Chapter 34: Not a Dragon, Close Enough¶
By the BEARDS of my fathers, let me tell you a tale that will curl the hairs on your chinny-chin-chin! There we were — a beast the size of a BARN, red-winged and reeking of cinder, close enough to a dragon that I'll not quibble the difference! And what does your old friend Elroy do? Sheathe the sword, spit in his palms, and LEAP for its throat! GLORIOUS!
Oh, they'll say it was madness. They'll say a man's got no business two hundred feet in the sky with his teeth in a drake's neck and the ground rushing up like a hammer to an anvil. And to THAT I say — when will a fellow ever get another chance to ride the sky like a thunderclap?! We fell, my friends. Grotdor and I, we fell like MOUNTAINS from heaven. And do you know what caught us? Not luck. Not the gods. TEAMWORK. My goblin brother's healing hands, and a werewolf's back for a cushion. That, THAT is what living is!
So gather close, and hear how the Reclaimers pulled a dragon out of the sky by its very tail — and lived to smell a Hodag's foul den just days later. COME ON THEN!
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I. The Waking¶
1st of Desnus (May), 4711 AR
They had crept into the hollow in the last grey light of the previous evening, and there they had waited through the short spring dark, close enough to hear the thing breathe. Now, on the first morning of Desnus, the light came up green and heavy through the canopy, and the beast came up with it.
It had made its den in a cave of ruin — collapsed trees, black roots, and brambles heaped over a hollow at the edge of the Narlmarches, a place no traveler would find who did not already know to look. Within that reeking dark slept a thing the size of a barn: a humongous, red-winged, bipedal creature, scaled the color of banked coals, its every exhalation carrying the dry stink of a smithy left burning too long. Not a true dragon. Close enough, as Elroy would insist for the rest of his days, that the distinction was a scholar's quibble and no honest man's concern.
Dravyn's last working of the night before still clung to its limbs. The Magister had traced a leaden weight across the beast as it first stirred, and so when it heaved itself out of sleep and loosed a bone-shattering roar, it rose sluggish, dragging, its wrath running a half-beat behind its intent. That half-beat was the only advantage five mortals two levels beneath it were going to get.
Elroy did not wait for a better one. The Pentarch of Valor stood already in his other shape — the werewolf's frame, broad and grey-furred and terrible, fang and claw where a braided beard had been. He cast his sword aside into the brush, spat once into his palms, and threw himself bodily at the creature, wrapping both arms around the base of its neck the way a drover wrestles a bull. His first grasp slid off the smoke-hot scales; his second locked, and locked hard, and the werewolf hung there grinning against the drake's throat. He filled his lungs and bellowed a challenge that carried across the whole clearing and fastened the beast's fury squarely upon himself, then angled his shield to his shoulder and bared his teeth at the soft place beneath its jaw.
Perry Marlowe was already moving, already reading. Where the others saw a wall of red scale and rage, the Pentarch of Inquiry saw a problem with a solution, and he studied it with the flat calm of a man appraising a lock. In a breath he had it: the beast was fire made flesh, and fire could not be turned against it; it would not be paralyzed, would not be knocked senseless, would not tire in any ordinary way. But it was cold-blooded in the oldest sense — winter was its one true enemy — and for all its mass, its guard against a clever strike was thinner than its hide suggested. He fed a vial of hissing acid into the breech of Infernis, his repeating crossbow, and loosed. The bolt spattered against the drake's flank and clung there, eating, a creeping green burn that would not go out. Then he melted back into the smoke and undergrowth and was, to any eye but his allies', simply not there.
The drake answered the werewolf at its throat with a frenzy of teeth and tail — two raking bites and a lash of its spiked tail, every blow aimed at Elroy and Elroy alone, exactly as he had meant them to be. He caught the worst of the first bite on the flat of his shield, timber cracking under the force; the second found him, and the tail after it, and the punishment would have folded a lesser man in half. But between the shield he had raised and the ward of fire-resistance Rust had laid across him, the werewolf only snarled through his fangs and held his grip.
Dravyn stepped in behind the beast, and here was the day's first small irony, though none but he would have savored it. The Magister wore a fully draconic head — angular black scales, a ridge of horns, eyes the color of a bruise — and he raised his hand toward this red imposter of a dragon and carved a sigil into the air. A wave of clawing dread poured off the rune and into the creature's mind; it shook off the deepest of it, but not all, and for an instant the great thing flinched, cowed, its confidence guttering. Moving faster than he had any right to — a borrowed speed still humming through his limbs — Dravyn brought his glaive around in a single clean arc and opened a line along its flank. Each word he had spoken over the sigil had been carved, not shouted. That was the difference between him and the beast, and he knew the beast would not live long enough to learn it.
Rust Freelox worked from the edge of the fight, as he always did, his wolf Dog pressed to his side. The goblin oracle called down a ray of freezing silver light — the drake's one dread, wielded with a healer's reluctance — but the beam slid past its shoulder into the trees. He sent Dog snapping in at the beast's hind legs, and the wolf's jaws came up a hair short of the scale. No matter. Rust had never counted his worth in wounds dealt.
Grotdor counted his that way, and he opened his account without a word. The Pentarch of Flame threw wide his kinetic gate and, against every instinct of a man made of fire, shaped his gathered power into cold — a lance of killing winter, aimed at the single seam in the drake's armor that Perry's reading had laid bare. It struck home and bit far deeper than its size had any right to, frost blooming black across red scale. Then Grotdor folded his aura into a hissing shroud of steam and, on a super-heated jet, vaulted clean across the clearing to take the beast in the flank. Heat had answered. It always did.
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II. Into the Sky¶
For a moment it seemed the thing might die on the ground where honest men could reach it. That moment did not last.
Elroy wrenched his grip tighter and drove his fangs into the drake's neck, and with every ally pressing on it at once the bite tore deep. He roared his challenge again to keep its wrath his own, and muttered, half to himself and half to the beast, that he could not wait for it to take to the air. Perry, reading it a second time and reading it entire, put another bolt into the acid-eaten wound and slid once more into cover. The drake — hampered, its wrath yoked to the werewolf at its throat, bleeding from a dozen small mouths — decided it had had enough of the ground.
Its wings came down like two falling roofs. The brush flattened for thirty feet in every direction, the fire in Grotdor's camp-embers guttered flat, and the drake hauled itself into the open sky above the hollow — with Elroy still clinging to its tail like a burr caught in a horse's mane. From aloft it drew a breath that lit red behind its teeth and loosed a gout of roaring fire down across the clearing. Its eyes cut through smoke and shadow both, and they found even Perry in his hiding place — but Rust had seen that coming and warded the halfling against the flame a heartbeat before it fell. He can see you, man, the oracle had warned. Dravyn, Perry, and Dog all twisted clear of the worst of the wash, scorched but whole.
Dravyn flung a snap of cold up after the climbing beast; it wheeled in the air, and the frost hissed past into empty sky. His quarry was out of reach now, and a runelord does not waste force on the unreachable. He laid a healing warmth across his own scorched shoulder instead and watched, and waited for it to come down.
Grotdor did not wait for anything. Seeing the drake carry Elroy up and away, the Burninator did the only thing a furnace-hearted man could think to do: he leapt. Forty feet of open air on a screaming pillar of steam, both hands out — and he caught the drake's underbelly, and for one glorious instant he had it.
Then his grip failed altogether, and the drake, almost absently, closed its jaws around him. From the tail, Elroy laughed. There was, at that particular altitude, nothing else worth doing.
“Mission failed successfully.”
— Elroy Jenkins
Now the Pentarch of Flame hung head-down in the beast's teeth and the Pentarch of Valor hung from its tail, and the whole snarling arrangement was climbing higher into the morning with every wingbeat.
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III. Two Hundred and Forty Feet¶
Elroy's hold could not last, and it did not. High above the treetops his grip on the scaled tail finally slipped, and the werewolf began to fall. He snatched at the beast in the same motion — a mad, scrambling grab for any handhold on a thing moving through the sky — and came away with nothing but air. Before the drop could take him the drake's bird-like talon shot down and seized him around the middle instead, and so he swung there, caught, and used the moment to snarl one more challenge into its face.
Perry, far below and unbothered by any of it, took the shot the chaos had opened for him. He triggered the antlered helm he wore — a working that caught even a wary foe a half-beat off its guard — whispered a steadying word from the pendant at his throat, and loosed a bolt fitted with a new rune, one meant to seize a flying thing and drag it back to the earth where it belonged. The drake shuddered under the pull and, by the barest margin, tore free of it; but the bolt itself drove deep, and a thin ribbon of blood began to unspool down its side to join the acid's work.
The beast climbed higher still, an ash-trailing roll carrying it up and over, Grotdor clenched in its teeth and Elroy in its claw. It savaged the fire-mage once more, worrying him the way a dog worries a bone. And then, without warning or mercy, it opened its talon and let Elroy go.
The Pentarch of Valor fell the better part of a hundred feet and struck the bramble below with a sound like a dropped wardrobe. He rolled, and did not rise, all but broken among the roots. Grotdor's frantic bid to grab back onto the beast failed as badly as everything else that morning had for him, and the drake kept him fast in its jaws.
Dravyn reached the fallen Elroy in three long strides and poured a flood of healing warmth into him, hauling the werewolf back from the very lip of death. Then, thinking as fast as he ever had, the Magister spun a heightened illusion above the grounded party — a phantom canopy of foliage, dense and green and entirely false — and drew Perry, Dog, and the barely-living Elroy in beneath it, out of the drake's smoke-cutting sight. Rust was already there, hands aglow, knitting Elroy back together stitch by stitch with prayer and field-medicine both, dragging him upward toward the crisis he could feel coming. High overhead, trapped in the maw, Grotdor loosed a blast of ice that missed in the tumbling and then salved his own wounds with a cool restorative balm, buying himself a little more life for the ride he had not chosen.
It was Rust's tireless work that set the tank on his feet in time — a great surge of healing, then steadier medicine after it, and Elroy came up out of the dark cursing and grinning in equal measure. He shook the daze from his shaggy head, cleared the brambles, and planted himself in the open directly beneath the circling drake, bellowing up that if the thing meant to drop his friend it had best drop him where a broad back was waiting.
The drake obliged him in the cruelest way it could find.
It surged upward one last time, to a dizzying two hundred and forty feet — nothing below it now but a long fall and the small figures of five people it had already half-destroyed — mauled Grotdor once more in its teeth, and dropped him like a meteor.
This is the beat the Reclaimers will still be telling when their beards are white. Grotdor twisted as he plunged, rolling with the wind the way a cat rights itself, shedding what speed he could. And Elroy hurled himself directly into the falling man's path and took the whole crushing weight of him full across his own body. The impact drove the Pentarch of Valor down into the earth and out of his senses entirely, the werewolf's frame going limp beneath the blow — but that same frame caught Grotdor and cradled him, and the fire-mage came to rest atop it merely winded and sprawled, without so much as a scratch. A man had fallen the height of a temple spire and walked away, because another man had chosen to lie down and be his landing.
Rust was on the crumpled Elroy before the dust settled, and a warm rush of life flowed out of the goblin's hands and pulled the General back from the black edge of it. Grotdor climbed up, salved himself once more, and ducked back beneath the phantom leaves. Dravyn eased just outside the edge of his own illusion, a spell held ready on his tongue, watching the sky for the beast to make its mistake. Perry, needing no one's help, brewed a healing draught in the cup of his own hands and drank it down, then coolly noted the drake's flight speed aloud so that everyone beneath the leaves would know exactly how long they had before it could be overhead again.
The drake, for its part, had begun to suspect the too-convenient foliage. It spent a precious moment peering down through the smoke — and saw the lie for what it was, the phantom canopy dissolving under its gaze. But the disbelief cost it its full dive, and it dropped only to a hundred and forty feet, glaring down at the black-scaled wizard who stood at the illusion's edge. In a rasp of Draconic it flung its contempt at him — that he was about as much a real dragon as it was a real dragon — and the insult, hurled across all that empty air, simply fell short and died before it reached him. Dravyn answered with a bolt of white lightning that would have gutted the thing had it landed. The drake cascaded aside in a roll of pure animal grace and the arc scorched only the clouds.
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IV. Through the Eye¶
At last the beast came low enough to be answered. It sank to forty feet above the clearing, cinder-red eyes darkening at their edges with the pain of a hundred small wounds, and Elroy — who had held his challenge coiled and waiting for exactly this — let it fly.
“Come and get a real target, you little pecker!”
— Elroy Jenkins
The drake got him. It breathed its fire square down at the Pentarch of Valor, a column of flame meant to end the argument for good — and Elroy's shield snapped up to meet it in the same instant, some old reflex faster than thought, and he came through the far side of the fire blackened and smoking and entirely, gloriously, still standing.
Dravyn's second bolt of lightning was dodged as neatly as the first. Rust poured yet more life into Elroy, and Grotdor botched one final leap into a burrow and had to content himself with pressing a last potion up into the General's hand from where he lay. But it no longer mattered how many of them missed. The acid and the bleeding had been at their patient work the whole while, and the drake was down to its last few ragged breaths.
And then it was Perry's turn.
The Pentarch of Inquiry had said very little through the whole shrieking, tumbling ordeal. He had studied, and calculated, and waited, and now he sighted down the length of Infernis at a beast the size of a barn wheeling forty feet overhead, and he found the one target on it worth the shot. The bolt crossed the distance and went in clean through the drake's eye.
“Right through the eye.”
— Perry Marlowe
With a colossal boom the Enormous Flame Drake rolled out of the sky in a churn of smoke and cinder and torn green vegetation, struck the earth it had lorded over all morning, loosed one last heaving, world-ending roar — and lay still.
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V. The Drake's Den¶
1st of Desnus (May), 4711 AR — evening
For a long moment nobody spoke. The clearing was a ruin of flattened brush and scorched root, and every one of them was scorched or bleeding or both. Elroy, taking stock of himself, reckoned aloud that between the beast's teeth, its claws, and two separate falls out of the open sky he had personally absorbed enough punishment to lay out an entire company of ordinary men. It had been a genuine monster of a fight, a thing two full steps above their weight, and they had won it on nothing but stubbornness and the fact that not one of them had been willing to let another fall alone.
There was treasure in it, as there usually was. Grotdor's last graceless leap had pitched him into a shallow burrow at the clearing's edge, and there, tangled in the roots, lay the long-dead bones of an elf — some earlier wanderer the drake had claimed, or who had simply crawled here to die. The remains gave up a handful of coin and a few small worked things, and among the drake's own scattered leavings the party recovered a fine cloak of muted elven make, which Grotdor claimed at once and had been eyeing for a season; a necklace strung with beads that each held a sleeping ember of fire, which fell to Dravyn; and a shirt of light mail woven through with a rune of protection. Something near four hundred gold in all went into the company's shared stores.
There was no safer ground for miles, and none of them had the strength left to look for it. So they did the only sensible thing and bedded down in the drake's own den. Nothing in the whole of the Narlmarches, they agreed, was fool enough to come knocking on the door of a lair that reeked this strongly of a dead apex predator. Through the night of the first of Desnus they rested, and the wounds closed, and the sky above the hollow turned from red to black to the pale grey of another spring morning.
It had been a little more than a year now since the charter was sworn on the banks of the Thorn River — a nation barely old enough to walk, and its five rulers spent as often in the wild wood as at any council table. This was the Pentarchy's work as surely as any road-survey or granary: the beasts that guarded the troll-king Hargulka were being pulled down one by one, march by march, while back at Stormfire Reach the Chief of Staff and the emissary and the viceroy kept the young capital steady in their absence. Fig — the leucrotta they had questioned and let go weeks before — had named this drake among Hargulka's guardians. One of the named things was dead now. There was one more to find.
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VI. Into the Narlmarches¶
2nd – 3rd of Desnus (May), 4711 AR
Rested and restored, the party struck out northwest, back toward a stretch of country they had glimpsed once, long ago, and prudently fled — the ground near the old Statue of Erastil, where a many-headed thing from the water had once come within a hair of making a meal of Elroy. They were not the same company that had run from that place. They were stronger now, and they carried the head of a not-quite-dragon behind them to prove it.
Deeper into the Narlmarches the air changed. It grew thick and close and humid as they left the open water behind and passed into old deciduous forest, the kind that had stood since long before any charter was dreamed of. The wood was loud with life — birdsong layered over the drone of insects, the rustle of snakes and small scurrying things moving through the leaf-litter. Two marches of careful travel and watchful reconnaissance passed without a single hostile thing crossing their path.
They were not alone in the wood, though, and they knew it. The trails through this quarter of the forest had been beaten flat and wide by heavy, two-legged traffic, again and again, coming and going. There was no honest mistaking what left tracks like that in numbers like that. Probably trolls, someone said, let's be honest — probably trolls. Servants of Hargulka, moving between their king's seat and whatever errands he set them, on ground the Reclaimers were quietly unweaving thread by thread. The trolls did not know it yet. Their king did, and had begun to hunt the Reclaimers in his turn — but a snare is a snare whether or not the fox has heard of it.
By the close of the third of Desnus they found what they had come for.
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VII. The Deadfall¶
3rd of Desnus (May), 4711 AR
It was another deadfall — trees and brambles heaped over the years into a mossy, cave-mouthed mound of a thing, so like the drake's own lair that the resemblance raised the hairs on more than one neck. This one was worse. The earth all around it was gouged with deep, four-clawed tracks, and the den itself swarmed: mosquitoes, black flies, and pale wriggling larvae rose in clouds from its dark, and out of that dark rolled a stench of old carcass and rotting meat thick enough to lean against.
Light was the first problem, and they solved it their own ways. Dravyn spoke a small radiance into being; Elroy set the Everlight Crystal he carried aglow. Perry, who had no wish to become a walking lantern while he was trying to hide, brewed himself a draught that let his eyes drink in the dark instead, and drank it. Then Elroy crept close and put the werewolf's nose to the foul air, sifting the reek — and beneath the carrion stink he found it: a single great reptilian thing, four-legged, alive and breathing somewhere within. Dravyn laid one clawed hand flat against the deadfall's wall and read the tremor of the earth through it, and confirmed the shape of it — one large beast, some thirty feet inside, holding to the north.
A short rest at the threshold shook the last of the road's fatigue from their limbs. Then they set their opening gambit, and it was a good one. Dravyn wove a shimmer of three false images of himself, so that any strike aimed at the wizard would as likely find empty air, and hurled a blooming ball of fire into the mouth of the den. Perry smashed a smoke-bomb down to sow the dark with cover and, in the same breath, loosed a flawless opening shot into the black. The fire tore into the den and drew blood — the beast within could not twist clear of it in time, and the flame washed full across its hide.
Out of the smoke and cinder it came lumbering: a thing the size of a bull and built like something older than bulls, low and reptilian, its broad back bristling with a forest of long, wickedly sharp spines, its wide mouth crowded with corkscrewing teeth that turned in on themselves like augers. The Everlight Crystal threw the party's shadows long and jagged across the deadfall as they set their feet and readied their weapons, the wounded Hodag heaving itself upright at the edge of its reeking home.
And there, at the very lip of the fight, with the drake dead two days behind them and the second of the troll-king's beasts risen bloodied and furious before them, the Reclaimers drew a breath — and held it.
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