He looked up, and saw in the distance, a brilliant winged horse banking an arc through the sky. Its rider sent blazing, blue blasts back at the massive, red-scaled beast, which had just rumbled the morning with its rage. Hyden couldn’t say what amazed him most about the scene, Mikahl, riding on a winged horse made of flame, or the way the snaky dragon corkscrewed its bulk effortlessly through the air behind him, to avoid the attacks.
Forgetting the crystal for the moment, instinct took over. All Hyden knew, was that he had to do something to save his friend. He had talked to squirrels, hawklings, and wolves, now it was time to try something bigger. He remembered Vaegon’s tale of Pratchert, focused his concentration, and in his head, he called out to the dragon.
Mikahl was certain that he had hit the dragon, but it had twisted around his magical bolt of energy like a snake sliding around a tree limb. Its agility in the air was breathtaking. The humongous beast started to snap at him, but paused for a heartbeat. It shot past him, and the woman riding on its back shook a strange looking staff at Mikahl and snarled. She looked angry, and half of her head was bald, and scarred. She was screaming something at the dragon now, but Mikahl’s attention was suddenly yanked away, as his bright horse rose up swiftly on a stall of flurrying wing beats.
The earsplitting crack of the dragon’s whip-like tail, as it snapped on the point in space where he had just been, brought his mind back into full focus. When he turned, the dragon was darting off towards the castle, on long, powerful strokes of its leathery wings.
He guided the Bright Horse lower. Vaegon had been trapped on a lone section of wall that was still standing, and he hadn’t looked too well. Mikahl had seen all the blood on his arm, and had watched as Vaegon’s leg had been cut out from under him just before he had knocked the attacker off the wall.
To Mikahl’s surprise, the elf was no long longer up on that part of the wall. In a panic, and with a stomach full of icy dread, he circled lower, around the unnatural plateau, searching the dying battles, and the dead, for his friend. His stomach lurched, and the ice moved to his bowels when he saw the elf. He clinched his eyes shut, hoping that when he opened them, it wouldn’t be Vaegon he saw lying there, half buried in debris, but it was. The patched eye, and glittering hair, left no room for doubt. Without thinking, he made to land the Bright Horse, and try to help unearth his fallen friend, but then realized, as he came in closer, that it was only part of the elf that he was seeing. The lower half of Vaegon’s body wasn’t buried. It had been sheared away, and was nowhere to be seen.
Sadness tried to envelop him. King Balton, Lord Gregory, and Loudin, not to mention Grrr, and now Vaegon, the only elf in the realm brave enough to stand and fight this evil, had all been killed. How many of the people he loved had to die. Were any of them alive anymore? What had happened to Hyden, Talon, and the other Great Wolves? He didn’t know, and that fact caused an explosion of determination to burst inside of him.
In response to his growing outrage, the radiance and power of Ironspike’s blade magnified, and shifted from blue to purple, and then to a heated shade of crimson. He spurred the bright horse up into the heights of the morning sky, until he saw the Choska demon. He was pleased to see it coming at him. In a blinding, white-hot rage, he urged his magical mount into a hard gallop towards the approaching bat-like beast, in a sort of midair jouster’s charge. He had had enough. It was time to put an end to this madness.
“The dragon comes!” Queen Willa hissed at Hyden Hawk.
“Aye,” Hyden replied simply. He gave her a grim smile. “Cast no spells, lady. Tell the guard to stand down.”
“You’d let it roast us?” she asked incredulously.
His scowl silenced any further protests, and she did as he bade her.
“Show no fear. When it is upon us, signal me.”
He put an arrow to the string of the old elven longbow, and started toward the edge of the tower. Once he was at the parapet, he ducked behind a crenel, and set his eyes on the frightened Queen. In his head, he spoke to the dragon again.
Shaella screamed at Claret vehemently for flying her away from the one on the fiery Pegasus. Claret just hissed, and suffered the anguish of Shaella’s punishment through the collar. She was glad that Shaella was yelling and screaming at her, because it kept Shaella from hurting her with something far worse. Claret also knew that Shaella could only do so much punishing while they were in flight, so she went to investigate the strange and powerful voice that was calling her away. It hurt her terribly to go against the will of her rider, but the promises the voice was offering her, were too great to be ignored.
Once Shaella saw the Witch Queen of Highwander, alone on the tower rooftop, gawking up like a child, she forgot the dragon’s punishment altogether, and grew excited. She could complete her father’s conquest, and earn his respect and admiration right here. She urged Claret to take her around the tower. She wanted to keep the witch from reaching the stair house when she snapped out of her stupor, and made a run for it.
To Shaella’s growing frustration, Claret didn’t circle the tower as she had commanded, but the Witch Queen didn’t break and run either. Instead, Claret made as if to land there, at the tower’s parapet, but stopped at the last moment, to hold in a slow hover. Shaella shrieked out curses at the dragon, as the Witch Queen waved her arms crazily. Shaella cast a spell, and was about to lash out with a blast of static energy, when her heart was stopped dead in her chest. She saw Gerard rise up from behind one of the crenels and loose an arrow directly at her. Realizing that it was Hyden, Gerard’s brother, and not her lover, she tried desperately to get the dragon to dip, or sway her out of the arrow’s path. Nothing happened. She couldn’t find the will to draw breath, as the steel-tipped shaft came flying at her. She was shocked to feel it only graze her just under the ear, and she felt lucky for a fleeting moment.
In that fleeting moment, another realization struck her. He hadn’t meant to kill her. But why?
Between the thumping beats of Claret’s wings, she heard the proud and fierce cry of a hawkling, as it came shooting down out of the sky, right past her. It didn’t stop. It kept diving into the shadows below. Suddenly, she was afraid. She gathered all the persuasive power she could muster, and urged Claret to turn away, but the dragon didn’t budge. Then, she tried sending the dragon a clearer, and more painful command through the collar, but found that somehow, her link with the fire wyrm had been broken. In a panic, she reached to her neck.
Claret felt the connection sever, and roared out with delight. The menacingly triumphant sound was so loud, and powerful, that the Royal Tower itself trembled, as if it were afraid.
Shaella began to cast a spell. Hyden saw this, and loosed a second arrow at her. This one struck the staff she held, just a fingers breath above her hand. The thumping impact of it caused her to lose her concentration, and forget the spell she was casting.
“Spell the rider!” Hyden called out to Queen Willa. “Bind her, if you can.”
At once, Willa did as she was told. The presence of the dragon had her in such a state of terror, that if Hyden had told her to jump off the tower she might have done it.
Half a heartbeat later, invisible ropes lashed around Shaella, and drew tight. Her arms, and her staff, were pulled hard against her breasts. When she tried to voice a protest, she found that her mouth was gagged as well. She could do nothing, but glare at Hyden as he motioned for the dragon to land.
Willa backed away in utter fear. Claret’s great bulk, took up three quarters of the tower top, and that was with the dragon sitting upright, and the entire length of its long, thick tail, dangling over the parapet. The tower itself seemed to groan with the weight of her. A glance at where the stair guard had been revealed only empty space. Willa couldn’t blame the man. Running from a beast that had slitted yellow eyes bigger than wagon-wheels, and teeth as long as a grown man’s legs, couldn’t really be considered dereliction of duty, could it?
In her terror, Willa marveled at the way the morning sun reflected brilliantly off the dragon’s palm-sized scales, and turned them golden; and the way heat, shimmered and radiated off of its body, as if it were a great furnace. A fluttering of little wings, Talon the hawkling’s wings, caught her eye. The bird had something clutched in its claws. It struggled to carry the object up and over to Hyden. He took the offering, and smiled deviously. Talon then flew up, and landed on the half bald head of the dragon rider. He perched there, and puffed out his feathered chest, as proudly as if he were a dragon himself.
Hyden fumbled with the object Talon had delivered to him. After a moment, he had wrapped Shaella’s collar around his wrist, and tied it off, using his teeth. At once, the mighty dragon lowered its head, and extended a fore claw out, to form a crude stair step up to its back. At that moment, Queen Willa had no doubt that Hyden Hawk was destined to be a wizard of Dahg Mahn’s caliber, if not something even greater. It never occurred to her, that Hyden had taken the Dragon Queen’s dragon without using any form of magic whatsoever. All he had used were his wits, and his skill with the bow. Talon had done the rest.
Hyden shouldered Vaegon’s bow, climbed onto the dragon’s back, and sat behind Shaella. He gave Willa a confident smile, and sent Talon down to land on her shoulder.
“Hold off the demon-wizard as long as you can,” he called down to her.
He reached back, and patted the Night Shard in his backpack. “If this works, he’ll be nothing, but a plain, old wizard when I’m done.”
With that, the dragon leapt into the air, and veered sharply away to the west. On wing beats, that made the very air shudder, it shot off at an uncanny speed, and disappeared into the distance.
After Pael saw Shaella and her dragon winging away to the west, he vented his anger on the outer city. He thought she was abandoning him.
He cast a spell that buckled the earth away from him, like ripples from a pebble thrown into a pond. A great circle rose and fell, crumbling all in its path as it went. Buildings were leveled, and horses and men were thrown, or crushed. A large portion of the secondary wall, and the inner city beyond it, fell into ruin. For a few moments, the rumbling quake seemed to stop the whole battle. Pael stood, looking up from the epicenter of the destruction. He was seething. His normally slick, white head was aglow with rage, and his arms flailed about like some mad conductor, as he cast spell after spell after spell.
In the air, Mikahl was in pursuit of the Choska. The big, black demon could barely stay ahead of the flaming bright horse. From the ground, Pael sought to change the odds a bit.
Several back clouds misted into being, around the angry wizard. Three wyverns took form, and a razor-tusked beast, that looked somewhat like a wild boar, but was as big as an ox, snorted and stomped behind him. At once, the wyverns took to the air. The tusked beast charged off, through the rubble-strewn streets in search of men to kill.
Pael’s arm suddenly shot forth, pointing up into the sky, and a sizzling bolt streaked away, brighter than the daylight, from his fingertip. It took Mikahl by surprise, and sent him tumbling through space, away from the dying flames of his bright horse.
At once, the Choska demon dove away if from its pursuer, and swooped down to land beside its master. Pael leapt up onto its lowered neck, and together, they rose back up into the sky.
For a few long heartbeats, Mikahl fell, like a sack of grain thrown from a window. He had almost let go of Ironspike, but somehow managed to avoid that fatal mistake. With its magical symphony still in his head, he managed to recall the Bright Horse into being. The fiery Pegasus reformed between his legs and caught his fall, but it took a moment to get reoriented with the world, and in that time, Pael, and the Choska, gained position on them.
It had taken only seconds for Pael to turn the tables on Mikahl. The chaser became the chased. It was all Mikahl could do to hold on, as the demon wizard’s pursuit forced him to shake away the cobwebs Pael’s lightning had burned into his brain. He needed to think of a way to avoid being overtaken. He could feel the evil behind him. It was a nauseating, icy feeling that grew with the proximity of the wizard on his heels. The bright horse shot left, and then right, into a sharp banking turn. Suddenly, something in Mikahl’s brain fell into place.
The thing called Pael, on the back of the Choska, was the dark enemy that had sent the hellcat, and the wyvern. It was Pael who King Balton had sent him away from. It was Pael who had poisoned his King, and misled Prince Glendar, all those years. It was Pael, who had caused Lord Gregory, Loudin of the Reyhall, Grrr, and Vaegon to die. All along, it had been Pael. He knew it now. His blood surged past the white-hot simmer it had previously been, and turned into a violent boil. Ironspike’s radiant glow changed with his anger, into a blinding, silvery beacon in the sky. He was no longer the chased. He was in control now. He was leading Pael out past the city’s outer wall, away from the populace. If Pael was pursuing him, Mikahl knew that he wasn’t in the city wreaking havoc.
Mikahl closed his eyes, and let the bright horse gallop through the sky on his own head. He searched Ironspike’s symphony for what he might need, what he might use, to bring Pael down. The words of King Balton, the words of his father, echoed like timpani drums, in time with the harmonies in his head. “Think. Then act! Think. Then act! Think. Then act!”
King Jarrek fought like a hero, to let the soldiers of the Blacksword get inside the secondary wall. He had almost gotten trapped in the doing. Then, General Spyra had charged out, with a group of cavalry, and with the brilliant use of their long pikes, won the red armored Wolf King and his group free of the undead that had surrounded them.
King Jarrek had no sooner gotten himself to safety, and had his wind back, when he heard the shouts that the secondary wall had been breached to the north. He was getting too old for this sort of thing. His bones ached, and his muscles sang. He decided to go find Queen Willa, and see if he might help her find a way to survive the coming madness. These men were brave and true, and fighting with all they had in them, but Jarrek didn’t even dare hope that any of them would survive.