A cry went out from the netherlings, only barely heard, even echoed amongst the warriors. Their line began to move as they shifted to change their face toward the edge of the ring and the creature emerging from it.
The sheets of kelp parted, trembling as it came forth, a tall and skeletal shadow. On long, thin limbs wrapped in glistening ebon flesh, it strode onto the sand. Through great white eyes, empty as the void between its gaping, fishlike jaws, it surveyed the carnage. Thunder muttered overhead. A drop of crimson rain fell from the sky to splash and leave a weeping red streak across the white of its eye.
Its ribcage buckled. Its webbed claws tightened into fists. The Abysmyth threw its head back and howled to heaven and hell.
And the world exploded behind it.
They came streaming over the horizon in sheets and tides. The Omens flocked in great, sweeping streams, their withered faces alight with an echoing chorus. The frogmen surged out from the forest in a sea of pale flesh and glistening spears, flooding onto the battlefield and rushing toward the center of the ring. The Abysmyths strode amidst the hairless flood, leisurely strolling toward the impending slaughter.
The netherlings were not so patient.
“QAI ZHOTH!” they roared in their iron voices, challenging the storm and its demonic chorus.
“ULBECETONTH!” the tide shrieked back.
“AKH ZEKH LAKH!”
“THE KRAKEN QUEEN!”
“ZAN QAI—”
“ULBEC—”
All of it lost in a crash of metal and flesh as they collided in the middle of the ring in a great spattering, screaming agony.
Gariath’s breath was lost somewhere in it all. He had seen carnage. He had caused carnage. But this was . . .
“The end, Rhega.”
Shalake had a rather good way of putting it. The Shen held his hands out helplessly, the club hanging limp and impotent from his claws.
“This is everything we fought for. The chance to watch it all end and go with our ancestors.”
“I’m not ready,” Gariath snarled.
The Shen’s good eye flickered, dispelling a fog that settled over his pupil. “No, not ready. We can’t go . . . we . . . we need to help the others.”
“They’re down there somewhere,” Gariath muttered. “Dreadaeleon is . . . somewhere. I have to find him.”
“Him? No, no. Them. The Shen. There are survivors, lead them to . . . to . . .” He stared at Gariath. The shard lodged in his eye wept a thick substance. “We can’t go looking for—”
“There is no ‘we,’” Gariath snarled suddenly. “I am not Shen. I am not ready to die. I am Rhega. I am the only Rhega. I will do what I have always done.” He reached out and tore the club from Shalake’s grasp. “And I need this.”
It wasn’t until he launched himself off the statue and into the ring that he bothered to wonder what he needed the club for exactly. It wasn’t just a fight that was raging, it was a massacre undiscerning.
The frogmen continued to stream out, the netherlings did not give a single footstep before drowning it in the frogmen’s blood. The Abysmyths swung their great limbs, seizing warriors, strangling them as the Carnassials and their great blades rushed forward, heedless of their breathless comrades as they brought their metal to bear.
Against that, he wondered what good a hunk of wood full of sharp teeth was going to do.
“QAI ZHOTH!”
She came leaping over a drift of corpses, pulling free from the great spreading stain of flesh and blood of the melee. Her sword was above her head, her shield was hanging off her arm. Blood covered her purple flesh as she charged toward him. The netherling’s mouth opened in a roar, jagged teeth bared.
Without realizing it, he swung.
A satisfactory crunch. Enough that he could barely feel the agony of his wound. The netherling’s teeth lay on the ground. The club lodged somewhere between her jaw and her left temple. Her eyes stared with a thick chunk of wood between them.
Ah, right, he thought, watching a bit of gray porridge slide down the wood. That is good.
His earfrills twitched with the sound. Not screaming. They were screaming, of course, but all that was drowned out in the sound of embers crackling and smoke belching. The frogmen fled as bipedal pyres, scattering like cinders on the wind before the gouts of flame pouring from the netherling’s hands. Not the netherling everyone was worried about; this one was smaller, weaker.
As weak as anything spewing fire from its palms could be, anyway.
But neither the netherling nor the creatures scattering before him were Gariath’s concern. Just one of them.
Dreadaeleon stumbled, scrambling on whatever limbs happened to be on the ground at the time in an effort to get away from the male and the great, laughing beast he spurred after the boy. The male seemed in no hurry. He possessed a burning serenity, leisurely sweeping great reins of fire through the crowds to sear blackened roads across the sand to leisurely follow after his quarry.
Gariath drew in a deep breath. The air was full of blood and dust and smoke. And for the first time in a long time, it tasted sweet. The scent was full of life, fading fast. It was a scent he wanted to cling to.
He didn’t want to die.
Which made it hard to justify what he was doing.
Running. Charging. Roaring. Swinging. A hairless head split apart, black eyes drowned in a spray of red. It fell, was replaced by another, purple one. Iron lashed out, his arm bled, a jaw splintered apart. More came, one after the other, blends of purple and white and red. It was hard to tell them apart. Color didn’t matter. Sight didn’t matter. The scent of life was growing stronger as it painted his face and stained his hands. The club hung to him. It belonged in his hands.
The longface with her head split apart didn’t really belong there, but he found her body in his hands all the same. He drove the body forward with a roar, a limp, leaking ram that smashed through the knots of combatants across the field, taking spears and swords and arrows meant for him as he bowled over frogmen and longfaces alike.
It was a disjointed and ligamented mess that he tossed aside when he emerged. The scent of life brimmed, in plumes of smoke from the scorched sand and in the hot breath of the sikkhun beast. The beast’s ears were fanned out, its rubbery lips peeled back in an eager smile as it advanced upon Dreadaeleon, stumbled and scrambling backward as the male rider looked on with contemptuous eagerness for the impending evisceration.
Gariath was slightly more enthusiastic.
The beast’s ears quivered at his roar, turning its sightless gaze upon him. It matched his howl with an eerie cackle as it turned about to face this new, more interesting quarry. Gariath matched it, tooth for tooth, noise for noise, as he closed the distance and raised his club above his head.
Roughly about the time he felt an invisible force tighten around his throat did he remember the male.
He felt his feet leave the sand as he was lifted helplessly into the air, snarling and clawing wildly at an unseen grip. That became slightly harder when he felt the sand meet his face as the male brought an arm down swiftly, slamming him into the earth and pinning him breathlessly beneath the magic. He swept his burning scowl between the dragonman and the boy.
“And you,” the male said, “were you there, too? Which one of you was the scum that killed her?”
Gariath grunted, looked to Dreadaeleon and mouthed “who?” The boy offered a hapless shrug before the air about his throat rippled. They were lifted as one, a hand outstretched to either of them as the male’s eyes burned like fire. The sikkhun beneath him giggled, pawing at the ground in anticipation of fresh meat.
“I wanted to spare ourselves this.”
The words came slowly, the concentration needed to hold onto the spell an endeavor even as the red stone burned brightly at the male’s throat. Gariath could feel something groaning, threatening to break as the trembling air closed around him like a vise.
“And look where that got us,” he hissed. “Sheraptus was right. Sheraptus always has to be right. That’s fine. That’s entirely fine. We can end this—”
A sound filled the air.
Something long, something loud, something from a very deep hole filling up with stale water from a storm that had gone on for centuries. It rendered the din of iron and death in the ring a pitiful background noise, something easily ignored. It had to be such a sound that made the male’s concentration snap and sent the boy and dragonman tumbling to the earth. It had to be such a sound that made eyes look up to the thundering skies above in awe and fear and joy and panic.
In thick, sticky drops, red tears fell from the sky. A shadow of a mountain with a white peak appeared at the edge of the ring. A roar rose from it, the sound of existence groaning under a great weight.
“Tremble, heathens.”
A man from atop the mountain spoke. A tiny, pale figure made significant, a voice made loud by virtue of from where it spoke.
“The long march of the inevitable has led us here.”
“Daga-Mer . . . Daga-Mer . . .” a chant began to rise from the crowd of onlookers.
“The sky bleeds for him. The storms are his crown!”
“Daga-Mer! Daga-Mer!”
“The faithless are crushed beneath him! The blasphemers tremble before him!”
“DAGA-MER! DAGA-MER! DAGA-MER!”
“FATHER!” an Abysmyth howled from below, echoed by many more. The mountain stirred at the word, rose as a living thing.