Terry flew down and landed his platinum dragon next to Burin, who had sat down on the floor. “Good job, Zeus,” Terry said, patting the dragon on the neck before speaking the command word and shrinking it back down and stuffing it in his pocket. He then walked over to Burin. “So, are you cured? Any more shadow demons or whatever?”
“I don’t know,” Burin said, blinking. “I feel… I feel dizzy.”
I walked over and patted him on the shoulder. “Take a few minutes. We have time. We’re gonna have to wait for Gregor to skin Yrax anyway.”
While Burin rested, I pulled out my phone and took a few pictures of everything. I was excited to tell Momma about how we had slain a tyrannical dragon warlord, and I knew she’d want pictures. I even took a victory pose selfie next to Yrax’s scorched head.
I was planning on sending that one to Becky the second I got home. That’d show her.
Once Gregor was done, he helped Burin to his feet and we broke open the door to the vault, which was no easy task. First, Gregor punched the door repeatedly for five minutes. Then it occurred to me that I could just access that weird new power in me and open the door with magic. The lock was too complex even for that. So Gregor went back to hitting it. It was only after two minutes more that Burin recalled that he had magic gloves that could rust the lock out in seconds.
Wish he’d thought of it earlier. Would have saved us almost ten minutes.
Inside the vault was an immense pile of wealth. I mean, the pile was at least ten feet across, and taller than Burin in some places. And that was just the coins, bars and gems. There was another pile about half as tall and not nearly as wide, made of valuable hides, which Gregor immediately started to gather. “Make sure to separate out the bearskin,” I told the fighter.
“Uh huh,” was all he replied.
“Set up the box,” Terry said, his eyes gleaming at all that lucre. “Burin, get your shovel.”
Burin seemed thankful for the mindless work as he fed shovel after shovel into the top of Cortana. While he did that, I looked around and found several magic items, none of which were any use to us, so I tossed them into the box as well. I felt a little bad about throwing the beautiful stargazing equipment in as well, but truth be told, they were pretty weak by Earth standards, and if I asked nicely, I’m sure my parents would build me an observatory – in orbit – so it’s not like I really needed them. But they were pretty.
There was one object that puzzled me. It was a piece of rock about a foot and a half in diameter sitting on a velvet covered pedestal. I tried to pick it up, but the damn thing was HEAVY. So Gregor walked over and tried to pick it up, and got it a few inches up before dropping it back on the pedestal.
“What is this?” Gregor asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“Maybe try breaking a piece off and feeding it to the box?” Terry asked. He had a point. Cortana would have no trouble analyzing it. But breaking a piece off was easier said than done. Terry broke his favorite knife doing so. We ended up having to print a small adamantine spike to make even a dent, and with good reason.
The rock contained adamantine. LOTS of it. So Gregor set to work using the spike to break it into chunks we could lift, and we fed almost the entire thing into Cortana. All in all, the meteor alone had been worth over fourteen thousand gold pieces. With the other treasures? We’d made something like twenty thousand each, and that was counting a split into a fifth pile to make the more powerful nanite gun we were going to need as part of my plot to revive Emily.
Once we’d gathered what was reasonable – there were still some coins lying around, but we’d reached the point of fatigue where we just had to leave them, since there couldn’t be more than a couple hundred gold left in what was essentially mostly copper coins – we headed back to meet up with Cesseer and Viveka. We returned Viveka’s shawl to her and she rewarded us with a magical decanter she took from the kitchen, then I tapped into the pool of power within again, casting a spell to teleport all of us to the hut’s doorstep.
From our vantage point, we could see that the fortress was in a state of pure chaos. “He was using the demon’s power to control everyone,” Burin said. “Now, with their free wills back, they don’t know what to do.”
“They’ll figure it out,” Terry said. “Come on, Bescaylie’s waiting.” We’d agreed to ask Bescaylie if they could arrange travel for Cesseer and Viveka, and we’d promised to let our allies know what happened, so we’d promised to meet up a dozen or so miles further out from where we’d set down the hut.
We drove the hut to the meeting place and ended up deciding to remain overnight so Bescaylie and the others could have a warm place to rest inside the hut’s inner gardens. Terry took advantage of the time to fly around in the magical fields on the back of Zeus – well, okay, that’s not exactly how it’s spelled, and he obviously didn’t mean the Greek god, but that’s the closest to the spelling in the translation. Knowing we’d be travelling for days if the past was any indication, he knew the statuette would have time to recharge.
Gregor and Cesseer spent hours training together. He taught her his techniques and learned many of hers in turn. Then, after dinner, he showed off his fur and skins collection to everyone. It’s not television, but it was something to watch, I guess. Greta was impressed, and I was more than happy to sit with her while she enjoyed herself.
When we went to bed, Greta had something of her own to reveal. In her boredom, she’d discovered something with the magic item she’d gotten from the rangers. Turns out that Daddy had, probably without even considering it, given the magical pendant she wore the ability to choose between both sexes during transformation.
Greta is HOT as a guy. The one armed thing really works for her as a him. Too bad she was still too injured to throw me down on the bed and screw my brains out. I mean, we still had sex, of course, but it was much more lovingly gentle and less primal. Either way, I really needed that. Also, I’m pretty sure from the pillow talk after that she was hoping to get me pregnant. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was on birth control.
At breakfast, Terry asked me and Greta for advice on a gift for Emily. It was adorable just how excited he was at the prospect that she would be back soon. Speaking of which, we really needed to start looking for a corpse to use for his body. I was really hoping the next world we visited would have humans, or at least elves. I was sure we’d probably end up fighting some kind of bad guy, and if one of them left a nice corpse that wouldn’t require too much effort to sculpt into Terry’s likeness, that would be great.
And I give Gregor crap about his skinning. I guess it’s fine as long was weren’t killing some guy just for his corpse.
I discussed options with Terry while Greta wolfed down – heh – her breakfast, and he settled on a cute floral sundress, a silk ribbon for her hair, and a pizzicato with four extra clips. Greta really approved of that last one.
When it was time to set out, we found Burin meditating in the garden. He had apparently been there all night. “Still trying to work through things?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s strange not having the demon. I couldn’t even fall asleep last night, even after trying to wear myself out by digging some holes in the garden.” Hopefully Baba Yaga wouldn’t be too upset about that.
“Well, that’s probably fine. You’ll have days to rest anyway.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“I’m gonna walk Bescaylie and the others out,” I told him. I didn’t want the hut to forget and attack them. “Want to come along?”
“I’ll be okay,” he said. “My leg fell asleep and it’s gonna be twenty minutes before I can really walk again anyway.”
I giggled. “Well, call if you need anything.”
I wished our guests well on their travels, returned to the hut, and we unceremoniously dumped the fur and Barnaby Two into the cauldron. I could feel the ground lurch beneath my feet, and we began the process of the planar shifting from point to point to reach our destination.
Only, something felt different about this one. I don’t know. Maybe where we were going was further away? Or maybe it was actually on another plane of existence? I couldn’t be sure, and it wasn’t like I could do anything about it either way. We’d find out when we got there.
A couple nights later, after I fell asleep with my head on Greta’s chest, I found myself in the Dreamlands once more. At first I thought it was because I had read that book Terry had found, but that was clearly not it, as I found Burin not long after.
“What’s going on?” I asked, watching the strange scenes unfolding before us.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “But I think these are the demon’s memories. No, I shouldn’t say that. It was an angel once. I think it wanted us to know what happened.”
We watched as the angel of wrath was commanded to slay an evil dragon tyrant by some faceless deity. He traveled to Golarion, where he faced the dragon, but he was bested. The dragon, rather than killing him, captured him, and tortured him. Then he used a strange ritual to trap the angel’s entire being within a magic gem.
The gem was then bathed daily in the dragon’s blood for fifty years. Then the dragon implanted the gem within himself like the ancient Thassilonians had implanted ioun stones. For ten years, more and more of the angel’s essence began to comingle with the dragon’s soul, until it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. And in time, the souls truly became one and the same, the angel driven mad by its ordeal.
It became more than the sum of its parts, a single being that was similar to a demon, but was so much more. We got a glimpse of its power, and had we let it escape, the devastation it would have wrought. We’d known that what Burin’s ancestor had done was amazing, but we had no idea just how amazing it was. And the sacrifice they’d endured… “Worth it?” I asked Burin.
A glowing nimbus, the memory of the angel before its corruption, appeared before us. “Thank you,” it said to Burin, before disappearing.
“Worth it,” Burin said. “Let’s just hope the same can be said of saving Baba Yaga.” He laughed. “I hope those weird dreams of glaciers are over now. I was starting to hear the sound of ice cracking even when I was awake.”
That sounded familiar. “Even while awake?” I asked.
“Yeah, I heard it really loud when we were fighting the demon. Right at the point when I picked my axe back up. What’s really weird is that something seems different about my axe now. It has grown stronger, I think. But more than that, it’s like it’s truly a part of me now.”
Now I was curious. Had the others been hearing things too? “I heard rolling thunder,” I said. “Do you think the others heard anything too?”
He shrugged. “Hadn’t considered it. I’m not too worried about it.”
“Well, I’m going to see if I can find their dreams. Want to come?”
“No, I think I’m going to meditate.”
“While inside a dream?” I asked.
“Why not?” Burin said with a shrug.
I left the dwarf there and headed out, focusing on finding Gregor’s dream first. I eventually found him, training. There was a drum beat, picking up in tempo as he moved faster and reverberating louder as his blows became stronger. “The man who would not die will find me a much different foe than he did last time,” he said to me as I landed.
“I can tell,” I said. “Say, did you happen to hear anything while we were fighting the demon? Something out of place?”
He tapped his chest. “I did not hear. I felt something, in here as I knocked him into the air. The beat of drums. I know what it is you are thinking, it was not my heart. I did not feel them within my body. Instead, they were within my spirit.”
“I see,” I said. “Thanks Gregor. Enjoy your training.”
“I always enjoy my training,” he answered as the drum beats began again. “Would you like to join me?”
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“One hundred push-ups. One hundred sit-ups. Then I run to the tree over there and back ten times,” he said, pointing at a tree maybe five football fields away.
“No, I think I’m good,” I said. “Have fun.”
Terry’s dream was strange. It was the ruined farmhouse I’d seen before, but Terry was nowhere to be seen. Instead, there was some kind of clockwork version of Terry, leaning against a wall. It was carefully protecting a small flower.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“This is what is left. The only thing that remains,” the automaton answered. “I must protect it.”
“I see,” I said.
The construct turned, looking at the horizon. “It’s coming again,” it said. Its gears began whirring to life as it took careful aim, firing at the approaching dragon and scaring it off. “I will kill it eventually,” it said, returning to sheltering the flower.
“Do you remember fighting Burin’s demon?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Did you hear anything while we were fighting it? Anything out of the ordinary?”
“Out of the ordinary?” it asked. Then it shook its head. “No, I only heard gears, which is not all that strange for a machine.”
I returned to my own dreams, and in the morning, finally got out of bed, now convinced that I wasn’t the only one who had awakened some new form of power. Not that I could talk about it with anyone, since none of them remembered seeing me in their dreams. But it was interesting to note.
During breakfast, the world lurched again, indicating that we had made it to our destination. “Go ahead,” Greta said to me. “I would only slow you down, and you need to hurry and get Baba Yaga back where she belongs, for the good of my people and everyone in Irrisen.”
I leaned down and kissed her forehead, then ran off to get my things. Hopefully this would be the last stop. Hopefully we would finally rescue Baba Yaga and be done with it.
I was really starting to miss home.
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