Below, ramps across the ships’ sterns extended. More creatures, ones that looked half-wolf and half-man, ran out on four legs down the planks and onto the shore, barking and growling. Bulbous thighs and wide chests stretched through the fibers of their torn tunics. The little human that was left in them was surely submissive. Even expecting the worst, Burton couldn’t believe what Demitri had created. The anatomy of beasts and men that Demitri had spliced together shouldn’t have been biologically possible to function. But the hybrids were animated and conscious.
Burton felt a profound pity for the human victims, taken from their families, never to return; if they did, they would never be the same. He was aware that Demitri had rounded up bastard children, searching relentlessly for the Volpi gene within their blood, while he was part of the Ikarus council. Were these monsters mere children that have been turned into beasts? he wondered.
The mages and what was left of the dead elders exited the ships and merged with the army of monsters. Without swords or shields they packed their weapons, small pouches of deadly powders and sharpened bones, in deep pockets. Without carrying heavy steel to weigh them down, the mages had an advantage. At the frontline, they sat upon konganroo and waited for their master’s introduction.
Loud cracking noises bellowed from the largest ship. It sounded like something from inside was trying to break out. The entire main deck started to bend up and down before the wood completely shattered. Long, hairy legs poked out of the hole where a colossal beast emerged from the shadows, snapping its two claws. It had the body and legs of a spider with the claws and tail of a scorpion. Its hide was as thick as an alligator’s. And it was as big as a house. It was a monster in every sense of the word. Its stinger, raised high above its body, dripped a foamy liquid. And Demitri Von Cobb sat atop the rim of its head, strapped with a leather saddle, riding it. Draped across his lap was a lengthy sack that he began to untie. When he unfolded the fabric, there was a mermaid shining with reflective skin. Demitri lifted her up by the neck to display, then threw the maiden’s lifeless body to the ground. It was Glassinger Lott. Burton knew it. But he couldn’t tell if she was alive or not. The scales of her tail were already dried.
Demitri’s army of creatures roared. The dead elders unlocked the lower cabin of the ship and rolled out catapults. They loaded the buckets with large, leafy sacks covered in mud.
“Ghords!” yelled Simon. “They’re launching ghords.”
Montague drew his sword. Burton stepped in front of him and readied his wand. He knew it would be the last time he would hold Vandagelle.
Rayne proceeded ahead, alone in the open field. From his lead, he signaled Burton and the rest to stop where they were. His feathered wings extended. Rayne raised his hands that were wrapped tightly with black gauze from his wrists up to his knuckles. Bolts of plasma erupted from his palms and into the sky. Then, he clinched his fists and thrust his hands forward, sending a transparent wave of energy into the incoming werewolves and mages. The shockwave hurled the monsters backwards, disabling a great number of the enemy’s frontline. Rayne’s gray skin reminded Burton of the power that flowed through his veins, a power second to none.
A cloud of dust smothered the battlefield.
Before the air could clear, the clicking of catapults launching in the distance rang loud. The payloads flew through the smoky sky. When the sticky sacks hit the ground, they bounced and rolled, rather than crumbling like stones or exploding like barrels of oil. The leaves of the sacks unfurled into the man-eating plants known as ghords.
The ghords had landed far beyond where Rayne stood, but the men of the Resistance raced forward and hacked at the snapping plants.
Burton could hear Demitri shouting to his army. “Now, while they are distracted!”
The swarming gargoyles gathered and flew at the Resistance.
Rayne’s body lit up like a firefly. He dashed into the night sky after the flying creatures, firing bursts of liquid light that exploded on impact. His targets were burned through. Dozens of exoskeletal bodies began to fall, snapping and cracking against the hard earth. But swarms still managed to dodge Rayne’s blasts. When they flew into him, they crashed like they hit an energetic wall; their bodies twisted as if instantly paralyzed before they too fell.
Demitri whistled, signaling the remaining passengers to exit the ship. Out of the hole that his hybrid monster had made in the largest vessel came thousands of spiders the size of Labradors. The spiders amassed and scurried onto shore, through the sea of mages, and toward Illyrium like a wave of death. There was no way the Resistance could stop them all, Burton thought. It would be a massacre—men would be eaten alive.
Then, a deep roar howled from the west of Illyrium, behind the Resistance. Burton feared that the enemy had surrounded them. But when he looked back, an army of trolls emerged from the ruins of Illyrium and came storming past him and the soldiers of the Resistance by the hundreds, straight into the open battlefield. The trolls wore shiny, razor-sharp armor that sliced the spider’s legs and through their bodies when they rolled into them. Some climbed into the ghords’ mouths, down the plants’ stems and exploded out from the sack of their slug-like bodies after intentionally being swallowed.
“Now!” Burton yelled. It felt right to follow the momentum and might of the trolls.
The men of the Resistance, both Ikarus and Graleon alike, charged the army of
