Chaos god 5, p.15
Chaos God 5, page 15
part #5 of Chaos God Series
“We’ve got company, people!” I shouted to my warriors. “Everybody, get ready!”
“You recognized the scent of the Draugar,” Nae commented with an amount of humor that felt disproportionate to the situation. “You must have fought these foul creatures before!”
“Once,” I confirmed as I pulled my sword and dagger from their sheaths. “We came across two of them when we were exploring the ruins of the Crystal Spire a few months back. I don’t think I’ll ever forget this particular smell. It’s so strong and unique. It stuck to my tongue for hours like a disgusting fur. They weren’t the hardest fight I’ve ever had, but the smell is like nothing else.”
“Be prepared,” the scarred Valkyrie commanded everybody in the vicinity as she pulled a broadsword from the joints between her metallic wings. Then she tilted her nose into the air and took a deep breath of the wretched smell. “There are quite a few more than just two of the beasts on their way.”
More than half of the dark elves re-emerged a moment later with weapons in hand and hastily put on armor. We all marched behind Nae to the northern part of the village, and we stopped about thirty feet before the line of evergreen trees that stood between the village and the mountains. The dark elves positioned themselves around in strategic spots like they’d practiced this before. They were all quiet and focused as they moved to their posts, and I was very impressed with the coordination of it all.
I held my human form until I could get a look at what we were up against, and my warriors and the dark elf fighters spread out in preparation for the battle.
Elora’s metallic wings spread out and curved around her body just the slightest bit, and she held her long spear out in a defensive position.
Ayen had taken up a position on a nearby stone wall that gave him a slight height advantage over the rest of our heads, and there were several dark elf archers dotted along the wall with him.
Kine was closest to my big blond friend, and he glared with contempt at Ayen’s more elegant bow.
Lyrie stood just behind Nae’s left side, and the white-haired beauty held a glass vial filled with what looked like dark red demon blood in it. The vial was about the size of a vintage Coca-Cola bottle but much rounder at the base, and there were tiny bones tied around the neck of the bottle that extended above her tight grip.
The black-skinned elf who’d sat with us around the fire held a strange sculpture-like totem of bones tied together with twine. Several feathers in dull brown colors stuck up out of the top of the vaguely humanoid figure, and a series of stones dangled down from the bottom like a mobile over a baby’s crib. He narrowed his red eyes with anticipation of the battle coming to us.
There were several other dark elves still outside with us, and I was impressed with how many of the villagers had remained to fight. The majority of them held bows and arrows or some kind of bone or blood totems like Lyrie and the black-skinned elf.
Nae stood at the front of the group, and Elora and I walked up to stand beside her and Lyrie as the stench grew stronger.
“You can tell how many there are by the smell?” I asked in a quiet voice.
“Yes,” Nae said through gritted teeth, and she took a moment to roll her shoulders in a quick stretch.
“How many are there?” I asked.
“By the smell, I would say a dozen, perhaps more.” Nae turned to look at me. “This is not all I believe to be in the chasm, Levi.”
“What else–” I started to ask, but before I could get the words out, a dozen and a half Draugar lurched forward from the trees that bordered the northern edge of the village.
They were similar to the Draugar we’d encountered at the Broken Spire, but their skin was black with frostbite, and huge icicles hung from every part of their half-rotten bodies. Their mouths gaped open, and even across the distance between us, I could see how many of their black teeth were completely missing. They held rusted swords and mauls in their fleshless fingers, and most of them wore plate or chainmail armor.
“Defend your homes!” Nae screamed, and she launched into the air.
The scarred Valkyrie soared a few feet over the snow with her sword held straight out. She slashed her blade straight through the neck of the lead Draugr, and its half-rotted head rolled right to the ground. But its decapitated body continued to march sluggishly forward as Nae carried on to her next target.
The headless Draugr’s body was felled quickly with a flurry of Ayen’s arrows and Kine’s dark-wood ones.
I began storming forward, and I urged my body into a new shift. Wide leathery wings began to emerge from between my shoulder blades, and my legs stretched out into the heavily-muscled legs of my wolf form. Dark gray fur sprouted all over the lower half of my body, but thick greenish scales covered my upper body. My lips thinned out as my teeth elongated into sharp fangs, and my fingers extended into brutal claws.
By the time I crossed the twenty feet of snowy ground between where I’d started and where the Draugar emerged, I was an interesting combination of dragon and wolf form.
I slashed my sword-powered claws into the nearest Asgardian zombie creature, and the little bit of flesh it had left snapped and exploded like an overly dry rubber band. My left hand followed through with a second strike, and the undead bastard’s half-broken rib cage shattered into dust under my dagger-powered claws.
The Draugr dropped to the ground in a more complete state of death, and I moved on to the next target.
I heard the familiar grunts of Elora beside me, and occasionally I caught the sight of her metallic wings in the corners of my vision. At one point, she launched herself into the air and came diving down onto the shoulders of one Draugr that appeared to be less decomposed than the others. My silver-haired warrior jammed the point of her spear right into the crown of the ugly bastard’s skull.
“Aahhh!” Elora roared as she flapped her wings and forced the spear all the way through the Draugr’s skull until it cracked like a chestnut.
Then I hauled another undead fucker up by the throat, and I ripped its body into pieces easily with my flesh-rending claws. I hucked the Draugr’s limbs and torso aside like so much trash as I prepared to go after the next target, but its body suddenly halted like someone had frozen it in place.
I stared in confusion for a half-second before the Draugr’s body tensed and began to violently rip itself apart. The bastard looked like it had been sucked into a black hole as it was pulled aggressively inward from its own middle.
I turned and found Lyrie a few steps behind me. Her face was contorted with concentration and the heat of battle, and she held the blood-filled vial up in front of her. The glass container almost glowed with a light from within, and Lyrie’s beautiful black eyes seemed to glisten with the same illumination, too.
A short distance away, the black-skinned male held up his bone talisman in his left hand, and then a blade formed out of thin air in his right hand.
My jaw fell open with shock as something I could only describe as a shadow blade solidified in the dark elf’s hands. It was the size and shape of a regular sword, but it reflected zero light. The edges were almost hazy as he moved it through the air, and it didn’t seem to be exactly solid. That proved to be totally false when the black-skinned elf lunged forward and jammed his blade through the leg of the closest Draugr. He hacked the frostbitten monster’s leg clean off in two strikes, and then he strapped his bone talisman to his waist and moved on to the next target.
“Aaahh!” Lyrie roared and drew my attention
Then a shock wave of magical power raced out from the white-haired elf’s hands and straight into the Draugr.
“Whoa,” I breathed through my long fangs.
Lyrie’s target screeched with agony as its body exploded out in every direction. It was like a million tiny hands had gripped onto every inch of the creature’s body and ripped it outward at the same exact moment.
Half-rotten blood and innards splattered out in every direction like a fruit salad in a blender without the top on it, and my stomach turned violently.
“Fuck,” I gasped at the carnage and the fierce display of power from the gorgeous dark elf.
I didn’t have the luxury to linger in the state of amazement, though, and I threw myself back into the fray. My wings caught the icy wind from the north, and I used them to aid my speed and agility through the crowd of undead fuckers. But the bastards fell easier than I thought they would, and it worried me a little.
Finally, when only four of the Draugar remained, they proved themselves to be more difficult. At the same instant, all four of the undead bastards’ bodies ballooned out to four times their size.
“Aaah!” Kine screeched in terror.
I forced my laughter back down my throat at the hostile elf’s sudden shift in bravado. Then I urged my own body to grow in size until I stood nearly as tall as the frostbitten zombies. My leathery wings stretched out wide, and I heard several gasps of surprise from the dark elves behind me.
“This village is protected,” I growled through gritted fangs.
The Draugar’s cloudy eyes narrowed with confusion for a moment before they grumbled with irritation, and then they all lurched forward at me at the same time.
“Fuckers,” I muttered.
I reared back with my right hand and swung my claws across the front of the first frostbitten monster’s chest. There wasn’t very much skin left to be flayed back by my sword-powered claws, but they did plenty of damage anyway.
The sound of its brittle ribs cracking under the sheer force of my strike echoed through the dark elves’ valley. Then I took hold of the bastard’s head and ripped it right off its shoulders, and I didn’t stop there. Without hesitation, I ripped the rest of the creature’s body limb from limb until it was a pile of half-rotten flesh and bones.
I kept my fangs off the fuckers’ rotting flesh, though, since I doubted that would taste remotely okay.
Instead, I pivoted around sharply on my wolf paws, and I slammed my heavily-muscled wings into the next Draugr’s hips with enough force to knock it to the ground. Then I stomped hard onto the bastard’s throat, and it squished and cracked beneath my massive weight. The Draugr’s head was separated from its shoulders like an overripe banana, and the body began to squirm in a half-assed attempt to get back to its feet.
“Stay down,” I growled as I slammed my rot-dagger hand directly into the ugly fucker’s decomposing chest.
The power of my dagger caused the rest of the Draugr’s body to decompose quickly into a pile of dust and goo, and I grimaced at the horrific sight.
The third enormous Draugr blinked stupidly for a second before its mouth fell open, and it growled at me.
“Death,” the ice-covered monster groaned, and its voice was hollow and dusty like an abandoned building.
There was something about the horrified look in the creature’s sunken eyes that made me question if it was asking for death or promising death. I didn’t wait to find out either way.
I whipped my wings around to pummel the bastard to the ground, and then I jumped high into the air. My clawed wolf paws came down hard right in the middle of the Draugr’s torso, and every one of its ribs cracked under the force of my body.
Once the third oversized Draugr was crushed under my wolf paws, I turned back to look for the final one.
But I couldn’t find the fucker.
I’d taken the majority of the frostbitten bastards to the ground, but their undead bodies and limbs continued to try and attack. Nae, Elora, Ayen, and the others were working to cut the still-wiggling limbs into small enough pieces so they would finally die for good.
“We must burn these, or the rot will spread,” Nae announced. “Kine, Lyrie… begin dragging the body parts to the fire.”
“I will help,” Elora said, and though she still looked a tiny bit pale from the stench, she got right to work.
I remembered how Shalanna had become violently sick from the stench when we’d encountered the Draugar at the beginning of her pregnancy. I didn’t know if Elora just had a stronger stomach than Shalanna, or if her elf genetics affected the morning sickness of pregnancy differently, but she was handling the rotting stench really well.
“What happened to the fourth one?” I asked no one in particular.
“It fled north!” Nae shouted as she skewered a half-destroyed Draugr torso into the ground so it would finally stop squirming. “Surely to the chasm from whence it came!”
“I’ll take care of it,” I growled through my fanged mouth. “All of you stay here, burn these corpses, and defend the village in case any more come back.”
“It is not worth it, Levi,” Nae insisted. “You should not go.”
“I wasn’t asking permission,” I said in the most polite tone I could manage.
The Draugr was escaping, and the further away it got, the harder it would be to track.
“Levi can handle it, Nae,” Elora insisted. “We should follow his instructions.”
“Very well,” the scarred Valkyrie relented, and she narrowed her eyes in a curious way. “But I will not send my people after you if you fail to return on your own.”
“That won’t be necessary.” I smirked, and then I turned on my heels.
I raced forward through the evergreen trees, and soon the sound of bodies being chopped up and the grunts of effort from the warriors faded behind me.
There was a thicket of the long-needled pine trees that was at least forty feet thick before they spread out as the mountains took over the land once more. The ground became much less even, and steep slopes rose up on both sides of me. The mountainsides narrowed tight around me on either side, and I was forced to shrink my dragon-wolf body back down to my usual height. I tucked my leathery wings close to my back as I maneuvered between the sharp cliffs and the occasional lone tree.
The few inches of snow had left the perfect terrain for the Draugar to leave tracks behind them. I wasn’t as skilled at tracking as Ayen, but I was able to follow them well enough. After about a hundred yards, I spotted the only pair of feet that were going against the flow of traffic. I picked out the north-going tracks and followed them carefully.
At no point was the lone Draugr in my field of vision, but its footprints were like a GPS straight to its location. I kept following the shuffling tracks north for quite a bit longer than I would have expected. The frostbitten creature had gotten more of a head start on me than I’d thought.
After several minutes, the mountains eased apart more, and the path I was following became as wide as twenty feet in some spots. The trees began to crop up in thicker clusters, but then something black caught my eye.
My heart leapt up into my throat as a black raven launched itself from the top branches of a tree. The sleek black bird circled overhead twice as its beady little eyes gazed down at me, and I nearly forgot what I was doing as Sylmarie’s words echoed in my mind.
Do not trust the raven.
The black birds had cropped up at the most unexpected moments since I’d arrived on this planet, and it always felt like a horrible omen when I spotted one. This one circled around and then headed west, and I watched it with suspicion until it disappeared between the mountains.
It took me a second to refocus on why I was out here in a dragon-wolf body, but then it hit me like a bag of bricks. I had bigger fish to fry than a fucking regular-looking bird.
“The Draugr,” I muttered as I looked back down to find its tracks once more.
I followed the footprints north through the mountains for a few more minutes before I saw the first large crack in the ground. They started to appear in the snow like hairline cracks in concrete, and I worried how deep they were if I could see them through the four inches of snow. One crack started to stretch and expand as I marched forward, and I took a moment to kick the snow aside to get a better look at it.
The small crevice was only about half an inch wide, but it looked like it was a good foot or two deep. The split in the planet’s crust ran in a sharp zigzag pattern in the same direction I was heading, so I followed it forward.
The break slowly grew until it was wide enough that I could have climbed into it up to my waist. I wondered if these new spiderweb cracks all connected back to the bigger chasm that Nae had spoken about. They seemed to angle back in that general direction, and it would make sense for the massive chasm in the crust of Asgard to be surrounded by smaller cracks like these.
For a moment, I tried to imagine what it must have felt like when the chasm first formed. I’d never been in an earthquake myself, but a former drinking buddy of mine who’d grown up in California had tried to explain it to me once. He’d said it was like the entire world was trying to shake his bones apart, and that it had rattled his teeth together with so much force that he’d chipped his front tooth.
I could only assume the tremors of a chasm as large as the one I’d found Njord in would have sent shockwaves all across the planet. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if the seismic activity had been felt clear on the opposite side of Asgard.
Then everything happened all at once. I caught the first scent of rotting flesh that told me I’d caught up to the Draugr, and an icy wind blasted into me from the north. In the same instant, I heard a low, grumbling roar from somewhere ahead of me. The sound echoed off the mountains and through the trees until it faded away.
There was another line of evergreen trees just in front of me, and I pushed through them with caution strong in my heart. Which turned out to be exactly the right choice because the ground fell away hard and fast just beyond the trees.
The single Draugr I’d followed from the dark elves’ village was about thirty yards to my left, and it crawled quickly over the edge. The half-rotten creature had climbed down onto a narrow ledge that led like a handicap ramp down the side of the chasm.
I shuffled slowly to the edge of the chasm and peered down into its depths.
It was a lot like the chasm north of Freesia’s village, but it appeared to be only two-thirds as deep. It was freezing cold instead of burning hot, and the depths were dark instead of glowing with the light of the lava deep below. It was filled with sharp rock formations, and sheets of ice covered every single bit of surface area I could see.
