Troy Denning: The Titan of Twilight

The tallest, wrapped in a cloak of the whitest linen, would be Nicias, dynast of the cloud giants. Behind him was red-bearded Masud, khan of the fire giants, his dark armor glimmering through even the thick layers of dirt and ice crusting the steel. Next were Vilmos, paramount of the storm giants; Ottar, jarl of the frost giants; Ruk, chief of the hill giants; Obadai, sage of the stone giants; and several others, among them the progenitors of some races that had not been seen in the Ice Spires since before Hartsvale was a kingdom. In their black and withered hands, all the monarchs clutched ancient weapons of splendor and power.

“Hiatea watch over us!” Galgadayle was standing with Tavis and Basil between Othea’s sundered halves, looking over the verbeegs toward the drumlins south of the tor. “We’re doomed!”

“Yes, we are,” agreed Basil. He was looking in the opposite direction, toward Bleak Palace’s looming mass. “By the time we finish with those cadavers, twilight will be upon us.”

Tavis said nothing. He knew better than to think he could defeat all of the dead giant kings, even with Sky Cleaver in his hand. The weapon’s defenses would age him to dust long before he could strike half of them down. Still, the titan had been appallingly haughty to call his own victims to his defense, and there was always a way to use an enemy’s arrogance against him.

A cry of fear went up from the verbeegs. Tavis glanced back. The giant kings had stopped well short of the tor, and now they were raising their weapons over their heads.

“Grab hold of me!” Tavis hefted Sky Cleaver. He had no idea whether the axe would protect his friends, but he hoped that if they were close enough to him, the attacks would also be deflected around them. “Don’t let go.”

Nicias whirled his pearly morningstar over his head, spraying a cloud of boiling white vapor toward the sundered tor. In the same instant, Vilmos brought his sword down on the plain, Ruk smashed his ebony club into his own palm, Masud pointed his flaming spear at Tavis’s chest, and a dozen different kinds of cataclysm struck the tor. The air turned as foul and thick as arsenic; sheets of lightning swept across the plain to crackle and dance off Othea’s battered stones; great rifts opened in the ground, and earthquakes pummeled the mount; fire gusted through the cleft like wind, reducing everything it touched to ashes and smoke.

Through it all, Tavis stood motionless, watching in gape-mouthed awe as Toril herself groaned and wailed in complaint. A savage, biting cold rose from Sky Cleaver’s handle and hovered about his body. He felt his skin wrinkling and folding over his flesh, his shoulders stooping beneath the weight of years not yet gone, his bones aching with rheumatism he had not earned. Yet no lightning touched him, no fire scoured him, no poison seeped into his breath; with the world itself ending around him, he did not fall.

At last, the cataclysms ceased, and all that lay between the giant kings and Tavis had vanished. The icy plain had become a torn and churned wasteland, with no sign of the verbeegs or anything else that had cowered there. Except for the stones beneath his feet, Othea Tor herself had crumbled to dust and blown away. Even her abyssal shadow had vanished, save for a single purple shaft at the base of the boulder upon which he stood. And there, lying at Tavis’s feet and clinging to his legs like frightened children, were Basil and Galgadayle. The eyes of both ’kin were white with shock, their expressions as void as the ground around them, their mouths gasping for air.

Seeing that their foe still stood, the giant kings lowered their weapons and started across the wasteland. Where their magic had failed, their strength would not.

“Your brother has made fools of you!” Tavis called. He gently freed his legs and turned to face Bleak Palace, which still stood proud and tall behind Ottar, the frost giant, and Obadai, the stone giant. “He murdered your mother, he poisoned you, and now he has summoned you from your rest to serve his foul purpose.”

The giant kings continued to approach, their shriveled eyes vacant and blank.

Tavis fixed his gaze on Lanaxis, who was peering out from the portico’s shadowy depths. He pointed Sky Cleaver’s head at the titan’s dark figure.

“No!” Lanaxis’s voice echoed out of the colonnade, trembling and quivering with fear. “I forbid it!”

“See what the titan has made of his immortal brothers!” Tavis cried. “Cleave!”

A stinging fire erupted inside the One Wielder’s hands and rushed up his arms into his body. Ottar stopped, then Obadai, Vilmos, and the others. Their shriveled eyes sparkled with glimmers of reason, and one by one they turned to face Bleak Palace.

Lanaxis’s looming figure strode forward through the shadowy portico. As he neared the entrance, he hunched over and scuttled sideways, presenting his shoulder to the sun and shielding his face behind his dingy cloak. He looked more ancient than ever, with a bald pate protruding through his golden crown and a back as hunched as a fomorian’s. He waved a gnarled hand at the giant-kings.

“I release you!” His voice was brittle with age. “Return to your graves!”

The giant-kings raised their weapons as they had done when they attacked Tavis. One of Lanaxis’s eyes opened wide, then the titan abruptly drew himself to his full height and turned to meet his brothers head-on.

Tavis leapt off his boulder and left his dazed companions behind. He sprinted across the broken ground, praying that the angry zombies would not destroy Bleak Palace before he rescued Brianna and Kaedlaw.

He needn’t have worried. As the giant-kings released their cyclone, Lanaxis retreated into his portico and called out the incantation to some spell so ancient and powerful that Tavis felt the air draw tight and crackle with faerie lightning. A shimmering silver curtain fell over the portico, and the zombies’ cataclysms ricocheted off the screen like stone-tipped arrows off steel armor.

Tavis stopped running and crouched on the ground, watching in awestricken wonder as rivers of flame and seas of lightning broke over Bleak Palace. The plain itself was melting around the portico, filling the air with billowing clouds of gray steam. Lanaxis’s citadel did not even quiver beneath the attacks. The giant-kings continued to press forward, persevering in their assaults until at last they reached the building’s entrance.

The cataclysms faded as suddenly as they had begun. Tavis rose and started running again, but he was still a hundred paces from the entrance. Nicias whirled his pearly morningstar and swung it against the shimmering screen Lanaxis had raised. The magical curtain vanished with a blinding flash and a deafening crackle, then an entire corner of the portico crashed down upon the cloud giant’s head.

Nicias fell beneath the avalanche, his huge body broken beyond recognition. The other giant-kings rushed through the opening he had created. Lanaxis stepped forward to meet his zombies, swinging a great sword as tall as gate tower. A thunderous tumult erupted from within the colonnade. Ruk came crashing out of the side wall, his body severed in two. Next fell Masud, who perished beneath untold tons of stone when he knocked a pillar from its foundations. The slaughter continued; Obadai, then Vilmos, and the rest, the portico crashing down around their heads, battering the plain so severely that crevices and rifts shot out hundreds of paces in all directions.

By the time Tavis danced around the pools of melted stone and reached the bottom of what had once been the palace’s entrance, the giant kings had all fallen. Lanaxis stood amid the ruins of his portico, leaning on his great sword and huffing gusts of searing wind across the plain. As far as the One Wielder could tell, the titan had suffered no injuries. The zombies were shattered beyond recognition; bits of their blackened flesh hung across toppled pillars, shards of their broken bones lay scattered through the rubble, and pools of their blood boiled in the cratered floor.