Harken these words, for these are the signs of the coming end…
First will come the bleeding of the northern sky. Day and night, the blue of the sky, the white of the clouds, the shimmer of the stars, all will glow a deep crimson that bathes the land in the visage of blood.
Second is the coming of the dread beast of woe, whose fury will devour the pure waters at the heart of the sacred basin.
Last is the coming of the rains that will fall in ebon torrents to blight all the and all the herds and all the people in death and discord.
Beware these signs, for the destroyer is nigh.
Chapter One
Raven mouthed the words of the prophecy as he stared at the wash of crimson that turned the northern sky blood red. There was something out there at the horizon, just beyond the edges of his awareness. It was the hint of sorcery, a flavor of sorts, but each time he tried to focus on it…
A bestial moan rumbled across the clearing like rolling thunder, snapping Raven back to the present moment. He crouched beside the wide trunk of an evergreen, staring on at the creature the Karakaru people believed to be the prophesied dread beast of woe. It lay asleep, curled beside the edge of the massive central lake on the other side of the clearing.
Stripping away the myth, the beast before him was in truth a land drake, blood kin of dragons. Where dragons had slender, lithe bodies better equipped to cut through currents of air, drakes were massive land roving monstrosities. This drake was no different, if perhaps a bit larger than any he’d heard of. Even settled on the ground, Raven had to crane his head up to take in the full scale of the creature.
Raven had given the Karakaru people a noncommittal answer when asked to terminate the dread beast before he left the village. It wasn’t until now, laying eyes on the beast, that he knew for certain he would. He was an assassin of the Bloody Murder, and despite the name, the group did not kill innocents in the name of a contract, be it people or animals. But the raw sorcerous affinity that choked the clearing and radiated up around the beast like waves of shimmering heat proved this was no innocent beast. No creature possessing such high affinity was innocent of the potential to threaten life on a wide scale. Given that, the drake became killable.
And that was for the best. His primary mission—the reason the Karakaru people hired the Bloody Murder—was to eliminate the source of the sorcerous power that threatened their existence. Of the three signs of the prophecy, this was the one chance he would get. The northern sky had already turned red, and there was nothing his knives or assortment of alchemical munitions could do to prevent the fall of black rain. Killing the drake now before it could somehow consume the full contents of the massive body of water, as unlikely as that seemed even given the drake’s size, meant, one would assume, the aversion of the prophecy.
Just another fifty paces at most and he would be in range, finally, after a full day of tracking. Now the real work would begin. As if killing an aspected drake wasn’t difficult enough, the Karakaru chief—or drottning as they called her—insisted he must first fill an empty walrus skin with the beast’s blood while it still lived. This part reeked of baseless superstition, but Raven would follow this through, because everything else regarding these people and this prophecy had proved true to this point.
Raven exhaled the last of his nerves and continued out into the open grass in a low trot, hands low in easy reach of the sheathed long knives on either side of his waist. The closer he came to the beast, the more the flavor of affinity took form. The aspect of sorcery he sensed caught him by surprise, as much as anything else he’d discovered upon arriving at the remote northern territory. It wasn’t the cryomancy most common among all aspected beasts of the frozen north. Nor was it the pyromancy most common to all kin of dragons. This was pure chaos, the sorcery closest to affinity in its rawest form than any other.
The potent chaos sorcery that radiated from within the drake’s aura called to his primal instincts and stoked the heat of his blood by sheer proximity. It took far more effort of will than he was comfortable admitting to maintain his focus and not sprint to the beast in blind rage, such was the effects of chaos affinity.
At twenty paces he paused and withdrew a vial from a sleeve at his belt and held the contents up to his eye to confirm it was the viscus amber alchemical liquid he wanted. He rotated the syrupy substance slow and steady to loosen the agent until it was the consistency of water. He then poured it all into his mouth and held on his pallet as he pulled a second vial from belt, this one containing a clear liquid indistinguishable from water. He took just a sip of the second vial.
The alchemical reaction began immediately. The potent mixture burned his tongue and mouth, causing him to bite down hard enough on his tongue to draw blood, lest he cry out in pain and wake the slumbering drake.
But the pain lasted only moments, and then the properties of the gold elixir took effect. Even as the alchemy burned away in his mouth, the alchemical burns healed and his mind sharpened. It was over in moments, and then Raven opened his mouth and exhaled, releasing a luminous plume of golden vapor.
The third vial he withdrew was black as midnight and allowed no light to pass through. From the edge of his periphery, it looked more like a stain in reality than any real substance. He drained just a quarter of the vial, glanced again at the slumbering drake, and then decided instead to consume fully half the vial. Once again, he held the contents in his mouth until he took a sip of the clear mix, but felt nothing but mild bubbling on his pallet this time. When he released that final exhale, nothing escaped but clean, clear air.
Carefully, he reached into the bandoleer strapped tight across his chest and gently ran his fingers along the smooth surfaces of the crystal orbs nestled within. His thumb brushed against the symbol for the alchemical orb Coragyps simply called the ‘weak force’ and pulled it free, casting the surrounding area in the pale-yellow light that emanated from the viscus liquid within. He splashed a drop of the clear activator onto the orb and began rotating, slowly at first, but quickly increased speed. The pale-yellow alchemy within the orb grew brighter, until it radiated so fierce Raven had to turn his head away.
One last glance at the sleeping drake, heart pounding in his ears, and then he lobbed the orb toward the sleeping drake. In a flash of motion, he slipped a throwing knife from a sleeve in his vest into his hand and sent it spinning end over end to intercept the orb. The blade skipped across the top of the orb and ricocheted harmlessly away from the drake to disappear in the grass somewhere outside the view of his periphery. Gouts of luminescent alchemy spewed out in all directions from the spinning orb as it landed and skidded toward the beast in an expanding tail of brilliant yellow liquid. It was a perfect throw on both counts.
Raven shrugged out of his heavy coat, letting it fall to the grass at his feet behind him, drew the twin long knives sheathed at his waist, and took off in a sprint toward the slumbering drake, pushing himself faster with each stride. He needed to make it to the trail of light before the glowing orb struck the drake and made the task of reaching the beast exponentially harder.
With barely a heartbeat to spare, he leapt toward the beginning of the trail, flattening his body as he fully extended in the air. The instant he crossed over the glowing yellow alchemy, gravity released him from its hold, and he shot forward like an arrow toward the slumbering beast, the grass and dirt speeding by beneath him in a blur of motion.
And then the orb struck the scaled flank of the drake with a soundless detonation of blinding yellow light. He had a moment to hope for the impossible, but the alchemy was true to its name, too weak to affect such a massive creature. Raven doubted it would have any effect on the beast had it truck with the full concentration.
The drake posted a thick, muscular foreleg onto the ground with a world trembling impact and rose from the grassy shore. It swung its massive head around toward Raven and opened cavernous maw to reveal three rows of jagged fangs. Then turned it head skyward and released a roar that shook the heavens and earth and turned Raven’s bowels to water.
And then Raven slammed into the side of the beast, knives leading, in an explosion of chipped dragon scales. There was an instant of terrible pain as ebon scales as sharp as his knives tore through his clothing and scoured layers of skin from his arms and legs. But the pain passed almost as quickly as it came as the gold elixir restored him to full heath.
The drake shifted and the world pitched so suddenly Raven’s legs flared out from beneath him, and only his tenuous grip on his knives kept him attached to the beast’s side. When the world righted itself again in a bone rattling thud and he still held, any fear he had of falling off melted away.
That peace of mind allowed Raven to begin his climb without fear. Hand over hand, Raven ripped a blade free and slammed it back into the scales hard enough to punch through as he worked his way higher. It made for painfully slow progress and an increasingly more enraged chaos aspected drake.
Raven finally rolled onto the drake’s jagged back and sprawled, limbs splayed in utter exhaustion as he stared up at the blood washed sky. But thanks to the increased endurance afforded by the gold elixir, he recovered in the span of only a few deep breaths, and then climbed to his feet atop the creature’s back.
A moment to steady himself atop the swaying creature’s back and held his knives held out before him. His blades were the length of his forearm yet still dry, not having the length to punch fully through the drake’s thick scales and pierce its flesh.
He padded forward, eyes scanning the creature’s back. That meant he had to go to the single point of vulnerability common for all dragon kin, the remnants of what many believed to be a remnant of an aquatic origin for the species.
He found what he was looking for just behind the base of the beast’s neck. It was a thin, semi-translucent membrane roughly ten strides in diameter. He rushed to it, and the moment his boots made contact with the vulnerable membrane, the drake reared and nearly sent Raven tumbling off its back. Bone jarring shrieks of rage pierced the air as waves of chaotic sorcery grew thicker, carrying pungent notes reminiscent of rotted plant and animal matter.
Maintaining a low crouch, Raven staggered and stumbled to the center of the membrane, to where a single vein the size of his thigh throbbed just beneath the surface, then slipped one of his long knives back into the sheath at his thigh. The other he flipped in his grip and dropped to a knee, and then drove the blade down into the skin and tore away at the thin membrane.
The beast heaved beneath Raven, but he ignored it as he dug away at the layer, carving a deepening fissure as he tore away thick chunks of the skin. Finally, after descending half the length of his arm, he struck the black vein and sent a geyser of deep violet blood into the air in rhythmic eruptions that rained down, drenching his body and making the surrounding membrane and scales perilously slick.
Within moments of contact, the drake blood on his skin and clothing began to sizzle, then boil away in rising wafts of ebon vapor. He needed to work quickly. As if the beasts needed any other defenses, dragons and their kin healed at an alarming rate. Already the fresh wound had begun to close. And when it did, the newly healed flesh would calcify stronger.
Raven sheathed his knife and fished the empty skin free from the inside his vest and submerged it in entirety into the pooled blood inside the hole. Just a few heartbeats later, Raven pulled the full bladder free, returned the cork, and returned it to the inside of his shirt.
Now was the hard part.
Keeping a low profile, Raven scrambled toward the back side of the drake. Perched just before the rise of its haunches, Raven’s heart leapt as he saw the drake hadn’t moved far off of the streak of yellow alchemy. He’d thought, given the beast’s frenzy, he’d have to use his second and final yellow alchemical orb. Seeing the drake standing atop the yellow streak was an unexpected stroke of luck.
He launched himself from the beast’s back and plummeted for an exhilarating moment, and then the stomach rising feeling of gravity’s release slowed his fall as he fell within the influence of the Alchemical Weak Force. He realized his mistake only after his descent stopped altogether and he was left coasting lazily forward unable to move as his body slowly rotated.
He craned his head around and watched in horror as the drake’s head swung toward him and its vertically slitted gaze found him. It released a deafening roar, and then brought its tail around in a blur of force. The impact shattered the left side of Raven’s body and sent the world spinning before his vision. He saw the clear water a moment before he landed, and immediately skidded across the rocky bed before settling at the bottom of the lake.
The pain…spirits above and below, the pain.
His jaw was shattered. Several ribs were either cracked or deeply bruised. And, most distressing, was the grotesque compound fracture of his left arm that saw a jagged bone protruding from the skin of his forearm, up near the elbow. He took a moment to growl in pain, releasing a flurry of bubbles to the surface, and then he began to work.
There was no time to swim back to the surface. He gritted his teeth, drew his knife with is good arm, and began cutting away at the already torn sleeve of his injured arm, ignoring the accidental nicks and gashes that stained the clear water red. When finally he had the cloth free to his bicep, he released the knife and grabbed his limp wrist. He was going to take a moment to steel himself, but already he could see the stream of blood beginning to slow and the ragged tear in the flesh around the protruding bone noticeably smaller as the gold elixir forced his body to heal in the most expedient way possible. If left unguided, the process would permanently rob him of any use of the limb. Raven pulled hard on his wrist and forced the limb to straighten. And then, even more agonizingly, he did his best to set the limb back in its proper place. He didn’t need to be perfect. So long as he was close enough, healing the bone correctly was the most expedient option.
Trembling, he held still and rode the waves of pain as they slowly intensified to the point where blackness closed in on the edges of his periphery, and then the pain receded in a rush leaving nothing but the increasingly urgent burning in his lungs. A few clenches of his hand and a quick rotation of the newly healed limb, and then he pushed back to the surface, breaching the water in a ragged exhale of frigid air.
He glanced around, frantic to catch sight of the beast but saw nothing but open water. He whirled in time to see the drake’s head swing back to him some thirty paces back to shore. It froze a moment, then turned its body fully around to him. It released a screeching roar, then pitch forward into the lake in an eruption of water so large the wave sent Raven spinning uncontrollably.
As soon as Raven gained some measure of control, he turned away and began swimming as hard as he could. He managed just four strokes, and then all behind him fell silent so suddenly it raised every mental alarm that his years of experience honed to a sharp sense. He stopped and turned. There was nothing but calm water. The drake was gone.
A knot in his belly compelled him submerge his head under water, and then the knot in his belly turned to ice as he saw the drake’s hulking body swimming toward him as graceful as a fish, its body snaking side to side as hit approached at speed.
Raven reached for his knives and remembered he’d released one somewhere in the lake, but drew the one that he had, whatever good it would do. The reality was, in all likelihood, he was moments from death. The drake needed only close its jaws around him or swipe him with one of its massive claws and he was dead; that type of damage would be too much for even high alchemy to heal through.
Instead, to Raven’s utter shock, it angled its massive body upward and breached the water in a violent wave that sent Raven tumbling along powerful currents. When finally he righted himself and pushed back to the surface, he was met by the drake’s looming figure, staring down at him with pale green eyes that glowed with a fierce luminance. The miasma of rot and decay was now so overwhelming Raven fought to keep the contents of his belly down. He had only the potent black elixir coursing through his body to thank for not being completely debilitated.
The drake stared with deceptive calm, and the chaos affinity spiked to sudden intensity.
Raven’s heart leapt with sudden hope. Raven eased his hand into the flap of the bandoleer across his chest and found the crystal orb he sought. It was the orb containing the deep amber alchemy Coragyps had named the Strong Force.
Eerie green light cast strange shadows across the top of the water as the drake’s eyes grew brighter still. Quickly, Raven pulled free the vial of black elixir and splashed a generous amount atop the orb above the water, watching as the liquid quickly absorbed into the crystal surface. As the alchemy within the orb began to swirl amber and black, he took the rest of the vial into his mouth and, this time, swallowed the acrid alchemy. He would pay for that later, but at least there would be a later.
Another half dozen heartbeats past, and then the rising chaos affinity cut. The drake reared back in sudden motion, opened its cavernous maw, and revealed a concentration of pale green sorcery coalescing at the back of its throat.
Raven grinned, and then a roiling gout of virulent sorcery belched forth from the drake and blasted through him, turning the world a blinding pale green. He screamed in agony as the pure chaos aspected sorcery warred with the combination of high alchemies protecting him. Even with the direct consumption of black elixir, alchemy of the highest quality, Raven knew with certainty his body would have been destroyed utterly had he not also had the healing of the gold elixir repairing the damage that still seeped through.
Arms and legs splayed; he could do nothing but tremble under the assault as he endured. Raven lost all conception of time, all sense of self, until there was nothing but silence and blinding light. And then there was darkness.
The first things to return to him was his thoughts. Specifically, the recognition of the intensity of pain that wracked his body. But already the pain was subsiding, slower than he would have expected with the gold elixir coursing through him. There wasn’t very much left, he realized. The damage may not fully heal. But it would heal enough—it already had.
A low rumble from above forced his eyes open to see the black scaled drake shimmering in the thick, humid air as it loomed over him. If he could read the expression in the soft glowing eyes of such a creature, he thought it might be surprised. Of course, that was most likely in his mind. The beast had but one thing in his mind, and that was his destruction.
The stench of fetid matter rose around him again, as if riding the waves of heat as the miasma gathered and intensified. His body tingled in the aura of the drake’s gathering affinity.
A soft golden glow off to right side of his periphery caught his attention. He glanced to the side and saw the orb still clutched in his hand, glowing with brilliant golden light. Somehow, even with his arm, and indeed his entire body, half buried in thick mud, he still held onto the orb. The trembling of his limbs had agitated the orb.
Raven climbed to his feet and met the drake’s eyes again. Chaos affinity spiked again, but as the drake reared back again, Raven threw the orb as hard as he could, then turned and hobbled away as fast as his battered body could manage.
He knew the orb struck true when he saw the flash of gold illuminate the world behind him. The drake released another deafening cry, but this time, no wave of chaotic sorcery crashed over him.
It was only after Raven reached the first of the trees still standing at the edge of the forest that Raven finally turned and watched. His stomach lurched as already half the drake’s massive body had collapsed into the churning sphere of glowing amber suspended off the ground. It fought against the grip of the Strong Force, harder than any creature Raven had ever seen, but the drake was pulled ever steadily into the ball of concentrated gravity. Ordinarily, Raven would turn away from the grisly work of perhaps Coragyps’ most destructive creation high alchemy. But Raven found he could not.
The drake let out one last weakened screech before falling silent. No longer resisting, the rest of its body was condensed down into the center of the churning mass of glowing amber light. Soon the drake would be nothing more than a perfect sphere of organic matter roughly the size of Raven’s body, fused together under the high pressure of intense gravity of the alchemy. That, Raven decided he did not need to see.
He had succeeded. At least Raven had briefly thought as much, until he noticed the sprawling lake that had dominated the basin was gone. The drake’s sorcerous unveiling had boiled away the entirety of the body of water.
…Second is the coming of the dread beast of woe, whose fury will devour the pure waters at the heart of the sacred basin.
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