Dragonslayer, Inc.

Steph was the first to draw blood.

We allowed it to see Machen and me, and as it prepared its attack, Steph came up from the side, caught the beast unawares, and stuck her gladius into its skin.

It would be our only easy hit.

Swiping its tail, Icithan nearly knocked her head off. It then turned to us. With a single deafening roar, it shot a column of ice out its mouth. We nearly died. I lost another finger.

Steph tried to take advantage and stab it again, but while it was breathing ice, it swung that tail around, and this time, it also launched a spike from its back toward her like a rocket. Avoiding these attacks, she stayed on the offensive, but the thin air got to her, and Icithan won in the end, landing a solid shot on her body and sending her hurtling through the air. She landed spread-eagled, and I thought she was dead, but then she got up and kept on fighting.

Meanwhile, Icithan wouldn’t take its eyes off us. I tried to roll around to its back and join Steph, but it stopped me in my tracks with a spike-missile. Before I could recover, it shot a blast of ice at me, and when that failed, it rammed me hard, and I almost fell off the mountaintop. Without much effort, it had seized control of the battle. It was the puppet master and we were the puppets. Half an hour in, we felt lucky to be alive.

Every little victory was hard fought. An hour in, I knocked out one of its teeth, but not before fighting off multiple claw attacks, an attempted ramming, multiple shots from its ice breath, and my own exhaustion. This was Icithan’s domain. It could handle the conditions with ease, while we were huffing and puffing and feeling like we were about to collapse.

The tides began to change at noon. Before then, the winds had been wild, and the temperature had been far below zero. If these aren’t impossible conditions to win a fight with an ice dragon in, they are fairly close to it. We bet that as the day went on, conditions would improve, and we also bet that as conditions improved, we would be more able to fight Icithan. These two bets were the two chief reasons we didn’t panic. Both were proven correct.

When the warmth came and the winds quieted to a whisper, the playing field became more level. That’s not to say Icithan didn’t have the edge, but when we got lucky or pulled off a good strategic maneuver, we were able to get in a few solid hits. For the first time, it cried in anguish. Its cry wasn’t deep and threatening, like its roar, but high and shrill, bombarding our eardrums for fifteen straight seconds. I nearly lost my balance. I had to stop attacking because I had diverted so much focus and energy into not falling over. When it finished crying, it began attacking. Unaware and unprepared, all three of us were hit. By the time we recovered from its attacks, it had recovered from ours. The problem was it had a lot more stamina. We tried to move as little as possible, but unlike Icithan, we had to take the offensive. It could wait for it to cool down and get dark, and it could wait for us to tire ourselves out, and it could wait because it had an inherent advantage in this fight, being a four-hundred-and-fifty-foot dragon facing three humans.

“Got any ideas?” I asked Machen as we dodged another spike missile. “If night falls…”

“I have something crazy.”

“Let’s try it.”

“Run away.”

“I thought you had a real plan.”

“Trust me. I know what I’m doing. You run. I’ll stay here.”

Icithan swung its mighty claws, missing both of us, but Machen pretended that he got hit. Knowing he had something up his sleeve, I ran away. Steph yelled at me, but I tuned her out. Icithan stomped toward me, and as it passed over Machen, he grabbed his scimitar and plunged it into the creature’s stomach. That cry rang out again, and I stopped running. Covering his ears with one hand and a shoulder, Machen continued to stab Icithan. Steph, adjusting to the situation, sprinted up its tail. This was risky. If it had managed to swing its tail, she would have been sent flying.

This nearly happened. Its tail was much longer than she had anticipated. She had only just reached Icithan’s back when it fought through the pain coursing through its body to kick Machen away. The pain gone, it noticed Steph, but it didn’t know how to react. It tried to smack her with its tail, but that didn’t work. It tried to shoot its spike-missiles at her, but she was able to dodge them with ease. It tried to turn its head and breathe ice at her, but that didn’t work either. It resorted to madly swinging its body to and fro, hoping to shake her off, but Steph saw this coming and thrust her swords into its back. When the shaking started, she hung on for dear life to the hilts, and she was safe. The blades stayed stuck into its skin, and when it had tired itself out, she gave a cheer of victory.

Machen was unconscious, but I sprang into action. Taking his scimitar in one hand and Ironwall’s dagger in the other, I worked my way up onto Icithan’s forehead, where Steph soon joined me. We plunged our weapons into its neck. A geyser of blood shot into the air, and it cried a third time, and this cry was much louder and more disturbing. Steph tried to talk to me, but I couldn’t hear her. There came a point where I couldn’t hear the cry anymore. My ears were ringing. I thought I’d go deaf. We kept up the attack. The cry never stopped.

There was a very, very tiny part of me that felt sorry for Icithan.

Growing more desperate for the second, it clenched its teeth and used its latent power. There was a reason it hadn’t resorted to this beforehand. It causes excruciating pain and is potentially life-ending. It is a rare power, possessed only by elemental dragons, and it is absolutely a last resort. Best I can tell, it involves the creature taking its internal elemental energy and pushing it outside its body. In my entire life, I have never seen a living organism in as much pain as Icithan was when it used this ability. Our bodies were frozen. If we had waited a second longer to jump off Icithan, we would have died. We were unconscious before we landed, and we didn’t regain consciousness until nightfall.

When I opened my eyes, Machen was standing over me and Steph. “What happened to you?” he asked.

As I wasn’t sure myself at the time, I didn’t answer, instead asking, “What happened to Icithan? Is it dead? Is it alive? Did it get away? Did you kill it?”

“Look for yourself.” He helped me sit up. I was still in shock, and what I saw didn’t help. Icithan was enclosed in a block of ice.

“How?” I asked.

“You know more than me. It was like this when I came to.”

“Did you try to break the ice?”

“Tried and failed. It’s not coming out of there.”

“It will when it’s ready.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

Steph woke. Stretching her head, she sat up and got her bearings. She was about to ask about Icithan’s ice block, but then it burst out, roaring and shooting ice. We leapt to our stances and brandished our weapons. A cool wind trickled along the mountain, and it was followed by faster and faster winds until we were fighting in a gale. It was bone-chilling and ceaseless, but we couldn’t retreat, not when we had come so far.

Our fears of Icithan unleashing that power again diminished once we got our first glance at what was left of it. Layers of skin had broken off and lay dead on the mountaintop. Its eyes were red and dim. The wounds we had inflicted on its throat were covered in ice. They had stabilized but not healed. Seeing us again, the mighty beast groaned. It had not expected us to survive. There wasn’t much it could do. The spikes on its back were nearly gone, meaning it was almost out of missiles, and though it could still use its ice breath, doing so caused it a great deal of pain. It wasn’t long for this world, or so we thought.

Conjuring up the last fragments of our energy, the three of us charged at Icithan. The end was in sight, and we weren’t gonna let it slip away. Icithan swung its claws at us, but these were tired swings, and they were easy to dodge. This was the first time the three of us had fought this battle on a single front, and it was remarkably natural. We worked off one another like we had known each other our entire lives. There was no question in my mind what moves Steph and Machen were going to make. We were of one mind and one heart, and we tore through the dragon. The ice around its throat was as impenetrable as the ice it enclosed itself in had been, but we found other spots to attack, the most fruitful of which proved to be its stomach.

We threw up a quick distraction to make it rear up, then we ran forward. By the time it figured out our plan, we were set. It stamped its front legs on the ground, closing the opening, but we merely laid down. There was enough space and then some. If I had been shorter, I could have sat up. As we stabbed it over and over again, its blood dripping onto our faces, I said to Machen, “That was a neat trick you pulled.”

“What?”

“The last thing you did before you got knocked out. Lying down and getting me to run away so you could deal some massive damage as it ran toward me.”

“Thought you’d like that. I was inspired by you actually.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. By the way you got on the Slayers. By how you killed that first dragon.”

“Now we’re taking from Ironwall.”

“I didn’t notice.”

“Remember how he beat the arma-tank?”

“That was more clever than this.”

“Maybe. But he was fighting an armadillo-thingy. We’re fighting a four-hundred-and-fifty-foot dragon.”

“Guys,” said Steph, “do you hear that? That flapping?”

“No,” I said. I could hear Machen and Steph fine enough, but I couldn’t hear anything else over Icithan’s cries, which were getting progressively louder and more anguished, as if it wanted to make every cry matter because it didn’t have much time left. “What is it?”

“Icithan’s wings,” she answered. “It’s gonna try to get away.”

I said, “Let’s stab our swords in and hang onto their handles, like you did.”

“Won’t work. We’d be working against the force of gravity, and if I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die fighting Icithan, not falling from five hundred feet and being impaled on a rock.”

Stealthily, we clambered out from Icithan’s belly and hopped on its back. It knew we were there, but it lifted off anyway. We tried to bring it back to earth by slashing at its wings. They weren’t well-attached to its body, and injuring one would have extinguished its dreams of flight. There was little it could do to stop us, but it was helped by the ice emanating from its core. Its back was cold- more than thirty degrees colder than the frigid air- and our bodies wanted to shut down, but we kept at it, and we were able to send its hulking body tumbling like a meteor to the ground.

It smashed into a snowbank. Holding onto its wings, we were able to survive. It took the brunt of the impact, but it wasn’t dead. It had been alive for millennia. It had seen empires rise and fall. It had existed before the Solanians, and it had existed after the Solanians. It had no desire to go easy into death’s cruel embrace.

The impact flung us from its body. The snow was deep, but with keen maneuvering, we got to our feet. We stood there waiting as the snow turned from white to pink to red. When Icithan arose, we tromped toward it, never loosening our grasps on our weapons. The look in its eyes was bleak. I didn’t think it wanted to keep on living, not when it was in so much pain, but I was wrong. Our trudging was slow, and the snow was deep.

We were too late.

The dragon flapped its wings, shook its head, and took to the skies. There was nothing we could do. It was flying south, away from Curam and back toward civilization. With the damage we had inflicted upon its body and wings, it flew slow and low. I thought it was going to crash, but it never did. It flew out of sight.

Before we could properly assess what had happened, before our adrenaline started to run out, before we could even nurse our wounds, Machen asked, “Are we supposed to chase it?”

I wanted to think about this for a minute, but Steph immediately replied, “Yes. We chase it until we kill it. Our mission’s that simple. It’s not gonna be hard, not next to everything we’ve gone through. It can’t fly fast. We’ll catch it before long.”

We took the night to rest. If we hadn’t, we would have died. There’s no question in my mind about that. Come morning light, we began our journey from Curam. On the plus side, we were beginning a return trip of sorts, which couldn’t help but cheer me up. On the negative side- and this gnawed at me- that final box on our list remained unchecked. This lack of completion drove me. It was one of the reasons I got up every morning.

Steph was wrong. We didn’t catch Icithan ‘before long’. There were times when we could see it in the distance, but we could never reach it. I nearly went mad. The journey up this continent was far and away the hardest thing I have ever done in my life, and we didn’t get to fight Icithan again until we had made the entire journey back.

Yes, the entire journey, and not Machen or Steph’s version of it, but my version, the version that started in Natura. It was summer when we caught it, and the air was hot. There is no summer but a hot summer in Natura. We were glad. It was noon when we arrived, and sunlight was dancing in the ocean. Winds trickled through the fronds of shady trees. It was more than warm. It was tropical, a word we could not use to describe any place we had seen since we first set out from Andes.

Our return trip was simple. We went along the same route, only heading the opposite direction. I’m shocked none of us died. We knew what to look out for and what to avoid, but we also needed to be the beneficiaries of outstanding fortune, and thankfully we were. The biggest challenge turned out to be getting out of the mountains. Injured and with few supplies, we had to find our way to Miyok. It was still cold and windy. If we had killed Icithan on top of the mountain and had to go through Life’s End once more, we likely would not have all survived, but because of our ride on its back, we got to begin our journey at the base of Curam. There was a time when I thought we were goners, but conditions improved, and we had an easy time crossing the plateau that had caused us so much strife in the past. We reached the forest one day before we were about to collapse, and that was enough. That sweet, savory Litriol water charged us up in no time.

When we came to the spring, we thought of Ironwall and the funeral we had given him. His body was dissolved, but his memory lingered on, and it haunted us. The journey back was emotionally rending. Efficient as it may have been, part of me wishes we hadn’t returned the way we came. There were too many painful memories. I ignored them best I could, but they lingered like a fog.

There weren’t any firecanes brewing when we passed close to Firecane Bay, but I saw one with my mind’s eye. Deaths of friends and allies replayed in my mind. I saw the aunt-like Slayer pass away, and I realized I never knew her name and never would. We took the path Machen and I had taken through Mulsor, and Steph was more than all right with this. She did not want to relive that blizzard. When we came to the ridge where I had found the tribe and Machen, I told the story of that day to her. She seemed interested. Machen was not, however, and I stopped after a while for his sake. The tribe was gone. Its members were nowhere to be found. I thought we might run into them on our walk through the highlands, but we never did. We weren’t sure whether they were even alive, but we reasoned they were, and we didn’t press the issue. When we arrived at the spot where we had split up in the midst of those creature attacks, Steph said, “Here we are.”

“Here we are,” Machen responded, and that was all they had to say.

I, on the other hand, had something to add. Quietly, almost whispering, as if telling a secret, I said to Machen, “Ironwall was ready to leave you for dead.”

“You weren’t.”

“It doesn’t bother you?”

“No.”

“It’d bother me.”

“I was rash. He was making the best decision for the group. I know that. I’m glad I’m alive though. Thanks for that.”

When I asked him a few more questions, he didn’t say a word, so I nodded, and then he nodded, and then Steph nodded, and then we were on our way. It got warmer as we went. There was no snow in Mulsor. We had a picnic near the north exit of Segrabi, using our food bags as a blanket. There was plenty of food for the three of us. Near Ezek, we had encountered a friendly tribe, and they gave us a bountiful harvest of food while explaining they lived in Ezek before it was destroyed. They didn’t talk to us about Taurus, so we didn’t bring him up. We thanked them for the food and conversation and continued south. That was not the only food we had been able to find. Though many areas were barren, there was a lot more foliage than there had been in fall and winter. Why, not ten yards from our picnic, there were summer grasses shaking their stalks, and to the east, there was a cluster of blue apples that we made sure to collect before we left. These were puny apples, less than half the size of those you buy at the grocery store, but they were tastily tart. We were rarely hungry from the time we got to Miyok to when we arrived in Natura.

On occasion, particularly after we had run out of Litriol water, we found ourselves in want of more hearty cuisine, and we found it in the animals running about. They were few in number, but that only made their appearance all the more conspicuous. They scurried from bush to bush or from tree to tree. Most of the time, we simply watched them go their merry ways. It was a thrill to see life and movement after having suffered through such loss and bleak discontent. When we wanted to eat an animal or two- which was rare, as the animals were small, and they didn’t have much meat on them- we had an easy time of it. They were harder to catch than the giant beasts we had made a profession and a journey out of slaying, but they were easy to kill.

Icithan flew through Gesen again, though this time, it caused widespread destruction. The city wasn’t leveled, but it took a big hit considering Icithan’s health and how quickly it left. It wanted to stay ahead of us. We had planned to stay the night in a hotel there, but after seeing the devastation, we took the time to help out instead. There wasn’t much we could do, but we saved some lives, so I’m happy we made the stop. We left before dawn, and we were glad to leave. We had been recognized by people who hated our guts. They were obscene, and they were cruel, and they had no idea what we had gone through. I tried to empathize with them, but I couldn’t. I had endured too much to stand there as we were crudely insulted. My temper flared, and I nearly thrust Ironwall’s dagger into a man’s chest.

Speaking of Ironwall, I had never better understood why he changed his name. I contemplated how he would have reacted in this situation, but I was too spent to spend too much time on the subject. We planned to sleep in Drens, but we found it destroyed. Icithan had stopped here, and it hadn’t showed restraint. Drens had existed long before us, and we thought it was going to exist long after, but it was not to be. We left. Icithan was in sight. It was so close and yet so far away. There was a time in Mulsor when we had been this close. On that occasion, we decided to keep chasing it. We thought we could catch it then and there, but we didn’t, and we didn’t really come close. Our feet gave out on us, and we were forced to camp for the night. When we woke up, Icithan had flown away.

The situation was direr this time, but we didn’t play as aggressively. We slept beside the road. There were a lot of cars passing by. When we woke up, we found drinks splattered over our bodies. They had been thrown by drunk hecklers. We weren’t angry, but we were annoyed. “You’d expect a better treatment,” I grumbled.

“It’s possible they don’t know who we are,” said Steph. “We don’t much look like ourselves. I’m surprised they recognized us in Gesen. Then again, I don’t know for sure. I kinda forgot what I used to look like.”

“Do you know what you look like now?”

“Yeah. I look in the water.”

“I haven’t done that.”

“There’s a puddle behind you.”

“I’m not sure I want to.”

“Go ahead. You look fine.”

“Maybe later. I’m not a good mood. Come to think of it, I haven’t been for a while. It’s hard coming back to city life. It’s so noisy and… irreverent.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“You will, I know that. You’re a versatile person.”

“I’m not so sure. It’ll take some time. Maybe if I have you guys with me…”

“Who says we need city life anyway? We’re rich. We could build ourselves mansions out in the country and never see these people again.”

“And we could build our mansions next to each other,” said Machen, jumping into the conversation. “That’d be wonderful.”

“Got that soda off your clothes?” Steph asked him. “You got the worst of it.”

“No, I didn’t get it off, but I don’t mind. It smells pleasant enough, and its worst crime is being sticky. I’ve been through worse.” Nonetheless, he took off his shirt and hung it over his shoulders. “It’s not important. Back to the mansion idea. That sounds great. We could have each other to talk to, and we could ignore everyone else. We helped each other cross a continent and back. They throw soda at us.” He kicked the soda cups into the next hillside.

“They’re not all bad. You know that.”

“I don’t care. They haven’t been through what we’ve been through. They don’t know our lives. They don’t know our experiences. They hear us about on the news, and think they know us, but they don’t. They think they could do what we did if they got good enough with a melee weapon, but they couldn’t. A lot of them think we’re failures, or that we didn’t do a good job. What arrogance. Why should we save these people? Why do they deserve to be saved? And yes, I’m bitter. I think I have a right to be.”

“I know how you feel, but you can’t expect them to empathize. We’ve been through a crazy chapter in our lives. We’ll never forget it, but we have to move on.”

“Wrong,” I said. “We can’t move on. Ironwall couldn’t. We were lonely on the trip, and we’re gonna be lonely afterward. It’s changed us permanently in a lot of ways, good and bad. There’s nothing we can do about that. Thankfully, we have each other. Ironwall didn’t have anyone. We can talk to each other, and we need to, because it’s gonna be hard, and it’s not gonna be fair. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t save people though.”

“You make a good case,” said Machen, shrugging. “Let’s finish our job, at any rate. We owe that to ourselves.”

Andes was close. When we got there, we were impressed. Icithan’s most recent pass over the city had been largely damage free by Icithan standards- it froze a few rebuilt structures and killed a dozen people, but that was it. Conversely, the rebuilding process had gone extremely well. Since the fall, most of the core city streets had been reconstructed, and a lot of key governmental buildings looked as good as new. Better still, there was this boundless optimism in the air. Draped over the street signs reading ‘Welcome to Andes’ were colorful banners that said ‘Building a Better Andes’. Our spirits were boosted as we walked in.

We endured jeers that were more acidic than those in Gesen. It would have driven me over the edge had I not gotten to indulge in the simple pleasure of telling random agitators Arge was dead. Most didn’t believe me. Some did. All had the same expression on their face for the first few seconds. It was an expression of befuddled, raw chaos, like their brains were exploding. It was satisfying. Those who didn’t believe me kept jeering, but as they had been caught off-guard, they weren’t as strong in their message, and they sat down not long after we passed. Those who did believe me didn’t say another word. Their body language was weak and deflated, as though they were balloons that had been pricked with pins.

After helping out with the recovery and eating at a classy restaurant, we went to the library and planned out our next moves. We tried to figure out why Icithan mostly spared Andes in its southbound rampage. I suppose it figured it had done enough damage to that poor city. More likely, it didn’t see a lot worth destroying.

Machen commented, “I’m surprised it’s flown so far given its injuries. It’s got grit.”

“I wouldn’t have expected anything less,” said Steph. “It’s probably the last of the dragons born before the Slayer era.”

“Is it gonna stop? Ever?”

“It has to. It’s gotta be going somewhere. But where?”

“Is it still going west?” I asked. “I didn’t see.”

“It turned south,” said Steph.

“Did you say south?”

“What of it?”

“There’s one major city in this continent it hasn’t hit. It’s a lovely, warm, bright city I know very well.”

“Natura.” She word slithered from her lips like a dying wind. “Oh no.”

“Acady. Mom. Everyone.” I dashed away. They had to pull me back. I had left supplies behind. They told me five minutes wouldn’t make a difference, and I admit they were right. Once we were ready, we sprinted to Natura across the same stretch of land I had once crossed, the first stretch of land I had crossed after leaving home. It was enough to give me déjà vu. We crossed much faster than I did then. The sloping hills sped by. We never lost sight of Icithan, gaining on it rapidly, but then it descended into the city. I shouted at the top of my lungs, saliva spewing over the grass, and I fell to my knees. If I had been alone, I might have stayed in that position for hours, but Machen took my right arm and Steph my left, and they lifted me to my feet. Natura was close now.

We arrived there to be greeted by an icy grave.

Over the course of our journey to Curam, most of the strings that had held me together snapped. On our return, a couple other strings snapped. Some of these strings were simply restrung. More were replaced with stronger strings of different fibers. A few were never replaced. Only one had never snapped, and it snapped when I saw my hometown consumed by the vengeance of a dragon we should have slain months ago.

“That’s a good one,” I cried hysterically, clapping my hands and devolving into fits of laughter. If we had arrived five minutes earlier, nothing would have changed, but if we had arrived five hours earlier, this city would have been better off. My hometown wouldn’t have been wiped from the surface of the planet. “That’s a real good one.”