Richard Byers - The Spectral Blaze

She cast some of the fire back into the Undying Pyre from which she and her weapon had drawn it in the first place. She sent part of it leaping up around her in a blue and gold pillar higher than the tallest spire in Luthcheq. Yet still there was more, shaking and drowning her at the same time.

She struggled against panic until something-a wizard’s intuition, perhaps-told her there was something else she could do with the fire, some alchemy it might accomplish and expend or cage itself thereby. Without trying to understand further-there was no time-she willed that magic into being. Heat blazed along her nerves and through her veins.

The staff screamed with the ecstasy of manipulating so much flame. It was still caterwauling when it exploded, and the shock flung Jhesrhi from brightness into darkness.

Flying above all the foot soldiers and horsemen, Aoth could see exactly what ailed Alasklerbanbastos. Clad in their vestments and regalia, a collection of the city’s priests stood in the luminous haze of the power they were raising. The cloud grew brighter at the front, where it was transferring all that divine might to Cera. It burned from the head of the mace in her outstretched hand as a beam that was shoving Alasklerbanbastos backward, breaking away pieces of bone, and charring other bits to ash.

Unfortunately even that wasn’t enough to stop him. Breasting the tide of light, he plunged forward.

Discerning Aoth’s intent, Jet dived at the dracolich.

Aoth had already expended the greater part of his magic, but he blasted Alasklerbanbastos with flame on the way down. Then Jet slammed onto the naked vertebrae of the undead dragon’s neck.

The griffon instantly started clawing and biting. Thanks to their psychic link, Aoth felt both Jet’s fury and his frustration as the massive bones proved difficult to crack or even scratch. Rider and mount jerked as the lightning sizzling around their foe’s body jolted them.

Aoth flailed his arm and flung his shield away. He gripped his spear with both hands, charged it with destructive force, and began stabbing at the narrow gap between two vertebrae. He wanted to break whatever it was that held them together.

Alasklerbanbastos lurched to a halt. He tried to twist his head around to get at his attackers but couldn’t manage it. Jet had plunged down too close to the skull.

That didn’t mean the blue was helpless. Aoth listened for the start of an incantation and watched for any little shift that might signal Alasklerbanbastos’s intention to fling him and Jet loose with a snap of his neck or to crush them by rolling.

None of that happened. But suddenly Aoth realized that the little shocks that had stabbed into him and Jet had stopped. Yet the smell of an oncoming storm was stronger than ever.

“Fly!” he bellowed and Jet sprang into the air. An instant later, big lightning bolts flared down the length of Alasklerbanbastos’s skeleton, arcing and crackling from his skull to the end of his tail and back again.

Aoth and Jet had avoided that attack, but by returning to the air, they made it possible for the lich to reach them by other means. With more little pieces of his body crumbling and falling away as ash, Alasklerbanbastos whirled and struck.

Jet lashed his wings and dodged. The huge fangs snapped shut on empty air, showering sparks as they clashed together.

Jet tried to get out from in front of the dragon’s gnashing jaws and paralyzing stare. But Alasklerbanbastos matched him shift for shift, meanwhile snarling words of power.

Aoth stood up in the stirrups and drove the spear deep into Alasklerbanbastos’s brow, between the empty, glowing orbits and the bony spikes above. The undead blue jerked his head back and so tore his attacker’s weapon from his grip. Aoth cursed. But at least when the lich recoiled, he stumbled in the cadence of his conjuring, and it finally gave Jet the chance to swing out from in front of him.

As the griffon climbed, Aoth saw that they weren’t the only ones who’d engaged Alasklerbanbastos in close combat. Medrash, Balasar, and others were on the ground, hacking at the blue’s legs like woodsmen felling trees. Somewhat to Aoth’s surprise, neither the paladin nor his sword was glowing, nor were there any luminous runes floating around his body. Apparently he’d already expended every bit of mystical strength at his command.

But he must have been doing some damage even so because Alasklerbanbastos raised his foot high to stamp on him.

Aoth sent Jet diving back down onto the blue’s neck. Alasklerbanbastos staggered and Medrash scrambled out from under the creature’s talons.

Jet bit and tore at the dracolich. Aoth willed his safety harness to unbuckle, grabbed the warhammer strapped to the saddle to serve as a backup weapon, and clambered over the griffon’s rump. Without the reach his lost spear had provided, it was the only way to get at his foe.

A jerk of Alasklerbanbastos’s neck almost flung him off, but he crouched low and grabbed a projecting knob of bone. He stayed in that attitude as he began to pound. The impacts woke the enchantments bound in the hammer. The glyphs graven into the steel glowed brighter and brighter, and each blow hit harder than the one before it.

Finally somebody’s attack-Aoth had no idea whether it came from him, Jet, one of the dragonborn, Oraxes, or Cera and the priests-proved lethal. Alasklerbanbastos roared, convulsed, and shattered like a piece of porcelain.

That left Aoth with nothing underneath him. But he released the magic bound in a tattoo quickly enough to turn a plummet into a slower descent. Bits of bone clattering beneath him, he drifted down into a cloud of dust and ash.

Caught in the midst of it, Balasar coughed and spat. “This is why I hate fighting the undead,” he panted. “You always get filthy.”

The twin strands of fire-the one streaming from Tchazzar to Jhesrhi and the one leaping from the wizard up into the sky-winked out at the same moment.

The sudden loss of all that brightness muddled Gaedynn’s sight. For a heartbeat, he imagined that the magic had stopped because Jhesrhi had killed or crippled the dragon. Then he saw that, although Tchazzar had shrunken into a wasted thing like the prisoner from the Shadowfell, with his gashed hide hanging loose on shriveled limbs, he was still on his feet. It was Jhesrhi who toppled with her body still wreathed in flame. Gaedynn couldn’t tell if that was a last, harmless manifestation of the magic she’d just worked or if she was in imminent danger of burning to death.

But he did see Tchazzar resume hobbling toward her, and he knew that if the red dragon reached her, she was going to die no matter what.

He sent Eider plunging to the ground. He tore at his safety straps and leaped off the griffon’s back. “Fly!” he shouted. Eider lashed her wings and sprang back into the air.

But Son-liin didn’t go along. She, too, swung herself off Eider’s back and snatched an arrow from her quiver.

His golden eyes burning as brightly as ever, Tchazzar glared down at the human and genasi who stood between him and the fallen wizard. “This is good,” he rumbled. “You’re another one I wanted to kill personally.”

“Shut up and die,” Gaedynn answered. He shot at the wyrm’s right eye. Son-liin loosed her shaft too.

Tchazzar tossed his head, and neither arrow hit an eye or any other particularly vulnerable spot, although Gaedynn’s did stick in the creature’s face. He reached for another of the few shafts left in his quiver, and the dragon advanced. His legs were so long that, even limping, he would come within reach of his foes with another stride or two.

Then Khouryn charged in on the dragon’s right. He bellowed, “East Rift!” and chopped at Tchazzar’s good foreleg with his axe. Armed with lances, Hasos and other warriors jabbed at the colossal creature’s belly. Meralaine and a white-scaled dragonborn hurled jagged blades of shadow and bursts of pale frost respectively.