67. That Old Serpent Called The Devil

67. That Old Serpent Called The Devil

Skylenna

The Stormsages make up forthe fact that Dessin and I have stopped fighting.

Marilynn’s cries break our concentration and send us pivoting in her direction. She’s kneeling in front of Niles, hunched over and trembling. Why would she be crying? Did someone…

“Dessin,” I blurt out in terror, praying we haven’t just lost one of our own. “Niles! Is it Niles?”

Dessin is tall enough to stare into the distance over the war and fire and pools of blood around us. His war-stricken eyes quickly flick back to me, and he shakes his head. Although his reaction isn’t severe enough for it to be someone in our family, it still holds a certain crushing weight. I push through the massive cluster of men and women, bumping into thrusting elbows, dropping bodies, and moving carriages. Finally standing in a clearing close to the bald cypress tree, it’s clear who Marilynn is hunched over. I lose my breath at the sight of him.

Aurick Demechnef lies against her lap, not moving, not breathing, not blinking. His silky ebony hair is sopping wet with blood, and Niles is reaching over his limp frame to close Aurick’s eyes. I feel hollow and in disbelief at the thought of his chest no longer moving.

Though there are many disastrous memories of this man, he was still my friend in that blizzard. He brought me closer to the love of my life by getting me a job at Emerald Lake Asylum. He was there when I had no one else, regardless of his ulterior motives.

I feel my lungs sag into my chest as I look through the fog at the leader of Demechnef, now fallen. Dessin appears at my side, silent and staring, too, like he also needed that moment to process the gravity of who we have lost.

“Dessin!” Warrose runs to us, using his bladed whip to cut through the crowd ambushing him. He’s pointing to a location off in the distance. “Dessin, look!”

We rotate at the same time, searching the sea of madness, though it’s hard to miss. There’s a bronze cage behind the many lines of Vexamen Breed soldiers. It’s the size of a small building with bright amber eyes glowing from between its bars. And it’s opening, unlatching locks from the bottom.

“It’s a Dralutheran! Get DaiSzek out of here!” Warrose’s thunderous voice sends a shockwave down my spine as my eyes widen toward Dessin.

What does that mean?

To my dismay, Dessin’s face loses color, and he’s suddenly searching the battlefield for DaiSzek, shouting his name. Tendons and veins bulge along his neck. His head twists and turns as he tries to locate our boy.

“What’s a Dralutheran?!” I ask in a shriek.

We’ve never worried about DaiSzek with another creature before. I’ve seen him dominate the most fearsome of creatures. Even when he was a pup, he defeated a night dawper that stalked me near the Red Oaks! And he was a freaking pup!

“Dralutherans are just as rare as a RottWeilen nowadays!” Warrose finally reaches me with a bloodstained hand on my shoulder. “They’re reptilian leviathans that only hunt apex predators! Nearly indestructible skin, and extremely intelligent.”

And in this instant, a creature steps out of the colossal cage opening. It’s a petrifying blend of a basilisk and a wingless dragon with seaweed green scales that glimmer to a shade of amethyst against the light of fire. Its short but powerful legs move with the speediness of a spider, reminding me of the claws and stance a crocodile has. And it sniffs the air through the slits of its stubby snout, flexing its purple tongue over those spiked teeth as it catches the whiff it’s looking for.

The only other apex predator in this land.

DaiSzek.

The gigantic creature sets its amber eyes on a target and doesn’t hesitate to blast through the lines of soldiers to get to it. The earth rumbles under my feet, vibrations quaking my innards and thrumming hard against my beating heart.

I finally spot Dessin sprinting through walls of opponents, cutting them down as he screams, “DaiSzek, NO!!!!”

Our boy is a mere fifty feet away, tearing apart a loaded cannon as he comes to a screeching stop, locking his sight on the Dralutheran. Those RottWeilen eyes flash to a blazing ruby red. Upper lip curling back to reveal his mountainous teeth. And he crouches low before bolting in that direction.

Dessin roars over the noise, begging DaiSzek to stop, to come back, to retreat.

But DaiSzek flies like a stallion, frothing at the mouth to protect us all from this new antagonist. Nothing on earth could stop him from meeting this challenge.

“It is what killed the last dragon,”the spirit of the elven queen, Knightingale, whispers to me.

My stomach convulses with doom. DaiSzek leaps and soars over the cinders and rubble, conquering his obstacles with ease. What can I do? How can I stop this?

I swivel to Warrose, gyrating his whip around us. “Cover me while I do this.”

“Do what?” he asks without missing a beat.

I tilt my face to the sky, conjuring that feeling that consumed me as I rode DaiSzek’s back into battle. I connect with it the way I would reach out and hold Dessin’s hand, using the void as a crutch to stabilize myself. It’s a tangible entity, warm and thrumming in my lungs and soul. Its lava spurting through my bloodstream, filling my brain with an electrical charge.

And I breathe life into the image I create in my mind.

My enemies burning.

The Dralutheran engulfed in flames.

A mere second away from a collision, DaiSzek unhinges his jaw to roar; an ear-splitting sound devastates the battlefield as a pummel of fire eats up the air surrounding the Dralutheran, taking out units of the Breed along the way. Those seaweed-colored scales heat up like glowing coals, turning red before brightening to coral with flecks of embers popping from its tough skin.

Endorphins fill me up from impact. Power. Elation. Seamless destruction.

But as I observe the great flames, my stomach takes a dip. The Dralutheran is only momentarily occupied by the bright lights and scorching heat around its body. It swats at the infernos like that combustion is an unwanted pest. And after the initial beat of surprise, the beast huffs, lunging forward to clip DaiSzek in the side with a scaley claw.

I cry out while DaiSzek flips to the side, looking so small compared to the gargantuan beast. But he doesn’t stay down for long. He attacks without hesitation, using his teeth to snap at the ankles, the places near the gut where vital organs subside.

DaiSzek tries everything to no avail.

“I can’t watch this,” Dessin grunts, rushing to my side.

I shake my head back and forth, as if the motion will make this all go away. I was accepting of this way before I knew DaiSzek had a true competitor. Where did they find this thing? What are its weaknesses?

“Warrose!” Dessin barks over my head. “What can we do?!”

In two side steps, Warrose is by our side, looking uncharacteristically dumbfounded.

“Dralutherans are fucking rare. They haven’t been spotted in over a century. I don’t even know where Vexamen could have found one, much less capture it!”

This can’t be happening. No. There is always a way. Dessin can always find a way.

“Weaknesses?” I choke out, watching the horror show while wincing, yet unable to turn away and spare myself the violent images.

“Not any that have been recorded. They usually are isolated and never enter combat. So no one has ever really gotten the chance to study them.” Warrose pauses, giving his whipping arm a break as a flood of the Nightamous Horde swarms the area around us.

“But it’s the Dralutheran that killed the last dragon.” I turned to Dessin with balled fists and crazy eyes. “It defeated a dragon!”

“How do you know this?”

“The elven queen told me.”

“She did?” He looks both fascinated and skeptical. “Isn’t she…”

“Dead. Yes. But they’ve both been here fighting with us. The two warrior angels that came before.”

“Ask her Skylenna!” He shakes my shoulders after DaiSzek crashes into a bed of explosives.

“DaiSzek, get out of there!” I scream.

I’m not sure if he hears me or he realizes what he’s fallen into, but the brave RottWeilen leaps away from the stacks of ticking time bombs, barely missing the destruction as it booms toward the sky.

As he shakes himself off, releasing a cloud of ash from his fur, a unit of heavily armed soldiers surround him in a circle. Dessin and I both stiffen in shock at their brazenness of getting so close to him. Two long spears are thrown strategically from two separate angles, sticking into his back with the precision of an arrow. I jolt beside Dessin as DaiSzek howls to the misting sky.

“Hey!” I scream, gripping Dessin’s arm with my nails.

“Marilynn! Warrose!” Dessin orders them over without any context, yet we all know. Because the moment Marilynn stands to Dessin’s right side and Warrose to my left, we take off in a race of vengeance. Several members of the colony fall in line with us, but Dessin, being an avenging alter, doesn’t slow his pace. This is what he was made for. This is what he lives for.

With a final leap toward a soldier with his back to us, Dessin throws him backward, directly into my arms. And I act on the fumes of my temper, snapping his neck swiftly. We fight together as if it’s all choreographed. Selected moves and countermoves, lethal hits, and ways we maneuver our bodies to kill at an inhumanly fast rate. Bodies drop around us. All of this without the use of our swords. We decimate every soldier attacking DaiSzek with nothing but our bare hands.

After the path is cleared, I fumble over the bodies to DaiSzek, who is fighting to stand up with the spears poking out of his back and sides.

“I’ve got you, buddy!” I pant, throwing my arms toward him.

His cinnamon eyes flare wide at something above me, pupils dilating, his irises growing a fiery crimson once more. A shadow slithers over me, daunting and cold. But before I can rotate to fight the beast I know is creeping up behind me, DaiSzek hurtles himself over my head with every ounce of energy he can muster and lands on the arm of the Dralutheran! His growls and snarls are warped and messy, muffled by his efforts to rip into the creature’s indestructible skin.

I scream something incoherent as the scaly creature rakes his claws into the side of DaiSzek’s tummy, spraying his hot blood above us like a sputtering shower.

“Let him go!” I cry, observing our archers and best swordsmen attempting to take the monster down. But DaiSzek is thrown as if he weighs nothing more than a sack of flour. Air puffs from his lungs as he lands on the hard ground with a thud.

Dessin jumps in front of DaiSzek, covering his core by making his body a human shield. The monster screeches at the back of Dessin’s neck, warning him that it will kill anyone to get to DaiSzek. It lifts his crocodile foot, hovering it over Dessin in an attempt to squash him.

And I’m running in a frenzy toward them.

I’m going to lose them both! I’m going to lose them both!

With a violent jerking of DaiSzek’s leg, he kicks Dessin in the stomach like a horse, launching him away from the Dralutheran’s foot. The sound that follows is deafening. A stomping of that scaly foot over DaiSzek’s leg. Quick. Sharp. A wet crack! And my mountainous boy lies there, yelping like a puppy in agony as his leg is broken.

Dessin howls against the symphony of war around us. Because the pain of this beautiful boy detonates through our souls, feasting on our organs, blistering our hearts. And I can’t breathe. Can’t move. Can’t do anything other than grasp at my chest to keep my heart from tumbling to the ground in pieces.

Knightingale, help him! Oh god! Please help him!

“I can’t lose my boy!” I’m bawling as I scream into the void, both real and in my mind.

The beast is working toward a deadly blow, twisting the energy of this battle into heartbreaking loss and sickening anticipation for what comes next. Because our men do everything. They try everything. This thing is unkillable. A cockroach that lives through a nuclear explosion.

Knightingale! PLEASE!

She appears in front of me with the grace of a shadow, at a height of five feet and eleven inches. Radiant bronze skin, long coffee-colored hair, and white paint drawn in intricate streaks across her face. Her red leather corset is decorated with gold buckles and belted straps from her neck to her ankles. And those pointed ears that are clearly not human.

“I am not the right Knightingale that can help him,” the elven queen says with a voice of gilded iron and expensive silk. Her wise eyes bore into me, waiting for me to understand her meaning.

“What?”

But there’s a figure off in the distance, staring, like a lighthouse calling a ship home. There’s a sensation creeping over my body as I let that magnetic energy pull my gaze away from the elven queen through the sea of the dead and the living, the bloody swords, and the dismembered limbs.

My eyes land on Knightingale, the Ginger Wrathbull, standing a few hundred paces away from this massacring carnage. She stares at DaiSzek with those doe black eyes; the fur spiking in a strip down her back as she witnesses the leader of her pack being beaten down and annihilated before her very eyes.

And though she’s an animal, I can see a potent idea rising to the front of her mind. A decision. She swipes her focus to the pile of explosives that are being used in the cannons. A hollow pit forms in my gut just as my mouth falls open.

“Knightingale!” I shout in terror.

Those dilated eyes switch over to me, then to DaiSzek in his slow death, then back to me.

I shake my head.

But it’s the way she’s looking at me, like she wants me to understand. She will bear no other options. The pain of watching her alpha, her only friend, be pummeled in a slaughter, is something she cannot stomach.

“Wait!” I scream to her. “Just wait!”

Dessin scrambles to his feet to set his sights on who I’m yelling at.

Knightingale lifts her snout proudly in a quick posture of honor. And her decision is made; her legs shoot into action, and she’s sprinting like an award-winning racehorse toward the pile of bombs. Without missing a beat, she picks one up with her mouth, the size and weight of a brick, and swipes it through a sweltering torch. She huffs and snorts in pain as the fire ignites the outer shell, licking at her snout and tongue.

But my brave, misunderstood Ginger Wrathbull doesn’t let that stop her. She barrels toward the Dralutheran, picking up speed with her pointy ears pressed back and the fire eating away at the sides of her lips and fur.

I screech and cry like a dying banshee, but Dessin holds me back. Arms wrapped around my waist, I can feel him shudder against me as I thrash and fight to stop her.

“Wait!” I scream through rivers of tears pouring down my cheeks.

DaiSzek looks up at the commotion through slackened eyes and the ache of his broken limbs. She chuffs and barks as he spots her zooming through the crowd, taking damn near flying strides like a cheetah before she reaches the grand beast.

And it…it happens too fast.

The Dralutheran lowers its head to the ground to greet her, opening its jaws wide and welcoming to enjoy a quick meal of this small, yet heroic animal. There’s a gap of a few seconds as she takes a hurried dive into its mouth. Those jaws close around her. Her copper-furred figure disappears into that darkness.

Dessin and I freeze with gaping mouths.

The Dralutheran has but a moment to blink its reptilian eyes. It implodes from the inside out, spraying everyone in a fine, pink mist. The skies weep with its disintegrated fragments, skin, innards, and, of course, DaiSzek’s friend, Knightingale.