No natural wings could have held Liv there, nearly motionless, in front of the great black wyrm’s head; but the feathers of shining blue and gold, no matter how delicate they looked, were conjured of pure mana – and within her Authority, Liv had absolute control of them. They would hold her where she wished: and if she wished not to move, she would not.
To say the wyrm could have swallowed her whole was to understate its size. Up close, Liv saw that a single one of the monster’s fangs was at least as long as she was tall; that its two reptilian eyes, burning with flame, were each as large as a carriage, within which half a dozen people might comfortably ride; that its skull was larger than the great cisterns of Castle Whitehill, or even those more recently carved to service Bald Peak; that the serpentine tongue, flicking out to taste the air of the rift, could have been a winding, cobblestone street upon which knights rode four abreast.
“In the painted desert of Feic Seria, I spoke with Silica of the First Clutch,” Liv shouted, in Vakansa. “If you can speak as well, answer me now.”
When the wyrm spoke, its breath washed over Liv like a foul, hot wind. She could smell the reek of a predator through her enchanted scarf, that stomach-churning stink of half-rotted meat.
“Of course I can speak, little goddess,” it told her, in the same archaic accent that Ghveris had used when he first woke from his enchanted sleep; and that the dreaming children of Ractia who Liv had come here to recuse spoke. Her experience speaking with her friend, and with Aisia more recently, made it easier for Liv to understand. “I am Umbris of the First Clutch. I spoke to the V?dim before your father’s father was ever born, from the time I was a hatchling.”
Liv exhaled in relief. It wasn’t that she was no longer frightened of the wyrm – he was terrifying, and the longer she spent within reach of his mouth, the more she felt that – but that she was now certain she’d made the right choice in not killing him immediately. This was Silica’s brother.
“My name is Livara t?r Valtteri,” she began, but the serpent interrupted before she could go any further.
“The Lady of Winter,” Umbris hissed. “Of the line of Celris. I know who you are, and why you have come. You will not have her.” The serpent stirred its wings, sending boulders the size of Liv’s head rolling off, down along the bones that supported the immense structures, and down into the collapsed and ruined undercity beneath them.
Liv blinked. “Will not have who?”
“My mother,” Umbris snarled. “The Lady of Blood warned me of you, how you’ve eaten the remains of both Costia and Celris. I will not allow you to disturb my mother’s resting place. You will have to kill me, first.”
“Ractia was here?” Liv blurted, before she could think better of it. Of course. First she’d sent Milicent to try to kill Liv, and now she’d tricked a wyrm into a second attempt. Ractia was too afraid to face her head on, so the goddess was using any weapon that she could find. It felt like desperation.
“Here before you,” Umbris confirmed. “And she told me that you are not a goddess yet.”
The wyrm’s mouth snaped open wide, fangs bared, and a spray of venom shot out directly at Liv. With a thought, she silent-cast a mana shield between her and the serpent’s head, so that most of the sickly-yellow venom hit that, instead of her. The spray was so wide that more shot past her on each side. Where it hit Liv’s shield, the venom began to smoke, and she didn’t trust the spell to last for more than a moment.
With a flap of her wings, she shot up, leaving the shield to dissolve into motes of blue and golden light. “I don’t want your mother’s corpse!” Liv shouted down, the air whipping the ends of her enchanted scarf out behind her. If it hadn’t been tucked under her helm, she was certain that it would have been torn off and left behind to float away on the wind.
“So you claim now,” Umbris roared. The ancient wyrm shook its wings out, clearing them of rubble with what amounted to a localized landslide. Once the bat-like wings were spread, they stretched wide enough to nearly blot out the sky. “After you’ve been caught in your schemes!”
“Celent N?v’belim,” Liv began, the incantation for Skyfall coming easily to mind. She didn’t actually want to kill the wyrm – not if the only reason he was attacking was that Ractia had lied to him – but she also couldn’t let him rampage through her friends and her army. Now, while he was still forcing his way out of the undercity, was the time to catch him –
With a great downward sweep of his wings, Umbris actually rose into the air.
The sight was ridiculous – nothing so massive should have been able to fly. Even Silica, who was perhaps half her brother’s size, moved with more grace and agility. Umbris was like some lumbering barge, crashing through the waves and swells of the ocean rather than riding upon them. Each sweep of his wings scoured the nearby floor of the crater of dust and debris, sending clouds of it flying out, as if his very wing-strokes were sand-storms. There had to be magic baked into the wyrm’s bones, Liv was convinced, something that Iravata and Ractia had designed to enable him to climb into the air like that.
The incantation died on Liv’s lips. She no longer had a stationary target – but she wasn’t certain what other spell she could possibly use that would hurt a creature with such a massive body.
Umbris chased her up into the sky, and it was only a small comfort that she was so much smaller and more maneuverable. Another jet of venom shot toward her, but Liv slipped it, rolling to one side so that the spray fell down upon the crater like rain, each drop scorching the rock and sending up tendrils of smoke.
They were headed for the clouds fast now, which still lay dark over Godsgrave, flickering with lightning. If they headed into the storm now – the storm Liv herself had spurred on and built – there was just as much chance that she’d be struck by lightning, as that Umbris would. Still, Liv had imprinted Luc long ago: it was her second word of power, even if she’d never become quite as skilled with it as someone like Julianne or Caspian. There was no reason to think Umbris knew the word, which would give her an advantage.
The thought of Caspian Loredan stirred an image in her mind. At Coral Bay, when Jurian had been tested for archmage, and Genevieve had attacked him so viciously, the fight had only come to an end when Caspian had pulled lightning down from the sky and caught it in his staff. Liv remembered the awe she’d felt when she’d watched it pulse there, shining and brilliant in his hands, as if the archmage had been holding the storm itself.
If he could do that with an ordinary enchanted staff, surely she could do it with a stormwand.
Liv beat her wings, swinging first to the left, and then to the right, keeping the path of her flight unpredictable as she fought for the clouds. But only half her mind was on evading the wyrm chasing at her heels: the rest was assembling a new incantation.
“Celent M? ?'Veikis,” Liv shouted into the storm, and with a reckless beat of her wings dove upward into the rumbling clouds. It was like plunging into a bank of fog or mist, save that instead of being colored white, these rain-laden clouds were nearly as dark as smoke. Liv was soaked through immediately, but had no attention to pay to that.
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Guided by her intent, and Luc, which roared like a beast in the back of her mind, the first forking bolt of lightning came at her nearly sideways, striking the wand and wrapping around its length like a lover’s caress. The wood shone as bright as one of Keri’s spells, save that it was tinged with purple shading into blue at the edges.
After the first hit, the strikes only accelerated, lashing out from the clouds above her, to either side, and even from below to strike the wand one after another, so quickly that Liv had to squeeze her eyes shut against the glare, lest she be blinded. In truth, she was certain that anyone who didn’t have the right word of power imprinted would never have been able to survive trying this.
She heard Umbris’s roar, and felt the wind of his passing, before she ever saw him. Liv opened her eyes, holding the stormwand she’d inherited from Julianne in both hands, pointed straight down toward the ground. Still, the glow from the raw bold of power throbbing between her fingers was nearly enough to make her miss Umbris as he came out of the clouds, materializing from a shadow into a gaping maw, all at once. Whether his venom sacs were depleted, or he’d just grown frustrated with the tactic, he’s apparently decided to simply swallow her whole and be done with it.
“Lucet Aiveh Arum’Orvis o’M?,” Liv whispered, and squeezed her eyes shut.
Every lightning strike that had been absorbed into the wand rushed out, all at once, surrounding her in a crackling sphere of electricity. Every hair on her body stood to attention, and the very air seemed to hum for an instant. Even the taste on her tongue, in the moment of inhalation, was strange – like the essence of a storm.
Then, after the barest moment of hesitation, the orb of lightning exploded outward in all directions. Liv heard Umbris scream in pain, and when she cracked her eyes open, caught the briefest glimpse of the lightning crackling across and actually through his immense body, lighting it up as if from within. She could swear that she actually saw the bones of the wyrm’s skeleton as dark shadows against the brilliant glare. Then, having lost momentary control of his body, Umbris plunged back down out of the clouds, falling toward the ground, the force of the wind wrapping his enormous wings about his body.
Liv dove after him, tallying her mana as she pursued. Four rings for the orb, half a dozen to draw the lightning in. Three for her wings, and another four used on the shield against the venom. That left her with only eighteen rings with which to finish the fight, if the fall out of the sky didn’t do it for her – unless, of course, she wanted to risk drawing in the font of roiling mana that surged through the rift. And that was a risk in itself – she’d barely been able to handle Costia’s mana, and there were three V?dic corpses here.
The problem was that Skyfall would cost her eighteen rings – leaving only one.
As she dove down out of the clouds in pursuit of the falling wyrm, Liv pulled a ring of mana each from her guild ring and her pearl. She caught at a scrap of her own ambient mana, trailing down along the path of Umbris’s descent, with her Authority, but she’d already left behind the rest of it. Her set of bracelet and rings was still empty, waiting in her tent, the mana inside it given to Keri when he’d needed it more than she had.
Four rings, Liv counted to herself. I can only use four rings and still pull off the spell to kill him. But if she did, she’d still have to explain that to Silica.
Halfway down, Umbris regained enough control of his body to fling his wings out. Liv had a hard time believing the bones didn’t simply snap under the force of his falling bulk, but somehow they held. Still, it wasn’t enough to save him entirely: he’d picked up too much speed for that. Instead, he managed to turn his end over end tumble into a sort of half-controlled glide, then tucked his wings again at the last moment before hitting the ground.
The black wyrm tore an enormous furrow through the rocky floor of the crater, sending rock, dust and debris spraying in every direction. His skidding impact carved a ravine through Godsgrave until he finally fetched up to a halt. Liv pulled up, beating her wings, both words of power held in her mind, waiting to see whether the monster would stay down, or keep fighting.
A cheer caught her attention, and Liv turned to see her friends clambering down the rocky slope, slipping in the scree. At Keri’s shouted command, a wave of crossbow bolts took flight, arcing up over the blasted landscape and then falling down toward the bulk of the beast, where it lay still. Ghveris’s shoulder-mounted weapons barked, and a blast of light shot out from Keri’s hand to impact the wyrm’s dark scales. Wren, in the form of a smaller wyrm herself, slithered downslope toward the ravine, clearly intending to close on the monster.
Once again, they were doing their part: her friends and the soldiers would tie Umbris down, keep him distracted and in one place so that Liv had time to cast her killing blow. Whether they could retreat in time, when her spears began falling from the sky, was a different matter entirely, and not a prospect that Liv was comfortable with.
Umbris roared again, and lashes of utter darkness rose up from the great furrow his body had dug in the ground. Though the immensity of the wyrm’s body clearly prevented him from diving through shadows, still, it was evident that he had some of Asuris’s power. A lash of darkness wrapped around Ghveris’s armored form, and the war-machine stopped firing long enough to hack down into it with the mana blade mounted on his arm. Wren’s fanged maw ripped apart the first tendril of darkness that came for her, but the second coiled around her serpentine body, her own scales shifting against it in a dizzying knot.
Liv’s soldiers fared less well. She saw men and women alike, wrapped in lashes of darkness, either dragged down into their own shadows, or crushed until their bones snapped and their bodies gave way. She only got a glimpse of them struggling before a burst of light drew her eye.
Keri’s spear shone like the sun, actually dissolving the whips of shadow from the space all around him, out to a distance of twenty or thirty yards. His eyes flared blue, and he rushed toward Umbris, firing beams of light into the wyrm’s dark scales.
Umbris’s long, serpentine neck reared back, and with a hiss the monster shot a jew of venom, enough to cover Keri from head to toe and leave his body twitching in a pool of the vile stuff.
Liv shouted something – certainly not the incantation of the spell, though she couldn’t have said what – and formed a mana shield in front of him. The venom hit it, ran down the surface, and bubbled atop the rock of the crater surface. And with that, the four rings that she had to spare were gone.
The wyrms’s head swung around toward her.
“I don’t want to kill you!” Liv shouted, trying to make herself heard over the wind. She could see traceries burned into Umbris’s dark scales, still smoking from the heat of her lightning. Bleeding sores showed where scales had been ripped off during his tumble across the landscape, and there were visible holes torn in the membrane of his wings.
Umbris lashed out, biting at Liv in the air, but she simply flew backward. The glint in the wyrm’s luminous eyes should have warned her, but she was too focused on trying to think of a combination of lesser spells that would put him down without actually dealing a deathblow.
Lashes of darkness wrapped around her limbs, one for each arm and one for each leg. They squeezed so tight that Liv thought her bones would break, and pulled her body taught between them, limbs stretched out to every side so that her body made an ‘x.’
“Caught,” Umbris said. “You paid too little attention to how close you came to the ground, infant goddess. And with this, I earn the second word of power that Ractia has promised me.”
The shadows tensed, and with four agonizing pops, each one of Liv’s limbs dislocated, one after the next. She screamed, a wail of pain that she hadn’t heard out of her own throat since Costia’s curse had turned her own bones against her.
The wyrm grinned, and in another moment, Liv knew that he would tear her into five pieces, limb from limb, right there in front of her friends. She knew what would happen next: Keri and the others would try to kill Umbris, even if it ended with all of them dead. She’d gotten a look at his face when he’d scorched what was left of Milicent’s body away, and when he’d thought she was dead in the seastone tower, and she didn’t ever want to see that look in his eyes again.
She might have time to use a Tether, but it would leave her on the other side of the world, with no way to affect this battle. There was a single other choice, but she’d been afraid to try it again – afraid that she wouldn’t be able to come back.
Umbris’s shadows pulled, and Liv let her body fall apart into swirling flakes of snow. The whips of shadow lashed uselessly, unable to grasp her. With no lips, she could not speak; with no hands, she could not strike. But her words of power were all still there, waiting. Liv released Aluth, and instead grasped Dā. The word of time strained against the word of winter. Liv had felt her grandmother do this, the older woman embracing her from behind while she cast, Liv’s hands clasped in hers.
A’Celēs Te En Dāēs, Liv thought, as clearly as she could. Cel and Dā surged forth from out of her, from out of the blizzard which had surrounded Umbris. Ice cracked over the wyrm’s scales, coating him in a later of rime that thickened faster than he could shake it off his wings.
Umbris let out a helpless roar, stretching his wings in a bid to reach for the sky, but before he could make a single beat, the ice had grown a yard thick, all around his body, and didn’t stop there. The violet eyes glared out at the world in hatred, until the last ring of mana drained out of Liv’s reserves, sealing the wyrm away in both time and cold.
volume nine is off and running!
here. I am more available there than I am here.
Outrun: Neon Divide which, in all honesty I am 100% going to go read myself, because I love me some cyberpunk.
not to kill the character she's fighting. And of course, this was set up to push her to overcome her fear of letting her body go, and falling apart into the winter storm. Character growth + progression! Hope you all enjoyed :)
Dramatis Personae
Livara T?r Valtteri Kaen Syv? - Archmage, former scullery maid at Castle Whitehill, the bastard daughter of Maggie Brodbeck and Valtteri Ka Auris. Mountain Queen, and Lady of Winter. Did not come out of that unscathed. [36+ Rings of Mana, not counting mana stored in items.]
Umbris - One of the original Great Wyrms of the First Clutch. Things are not going according to plan. [33 Rings of Mana]
