Last time I’d set foot in that palace, I’d been set on becoming a Consecrated Knight. Elandriel had shot that dream down quite spectacularly, with his so-called prophecy. He told me that the next time I would set foot in Luminescent Spires, I would be nothing but a street beggar.
“I guess you were wrong on that one, you wrinkled old goblin scrotum,” I growled under my breath. “Because I’m about to strut into your corrupt shithole of a city as a god.”
“Who are you talking to?” Yumo-Rezu asked, yawning and stretching as she woke up.
“Nobody, never mind,” I said gruffly. Just thinking about Elandriel put me in a bad mood, and I didn’t want to have to talk about him.
“No man has ever done what you did to me—us—last night,” Yumo-Rezu said, flashing me a wicked grin, with naked lust smoldering in her dark eyes. “I can barely walk after that … not that I’m complaining.”
That, at least, lifted my mood.
I smiled at her. “I’d be happy to be of service again, but we did lose a lot of valuable time last night by, well, literally fucking around. We have a lot of distance to make up tonight, and a lot of ground to cover. Fang’s going to have to run at full speed from now until dawn, so I hope you and Friya have strong stomachs, because it’s going to feel like a twelve-hour hurricane at sea.”
“I’m about to prepare some herbs that will help with that.” Friya emerged from the shadows with a bunch of weeds she had just picked from the forest. “Fang can run as fast as he wants, and Yumo-Rezu and I won’t feel even a smidgen of seasickness. You, on the other hand, are used to this giant lizard’s lurching movements, aren’t you?”
“I could sleep like a baby on his back at full speed … if I needed to sleep, that is,” I said. “As for you two, Friya, you’d better get your herbs ready. We need to get moving.”
As soon as Friya and Yumo-Rezu had taken the herbal concoction, we set off. I sent Fang barreling through the woods at full speed. His undead energy, which was boundless, drove us toward Luminescent Spires at a relentless pace.
As the miles passed, the forests began to thin out into plains, and the mountains flattened out into hills. We found a cave in the hills where we hid and rested during the daylight hours, then when darkness fell again, Friya and Yumo-Rezu took their herbs, and once more I had Fang sprinting through the night. We kept clear of any signs of human settlement, and, thankfully, nature was on our side too, for it was a moonless night and the plains were thick with darkness.
The next morning, as the sky grayed with the approach of dawn, we saw it on the horizon: the enormous city on the hill, Luminescent Spires. The plains had given way to farmland now, so we had to be careful about where we took shelter.
We hid out during the day in a ruined farmhouse, on an abandoned farm overgrown with weeds. I kept watch during the day with the Tree God’s crossbow on my wrist cocked and ready to fire. Anyone who approached would be sprouting roots from their feet and boughs from their skull before they could open their mouths to raise any sort of alarm. Aside from a patrol of Church troops a good mile away, though, I saw no signs of any human activity in the area.
When night fell, we mounted Fang for the last time. I wished I could take him with me into the city, but a gigantic man-eating lizard wasn’t exactly conducive to stealth and anonymity. We made our way across the farmland, and I noticed that almost two-thirds of the farms we came across had been abandoned. They’d been abandoned quite recently too, from the look of it; all signs pointed to ominous happenings in Luminescent Spires. Elandriel and the Blood God needed fuel in the form of human blood, and I suspected that the farms hadn’t been abandoned as such. Their former residents had probably met a grisly fate in the bowels of the city, sacrificed to the Blood God in the Blood Pyramid below Luminescent Spires.
In the early hours of the morning, when we were within sight of the huge city walls that ringed Luminescent Spires, we dismounted from Fang. From this point on, I would have to leave Fang behind, and my faithful mount could only join me again when the time for battle was near. The ocean was a mile away, and this would be the perfect place for my undead lizard to hide out while we completed our mission of stealth and thieving inside the city. Then, when the time was right, he could emerge from the waves with the rest of my undead army … if they were able to make it here before it was too late.
“I’m gonna miss you, boy.” I gave Fang a good scratch on the scales behind his ear holes.
“It’s no dragon,” Yumo-Rezu scoffed. “It’s not even alive. It’s just a rotting corpse kept moving by your magic.”
It was true; Fang wasn’t alive, not technically, but I had realized something about him and my other undead creatures. “No, he’s not technically alive,” I said, “but neither is he a mere lump of decaying matter. The force that pumps that green blood through his veins is the same force that keeps the blood pumping through mine. He—and all
