Victor of Tucson-12.40 Clinging to Hope
40 – Clinging to Hope
Victor looked around, panic quickening his pulse. The sky was gone; a seemingly endless void existed beyond the thin bubble of air around the massive island. He banked his wings, looking back toward the mountainous pyramid. It was still there, still smoking, with geysers of lava bubbling up from the depths and splashing down its great stony slopes. He flew in a slow circle, watching with his veil walker’s senses as the flows of Energy fell apart or, in some cases, reconnected, thinner than before.
“Do you like my work, little cousin?” Xelhuan’s voice, bodiless, echoed through the surrounding air. “My mother will be happy, at least. I’ve left her precious universe. I’ve ascended, have I not? Here we are, you and me, in a world of my own creation.”
Victor coasted through the still, windless air, flying slowly back toward the pyramid. He forced his racing thoughts to calm. His earlier panic had been for his friends—his armies—but what was done was done. Surely the instantaneous removal of a massive landmass would be cataclysmic to Dark Ember, but his people weren’t without means. They’d have a chance to make an escape or fortify their position.
For a moment, he contemplated landing, taking out his teleportation array, and attempting to return to Dark Ember. The only problem was that he knew it wouldn’t work. The array was valuable and quite powerful in its own way, but it had a limited range, even within a single universe. He doubted it could bridge the gap between Xelhuan’s nascent realm and the one where Dark Ember and the rest of the worlds Victor was familiar with existed. He couldn’t do anything about that, so he focused on what he could confront—Xelhuan.
He looked to his Core and a flutter of concern washed over him. His accelerated veil-walker regeneration seemed to have stalled. Glancing around, he supposed it wasn’t a surprise; when Xelhuan ripped his island out of its home universe, dragging it into one of his own design, he’d severed the flows of most types of Energy. Thin trickles of elemental Energies flowed near the ground, but the broad rivers that ran from world to world, that had propagated through space for millions and billions of years, were simply gone. It was a sobering discovery—enough so that he stopped his flight and descended toward the grassy plain below.
“Do you feel it, cousin?” Xelhuan whispered through the wind. “I’m a god here!”
As if gravity had been dialed up, multiplied by a hundred, Victor felt something pull him toward the ground. His wings had no effect, and in the blink of an eye, a thousand feet of altitude was gone, and he slammed into the hard-packed soil. A fall like that would be devastating if he weren’t a titan. As it was, his enormous form hit the ground with the concussive boom of a collapsing building. Dust flew up in a mushroom cloud, and he blasted a crater into the dry, grass-covered plain.
Victor clambered to his feet, frustration tinting his vision red as it matured into rage. He twisted Lifedrinker’s haft in his fists as he clenched his jaw, trying to imagine how he was supposed to fight the bastard in a world he’d created. The only thing he could come up with was that he’d have to be a hell of a lot tougher—a hell of a lot more stubborn. Xelhuan might have a tremendous store of Energy in that place that he’d been constructing for who knew how long, but there must be a limit. Victor just had to find it.
He stepped out of his crater and began stalking toward the pyramid. If he didn’t have the Energy for great workings of magic, then he’d just have to do things the old-fashioned way—with his fists and his axe. He’d taken about ten strides when Xelhuan whispered out of the wind again. “I have more of our kin here, little cousin. Did my mother tell you that when she sent you to kill me? They’re eager to meet you.”
As the susurration of Xelhuan’s raspy voice echoed away on the wind, the ground began to shake, and, as Victor watched, enormous, titan-sized skeletal figures broke free of the earth. He stopped in his tracks and watched as the field, stretching all the way to the horizon where the pyramid rose into the sky, erupted with gigantic undead warriors. Some were clad in armor—feather-adorned headdresses, leather, and bronze—some bore rectangular shields with spiked edges, and almost all of them held at least one macahuitl. Some of those ancient weapons looked weak and rotten, but some were like Xelhuan’s—crafted from dense, magical materials.
The undead Quinametzin clawed their way out of the earth and stalked toward him, fanning out in a semicircle to approach him from the flanks. Victor’s mind was quick, and he was accustomed to estimating enemy counts; he figured there were at least ten thousand titans coming at him with murder in their glowing eyes.
###
Tes screamed her fury as the undead dragon dug his hind claws into her left wing’s membrane and raked down, drawing four bloody tears through it. She gave as good as she got, though. In fact, she’d already ripped one of the vile creature’s wings clean off. As they rolled through the surf, and lightning surged around her, she sank her massive fangs into his shoulder and crunched down with all her might.
Nesut-Karemet was a powerful being; he’d proven as much when he survived her initial alpha strike. He’d poured his cultivation and his undead progression into his physical form—his presence, his durability, his innate power. While most Death Casters honed their death-attuned Energy into deadly spells, reanimation, and corruption, the dragon lich had turned those dark arts inward.
Tes choked on his vile blood. She ripped her teeth side to side to do as much damage as possible as she released her hold and coughed out a searing bolt of plasma to cleanse the filth from her mouth. Meanwhile, Karemet latched his powerful jaws onto her left forearm, biting down until his scythe-like fangs crunched into the bone. Then, the undead king propelled himself down, dragging Tes with him. For the first time, Tes began to taste fear behind her outrage and innate dragon’s zeal for battle.
The lich hissed its pleasure as she struggled to pull her arm free, and a cloud of green-black miasma poured out of the creature, tainting the stormy waters with a cloying entropy that stole the strength from Tes’s muscles. Together, they sank. Tes clawed and bit, seizing the chance to tear a hunk of hard, black-blooded flesh from Karemet’s neck when he refused to release her arm.
He bucked and thrashed, worrying at her limb, trying to tear it off, but dragons were made of sturdy stuff, and Tes was larger than he. She used her living buoyancy to position herself atop him and whipped her tail back and forth, trying to work herself free. Finally, growing desperate with the water’s great pressure, she focused on the wound in the creature’s neck and emptied her Breath Core in the largest bolt of plasma she could muster.
The swirling, salty ocean water came alive with the electricity. Blue light flared through the dark waves, and the powerful beam struck the fiend’s neck precisely where she’d aimed. It was a terrible attack—nearly as much power as her initial blast. This time, the lich’s flesh was exposed, though; she’d ripped away his scales so they couldn’t diffuse the breath attack. The powerful bolt penetrated his thick, undead flesh, blasting it apart, cooking it, utterly annihilating its integrity.
As her lightning attack propagated through the undead dragon’s neck, jaw, and ultimately his skull, his undead muscles clamped down with bone-shattering force. Even as his jaw shattered, he bit through Tes’s foreleg. She screamed again, and as the undead king sank, black blood pouring from his eyes, Tes used her mighty rear legs and tail to propel herself up, out of the depths.
Like most elder species with advanced bloodlines, she didn’t need to breathe…much. Still, she hadn’t been ready when Karemet pulled her down. She had one wing, hanging limply from her back, dragging against the water, and her stump of a foreleg poured her life’s blood into the water as she kicked and undulated, surging through the dark water, silently praying that she was moving in the right direction.
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It was the uncertainty that brought panicked thoughts racing through her mind. What if she were wrong? What if it had been a current pulling Karemet “down” and she’d been mistaken to swim in the opposite direction? How had they gotten so deep? Tes focused her will, driving the panic and the illogical thoughts out of her mind. She knew she was moving in the right direction. She was a dragon. Could she not feel the sky? The storm? Could she not see those flows of Energy?
When she broke the surface, she smiled a toothy grin and inhaled massively, filling her great lungs with the cool, lightning-rich air. After a moment to savor her victory—over the undead dragon and her fear—she twisted her long neck left and right, looking for the shore. She was dismayed to see she’d been pulled out into the storm. The citadel was distant, only visible because of the display of magical attacks and defenses.
There was something else—something felt wrong, and it took her only an instant to realize what it was. She couldn’t feel Victor. Heart racing, she scanned the sky for a current of lightning-attuned Energy and then she let her dragon’s senses travel along it, streaking through the storm toward Xelhuan’s island. Only… it wasn’t there. Millions of broken Energy streams told the tale; somehow Xelhuan had removed his stronghold from the world.
Clenching her jaw against the pain of her injuries—clinging to the sliver of hope in her heart—she whipped her tail, swimming as only great reptiles could. She pushed through the choppy surf toward her allies…and a safe place to heal. If she were going to help Victor, she’d need to be strong.
###
Victor charged the closest ranks of skeletal Quinametzin, carving a wide arc with Lifedrinker’s gleaming blade. When he’d seen the army of undead titans emerge from the soil, he’d known exactly what Xelhuan was trying to do. Victor had limited resources in that universe; there were flows of Energy there, and he was slowly regaining his Core’s power, but if he tried to fight all out, with all the abilities at his disposal, he’d run himself dry in no time. Xelhuan was trying to push him into that corner. What he didn’t know was that Victor—and Lifedrinker—loved to fight.
“If he wants us to beat the shit out of some ancient skeletons, then we’ll do it! Right, chica?” he screamed as Lifedrinker sheared through two hastily swung macahuitl, then shattered an enormous skull.
For our ancestors!
Lifedrinker’s cry rang across the battlefield, given voice by the terrible force of Victor’s mighty blows. He laughed and roared, his blood-tinted vision showing him a playground of mayhem and violence as he wove between giant skeletons and their clumsy blows. The undead titans weren’t uniform; some were more skilled than others, some had better equipment, and some even used magic, empowering their blows, blasting Victor with elemental attacks, or even summoning environmental hazards—pools of acid, writhing tentacles, spectral vines, and a hundred other such things.
Victor took joy in their efforts. Every spell they cast was death Energy that Xelhuan couldn’t use. Every time he shattered their bones, and they recovered, he knew Xelhuan was draining himself further. He fought tirelessly; his body was beyond superhuman. Victor was a primal titan, and his very cells were swollen with potential-attuned Energy—the stuff the universe was made of.
Moreover, as he wove between the skeletons—hacking, parrying, smashing, kicking, throwing—his veil walker’s senses began to adjust to that new universe, and the lines of Energy that had seemed almost too dim to acknowledge became his new norm. As his senses and his mind adjusted, he realized something: when he’d triggered the volcanic activity on Xelhuan’s pyramid, he’d drawn a tremendous pool of magma-attuned Energy toward the surface. He could see the fiery streams of it circulating there, and the seed of an idea took root in his mind.
###
“Lady Moonglow,” the Elementalist, Sarno Sarak, said, visibly struggling to keep from yelling, “I cannot begin to express the dire nature of this event. Those receding waters—they will turn back.”
“And?”
He leaned forward, grabbing her shoulders. He was a huge man, a Ruhnian steel seeker of some renown, and when he leaned forward, his eyes ablaze with stormy blue Energy, it was hard not to shrink back at the vehemence in his tone. “When they come back, it will be a wave a thousand feet high carrying enough water to wash our armies away. The impact will be world-changing!” He waved an arm over the battlements, indicating the hundreds of thousands of soldiers fighting the undead out there. “Most of these soldiers will die.”
Arona nodded. She’d felt that something terrible was coming. Of course, when Citlalmina said she couldn’t feel Xelhuan any longer, she’d searched her heart for what she’d already acknowledged on some level: Victor was gone, too. She’d thought her dread was due to that, but if a true cataclysm was coming… Sarno shook her again, and she scowled, “Take your hands off me, sir.” When he complied, scowling all the while, she said, “How long do we have?”
“Assuming the root of this is something that happened on that damned death-filled island, then three or four hours. If it’s something closer…” He shrugged, letting the words hang.
“Then we must begin evacuations.”
“Leave the citadel? Lord Victor is depending on—”
“Lord Victor wouldn’t want us to die. If we can draw our troops inside and down to the gateway, then what will happen to these undead when the wave hits?”
Sarno’s eyes unfocused as he pictured the scene. Slowly, he began to nod. “Aye, we can let nature finish the job.”
Arona smiled and then turned toward the captains, who stood huddled nearby, awaiting clarity on the situation. They were her voices on the battlefield, each of them skilled in various forms of quick travel—flight and short-range teleportation for the most part. “Join me at the map table. We must create a plan of action.”
She led the way, struggling to hold back tears. She wasn’t sure why the tears were coming just then. She’d realized Victor was gone for several minutes already. Knowing she was about to order the evacuation of his citadel—the abandonment of their foothold—felt like a hand around her throat though, squeezing and tugging the hope from her heart. She shook her head. This was no time to give in to despair; Victor knew what he was doing. He was strong, and, just as she’d told Sarno, if the wave was that powerful, let the undead be the ones to greet it.
###
Victor worked his way through the horde of skeletons, but it was slow, hard going. He’d faced worse odds, but he’d never faced thousands of titans before. All he could do, other than fight with everything he had, was be thankful that the pinche cabrones weren’t still alive. As skeletons, they lacked the verve of a true titan. They weren’t as strong, they weren’t as quick, and their skills were only echoes of the true talents that they’d had in life.
That being said, the skeletons were strong and sturdy, and they came at him in a coordinated effort that made his armor earn its place on his body. His aegis ate a thousand powerful attacks. His crown, nigh indestructible, took a blow from a macahuitl that pulsed with black and red Energy, and nearly split in two. The thing’s jagged black teeth bit halfway through the crown’s front rim.
Victor kicked the titan wielding that potent weapon in the chest, sending it sprawling back, but she—the long ragged hair, green-scaled skirts, and bracelet-covered arms convinced Victor the skeleton had been a woman—quickly regained her feet and came at him again. Victor was moving, though, and the titans dotted the plain in groups ranging from five to five hundred, and she was pushed aside as dozens of fresh combatants bore down on him.
He fought through them; the Paragon of the Axe had joined his battle, summoned by the perfect form that he and Lifedrinker exhibited, and that ghostly edge cut through lesser weapons and bone—even the dense Quinametzin ones—with aplomb. He pushed through them, his armor absorbing impacts, Lifedrinker carving a path.
The entire time he fought, Victor worked his way steadily toward the pyramid. Occasionally, he leapt, launching himself away from the crowds of giant skeletons, but many of them seemed to have a similar talent. So, despite his best efforts, he never got much of a break. He didn’t want to use abilities that consumed Energy, so he’d even let his berserk state fade away. He fought that army of undead titans with nothing but skill, determination… and his absurdly powerful axe.
Each time he leapt, he spun in the air, taking a good look at the undead army, trying to assess his progress. He thought perhaps three-quarters of the skeletons remained. Of the ones he’d killed, Xelhuan healed and reanimated perhaps half. Only when Victor truly blasted their skulls and spines into fragments did it seem too much for the Death Caster to recover. Even so, Victor didn’t mind; he knew from long chats with Arona, and from experience with lesser Death Casters, that it was a costly endeavor—animating an entire army. He could only imagine how difficult it was to empower ten thousand dead Quinametzin.
At first, he just hoped he was wearing down Xelhuan’s resources, but as the battle wore on, he began to feel it. The ambient death-attuned Energy was dwindling. Whatever Xelhuan had done over the centuries to build that enormous battery, it wasn’t limitless. So, Victor soldiered on, trusting in his primal, titanic constitution to carry him through while his Core ever so slowly regenerated.
