It was a stallion of the deepest ebony, an impossible and grand creature more massive than any the sorcerer had ever seen. As it slowed to a halt, the clap-clap noise, the sound of its hooves striking the hard surface of the floor, died. The steed stood taller than either the human or the avian. The animal shook its head, sending the wild mane fluttering. It looked at the two tiny figures before it as if they were specks of dust needing to be swept away and began pawing at the rock-hard floor.
Dru tried to step back, but the leader’s stiff form prevented him from doing so. Before the eyes of the party, the stallion continued to paw at the floor with its hoof… and was quickly succeeding in gouging a crevice in it!
The steed lifted its head high and, instead of a loud neigh, laughed at their dismay.
X
Lochivan ceased screaming the moment he felt the hands upon him, knowing that he had already shamed himself before his clan. The raging wind and the stormy heavens could not take his mind from that fact.
“Have no fear concerning your reaction to the cross-over,” he heard Esad, his brother, whisper. “Most of us screamed and the rest have all felt the pain. No one will speak of it when Father arrives.”
The newly arrived Vraad gazed down at his naked form, at last feeling the effects of the storm. “My clothing-” He looked up at Esad, who was clad in armor identical to that which they had been forced to abandon back in Nimth… along with their old bodies. The armor and the rest had been conjured, no doubt, but then why could Lochivan not emulate his brother’s work? Why did the magic resist him?
“The first arrivals clothed me,” the other Tezerenee said, reading Lochivan’s mind. “It takes great effort and often more than one person to push the spell to completion.” Even with the helm covering much of his features, it was obvious that Esad was under tremendous strain.
As Lochivan stood and shook his head, causing several locks of brown and gray hair to obscure his vision, he found himself clad once more in the comfortable feel of cloth and dragon scale. The Tezerenee nodded his gratitude to those of his kin who had aided him. “Have we all made it across so far?”
“Yes.”
Something in Esad’s tone encouraged his brother to survey the others assembled. There were ten, so far, including himself, and he could see that each and every one was there. Still, something was amiss. There was no mistaking the worry in Esad’s voice, and Lochivan knew it was not for him. “Tell me what is wrong, brother?”
“A number of the golems are missing.”
“Missing?” The Vraad whirled about until he caught sight of the still forms. Seeing them even now made his stomach turn, though he would not admit that to the others. That the body he wore had once been as these…
It took him a moment to estimate their numbers and then he saw that what Esad said was true; there were perhaps a hundred of the flesh-and-blood golems remaining where Esad had reported two hundred or more. “The dragons!” Lochivan snarled, recalling the beasts that the golems had been formed from. “Ephraim will pay dearly for his betrayal! With he and his band of traitors gone, the dragons returned and devoured the-”
“No.” It was not Esad who spoke, but one of their sisters, a tall, slender woman who favored their mother in form. Tamara was her name, if Lochivan recalled correctly. She had been born some eight or nine centuries prior to both of them. It was sometimes so difficult to keep track of those within the clan, much less the outsiders as well. “No,” she repeated. “It was not dragons. There are no traces, no blood. The bodies vanished in too orderly a manner, as if those who had taken them had stood in line, one following after another.”
“Logan will be crossing in one quarter hour,” Esad reminded the two of them. “We should be preparing to guide him on this side of the veil. If we don’t, there is always the chance his ka may become lost.” The chances of such were slim as long as those back in Nimth still controlled matters; both Lochivan and Tamara knew that Esad was trying to steer them both away from a subject he found unnerving. Father would not be pleased and he would want someone physical to blame. For the moment, Ephraim was beyond his capacity to punish, but they were not.
Lochivan shook his head again. “Father must know before long. The greater our delay in informing him of this latest debacle, the worse it will be.”
“We will still have to wait for Logan,” Tamara reminded them. “We need at least eleven to reach through the veil and establish a true link of communications with the others. Any word we send now would likely be garbled, and I, for one, want everything perfectly clear when we report this to Father.”
The storm, a side effect of the transfer, was rapidly dwindling to nil. Gazing up at the wondrous blue color replacing the dark gray clouds, the latest immigrant quietly cursed the misleading innocence that lay all about him. At any other time, the clear sky would have entranced Lochivan, who had never seen such a thing. Now, though, he thought of the problems the plan had suffered of late and how the Dragonrealm was not going to fall to Barakas’s might so easily.
“Very well.” Unconsciously, he stood in a pose that mimicked the patriarch almost exactly. If his relations paid no notice to it, it was only because they themselves were often guilty of the same mannerisms.
“We have a little over a quarter hour to decide exactly how we’ll tell Father… and how we’ll avoid his anger!”
Dru started to speak, but his mouth refused to answer his desperate summons. The laughter died away, though its echo would continue on for several seconds. Trotting closer, the huge ebony steed eyed the avian party with blue orbs that chilled any who stared in them. It chuckled, a low, spine-scraping sound that mocked those who would stand against it.
One of the Seekers held up a medallion and focused on the demon horse. Dru recognized the terrible mist. It started to form around its intended victim in the exact manner it had around the hapless earth dweller earlier. In the space of a breath, it was nearly impossible to see the stallion. The Vraad could feel the sense of triumph that flashed between his captors.
The ebony steed trotted forward, ignoring the mist as the sorcerer might ignore the very air he breathed.
“If that is the best you can do,” the animal boomed, and its voice stunned Dru, for he recognized it instantly, “you should not have struck at all!”
Laughing, the entity calling itself Darkness winked at the captive spellcaster. “You should not run off, little Dru! I was most distressed when I found you missing! At least I waited while you slept!”
Two brown shapes dove down from behind the Void dweller, talons poised, while his attention was focused on the human.
“Look-” A backhand slap from the Seekers’ leader silenced him before he could warn Darkness of the danger to him. Nonetheless, the massive stallion understood enough to twist his head around, though it was too late to avoid the attack.
The first avian struck, his clawed feet ready to rend the back of the impudent creature below. To his horror and that of the rest of the party, the diving attacker found no solid flesh beneath his talons. Instead, he kept diving, sinking into the darker than dark mass that was the phantom steed. The Seeker screeched once, then seemed to dwindle as he sank completely into Darkness. It was as if he had fallen into a bottomless crevice that sucked him ever deeper despite his efforts to the contrary. In mere moments, the would-be killer had vanished, taken completely in by Darkness.
A raucous noise rose among the Seekers as they voiced their dismay.
That was what he meant by taking me, Dru realized when thought was finally possible again. He swallowed hard, thankful for his escape from such a fate.
Unable to combat his own momentum, the second winged fury joined his brother, dwindling and vanishing even faster than the first had. It was almost anticlimactic after the first, though no less horrible, and in less than a minute, Darkness had destroyed-devoured? — two opponents without even striking.