This is a piece of MtG fanfiction set on my upcoming Create a Card plane. I've written the story so as to make it accessible without the need of a primer. You can pick up a piece of fantasy fiction from the bookstore without having had a primer on the setting, so that's my intent here.
A careful study of her surroundings gave Beka Stoneblade the impression that the cavern she found herself in was the chest cavity of some great dragon’s skeleton. Her scholarly nature made the seawater drenching her land leviathan-skin leathers the pleural fluid while the cavern’s drakelike altar was a plaque-ridden heart and atrophied lungs. Beka concluded her study by identifying the cavern’s pathology – its height left it hunching, the bladelike fins covering its body quivering as it loped apelike from the altar.
It wore the bones and chrome scales of something too small to be a dragon, yet too large to be a drake, and nowhere near light enough to be a ptera – the malignancy that lingered on within the dead dragon.
The merfolk is a cancer. Excise it before it begins to metastasize…well, a virus given its disguise…clever little hatchling, a rarity given that you’re on the Forge Masters’ leash.
Beka didn’t know if that was her own line of thought or the cavern speaking to her academic’s mind. The suggestion in the thought felt like something old and powerful that had lingered at death’s threshold, being either too stubborn to die or wishing for a cure that outweighed the disease.
“Where’s your master?”
The merfolk stopped before the altar and looked to either side of Beka. A tongue flickered out. It lashed the air, jerking in search of a scent.
“My mentor’s dead.” Beka lifted her dragon fossil sword, its blade glowing blue and red. “I was crafting my Stoneblade when they came. The djinn and the efreet killed her. A drake took me from the dig site.” She let the sword fall when she saw the merfolk had fixated on her Stoneblade, its yellow eyes wide and its pupils reduced to slits.
“Drake – where?” The merfolk drew in on itself, bobbing its head like a cornered iguana and puffing out what Beka believed to be its venom sacs. It sprang at Beka from crouching, sending her stumbling back.
“Tell me about the Chain of Fire and the viashino. The viashino woke the rage in your people and from them came its legions of elementals—”
Beka’s blade clattered to the cavern floor as she clamped her hands over her ears. A throbbing began around her eyes. The cavern disappeared. In its place she saw the tropical jungles and mountain valleys of the Chain of Fire. At the heart of the Chain upon a smoking mountain stood a squat reptilian thing waving its clawed hands like a conductor at the opera. The viashino shaman’s magic took hold in the countries surrounding its mountain lair. Beka stood with her mother at the oilrig when the reptilian thing unleashed its opening fusillade.
The security detail’s elementalists were hit hardest by the viashino’s magic – and to Beka that was the cruelest joke of all. Watching with her mother – the chief elementalist – unable to do anything as the men and women fell to the ground, seizing and shaking apart into bloody chunks of meat and blackened bone. They hadn’t stayed like that for long – flesh, organs, and bone began to pull themselves together into things that turned her dusky mother ashen.
“Flamekin,” her mother had whispered as she began her conjuring. More of the “flamekin”, looking like piles of charred meat stitched together in a mockery of the human form, began rising from the piles of gore.
Not flamekin, Beka had thought as her mother pushed her away from the guardrail. Those are cinders firing the tankers. At the time Beka hadn’t known it, but flamekin were born from mad elementalists injecting themselves with hellkite venom. Though combustible, it mingled with the elementalists’ magic to give rise to the perpetually flaming elementals of living fire. Beka started when the tankers began exploding. Similar explosions ripped through the jungle as more cinders were born by the viashino’s magic.
“It didn’t matter what they were – cinders killed as quickly as flamekin.” The merfolk said.
Bekka felt the headache radiating from her eyes, circling around her head in a visegrip. Images of the Chain of Fire and the boats in which they fled the burning wastes turned to psychic ash. Rising from the ash came memories of the Stoneforge Monastery.
The Monastery had been conjured by Kargathdrasi sangromancers. Their blood magic had extracted iron from the gored corpse of a Primeval. Within a tower of draconic neurons Bekka saw the Forge Masters discussing…her.
“You were a key – **** right off, I’m in charge of this spell! – you were their key to the Chain of Fire, Bekka.”
What was that? The Forge Masters’ plan to exploit her homeland’s folklore became white noise. Another presence had entered. It rolled in on the roar of a tide. Blown by winds of brine and rot.
“You know,” the merfolk said. “You were the materials given to your mentor. Materials to be forged into a Blackblade with which to steal the souls of your broken people; from there, a key to the world’s end.”
No. You’re nothing more than a cancer –
-virus
-that needs killing.
Bekka steeled herself against the image of the Forge Masters conspiring. She clenched her fists against her anger. Anger at betrayal, though these could easily be illusions sent by the merfolk. A creature that, by all accounts in the Stoneforge Monastery, should be nothing more than a piece of the fossil record.
The fossil record – remember what you found amid the bones.
This thought came with the soothing sounds Bekka had experienced when she pressed a conch shell against her ear. She smiled, remembering how she’d listened to two at the same time as she and mother sailed from the Chain of Fire.
Beka’s eyes burned. Her vision blurred. A quicksilver riptide pulled her from the Stoneforge Monastery’s tower. The quicksilver receded. Beka opened her eyes to an island of iron within the underground sea. Drakes swarmed in a seafoam green tide, hiding Beka’s island from the merfolk’s malignancy – from what little Beka could see, it looked like the merfolk’s black magic involved the fish-thing pulling a sea-cucumber with its innards.
There’s something here for me, Beka thought. Bone jutted from the island’s iron skeleton. Etchings in the bone – this is the amphin language. The amphin were precursors to mankind, predating even the trolls and their simian descendants. A link, some said, between the dragons and humans. Amphin were the first to turn the dragons’ weapons back against them –
-yes, savagery masking cleverness. A trait still valued on Kargathdra. They took the demons, djinn, efreet and elementals and did what none other could: foster unity among the Primevals.
Beka touched the etchings for the djinn and efreet. The markings’ contours sent her back to the tundra dig. She experienced it again. Her mentor ripped apart by the efreet. The djinn’s magic countering her mentor’s attempts to stop the efreet from decorating the tundra’s myriad amphin ruins with steaming intestines.
Seafoam green water began flowing from the etchings. It rose into the form of an efreet. A grin spread across its skeletal face. It raised an arm ending in a scythe and ran the tip across Beka’s subclavicular.
The efreet spoke in the language of the amphin: “It took the savagery of the amphin to break us. Show me what you’ve got, little girl.”
Beka dropped when she saw the scythe. It slashed the air where her head had been. She rolled, rose and drew her deathblade. A glance to the swarming drakes sent her heart pounding. The merfolk’s innards had disgorged scarlet masses of flesh that attacked the drakes with leechlike suckers. Beka felt herself growing lightheaded.
This is a spell, Beka realized. Those things attacking the drakes are part of the merfolk’s spell. Mana drains of some kind. That means this whole thing is my spell. She dipped and thrust upward, driving her sword through the aqueous underside of the efreet’s torso.
The efreet, screaming, returned to seafoam and seeped back into the etchings. Next came the djinn – the same one Beka had seen the drake kill. After her mentor had been left a steaming mess in the snow, the sea drake had come down and thrashed the efreet and the djinn. Then the seafoam green drake had born Beka to the cavern and its malignancy.
“No point,” the djinn flowed back into the bone. “Summon me when you’ve got an enemy in need a proper spell****ing.”
Beka jerked at the touch of the merfolk’s mana drain. The drakes were gone – now it was her and the merfolk’s spell-casting innards. She scowled at the mess the merfolk had vomited up. Then smiled and jammed her deathblade into the glistening mound in a spray of blood and bile.
At the foreign entity’s touch-gore splattering the bones jutting from the dig site- the efreet came shrieking from the bone. It savaged the merfolk. The djinn came in a rush of quicksilver that drenched the merfolk’s mana draining appendages, eliminating the spell.
he defense mechanisms are down. Now excise the malignancy.
Beka flew from her iron island on drake’s wings. Within the cavern she stood over the merfolk. Its legs were bent at angles she didn’t think they would normally bend.
Steaming briney breath kissed the nape of her neck. She knew that the drake from the strange sorcery had come at her summons.
“Stop being used –”
Beka kicked a jag of bone that had ripped through the merfolk’s twisted leg. “You don’t have any room to talk.” She knelt and tried to draw the merfolk’s gaze. It was a hard read. “Look, I’m tell me something: why?”
The silence stretched. She became aware of the drake’s subtle hiss. Its musk had turned from brine to oil. Oil turned something that smelled more caustic.
Shred. Rip. Oil-blood. Beka felt a kick of nausea at the drake’s plea. She glanced back at her summons. Its draconic majesty had been stripped. In its place she saw a bat-winged scavenger with all the charm of a shark that had scented blood.
“Why? Because…because…forgot.” The merfolk’s eyes rolled toward the altar. Steam began rising from the merfolk. It screamed. Chrome plates fell from its body, baring deformities that told Beka this one’s family hadn’t been a tree so much as a stick.
You’re right – this thing’s lineage is straight as the blade that slew my Primeval broodmaster; yes, the same Primeval whose blood and brain gave you your Stoneforge Monastery. The psychic statement came from a dragonlike thing. Its body was an amalgamation of the merfolk’s bone armor and chrome plates. The steam that had come from the merfolk was the dragon-thing’s lifeblood.
The dragon clanked toward Beka and lowered its triangular head. Multifaceted eyes of sapphire, jet and pearl beheld Beka. Beka’s blood ran cold. Behind her the drake’s hiss grew louder.
“You could have this wretch executed. That’s the safest course and most familiar for you, yes?”
Prune it. Shred it like a crippled neuron. The drake rested its chin on Beka’s shoulder. Its breath smelled like rancid shellfish mingled with acid.
One move and the drake’s into my carotid. Or the dragon chews my face off. When you’ve got no good options – well, what does it matter if I don’t have anything to lose?
“I’m no executioner.” Beka said, her voice cracking under the dragon’s duress.
A gust of warm brine buffeted Beka, scalding the nape of her neck. The dragon’s casting a spell! She took a deep breath, blinked several times, flexed her fingers and toes. Keep sharp, Beka, don’t let the spell--
The sound hit Beka like a gun’s report. She jumped and sliced open her shoulder on the drake’s mandible. The sound she had heard was the scrape of iron on stone. Then the clatter of a chair tumbling across a floor. Finally, the distinct snap of a neck as the rope pulled taught.
Beka knew the sound. She’d heard it many times while practicing her spellcraft in the Monastery’s training gym.
We’re in a cutthroat business at the Stoneforge Monastery, she thought. The ones that picked that short drop and sudden stop couldn’t compromise. They couldn’t do what needed doing to make it. The Forge Masters have no patience for materials so brittle that they break before they bend. Beka took a deep breath and blew it out. She felt a headache coming on. It was triggered by thinking about ambitionless colleagues born with the silver spoon, combined with watching cinders reduce her homeland to ash.
Movement, Beka thought. She saw something swinging behind the chrome dragon.
Chains in the cavern’s ceiling: the stubborn ones that couldn’t cut it. More movement past the gray corpses caught Beka’s attention: men and women in battle-worn drakehide bodysuits marked with the insignias of a dozen insurgencies from the tundras of Underworld, the jungle-marshes of Takejukai, the misty rainforests of Eberrai, the savage lands of Kargathdra and the cinder-plagued Chain of Fire. Trailing the renegades were the spirits of men and women, their bodies bearing the traumas that ended their lives. Clinging to these were the spirits of children weighted down by chains of spellbombs – when the failures decided to wallow in their shortcomings, it was no surprise that they’d be driven to snuff out those whose future shone bright. In her periphery Beka saw the chrome dragon’s snout open in what he took for a dragon’s smile.
Subtly is lost on dragons, apparently. Beka thought. A shot of levity desperately needed when looking into the ruined faces of the renegades’ child-soldiers.
“Souls linger within my Primeval’s cavern,” the chrome dragon said, its voice like the hiss of steam escaping boiler pipes. “Think of the renegades like viruses whose coats are the Stoneblade uniforms. They use their neglected talents to survive, at the expense of their hosts.”
Looking at the spirits more closely, Beka saw that the spectral children didn’t share the same angular features, bone-white skin, or lithe builds of the Underworldites. They came from various countries and continents…curiosity sent Beka closer to the spirits. Kneeling, she traced a finger through their ethereal forms. Though they weren’t solid, her sharp eyes picked out signs of starvation, the landmarks of injuries indicative of non-accidental trauma…hosts – kids, not hosts. Kids whose futures were snuffed by the magical coercion of the Monastery’s renegades. Beka scowled. She felt her eyes tearing. Renegade isn’t the right word for them. That implies there’s a basic humanity somewhere within. The things that crawled from the Monastery left their shreds of humanity for the drakes to pick over like carrion.
Beka’s eyes widened with realization. She looked from the spectral children, to the “viruses” dishonoring the drakehide uniforms of the Stoneblades, to the hyperventilating merfolk, the drake lingering over her shoulder and then the chrome dragon.
Its like a leviathan devouring its own tail… “Ha, ha, ha,” she cradled her head in her palm. “Oh man, it’s coming back to philosophy. ****ing philosophy,” she said to herself, “where you laughed at the instructor because the treatises you wrote the morning of the due date got you through that special brand of torture.”
“All the tools have a purpose,” the chrome dragon said. “You’re one of the few to grasp this simple truth.” It nodded at the “viruses” and their victims. “These couldn’t come to terms with it. Perhaps the ways of the Stoneforge Masters are too subtle for the younger generation.”
“We’re not telepaths.” Beka walked from the child-soldiers to the chrome dragon, looking it in the eye. She set her stance, squared her shoulders. “I could raze the Monastery with your help. You the Primeval, the drake, my efreet and my djinn.”
“I’m not the Primeval,” the chrome dragon said. “I’m the last survivor of its brood. Philosophy was my weapon. While the Primeval struggled against the amphin, my arguments led the Primeval to its doom. Right upon the island where the Stoneforge Monastery now stands.”
The Primeval, a shaper of whole worlds, led to the slaughter by this dragon’s words. My dismissal of those philosophy lessons may have been a tad shortsighted.
“Your proposition is very atomistic. It brings to mind the viashino mindset.” The chrome dragon said, smiling.
The dragon’s words were like a sai driven into Beka’s chest. She willed herself to remain still. Her mind fought to keep her facial muscles arranged in a wall of stoicism. Beka’s brain prepared to grip the metaphorical sai and send it right back into the dragon’s smirking snout.
“It all comes back to tools.” Beka turned to the drake. The skin was raised from its snout. Saliva dripped from its needlelike fangs. The acidic stuff hissed when it hit the cavern’s floor. Beka watched the cords in its neck tensing, dropped when it struck and thrust up with her hands. She took a fistful of throat, dug her nails deep and watched the drake’s blood roll down her arm. Her second hand struck just as quick. She gritted her teeth and dug in, bracing herself against the drake’s thrashing.
This is like dissecting a cadaver, Beka. Except here, you make a mistake and the cadaver will rip you to pieces. Beka worked her hands deeper into the wound, tearing whatever she could. A hand slick with gore slid free. She snatched the hunting knife from her bootstrap, made an incision in the soft flesh of the underbelly and started gutting. The drake’s resistance lessened with its bloodloss.
Now you’re back with your mom, cleaning the day’s kill. The thought of her mother, who had died at the end of a land leviathan’s tusk, brought a smile to Beka’s face. I wish you were here, mom. All your lessons in cunning and quick reflexes have me on track to my deathblades. I think I’ll go for boomerangs. That’s what the drake’s jawbone and talons are good for. You were always good with the boomerangs.
Beka kept the memories at the forefront of her mind throughout the struggle. When the drake expired she began digging out its talons and jawbone. With those free, she rose and began scraping bits of raw meat from what would be her new boomerangs.
“The forging’s finished. You started as a tool for the Stoneforge Masters. Now you’re become a tool for this dragon-spirit.” The merfolk’s voice sounded thick. As if a tumor had metastasized to its vocal cords. Merfolk were generally extinct in this day and age, so Beka couldn’t say whether or not that was possible.
Something wet, warm, and pulsating wrapped itself around Beka’s torso. She found herself facing the merfolk. Its hinged mouth hung down to its groin. It had disgorged purple-blue viscera that looked like an amphin turned inside out.
That thing’s alive. Beka saw four beating urchin-like organs on the amphin-horror’s chest. Four hearts, that thing’s alive...I believe I’ve found the malignancy. Looking closely at the merfolk, she noted the taughtness with which its skin was stretched over bone, the lack of muscle, weak eyes and sheen of oily perspiration coating the suffering creature. I’d love to bring the amphin-horror back to the Monastery’s anatomy department.
“I’ll have no part of your casual carnage,” the merfolk said. “Not yours, the Masters’ carnage, mind you. You have yet to be used – but used you will be…” the amphin’s webbed hand slammed against the top of Beka’s head. The horror’s oil rolled down her face, gumming up her eyes, clogging her noise, sliding into her screaming mouth.
Beka’s headache returned like a thunderclap. Ringing filled her ears. Darkness swallowed her vision. She screamed in fear of being blind. It felt as if her heart wanted to tear through her chestwall. Beka’s nose caught a familiar scent. Her ears pricked at the crashing of waves. She knew where she was before her heart resumed its normal rhythm. The darkness fell away and her headache became a dull annoyance.
The Chain of Fire stretched out before her like a scab. The cracked land was red and smoking. Petrified jungles stood where once hills and mountains of verdant green had provided life for the people and oil for their machines.
“Champion, you’ve come to us at last!”
Beka retained her composure and looked toward the stone jungle. Standing there was a human – no, a hellkite junkie – whose exposed skeletal muscles and gunshot burns indicated an addiction to hellkite venom. The stuff sloughed the skin, lizardlike, and started changing you on a cellular level. Beka had seen addicts like this in the Stoneforge Monastery – they were used in training exercises – and they became something not quite human, but not quite dragon. A mass of scarred scales, a short temper, and the dim intellect of a drake was what lay at the end of the junkie’s road.
The junkie waved her toward the petrified jungle. Beka strode forward, noting that she wore the seafoam leathers indicating her place in the ranks of the Stoneblades. She allowed a small smile beneath her facemask.
I should take my victories where I can, I guess. Her smile faltered. The mental discipline that maintained her poker face flagged with each step toward the dead jungle.
Dead jungle, dead people, dead land – the telepathic voice rang out in Beka’s ear. It was as if the speaker was at her shoulder. A sideways glance revealed nothing but air. Briefly, she thought she saw an oily rainbow shimmering there. She cut her eyes back at the junkie. He could snap at any moment. Beka’s had rested on her boomerangs – red, she noted and deadly sharp.
The junkie didn’t attack. He clapped his hands, clutched them close to his stomach. It reminded Beka of a child waiting to open a gift. His eyes, she noted, were covered with a yellow film. His lips had peeled back so that his blunt, protruding mandible and maxilla could assume the shape of a dragon’s snout. Gums slick with saliva quivered back (pushing out a few human teeth in the process) from a row of uneven fangs.
“We were told to expect you, Champion.” The junkie said. “Your herald came with the tide and slew many with a lightning-spitting trident of ammonite.”
Beka recalled her scab analogy; if she’d seen the scab, then the hell into which the junkie led her was the festering wound. Within the underground chamber torches guttered with blue fire. They illuminated iron cages imprisoning folk every bit as horrific as the junkie. A table set against the wall held the source of their addiction: a hellkite hatchling, chained down and loaded with lines delivering a life sustaining solution.
“Renegade.” Beka picked out the figure. It was nearly invisible in the dim light. Standing on an outcropping of rock, hands on a guardrail, was a thing wearing a bodysuit modeled after the Stoneblades’. Whereas theirs were made from drakehide, this thing wore the blade-finned skin of a merfolk.
Eyes on the uniform fixed on Beka. A gash on the uniform’s shoulder opened and screeched, “Help.”
“The last of my kind,” the ronin said. It removed its gloves, revealing webbed talons. Blue mist gathered around its hands. “You can just **** off and leave my brother and me alone.”
Beka’s hand hesitated on her boomerangs. It sounded like the thing’s human voice was cracking from grief. She was reminded of her mother’s voice as they’d watched the Chain of Fire sink into the sunset from the deck of the freighter.
That’s an oddly human sentiment and an oddly human choice of words. Not surprising given the evolutionary relationship between us.
Crimson light erupted from a pit beneath the amphin-ronin’s platform. A rumbling growl rolled up from the pit’s depths.
“Ah, you! Yes, you, come now is the time to join the rebellion’s ranks!” the junkie grabbed someone from the herd of mangled horrors. He’d picked a woman that struggled against his grip. He tightened it, drawing blood. She screamed. There was a commotion from the herd. One of their numbers sprang forward and drove a needle into her arm. As the junkie passed Beka, his captive swung the hair from her eyes.
Beka knew the captive’s face. Mother. You died on a land leviathan hunt. To pay for my entry into the Stoneforge Monastery. This isn’t real.
“Judging from your scent, I’d say it’s real enough,” the amphin ronin said.
Beka averted her gaze as the junkie shoved his captive into the pit. The bellow that came from the pit told Beka that the unseen beast was one of the wingless breeds of dragons native to Kargathdra. She focused on the amphin ronin, gritting her teeth against the grunts and moans rising from the pit.
Kill the dragon and the captive. The products of this amphin’s sick conception need to be terminated.
“There you go. You’re a butcher, all of you are butchers. The child that comes from this,” the amphin ronin nodded at the pit. The crimson light from within beat like a heart. The sounds were reduced to the dragon’s growls. “The viashino that will be born from this will be no different than me. The Kargathdrasi breed and butcher the pit dragons in their mercenary companies. The viashino shaman grows its legion of cinders by butchering the humans of the Chain of Fire.”
Beka’s hand dropped from her boomerangs. She smiled, remembering her philosophy treatises. In her opinion they had been rushed and full of circular logic that made it all a pile of utter nonsense. The amphin-horror’s spell, and this nightmare that grew from that spell, would be dealt with by a subtler blade than the one at her hip.
“I’m a butcher. A tool to be used by the Stoneforge Masters that wallows in its ignorance, so please help me understand the biology of this,” Beka waved at the pit.
“Our magic can trigger polymorphs at the cellular level. Any barriers to reproduction are eliminated by dragging out the inactive genes you carried over from our dead race; as it happens, the dragons also shared these genetic similarities with the amphin race.” The amphin ronin lifted his hand.
Beka watched as the captive was levitated from the pit, covered in bruises, bite marks and burns. The junkie escorted her to a separate cage from the others. He caught Beka’s gaze.
“Give us time, Champion. We need time to provide you with your army.” He reached through the bars to pat the captive. She flinched back from his reach. The junkie jerked his arm back from the cage.
An army of nightmares to battle the viashino and its cinders; that would be a nice way of killing two drakes with one fireball, Beka thought. That lizard will burn for what its done.
"That’s what the Stoneforge Masters hope you’ll think,” the amphin ronin said. “You’ll secure them the Chain of Fire. And then, they’ll use you to infiltrate the Crimson Company of Kargathdra.” The amphin-ronin gripped the guardrail. “Once that’s done, they’ll be free to bastardize my race’s legacy – the djinn, efreets, elementals, and demons we freed from the Primevals will once again be forced to serve things with the same low cunning and brutality of their former masters.”
Beka griped her boomerangs, more for support than anything else. Your mother died to put you in the Stoneforge Monastery. Gored by a land leviathan, so forget whatever they gave to the pit dragon. It wasn’t real. . “I don’t hold people responsible for their mistakes. I believe that the individual is the one steering the ship. I ask that you show the force of will necessary to fulfill your duties. Instead, you took your mates to the chrome dragon’s cavern and ****ed yourselves.” She forced a smile. The words that had come from her lips left a bitter taste on her tongue. She knew her mother would’ve had her in the corner, bar of freshly wetted soap in her mouth for using that kind of language. “In more ways than one.”
Beka let her hand fall to her side. She recalled her mother’s words about the amphin cults that haunted the ruin-covered tundras. “They only respond to violence, baby girl,” her mother had said as she cleaned the blood from her speargun’s ammunition. “The Forgemasters may not believe that – but what do they know, hiding in the corpse of the great Primeval. Bunch of pale maggots that wouldn’t last a day on the tundras…”
I’m no executioner, Beka reminded herself. She picked a stray scrap of drake flesh from her jawbone-turned-boomerang. It glistened with mana that dripped oily and blue like blood from a rare slab of steak. That doesn’t mean I have to stop you from hanging yourself.
Beka shaped the mana into a spell that shook the amphin-ronin’s enchantment. Threads of magic unraveled. The effect was like ripping sutures from a fresh arterial ligation.A tsunami of reality crashed through the enchantment’s gash. It bore Beka away from the hellish vision of her homeland.
Within the dragon’s cavern Beka found herself gasping like someone that’d come up from a deep dive. She looked down on the amphin. Its eyes were solid black and impossible to read. Barbels hanging from its elongated skull drew in like snakes preparing to strike. The placental cord connecting it to the merfolk’s gaping maw had turned sclerotic.
This thing’s going to take its brother with it. Beka’s stoney expression shifted into a scowl. She completed the misdirection spell by embracing the mana she’d squeezed from the drake flesh. This is the drake speaking. Not you, but you can stop it whenever you like, she told herself. The poison that seeped into her thoughts began to spew from her mouth in a verbal onslaught.
“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, newt.” Beka let the drake’s poison drive her around to the connection between amphin and merfolk. She drew her talon-boomerang and struck it against the hardened placenta. Sparks flew where they contacted. Gritting her teeth, she continued working. The amphin squelched something unintelligible. The merfolk had eyes for the sharp end of the boomerang and an escape from its slow death by its malignant brother.
“Actually, picture this,” Beka finished severing the connection. Blood plopped out in thick black clotted clumps. She slammed her hand against the rounded dome of the amphin’s skull. Her fingers clenched it like a drake’s talons. She kept her eyes on the amphin’s. A film slid over her field of vision, generated by the drake’s blue magic. Through the magic she saw into the amphin’s mind.
“My kind – foreigners from the Chain of Fire – were worth little and less to the Stoneforge Masters than a pile of land leviathan dung.” In the amphin’s mind she saw the fate of spawn the amphin considered lesser. The pale creatures were used to bait the mollusks whose shells were key to the construction of the amphin temples. While the mollusks feasted on the ones the amphin deemed weak, the amphin hunters attacked the shellfishes’ primitive minds. Psychic tridents were thrust into the storm of impulses that drove the mollusks. Tines raked and twisted, drawing forth elementals from the shellfishes paralyzed by the laval amphins’ innate defense mechanisms.
“Well, my mother wasn’t having any of that. She picked up a speargun from a Kargathdrasi outpost in the wharf district and made the Stoneforge Masters take notice. They were funded by the oil barons, and there’s no better source of it than the land leviathans.” Beka watched the amphin’s barbels droop and shrivel. In its eyes she saw the cancer’s horror: larval amphin snapping the jagged edges from the temples where they were prepared for their role as bait, then the explosions of oil from the amphin hunters as their bait began attacking them. Blood mingled with oil as the larval amphin sawed through calcaneal tendons, arteries and bundles of vasculature.
“I wasn’t as sheltered as the young of your kind.” Beka felt her nails split the amphin’s slick skin. She saw what waited for the amphin larvae kept ignorant to the natural order: elementals with a taste for blood wakened by the young ones’ butchery. Amalgamations of coral, ammonite, stitched together by kelp and eels with the gape-mouthed heads of leviathans devoured the stuck and bleeding bodies of their former masters. Beka’s grip was nearly lost when the amphin-horror jerked at the vision of the murderous larvae being crushed underfoot by the sated elementals.
Beka’s misdirection of the amphin-horror’s mind-rending spell climaxed with the horror popping its urchin-like hearts with the drake-talon boomerang. She released her grip on the salamander’s skull and staggered back into the cool grip of the chrome dragon. Its warm breath sent a shiver down her spine.
“Well done, Drakeblade.” The chrome dragon released Beka. She went to the merfolk and knelt by the dying relic of a bygone era.
“I stand by what I said – I’m no butcher.” Beka smiled weakly. “A passable enough surgeon,” she nodded at the severed placenta and the dead amphin. “The cancerous salamander has left you at death’s threshold. You can lay here, die –” choose your words carefully, Beka. Those would be mother’s words; except mother wasn’t dealing with a dragon that’d killer her over an insult – “and likely be raised as an undead guardian of this cavern. Or, you can let me—”
“Spawnkiller, I was taking care of my spawnmate and you killed it!”
Beka drew her jawbone boomerang and summoned her efreet. Seawater flowed from a rune in the jawbone, forming the upper body of a jaundiced humanoid with skin stretched tight over a skeletal face. It flashed a shark’s grin at the sight of its master.
“Hold it.” She pointed at the merfolk. Its protests had turned into incoherent shrieks. Trembling webbed fingers grasped its bladelike fins. What little muscle remained in its body tensed as struggled to rip fins from its sweat-slick skin.
“Blood’s my price, lady.” The efreet did as commanded. “I like you, so rather than me demand payment up front, I’ll be happy to set up a tab.”
Beka chuckled at the bloodthirsty efreet’s joke. “That’s fine. You’re saving a life here. Does that count for anything?”
“Little and less.” The efreet’s voice was flat, devoid of humor. “This thing’s spawnsire couldn’t stop sucking off the self-righteous sons of *****es that chained us.” It looked at Beka, something like sadness in its eyes. “We were all free, and because these dragon-****s couldn’t understand our happiness, they forced themselves on us.”
“Ask me about the Chain of Fire. Between the amphin and my viashino, we might have something to bond over.” Beka said. She ran her drake’s talon boomerang along the merfolk’s back. Fingers trained by the anatomists in the Stoneforge Monastery dug through atrophied muscle, fat (it seemed that was all the amphin-horror had left in its brother-host) and found the merfolk’s nerves. Beka quickly cut free the merfolk’s central nervous system and gave it to the efreet. “Take this back to the dig site. There should be a rune in the dragonbones that’ll fit it.”
“Consider your tab paid.” The efreet grinned. “I’ll be having a long talk with the merfolk.”
“I’ve saved its life. You end it and my drake will end you.” She starred into the efreet’s yellow eyes.
The efreet looked away and muttered, “Yes ma’am.” It dissolved into a stream of seawater that flowed into the rune in the jawbone boomerang.
“You’ve shown more initiative than any of the Forge Masters,” the chrome dragon said. It clattered around so that it stood behind the altar, facing Beka. “They’ve been here, and they do exactly as I say. There’s no analysis on their behalf, no questions. That sort of drakestepping is dangerous, particularly in academia.”
Beka exhaled and leaned against the altar. She glanced back at the dissected corpse. This merfolk may not be the only thing that needs excising. A lifetime among the elite of the Monastery have proven mother’s old adage true: no smoke without fire. Beka felt herself growing lightheaded. Something came darting into the cavern: a carplike elemental with slick blue skin, its mouth open in a dragonlike smile.
“You’ve got a lot to mull over,” the chrome dragon said. “Think on it while you make your way across the tundras. I believe you have a drake to slay. Get that uniform made and get into the ranks of the Monastery’s ninjas. “Then you’ll be on your way to fixing the malignancy that lingers in that dragon’s corpse-turned-academy.”
Beka mounted the elemental, gripped a set of barbels dangling from its skull and filled her lungs with air. In an instant they were rocketing through the underground seas, then breaching the surface and coming in toward the Stoneforge Island’s less-used dinghy district.
The elemental came to a stop amid docks falling into ruin. Old warehouses and storage sheds dotted the landscape. Graffiti painting the ruined streets featured fearsome three-eyed demons screaming as multiple tendrils filled their nostrils, eyes and maws. Beka had seen thugs with similar tattoos in the slummy wharf district and instantly knew the king of this rotting court.
This is the Storm’s territory. The Storm was an infamous ronin whose ranks were filled with demon-worshipping dragonhearted from the badlands of Takejukai. At the end of the day, the Storm’s thugs are nothing more than viruses. They’re looking for a place to feed and reproduce. Beka drew her boomerangs and began her trek into the Storm’s territory. She kept to the shadows and began running through the virology she’d picked up at the Monastery. Take the Storm’s thugs, offer them better than what they’re getting here, and you’d have your metaphorical vaccine. A toolbox of vaccines – what more could you ask for when there’s likely a few viruses infecting your patient?
Whatever malignancy waits in the Stoneforge Monastery – it won’t be metastasizing to the Chain of Fire. Or the barbarian-lands of Kargathdra.
As she evaded the hulking, blunt-snouted dragonhearted, Beka couldn’t help but think on what the chrome dragon had said about the Forge Masters. And the more she thought on it – at the very least it distracted her from the shrieks, roars, wet ripping and satiated growling that accompanied the dragonhearted thugs’ debt collection – the more she wondered if she’d followed the Forge Masters in taking the dragon’s bait.
One thing at a time, she told herself. Deal with the source of the symptoms rather than worry about the symptoms.
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A careful study of her surroundings gave Beka Stoneblade the impression that the cavern she found herself in was the chest cavity of some great dragon’s skeleton. Her scholarly nature made the seawater drenching her land leviathan-skin leathers the pleural fluid while the cavern’s drakelike altar was a plaque-ridden heart and atrophied lungs. Beka concluded her study by identifying the cavern’s pathology – its height left it hunching, the bladelike fins covering its body quivering as it loped apelike from the altar.
It wore the bones and chrome scales of something too small to be a dragon, yet too large to be a drake, and nowhere near light enough to be a ptera – the malignancy that lingered on within the dead dragon.
The merfolk is a cancer. Excise it before it begins to metastasize…well, a virus given its disguise…clever little hatchling, a rarity given that you’re on the Forge Masters’ leash.
Beka didn’t know if that was her own line of thought or the cavern speaking to her academic’s mind. The suggestion in the thought felt like something old and powerful that had lingered at death’s threshold, being either too stubborn to die or wishing for a cure that outweighed the disease.
“Where’s your master?”
The merfolk stopped before the altar and looked to either side of Beka. A tongue flickered out. It lashed the air, jerking in search of a scent.
“My mentor’s dead.” Beka lifted her dragon fossil sword, its blade glowing blue and red. “I was crafting my Stoneblade when they came. The djinn and the efreet killed her. A drake took me from the dig site.” She let the sword fall when she saw the merfolk had fixated on her Stoneblade, its yellow eyes wide and its pupils reduced to slits.
“Drake – where?” The merfolk drew in on itself, bobbing its head like a cornered iguana and puffing out what Beka believed to be its venom sacs. It sprang at Beka from crouching, sending her stumbling back.
“Tell me about the Chain of Fire and the viashino. The viashino woke the rage in your people and from them came its legions of elementals—”
Beka’s blade clattered to the cavern floor as she clamped her hands over her ears. A throbbing began around her eyes. The cavern disappeared. In its place she saw the tropical jungles and mountain valleys of the Chain of Fire. At the heart of the Chain upon a smoking mountain stood a squat reptilian thing waving its clawed hands like a conductor at the opera. The viashino shaman’s magic took hold in the countries surrounding its mountain lair. Beka stood with her mother at the oilrig when the reptilian thing unleashed its opening fusillade.
The security detail’s elementalists were hit hardest by the viashino’s magic – and to Beka that was the cruelest joke of all. Watching with her mother – the chief elementalist – unable to do anything as the men and women fell to the ground, seizing and shaking apart into bloody chunks of meat and blackened bone. They hadn’t stayed like that for long – flesh, organs, and bone began to pull themselves together into things that turned her dusky mother ashen.
“Flamekin,” her mother had whispered as she began her conjuring. More of the “flamekin”, looking like piles of charred meat stitched together in a mockery of the human form, began rising from the piles of gore.
Not flamekin, Beka had thought as her mother pushed her away from the guardrail. Those are cinders firing the tankers. At the time Beka hadn’t known it, but flamekin were born from mad elementalists injecting themselves with hellkite venom. Though combustible, it mingled with the elementalists’ magic to give rise to the perpetually flaming elementals of living fire. Beka started when the tankers began exploding. Similar explosions ripped through the jungle as more cinders were born by the viashino’s magic.
“It didn’t matter what they were – cinders killed as quickly as flamekin.” The merfolk said.
Bekka felt the headache radiating from her eyes, circling around her head in a visegrip. Images of the Chain of Fire and the boats in which they fled the burning wastes turned to psychic ash. Rising from the ash came memories of the Stoneforge Monastery.
The Monastery had been conjured by Kargathdrasi sangromancers. Their blood magic had extracted iron from the gored corpse of a Primeval. Within a tower of draconic neurons Bekka saw the Forge Masters discussing…her.
“You were a key – **** right off, I’m in charge of this spell! – you were their key to the Chain of Fire, Bekka.”
What was that? The Forge Masters’ plan to exploit her homeland’s folklore became white noise. Another presence had entered. It rolled in on the roar of a tide. Blown by winds of brine and rot.
“You know,” the merfolk said. “You were the materials given to your mentor. Materials to be forged into a Blackblade with which to steal the souls of your broken people; from there, a key to the world’s end.”
No. You’re nothing more than a cancer –
-virus
-that needs killing.
Bekka steeled herself against the image of the Forge Masters conspiring. She clenched her fists against her anger. Anger at betrayal, though these could easily be illusions sent by the merfolk. A creature that, by all accounts in the Stoneforge Monastery, should be nothing more than a piece of the fossil record.
The fossil record – remember what you found amid the bones.
This thought came with the soothing sounds Bekka had experienced when she pressed a conch shell against her ear. She smiled, remembering how she’d listened to two at the same time as she and mother sailed from the Chain of Fire.
Beka’s eyes burned. Her vision blurred. A quicksilver riptide pulled her from the Stoneforge Monastery’s tower. The quicksilver receded. Beka opened her eyes to an island of iron within the underground sea. Drakes swarmed in a seafoam green tide, hiding Beka’s island from the merfolk’s malignancy – from what little Beka could see, it looked like the merfolk’s black magic involved the fish-thing pulling a sea-cucumber with its innards.
There’s something here for me, Beka thought. Bone jutted from the island’s iron skeleton. Etchings in the bone – this is the amphin language. The amphin were precursors to mankind, predating even the trolls and their simian descendants. A link, some said, between the dragons and humans. Amphin were the first to turn the dragons’ weapons back against them –
-yes, savagery masking cleverness. A trait still valued on Kargathdra. They took the demons, djinn, efreet and elementals and did what none other could: foster unity among the Primevals.
Beka touched the etchings for the djinn and efreet. The markings’ contours sent her back to the tundra dig. She experienced it again. Her mentor ripped apart by the efreet. The djinn’s magic countering her mentor’s attempts to stop the efreet from decorating the tundra’s myriad amphin ruins with steaming intestines.
Seafoam green water began flowing from the etchings. It rose into the form of an efreet. A grin spread across its skeletal face. It raised an arm ending in a scythe and ran the tip across Beka’s subclavicular.
The efreet spoke in the language of the amphin: “It took the savagery of the amphin to break us. Show me what you’ve got, little girl.”
Beka dropped when she saw the scythe. It slashed the air where her head had been. She rolled, rose and drew her deathblade. A glance to the swarming drakes sent her heart pounding. The merfolk’s innards had disgorged scarlet masses of flesh that attacked the drakes with leechlike suckers. Beka felt herself growing lightheaded.
This is a spell, Beka realized. Those things attacking the drakes are part of the merfolk’s spell. Mana drains of some kind. That means this whole thing is my spell. She dipped and thrust upward, driving her sword through the aqueous underside of the efreet’s torso.
The efreet, screaming, returned to seafoam and seeped back into the etchings. Next came the djinn – the same one Beka had seen the drake kill. After her mentor had been left a steaming mess in the snow, the sea drake had come down and thrashed the efreet and the djinn. Then the seafoam green drake had born Beka to the cavern and its malignancy.
“No point,” the djinn flowed back into the bone. “Summon me when you’ve got an enemy in need a proper spell****ing.”
Beka jerked at the touch of the merfolk’s mana drain. The drakes were gone – now it was her and the merfolk’s spell-casting innards. She scowled at the mess the merfolk had vomited up. Then smiled and jammed her deathblade into the glistening mound in a spray of blood and bile.
At the foreign entity’s touch-gore splattering the bones jutting from the dig site- the efreet came shrieking from the bone. It savaged the merfolk. The djinn came in a rush of quicksilver that drenched the merfolk’s mana draining appendages, eliminating the spell.
he defense mechanisms are down. Now excise the malignancy.
Beka flew from her iron island on drake’s wings. Within the cavern she stood over the merfolk. Its legs were bent at angles she didn’t think they would normally bend.
Steaming briney breath kissed the nape of her neck. She knew that the drake from the strange sorcery had come at her summons.
“Stop being used –”
Beka kicked a jag of bone that had ripped through the merfolk’s twisted leg. “You don’t have any room to talk.” She knelt and tried to draw the merfolk’s gaze. It was a hard read. “Look, I’m tell me something: why?”
The silence stretched. She became aware of the drake’s subtle hiss. Its musk had turned from brine to oil. Oil turned something that smelled more caustic.
Shred. Rip. Oil-blood. Beka felt a kick of nausea at the drake’s plea. She glanced back at her summons. Its draconic majesty had been stripped. In its place she saw a bat-winged scavenger with all the charm of a shark that had scented blood.
“Why? Because…because…forgot.” The merfolk’s eyes rolled toward the altar. Steam began rising from the merfolk. It screamed. Chrome plates fell from its body, baring deformities that told Beka this one’s family hadn’t been a tree so much as a stick.
You’re right – this thing’s lineage is straight as the blade that slew my Primeval broodmaster; yes, the same Primeval whose blood and brain gave you your Stoneforge Monastery. The psychic statement came from a dragonlike thing. Its body was an amalgamation of the merfolk’s bone armor and chrome plates. The steam that had come from the merfolk was the dragon-thing’s lifeblood.
The dragon clanked toward Beka and lowered its triangular head. Multifaceted eyes of sapphire, jet and pearl beheld Beka. Beka’s blood ran cold. Behind her the drake’s hiss grew louder.
“You could have this wretch executed. That’s the safest course and most familiar for you, yes?”
Prune it. Shred it like a crippled neuron. The drake rested its chin on Beka’s shoulder. Its breath smelled like rancid shellfish mingled with acid.
One move and the drake’s into my carotid. Or the dragon chews my face off. When you’ve got no good options – well, what does it matter if I don’t have anything to lose?
“I’m no executioner.” Beka said, her voice cracking under the dragon’s duress.
A gust of warm brine buffeted Beka, scalding the nape of her neck. The dragon’s casting a spell! She took a deep breath, blinked several times, flexed her fingers and toes. Keep sharp, Beka, don’t let the spell--
The sound hit Beka like a gun’s report. She jumped and sliced open her shoulder on the drake’s mandible. The sound she had heard was the scrape of iron on stone. Then the clatter of a chair tumbling across a floor. Finally, the distinct snap of a neck as the rope pulled taught.
Beka knew the sound. She’d heard it many times while practicing her spellcraft in the Monastery’s training gym.
We’re in a cutthroat business at the Stoneforge Monastery, she thought. The ones that picked that short drop and sudden stop couldn’t compromise. They couldn’t do what needed doing to make it. The Forge Masters have no patience for materials so brittle that they break before they bend. Beka took a deep breath and blew it out. She felt a headache coming on. It was triggered by thinking about ambitionless colleagues born with the silver spoon, combined with watching cinders reduce her homeland to ash.
Movement, Beka thought. She saw something swinging behind the chrome dragon.
Chains in the cavern’s ceiling: the stubborn ones that couldn’t cut it. More movement past the gray corpses caught Beka’s attention: men and women in battle-worn drakehide bodysuits marked with the insignias of a dozen insurgencies from the tundras of Underworld, the jungle-marshes of Takejukai, the misty rainforests of Eberrai, the savage lands of Kargathdra and the cinder-plagued Chain of Fire. Trailing the renegades were the spirits of men and women, their bodies bearing the traumas that ended their lives. Clinging to these were the spirits of children weighted down by chains of spellbombs – when the failures decided to wallow in their shortcomings, it was no surprise that they’d be driven to snuff out those whose future shone bright. In her periphery Beka saw the chrome dragon’s snout open in what he took for a dragon’s smile.
Subtly is lost on dragons, apparently. Beka thought. A shot of levity desperately needed when looking into the ruined faces of the renegades’ child-soldiers.
“Souls linger within my Primeval’s cavern,” the chrome dragon said, its voice like the hiss of steam escaping boiler pipes. “Think of the renegades like viruses whose coats are the Stoneblade uniforms. They use their neglected talents to survive, at the expense of their hosts.”
Looking at the spirits more closely, Beka saw that the spectral children didn’t share the same angular features, bone-white skin, or lithe builds of the Underworldites. They came from various countries and continents…curiosity sent Beka closer to the spirits. Kneeling, she traced a finger through their ethereal forms. Though they weren’t solid, her sharp eyes picked out signs of starvation, the landmarks of injuries indicative of non-accidental trauma…hosts – kids, not hosts. Kids whose futures were snuffed by the magical coercion of the Monastery’s renegades. Beka scowled. She felt her eyes tearing. Renegade isn’t the right word for them. That implies there’s a basic humanity somewhere within. The things that crawled from the Monastery left their shreds of humanity for the drakes to pick over like carrion.
Beka’s eyes widened with realization. She looked from the spectral children, to the “viruses” dishonoring the drakehide uniforms of the Stoneblades, to the hyperventilating merfolk, the drake lingering over her shoulder and then the chrome dragon.
Its like a leviathan devouring its own tail… “Ha, ha, ha,” she cradled her head in her palm. “Oh man, it’s coming back to philosophy. ****ing philosophy,” she said to herself, “where you laughed at the instructor because the treatises you wrote the morning of the due date got you through that special brand of torture.”
“All the tools have a purpose,” the chrome dragon said. “You’re one of the few to grasp this simple truth.” It nodded at the “viruses” and their victims. “These couldn’t come to terms with it. Perhaps the ways of the Stoneforge Masters are too subtle for the younger generation.”
“We’re not telepaths.” Beka walked from the child-soldiers to the chrome dragon, looking it in the eye. She set her stance, squared her shoulders. “I could raze the Monastery with your help. You the Primeval, the drake, my efreet and my djinn.”
“I’m not the Primeval,” the chrome dragon said. “I’m the last survivor of its brood. Philosophy was my weapon. While the Primeval struggled against the amphin, my arguments led the Primeval to its doom. Right upon the island where the Stoneforge Monastery now stands.”
The Primeval, a shaper of whole worlds, led to the slaughter by this dragon’s words. My dismissal of those philosophy lessons may have been a tad shortsighted.
“Your proposition is very atomistic. It brings to mind the viashino mindset.” The chrome dragon said, smiling.
The dragon’s words were like a sai driven into Beka’s chest. She willed herself to remain still. Her mind fought to keep her facial muscles arranged in a wall of stoicism. Beka’s brain prepared to grip the metaphorical sai and send it right back into the dragon’s smirking snout.
“It all comes back to tools.” Beka turned to the drake. The skin was raised from its snout. Saliva dripped from its needlelike fangs. The acidic stuff hissed when it hit the cavern’s floor. Beka watched the cords in its neck tensing, dropped when it struck and thrust up with her hands. She took a fistful of throat, dug her nails deep and watched the drake’s blood roll down her arm. Her second hand struck just as quick. She gritted her teeth and dug in, bracing herself against the drake’s thrashing.
This is like dissecting a cadaver, Beka. Except here, you make a mistake and the cadaver will rip you to pieces. Beka worked her hands deeper into the wound, tearing whatever she could. A hand slick with gore slid free. She snatched the hunting knife from her bootstrap, made an incision in the soft flesh of the underbelly and started gutting. The drake’s resistance lessened with its bloodloss.
Now you’re back with your mom, cleaning the day’s kill. The thought of her mother, who had died at the end of a land leviathan’s tusk, brought a smile to Beka’s face. I wish you were here, mom. All your lessons in cunning and quick reflexes have me on track to my deathblades. I think I’ll go for boomerangs. That’s what the drake’s jawbone and talons are good for. You were always good with the boomerangs.
Beka kept the memories at the forefront of her mind throughout the struggle. When the drake expired she began digging out its talons and jawbone. With those free, she rose and began scraping bits of raw meat from what would be her new boomerangs.
“The forging’s finished. You started as a tool for the Stoneforge Masters. Now you’re become a tool for this dragon-spirit.” The merfolk’s voice sounded thick. As if a tumor had metastasized to its vocal cords. Merfolk were generally extinct in this day and age, so Beka couldn’t say whether or not that was possible.
Something wet, warm, and pulsating wrapped itself around Beka’s torso. She found herself facing the merfolk. Its hinged mouth hung down to its groin. It had disgorged purple-blue viscera that looked like an amphin turned inside out.
That thing’s alive. Beka saw four beating urchin-like organs on the amphin-horror’s chest. Four hearts, that thing’s alive...I believe I’ve found the malignancy. Looking closely at the merfolk, she noted the taughtness with which its skin was stretched over bone, the lack of muscle, weak eyes and sheen of oily perspiration coating the suffering creature. I’d love to bring the amphin-horror back to the Monastery’s anatomy department.
“I’ll have no part of your casual carnage,” the merfolk said. “Not yours, the Masters’ carnage, mind you. You have yet to be used – but used you will be…” the amphin’s webbed hand slammed against the top of Beka’s head. The horror’s oil rolled down her face, gumming up her eyes, clogging her noise, sliding into her screaming mouth.
Beka’s headache returned like a thunderclap. Ringing filled her ears. Darkness swallowed her vision. She screamed in fear of being blind. It felt as if her heart wanted to tear through her chestwall. Beka’s nose caught a familiar scent. Her ears pricked at the crashing of waves. She knew where she was before her heart resumed its normal rhythm. The darkness fell away and her headache became a dull annoyance.
The Chain of Fire stretched out before her like a scab. The cracked land was red and smoking. Petrified jungles stood where once hills and mountains of verdant green had provided life for the people and oil for their machines.
“Champion, you’ve come to us at last!”
Beka retained her composure and looked toward the stone jungle. Standing there was a human – no, a hellkite junkie – whose exposed skeletal muscles and gunshot burns indicated an addiction to hellkite venom. The stuff sloughed the skin, lizardlike, and started changing you on a cellular level. Beka had seen addicts like this in the Stoneforge Monastery – they were used in training exercises – and they became something not quite human, but not quite dragon. A mass of scarred scales, a short temper, and the dim intellect of a drake was what lay at the end of the junkie’s road.
The junkie waved her toward the petrified jungle. Beka strode forward, noting that she wore the seafoam leathers indicating her place in the ranks of the Stoneblades. She allowed a small smile beneath her facemask.
I should take my victories where I can, I guess. Her smile faltered. The mental discipline that maintained her poker face flagged with each step toward the dead jungle.
Dead jungle, dead people, dead land – the telepathic voice rang out in Beka’s ear. It was as if the speaker was at her shoulder. A sideways glance revealed nothing but air. Briefly, she thought she saw an oily rainbow shimmering there. She cut her eyes back at the junkie. He could snap at any moment. Beka’s had rested on her boomerangs – red, she noted and deadly sharp.
The junkie didn’t attack. He clapped his hands, clutched them close to his stomach. It reminded Beka of a child waiting to open a gift. His eyes, she noted, were covered with a yellow film. His lips had peeled back so that his blunt, protruding mandible and maxilla could assume the shape of a dragon’s snout. Gums slick with saliva quivered back (pushing out a few human teeth in the process) from a row of uneven fangs.
“We were told to expect you, Champion.” The junkie said. “Your herald came with the tide and slew many with a lightning-spitting trident of ammonite.”
Beka recalled her scab analogy; if she’d seen the scab, then the hell into which the junkie led her was the festering wound. Within the underground chamber torches guttered with blue fire. They illuminated iron cages imprisoning folk every bit as horrific as the junkie. A table set against the wall held the source of their addiction: a hellkite hatchling, chained down and loaded with lines delivering a life sustaining solution.
“Renegade.” Beka picked out the figure. It was nearly invisible in the dim light. Standing on an outcropping of rock, hands on a guardrail, was a thing wearing a bodysuit modeled after the Stoneblades’. Whereas theirs were made from drakehide, this thing wore the blade-finned skin of a merfolk.
Eyes on the uniform fixed on Beka. A gash on the uniform’s shoulder opened and screeched, “Help.”
“The last of my kind,” the ronin said. It removed its gloves, revealing webbed talons. Blue mist gathered around its hands. “You can just **** off and leave my brother and me alone.”
Beka’s hand hesitated on her boomerangs. It sounded like the thing’s human voice was cracking from grief. She was reminded of her mother’s voice as they’d watched the Chain of Fire sink into the sunset from the deck of the freighter.
That’s an oddly human sentiment and an oddly human choice of words. Not surprising given the evolutionary relationship between us.
Crimson light erupted from a pit beneath the amphin-ronin’s platform. A rumbling growl rolled up from the pit’s depths.
“Ah, you! Yes, you, come now is the time to join the rebellion’s ranks!” the junkie grabbed someone from the herd of mangled horrors. He’d picked a woman that struggled against his grip. He tightened it, drawing blood. She screamed. There was a commotion from the herd. One of their numbers sprang forward and drove a needle into her arm. As the junkie passed Beka, his captive swung the hair from her eyes.
Beka knew the captive’s face. Mother. You died on a land leviathan hunt. To pay for my entry into the Stoneforge Monastery. This isn’t real.
“Judging from your scent, I’d say it’s real enough,” the amphin ronin said.
Beka averted her gaze as the junkie shoved his captive into the pit. The bellow that came from the pit told Beka that the unseen beast was one of the wingless breeds of dragons native to Kargathdra. She focused on the amphin ronin, gritting her teeth against the grunts and moans rising from the pit.
Kill the dragon and the captive. The products of this amphin’s sick conception need to be terminated.
“There you go. You’re a butcher, all of you are butchers. The child that comes from this,” the amphin ronin nodded at the pit. The crimson light from within beat like a heart. The sounds were reduced to the dragon’s growls. “The viashino that will be born from this will be no different than me. The Kargathdrasi breed and butcher the pit dragons in their mercenary companies. The viashino shaman grows its legion of cinders by butchering the humans of the Chain of Fire.”
Beka’s hand dropped from her boomerangs. She smiled, remembering her philosophy treatises. In her opinion they had been rushed and full of circular logic that made it all a pile of utter nonsense. The amphin-horror’s spell, and this nightmare that grew from that spell, would be dealt with by a subtler blade than the one at her hip.
“I’m a butcher. A tool to be used by the Stoneforge Masters that wallows in its ignorance, so please help me understand the biology of this,” Beka waved at the pit.
“Our magic can trigger polymorphs at the cellular level. Any barriers to reproduction are eliminated by dragging out the inactive genes you carried over from our dead race; as it happens, the dragons also shared these genetic similarities with the amphin race.” The amphin ronin lifted his hand.
Beka watched as the captive was levitated from the pit, covered in bruises, bite marks and burns. The junkie escorted her to a separate cage from the others. He caught Beka’s gaze.
“Give us time, Champion. We need time to provide you with your army.” He reached through the bars to pat the captive. She flinched back from his reach. The junkie jerked his arm back from the cage.
An army of nightmares to battle the viashino and its cinders; that would be a nice way of killing two drakes with one fireball, Beka thought. That lizard will burn for what its done.
"That’s what the Stoneforge Masters hope you’ll think,” the amphin ronin said. “You’ll secure them the Chain of Fire. And then, they’ll use you to infiltrate the Crimson Company of Kargathdra.” The amphin-ronin gripped the guardrail. “Once that’s done, they’ll be free to bastardize my race’s legacy – the djinn, efreets, elementals, and demons we freed from the Primevals will once again be forced to serve things with the same low cunning and brutality of their former masters.”
Beka griped her boomerangs, more for support than anything else. Your mother died to put you in the Stoneforge Monastery. Gored by a land leviathan, so forget whatever they gave to the pit dragon. It wasn’t real. . “I don’t hold people responsible for their mistakes. I believe that the individual is the one steering the ship. I ask that you show the force of will necessary to fulfill your duties. Instead, you took your mates to the chrome dragon’s cavern and ****ed yourselves.” She forced a smile. The words that had come from her lips left a bitter taste on her tongue. She knew her mother would’ve had her in the corner, bar of freshly wetted soap in her mouth for using that kind of language. “In more ways than one.”
Beka let her hand fall to her side. She recalled her mother’s words about the amphin cults that haunted the ruin-covered tundras. “They only respond to violence, baby girl,” her mother had said as she cleaned the blood from her speargun’s ammunition. “The Forgemasters may not believe that – but what do they know, hiding in the corpse of the great Primeval. Bunch of pale maggots that wouldn’t last a day on the tundras…”
I’m no executioner, Beka reminded herself. She picked a stray scrap of drake flesh from her jawbone-turned-boomerang. It glistened with mana that dripped oily and blue like blood from a rare slab of steak. That doesn’t mean I have to stop you from hanging yourself.
Beka shaped the mana into a spell that shook the amphin-ronin’s enchantment. Threads of magic unraveled. The effect was like ripping sutures from a fresh arterial ligation.A tsunami of reality crashed through the enchantment’s gash. It bore Beka away from the hellish vision of her homeland.
Within the dragon’s cavern Beka found herself gasping like someone that’d come up from a deep dive. She looked down on the amphin. Its eyes were solid black and impossible to read. Barbels hanging from its elongated skull drew in like snakes preparing to strike. The placental cord connecting it to the merfolk’s gaping maw had turned sclerotic.
This thing’s going to take its brother with it. Beka’s stoney expression shifted into a scowl. She completed the misdirection spell by embracing the mana she’d squeezed from the drake flesh. This is the drake speaking. Not you, but you can stop it whenever you like, she told herself. The poison that seeped into her thoughts began to spew from her mouth in a verbal onslaught.
“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, newt.” Beka let the drake’s poison drive her around to the connection between amphin and merfolk. She drew her talon-boomerang and struck it against the hardened placenta. Sparks flew where they contacted. Gritting her teeth, she continued working. The amphin squelched something unintelligible. The merfolk had eyes for the sharp end of the boomerang and an escape from its slow death by its malignant brother.
“Actually, picture this,” Beka finished severing the connection. Blood plopped out in thick black clotted clumps. She slammed her hand against the rounded dome of the amphin’s skull. Her fingers clenched it like a drake’s talons. She kept her eyes on the amphin’s. A film slid over her field of vision, generated by the drake’s blue magic. Through the magic she saw into the amphin’s mind.
“My kind – foreigners from the Chain of Fire – were worth little and less to the Stoneforge Masters than a pile of land leviathan dung.” In the amphin’s mind she saw the fate of spawn the amphin considered lesser. The pale creatures were used to bait the mollusks whose shells were key to the construction of the amphin temples. While the mollusks feasted on the ones the amphin deemed weak, the amphin hunters attacked the shellfishes’ primitive minds. Psychic tridents were thrust into the storm of impulses that drove the mollusks. Tines raked and twisted, drawing forth elementals from the shellfishes paralyzed by the laval amphins’ innate defense mechanisms.
“Well, my mother wasn’t having any of that. She picked up a speargun from a Kargathdrasi outpost in the wharf district and made the Stoneforge Masters take notice. They were funded by the oil barons, and there’s no better source of it than the land leviathans.” Beka watched the amphin’s barbels droop and shrivel. In its eyes she saw the cancer’s horror: larval amphin snapping the jagged edges from the temples where they were prepared for their role as bait, then the explosions of oil from the amphin hunters as their bait began attacking them. Blood mingled with oil as the larval amphin sawed through calcaneal tendons, arteries and bundles of vasculature.
“I wasn’t as sheltered as the young of your kind.” Beka felt her nails split the amphin’s slick skin. She saw what waited for the amphin larvae kept ignorant to the natural order: elementals with a taste for blood wakened by the young ones’ butchery. Amalgamations of coral, ammonite, stitched together by kelp and eels with the gape-mouthed heads of leviathans devoured the stuck and bleeding bodies of their former masters. Beka’s grip was nearly lost when the amphin-horror jerked at the vision of the murderous larvae being crushed underfoot by the sated elementals.
Beka’s misdirection of the amphin-horror’s mind-rending spell climaxed with the horror popping its urchin-like hearts with the drake-talon boomerang. She released her grip on the salamander’s skull and staggered back into the cool grip of the chrome dragon. Its warm breath sent a shiver down her spine.
“Well done, Drakeblade.” The chrome dragon released Beka. She went to the merfolk and knelt by the dying relic of a bygone era.
“I stand by what I said – I’m no butcher.” Beka smiled weakly. “A passable enough surgeon,” she nodded at the severed placenta and the dead amphin. “The cancerous salamander has left you at death’s threshold. You can lay here, die –” choose your words carefully, Beka. Those would be mother’s words; except mother wasn’t dealing with a dragon that’d killer her over an insult – “and likely be raised as an undead guardian of this cavern. Or, you can let me—”
“Spawnkiller, I was taking care of my spawnmate and you killed it!”
Beka drew her jawbone boomerang and summoned her efreet. Seawater flowed from a rune in the jawbone, forming the upper body of a jaundiced humanoid with skin stretched tight over a skeletal face. It flashed a shark’s grin at the sight of its master.
“Hold it.” She pointed at the merfolk. Its protests had turned into incoherent shrieks. Trembling webbed fingers grasped its bladelike fins. What little muscle remained in its body tensed as struggled to rip fins from its sweat-slick skin.
“Blood’s my price, lady.” The efreet did as commanded. “I like you, so rather than me demand payment up front, I’ll be happy to set up a tab.”
Beka chuckled at the bloodthirsty efreet’s joke. “That’s fine. You’re saving a life here. Does that count for anything?”
“Little and less.” The efreet’s voice was flat, devoid of humor. “This thing’s spawnsire couldn’t stop sucking off the self-righteous sons of *****es that chained us.” It looked at Beka, something like sadness in its eyes. “We were all free, and because these dragon-****s couldn’t understand our happiness, they forced themselves on us.”
“Ask me about the Chain of Fire. Between the amphin and my viashino, we might have something to bond over.” Beka said. She ran her drake’s talon boomerang along the merfolk’s back. Fingers trained by the anatomists in the Stoneforge Monastery dug through atrophied muscle, fat (it seemed that was all the amphin-horror had left in its brother-host) and found the merfolk’s nerves. Beka quickly cut free the merfolk’s central nervous system and gave it to the efreet. “Take this back to the dig site. There should be a rune in the dragonbones that’ll fit it.”
“Consider your tab paid.” The efreet grinned. “I’ll be having a long talk with the merfolk.”
“I’ve saved its life. You end it and my drake will end you.” She starred into the efreet’s yellow eyes.
The efreet looked away and muttered, “Yes ma’am.” It dissolved into a stream of seawater that flowed into the rune in the jawbone boomerang.
“You’ve shown more initiative than any of the Forge Masters,” the chrome dragon said. It clattered around so that it stood behind the altar, facing Beka. “They’ve been here, and they do exactly as I say. There’s no analysis on their behalf, no questions. That sort of drakestepping is dangerous, particularly in academia.”
Beka exhaled and leaned against the altar. She glanced back at the dissected corpse. This merfolk may not be the only thing that needs excising. A lifetime among the elite of the Monastery have proven mother’s old adage true: no smoke without fire. Beka felt herself growing lightheaded. Something came darting into the cavern: a carplike elemental with slick blue skin, its mouth open in a dragonlike smile.
“You’ve got a lot to mull over,” the chrome dragon said. “Think on it while you make your way across the tundras. I believe you have a drake to slay. Get that uniform made and get into the ranks of the Monastery’s ninjas. “Then you’ll be on your way to fixing the malignancy that lingers in that dragon’s corpse-turned-academy.”
Beka mounted the elemental, gripped a set of barbels dangling from its skull and filled her lungs with air. In an instant they were rocketing through the underground seas, then breaching the surface and coming in toward the Stoneforge Island’s less-used dinghy district.
The elemental came to a stop amid docks falling into ruin. Old warehouses and storage sheds dotted the landscape. Graffiti painting the ruined streets featured fearsome three-eyed demons screaming as multiple tendrils filled their nostrils, eyes and maws. Beka had seen thugs with similar tattoos in the slummy wharf district and instantly knew the king of this rotting court.
This is the Storm’s territory. The Storm was an infamous ronin whose ranks were filled with demon-worshipping dragonhearted from the badlands of Takejukai. At the end of the day, the Storm’s thugs are nothing more than viruses. They’re looking for a place to feed and reproduce. Beka drew her boomerangs and began her trek into the Storm’s territory. She kept to the shadows and began running through the virology she’d picked up at the Monastery. Take the Storm’s thugs, offer them better than what they’re getting here, and you’d have your metaphorical vaccine. A toolbox of vaccines – what more could you ask for when there’s likely a few viruses infecting your patient?
Whatever malignancy waits in the Stoneforge Monastery – it won’t be metastasizing to the Chain of Fire. Or the barbarian-lands of Kargathdra.
As she evaded the hulking, blunt-snouted dragonhearted, Beka couldn’t help but think on what the chrome dragon had said about the Forge Masters. And the more she thought on it – at the very least it distracted her from the shrieks, roars, wet ripping and satiated growling that accompanied the dragonhearted thugs’ debt collection – the more she wondered if she’d followed the Forge Masters in taking the dragon’s bait.
One thing at a time, she told herself. Deal with the source of the symptoms rather than worry about the symptoms.