that the nature of the short-lived humans, and their delicate mentality, made the funerary process a necessity. Not so much for the deceased, but for the friends and relatives that survived him.
While he was working, Vaegon heard the trees whisper of the great evil they were feeling among their roots. The wyvern’s blood was in the soil now, and they feared what it would do to them. They could sense that the unnatural beast’s presence in the world was just the beginning of something far worse.
Vaegon listened, and a tiny speck of fear took root in his heart as well. It was no mountain-born wyvern that he had killed this day. That thing was evil and born in a place unnatural; a place from which things shouldn’t be allowed to escape. He understood then that some great dark force had let it and the hellcat loose, and just as the trees feared, far worse was more than likely on its way.
The next day, when the three companions came to the clearing to bury Loudin, they found the strangest of things. In the middle of the clearing, a perfect circle of fragrant blue flowers had grown overnight. The center of the circle was exactly where Ironspike had pierced the earth after Loudin had thrown it, and the whole thing was easily twenty paces across. Mikahl chose that spot to bury his friend. The sign of the good cross that the sword had made, as it wavered there, was fresh in his mind. He felt it would be an ill omen to bury the hunter anywhere else.
The coincidence that he had met Loudin in a clearing, not unlike this one, wasn’t lost on Mikahl either. Where that glade had had a pond, full of sparkling water, this one had an island of magical flowers. It was thoughts like this that kept Mikahl from breaking down as they piled up a great mound of stones over the grave.
The chore was done, slowly and carefully, so as to avoid damaging the flowers around the burial mound. When it was done, even the trees blessed the old hunter’s passing. The magic from the sword, that had leeched into the soil and caused the sapphire blooms to suddenly erupt, had also spread through the earth, and eaten away the corrosive power of the wyvern’s black blood. Vaegon heard the trees whisper a promise to watch over the sacred place, and told his companions as much as they returned to the camp just after dark.
That night, they started using a watch system. Vaegon would be first, then Hyden, then Mikahl. Mikahl insisted on being last. He didn’t explain why and no one asked.
The next morning, as dawn lit the valley shadows, they learned the reason. The young Westlander was going through a furious series of workouts with his softly glowing blade. Hyden and Vaegon both woke, and watched, with respectful awe, as Mikahl went through grueling combinations of slashes, thrusts, and turns, each more strenuous, and graceful than the last. When he was done, he bowed deeply to the four corners of the compass, and even managed a thin smile at the others, as he toweled himself off with one of Loudin’s old shirts.
Through the darkened part of his watch, Mikahl had tried to adapt the sheath from Duke Fairchild’s sword to fit Ironspike’s blade. He managed to work its narrower width so that he could slide his blade down to the bottom, but it was still a hand’s width too short. When the belt was around his waist, a small part of Ironspike’s blade rose glowing up out of it, and the pommel rubbed at his ribs uncomfortably, but it would have to do for now. Ironspike’s scabbard was gone.
After breaking their fast on some dried meat and stream water, Vaegon grew tired of watching Mikahl fiddle with the ill-fitting scabbard, and excused himself from the camp. With a troubled look on his face, he trekked out into the forest, and disappeared.
Hyden was lying down. He appeared to be asleep, but he wasn’t. Talon was out exploring the valley, and through the hawkling’s senses, Hyden was soaring with him.