World Warden, page 54
Tentacles sprouted from her body instead, six of them, muscular and covered in spines. They slithered on the ground, and faint luminescence twinkled in their scales. They were nothing like the vines that had come out of the ground. These appendages looked powerful, and they moved with exquisite precision. They lifted the creature’s massive body with ease, and their overpowering strength was evident as they crushed rocks that were in her way. Their tips were made of crystal, exactly like her spines, and each skewered the ground like a stinger sinking into tender flesh.
When she opened her wings, Oscar very nearly cried. It was too much horror. The cyclopean membranous appendages were exactly like Dresde’s, but instead of crimson they were black, the veins in them shimmering conduits of the same prismatic luminescence that coursed through her entire body. The mesmerizing glow ran up her neck and appeared to concentrate around the edge of her maw, a monstrous thing that was held half-open. It was segmented in three parts, each of them needled with long, wicked-looking teeth.
Oscar backed away. She was dazzling and tenebrous at once. She was a vision of brilliant darkness.
You go no further, Dresde said. Her thought boomed with command. You will besmirch my domain no longer.
The creature paused.
She Who Hungers focused fully on Dresde and rotated her head to the left ever so slightly, as if appraising her enemy. She did not speak, nor did she project intent or conscious thought with her mind.
Instead she fired a spine at Dresde’s heart.
Chapter 31. Her
ELIAS SENSED the deadly projectile an instant before it was shot, but even with his heightened reflexes, he was shocked at the sudden brutality with which She Who Hungers attacked.
For a moment, a large spine on her shoulder glittered with prismatic otherworldliness. Every wavelength in the rainbow coursed briefly along its shaft.
Then she launched it. The air cracked in a sonic boom. Elias jerked his head to the side, expecting to see Dresde impaled on the glass needle.
Impostor! Dresde accused, vaulting through the air with exquisite precision. She dodged the spine by a hair’s breadth as it sailed past her chest, and she landed a moment later in a burst of sparks when her glowing talons struck the ground. Dresde sneered with her mind. You are an abomination, born of stolen life!
She Who Hungers crouched and smashed the crystalline tips of her tentacles into the ground.
A fractal latticework of glowing polychromatic fissures splintered the rock and spread out from the six puncture wounds in the earth. The world groaned.
Elias’s breath caught in his throat. He almost let go of Sizzra’s spine when his mind registered what the creature was doing.
“Eli!” Tristan said. “What’s wrong?”
Sweat beaded on his forehead, and it took him a moment to be able to answer in a strained gasp, “Everything.”
The spirit-lines of the world were being drained. He could feel the horrible rending as She Who Hungers drew sustenance from the network of life around her and used it to bolster her strength. Life forms in the far-off continent of Reena were dying, falling to the ground, and the oceans shuddered as living things seized up in their last moments and then sank to the depths as corpses. It was as though every victim dropped into nameless darkness to disappear forever. The Flowers could no longer find them in death. They had been ripped from the world itself.
Through the contact Elias caught a glimpse of the mind of She Who Hungers, and he teetered on the brink of despair. There was nothing there. The enormous reptilian monster before him, the amalgamation of stolen life energy from the three guardians of the world, was a mindless hungry void.
You dared make a thrall of me, Dresde hissed. Her eye cluster blazed, and she radiated the heat of the midday sun. She slunk forward without a hint of hesitation, approaching her rival.
The spines along the monster’s entire length shone brighter with the rapturous beauty of shimmering multicolored light. A moment later she jumped up, dizzyingly high, and flapped with wings that were at once blacker than night and brighter than the moons.
You should have never dared take physical form, Dresde threatened. A body can be killed!
She jumped with a wild roar. She Who Hungers flapped harder, as if wanting to rise out of reach, but Dresde was too fast. She collided with the intruder in a burst of sparks and raked the creature’s black scales with all four of her glowing talons.
You try to fly away from the queen of the sky? Dresde demanded with arrogant ferocity. Your stolen wings are nothing in the face of my power!
Dresde twisted out of the way of spine after spine and slithered to the back of the resplendent abomination. She snapped her jaws shut at the spot where a dark wing sprouted from a nest of aberrant crystals and crunched bone into splinters. She braced herself for a heartbeat, gathering strength, and then ripped the wing from muscle with a sickening tearing sound.
She Who Hungers dropped to the ground.
Dresde vaulted away and landed gracefully on her feet, tossing the bleeding wing to the bottom of the crater a moment later. She Who Hungers crashed down in a spray of black sand that forced Elias to cover his face. When he was able to open his eyes again, he saw the creature already up on her thick wriggling tentacles, her remaining right wing a mangled mess that had been torn to shreds by her own spines in the fall.
Incompetent newborn! Dresde crowed, facing her squarely. You are nothing but a facsimile of true life. You can barely wield the strength you hold!
She Who Hungers gave no outward indication of pain or fear. Instead she lifted her serpentine neck, and the twinkling light along its length began to pulse, faster and faster.
Time to end your life, Dresde declared with supreme confidence. She pounced.
She Who Hungers opened threefold-segmented jaws that resembled the petals of a carnivorous flower, and she screamed.
Her voice was the sound of countless creatures dying. It was a painfully strident chorus of death that sliced a path through the air and appeared to rend the very molecules asunder.
Dresde’s body was paralyzed. Her jump was cut short, and now it was she who crashed down in the sand, helpless, mere centimeters away from the lava and the clutch of sky-blue eggs.
She wasn’t the only one. Elias couldn’t even cry out as the creature’s ragged shout ravaged his brain. The stridulating notes were so loud that he was sure his ears were bleeding, but he couldn’t lift his hands to cover them. He was awash in pain, but that was only part of the reason that his mind was blanketed in stifling horror. This howling scream could not exist in a world with life. It was the deafening sound of the emptiness between the stars, an echo of the titanic convulsions of a dying sun. All who heard it had to die.
There was no escape. She Who Hungers approached Dresde with insolent calm, and the Flyer queen was powerless in her dissonant grasp.
A new song pierced the rattling chaos like an arrow sailing through thick fog. The ravenous cacophony was disturbed by a pure and gentle sound, a single musical note that vibrated through the air and then grew, joined by harmonic layers that built upon one another until the song became a multifaceted arrangement of melody of ever-increasing complexity.
She Who Hungers hesitated and screeched again, more loudly. Pain sliced through Elias’s mind, but an instant later the song in the distance reached a crescendo, and it shattered the dissonance into irretrievable fragments.
Fathomless silence followed.
Dresde struggled to get up but failed. Elias barely avoided losing his balance when he regained control of his body. He and Tristan exchanged a quick look as the last echoes of the harmonious song faded away. Both of them knew who had sung.
Samantha and Oscar screamed when she flickered into view, discarding her mantle of invisibility.
Lyrana came through the rubble at the mouth of the eyrie, tossing boulders out of the way as if they were pebbles. Her head and blazing eye cluster were visible first, but she smashed rocks into fragments and burst out into the open a moment later. Her terrifying jaw was still open, its three segments displaying its fearsome teeth, but it was not that which made Elias shrink away from her out of sheer animal instinct.
Lyrana was walking.
Her slender golden tentacles stabbed the ground with every step she took. They no longer appeared graceful and dexterous. They were bent at right angles and moved with the disturbing synchronicity of the legs of a spider. They lifted Lyrana’s diaphanous form off the ground as she went, making her look like a gigantic arthropod from whose body there hung still-dripping kelp like the tattered remnants of a veil.
Lyrana jumped down to where She Who Hungers stood motionless, as if in utter shock. With unmistakable wordless clarity, the queen of the ocean proclaimed immense anger, defiance, and condemnation. Her mind-voice was like a balm that washed over the raw wounds left behind by the monster before her. Elias found himself reaching out with his own mind, supporting her, but Lyrana paid him no heed. She was entirely focused on her enemy.
“Beautiful,” Samantha whispered nearby.
Lyrana was a mirage of ethereal splendor. Even out of the water, the countless pinpoints of white-and-azure bioluminescence on her scales were magnificent. They outlined not only her tentacles and streamlined body, but also decorated the length of her serpentine neck and twinkled around her head and the long whiskers under her jaw. It was like seeing the night sky itself, a spectacle that eclipsed even the beauty of the setting sun. Elias was filled with hope at seeing the eldest of all creatures in the world come to fight at long last. He knew from Lyrana’s own memories that her power was vast.
She Who Hungers slithered back on her bloated tentacles as if attempting to flee, and Lyrana sang again.
The air appeared to stand still, and then it boomed with a missile of pure sound that blasted away a wide swathe of sand along its cylindrical path. It was a sonic onslaught impossible to avoid. Elias was thrown back by the wave, but instead of hope he trembled with icy foreboding. The sound was not directed at him, and yet he recognized it, although he had never heard the doom-ridden notes before. It was the weapon that Lyrana had resisted using through the long decades and centuries of her confinement as she had clung to the tattered remnants of her sanity, the thing she had never dared unleash out of fear for the destiny of the world. Her ultimate attack.
The Song of Death.
Elias had never heard such a heartrending harmony. The very earth under his feet appeared to resonate with energy from the spirit-lines themselves, intent on doing one thing only. Destroying.
She Who Hungers was thrown back by the blast and then appeared to convulse. Her tentacles flailed in the air under the onslaught, but Lyrana did not stop. She rushed forward, still singing, her jaws dripping saliva, and positioned herself for the killing blow.
Lyrana struck. Her maw closed on the vulnerable throat of her enemy with the viciousness of a starving predator, and she tore out an entire chunk of black flesh from which dangled long cords of vibrating tissue. Lyrana consumed it and reared up as she sang again, skewering She Who Hungers with a second assault of the song.
In apparent panic, She Who Hungers jumped back with such force that she sailed high enough to grab on to several boulders protruding from the curved sides of the far crater wall. She hung there like a cornered beast, bleeding, and screamed out her defiance.
Except she was unable to make a sound.
Lyrana’s voice wavered. Elias sensed her confusion clearly—She Who Hungers should not be able to move. She should have been killed instantly. Lyrana resumed the song, but a horrible clawing dissonance struck at each and every note and latched on to it, draining it of power, destroying the critical melody. Black ooze pooled in Lyrana’s mouth, and part of the luminescence along her neck was snuffed out.
A second before it happened, Elias understood.
“It’s inside her,” he whispered in naked terror.
Crystals burst through Lyrana’s neck with a gut-wrenching scrape of sharp glass rupturing flesh. They sliced through her scales in a fountain of blood, and her song was silenced forever.
Lyrana stumbled. Elias’s heart seemed to skip a beat when the crushing realization hit him as Lyrana herself understood. The Song of Death was useless against She Who Hungers.
It’s impossible to kill something that isn’t alive.
With an almost triumphant flash of her eyes, She Who Hungers vaulted off the crater wall. She blazed with kaleidoscopic brilliance along her path like a meteor burning in the atmosphere of its victim planet, and then she fired.
Every spine on her body glittered and then shot through the air in a dazzling chromatic explosion that had but a single target.
Lyrana.
It was too sudden. Too fast. Lyrana’s body was impaled by hundreds of wicked crystals that struck her with unbridled brutality. For a single moment she was able to project a last emotion, something akin to the sadness of ages.
Then her life-spark was destroyed.
“No! Lyrana!” Elias shouted, bursting into tears.
Her body collapsed to never move again. Her luminescence faded. The multitude of spines that had killed her lost their polychrome intensity and became transparent, seemingly drinking from the void itself.
She Who Hungers landed in a cloud of dust. Half obscured by it, she opened her multijointed jaw as if to proclaim her triumph, but no sound came out. She tried again, and there was nothing. She whipped her head from side to side with apparent animalistic confusion.
None hear her final Song and go unscathed, Dresde said, climbing onto her feet with evident difficulty. My elder sister tore off your vocal cords. Your misbegotten voice is gone.
She Who Hungers focused on Dresde again. Her body was now devoid of spines, and without them, she was almost entirely black. Only her eye cluster still glimmered with its shifting prismatic radiance.
She crouched when Dresde stood up fully, but this time She Who Hungers did not back away. Still mindless and now voiceless, she thrust the tips of her tentacles into the ground once more, and the rock underneath her glowed along the radiating cracks she inflicted on the world.
Elias cried out in pain. She was stealing more life, feeding her never-ending hunger, and creatures were dying. However, now the essence she leeched coursed through her body with an additional horrifying effect.
“No,” Samantha whispered. “It can’t be.”
The spines on the body of She Who Hungers were regenerating. Like crystals growing at a speed that defied nature, glassy multicolored stubs pierced through the black scales on her shoulders and back, along her neck, down her tentacles, and along the length of her tail.
So many tricks you have, Dresde said, attempting to project sarcasm. Elias wasn’t fooled. Dresde was scared.
It wasn’t only the spines that were reforming themselves. Tissue was growing on the stump of her left wing where it had been torn off. Membrane knit itself together. Bone reconstituted and lengthened. The gash in her throat was closing.
“Impossible,” Tristan cried out in dismay. “No, no!”
Interesting, Dresde said, but too slow!
She snarled and pounced on She Who Hungers. The creature took barely a moment to disentangle herself from the world she was ravaging, but it was enough. Dresde struck her side and slashed with her back feet, severing one of the tentacles cleanly. Before the beast could recover, Dresde tackled her to the ground.
She Who Hungers writhed and flailed. She managed to push Dresde off, but the wurl queen wasn’t done. She reared back on her hind legs and swiped at the abomination’s face. Her talons found their mark, and she shredded all three prismatic eyes to bloody ribbons.
Even that which does not die can be destroyed!
Dresde seized the creature’s neck with her front claws in triumphant bloodlust, hacking at her flesh. She Who Hungers struggled ferociously but to no avail. She could not break free, and after a snap of what could only be the bones in her spinal column, she went still. Elias dared to hope for a moment.
Then She Who Hungers engulfed Dresde in an embrace.
She raised her heft on her two thickest tentacles and spread the remaining three as wide as their length would allow. The appendages bent at right angles along invisible joints with horrible loud crunches, turning into crooked lances tipped with crystalline blades. She Who Hungers fell into Dresde, pulling her close, and stabbed the Flyer queen in the back.
“No,” Elias whispered. His legs felt as though they would give way.
He felt the sharp spike of Dresde’s pain and then a horrible emptiness as her consciousness faded. The three tentacles had sunk into her flesh, impaling her completely with a mortal wound.
She Who Hungers did not allow Dresde to drop to the ground. She held her tight instead and started to feed, drinking from Dresde’s essence to fuel her own corrupted healing. One of her eyes reformed. Several long spines on her shoulders grew to full size.
“This is the end,” Samantha said in audible despair. “That thing will destroy the world.”
The creature’s tentacles shimmered with their stolen energy. But in their midst, a spark began to glow.
It started on Dresde’s back. The edges of a single scale started to shine, as though there were an irresistible source of golden radiance below it.
Dresde twitched.
The light spread across her back. Yellow brilliance became orange and then vermillion. Her scales themselves were progressively infused with bright energy that turned them into crimson plates, like red-hot slabs of metal in the depths of a furnace. A moment later heat radiated from Dresde again, ferocious and undeniable. Elias gasped when the first wave reached him. It felt as though he had been thrust into the stifling confines of an iron oven and the door was about to shut behind him, trapping him to roast to death.
Shatterer of worlds, Dresde panted with a tattered voice, your corruption ends here.
The heat became even stronger. Dresde clamped all four of her legs around the body of She Who Hungers, and the glow in her glittering ruby scales resembled magma itself.
