But that might have been from the vast shadow falling over them.
Gariath turned and saw him. Daga-Mer’s light was a dim, steady, bloodred throb as he loomed over the dragonman at the top of the staircase. His great webbed claws clutched the bridge. Stale wind tinged with red burst from his jaws with every long, ragged breath. Deep within a hollow eye socket, a red fire burned upon Gariath.
The dragonman took a step back and felt something beneath his foot. He looked down and saw a trickle of water weeping out from the doorway behind him. Daga-Mer clawed forward, reaching out to haul his tremendous body forth with a great quaking sound as he settled upon the stone. His hand rose, clenched into a fist and prepared to bring it down upon the tiny red parasite on the stone before him. There was silence. All of creation held its breath for fear of being noticed.
Almost all, anyway.
Gariath’s earfrills fanned out with the sound. A distant rumbling, growing louder. The stream beneath his feet grew swifter, sweeping over the bridge, beneath Daga-Mer’s fingers. He watched the black flesh of the titan’s skin sizzle and steam. The great beast did not seem to notice.
Gariath did.
Gariath slung Mahalar’s body over his shoulder and leapt, scrambling up over a pile of rubble and into the arms of Ulbecetonth over the doorway.
And the water came in a great roar of froth and liquid, dragon’s breath from an old, rocky beast. It washed over Daga-Mer, striking him like a fist and bathing him in a silver glow. The titan howled with agony as it raced over him like a living thing, setting his black skin afire with steam.
He roared, he thrashed, he held out his titanic hands as if to hold it back. But the water kept coming. The water was pitiless. The water devoured him.
Gariath watched as Daga-Mer disappeared beneath a colossal wave and a cloud of steam. He rose again with a howl, his white bones left bare as the black skin of his body shrank like puddles under the sun. He fell beneath the water and rose again, soundless, stretching out a skeletal hand as if to grab Gariath with whatever hatred kept those bones alive just long enough to swing out with a skeletal claw and sink back beneath the water.
He did not rise again.
Gariath watched the water rush endlessly out, sweeping down the stairs and onto the battlefield below. His eyeridges furrowed. Theoretically, this would be a good time to say something pithy.
But at that moment, he caught a glimpse of them. The humans, the tall ones, carried out over the water and down it. Alive? Dead? Irrelevant. He had only one course of action and, thus, only one thing to say.
He turned to Mahalar and grunted.
“Hold your breath.”
Voices without words. Screams without substance. Agony unending. He could hear them as though they were drops of liquid dripping into his skull from the tiny gouges the crown’s spikes dug into the tender skin of his brow. He could hear pleas, wails, individual terrors blended into a swampy soup of pain that could not be shaken.
The Gonwa. Screaming. As their lives fed into his skull, down his throat, into his body.
He looked at his hands and saw them tensed and strong. He could feel the disease burning away, the weakness sweeping into the stones upon the crown and being carried to someone else.
Dreadaeleon felt strong. Impossibly strong.
And this would have come with such impossible relief had he been able to disregard the screaming.
“They won’t stop, will they?”
Sheraptus was still smiling when Dreadaeleon turned upon him. Despite the fact that his eyes were a pale white and his body was fragile and weak, the longface was still beaming as though nothing had changed.
“It was difficult for me to get used to, at first, too,” Sheraptus said as he picked himself up off the earth. “Eventually, you learn to block them out.”
Dreadaeleon found that hard to believe with how long and loud they screamed, with how clear and crystalline their pain was. He would have torn it from his head and cast it upon the ground if not for. .
Damn it, old man, he cursed himself. Not this way. You’re not supposed to feel this. It’s heresy. It’s treason. It’s against every oath you took and every lesson you knew. It’s. . it’s. .
“It’s power,” Greenhair chimed, coming up alongside him. “The power to end all of it.” She swept her arm over the battlefield. “The power to do what no one else could do.”
“In all fairness, I tried to do it,” Sheraptus replied. “But the people in the sky had a different plan for me.”
“Starting with him,” Greenhair hissed, pointing a webbed finger at Sheraptus as she laid a hand on Dreadaeleon’s shoulder. “He tried to kill you. He defied the Sea Mother. He served darker masters than even the Kraken Queen.”
“Shut up,” Dreadaeleon replied, rubbing his eyes. “Just. . let me think.”
It was hard to do so. The sound of the Gonwa’s pain did not fade. Every ounce of their life that flooded into him, burning away his sickness, filling his body with life, came accompanied by a scream to a god, a cry to a mother, a wail to a brother to save them.
“I wouldn’t take too long,” Sheraptus replied. “She might grow tired of you and arrange for someone else to kill you, as she did me.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Greenhair said.
“Yes, don’t listen to me, little moth. Don’t listen to the only one here who’s had dealings with that creature. Don’t listen to the man who knows what she’s about. She proclaims to want peace, bliss, for the Sea Mother or whatever. But all she’s interested in is the power. Same as any sensible creature, really. I can’t fault her.”
“Lorekeeper,” the siren said, pulling on his shoulder. “Ignore him. All that I have done has been to save this world, to preserve it from Ulbecetonth, to serve the will of the Gods.”
“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong.” Sheraptus held up a finger. “Of course, you claim to serve the Gods. You get others to do it for you, naturally, to use their power to serve them on you wield. A liar’s power. One I hadn’t really appreciated until everything was made clear to me by them.”
He pointed upward, to the bloodstained sky, and smiled. He drew in a breath, let it out as a cold cloud of frost.
“And so, I do name you a pretender to their power and their servitude, and so honor their distaste.”
Dreadaeleon saw it. The gesture of the hand, the twitch of the lips that heralded the spell. He saw the ice crystals form in the cloud of frost and become a jagged icicle. He saw it fly past him. He felt the warmth of her life spatter upon his face as it struck her squarely in the sternum and carried her to the ground, pinning her there. He saw it, before it had even happened, as it happened, after it happened.
And he did nothing.
Greenhair lay upon the sand, eyes wide and reflecting the cold blue chill of the icy spear pinning her to the earth. She reached out a hand to him, as if to beg him to pull her up, as if there weren’t a jagged chunk of ice in her chest. She gasped for air through a mouth dripping red.
“Why?” she gasped. “Why didn’t you stop him?”
“She has a point.”
When Dreadaeleon whirled on him, his smile had faded. The longface simply looked at Dreadaeleon, all the boy’s wide-eyed, jaw-clenched shock, and blinked.
“What?”
“You killed her,” Dreadaeleon said.
“Sorry, have you not been paying attention? I kill lots of things.”
“She. . she helped you, though. She was your ally. You treated with her and you killed her like. .”
“So? She helped you and you watched her die. You have the crown, you could have stopped me.”
“I was confused, the screams, they’re just. .”
“Just more screams. No different than any you have heard before. You could have stopped me. You could have saved her.”
And Dreadaeleon was left with nothing more than a silence and Greenhair’s blood crackling as it froze upon the ice.