World Warden, page 55
Be destroyed!
Dresde’s scales begin to melt. They fused together for a moment and then began to flow around her body like lava given life.
Flesh sizzled, but it was not Dresde’s.
She Who Hungers flailed her neck from side to side in a silent, soul-rending scream as her tentacles burned. The half-formed crystals of many new spines exploded. Her black scales smoked under the onslaught of the inescapable heat and light as she attempted to break free but could not, and every time she struggled, her body was further consumed by the inferno.
Dresde glanced back, and her face was blinding. It was like looking at the molten core of the planet itself.
She gazed at Samantha for a timeless moment with an expression of unreadable complexity.
Dresde raised her left foot and tore off one of her talons with her jaws. She threw it in Samantha’s direction, where it glowed on the ground for a moment before its light went out.
Dresde’s last look was for the crimson egg.
Remember, daughter.
She roared with her ultimate strength, and the light from within consumed her form. Her body shone as she immolated herself in order to destroy the ravenous creature in her grasp. For an instant, her sinuous length appeared to be entirely made of molten bronze, and she was a blazing vision of liquid grace incarnate.
She Who Hungers squirmed in her grasp like a worm and brought her two remaining tentacles to bear. She stabbed Dresde through the heart and spasmed as both her appendages were destroyed.
Dresde’s body collapsed and tumbled down to the bottom of what had once been a beautiful lake at the top of her domain, a place where land met water and sky. She never moved again.
Elias clutched at his chest the moment he felt the rending loss of Dresde’s death. Before him, She Who Hungers was a mangled mess of twitching and smoking flesh. All of her tentacles were gone, and her neck had been half obliterated by the heat. Her tail was a charred stump.
But she was still moving.
Elias gritted his teeth and slashed at the air with his spine.
“We’re not done.”
“I’m here,” Tristan said at once.
“As am I,” Samantha joined in. She rushed to the place where Dresde’s talon lay and picked it up. In her hands it looked like a scimitar with a bloody handle made of crimson scales.
She Who Hungers bucked and flipped onto her back. Her tentacles were already regenerating.
“We end this. Now!” Elias declared.
The three of them charged. They ran over glassy sand and fragments of dead vines. They ran past Lyrana’s body and avoided pools of black ichor.
She Who Hungers appeared to sense them coming. She opened her jaws and tried to lift her neck to attack them but failed.
Elias was first to reach her. He jumped onto her hideous belly and kept running. He slipped several times, but he made it to the very center of her exposed chest. There he grasped his spine with both hands and plunged it down.
The scales were too thick. The spine sank only halfway.
A drop of icy drool fell on Elias’s shoulder.
Elias realized what was happening an instant too late. She Who Hungers twisted her body, and her neck crunched as it regained its full range of motion. She unhinged her maw and bit down on him savagely like a striking snake.
There was no time to get away. All Elias’s reflexes enabled him to do was realize the certainty of his own death.
“Eli!” Tristan shouted.
He jumped in front of Elias with Lyrana’s scale in both hands.
Clang.
Needle jaws collided against the shield and broke off. She Who Hungers was paralyzed for a moment with the clear note that resounded through the air, vibrating with the unmistakable echo of the voice of the Singer queen.
“Tristan!” Elias cried out.
The impact pushed Tristan over the side and to the ground. The scale tumbled out of his hands.
She Who Hungers bent her horrendous neck in his direction.
Something glinted in the darkness with kaleidoscopic light.
“No!” Elias shouted at the same moment the creature fired one of her fully formed spines. There was a horrible metallic groan when the projectile hit.
Elias almost jumped off in desperation, but Samantha grabbed his wrist with a grip of steel.
“Elias, no!”
He struggled briefly against her, but She Who Hungers reared her head over them again, forcing him to hold on to his spine to avoid being thrown off.
Clang.
Impossibly, Lyrana’s scale rang again. The abomination froze for an instant.
“Heart scale,” Samantha whispered.
Dresde’s talon began to glow in her hands, and Samantha stabbed She Who Hungers with the wicked edge of the blazing weapon. Its hooked tip cleaved black armored plates with terrifying ease, and Samantha roared out a wordless cry as she ripped the chest of the creature open.
Black scales parted, exposing the heart.
Elias yanked his spine out and gasped. The monster’s nexus was a perfect octahedral crystal, pulsating with otherworldly light in every color he could perceive and in others he could not, but which nevertheless reached into his consciousness with their terrifying energy. Cold enshrouded it as it floated in a pool of utter blackness. There were no veins, no muscles. She Who Hungers was an empty husk.
“Not alive,” Elias said.
“Now!” Samantha urged.
She Who Hungers fired a serrated projectile at him, but Elias knocked it out of the air. He lifted Sizzra’s spine above his head and plunged it down with all of his strength, roaring with unrestrained ferocity.
He pierced the perfect surface of the bloodless heart and cleaved it to the core.
The crystal shattered. She Who Hungers convulsed once, and then the light animating her body vanished from sight, as if fleeing to the void of night itself. The prismatic radiance was snuffed out in a single instant, and her body collapsed.
“Get off her!” Elias yelled. He took Samantha’s hand, and they jumped.
They landed and rolled. When Elias leaped to his feet, he saw that the corpse of the thing that had once moved was now boiling and bubbling, melting into a pool of black decay.
“Tristan!” Elias shouted, tossing his weapon away as he broke into a run. He skirted around the diminishing pile of vile flesh and skidded to a stop on the other side.
Three metal-clad wurl were huddled together. The glassy spine She Who Hungers had fired lay on the ground as a pile of harmless shards, along with a torn silver scale.
“Guys?” Elias asked, disbelieving.
Narev, Vanor, and Siv gave him flashes of acknowledgment and parted to reveal Tristan crouching in their midst.
Safe.
“Tristan!” Elias exclaimed.
Tristan grinned and stood up fully. He opened his arms wide, and Elias gave him the fiercest hug of his life. He kissed Tristan on the lips, hard, shedding tears of joy and relief.
“I thought…,” Elias sobbed. “I thought—”
“I’m here, Eli. I’ll always be with you.”
“I love you so much,” Elias said, still crying.
“I love you too,” Tristan said with a smile, gently wiping Elias’s tears away. “More than life itself, and I think I proved it just then!”
Elias chuckled at the unexpected humor, the dam of anxiety and fear and stress breaking all at once with Tristan’s words. “That was stupid,” he reprimanded Tristan.
“And that’s why you love me.”
“Eli!” Oscar shouted, rushing over to them. “Tristan!”
“Oscar!” Elias replied.
He hugged his little brother, and they cried together for a few blissful seconds. It was as though the world around Elias disappeared and the only thing he focused on was an inexhaustible surge of gratitude. His family was safe. Tristan and Oscar and the wurl were with him, and it made every sacrifice worth it. For the first time in months, his heart was light, and the last remnants of shadowy worry were dispelled by true happiness.
Elias gently pulled away from the hug and looked at Oscar, smiling.
“I’m so sorry for everything,” Oscar sobbed. “It was my fault, Eli. The day of the storm, I was so scared. It’s my fault you and Tristan had to c-cross the world to find me.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Elias contradicted. “You were taken. And you survived.”
“But if only I h-had been different. Stronger.”
“You are different now,” Elias told him. “You’ve grown strong. You’ve grown brave.”
Oscar’s eyes pooled with more tears even as he smiled, as though the praise were reaching his very heart. “I always wanted—” He hiccupped. “I always wanted to be brave like you. To stop being scared.”
Elias shook his head. “I think I should be more like you, Oscar. Gentle. Kind. Caring. You were the only one to show Dresde compassion, and you were right. You’ve always been right.”
“I think we’re all amazing,” Tristan interjected, clapping Oscar on the shoulder.
They looked at him for an instant and then laughed. Elias let the adrenaline-fueled tension evaporate as it was replaced with joyful relief.
As though on cue, Narev bumped against Elias, demanding attention. Vanor and Siv were slightly more dignified, but they also came close. Vanor was limping, but they were all safe.
“Narev!” Elias exclaimed. “I’m so glad you’re okay. Siv, you look weird without your spines.”
“’Sup,” Tristan said to Vanor. He received a grunt in response.
Elias gave another silent, heartfelt thanks. His heart brimmed with happiness.
“Let’s sit for a bit,” he proposed, “and then we go home.”
Chapter 32. Free
THEY SAT together in the sand for what felt like a long time, resting.
Oscar held Elias’s hand for a while. The contact reassured him. He was having a hard time comprehending that his older brother was there, next to him. He hadn’t abandoned him, and he hadn’t come alone.
Oscar wasn’t freaked out by the three large silver wurl a few steps away. He might have been in the past, but he knew these were friends. He admired the way their scales reflected the moonlight, and the length of their beautiful spines. He watched them as minutes passed and became an hour. The moons moved across the sky. Behind them, the horrible mass of black goo had shrunk to barely a puddle, and its noxious odor was dissipating at long last, leaving in its place the icy freshness of the mountaintop wind.
Samantha was sitting by herself, closer to the warmth of the lava. She hugged her knees close to her chest, and her eyes were on the pile of sky-blue eggs, but her gaze appeared to be lost in the distance.
Oscar squeezed Elias’s hand once and stood up. He walked over to Samantha and took a seat, not saying a word. They spent several minutes in companionable silence.
“It has ended,” Samantha said eventually.
“Yeah,” Oscar replied. “It’s over.”
“My father….” Samantha shut her eyes, and a tear rolled down her cheek.
Oscar reached for her hand. “I’m so sorry.”
She nodded and did not pull her hand away. It took her a while to be able to speak again.
“Doran fought by my side at the end,” she all but whispered. She looked at Oscar with a bittersweet smile.
“I know,” Oscar replied, smiling too. “He loved you.”
“I loved him too. He was my only friend before you came.”
“He was amazing. And he let me ride him so many times! Remember how I screamed the first time I flew with you guys?”
Samantha chuckled as though in spite of herself. “I remember. He liked you from the start.”
“Are you sure?” Oscar asked. “I always thought he didn’t.”
“He was just being protective of me. But when he came to know you, he trusted you, like I do.”
They fell silent again, but a small part of the pressure of sorrowful loss had lifted. Oscar looked to the right, where the crimson Flower lay in the sand, no trace of darkness on it whatsoever. Some distance away, two large and beautiful eggs rested side by side.
Of the creature there was no trace anymore. The severed sections of black vines had shriveled and crumbled like ash in the wind. Crystals large and small had seemingly vanished. The foul tissue of her body had bubbled into nothing.
Samantha touched a faint dark scratch on her cheek. “My family is free,” she said in a low voice. Then she spoke louder. “I am free.”
She looked at Oscar, and her eyes widened, as though she truly realized what her words meant.
He grinned. “That’s right. You can do what you want. You don’t have to live here anymore. I mean, if you don’t want to.”
Samantha took a long breath in and let it out slowly. “This place is full of sorrow. I would be glad to leave it, but where would my family and I go?”
Oscar raised an eyebrow. “Duh? You guys are coming with us. Back home. That was the plan, right? With the shuttle and all.”
“I suppose, but I have been thinking. Will your people accept us?”
“Are you kidding? Everyone’s going to freak!” Oscar exclaimed. “In a good way, I mean. There’s so few of us, you guys are going to be like celebrities. If you want, you can live in one of the empty houses next to mine. We can be neighbors!”
Samantha nodded slowly. “That would be nice.”
Elias and Tristan had stood up. Oscar followed suit and offered his hand to Samantha. “Let’s go.”
She sighed with a last glance at the edge of the erstwhile lake, where Dresde’s remains rested. “Yes.”
After helping Samantha stand, Oscar walked over to the Flower and picked it up. It was no longer blazing hot, but it radiated wonderful warmth nevertheless.
“Is the Flower all right?” Elias asked, although he kept his distance from it.
“I think so,” Oscar replied. “It’s so beautiful now.”
“We must return it,” Elias said. “But first….”
He approached the eggs and knelt beside them. He placed a hand on each, his right on the porcelain-white one, his left on the ruby shell. Elias then closed his eyes and appeared to commune with the unborn queens.
“This is a new beginning,” Elias said under his breath. “The bloodshed can end.”
Oscar felt something. It was coming from the Flower in his arms, a faint sensation, almost like the brush of a dormant mind.
Elias stood up with Sizzra’s egg in his hands. He looked at Samantha.
“Will you take the other one?” he asked her. “It should be placed at the top of the clutch, above the males.”
Samantha looked down at the fragile object not two steps away from her. For a moment Oscar grew afraid when he saw something like rage flash across her face. However, the emotion faded from view as quickly as it had come, and Samantha said instead, “I will.”
With unusual care, Samantha scooped the egg up and held it in the crook of her left elbow. She then walked a few steps away and picked up Dresde’s talon. It looked dull in the moonlight, but Oscar felt the faintest hint of heat coming from it as Samantha fastened it through her belt.
“Over here,” Elias said.
Samantha followed him. Oscar hung back, careful to keep the Flower away from any of the eggs.
“Place her there,” Elias instructed, pointing at a spot where the pile of blue shells was tallest. They were lit from below by the lava, each one a perfect jewel.
Samantha hesitated. “Will she be my enemy?”
“No,” Elias assured her. “She will remember.”
“I do not understand.”
“She will know what her mother knew. She will know what you did.”
“Very well,” Samantha said. She laid the ruby egg down on its rightful place.
“When will it hatch?” Tristan asked, standing behind them.
Elias shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe soon, maybe not for a long time. All I remember from Sizzra is that she was born around the same time as Dresde.”
“And…,” Tristan said again. He looked at Lyrana’s body, beautiful even in death. “Her daughter?”
Elias closed his eyes. “I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll know when we’re in the water again.”
“She was Dresde’s sister, right?” Oscar asked.
“And Sizzra’s,” Elias confirmed. “Lyrana was the oldest creature in the world.”
“She was beautiful,” Oscar said. “And scary.”
“You should see her mate,” Tristan commented. “Alinor is terrifying.”
“We ought to leave,” Samantha reminded them. “I need to see if my family is well.”
“Let’s go,” Elias said. “Oscar, you’re up. It’s time to make things right.”
They climbed over boulders and pebbles and reached the entrance to the eyrie with little trouble. Oscar focused on not dropping the Flower, but once he was about to enter the cave, he couldn’t suppress a slight shudder.
“What if those horrible vines are still there?” he asked Elias. “What if they attack us?”
“They won’t,” Elias said with audible certainty. “The darkness is gone.”
“Okay,” Oscar replied.
The eyrie was empty and forlorn. Their footsteps appeared to echo off the cave walls, and evidence of the fight was visible in many places under the beams of the link flashlights. The ground was covered with broken stalactites, and there were deep scores in the ground.
There was also a body. Samantha and Oscar walked over to it in solemn silence.
“Thank you, Doran,” Samantha said softly. She placed her hand on his scales. “I will always remember you.”
Oscar gave Samantha some privacy and picked his way carefully through the chamber until he came to its very center. Tristan was with him, but Elias and the three wurl remained several paces away.
“I don’t think we can get any closer,” Elias said. He wiped sweat off his brow, holding the white egg under his other arm. “Something’s happening to the Flower.”
“It’s getting hotter,” Oscar observed. It wasn’t painful yet, but the crimson petals were giving off a faint radiance that was accompanied by palpable waves of heat.
