James Maxey - Greatshadow

With sickening suddenness, the screaming stopped. The doorway to the spirit world was gone.

Tower leapt at Nowowon, punching him hard in the knee. “Bring her back!”

“No sir! Prefer prison,” chortled the old god, before smashing the knight in the head with the Gloryhammer. The metallic chime that rang out from the impact practically made my ears bleed. I could only imagine what it must have sounded like on the inside. Tower fell to his knees, holding his head, and Nowowon pushed him over with an oversized toe. He pinned the knight beneath his foot, then tossed the Jagged Heart so that it imbedded in the ground near my feet.

I didn’t flinch. He wasn’t trying to strike me.

I still owed him a murder.

“I need another drink to do this,” I said, holding out my trembling hands. “All the excitement has left me shaky.”

He nodded as he gave me a look of sympathy, an expression out of place on the features of a sadistic god of self-destruction. One of his free hands produced a second jar. “Regal lager,” he said, offering it to me.

“Regal lager,” I agreed, taking the crimson brew from him. I lifted it to my lips, inhaling one long, intoxicating sniff of the heady aroma. Never had I wanted a drink so badly.

But instead of drinking, I spun around, covered a dozen feet in three long strides, and dumped the ice-cold liquor on Father Ver’s face.

The priest’s eyes snapped open, his bloodied brow furrowed in confusion as he focused on me. “You’re the boy who ran away after stealing the poor box,” he said.

Considering that had been damn near forty years ago, I was more impressed than offended by the greeting. The bastard really was good at seeing truth.

“False god!” I said, pointing in Nowowon’s direction. “Get him!”

“Was it a rat I saw?” asked Nowowon. He snapped his fingers and, instantly, my heart stopped. I moaned as my body faded back to its spectral form.

If Father Ver was bothered by my vanishing act, he showed no sign of it. Instead he rose, wiped the blood from his eyes, then straightened his shoulders to look at the old god.

“No! It is opposition!” cried Nowowon, as he shrank back down to the height of an ordinary man. He brandished the Gloryhammer in both hands and growled, “Raw war!”

“War is not necessary,” said Father Ver. “You’ll drop the hammer. It isn’t yours.”

The Gloryhammer slipped from the old god’s shaking fingers.

Father Ver walked toward Nowowon, stepping over the gibbering form of the Deceiver. He looked down on the man with contempt, but took pity as he said, “Your vision isn’t real. You’ve been caught in a mental trap. Arise.”

Zetetic’s eyes opened. He pulled his drool-covered fist from his mouth and gave it a puzzled look.

Father Ver thrust an accusing finger at Nowowon.

“You do not belong here! You are a false being, and have no place in this world!”

Nowowon walked backward toward the vortex of stone, looking at it nervously, as if he was considering making a break for it. But he sounded defiant as he looked back at the Truthspeaker and shouted, “Evil dogma! I am God, live!”

“We both know that isn’t true,” said Father Ver, as Tower crawled to retrieve the Gloryhammer. “I sense a summoning spell at work. Someone has trapped you here against your will. You faded from the memory of men long ago. There are no believers to sustain you.”

“O no! O no! O no!” the old god screamed as he shrank before the force of the Truthspeaker’s words.

“You are a fraud,” said Father Ver, as the old god shrank to waist height.

“You are a perversion,” he said, reducing Nowowon to the size of a house cat.

Father Ver looked down on the diminutive old god and crossed his arms. “You aren’t even worth crushing beneath my sandal. You’re a lie, and no one believes you any more.”

Nowowon squealed as he shrank to the size of a mouse, then a cockroach, then a fly. Lord Tower’s spiked metal boot suddenly slammed down, driving into the solid stone.

“I’m not wearing sandals,” he said, casting the Truthspeaker a sideways glance.

Zetetic ran up, snatching the Jagged Heart from the ground. “Why is there a crippled baby dragon over there? Why is the spirit gate closed? What the hell happened? I thought the world had come to an end!”

“Why would you think that?” asked Tower.

“I threw you both through your gates. Greatshadow was ready for us. He killed you both and came into the chamber and killed the rest of us. I survived because I had told No-Face that fire couldn’t burn me. But when I left this place, I found nothing but ash as far as the eye could see. I traveled the world, entirely alone, for decades without finding another survivor. Even the mermen and ice-ogres were gone. The primal dragons had joined together to strip the earth of all sentient life.”

“You were trapped in a deception by the old god,” said the small dragon, rising up on his misshapen legs with the help of his gnarled cane. This was definitely Relic’s voice, and now there was no mistaking this dragon’s eyes were the same eyes I’d spied through the burlap hood. “Nowowon knew that you were vulnerable to assault with a highly detailed hallucination. You were trapped by what was essentially a lie.”

“It lasted forty years!” said Zetetic, waving the Jagged Heart in Relic’s face for emphasis. “And who the hell are you? Why is no-one telling me why there’s a dragon here?”

He was answered with a deep voice that made the ground tremble.

“There’s a dragon here because you woke me from my slumber.”

Everyone turned to the vortex of stone.

A scaly head the size of a ship had squeezed through the hole. It was a deep, glowing red, the color of embers shimmering beneath a blanket of dark ash. Sulfurous smoke rose from the creature’s nostrils. The dragon glared at us with eyes that burned like foundry furnaces, with a heat that caused Father Ver’s robes to send up tendrils of white smoke from fifty feet away.

All we could do was stare back, the moment frozen, as Greatshadow opened his enormous maw, revealing teeth like ivory stalactites and a tongue like a carpet of lava. Wind howled through me as Greatshadow sucked in air like a bellows.

And then there was fire, a great red wave of flickering tendrils engulfing us in a flood of heat and light. Imagine a coal-fired oven, stoked to a cherry red, with a pot of oil boiling furiously upon it. Imagine plunging your head into this pot, the burning oil working its way into your nostrils and ear canals, into your tear ducts, searing every pore. My spectral teeth burned, my tongue scalded, and there was nothing to do but keep screaming, though I couldn’t even hear my own voice. Once, I’d ridden out a hurricane in my small boat and the roar of the wind had been so loud it loosened my bowels. This devouring flame howled far louder, a crescendo appropriate for announcing the end of the world.

And the smell. As a veteran explorer of volcanoes, I knew all too well the brimstone stench and the peculiar acid tang of molten rock. Add to this the stink of vaporized hair and flesh crackling on the bone and you still cannot imagine the foulness of the atmosphere.

As suddenly as it had begun, the flame passed. The pain jangling my phantom nerves collapsed from incapacitating to merely agonizing. Blinking away the ghost tears in my scalded eyes, it appeared that little had changed. The four figures who’d been present before were still there: Relic, revealed as a dragon, was unharmed, save that his staff was but a heap of white ashes at his feet. He was standing where Infidel’s clothes had been; they were completely gone. There was no sign of the bone-handled knife, though I still felt its tug… from Relic’s mouth?