The Gift of Battle

CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

The Blood Lord arose from his ancient slumber, disoriented, in complete shock. He had felt his castle shaking all around him, rousing him from his sleep, had felt a great disruption in the force, had felt instantly that someone had intruded in his sacred space.

It was impossible. No one had ever before approached his castle—much less broken inside it. Not in a thousand millennia.

At first, the Blood Lord assumed it had been a nightmare. But as the walls continued to shake and crumble all around him, deep underground, he soon realize that it was not. It was a disruption unlike anything he had ever felt. And as he sat up, at attention, he sensed immediately that the boy was gone.

Guwayne.

The Blood Lord let out a horrific shriek as he jumped to his feet then jumped straight up, raising a fist and shattering the stone. He flew up, through the floor, bursting out of the rock into the chambers above.

As he stood there, in a room now filled with rubble, he was distraught. Around him, nearly all of his precious gargoyles lay dead, crushed, writhing. The few who remained were screeching and circling high above.

He turned immediately and looked up, for his throne, for the bassinet—and with a sense of horror and dread, he saw that his throne was crushed, and that the bassinet lay empty. Someone had snatched the child.

The Blood Lord seethed, as he realized immediately who it was: Thorgrin. He had snatched away his child. He had taken away his most precious jewel, this power child whom he’d hoped to raise as his own, whom he’d groom to become greatest darkest Lord of them all. Whom he would use to rule the world—just as the prophecies had proclaimed.

Yet he did not understand how it was possible. He was more powerful than Thorgrin; he had already defeated him once. Thorgrin did not have that kind of power—unless, he suddenly realized, he had retrieved the sacred Sorcerer’s Ring. Had he?

The Blood Lord shrieked in agony, seeing his whole life’s mission destroyed, feeling his veins burning with fury, with a desire for vengeance. He knew instantly what he had to do: find Thorgrin. Crush him. Retrieve the child.

And he knew instantly that there was only one place that Thorgrin could have taken him: the Ring.

He leapt up, as the walls continued to collapse, and this time he burst right through, out the other side of his castle, into daylight, smashing through rock with his fist. He emerged on the ground, outside his castle, and immediately he looked up and searched the skies. There, in the distance, on the far horizon, he spotted Thorgrin. He was flying away on the back of a dragon, and holding something.

Guwayne. His child.

The Blood Lord howled in fury, his face contorted in agony, and he knew there was only one thing he could do: muster his army.

He put his palms out to his side, turned them, and slowly raised them, higher and higher. As he did, all around him the landscape of ash and mud began to crawl, to squirm, to come alive. There slowly emerged from the black soil an army. An army of undead, emerging as if from a field of eggs, reaching up out of the soil with their long, hideous red claws and pulling themselves up. They looked like gargoyles, but were five times the size, with blackened scales, hairy bodies, and long, slimy fangs. They had wings as long as their bodies, and tails just as long, which flopped against the soil. They stared back at the Blood Lord with their glowing orange eyes, thousands of them, awaiting his command, drooling, shrieking. Wanting to kill something. Anything.

Thorgrin had made a grave mistake. The Blood Lord was no primitive sorcerer. No local king. He was the Lord of all Lords, the one who could raise an army from dust, the one that no one had ever defeated. The one who had punished anyone who had dared defy him.

Thorgrin had provoked a nest the likes of which the world had never known. He would follow him to the ends of the earth, until the earth was scorched with his creatures, and tear him—and his son—to pieces.

The time had come to destroy the world.

And the first stop on his mission could be but one place:

The Ring.