It came upon him as a sudden awareness. He—although could he truly be called a “he” now that the body he inhabited was female?—sensed a presence that should not be there: a smudge upon a perfect canvas, a pustule on the lip of a loved one. The awareness began glimmeringly small. But soon it grew until it was a second sun, a merciless presence that could neither be ignored nor mitigated. If he had possessed human jaws he would have gritted his teeth. Instead, he let out hissing fire from his gullet. Anyone looking below would see streaking red scales trailing smoke through the sky, moving so fast it was more like a comet than a living thing.

  They are here, the Daimon whispered. The false gods. Nearby. Somewhere…

  He was almost at the western coast of Aurelia. He had flown arrow-straight from Auroch, over miles of farmland, then miles more of desert, following old and forgotten Engine lines, until he saw the ragged edge of the empire—and the Winedark Sea beyond. Whereas the Winedark Sea hugging Aurelia’s eastern coast was furious, temperamental, and coloured a bright scarlet, this sea was darker, slower, more like coagulated blood than wine.

  But he could not take in the natural beauty of the scene. The presence unnerved him, ate at him like a cloud of gnats. He expected ambush even though the thought was ridiculous—he was miles high in the sky, level with the clouds. What could possibly…

  And then it hit him. The presence was growing stronger because he was getting closer to it. And he was getting closer to it because it was in the sky, with him.

  He cast his huge head about. His eyes were positioned laterally, affording him a greater peripheral vision than human eyesight. But still he turned his head to scour the full expanse above and below him. The clouds, which had seemed beauteous to him moments before, now seemed treacherous forestry, obscuring ambushers.

  Where is your ship hiding? he snarled.

  He had seen the sky-ships in the shared dreams and memories of the Daimons. He knew their general shape, the way the supernatural metal curved and folded and eluded the eye, even if his own eyes had never witnessed one.

  Ahead, the clouds billowed and folded. They seemed to be rising up to meet him. Could those clouds obscure a ship? He wondered. He dived lower, eyes scouring both ground and sky for threats. The warning in his heart was a clarion, a horn thundering from a mountain peak. He could barely remain sane, such was its urgency and immediacy. Act, kill, attack, run, flee, evade, kill, seek. His body craved action, but there was nothing to react to. Just miles of land, miles of sea, miles of cloud, and a tiny little village below, hugging the close. A little jetty projected from it into the ocean. Skiffs and medium-sized vessels went to and fro from it. One or two galleons had laid anchor farther out to sea.

  The warning suddenly peaked. And that was when he realised his mistake. What he’d taken to be a rising cloud had in fact been a reflection upon the supernatural hull of a machine. It was above him.

  He twisted just as the cannon screamed—some buzzing whine of gathered power—and then discharged what seemed a lightning bolt, only ten times stronger. The bolt struck the Warden and he let loose a scream from draconian lips that shook the sky.

  Burning! Burning! The pain! Oh by all hells the pain!

  Scales were ripped asunder, flesh seared black. The bolt passed through him, rupturing organs, cauterising the wound as it went. His wings beat desperately. I must get out of its path, I must—

  The second cannon fired from the cover of cloud and his left wing was sheered off.

  He tumbled, clawing desperately at the air. Agony spread through his entire left side. His ears rang with tinnitus, deafened by the blast. The taste of chemicals and metal and—and my own kind, he realised with horror. Daimonsblood powers their machines. They have made us… made us fuel!

  But the horror was eclipsed by the death-terror. He was plummeting, with no way to control his fall. He beat his single remaining wing and it only succeeded in spinning him, so that now the world span in a blurred vortex of nonsensical colour. This time when he tried to scream, even the dragon’s mighty lungs could not draw the breath. Black spots appeared as he hurtled down.

  The impact rent the earth.

  Two nearby houses cracked to their foundations and a fissure opened. The super-hardened bones of the dragon shattered. Were it not for the fact that a part of him remained divorced from the body, occupying some liminal space, aware that he was a parasite, in some sense, a disembodied entity of blood that now inhabited skin as one might wear a different coat, then he would have blacked out from the pain. But a guillotine blade came down in his mind and severed him from the destruction of his flesh.

  The second time you have fallen, a surprisingly calm voice said in his head. It seems you are destined, always, to fail.

  Was this the Daimon, his father, or himself? He did not know. The voices were becoming a confusion: he could not tell them apart anymore.

  One eye had been destroyed. His skull was broken. Somehow, he was still alive. A testament to the hardiness of dragons. With his remaining eye he blinked through blood and tried to take in his surroundings. He had landed in the middle of the seaside village. There were people running, screaming.

  “The Watch! Get the Watch!”

  “The Watch? It’s a damn dragon!”

  “Take the children. To the station. Now!”

  “It’s hurt, mummy…”

  Something with in him twitched. He remembered Iliyet, spying a deer one day as they walked back via a forest route. It was limping, could barely walk in fact. He’d drawn his dagger and marched towards it, taken it by the antlers—for it could hardly get away.

  “What are you doing?” she’d cried.

  He’d looked at her in genuine surprise.

  “This will feed us for a week,” he’d said.

  “But it’s hurt, Koron. Don’t you have any compassion?”

  He blinked. Above him, the ship descended. It had finally come out into the open although it was still difficult to pin down. The metal warped and waivered, on the edge of the visible, always bending out of logical architecture, making the eye strain. Cloud and sky were wrapped about it, a shield of illusion. Yet, he saw its cannons aiming down at him.

  He tried to rise, and found he could not.

  This is it, then. This is the end. To die like a dog, put down, in ignominy.

  The ship hovered. The moment stretched.

  “Just… do… it… already…” he growled. A dragon’s tongue was not made for human speech, but he bent it to his will, and the words formed, albeit slurred and lisped and awful.

  But the shot did not come.

  Does he pity me? He thought.

  The gods know no pity, the Daimon replied. But the cannon is too powerful. It would destroy the village. And some still linger. They are forbidden from taking human life after the… problems… they had in the beginning.

  The Warden waited. Slowly, the ship began to descend. More screams were going up, but also cries of jubilation.

  “A sky-ship! A sky-ship comes! We are chosen! The gods return!”

  “Idiot! That’s clearly some Qi’shathian invention!”

  “Nonsense! We would know if the Tablets of Mastery had been decoded!”

  “Get the damn Watch!”

  The ship produced stabilising legs and came to rest upon the waving grassland. This place was greener than the rest of Tezada, a little belt of homeliness at the edge of a desert. The roads here were well-used, worn and cracked. Smoke roses from the fires of gentle hearths. Here, he thought. I could live here.

  Focus your mind, Daimoniac. It is not over yet!

  An aperture appeared from solid metal, and a ramp lowered. Golden light fell down upon the ground as though a second sun had risen, or else each sky-ship carried with it the celestial hues of Nilldoran. A figure stepped onto the ramp. His footfalls were thunderous metal. He towered, nearly eight-foot tall, a behemoth of iron and flesh and determination.

  A mask covered his face. In two hands he held a hammer large enough to crack a city gate. It smouldered with forge-light, as though it had only just been plucked from the flame. His entire being glowed. A mantle of volcanic orange rippled about him.

  Beltanus. The Warden knew it was him. He’d never believed in the gods, but he had learned their faces and names and attributes, if only to hate them more deeply. But despite his years of dismissal, despite all he had learned about them, despite how much he hated them, he could not deny he was awed.

  He knew it was death, now. Nothing in him was strong enough to withstand that hammer.

  I can remake us, the Daimon whispered. There is flesh here that can be resoldered, repurposed into a smaller form. But it will take time.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Beltanus was only ten strides away now. He had hefted the hammer onto one shoulder. He would pulverise his skull and body, leaving nothing to chance.

  We have no time.

  There is but one thing we can do now…

  Control slipped away from The Warden. It was not so much that the Daimon took over his body, but rather, some primal instinct awoke. Just as babies and toddlers duck when a bird swoops overhead without ever having been taught, so too did this natural instinct command his bodily functions.

  He had little body left to obey, but his throat was miraculously intact.

  He screamed.

  But it was no ordinary scream. It registered at a frequency and pitch that caused dogs miles away to rise from slumber, tails bolt upright, hackles raised, teeth bared. It sounded at a frequency so incandescently harsh that trees shed bark, birds took flight, and children wept without knowing why. It reverberated, lingering in the air. It travelled as though a physical thing. The earth received it and shuddered. The sea quelled momentarily, disturbed.

  The sea. It had fallen utterly silent. The sluggish waves stilled, and for a moment, The Warden thought he had slipped into a dream, or else looked upon a painting, not waking life.

  Then he heard it.

  The answering screams.

  Beltanus had paused. His eyes—one of which was technologically augmented—searched the ocean, then widened in shock.

  Some could already see it. They fled first. But others lingered, awed, fascinated, horrified. The town—which was Dreamholding—had become one great amphitheatre of spectators, some terrified, some opportunistic, some religious, but all enthralled by the battle unfolding, and even more so by this new development.

  There were hills in the ocean. Rising.

  The water swelled as though pregnant.

  Five mountains arose.

  And then the waters fell away and what revealed itself were colossal forms.

  Scoprion, crab, lobster, octopus, and yet none of these. The oceanic monsters loomed, and loomed, and loomed. They raised themselves on limbs of hideous chitin and carapace. They felt the air with attennae longer than oars. Huge tentacles swept through the water, causing tidal waves that battered the beaches and shook the jetty to its foundations.

  Daimons. Not foetuses of potential, like the one that The Warden had found in the forest of Yestermere, but Great Ones, waxed powerful over four-thousand years of hiding and hunting and assuming. They were titans. And now, they revealed themselves.

  “Thank you!” he whispered through a broken, reptilian mouth. “Thank you!”

  We do this not merely for you and us, the Daimon snarled. But to kill the god. His head is worth much to us, worth enough for us to risk open war.

  The people gathered on the shores were losing their minds. They knew what they saw but could not understand what they were seeing. Daimons were not real to them. They were mythical, bones in the earth, images on Sumyrian pottery. They were fables to keep children in bed, curse-words to spice up language. They were ways of making money.

  They did not rise from the ocean. They did not walk.

  They did not chitter and shriek.

  They did not tower over the meagre dwellings.

  They did not shatter rooftops with their titanic limbs.

  Screaming. Running. The whole town was in flight. A few brave and stupid men stood before the Daimons, bearing swords and spears, and were reduced to red mist by a single descending limb. Suckers descended from unseen orifices and hoovered up their remains. Soon, there was nothing left of them.

  The Daimons marched on.

  Beltanus had turned away from The Warden. This was a threat even a god could not ignore. He could run back to the ship, but the Daimons were swift purely by virtue of their size—they had already gained the beaches and were slaughtering the populace, scything them down with colossal claws, splitting them apart with crab-like legs. Buildings cracked and toppled as their huge bodies piled through them.

  God blood! God blood!

  The psychic hive-mind was alive with desire, with intent. The Warden could scarcely think for the hunger and fury that emanated from his brothers.

  But something else was happening: his body was moving. Scales were falling away. Flesh was rejoining, moulding. Pieces of him were detaching, re-attaching.

  The blood was changing its course, flowing in new directions.

  The Daimon was reknitting itself—him.

  And it was agony.

  This is all I am, he thought, as the pain blossomed anew, as his entire body seemed to become a labyrinth of fiery passageways, each more virulent, more burning than the last. Shattered bones shattered themselves more and moved through the fleshways of his being, cutting as they went. Muscles contracted to the point of orgasmic pain. His spine condensed, verterbrae’s slipping into one another, compressed to the point where he felt as though he were an accordion played by some heavy-handed drunkard.

  Pain, pain, pain, is this all I have known?

  In the delirium there arose images of Iliyet: her smile, her taste, her smell.

  Oh hells! Oh hells! Why? Why was she taken?

  Because the gods are cruel, came the dark reply.

  Beltanus fought with the Daimons. He rose—the heels of his ironshod boots emitted bursts of flame that catapulted him into the air. A Daimon wearing the form of a black-armoured lobster met him with reaping claws. He dodged, impossibly swift. His hhammer flashed and descended, rupturing the skull of the beast. Black blood spurted from the wound. Its armour had been nothing beneath the superheated hammer.

  Beltanus roared like a lion awoken.

  “Daimon-scum! I’kil’den!”

  He leapt even as the lobster fell. A betentacled horror assailed him with swiping tentacles. Beltanus evaded the first strike with his flying boots—but was not fast enough to avoid the tangle that followed it. The tendril struck his midriff and launched him through the air. He flew, slamming into a building that shattered on impact, reduced to bricks and rubble and tiles. He emerged from the wreckage bleeding. Another octopean limb descended and he raised his mechanical hand. The hand glowed with a phosphorous sheath of lightning—and he caught the descending limb.

  The Daimon shrieked as poisonous energy surged through it. Beltanus roared again and leapt. His hammer flashed and the bulbous head of the creature broke open, spilling brains and fluid.

  My brothers die! The Warden thought. Our brothers—

  They buy us time, the Daimon answered. We are one, Daimoniac. We fight as one.

  The process of his remaking was reaching a grim apogee. Everything was pure flame burning. His flesh was fire. His bones were coals gleaming in the hearth. His veins were liquid metal.

  When will the suffering end?

  Beltanus, now on the ground, stepped within the reach of another monster. He swung his hammer horizontally, breaking its crab-leg in twain. The Daimon screamed, wobbled, and lost its balance. As its head rushed toward the earth, Belanus’s hammer rose up to meet it.

  Armour split. Blood burst like a river freed.

  The Warden could feel his brothers’ pain, too. And he could feel they were not dead, though they were close. Like him, they possessed extraordinary resilience and healing. But would Beltanus give them the chance? They lay broken and ruined. It would take them hours to rebuild their bodies.

  The god closed with the final two. So furious had been his assault that the Daimons, even with their mind-link, had not been able to work together sucessfulyl. Partly, it might be due to their size. They had grown strong in the deep, but their mass—so useful for hunting whales and monsters in the deep—was little good against an opponent who could move so rapidly, darting between them, then striking with the force of a meteor.

  But now the final two worked in tandem. Each had more than six limbs, a mixture of claws, hands, and tentacles. These lashed and darted in deadly patterns, preventing Beltanus from closing the gap.

  Now!

  The pain vanished. Like a storm silenced by the closing of a window, it was suddenly not there. Its absence was its own kind of wound. He almost missed the fire…

  He rose. He looked down and found his body to be a strange and pleasing hybrid. He was dragon, he was man. His flesh was blackly scaled in places. He walked on two limbs, upright. He had two hands with five fingers each. His wings were gone, but his tail remained, adorned with a bone-hard scythe upon its end. His head was elongated into a hideous crest. Horned. His tongue was long and sharp enough to deglove a man’s face. His eyes were supernaturally sharp.

  Now, Daimoniac! Now before all is lost!

  He saw Beltanus, his back turned. He saw, lying on the ground nearby, one of the huge, black, crab-limbs of his brethren. It was curbed and serrated, almost like a great sword. He bounded towards it, finding he could move on four limbs or two. He hefted up the weapon, and instantly felt the bond with it, the presence of the mind-link, the Daimonic intelligence.

  Wield me, brother!

  The limb fashioned itself to his hand, making itself into the weapon.

  This is the power of Daimons, The Warden thought. To fight as one. To work together.

  Beltanus still faced down the two Daimons working in tandem. His hammer and gauntlet flashed. Lighting arced from him. Fire burned at the head of his hammer. But he had not yet found the opening.

  This is for Iliyet!

  The Warden leapt.

  The god knew. Some preternatural instinct had awoken in him. His head started to turn, the hammer to rise—but it was not swift enough.

  The Warden’s blade came down, wielded in two hands. Black chitin hardened itself beyond diamond. All Daimons communed in this divine moment, pooling their power, their focus, their will, their life. The sword was as much a part of The Warden as his limbs. He did not so much swing it as follow its path, a path pre-determined by the imaginal eyes of Daimonhood.

  The strike was perfect.

  The blade struck at Beltanus’s throat, the one area even remotely exposed. It passed through flesh, cartilage, and bone, passing out the other side.

  The gods’ eyes widened. He staggered.

  Then his mighty head fell from his shoulders, landing in the dirt.

  The Warden stood, divine blood dripping from his blade. The sky above rumbled with sudden thunder. The air zinged.

  The Law is broken! The Daimons cried.

  Fate is broken!

  The Game is rewritten!

  Destiny is ours!

  A silent cry went up to heaven itself, piercing the atmosphere, flying out into the blackness of the Great Dark.

  Somewhere, mighty Koronzon turned in sudden anguish, feeling a terrible weight upon his immortal heart.

  The Warden stared down. The air frothed and churned. His vision was blurring.

  It was the hunger, which had become impossible, feverish, world-ending.

  The blood! He could taste it. It was all he could taste. It was the universe entire.

  He fell to his knees, scooping up the headless corpse.

  And drank the nectar of the gods.