Don Bassingthwaite: The Eye of the Chained God

The first time Vestapalk, as a young dragon, had flown high, he’d felt like the world belonged to him. Not in the sense of boundless opportunity, the way lesser races seemed to mean it, but in a way that woke something in his dragon heart. The world belonged to him. From horizon to horizon, everything below was his to possess, nurture, or destroy as he saw fit. And the higher he flew, the more the distant horizons expanded and the more his territory presented itself.

Oh, he had been a naive wyrmling. His quest for power in the years since had nearly killed him more than once. But he was still flying and his territory was still growing. Soon the world would truly belong to him.

In distant Nera, a human woman fled from him down a dark alley. She did not realize he only drove her into a trap. Vestapalk shifted his focus so that the woman ran toward him, lurking near the alley’s end.

Outside the gates of a shadowed dwarf town, he gripped a struggling guard with four wiry legs and chewed on his shoulder with sharp teeth. The dwarf screamed. Other guards appeared. Vestapalk leaped from his original prey straight into the midst of the would-be rescuers. He bit a second and raked claws of red crystal across the face of a third. None of them would die, not as such. They had his saliva and fragments of his claws in their wounds, though. They were infected.

In a hut in a lush, wet forest, he stared in horror at the spindly, gnarled horror his arm had become. Four fingers had fused into two thick digits. The pus had drained from his red sores to reveal lumps of crystal that couldn’t be scratched away-when he tried, his skin just tore to show more crystal and something hard and black like living stone beneath. He could feel more sores all over his body bursting whenever he moved. There was something in his mind, too. Some presence, watching him. Watching through him.

“More than watching,” Vestapalk said through those distant lips, and the man in the hut screamed at the words that were not his own. No one responded to his cry. The village was empty, its other inhabitants fled.

Find them, Vestapalk said directly into the mind of his new minion. But do not kill them-not all of them at least. Bite them. Cut them. Open wounds. Make them as you are.

“Yes,” said the creature in the hut. It rose on thick legs, the last rags of its humanity sloughing off with every step.

On a ship three days from the nearest port, Vestapalk listened as sailors who had nowhere to flee to whispered of murder and mutiny. The captain was sick with the plague. Maybe not just any plague-there had been rumors in the last port of a sickness that transformed sufferers into monsters. Demons. They were calling it the Abyssal Plague. If they wanted to reach their next port, the mutineers said, they had to act now. Throw the captain overboard. Aye, and anyone who showed signs of sickness. Vestapalk smiled to himself. It was too late for that. Shadows clung to him as he drifted into the circle of mutineers, touching each sailor with light, darting taps. Eyes went wide and color drained from faces. Vestapalk didn’t know what visions of fear filled their minds, but it didn’t matter. The demon that had been their captain flexed its taloned fingers and lashed out at the would-be mutineers.

When the vessel arrived at its destination, it would be a plague ship. Vestapalk’s horde would continue to grow.

From a marsh where lizardfolk fled from a horde of crystal spiders with humanoid eyes, to a forest village where elves battled creatures formed of living flame around crystalline crimson hearts, to an ancient city whose inhabitants hid while juggernauts big as houses stalked the streets-Vestapalk roamed the world that would soon be his in both name and substance. Just a thought was enough to extend his awareness to any of the multitude of demons his plague had birthed. His horde shared the touch of the alien Voidharrow that had transformed him from a mere dragon to something far, far greater. They were of the Voidharrow. He was the Voidharrow. Where they were, he was. And he was everywhere.

Except the one place from which he had so far been thrown back.

The scope of his perception collapsed with that thought. Vestapalk tumbled back into his own body.

The noise of the Plaguedeep returned to him first. The chittering, shrieking, and roaring of hundreds of plague demons gathered at the heart of his power, all traces of the beings they had been gone. The soft, seething hiss of the Voidharrow as it ate into the bones of the world-less of a sound and more of a sensation at the edge of his awareness. The irregular boom and crackle of the unbound elements upon which the Voidharrow had already done its work. Vestapalk let the sounds wash over him for a moment, then he opened his eyes.

Not so long ago, the Plaguedeep had been the crater of an active volcano, where tubes of magma stretched like arteries deep into the world. But the Voidharrow transformed more than just living flesh, and Vestapalk had spewed vast quantities of it into the roiling molten rock. Until the crater had become a great shaft, where boulders and columns of stone floated like air, lightning oozed like mud, and wind howled in gales so furious they were thick as waves of water.

At the very bottom of the Plaguedeep, the Voidharrow collected in a pool of liquid crimson crystal shot through with ribbons of silver and flecks of gold. Vestapalk rode the surface of the pool, embraced and supported by it. Sluggish ripples spread across the surface, deceptive in their motion-they didn’t radiate out from Vestapalk, but instead stirred slowly toward him. The Voidharrow knew its master.

So did the plague demons. As if they could sense the anger and frustration within him, they grew quiet. Where they lurked in niches and tunnels, along ledges, and clinging to the softened rock of the shaft walls, they went still. The incessant fighting, the constant struggling to establish position in an ever-shifting hierarchy stopped. Eyes of a hundred varieties set in heads of all shapes and sizes turned to Vestapalk. For a moment, he saw himself as they saw him: still draconic in form but lean, all hide and muscle, his flesh contracted around his bones. Scales that had once been brilliant green carried a tinge of red. Red showed too in the spurs of crystal that had erupted around his joints and in the translucent spikes that rose along his spine.

When he flexed, Voidharrow flashed between his scales like embers in a fire. It was within him, dripping like venom from his jaws and filling his eyes. It consumed him. It sustained him. When dry scales sloughed from his hide, it welled up to form glittering new scales in their place, as the old scales squirmed with brief pseudo-life on the shifting surface of the pool.

The plague demons looked at him with hunger and desire. And fear. When he snarled at them, they flinched as one and dropped their gazes in submission. Or rather, most of them dropped their gazes. On the far side of the pool, a bulky figure stood tall. It met Vestapalk’s gaze, then stepped out from among the plague demons clustered around it.

Most of the demons were bone thin, as if their flesh had been fuel for the transformation wrought by the Abyssal Plague. A few were muscular and solid. Churr Ashin was bigger even than them. Plates of crystal armor spanned his shoulders, running down his arms and along his spine. His movements were ponderous. Each slow jump as he made his way along the rough, crystal-studded rocks that formed a kind of stepping stone pathway out into the pool threatened to dump him into the Voidharrow. A few demons watched him, hope for a spill naked and malicious on their faces.

Churr disappointed them. The massive creature was one of Vestapalk’s exarchs, anointed with the Voidharrow by Vestapalk’s own tongue. He had the strength and power to crush any lesser demon’s skull in one meaty fist. He’d done it more than once.