Chapter 584: Here It Comes

The floor gave out without a sound.

One second we were standing on a vast plain of warm, ridged basalt, and the next the plain was tilting. The stone split open along dark seams that ran for miles, and the whole world heeled over like a ship taking a wave broadside. Then it rose, and we slid off its back into the black.

We fell into total darkness.

The air roared past my ears. I couldn’t see the walls or the bottom. I could only hear the wind screaming up the drop, and somewhere under that, something enormous shifting its weight.

’Feather Step. Now!’

I unspooled Chains of Agony from both wrists first, sending two chains whipping through the dark. The first snagged Light by his belt. The second wrapped around Ilse’s waist and cinched tight. Maggie didn’t need one. She was already sinking past us slow and upright, her veil lifting in the draft, as unhurried as a woman walking down a flight of stairs.

Then I stepped.

The dark lurched. A white feather spun away where I’d been, and I was lower and off to the side, both chains snapping taut behind me. I stepped again. And again. Every jump dragged two full-grown bodies through with me, and the load hit my well like a sledgehammer.

Almost a thousand essence was gone in the time it takes to sneeze. On the last step the chasm wall came up out of the black, and I threw all three of us at a narrow stone shelf jutting off it.

We landed badly.

Light hit shoulder-first and rolled to his knees without a sound, clutching his burned black arm against his ribs. Ilse came down hard beside him and hissed through her teeth as her scorched skin met the gravel. A second later Maggie touched down at the lip of the shelf, light as a dropped glove.

I dragged my chains back in, which felt like pulling barbed wire through the eye of a needle, wiped the sweat off my brow, and turned to look at what we had been standing on.

Down in the dark, the plain was moving.

It wasn’t a plain. It was a back, and the thing it belonged to was unfolding its colossal body in the void below us. Charcoal scale plated it from end to end, but the scale wasn’t whole. Raw crimson flesh showed through every gap, wet and glistening, like something skinned alive and left to heal wrong.

It raised its wings. They were pale violet-grey and tattered, the membrane torn so thin you could see the bones through it. They looked far too broken to lift anything that size. Then they beat once, and the wind nearly peeled us off the shelf.

I leaned over the edge and counted the necks rising out of the dark.

’Two heads. Great.’

Then the chest split open.

’...Three. Three heads.’

Two of them sat on long, writhing necks studded with thorns, each head carrying a cluster of red eyes that glowed like coals in the gloom. The third was smaller. It pushed out low from a split in the dark breastplate, its jaws hanging half-open and a thick tongue lolling out over the scale, dripping.

And then there were the teeth. Rows of bone-white fangs didn’t stop at its jaws. They ran down the necks and along both flanks in long, jagged lines, as though the whole body were one mouth split open lengthwise. Spines bristled down its back to a heavy tail that frayed into a mass of ragged, quivering quills.

Light pushed himself up and drew his longsword one-handed. He blurred off the shelf, dropping toward the nearest neck, and the blade flashed silver in the dark.

Steel met scale with a sharp, ringing clang.

Nothing happened.

The sword bounced off the charcoal plating without leaving a scratch. Light caught a thorn on the way down, kicked off it, and landed back on the shelf with his boots skidding through the gravel and his white hair plastered to his forehead.

Ilse raised her hands. A faint red ember flickered around her palms, which was all her burned body had left to give, and she thrust it forward anyway. A column of Drakonir fire slammed into the beast’s flank. The heat rolled across the scale, and when it died down the raw meat underneath hadn’t so much as blackened.

I flicked my wrists and sent four chains at its back.

They hit the spines and slid straight off. There was nothing to grip in that thicket of thorns, and every link came back scraping. So I pushed Emperor’s Dominion out instead, pressing down on the whole mass of it to cut its strength in half.

It didn’t flinch. It didn’t even turn its heads. Half of that much monster was still that much monster.

"Nothing’s touching it." I ground my teeth hard enough to feel it in my jaw. "Nothing."

Beside me, Maggie stepped forward.

She didn’t run. She didn’t shout or reach for a weapon. She walked to the lip of the shelf the way she walked everywhere, her scorched habit whispering over the gravel and her silver chain dragging a thin line through the dust behind her.

She raised her right hand and opened her palm toward the lowest head.

The air above her skin ignited. It didn’t roar the way Ilse’s fire had. It sat there for a fraction of a second, flat and silent, a single point of white heat. Then it was a lance crossing three hundred metres of darkness faster than my eye could follow.

It struck the low neck clean on the charcoal scale.

It didn’t burn. It didn’t scorch or char. Where the white flame landed, the scale unmade itself, going grey and brittle in an instant and sloughing off the body in long, disintegrating sheets.

The beast screamed. It was a sky-splitting sound, and the shelf rattled under our boots.

’Oh. Holy fire.’

I dug into my own well, called up my white flame, and snapped it at the creature’s flank. It hit raw red meat, and the same thing happened. The corrupted flesh unravelled into grey ash and left a wide, weeping crater in its hide.

So that was the first discovery. Holy flame was negation to this thing, and nothing else we had could touch it.

The scream sank into a low, guttural growl that I felt in my ribs more than I heard it.

Then, slowly, all three heads turned at once.

The left head, the right head, and the small low one at its chest all fixed their red eyes on the same point of the shelf. Not on Light. Not on Ilse. Not even on me.

Every one of them was looking at Maggie.

It had learned who to kill first.

Far behind us, up on a higher ledge and out of the beast’s line of sight, Devant sat against the cavern wall with his knees pulled up and his dented tin cup cradled in both hands. He hadn’t drawn his sword. He hadn’t raised his aura. He was just sitting there in the dark, watching us with those pleasant, hollow amber eyes, and he took a tiny sip from his cup without offering a single word of help.

I looked back at the dragon, then at Maggie, small and straight-backed at the edge of the drop.

’Ah, damn...’

All three heads opened wide, showing fangs that ran all the way down their throats, and lunged for the shelf.