Douglas Niles - The Puppet King

But now fires rose from beyond these doors, and the screams of dying elves, accompanied by the horrific stench of charred flesh, roiled into the chamber amid clouds of black, churning smoke. Heat blasted inward with the smoke, and beyond each door, orange flames glowed even brighter than daylight, radiating into the chamber in waves of searing heat.

“Dragons! Dragons of fire!” cried one senator, his face blackened and peeling from a blast of supernatural heat. “The city is burning—Qualinost dies!” he groaned, toppling to the floor and quivering in the throes of convulsion.

Gilthas watched, horrified, as death surrounded the chamber, wading through in the person of the fire-eyed warrior of Chaos, pouring into the side doors as beings of living, boiling flame. A dragon stuck its head through one of these smaller apertures, and the elves recoiled from a visage of gaping jaws and pure, roiling flame. A cloud of fire burst from those jaws, roaring through the chamber, crackling in greedy hunger, killing all the elves across a wide swath of the floor.

“What can we do?” Rashas demanded, staring wildly around, reaching forward to clutch Gilthas by the arms.

“This way!” the Speaker said, breaking away and racing toward the stairs that curled upward to the tower’s higher reaches.

With Rashas at his side, Gilthas darted onto the steps, pounding upward, dashing away from the carnage in the main hall. He left the screams and cries below him, climbing until he was gasping for breath, until his lungs rasped desperately for air. Trying to think, he sought to make some sort of rational plan, but in the end, all he could do was run. Rashas, screaming for him to wait, was left far below.

On an upper level, he burst through a door to find himself on one of the side balconies, perhaps halfway up the thousand-foot spire of the Tower of the Sun. He gaped in horror at the scene of Qualinost spread below him. Immediately he saw that events had advanced rapidly, even in the relatively short time since he had entered the council chamber.

The rainbow bridges flanking the city had collapsed and now smoldered as twisted ruins to the west and south. The sun was still high, red and stark and unforgiving as it blasted downward from a sky of pure, roiling white. It seemed to the elf that it hadn’t moved from its spot at the zenith of the heavens.

Flames broiled upward from many parts of the city as groves, gardens, and splendid buildings were consumed by fire. He noticed, with odd detachment, that even structures of marble and crystal were engulfed, tongues of orange licking along surfaces of solid stone, charring and melting the rock. One lofty spire, the mansion of a great and ancient noble family, shriveled and bent before his eyes. With a groan of helplessness, he watched the structure topple, crashing into the street to crush dozens of panic-stricken elves who fled this way and that.

Here and there he saw more of the fire dragons, at least a dozen creatures of pure, living flame. They seemed to frolic and cavort with monstrous cruelty, trailing sparks, bellowing hate, belching flame. Everything they touched was incinerated, and they howled in unworldly exultation when their fiery tails lashed around to consume the people of the city.

At the base of the Tower of the Sun were two of these creatures, eagerly pouncing on the few elves who had escaped the council chamber below. These wyrms paused only to raise their heads to the skies, roaring in triumph, blasting gouts of fire and sparks from their widespread jaws. Then they dropped to the ground again and resumed their murderous game.

White wings flashed before him, and Gilthas saw a griffon approaching, incongruous in this sky of fire and death. The creature’s feathers were seared by fire, its flesh torn and bleeding, as the valiant animal crashed into the balcony.

Only then did Gilthas see that the creature had a passenger, an elf woman who had been clinging desperately to the saddle. She had long, golden hair, though some of it had been charred away. The skin of her arms was reddened by fire, and she moaned in pain as the Speaker helped her to slump down from the saddle. Only then did he get the shock of recognition.

“Mother!” he cried, taking her in his arms, easing her from the saddle.

Like the griffon, Laurana had been burned. Her skin was blistered, and some of her tunic had been singed away—clearly the griffon had barely evaded one of the fiery wyrms. She was weeping, and he laid her, as gently as possible, on the floor of the balcony. A low wall blocked their view of the tortured city, though Gilthas was keenly aware of the fires that had burned through marble and of the monsters still cavorting at the base of the Tower of the Sun.

The balcony’s tower door burst open, and Rashas tumbled through, gasping for breath, his face streaked with lines of age and horror. Wiping the sweat from his brow, he dropped to one knee and drew deep, ragged breaths. He didn’t seem to notice Gilthas or Laurana as he cowered against the wall, his eyes fixed upon the door that he had slammed behind him.

From within the tower came a sound that chilled the young Speaker’s blood. It was the fire-eyed monster, climbing the stairs, and he could clearly picture it tossing back that grotesque head, mouth gaping as it once again gave voice to that cruel mockery of a laugh.

At that sound, Laurana groaned and opened her eyes. They fixed upon Gilthas, but then widened as the horrible laughter was repeated. Wincing in pain, she struggled to raise herself to a sitting position.

“Mother, what’s happening?” asked Gilthas.

“The Storms of Chaos, my son. They have broken upon us, upon all of Krynn! I was on my way to you when I saw the first signs of war—fires everywhere, dark shadows writhing across the land. And these daemon warriors, such as that thing that we hear now, everywhere leading the forces of Chaos across the world.”

Now the thudding crashes of the daemon warrior’s footsteps boomed beyond the door and halted.

“You—you have a sword!” cried Rashas, suddenly pointing at Gilthas. “You must stand against that thing—fight it, slay it, or we’re doomed.”

Gilthas shook his head, denying the truth. He looked at the griffon, then at his mother. “Get back in the saddle. Fly away from here to safety!”

“Osprey will do no more flying,” the elf woman said gently as the griffon struggled unsuccessfully to raise its proud head. “And in any event, there is no safety, no refuge save what we make for ourselves.”

The door splintered outward, crushed by the impact of a mighty fist, and Gilthas scrambled to his feet, clumsily drawing his sword. This situation was absurd, he knew, remembering the way Fennalt’s sword had bounced off this same creature’s breast. He moaned, fighting back tears, afraid not so much for himself as at the thought of his mother similarly ripped by this unstoppable beast. She had come to him in answer to his summons, when he had called her here for her protection! Now she would die horribly in the hour of her arrival.

Yet somehow he found his feet carrying him forward, his hands—in the maneuvers that Fennalt had taught him only in the last few days—clutching the hilt of the long sword, raising the blade to slash warningly before the daemon warrior’s laughing face.

And even now that face resembled the visage of the warrior the monster had slain, the curved mustache and blocky chin that had once represented such competence to Gilthas. The beast crowed with a cruel caricature of the arrogance that Fennalt had displayed toward the untrained elves he had sought to prepare. Yet now that hauteur had a sneer of real viciousness, and the look of contempt caused Gilthas’s stomach to lurch and his knees to quiver.

But when the monster reached forward, enough of the young elf’s instincts remained that he slashed the sword through a frantic, wheeling arc, driving the keen edge against the daemon warrior’s arm even as he prepared for the aftershock when the blow bounced away. Closing his eyes, gritting his teeth, Gilthas put all of his strength into the attack, praying to every god. With fear and hate, he drove the weapon through the monster’s flesh, lopping off one hand, continuing on to slash deeply into the second wrist. The daemon warrior howled, falling backward for a step as the stunned elf opened his eyes and looked at his bloodied blade, gagging in horror at the sight of the dismembered hand twitching on the floor at his feet.