Troy Denning - The Titan of Twilight

“Of course he should!” Brianna said. “Lanaxis is mad with power-lust. Tavis’s anger is no match for that.”

Galgadayle sighed heavily. “Then we are finished.”

Brianna shook her head. “Perhaps not. There are plenty of emotions mightier than power-lust.” She turned to Tavis. “When Lanaxis tries to call Sky Cleaver away, fight him with a stronger emotion. Call it back with compassion in your heart, and you will win.”

Basil shook his head. “That won’t work. How can Tavis fight while he’s trying to be compassionate?” the runecaster demanded. “He’ll never kill the titan that way!”

Brianna let her eyes drop to her son’s cherubic face. “Of course not, Basil.” She kissed Kaedlaw on the brow. “We can’t defeat Lanaxis by killing him.”

Fools. Watch this.

A gloomy hand appeared first, as they knew it would, rising from the pit as the ashen afternoon darkened into twilight. Tavis stood on the boulder, Sky Cleaver in hand, with Basil and Galgadayle to either side of him. Brianna, unable to leave Bleak Palace, stood beside Kaedlaw at the end of the demolished portico.

Waiting was the hardest part. The queen’s plan called for the One Wielder to attack last, but he wanted nothing more than to leap now and finish the battle. They had made their plans and completed all their preparations. He felt as though the combat had been fought already and they were only awaiting news of the victor.

The arm climbed slowly, filling the pit so completely that it seemed to drag the edges of the hole up with it. The limb continued to rise until it loomed above the boulder to twice Tavis’s height, then tipped toward Bleak Palace and lay flat as a fallen tower. The hand wedged its fingers into the broken plain and pulled. An enormous, gloom-cloaked shoulder appeared in the hole.

“Now, Galgadayle!” Tavis urged. “Before he can call to Sky Cleaver.”

The seer stepped forward and threw a glowing dagger. The blade sank deep into the titan’s flesh, illuminating his shoulder in a brilliant halo of light.

If Lanaxis felt the weapon’s sting, he showed no sign.

Basil attacked next, rushing forward with a javelin-sized knife stolen from the palace kitchen. For once, his flat feet made no sound as they slapped the ground, for he had painted runes of silence upon his boots. The runecaster lowered his weapon as though it were a lance and drove the point deep into the titan’s clavicle.

Basil’s legs were still pumping when the tenebrous arm abruptly dissolved into wisps of purple murk. He plunged forward. The verbeeg’s mouth opened in a silent scream. He flailed his arms, dropping his weapon into the dark pit where the titan’s shoulder had been a moment earlier.

Tavis leapt off the boulder and grabbed Basil’s arm, pulling him away from the hole before he followed his knife into what remained of the Twilight Vale.

“It was an illusion!” Galgadayle continued to stare into the pit as he spoke.

“Then he’ll be returning from someplace else.” Tavis spun toward Bleak Palace, expecting to see the titan’s looming figure charging across the demolished portico.

There was only Brianna, standing at the edge of the lowest step, with twilight rising around her like a ground fog. Tavis turned slowly and saw the purple gloom seeping up all across the plain.

No, not across the entire plain. To the east, a blanket of damson light was falling from the sky to cover the ashen snows. Twilight did not rise from the ground, not on a tableland as vast as the Bleak Plain.

“Watch yourselves!” the high scout yelled. “He’s coming up under-”

Four purple talons burst from the ground and seized Tavis, crushing his arms to his sides. Sky Cleaver popped free and tumbled away. The shadowroc’s foot closed only tightly enough to hold the high scout motionless, as though the bird thought he still had the axe and feared squeezing too tightly would trigger the weapon’s defenses.

The shadowroc was emerging upside down. As its enormous breast rose from the plain, both Sky Cleaver and Basil tumbled off. The runecaster hit first, with the axe’s enormous heft falling across his chest.

The verbeeg’s baggy eyes grew as round as plates. His thick-lipped mouth fell open, and he glanced up at Tavis. When he found the high scout still locked helplessly in the raptor’s enormous claw, he raised his sagacious eyebrows in apology. He looked away and wrapped both arms around Sky Cleaver’s ivory handle.

Tavis felt the syllables of the axe’s ancient summons rise spontaneously in his chest, but he could not force so many strange words past his trammeled ribs. An unreasoning panic welled up inside him, not because he was caught in the titan’s grasp, but because he had lost Sky Cleaver.

As the shadowroc’s enormous wings and tail rose from beneath the plain, Basil rolled onto his stomach and covered Sky Cleaver. The runecaster murmured something, then he began to pale-hair, flesh, even his clothes.

A shrill screech erupted from the shadowroc’s throat as it broke completely free of the ground. Tavis felt himself whirl. The enormous bird rolled off its back, and then the air throbbed beneath the force of its great wings. Basil’s figure, already as translucent as alabaster and still paling, began to recede. The raptor beat its wings again. The plain spread out beneath Tavis like a milky-blue sea. In the center lay a dark island of shattered ground, the ruins of Bleak Palace.

There was nothing above save the shadowroc’s umbral torso, a ceiling of purple feathers as vast as a cloud. Every few seconds, the bird’s distant wingtips dipped below its gloomy abdomen, lifting them ever higher into the sky. Perhaps twenty paces away, the sticklike stump of a severed leg dangled beneath the fan of a monstrous tail.

Tavis began to work his pinned arms back and forth. Though it required only a few moments to free an arm, by the time he succeeded the shadowroc had carried him so high he could have looked down on the moon. The immensity of Bleak Palace was a mere dot in the milky snows below. He could look across the Endless Ice Sea to where it spilled off the northern edge of the world, and in the opposite direction he saw the dark valleys of Hartsvale lying beyond the white teeth of the Ice Spires North.

The shadowroc leveled off. Tavis wrapped his free arm around a talon toe and jerked back as hard as he could. There was a muffled crack, and the bird opened its claw. The high scout dangled for an instant, then pulled himself up to wrap his free arm around the raptor’s ankle. He shimmied up the tarsus as fast as he could, trying to reach the jungle of feathers overhead.

The shadowroc’s ebony beak darted back beneath its breast, a blue tongue fluttering in its gaping maw.

Tavis grabbed a handful of feather vanes and pulled himself into the dark thicket that covered the bird’s meaty thigh, barely escaping the hooked mandible that came scraping across the tarsus below.

Suddenly, the high scout’s legs began to rise, as though floating, and his entire body followed, straining away from the shadowroc’s thigh. The vast expanse of the Endless Ice Sea flashed past his eyes, then the starlit sky, the jagged Ice Spires, and finally the creamy snows of the Bleak Plain. Tavis pulled himself deeper into the feathers and held on for his life, trying to keep from being thrown clear as the raptor tumbled. Again, the Ice Sea flickered past, followed so quickly by the stars and distant mountains that the sky and ground blurred into a kaleidoscope.

The shadowroc pulled a beakful of feathers from its thigh and tossed them to the wind. Tavis could not tell how far the bird had already fallen, but he felt certain those hooked mandibles would find him long before the raptor crashed itself into the ground. Nor could he climb to a safer hiding place. It was all he could do to keep from being flung off the tumbling creature. He realized now why the titan had attacked in this form. As long as they were in the air, Lanaxis was the master; even if the high scout had been holding Sky Cleaver, he could not have killed his foe without sending himself plummeting toward the wasteland below.