Richard Byers: Queen of the Depths

The dragon turtle boiled a squad of tritons with another puff of its superheated breath. Water drakes and dolphins spun around one another in a combat like intricate dance. The cetaceans fought fearlessly, and their bards sang songs laced with magic, but the reptiles had them overmatched and ripped them to bloody shreds of fin and viscera. A dragon eel caught a giant crab in its beak, bit down, and cracked its adversary’s shell. Still alive for the moment, the arthropod groped with its pincers, but the drake kept is scaly coils out of reach.

Two dragons, the colossal black Ingvatorc had tried and failed to imprison and the equally enormous topaz, tore another contingent of morkoths and slave warriors into a gory haze. Hetham saw with a thrill of terror that no one remained between the wyrms and his own company. Sure enough, the reptiles oriented on them and charged, legs stroking and kicking, wings sweeping, and tails lashing.

Some of the mermen turned and bolted. For an instant, Hetham wondered if he was gong to do the same. But evidently he was not, though he wasn’t sure why. He was certain he was just as frightened as those who’d fled.

“Aim!” the captain shouted.

The mermen lifted their crossbows. Hetham pointed his weapon of bone and coral and its bolt of blowfish spine at the topaz’s radiant yellow eye.

“Shoot!”

The volley flew. Hetham’s quarrel missed the eye by a finger’s length. For an instant, he thought it might still do some good, but it just glanced off the creature’s brow. Many of his comrades’ darts did the same. A few lodged in the dragons’ scales, but failed to penetrate deeply enough to kill or cripple. It seemed possible that the reptiles didn’t even feel the stings.

Some storm giants cast additional spells, but whatever the resulting flashes of green and purple light, sudden chill, carrion stink, and head-spinning moment of dizziness were supposed to accomplish, the reptiles weathered it all without slowing down or veering off. The rest of the band discharged their own crossbows. The oversized missiles might have done the dragons some actual damage, but they dodged the bolts by lashing their serpentine bodies low or from side to side. The black had but a single hole punched in its leathery wing, and the topaz suffered no harm at all.

“Tridents!” the merman officer shouted, reasonably enough. A warrior didn’t want to be caught with a missile weapon in his grasp when the foe closed to striking distance, even if said foe’s prodigious fangs and talons were such fearsome implements of destruction that Hetham’s three-pronged lance seemed a joke by comparison.

The giants dropped their crossbows and unsheathed greatswords of sharp, faceted claw coral. For a sea creature Hetham’s size, such a cutting, chopping weapon was all but useless. The resistance of the water kept a merman from swinging it hard enough to do much damage. But beings as strong as Ingvatorc and his kin could wield them to deadly effect. Hetham tried to draw some encouragement from that fact.

Meanwhile, the dragons raced closer, loomed larger, until even the giants seemed puny by comparison. For Hetham, dazed with dread, the moment had a dreamlike quality, and he had the daft thought that if only he’d lived a better life, and so inclined the gods to love him better, it might truly be possible to escape this doom by the simple expedient of waking up.

Just as the drakes were about to close, one of the storm giants bellowed a command or war cry in his own language. He and his fellows lunged to meet the onrushing dragons, essayed a first strike with their long, heavy, gemlike blades, then tried to dodge and spin away from the reptiles’ ripostes. Some were such able swordsmen, or had so augmented their natural prowess with enchantment, that they jumped away from that first exchange unscathed. Another, less skillful or less fortunate, sank down to the sea floor with three gaping vertical rents in his torso. Blood streamed out to dirty the water, to taint it with its coppery smell and taste.

“Kill them!” the merman officer cried.

The warrior beside Hetham cried out, “I’m sorry!” dropped his trident, and fled. Everyone else rushed forward. Hetham had once watched a big shark and eel fighting while smaller fish, ignored, perhaps even unnoticed, whirled around the combatants to feast on drifting morsels of flesh from their wounds. The moments that followed reminded him of that, with his fellow mermen and himself playing the roles of the scavengers.

The dragons were too intent on the giants, by far the more serious of the two threats facing them, to pay much heed to mermen. Unfortunately, the wyrms were so huge and powerful that they could annihilate a smaller creature hovering close at hand without even particularly intending to. The black-scaled “skull dragon,” as such reptiles with their shriveled masks were called, raked at a giant, accidentally snagged a merman on the tip of one claw, and crushed him when it set its foot back down. A random swat from a dusky wing shattered the bones in another warrior’s body. The topaz pivoted to strike at the towering swordsman on its flank, and its whipping tail smashed the merman officer’s head, which tumbled clear of his shoulders.

Even the storm giants posed a hazard. One feinted a cut at the jewel wyrm’s leg then whirled his blade high for the true strike at its neck, without seeing the merman obliviously swimming into the arc of the attack. The coral blade sheared off the flukes of his tail.

All but choking on the blood in the water, his eyes smarting and nearly blinded by it, Hetham strained to block out the horror of what was happening, believing his side might actually have a chance. For after all, the giants were fearsome combatants. Their greatswords hacked long, deep gashes in the dragons’ hides. At the very least, they were keeping the wyrms busy, and while they managed that, maybe the mermen’s desperate little pokes and jabs would actually do some good.

He wanted to think so. But despite their wounds, the dragons never faltered, while, one by one, the giants slowly collapsed to the sea floor with crushed, misshapen heads, shredded torsos, and ragged stumps where massive limbs had been. Finally only Ingvatorc remained. The reptiles maneuvered to flank him, and knowing himself overmatched, he started jabbering a spell. Before he could finish, though, the wyrms pounced. He lashed out with a stop cut, and intent on the kill, the topaz didn’t even try to avoid it. The blade sliced its flank, but at the same instant, the creature caught Ingvatorc’s shoulder in its jaws.

Meanwhile, the skull wyrm plunged its fangs into the giant’s lower back. The drakes twisted, wrenching and pulling in opposite directions, and Ingvatorc’s torso ripped into two pieces.

With that accomplished, the reptiles rounded on the surviving mermen. The topaz clawed at Hetham. He jerked out of the way and swam backward.

The retreat carried him into water where the drifting blood wasn’t quite so thick, permitting a glimpse of the battle as a whole. What he saw came as no surprise but wrung his heart nonetheless.

The army of the alliance was finished, Dukars, high mages, morkoths, mermen, shalarins, sea-elves, and tritons all annihilated, or maybe, in the case of a few lucky folk, put to flight.

We tried, he thought, perhaps addressing the multitude of folk who’d depended on them for their deliverance. I swear by the tides, we tried. But we just couldn’t stop them. No one could.

Still, he had a duty to fight on, for these last few moments of life. He aimed his trident at the topaz’s mask. If it bit at him, he would try again to put out its luminous yellow eye.

But when he met its gaze, pain exploded through his head, paralyzing him. Before he could recover, its fangs pierced him through.