Rollar walked up to the wyrm, marveling at its size. He looked like a mouse in comparison to the huge thing. He tapped on the wyrm’s stony armor and chipped a chunk off it with his ax.
“It’s rock, sure enough,” he said, examining the chip. “This is a creature of rock and flesh, somehow.”
“It might be covered with stone, but it also eats boulders for breakfast,” I said, walking up to the wyrm’s mouth.
Just as the caverns here seemed like the interior of a majestic cathedral, the wyrm’s open jaws and gaping mouth was a large enough chamber to fit a house into. The creature’s innards didn’t reek of rotten flesh the way the undead whale did.
One reason, of course, was that we’d only just killed the wyrm and it was nowhere near rotting stage, but another was what it ate. I knew that it feasted on cave trolls from the scent I’d been following since we entered the Black Passage, but I suspected it ate anything it could clamp its jaws over, really. However, the way it digested things seemed unlike any other creature I’d encountered, for coming from its tunnel-like throat was the earthy smell of compost. Unlike being inside the undead whale, stepping inside the wyrm’s open jaws didn’t make you gag immediately.
“Everyone, get in here,” I said. “We’re taking the wyrm express outta these caverns.”
Everyone entered the wyrm’s open jaws. There was plenty of room for Fang, the direbear, and the wolf’s head weapons, along with the barrels of gray powder and red balls too.
Along with the wyrm’s incredible sense of detection when it came to vibrations—which I could feel rippling through its body, coming from the surface of Prand a few hundred yards above us—I found that it possessed an innate map of sorts built into its body and brain. I knew right away which way was north, and which was east, west, and south. I could tell where rivers and lakes were, and towns. They were distant, but I knew they were there.
The first order of business was to get up from underground onto Prandish soil. It would need to be somewhere remote and isolated, where we wouldn’t be spotted by the many pairs of unfriendly eyes scattered across Prand that were passing information to Elandriel.
Now, with the wyrm’s abilities to detect moving creatures on the surface of the ground, and figure out their sizes and how many of them were in any given place, this task was a lot easier.
I set off, driving the wyrm through the complex series of caverns and tunnels, of which there were hundreds. The wyrm had to have been living here for centuries, perhaps even longer. I sensed there were more wyrms around, but none were within dozens of miles. Creatures like these had to have huge individual ranges. I fancied my chances of being able to defeat another wyrm in a fight, but it would take too long to cross the vast distances necessary to hunt another one down.
Time was of the essence right now.
Contenting myself with this one undead wyrm I did have, I picked out a spot to surface. Using the wyrm’s fine-tuned sense of detecting the presence—or, rather the absence—of living things above ground, I found a location that seemed pretty deserted.
“All right everyone, get to the very back of the wyrm’s throat,” I said. “We’re about to munch through some earth and rock. If you don’t stand back, you’re gonna get buried pretty fast.”
We all went as far back down the wyrm’s throat as we could, then I sent it into the virgin earth.
Its jaws started chomping at a manic rate, and its entire body undulated like a writhing serpent. We started to plow through the soil at a tremendous pace, chewing through the earth as if it was melting butter. The wyrm’s jaws were immensely efficient when it came to this task. It devoured earth with the front section while it sort of funneled the chewed-up earth and pulverized rocks out of the rear edges of its mouth instead of swallowing the dirt.
“If miners could tame one of these things, they’d be able to tunnel through the earth a thousand times faster!” Rollar said.
“Perhaps I’ll get into the mining industry once all this Blood God bullshit is over and done with,” I said.
After fifteen minutes of tunneling, we smashed through the surface. Daylight flooded into the jaws and throat of the wyrm.
Everyone gave a great cheer. It was wonderful to see blue sky, grass, and trees all around us after everything we’d been through since leaving Yeng.
We jumped out of the wyrm’s jaws, grateful and happy to be back on Prandish soil again at last. Everyone was smiling and laughing.
Except me. My mind was focused on a singular goal.
“I’m back in Prand, Elandriel,” I whispered to the cold wind, blowing in from the north. “And I’m not stopping or slowing down until your head is on a fucking spike, and the Blood God is nothing but a bad memory.”
Chapter Fifteen
I had a big decision to make and couldn’t waste any time on making it. Even now, Elandriel, the Blood God and their Demogorgon—or multiple Demogorgons, if I ended up being really unlucky—were growing more powerful by the day.
I had an ace in my pocket in the form of all the ingredients, bar one, needed to resurrect and control a dragon. The one thing that could demolish the Demogorgon. That final piece of the dragon puzzle was the Dragon Heart, locked away in the deepest and most secure vaults in Luminescent Spires. In the vault was also the last Tear of the Lord of Light: the one item that could destroy the Blood God forever. It was going to take one hell of a burglary to shift these two items, but I hoped that with my old assassin and
