Will’s mouth went dry. Aislinn couldn’t have betrayed him. It was impossible. The unbound favor guaranteed she would act as she’d promised. Unless my favor conflicted with another, in which case she’d die, but she would have had to warn me before accepting.

  “Don’t overheat that tiny piece of fat your kind use for a brain. Think! My nest is protected by a blood ward. Without the proper blood, no one can enter, except myself. Your surprise gate would have worked, while the way was open, but once it closed, the magic sealed this place again. You watched and waited, hoping your enemies would destroy one another, but you waited too long. Once I destroyed the arch, your fate was sealed.”

  Hissing sounds informed Will that the hatchlings were beginning to circle him, so he cast an elemental travel disk to gain some height. Again, he wished he knew the spell Grim Talek had used to hover and fly about. “You should summon some elementals,” Will suggested. “It’s lonely in here with just the two of us.”

  “So you can drain them? I think not.” Another gout of flame filled the air.

  Will canceled the travel disk. He couldn’t afford the energy any longer. He barely had enough left in him for one more sound barrier, but one last idea had come to him. If it didn’t work, he thought he might be happier letting the hatchling tear him apart rather than suffer Lognion’s tender mercies. The ancient wyrm seemed to enjoy playing with his food.

  Before he could do anything else, a light shone from behind him, and a rush of ambient turyn rolled in, like clouds on a breeze. Seizing the moment, Will created a sound barrier around himself and tuned it for flesh and bone. The dragonlings were all around him, and some of them had leapt for him. They regretted it.

  A cloud of disintegrating flesh filled the air, coating both Will and everything else within ten feet of his barrier with a sticky layer of red ooze. The buzz in the air as the dragonlings half-destroyed themselves was a disturbing sound that vibrated in his jaw and made his tongue feel numb. Will barely saw the flames coming in the midst of the blood-bath, but he retuned the shield just in time.

  Lognion’s breath killed the wounded hatchlings and half-killed the ones that managed to get some cover behind the broken eggs. Dozens laid around Will now, smoking and dying. Hundreds more were still in the chamber, but he felt a small thrill of triumph. “Keep that up and you won’t have any snacks left!”

  The furious dragon switched tactics, bringing one of his huge claws down on Will’s position. Not trusting his shield to stop it, Will retuned it for flesh again, teleporting just ten feet away at the last instant. He was rewarded with Lognion’s pained scream as the shield destroyed some of the hide protecting the bottom of his clawed foot. The dragon swiped sideways, and Will repeated the trick. There was power aplenty now.

  Glancing back, he saw why. The damaged archway was no longer there, but a gate had opened nonetheless, and it still opened into the same room. Selene stood over the circle, controlling the flows of power directly while blood drained steadily from her wrists. She stared at him through the burning gate with eyes that said she had nothing left to lose.

  She was dying and there was no way to stop it, not without throwing away her sacrifice. Furious, Will turned back to the dragon and reached for the ley lines. The air was suddenly filled with lightning. It slammed into the dragon, and more branched out to find hatchlings around the room. Every living thing in the cavern was swept by the terrible incandescent power.

  Moments later, it ended. The hatchlings still twitched, as did Lognion, and Will knew his lightning couldn’t kill them. He did it again anyway, focusing the largest blasts on the demon-steel bolt sticking out of the dragon’s chest, hoping it would overload.

  The weapon was already burning with black flames, but his lightning didn’t help. Driktenspal converted kinetic energy, not lightning or other magic. A sonic barrier might do the trick, however, given some time and effort. Will strode toward his foe with deliberate malice, his lightning filling the air to prevent the dragon or his children from recovering. If Selene was dying, at least she wouldn’t die alone.

  Even with the constant barrage, Lognion wouldn’t stay down. Though his vast reptilian form refused to respond to his commands, his mind was somehow still clear enough to call on his elementals. Will felt a disturbance in the turyn behind him and turned, thinking he’d need to defend himself, but what he saw was worse. Three earth elementals surrounded Selene and though she saw them coming, she couldn’t divert her attention from the task of keeping the gate open.

  The Cath Bawlg appeared, leaping onto one and knocking it aside, but she couldn’t stop them all. Before Will could waste breath yelling, their massive fists battered her into the floor, crushing her frail human body against the hard paving stones. Her improvised ritual failed, and the gate closed once more, leaving Will trapped with the monster she had once called ‘father.’

  Will turned back to face Selene’s murderer, his heart filled with nothing but wrath. The power around him was rapidly failing, but he continued to focus it on the hateful beast that had taken his joy and smashed it forever. Incoherent rage twisted his face into a rictus grin, showing blood-stained teeth, and Will did his best to sunder the dragon into pieces with nothing but lightning.

  His power failed briefly, but he remembered his idea from moments before—before Selene had given her life trying to save him. The pocket dimension might be sealed away, there might be no elementals for him to drain, ley lines to tap, but one incalculable source of power remained. The dragon himself.

  In general, the first spell Will ever saw demonstrated, the source-link, was only used against weak foes. Arrogan had used it frequently against Will when he was an apprentice, and Will had used it often against normal people who weren’t able to guard their own source. On occasion, he’d used it against sorcerers, especially those he knew lacked the strength to oppose him.

  Between equals or near-equals it was unheard of. The will of the aggressor needed to be significantly stronger than the one he sought to dominate. Lognion was no wizard, but the dragon still possessed considerable inner strength to guard the vast power that fueled his terrible form.

  Will didn’t care.

  He was within five feet of the twitching dragon, close enough to be crushed the moment the cursed fiend regained movement in its limbs, but he didn’t wait. Reaching out with the simplest spell he knew, he drove his intent into Lognion’s bloody flesh and sought the dragon’s core. As a rule, a strong will made the source hard to find, but William found Lognion’s in less than a second and seized hold of it.

  The beast that claimed to be a part of the very pillars of creation lost after only the briefest of struggles, and Will began drawing on the dragon’s source. Turyn flooded into him like a hot knife, and his rage turned it back against the dragon in the elemental fury of a lightning storm.

  And still the dragon refused to die. Paralyzed and helpless, Lognion suffered intensely as the minutes ticked by, but his body refused to surrender. Unfortunately for him, the wizard tormenting him had no intention of giving up.

  Over time, Will’s brain began to offer suggestions that were able to cut through the rage and find a place in his actions. Moving even closer, Will created a sonic barrier tuned for flesh and pressed forward into the dragon’s twitching body. The lightning never stopped, and the sonic barrier consumed incredible amounts of power as the reptilian flesh tried to dampen its insatiable appetite with sheer mass alone.

  It resisted him like nothing else had, but with the endless resources of Lognion’s source, Will kept inching forward, destroying everything his barrier touched. He intended to get to the demon-steel bolt still imbedded in the dragon’s chest, for if he could overload that, it would blow them both straight to oblivion, but the damn thing was too high up.

  Not caring to stop and try something else to reach it, Will let the lightning cease and focused everything he had into carving a bloody hole straight through the dragon. He was too far in to see anything now, aside from a dim light coming from behind. Rivers of blood and liquified flesh flowed around him, threatening his balance as he slogged onward.

  Eventually, light appeared in front of him, and Will realized he’d gone completely through, yet Lognion’s source was still in his grasp. Somehow, the dragon wasn’t dead. “Why won’t you die?” he screamed. Turning back, he prepared to do it again, but he saw something that made him stop.

  Dozens of hatchlings had approached the meaty tunnel he had carved, and they began sniffing and tearing at the bloody flesh Will had exposed. Alive but paralyzed by the source-link, Lognion couldn’t move to drive them away. Finally, Will found a reason to smile, and his white teeth appeared, centered in a face painted vividly red by dragon-gore.

  Laughing, he created a travel disk and lifted himself up to avoid tempting the young whelps, but he needn’t have worried. Lognion’s children had found the tastiest meal in the nest, their father. More of them hatched with every minute, and invariably they found their way to the sanguineous feast in the center of the nest. Will watched delightedly as they slowly devoured the dragon, and thanks to the source-link, he knew that Lognion was awake and aware through it all.

  The former king suffered unbelievable agony for nearly half an hour before his children found his heart and began to rip it apart. Will felt him die, as the dragon’s source faded and slipped from his grasp.

  Lognion, the tyrant of Hercynia and author of countless evils, finally passed into eternity. Will wished there was a real hell for the bastard to go to, but someone important had told him it didn’t exist. He hoped they were wrong.

  Chapter 48

  Time passed while Lognion’s carcass was gradually reduced to bones and tattered hide. Hundreds of hatchlings were swarming over the remains, and from what Will could see there were no unhatched eggs left. Given the size of the room, he couldn’t be sure, though.

  Some of the newborn dragons stared up at him curiously, and given that they were only ten feet beneath him, he felt understandably nervous. They seemed to have sated their appetites, but that was temporary. Eventually, they’d get hungry, and given that they were trapped within a very limited space, there weren’t many options for food.

  Cannibalism was a certainty, but Will would be the juiciest steak in the room once his turyn ran out. He wondered how long he could maintain the travel disk. There was no natural ambient turyn in the cavern, so the only energy available came from his source and the dragonlings. If he opened his source up to that of a normal person, he could potentially stay afloat for several hours, but the spell would gradually wear him down. The normal flow of turyn from a person’s source was meant to sustain the body, not fuel external spells.

  If he didn’t decompress his source, he would run out of turyn much sooner, but he could surely do the same to the whelplings as he had done to their father. He imagined dropping to the floor and attaching to one of their sources. If I create another sound barrier and use their strength to maintain it…

  It was a disgusting mental image, but he was already covered in blood and other foul substances. The jellied remains of Lognion were becoming dry and crusty on his skin and clothes. He’d literally taken a bath in liquified dragon flesh, and every part of him was soaked in gore. Beyond the biological obscenity of that idea, Will had a deeper, existential problem. Even if he managed to somehow slay every young dragon in the nest, he would still be trapped.

  Maybe he could butcher and cook one of the hatchlings, but the rest would spoil soon after. Will had considerable amounts of food and water stored in his limnthal, but sooner or later he’d starve to death. “Assuming I don’t kill myself to escape the stench of decaying dragons,” he muttered.

  The only way he could escape the pocket dimension was a gate, and no one could create a way in from the outside. Lognion’s blood ward prevented that, otherwise Aislinn would have honored her debt to him already. Will wondered if the failure had killed her yet. He hadn’t set a specific time frame, so she might potentially be forced to keep trying forever. He chuckled, thinking that she might somehow succeed years later, in the distant future, only to find him a pile of dried-up bones.

  Looking down, he caught the eye of one of the hatchlings and told it, “This sucks.” Its lips pulled back to expose needle-like fangs as it hissed back at him.

  A final option would be to make his own gate. The blood ward probably wasn’t designed to stop exits, but there were many problems with the idea. Finding the necessary power was the largest obstacle. Draining a large number of whelps might be enough, though he really didn’t know how much turyn they could supply. The second issue would be trying to create a gate while his turyn sources were attempting to eat him.

  Not to mention I’ve only done it once in practice, and that was using a ritual setup, he thought sourly. Even attempting what he’d imagined would require skill comparable to his grandmother’s. Plus, there was a limit on how many sources he could connect to simultaneously, so unless a handful of the children were equivalent to their progenitor, he was still screwed.

  With no way out, was there even a point to delaying the inevitable? Anguish pierced his heart when he thought about what awaited him outside. Selene was dead. She’d already bled herself dry for a second time before the elementals had pounded her into the ground. Will doubled over, fighting to control his grief as his stomach muscles contracted painfully.

  He wasn’t wounded—far from it. It was simple sorrow that assailed him so powerfully that even tears wouldn’t come. His body twisted itself into a knot, and the travel disk began to waver in the air as his concentration started to fail.

  This was worse than the pit in Hell. There, he’d expected a definite end, and he’d known that at least some of his family was safe. They still are, idiot, came Laina’s voice in his mind.

  “Sammy’s lost her magic. She can’t even talk or read,” he whined angrily.

  She’s alive! So is your mother.

  He couldn’t deny that, but he refused to accept it either. His pain wouldn’t allow for reason or rationalizations.

  Tabitha will be shattered if you don’t come back.

  His eyes grew damp. “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” he screamed, clutching his hair as though he could drive out the voice in his head.

  Laina didn’t respond, so he simply sat atop the disk, arms around his knees. Too tired to cry, he watched the milling dragonlings while he languished in dull despondency. The only excitement left to him was the occasional panic when he caught himself imagining what their teeth would feel like tearing through his muscle and bone. “An ironic end for the mighty dragon slayer,” he mumbled quietly.

  More time passed, and he found that the most miserable part of the present was the taste of Lognion on his lips. The crusted gore kept flaking away and would drift into his mouth and nose while he breathed, forcing him to spit as he tried to clear the salty sweet taste from his tongue. Casting Selene’s Solution would have solved the problem, but he didn’t have the turyn for that.

  When light appeared and the gate opened, Will stared at it numbly, unable to accept what his senses presented. Through the ten-foot-wide opening, he saw Aislinn and the Cath Bawlg standing in the ritual chamber. Selene’s crumpled form was in front of them. Fresh turyn drifted in, sending shivers across his skin. Unable to help himself, Will sent the travel disk closer, drawn by the inexorable pull of strange hope and the macabre sight of his wife’s body.

  The hatchlings followed, but he got there first, and after he passed through, a force-wall sprang up to block their passage. Will saw them scratching at it with sharp claws. Impressively, even the fresh dragonlings had the power to destroy it. Tears and rents began appearing in the magical barrier.

  Aislinn urged him, “Name your second gate. Quickly.” Her eyes had lit up expectantly. He’d planned it out before, but reluctance filled him now that the moment had come. Aislinn created a second force-wall as the first failed. “Hurry!”

  “Hell,” he whispered.

  “I’m pledged to the Accord,” she reminded him, as she had to. “Creating a gate from Hercynia to Hell will violate that. Is that still your wish?” There was hope in her voice.

  “Yes,” said Will softly. With two competing and incompatible compulsions, she would be forced to violate one, but it would be her choice as to which.

  His grandmother smiled, then drew on additional power from the ley lines to create a second gate directly behind her now failing force-wall. When it opened, it was mere inches from the gate into the nest, and the hatchlings began to stream through to explore and conquer their new home.

  The brute fact that Aislinn could create and control two such complex and demanding magics simultaneously, while also channeling the turyn needed to maintain them, was a testament to the legend of her skill and mastery. Those who understood nothing of the fae and their mortal origins had named her the Goddess of Magic, but they hadn’t been far from the truth.

  The unearthly vitality that had been ever-present in her form and features gradually faded as she maintained the two gates. Minutes passed and turned into a quarter of an hour, and after Will peered through the gap between the portals to confirm the young dragons were all gone, she let the second gate close. The one to the nest remained open.

  Will’s grandmother looked tired as she told him, “Do you remember our conversation about the lich?”

  His mind was numb and mostly empty, but he nodded anyway.

  When he failed to take the hint, she clarified, “Go through and collect Grim Talek’s remains.”

  “Oh.” That hadn’t occurred to him. He’d assumed the lich was already elsewhere, making a new home for himself in a fresh body. The charred bones that remained didn’t interest him, but he was too worn down to debate anything. Will went back in and studied the room, unsure how much time he had left.

  He remembered where Grim Talek had died, but he went to Tiny’s body first to confirm his suspicion. As he’d thought, the armor contained nothing but grey clay, which had dried and cracked from the heat. The demon-steel had melted in places. Some parts of the armor had been welded together from the heat, while others had fallen completely away after the dragon-fire destroyed the harness that held them on, exposing portions of the clay body.