“I don’t know what that stuff did to you…but hang tight, Soph,” Kalus murmured, a haunted sound in so empty a place, “I’ll be back.”
Kalus crept down the long, central hall of stone. He rolled each step so as not to leave an echo. He breathed slow and controlled, when all he wanted was to heave. Kalus slipped one hand around his Chrysum pistol, the other around a sword on the opposite side of his belt. He clutched them both ready before he peeked around the door to the first room. There was little inside - a few windows shone on dangling, broken Chrysum bindings.
Kalus kept on, past room after empty room. He peered into each one, ready to fire. There was a room full of long benches, an altar and even some colored glass. He recognized some of the designs engraved on the panes as great and terrible Dragons. A…temple? He thought. A few doors down, he passed a beautifully-crafted stone table with chairs for a meeting of twenty. There wasn’t one in attendance, Dragon or Fader. Kalus didn’t find something to point his gun at until he crossed to the far side of the building. There, his pistol leveled at a shining white chest of scales. There sat the King of the Dragons, alone, on just one long bench of many, at many very long tables under a colossal vaulted ceiling. The place looked most like a dining hall, yet there wasn’t a single scrap of food.
“Donellanus,” Kalus greeted. His iron sight shook just below the Dragon’s astonished face. “Or is it Machaeus?”
“Yes, and yes,” the Dragon grinned wide, “I hardly expected this.” Donelannus sat up straight, to eye Kalus with all the respect his raw gall was due.
“Well, if you’d told me this was a dinner, I’d have brought us some surf and turf,” Kalus grinned back.
“You would risk your life for someone you can’t stand?” Donellanus challenged. He pushed himself upright.. Kalus crossed the massive, open hall toward him. With each step, he tilted his pistol further down. If it were any other Dragon, he’d never have taken his sights off his opponent. But Kalus wasn’t about to feed Machaeus more Chrysum ammo. He holstered it at the hilt of his other Chrysum sword instead.
“Sometimes family gets on your nerves,” Kalus shrugged. His secondary blade edge popped free of its hilt. Green and yellow flames danced down beside him. “I’d risk my life for any one of the Dogs of War.” Donellanus rounded a nearby table to trudge straight for his foe. Both walked fast, head tilted forward, a weapon at each side. Chrysum sword. Claws. They came at one another like two slow-moving meteors.
“A promise I intend to test,” said Donellanus. He strafed sideways with a flap of a muscular wing. The dining table between him and Kalus flung across the hall. Its two halves parted a foot away from Kalus by the sear of his Chrysum edge. The scalding debris shot out behind him as he pulled up his blades to defend. In the matter of a second, Donellanus had blipped in front of him.
Kalus deflected three mighty claw swings before his muscles started to seize. Then he jumped back from the flash of talons. They grazed his survival suit collar as Kalus jerked back two big steps. On the third, his heels hit another table behind him. He leaped up and backward to the bench. Donellanus lunged. Kalus swiped white five-fingered blades away with arcs of green fire while he stepped up to the top of the table. He countered with downswings of his yellow blade, which Donellanus easily slipped away from by arching his long neck. Then Kalus felt the pulse under his feet. He caught sight of Donellanus’ foot wedged under the table. He jumped backward off the table just before his foe launched it, flipping top over bottom, halfway to the ceiling. As soon as it passed him, Kalus ducked under to charge.
His swings converged in a wave of green-yellow light at the Dragon King’s gut. Donellanus evaded by sweeping backward, off the ground. He hovered over his foe and his strikes for half a second. He flexed his five-bladed fingers wide to slash down at Kalus. Green flashed up against silver, the two strafed away from one another. Red eyes of blood and fire burned into green ones of sea glass.
“Why send all your royal subjects away, when you just got your crown?” Kalus challenged in the panting pause between clashes.
“Why explain anything to someone less consequential than an insect?” Donellanus quipped back. He swiveled his shoulder in to clip his wing across Kalus’ chest. What it actually cut through was empty air, when he ducked low and charged. So small a target was he, he slipped past every attempt to grasp him, until he drove his shoulder into the chest of the Dragon King. It was slight, but he heard the tiniest gasp escape his scales.
Kalus turned with the swing of his blades, each of which scorched an open crevice across Donellanus’ torso. Kalus turned on his heel to block the incoming claws at his back. He met talons with steel and Chrysum, but was trapped against the armored chest of his opponent. Kalus trembled as the white-armored hands compressed him tighter. He held his breath while he tried to roll his left shoulder out of the lock Donellanus had him in. The second he slipped loose, Kalus turned to pierce the beast straight through. The blood of his opponent sizzled in the yellow Chrysum fire on the edge of his blade that stuck out from Donellanus?
?? back. He threw his head back to screech, which Kalus took as a chance to shove his way out. He broke free of Donellanus’ arms and trotted two steps away before he felt the blades in his back. Three lines of hellfire slit through his survival suit, and deep into his back beneath.
Kalus stumbled to a knee. Donellanus’ leisurely stroll to his foe was marked by a trail of blood splotches from his dripping talons. Sirens blared through the speakers inside Kalus’ helmet to warn him of the destabilization. A timer appeared on the side of his visor interface. Three minutes ticked down just how long he had, before the air and pressure regulators ran out of backup power. His future lifespan, the weight of eternity, reduced to three minutes. Kalus shook off the hot drip of his own fluids down the inside of the suit. He fought the listless weakness infecting his extremities. With all the concentrated will of his three remaining minutes, he whipped both Chrysum swords around.
Kalus turned into a strike to deflect Donellanus’ inbound claw. The hard connection of dirtied steel sprayed blood over both combatants. Kalus held his flaming green blade against his foe, and lashed in from the side with his yellow one. Donellanus caught it in a loose, clumsy grip. Kalus gritted his teeth to fight through it, to rip it loose. He carved a deep slit from Donellanus’ palm, all the way across his chest. The Dragon King roared as fire and steel spilled his blood. He swiped straight down the center of Kalus’ chest. Both combatants fell back and away from one another. The panel on Kalus’ helmet beeped a new warning with less than half the time. He had seconds.
The King of Dragons heaved himself up by a dining table. He left bloody clawprints everywhere he grasped to get shakily upright. The Arms Master of the Dogs of War aimed his pistol out of spite alone. His last seconds would be loyal to the way he lived, even if the air left his lungs with a finger on a futile trigger - fighting. Kalus’ Chrysum pistol kicked back in his grip. A single, shining bolt struck a barrier of black mist that manifested instantly from beneath Donellanus’ scales. That same mist swirled around the beast as it limped over him. It collected to form a long, black pike in the grip of his talons. The clock ticked down before his eyes. The spear of darkness lifted for the fatal strike. The pistol shook in Kalus’ grip. He saw each as if some abstract detail through a movie screen. Yes, just like a move. The end.
The timer stopped with two seconds left. Kalus thought he must be hallucinating. He even considered that Donellanus had already killed him, and his brain was struggling to console itself. Then he looked up at the Dragon King, who had not yet plunged his spear. In fact, Donellanus’ eyes were not on Kalus at all, but pointed toward the hall he’d come from. Kalus had no time to turn and see what it was, before a battering ram of liquid shadows freight-trained into Donellanus’ chest. It pummeled him all the way to the far side of the room. It flattened him against the wall, so only his legs, arms and head were free. Then, not unlike the SkyLine, it filled with the bright blue light of Chrysum.
“Machaeus!” Donellanus screamed, hateful, into the high ceilings, carved by the Faders for their Gods made flesh. It was all he could get out before the flood of concentrated Chrysum incinerated everything it touched. When the blue light dimmed and the darkness retreated, all that was left of him fell in a dismembered, cauterized pile. Arms, legs and a head thumped down in the muddy light of Jupiter coming in through the massive hole in the wall.
“Guess…again…” panted Sophia. Kalus followed her voice across the room, to where she stood in the opening from the hallway. He watched the darkness of M-Particles swirl around her outstretched arm and bond back to her skin. He felt the back and front of his survival suit, where the same substance had formed patches over the slices from Donnelannus.
“I…don’t think he can,” Kalus said, still numb. Sophia huffed in a feeble attempt at a laugh. Kalus did the same. Somehow, without any of the understanding, Sophia had accomplished what her Uncle tried to create synthetically in his Martian lab naturally. The M-Particles returned to her by her will alone, as they’d bent to save Kalus.
“Now get up…” Sophia said, a hand hung down to help him up, “I…got a glimpse of some things behind the curtain… Not good.”
“You mean from Machaeus?” Kalus asked. He took her hand to hoist himself onto shaky feet.
“Yeah. We have to go to Mercury. Now.”
Chapter Nineteen: Sunset
“This is crazy,” Lilia grumbled. It wasn’t the first time she’d said it, each time with mounting frustration. Never, though, did her fingers stray from the navigation bars of the Cerberus. Two empty seats at the front of the bridge marked the worries of both her and the rest of the crew. It’d been hours since they left Jupiter behind. Since they left Kalus and Sophia behind. Burning double fuel in the SkyLine, they would be at Mercury some time the next day.
“Kalus told me,” Demi finally cracked under the stress of it. “Right before he left to get Sophia. He told me, “go to Mercury.” He was sure. He had a plan. We have to trust that. Trust him.”
“And you trust Machaeus?” Lilia countered. Her hands clutched the controls of the Cerberus tighter. The ship rumbled in an attempt to accelerate to meet her out-of-regulation demands. “Explain to me why, again, we believe a bodiless darkness when it says we have to go to Mercury to save everything?”
“You saw it yourself, during the battle on Nimbus,” Demi shot back, trying to stay calm, “All the Dragons fleeing the planet. Where did they go? Why not stay and fight us there, at their base?”