Aurora lunged, the Jagged Heart held above her head, aiming for the gap between Greatshadow’s eyes. The dragon pulled away, pressing down on the stone ledge with his massive claw. The volcanic rock cracked beneath his weight, creating a deep pit a yard wide just where Aurora’s oversized boot should have landed. She fell as the ground between her and Greatshadow gave way.
Greatshadow plunged into the magma lake once more. I ran to the hole where Aurora had vanished. She’d dropped about twenty feet; her heels were balanced on a six inch lip of stone. Fresh lava bubbled below her, fiery red.
I pulled off my cloak and dropped to my chest, my arms dangling over the edge to allow the hem to reach her.
“Climb up!” I shouted.
“Infidel thinks you’re dead, you bastard!” Aurora said as she grabbed the thick velvet cloth. “Why the hell are you still alive? What on earth are you doing here? For that matter, what the hell am I doing here?”
Zetetic looked over the edge as Aurora began to climb up the cloak. My arms felt like they’d be pulled from their sockets. Zetetic said, “The pyramid trapped you in an interstitial realm where time doesn’t exist as a dimension. I freed you.”
“And while you’re pondering that, you should know I’m a ghost, but turn solid when dragon blood gets on my knife,” I explained, my voice strained as I struggled not to drop her. “I may dematerialize at any second, so hurry.”
Aurora furrowed her brow as she climbed. “I can’t decide which of you is making less sense. Let me talk to someone sane. Where’s Infidel?”
“The spirit realm,” said Zetetic.
“She’s dead?”
The Deceiver stroked his chin as he contemplated the question, then said, “I don’t believe a word has been invented that describes her condition. She’s been split into physically manifested dual aspects of her psyche then thrust bodily into a non-material realm of souls.”
“You are not allowed to answer any more of my questions,” Aurora grumbled as she grabbed the rocky ledge next to my shoulder with her sausage-sized fingers. My teeth chattered as she clambered over me back onto the relative safety of the ledge. “Where’d the damn dragon get off to?”
Relic crawled from the tunnel toward the bone-handled knife. He answered Aurora through teeth clenched with pain: “Greatshadow is bathing in magma to cauterize his wounds.”
Aurora tensed as she saw the small dragon. She raised the Jagged Heart, looking ready to put him out of his misery.
“Wait!” said Zetetic, grabbing her arm. “He’s a friend.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said.
“He’s an enemy of our enemy,” said Zetetic.
Relic reached the knife and moved it from the vaporizing dark-brown pool it lay in, touching it to the sticky red blood coating his shoulder from his broken wing. The fresh fluid filled me with a surge of energy.
“So, can Greatshadow just wait us out?” I asked. “Could he stay under the magma forever?”
“Actually, no,” said Relic. “Despite the fact my father dwells in a volcano, the elemental force he’s merged with isn’t magma, it’s fire. His physical body and his internal flames both require air. He must surface soon.”
Zetetic looked around. “Soon may not be soon enough,” he said. “Tower’s armor is disappearing piece by piece.”
He was right. Tower’s chest plate was still there, along with various nuts, bolts, and gears, but the bulk of the armor had vanished. As I watched, the hip compartment that held the magic book flickered, then turned to smoke, leaving the leather-bound volume within sitting on the barren ground. Zetetic tore off a piece of his robes and fashioned them into impromptu mittens, lifting the book.
“Technically, I’m not touching it,” he said as he flipped through the book. He shook his head slowly as he studied the pages. “Not that having this will do me any good. Greatshadow is no doubt burning the monastery to the ground, killing everyone inside. When the last monk praying to keep my heart beating is slain I’ll be dead, permanently this time.”
“Greatshadow may have plucked that information from Stagger’s mind,” said Relic. “Perhaps he thinks if he waits long enough, he can face one less foe. Aurora is our best hope now. She can use the magic of the Jagged Heart to slay Greatshadow.”
“This still doesn’t make sense to me,” I said. “Fire melts ice. Why is an icy fragment of Hush more powerful than a whole dragon?”
“Hush isn’t the dragon of ice,” said Aurora. “She’s the dragon of cold.”
“So?”
“To understand the true nature of reality, you need only look into the night sky. Darkness is the permanent state of things; light is merely a fleeting local phenomenon. The same is true of heat and fire. Flames can rage brightly for but a moment. Just as darkness will always win out over light, cold is the eternal backdrop that existed before fire, and will endure after. Flame can never win any permanent victory against cold.”
“The true power of the weapon lies in more than simply its elemental chill,” said Relic. “Greatshadow is the dragon who broke Hush’s heart. Its frosty bitterness embodies the seething hatred Hush feels toward Greatshadow. It can, and will, slay him.”
“I know a lot of dragon history, but I’ve never heard that,” said Zetetic.
Before Relic could provide us with a history lesson, Greatshadow burst from the surface of the bubbling magma, his neck rising up fifty feet, a hundred, as he drew a deep breath into his mighty lungs. He was wreathed in fresh flames, his skin aglow with his newly stoked energies. The ground beneath us trembled as the lava pool began to rise.
Relic shook his head, looking as if he might be about to cry. “He’s opened fresh lava vents beneath the surface! If the volcano erupts, we’ll all perish!”
Aurora craned her neck up, drawing the harpoon back. Greatshadow spread his enormous wings, beating them in a powerful downstroke. Globs of molten rock rained around us as a foundry wind nearly swept us from our feet.
“His head’s too far away!” Aurora shouted over the gale. “I can throw a harpoon a hundred yards on a good day, but not straight up!”
“You could if you were bigger!” Zetetic leapt in front of her. “Fortunately, I have the power to make you a giantess with an enchanted kiss!” He stood on his tip toes, grabbed her cheeks, and mashed his puckered lips between her tusks.
A wall of flame shot down toward us as Greatshadow exhaled once more. As before, the flame was thwarted by a shield of ice as Aurora grew rapidly, doubling to sixteen feet, then thirty, as Zetetic grabbed Relic by the tail and dragged him back toward the tunnel.
I lingered behind for half a second to watch as Aurora topped out close to ninety feet tall. The Jagged Heart had grown with her, taller than any tree. Her long black coat flapped as she leaned back to throw, the hem catching me like a sail, knocking me from my feet. Flat on my back, I watched as she let the harpoon fly, aiming toward Greatshadow’s open maw as the jet of flames died away.
The Jagged Heart flashed up like reverse lightning, trailing snow, entering the dragon’s cavernous jaws and punching into the roof of his mouth. His head tilted sideways as he shrieked in pain. The bright, crystalline tip of the harpoon jutted from the top of his skull. His eyes rolled up, as if trying to focus on it.
Finally, Greatshadow shuddered, his body wracked with a death spasm. Zetetic ran from the tunnel and grabbed my hand, dragging me back toward relative safety as the dragon began to fall. Magma splashed up in a raging tidal wave as his body collapsed. Aurora, no longer in possession of the Jagged Heart, dropped to her hands and knees and tried to squeeze her massive bulk into the tunnel.
She was too late. The molten wave fell upon her and she screamed as her giant shoulders slammed into the tunnel entrance, plugging it, saving Zetetic, Relic, and myself from the magma bath.
I ran to her as the magic that had transformed her drained away. She returned to her normal size, inside a large cave that was a perfect negative outline of her body. The lava had hardened into solid stone on touching her, but not before it had burned away much of her skin. Her face had been spared, at least, and she was still alive as I dropped to my knees in front of her. “Hang on!” I screamed. “Zetetic can fix you!”
Her words were nothing but a whisper as she answered, “Th-the Heart… i-it must b-be returned…” The last of her breath passed between her ivory tusks as her eyes closed.
I pursed my lips together, fighting to keep from crying. She’d never intended to fight Greatshadow when this all began. She’d never done a thing to deserve this fate.
Relic hobbled next to me, the bone-handled knife in his bleeding claw. “There is no time for mourning,” said the small dragon. “Greatshadow’s body is dead. We must act swiftly to kill his elemental spirit, before he can grow a new shell.”
Zetetic wandered around the cave left by Aurora, staring up at specks of light that dotted the ceiling. He climbed a wall and thrust his fingers into one of the lights, which proved to be a hole in a paper-thin sheet of rock. He flaked it away in big handfuls, and soon had a large enough gap to climb through.
“Follow me,” he said, as he wriggled out.
Relic leapt onto the wall and clambered after him. Despite his injuries and the obvious pain of every movement, the little dragon still seemed much stronger and faster than I was. I guess even a lamed dragon was a better physical specimen than an ordinary man. Or, at least in better shape than me. I was panting, my arms trembling, by the time I managed to drag myself through the hole. My legs were quivering as I walked out onto a freshly formed plain of soot-black rock still spiderwebbed with tendrils of bright red lava. The volcano seemed to have lost a great deal of its energy with Greatshadow gone. Still, I danced around, grateful I had boots. As long as I kept moving, the heat was merely blistering instead of crippling.
In the center of the rapidly cooling lava, amid rock that cracked and popped as it gave up its heat, was Greatshadow’s enormous head and shoulders, frozen into the solidifying stone. One wing jutted into the air behind him like a giant black sail. The deep brick-red of his scalp was now pink beneath a layer of thick frost. The Jagged Heart had returned to its normal size and lay upon his snout as if it had been dropped there by some hopelessly lost whaler.
Zetetic ran across the smoking plain, jumping over glowing cracks, scrambling up Greatshadow’s scaly hide. Though it was entirely the wrong thing to be thinking about, I couldn’t help but gawk at the sheer size of the dragon’s skull as my internal booze calculator tried to figure out how many rounds I could buy at the Black Swan if I could somehow cash it in. A lot. A whole damn lot. Numbers weren’t my strong suit.
Zetetic stood between the dragon’s eyes as he snatched up the Jagged Heart. “Got it!” he shouted. “Now, we just need to get a warrior to the spirit world to finish off the dragon!”
Relic nodded, standing before the Greatshadow’s toothy jaws, staring up at Zetetic. “Stagger will have to do.”
“Have to do what?” I asked.
“Go to the spirit world to kill Greatshadow,” said Zetetic, tossing the harpoon at me. I jumped back as the tip buried into the stone where I’d just stood.
“You almost killed me!” I shouted.
“I don’t think that’s possible,” the Deceiver said. “You aren’t alive, remember? No court would convict me.”
I grabbed the harpoon and yanked it free. I held it toward Relic. “You’re the one with the daddy-grudge. You do it.”
“Nowowon has broken my claws. It’s agonizing to hold this knife; I could never wield the harpoon effectively,” said Relic. “And Zetetic is too cowardly to be trusted with the mission.”
“I have no argument with that statement whatsoever,” said the Deceiver.
“I’m not exactly a prime physical specimen myself,” I said, wiping sweat from my brow. “And I’ll fight any man who says I’m not a yellow-bellied coward!”
“You may not need to fight the dragon yourself,” said Zetetic. “The War Doll — I mean, Infidel — is already in the spirit realm. The gate she passed through leads to the specific abstract reality where Greatshadow’s soul resides. She did show a certain talent for violence. If she’s somehow recovered from her psychic split, you could have her complete the mission.”
My immediate thought was, screw the mission. Except for the whole end-of-the-world-by-fire thing, what did I care if Greatshadow’s soul was killed? But the thought that I could be reunited with Infidel in the spirit world made my heart beat faster. I didn’t want her to die, but, if she was already a spirit, I’d rather be on the other side with her than trapped here as a ghost.
“Okay,” I said, holding the harpoon in a two-handed grasp. “You’ve made your case. How do I get to Infidel? Zetetic can’t open another spirit gate. If there was a magic item here that could open the portal, isn’t it buried under about a thousand feet of rock now?”
“Oh,” said Relic. “That was a lie.”
“Nice,” said Zetetic.
“Then there’s not some object here with the power to send me to the land of the dead?” I asked, confused.
“I wouldn’t say that’s true either,” said Relic, walking toward me, wincing as he shifted the bone-handled knife around in his claw to grasp it by the hilt instead of the blade.
Before I understood his intention he stabbed me, the blade punching though my left nipple. In a second of time that dribbled by like molasses I felt the knife tear through my pectoral muscles, skim between my ribs, slice the edge of my left lung, and puncture my heart, halting it mid-beat.
The world went black.
I lifted my throbbing head from my folded arms and looked around the bar at the Black Swan. I blinked my bleary eyes, attempting to focus in the dim light. The lanterns barely flickered behind soot-grimed crystal globes. A score of empty tankards were set out around me in a semi-circle of pewter and glass. My whole body was stiff and cold as I stretched, working out the kinks in my back.
I rubbed my sleep-fogged eyes, then studied the bottles behind the bar, choosing what I’d drink next. I frowned when I realized all the bottles looked empty. Everything was covered with dust. Busty, one of the regular serving wenches, was at the far end of the bar, her back to me.
“I just had the worst nightmare,” I said. My tongue felt thick in my mouth, covered with a dry, pasty scum. “Bring me a beer, would you, luv?”
She wouldn’t. At least, she didn’t. She just stood there, still as a statue. I got up from the stool and staggered toward her, keeping one hand on the bar for balance. I reached the end of the bar and suddenly sobered up.
Busty was nothing but a dusty skeleton, still standing upright, staring blankly ahead with empty sockets. Her frilly blouse hung like a sack, the generous bustline now dangling to reveal a desiccated breastbone. I spun around, surveying the silent room. There were a hundred people packed into every corner, all dead, their skeletons frozen in rough approximation of daily motion. Players gathered around a table, faded cards forever clasped in their bony fingers. A whore leaned on the shoulder of a client in a corner booth, her mummified cheeks stained with rouge, her dusty wig askew atop her skull.
“Hello?” I said, to the silent room.
No one answered.
However, as I strained to listen, in the distance I heard a long, low howl, like the baying of a wolf. I crept across the dusty floorboards to the door, looking out onto the familiar skyline of the Isle of Fire.
Only, it wasn’t quite as I remembered. The boats surrounding me were all derelict husks, floating in water the color of red wine. A rotting, tilted pier ran toward the banks of the bay. The damage done by Greatshadow’s attack on Commonground was nowhere to be seen. Instead, the slopes of the island were still covered with a thick jade canopy of trees, rising to a volcano from which plumes of stark white steam boiled heavenward. The sky was a light gray slate, devoid of a sun, or even clearly defined clouds. The island that lay before me seemed out of scale, smaller somehow.
I crouched down, startled, as the animalistic howl once more rolled over the bay. Wolves weren’t native to the Isle of Fire, though they haunted the mountains near the monastery where I’d spent my childhood. I’d gone to sleep many a night pondering the meanings of their different songs; sometimes, they sang toward the moon to tell tales of loneliness and lost loves. Sometimes, their songs were almost joyous, a simple declaration of, “I’m alive! I’m here! And I’m a wolf!” That song was easy to distinguish from a harsher, more sinister war cry, when they howled to frighten prey, to startle them into running. This was that last type of howl.
I glanced back to the bar. The Jagged Heart was lying on the floor beside my stool. I looked down, surprised to find I was still wearing the finery Zetetic had conjured. To my greater surprise, I found the bone-handled knife jutting from my chest. I didn’t feel a thing as I grasped the hilt and popped it free. No blood flowed from the wound.
“Relic?” I said, wondering if he could still hear me.
The only answer was the gentle lapping of the wine-dark sea.
Going back inside, I grabbed the Jagged Heart. I wondered how it had made the transition. I’d been holding it when I was stabbed, but when I first died, I’d passed over naked. Maybe the difference was that Relic hadn’t stabbed a living man to dispatch me to the ghost realms. He’d stabbed a materialized spirit. If I ever met the Divine Author, it seemed like a good thing to ask Him about over a pint of beer. Assuming the Divine Author drinks.
What am I saying? He’s a writer. Of course He drinks.
Alas, He wasn’t here at the moment, and my quick pillaging pass behind the bar showed that beer wasn’t present either. If this were paradise, the sea outside would have been made of actual wine, but I suspected I would be in for an unpleasant surprise if I tested that. I was going to be doing this dragon hunt sober, damn it.
Back outside, I headed up the boardwalk toward the forest. Like the bar, it was eerily silent: no bugs buzzing, no bullfrogs bleating, no birds providing a serenade. I pushed through underbrush studded with fearsome thorns. The Jagged Heart proved better than a machete; vines and limbs studded with wooden needles froze solid as I touched them, snapping with only the slightest touch. Once I was through the brush, I was surrounded by towering trees, their smooth, perfectly formed trunks stretching high overhead into a curtain of unbroken green. It was dark as a moonless night, but my eyes soon adjusted to the dimness.
From high up the slope, the howl of the unseen beast once more rolled through the air. As the sound faded, I thought I could hear a crunch, crunch, crunch in the distance, the footsteps of something large creeping amongst the trees. I had a pretty good idea what might be making the noise.
Somewhere out in the darkness was the monster who’d lived inside the woman I’d loved.
I skulked up the slopes, holding the harpoon like a halberd, a weapon I had absolutely no experience with. Not that I had much experience with any weapons. Infidel had been my principal mode of defense, which was for the best. Given how often I’d been drunk when our fights broke out, if I’d tried handling anything sharp I’d probably eventually have stabbed myself.
I heard a shuff, shuff, shuff of something moving through the leaves and pressed up closely against an ancient tree trunk thick enough to hide an elephant. I peeked around, listening closely to see if the noise was drawing closer.
Shuff, shuff, shuff. It was right on the other side of the tree.
When I met the she-dragon, would I kill her? Could I? What if I tried to talk to her? Would she recognize me or just try to eat me?
Trusting that I would know what to do when the moment came, I grasped the harpoon and raced around the tree at top speed, which, thanks to my cape snagging on the trunk, wasn’t all that fast. Still, it was fast enough to terrify the little girl in the lacy dress I found pressed up against the tree on the far side. Her eyes popped wide and her mouth gaped into an almost perfect ‘O’ as she filled her lungs, ready to scream. I dropped the Jagged Heart and jumped toward her, hands outstretched, knocking her to the ground as I clamped my hand over her mouth. Air gushed around my fingers as her muffled scream tickled my palm.
“Shhh!” I hissed, as quietly as I could manage. “Shhh! Do you want your other half to hear?”
Tears welled in her eyes as she shook her head ‘no.’
I couldn’t believe how tiny she was, pinned beneath me. Infidel had actually been somewhat petite, I guess, but it was easy to forget this when she was juggling around bruisers and brutes. Princess Innocent was a whole lot shorter and her arms were thin as broomsticks. My hand practically covered her whole face.
“I’m going to let go,” I whispered. “Don’t scream.”
She trembled as I pulled my hand free. I helped her stand, while I rose to my knees so we’d be on eye level.
“Are you all right?” I asked. Her dress was torn in a dozen places, and her cheeks were covered with scratches. Her long silver hair was a mess.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
“You don’t remember?”
She shook her head.
I weighed my words carefully. I had dreamed, should I ever reunite with Infidel, I’d confess my love and kiss her hard enough to make us both dizzy. That seemed highly inappropriate now, given her reversion to such a young age. “I was… I was a friend. My name is Stagger.”
“You smell bad,” she said, scrunching up her nose.
No doubt I did. Growing up in a palace, Innocent had probably never met anyone who sweated.
“Have you seen your other half?” I asked. “Is she near?”
She furrowed her brow, looking confused.
“The she-dragon,” I said. “She brought you here.”
“She wants to eat me,” said Innocent. “But I’m good at hiding.”
Which was true enough. The princess had hidden inside Infidel all these years without me suspecting a thing.
As I thought this, an idea occurred to me. Innocent had been hiding inside Infidel. Could she do so again? What if… what if the way to join her two halves back together was simply to let the dragon once more devour the princess?
“The way you’re looking at me scares me,” said Innocent.
I pursed my lips as I pondered my options.
Whatever was showing on my face couldn’t have been good, because Innocent suddenly burst into tears. She went limp, almost fainting, as she fell against my chest, sobbing. I wrapped my arms around her, stroking her hair.
“It’s okay,” I whispered. “It’s okay. I’ll protect you. I won’t let the monster hurt you.”
And that was that. The vile thought of feeding this little girl to the she-dragon was banished back to whatever dark pit in my brain it had crawled from. Some fatherly instinct welled within me and I knew with absolute certainty I’d willingly die to protect this girl.
“I’m s-so tired,” she sobbed. “I’ve b-been running and running and running.”
Again, this was true for Infidel as well. The whole time I’d known her, I’d thought of her as a fighter, but, in truth, she’d lived every moment on the run from her own past. How had I been so blind?
“You won’t have to run any more,” I whispered, setting my jaw firmly. “I’ll fight the monster for you.”
I hugged her for a long time, her face pressed against my chest, until her sobs died down to whimpers, then sniffles. I finally pulled away from her, still on my knees, my hands on her shoulders as I said, “Everything is going to be fine. I’m your friend, and I’ll take care of you.”
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t move. Her mouth hung half open as her eyes were fixed at a point in space somewhere over my shoulder.
I didn’t have to turn around to know what was standing behind me.