That left one Gorgoloth to advance on Dane. The giant’s leonine mane flowed like a pale cape in the thick wind; his pale simian fangs were stained red, and his thick and knotted ebon muscles were bound in a mesh of chain and bone. He stood just over eight feet tall, and he held a massive flail in each hand; their spiked tips dangled close to the stone as he advanced, where they struck down and flared like flints.
Dane held his sword high. Coming up the incline, the Gorgoloth would have little height advantage over him, even if his reach with those flails would be difficult to get around. Movement flashed in Dane’s eyes on the other side of the bridge, but he focused on the advancing giant. He felt the Cruj’ inhuman eyes on him, watching, more intent than all of the rest. He felt himself teeter as the giant ascended: the slope was ice blue stone covered in brittle snow and scree as sharp as blades. Dane glanced over the side: the bitter bank terminated like a cut into the endless stale fog that choked the air like a rancid breath.
He heard the chain snap, saw the iron head sail towards him, but he was far ahead of his opponent: in a fluid motion Dane rolled forward, well within the arc of the swinging stone, and in a quick cut he severed the chain and sent the flail head flying through the air behind him. They were frozen in a dream: Dane dreamily watched the Gorgoloth draw back his left arm and pull the other flail into the air, but Dane dove at him, and moved up and into his chest with the vra’taar with such speed that the giant’s body shuddered as it folded itself over the blade. Cold blood fell onto Dane’s arm and neck as he twisted the blade, shifted the massive weight away from himself, and with a heave sent the massive body over the side. The giant cried out as his black body was swallowed in the bed of frothy smoke below.
Voices sounded up above. Dane saw another woman – a warrior, from the looks of her, familiar and yet entirely unknown to him – ascend from the opposite end of the bridge, a mirror of his own position. More Gorgoloth trailed behind her, rushing at her with axes and enormous spears while she made a dangerously fast descent down the slope; bits of loose stone and black ice fell away before her.
Dane felt the ground shift, and he heard a loud crack of stone. There was too much weight on the bridge. The ship’s wood creaked, loudly, as if voicing its protest. The Gorgoloth on the bridge looked back and forth between Dane and the dame. Time seemed to freeze as Dane readied himself for the hammer blow that would follow. The dame, he saw, also had a vra’taar in hand, and for a moment, even though he couldn’t clearly see her at that distance he knew that at that moment they locked eyes, that they saw in each other a kindred that would last only moments before they both died protecting people they’d never before met. They raised their blades overhead at once; their radiant blades refracted the dead light of the pale sun.
For that moment – perhaps the first moment in his entire laugh – Dane was proud of himself.
The Gorgoloth moved closer. The maul in the giant’s hands was covered in fetishes and jagged bone protrusions, and the sling that dangled from the hooks at hammer and hilt was woven of beaded human flesh. Dane crouched down and set his blade. The white eyes of the black giant fell on Dane, and then past him. Dane saw a shadow in the reflection of those eyes: a cloaked wraith that floated through the air in a haze of silver and grey.
The maul swung, and missed, and even as the resounding impact against the stone sent up sparks and echoed through Dane’s skull he leapt forward into the air and arched his vra’taar down to take the giant in the throat. At that moment, a funnel of churning flame violently tore the world apart: it was a lance of cold white fire, and it tore through the sky and ignited the air.
Everything happened at once. Dane felt hot blood wash up over him as his momentum forced the dead Gorgoloth to the ground; the impact knocked the wind out of Dane and jolted his limbs with such terrible force that he felt his bones nearly snap. Shouts and steel hammered his skull as he rolled forward and onto the slope, where his motion rolled him painfully forward down loose stone and a rain of sparks. Dane’s eyes opened for a moment, long enough to see the dame escape down from the opposite hill, long enough to see the Cruj struggle against his captor, long enough to see the Gorgoloth sentry walk towards him, languidly. Its bare and clawed feet crunched ice and rock beneath their path as the giant almost playfully advanced to where Dane would end his uncontrolled descent. Its axe was ready, and Dane almost felt it cleave in half well before the haft was even raised and his executioner’s massive teeth gleamed in the white fire, which was just moments before the sky seemed to explode.
There was, for the briefest of moments, a splotch of darkness in the sky: a blot of ink, a hole. Then there was the fire, which erupted in a whirlpool of churning white and blue that had the consistency of ice but that burned with such intense heat Dane almost screamed. Bits of the flaming goop sprayed onto his armor, and if not for his continued fall towards the nadir of the stone bridge the heat would have undoubtedly eaten through his armor. His would-be executioner was not so lucky: the Gorgoloth’s eyes and face were burned in a spray of flaming ice that latched onto its black skin and clung there like a burning parasite. Heat lashed against Dane like whips of fire. Something died in front of him; sticky drops of red rain hailed down onto the snow. The sound of the explosion shook the air.
Dane landed at the bottom of the bridge, hard on his face. He tasted blood and felt ice pressed into his face like splinters. Though the air had been knocked from his lungs, Dane struggled to rise. The fire was gone, but the sonic vibration left in the air in the wake of the strange explosion still resonated. Dane came to his knees with the help of a beautiful blonde-haired woman. She had deep green eyes and a scar down one side of her face, and she wore the black and purple armor of The Fallen, even if she bore a Dawn Knight’s blade. Dane looked behind her, and saw that all of the Gorgoloth had shared a similar fate as that who’d been ready to kill him: their flesh had been burned away by the same dreadful fires, the fiery plasma vomited up by their burning hole in the sky. Their bodies writhed on the ground all along the bridge and on up the slope that led to the far ridge; smoking vapors rose from their immense corpses.
© 2007 Steven Montano
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