Edge of Destiny

THE DESTROYER OF LIFE

At the edge of the caldera towered the Destroyer of Life-a massive primordial mantis of stone. Fire blazed from its eyes and joints and roared through its thorax. At its feet lay four burned-out arrows, and at its back boiled a white-hot caldera-the source of its power. The Destroyer of Life gazed down at the lake of fire, where more of its minions emerged, oozing rock. They were infinite, his destroyers. No puny band could stand against the tide of them.

The Destroyer of Life pulled a magma bow from its back and fitted a white-hot shaft to it. The arrow burned with primordial fire. Once woken, it could never be quenched. The champion of Primordus drew back on the metal string, sited the red-haired woman below, and released.

Eir and her comrades watched as the white-hot shaft curved downward, smoking through the air, and came straight for them. They leaped aside. The arrow drilled into the volcanic rock nearby, and flame awoke within the hole.

"He's going to be a challenge," Caithe noted.

Above, the Destroyer of Life lifted his arms and roared. His minions answered, the shout sounding like a volcanic eruption.

"Hold them back!" Eir commanded. She fitted and loosed three more shafts.

They struck the Destroyer of Life and spewed frost but did nothing more.

"They don't work!" Rytlock growled, climbing up a smoldering mound of destroyer parts. "Try something else!"

"Buy me time!"

Logan's powerstone-enhanced war hammer pounded the head of a destroyer. The creature's outer skin solidified. Another blow ripped the skin loose. The magma monster stood there shivering as if it had been flayed. A new shell of rock began hardening on its amorphous form. "Oh, no, you don't." Logan struck again. The shell cracked, and magma gushed out across the ground.

Rytlock meanwhile plunged steel gauntlets into the chest of another rock creature and tore the thing in half. "I love these gloves!" he exulted. Just then, a second destroyer bashed into him, flinging him to the ground. It rushed him, but Rytlock lifted his foot, planted it on the steaming torso of the thing, and flipped it overhead to break on the lava field. Rytlock struggled to his feet as a third destroyer charged him. It would have tackled him and set him on fire except that Caithe plunged a powerstone-stiletto into its neck. It froze up like a statue and broke into a thousand pieces.

"Thanks," Rytlock said.

A destroyer charged Eir, grabbing her arm and burning it brutally. She cried out, kicking the monster back. As it staggered, she dropped her bow and grabbed an axe and buried it in the destroyer's lava-gushing head.

Still, she swooned back, her arm blackened where it had touched her.

More destroyers surged up, but a great deluge poured down upon them all-a sudden rain that healed Eir's burns and Rytlock's bruises and every wound they had suffered so far. The rain also solidified the rock monsters around them, letting axes and hammers do their work.

When the work was done, the comrades turned within a circle of smoldering stones to see Zojja, drenched but grinning. "A healing rain, don't you think?"

"Thanks," Eir said, turning with an axe in each hand. She brought them down in a brutal rhythm, slaying destroyers two at a time. But the tide of magma monsters was unending, and the Destroyer of Life still commanded the caldera, still sent red-hot shafts down into the battle.

One iron arrow struck Big Snaff's left hip, melting the joint. The golem teetered sideways and crashed to the ground.

"Damn it!" shouted Eir.

Rock monsters hurled themselves onto him. They would have torn him apart if Zojja hadn't laved the fallen golem with conjured water.

The Destroyer of Life next turned its bow back on Eir, loosing a shaft that moaned as it fell.

She heard it just before it struck and ducked down, seeing the iron arrow impale Big Snaff's foot. Somehow, the metal caught fire.

"Primordial flame!" Eir realized. "The core of the Destroyer's power." She turned toward Rytlock. "Give me a gauntlet!"

Rytlock ripped the powerstone-enhanced weapon from the chest of a destroyer, shucked the glove from his hand, and flung it to Eir.

She grasped it and shoved her hand within. Then she reached down and snatched the white-hot arrow from Big Snaff's foot. The primordial arrow screamed in the clutch of that frigid gauntlet.

Eir spun about, nocking the blazing-hot arrow on her bow and drawing back. The bow burst into flame. She sighted on the Destroyer of Life and released.

The scarlet shaft soared up beneath the vault of the magma chamber.

Crying out, Eir dropped her bow, which flamed for a moment before it was wholly consumed. It fell to ash.

The primordial arrow was falling now toward the dragon champion.

"Come on!" Eir said through gritted teeth. "A little luck…"

The shaft descended to smash into the Destroyer of Life's face. Primordial fire pierced through to primordial fire. A holocaust erupted from every joint of the beast. The flames roared, going red-hot and white-hot and blue. Then came a deafening crack. The rocky figure of the Destroyer of Life blasted apart. Hunks of basalt cascaded all around, trailing fire. The conflagration chased the pieces down from the air, plunging them into the red-hot lake below.

"Ha ha!" Logan shouted.

Rytlock roared, "The Destroyer of Life is destroyed!"

But there was no time to celebrate. Destroyers were pounding Big Snaff, denting his chassis and tearing away the armor around the cockpit.

"Help Snaff!" Eir ordered as her mallets bashed a pair of destroyers away.

A moment later, Logan and Caithe and Rytlock arrived. Logan's hammer knocked the head from one destroyer, sending the pulpy thing flying. Rytlock's gauntlet ripped out the chest of another. Caithe's stiletto severed the neck joint of a third.

They were falling more easily now. The Destroyer of Life had been their conduit to the power of the dragon. With him fallen, the destroyers staggered, stunned.

Still, there were dozens to slay.

Eir and her comrades demolished the rock beasts that swarmed Big Snaff, but the golem was burning.

"Get him out!" Eir called, ripping back the heat shield over the cockpit. A great cloud of steam rose from it, but once it cleared, Eir could see Snaff lounging in his harness and grinning in triumph. "We did it!"

"Yes," Eir said, helping Snaff climb from the golem's chest. "I'm glad."

Snaff rubbed his hands together. "Time to deploy the caldera plug." He reached to one corner of the cockpit and hoisted a bluish cluster of arcane crystals, dangling from a single cord.

Rytlock rolled his eyes. "You think that thing's going to work?"

"Probably not," Snaff replied with a shrug. "After all, Master Klab made it. Still, we need to give it a try."

"Let's go, then," Eir said, returning the gauntlet to Rytlock.

He slid it on, grinning, and flexed the metal gloves. "On to the caldera!"

With powerstone mallets in hand, Eir led the group in a march up the subterranean volcano. Logan followed to her right and Rytlock to her left. The two asura trundled along behind this advancing wedge, trailed by a watchful Caithe and a growling Garm. Here and there, a destroyer would rise from the smoldering wreckage of the army and charge the group, only to be frozen and bludgeoned and shattered.

Minutes later, the companions reached the crater where the Destroyer of Life had exploded. The blast had carved out a fifty-foot hole in the basalt, and chunks of the champion lay all around. A hundred feet farther on, the team reached the caldera itself, a vast pool of white-hot lava. Within it swam the figures of half-formed destroyers.

Snaff hoisted the caldera plug and stared dubiously at it. "Let's hope Klab knows what he's doing."

"We have to get the stones to the center," Eir said, "but my bow is destroyed."

Snaff took a long look up Rytlock's arm. "Looks like we've got a natural catapult."

"Heh heh. Hand me that thing." Rytlock took the crystalline bundle, sniffed it once, and said, "Stand back." Rytlock pivoted, letting the bundle swing in the air around him. He whirled around and around, gathering speed, and the bundle whistled with wind. At last, grunting, Rytlock released it.

The crystalline bundle flew through the air. It arced upward, growing small, and soared to the center of the caldera. The plug plunged like a meteor, struck the lava, and sank, leaving a black hole. A blue light erupted from the hole, and the edges cooled and hardened.

"Well, that was pretty much a bust," Snaff said.

But the caldera plug wasn't finished. The white-hot magma cooled to red-hot, and then to brown. In a wave out from the central hole, the molten rock solidified, first a mere skin, then a thick plate with cracks running through it. Steam shot up through cracks, and the plate darkened as it thickened.

"It's working," Snaff said incredulously.

Rytlock shook his head. "The crystals did nothing against the Destroyer of Life."

"It was made of elemental fire," Eir said. "Now that the Destroyer of Life is gone, the power of the dragon is cut off. This caldera has once again become natural lava."

The solidifying plate turned black as the heat below it went out. Rivulets stopped flowing from the caldera. Soon, the sea of fire would become a smooth expanse of black basalt.

"It worked!' Rytlock exulted.

"Yeah," Snaff replied emptily. "I just wish I didn't have to tell Klab."

Rytlock arched an eyebrow. "What do you mean? He'll be pleased."

"Exactly."

Whether Klab was pleased or not, the rest of Rata Sum was. It was a heroes' welcome. The walkways of the city were lined with shouting and laughing asura, and children rushed out to drape them with necklaces fashioned from discarded ether crystals.

The Arcane Council stood on one side of Snaff's ziggurat and cheered more loudly than even the children.

Walking in the midst of his friends, Snaff said dourly, "Oh, no."

Zojja turned to him. "What do you mean, 'Oh, no'?"

"Those are the councilors, my dear."

"Of course they are."

"What do the councilors do?"

"They run the city."

"Yes, but the other thing they do is try to rope other people into being councilors so they can go back to inventing."

Zojja laughed. "You think they'll appoint you to a position?"

"I know they will! Just the sort of spiteful creatures they are!"

Zojja tried to look serious. "Too bad we don't have Big Snaff. You could attack."

"Too bad," he echoed darkly.

The companions came to a stop before the Arcane Council.

Councilor Thud waddled forward and lifted his hands, calling for silence. "On behalf of the Arcane Council and empowered as I am by the Arcane Council, I, Councilor Thud-"

"They're going to stick me with pest control," Snaff hissed to Zojja. "I just know it. Thud's been looking for a patsy for months."

"-do hereby welcome the genius Snaff and his apprentice, Zojja-"

"I built those cockpits!" she whispered peevishly.

"-and their allies from lands far removed-"

"He can't find the end of this sentence," Snaff noted.

"-to Rata Sum and confer upon such genius the highest honor-"

"Wait just a moment!" shouted Master Klab, inventor of the flying puffball and, most recently, the caldera plug. "What did Snaff do to deserve this honor?"

Councilor Thud's eyebrows fluttered like moths. "He… well, he designed a golem and marched it out to defeat the Destroyer of Life before his destroyers could attack Rata Sum."

"Yes, yes, all that. But in a matter of weeks, perhaps days, another army would have spilled from that hole in the ground. Whose invention stopped that? Whose invention ensured peace for years to come?" When Councilor Thud mistook this for a rhetorical question, Master Klab exasperatedly said, "Mine! That's whose!"

"I thought you were working on a magic icebox," Snaff offered innocently.

Master Klab whirled on him. "Not the icebox, but the cold-stone crystals that drive it-the bundle of cold-stone crystals that I gave you to solidify the volcano-the caldera plug!"

"Oh, that," Snaff averred. He turned to a nonplussed Councilor Thud and said, "He's quite right. His volcano stopper-"

"Caldera plug!"

"Yes, that thing-it really did save the day. Whatever honor you were about to bestow on me should instead go to genius Klab."

Master Klab shot a look of astonished suspicion at Snaff.

A moment later, the suspicion was vindicated when Councilor Thud reached up to the mantle that draped his shoulders, lifted it, and said, "On behalf of the Arcane Council, I hereby appoint Master Klab to the role of director of pest control."

"And iceboxes," added Snaff.

"No. That would just be silly." Thud said as he lowered the mantle around Master Klab's neck.

Klab's red face went green, and he suddenly realized he'd been had-a fact made obvious when Thud and Snaff heartily shook hands, congratulating each other.

The new director of pest control swayed unsteadily.

But the one who actually swooned was Caithe. She grabbed her heart and fell to the ground.

Logan knelt down, seeing that her face looked as white as paper. A cold sweat dappled her skin. "Heat exhaustion! We need water!"

As asura scrambled to get water, Caithe blinked at Logan and shook her head. "No. It's not the heat. It's Faolain. She's poisoned me."

"What?"

"She serves the Nightmare Court, and her touch has poisoned me." She reached to her collar and pulled down, showing that a hand-shaped tumor had formed above her heart. Tendrils of rot reached out from it across her skin. "As I fight the Nightmare, the poison spreads. I must join her, or die." And with that, she collapsed in Logan's arms.