again and began to stroke the air, heading away from the center, the sun’s rays warming his back as he flew. Regillix worked easily to gain altitude, trying to conserve his strength for when he would really need it.
Full Lighten drew near, and the wind against his belly became a rush, air pushing upward with relentless force, bearing him away from Nayve now with a hurricane force. The sun was hot, hotter than he had ever imagined, but still he kept his back to it, wings spread, riding the powerful updraft. Wind blasted and buffeted his belly and underwings, and he fought for control, trying to master the air. He caught the power of the rising drafts, climbing, soaring skyward, leaving Nayve an invisible distance below.
Until the heat began to sear him. He squirmed and twisted, desperate to escape the scalding fire that seemed to rage across his back, as if it would melt his scales and bake his flesh. But he kept his wings spread, and the wind blew, and it seemed that his body was burning away. Yet the mighty dragon could only drift upon the wind between worlds.
The sage-ambassador teleported him at Lighten, and in an instant Natac arrived at the pool on Hill Number One. Jubal and Tamarwind were there, both greeting him with visible relief, supporting him as the disorientation from the magic spell sent him reeling away from the casting pool. “Thanks,” he said after a moment, shaking his arms free, standing steadily again.
It did not surprise him to realize that, here among the troops of his army, he felt more at home than he did anywhere else in the cosmos. He clasped the hands of man and elf, then turned to inspect the scene of the imminent battle.
As Natac surveyed this scene from his hilltop, he found it hard to find any shred of hope. His memory of Miradel came back: the shape in the darkness, running for her life through the labyrinth of the Deathlord. A voice nagged at him: he should ignore this fight, turn his back on these armies, and go to the woman he loved.
To rescue her, or to die with her. It didn’t matter, not really… nothing mattered. Why shouldn’t they be together now, as they faced the end of all worlds?
But he could not do that, for he knew that, if he was gone, this army was doomed. Never before had he felt the weight of command as such an immense burden. Now it was a trap bearing him down, smothering, suffocating. In one way or another it would kill him, he knew.
It was well past midnight when he got the only dash of good news from this long, dark day. Horas of Gallowglen buzzed up to the hilltop and did an aerial bow before the general. The bounce in his flight suggested something other than disastrous tidings, Natac observed with interest.
“You have some more helpers,” the faerie reported. “Roland Boatwright is here with the warriors and druids from his fleet. There are many of them, half a thousand druids and that many warriors, too. And Crazy Horse has come with them.”
Reinforcements! And not just additional bodies; Natac knew that the each of the little boats had been crewed by a powerful, windcasting druid, accompanied by one of the veteran human warriors brought from Earth. These veterans would be immeasurably useful in the defense of the wall.
“Tell them I will be right there,” said General Natac. He followed the direction of the faerie’s flight as he started down the hill, toward the campfires of his own army. He knew that those blazes were warm and friendly, but they seemed paltry and feeble when contrasted to the vast darkness of the encompassing night.
19
Faces of the Deathlord
Shadows of silence,
Nightmares of death;
Mem’ries of violence,
Shortage of breath;
Shades shout “Hail!”
And pray
To the mistress of fate.
Regillix Avatar was past the sun now, barely conscious as he drifted upward on the blast of the hot, dry wind. His wings smoldered, seared by the intense heat. He closed the protective inner lids over his eyes, reducing his visibility to a cloudy murk, and even that wasn’t enough to insulate him from the massive, fiery orb.
He lapsed into a kind of torpid agony, his body numbed to all sensation, reducing the awful pain to something he could at least tolerate. Water… he thirsted for the life-giving kiss of water, but there was none to be had, not even a cloud in these parched skies. There was just that air, as hot and dry and crushing as if it emerged from a blast furnace. It pushed him from below, rushing past in an explosion of wind, seemed to dry out every drop of moisture in his flesh.
Even in the depths of his groggy pain, however, the mighty dragon realized that it was the very force of this air that gave him a chance of surviving. He still rode his massive wings, extending those vast membranes to either side. No longer did he have the strength to stroke, to pull his way upward through the labor of his muscles. But still he continued to rise, because the air was bearing him upward with such force. The cosmic draft between the worlds was flowing fast, a strong current of air-Socrates had been right-countering the Worldfall, aided by the surge of Nayve’s Lighten, it lifted him, bore him toward home.
Gradually a new awareness penetrated his mind; he knew that time was passing, that the day of Nayve would be approaching its end. At the Hour of Darken the sun would begin to rise, and the corresponding rush of air into the vacuum created by its departure would start to flow downward. If he had not reached his destination by then, he never would.
So once again he worked, driving his wings through the dry air, lifting, pulling, straining now as the image of the Overworld came into his mind. How far above? He couldn’t know. When he looked upward, he saw that the sky was light around the edges, darkening to black in the middle, as if he looked into a hole stretching impossibly far into the distance. But the sun was far below now, and the air was not so lethally burning. That patch of darkness became his objective, and he strove mightily, thought of nothing else… Reach that place, and his burning flesh would be cooled.
Still he labored, and at last he began to move beyond the lethal fire, until finally the crushing heat was but a memory. Soothing coolness surrounded him, masking the rays of the now-distant sun. For a long time this was blessed relief, moisture caressing his burning scales, filling his nostrils with invigorating mist. The burned scales, the seared membranes of his wings were balmed by the moisture.
It was when that mist began to thicken that he began to understand where he was. He had to work to move, to fight through increasing resistance. More and more water surrounded him, dense and choking, until he was swimming, struggling upward through actual liquid. No longer could he breathe, for he was in the depths of the Cloudsea, had reached Arcati only to pass into his home world through the bottom of the ocean.
How ironic, he thought, as darkness closed in from the edges of his vision… how ironic that he would fly through the air, through lethal heat, to go home…
Only to drown in the depths of the Overworld’s largest sea.
Natac told Crazy Horse where he would find the elves of Hyac. Together with about a hundred survivors from the fleet of druid boats-all of them human warriors with cavalry experience-the Sioux chief made his way along the base of the vast earthwork, marveling at the extent of the wall that had been raised in just a couple of days.
The barrier finally terminated at the base of one of the largest of the Ringhills, a craggy bluff that served to anchor the rampart, which abutted the base of the precipice in a very strong position. Walking around that elevation, the warrior found a shallow stream flowing out of the hills and followed it into the valley where he had been told the Hyac were encamped.
Crazy Horse found the elven warriors in their bivouac, which was nestled very much like a Sioux camp in the
