Guild Wars_ Edge of Destiny - J. Robert King [108]
The lightning leaped onward to Ebonhawke Keep itself. It exploded the guard station atop it and tumbled the burning warriors to the courtyard below.
The strike then vaulted to the back wall of Ebonhawke and ripped it open as well.
Capering and cackling, it tore on southward, across the Crystal Desert.
Only as the blinding glare eased and the thunder retreated was there room to think.
Stunned, Dylan stared at the lightning’s path—the fires that burned the charr camp, the great breach in the northern wall, the toppled ruins of the asura gate, the shattered height of the keep, the blasted rift in the southern gate . . .
It was as if the god Balthazar had run his finger through camp and fort—a boy mixing black ants with red—so that human and charr would annihilate each other.
But it wasn’t just humans and charr.
There were ogres, too.
Already, the ogres were charging into the northern part of the charr camp. Rifle blasts ripped out from the charr, but not a single ogre fell. They roared in, their clubs bashing charr, their hyenas tearing through tents. More gunfire. More clubbing. The ogres bounded through the charr as if they were not there. In moments, they would break through the encampment and surge across no-man’s-land.
“Prepare to fire!” shouted an Ebon Vanguard lieutenant.
All along the wall, bows drew taut and ballistae creaked and catapults strained.
“Fire!”
A hail of bolts and shafts and boulders vaulted down onto the ogres and hyenas. The arrows only glanced off them. One ballista impaled an ogre, bringing him down, and two of the catapult stones smashed others, but the rest came on.
Armed for hand-to-hand combat, Dylan would be no help on the wall. He turned and descended the stairs into a courtyard in turmoil. Warriors rushed to their posts or struggled to close the breaches in the walls. Dylan strode among them, heading toward the keep.
He would defend it with his life. With his life, he would defend his queen.
Queen Jennah and her three Shining Blade bodyguards had just entered the armory on the fifth floor of the keep when lightning struck. Boom! It was like being inside a drum. The walls shuddered, the floor shook, and stones and bodies plunged past the windows.
Hands gripped the queen, steadying her. It was Countess Anise—pale, thin, beautiful, and angry.
“What was that?” the queen wondered aloud. “There was mind in that stroke.”
Countess Anise said, “Yes. I felt it, too.”
The queen stepped up to the window, drawing Anise with her. She stared out into the tormented sky and said, “We are mesmers. We know minds—how to touch them, how to turn them. Let us meditate on the mind in this storm.”
Anise channeled thoughts into her.
Queen Jennah of Kryta, staring from a window high in Ebonhawke Keep, peered into the mind of darkness.
It was unlike any she had wrestled before.
A sandstorm. A chaos. Bottomless hunger. Endless outrage.
She glimpsed it for just a moment, but that was enough. In that moment, it had glimpsed her.
Crying out, Queen Jennah reeled back from the window. Countess Anise caught her, staring in dread at her queen.
“That’s what they look like,” Jennah said, panting. Her eyes were like mirrors. “That’s what it’s like to look into the mind of a dragon.”
This was Dylan’s finest moment. In Divinity’s Reach, he had stood vigil beside Jennah through a hundred silken parties and a thousand confetti parades. Now, in the fortress of Ebonhawke, he had his one chance to truly defend her.
Dylan stepped out before the keep, his sword bared. “What comes?”
Something was fighting through the breach in the curtain wall—something huge. Dylan saw golden eyes and snapping jaws and spiked hackles. Vanguard troops clustered before the breach, shoving polearms into it, but the creature still came. Suddenly, a crystalline hyena burst through the rift, breaking it wider. The beast landed on a line of