Far ahead on the Forest Road, Mallik and Sir Rogan leaped from the trees into a mass of Paragor Knights. Nock remained high on a limb and covered them with arrow fire. Mallik came up swinging his massive hammer, crushing two enemies against the trunk of a Blackwood. Sir Rogan’s broadaxe felled three enemies as if they were saplings. The two Alleb warriors, with steely, grim purpose, marched side by side plowing up the Forest Road, and none withstood them. Nock leaped from tree to tree, keeping a watchful eye.
“Is your axe full yet?” Mallik joked. “Shall we go home now?”
Sir Rogan stroked his beard, glared at his friend, and thundered up the road.
“I guess not,” Mallik said and raced to keep up with him.
Since the battle began, the three of them had fought their way through more than a hundred Paragor Knights, and Nock had to climb down to scavenge for more arrows. They walked along unopposed for a time, but something about the quiet of the wood was unnerving. And the absence of the enemy, the absence of an attack, was more troubling still.
Sir Rogan stopped unexpectedly and held up his large fist. “There is something on the air,” he said. His voice was low, gravelly, and full of anger. “It is like the burning of many things.” And soon, they all smelled it. With each step up the Forest Road, the odor became more acrid—and the sickening stench was almost too much to bear.
They proceeded cautiously, taking slow, even breaths and straining to hear. Nock noticed that foliage along the road began to appear wilted, and many of the trees had an odd lean. Soon, the smell became stifling, and the smoldering trees on both sides were toppled and charred as if an intense fire had come upon them suddenly. Small fires crackled deep into the woods. The road rolled out ahead, gray and shadowy, but crisscrossed with strange twisting patterns.
“Ah!” Nock exclaimed, pointing to their feet. “The road! Look at the road!”
Mallik and Sir Rogan strained to see, but at first they could not tell what had terrified Nock. Then Mallik leaped to the side. “They are bodies!” he bellowed.
“Shapes of bodies . . . ,” Nock said.
“King Eliam, save us!” Sir Rogan exclaimed. “They have been burned into the ground . . . reduced to an ashen imprint upon the road!”
“. . . and bows,” Nock said as he recognized the distinctive shape of the Yewland Braves’ Blackwood bows burned into the road. “My kin!”
“I am sorry, my friend,” said Mallik.
“What has laid low so many braves?” Nock asked, his bow hanging limp at his side.
Sir Rogan knelt by one of the bodies and stared. “It is near,” he said.
“What do you mean by that?” Mallik demanded.
“The Wyrm Lord,” growled Sir Rogan. “It would take more than a regular dragon’s fire to bring down the trees and burn hundreds of warriors into the ground.”
Suddenly, Sir Rogan clutched his axe, looked skyward, and screamed with pent-up rage for the fallen at Mithegard, and delivered an unmistakable message: The enemy had better beware.
Sir Rogan charged up the road. Mallik and Nock followed.
The trail suddenly widened. The knights stopped and stood very still, their eyes locked on a huge, black, iron-framed carriage that sat upon eight enormous spoked wheels and was drawn by large horses. The top of the carriage was crowned with a dozen torches. A tendril of smoke escaped the roof and snaked up into the night sky.
“We should not have come here!” whispered Nock urgently.
“I feel the marrow in my bones beginning to freeze,” said Mallik.
Sir Rogan did not reply.
And then there was movement at the front of the carriage. Someone very tall stepped down. They heard the dull clink of metal and the heavy thud of his boots as he walked slowly toward the back. Hidden by shadow, they could not see his face, only that he had a weapon of some kind hanging at his side—and his eyes flashed red.
He reached up and worked at something on the side of the carriage—metal sliding against metal. A voice came out of the shadows. It seemed to those who listened that the words were spoken from a grave. “Ancient One, how fortunate, three knights—a meal to enchance your strength. Go now and feast upon them. A taste of Alleble’s fall!”
Though they knew they should flee, Mallik, Nock, and Sir Rogan stood rooted in the road as the huge doors atop the carriage swung open. A long, sharp gasp escaped the carriage as if something very large had drawn a breath. It was followed by a low growl that rose like the moaning of a haunted wind until it peaked with a hideous shriek. The sound rattled the Alleble Knights’ armor and chilled their skin.
Nock stared at the top of the carriage, and what looked like a dark tentacle, blacker than the night shadows around it, began to creep out. Then another. And a third—twisting, grasping, reaching. They were not fleshly things, but rather tendrils of dark mist. More began to spill out of the carriage as if it were a cauldron that could not contain its horrid brew. The mist came more steadily, and the road became darker where it swirled.
The tall figure standing beside the carriage laughed. His eyes flashed red, and he seemed to fade into the shadows as something rose out of the carriage and perched heavily upon it. It was a great winged beast, wreathed in shrouds of the swirling mist. The creature was most like to a dragon—wide wings, long neck and tail, and sharp scales armoring the length of its body. But the black mist that swirled all around the creature issued from its jaws and trailed out from its nostrils. Its eyes, smoldering, red, reptilian eyes, stared back with cunning beyond that of other wyrms. In its gaze a deep history lurked, a knowledge of time that no Glimpse could boast. And there was also murderous hatred—malice born out of the creature’s own evil but nursed in the never-ending night of a stone cell beneath the lake of fire while centuries passed.
Its eyes turned on the three knights of Alleble—first almost in curiosity, then in recognition and hatred. Craning its neck back, it drew in a great breath.
“Beware its fire!” Mallik bellowed, breaking their paralysis. Nock leaped off the road and clambered up the charred trunk of a large tree. Mallik had flung himself into a ditch near the bend in the road. Sir Rogan stood behind one of the blackened trees that remained standing.
The Wyrm Lord spewed a molten stream onto the road where a second before they had stood.
Nock let fly six arrows in rapid succession. But one by one they bounced away from the creature’s scales. “Weak shafts!” Nock muttered, feeling around the quiver frantically for a Blackwood shaft.
The Wyrm Lord hissed and turned toward the archer’s perch. It discharged a burst of flames at Nock’s tree, and it gave way beneath him. Nock was far too agile to be caught so easily. He jumped from the tree where it fell and rolled to the side of the road. He stood to fire again. Finally, he found his last Blackwood shaft from among the other arrows. In a flash, he fitted it to the string and aimed for the beast’s right eye. But the creature’s fire streamed forth again. Nock’s shot was rushed. He loosed it and dove for cover behind a low berm. For the first time in many years, Nock missed.
The Blackwood shaft disappeared harmlessly into the shadowy woods. The Wyrm Lord unleashed its flames once more, and kept Nock pinned down. Try as he might to sink into the ground, Nock was still too close to the heat. He felt his armor grow hot, and his bowstring frayed and snapped. Nock could not breathe, and his thoughts began to swim in feverish mire.
Seeing Nock’s plight, Mallik climbed out of the ditch and ran into the road. He hefted his great hammer and yelled as he rushed toward the creature. “Turn to me, foul-smelling beast!” he bellowed. “And bring your broad face within reach of this hammer!”
But the Wyrm Lord was no dumb serpent, and it understood full well the speech of Glimpse-kind. It leaped down from the carriage to meet Mallik’s charge, but it kept its head away from the lethal hammer. Instead, it opened its jaws and prepared to loose an incinerating blast.
Were it not for Sir Rogan’s quick thinking, Mallik would have perished there. Sir Rogan swept his axe across the tree he had hidden behind, and it crashed down upon the Wyrm Lord’s back. The blow stifled the creature’s fire, and it shrieked so loud and long that Mallik almost collapsed from the sound.
The beast reached up with one of its taloned forelegs and threw the massive tree trunk back at Sir Rogan. Sir Rogan tried to avoid it, but the great tree hit the ground in front of him, bounced, and smashed into him as he fled. Sir Rogan fell like a stone, but the blackened trunk did not come to rest on his sprawled body.
The beast turned back to Mallik, who suddenly realized how foolish and rash his attack had been. He may have saved Nock, but in so doing, he had forced Sir Rogan to expose himself. Now Sir Rogan and Nock were down, and Mallik was left alone before the Wyrm Lord. He turned to flee, but the creature’s tail whipped around and took Mallik’s legs out from under him. He rolled and stood and found himself staring into huge red eyes and gaping jaws full of ivory daggers. Mallik tried to run to his right, but the creature blocked him with one enormous claw. Mallik swerved aside and sprinted back only to find another claw waiting. Mallik—a massive Glimpse even among his large kin in the Blue Mountains—felt like a mouse being toyed with and taunted by a great cat so far superior in strength that it sought entertainment rather than a quick kill.
“I will not die like a common rodent!” Mallik roared. And this time, when the Wyrm Lord’s claw barred his way, Mallik brought his hammer down upon it with every ounce of his strength. The immense pulverizing head of Mallik’s hammer crunched down on the creature’s claw, but only for a second. It sprang away as if Mallik had struck a granite boulder. The shiver of the blow shook the hammer free from Mallik’s hands, and he stood as one thunderstruck. The Wyrm Lord drew back the uninjured claw and smacked Mallik across the road. Mallik shook his head and looked up just as the creature started inhaling a deep breath, but then it stopped as a baleful howl rang out from somewhere deep in the forest.
The Wyrm Lord craned its neck high and, with an odd tilt to its head, seemed to be listening.
Mallik stood, saw his hammer at the feet of the creature, and ran for it. Before Mallik could reach his weapon, the great cry from the forest rose in pitch and intensity until it blotted out all other sounds. Mallik could not bear it and fell to one knee. He covered his ears and looked up at the creature.
When the howling noise finally came to an end, the Wyrm Lord seemed to nod as if in agreement. Then, to Mallik’s surprise, it appeared to have lost interest in the three knights.
Suddenly, the beast spread its great wings, and its body began to convulse. The Wyrm Lord roared, gnashed its teeth, and reared up on its hind limbs. It seemed to be gathering strength—drawing on some hidden reserve of power—preparing to unleash some horrific power. Mallik watched in horror as the rigid pattern of scales on the creature’s armored chest and the folds of cracked skin on its stomach began to change. There appeared faces, anguished faces, as if beings were captive beneath the creature’s flesh and, in great torment, were struggling to be released. The Wyrm Lord shrieked, began to moan, and vomited out a shroud of darkness. Like a dense black tide, it poured out of the creature’s jaws and filled the road.
It swept over Mallik, and all went black.
