• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Hold them back!” Eir commanded. She fitted and loosed three more shafts.

They struck the Destroyer of Life and spewed frost but did nothing more.

“They don’t work!” Rytlock growled, climbing up a smoldering mound of destroyer parts. “Try something else!”

“Buy me time!”

Logan’s powerstone-enhanced war hammer pounded the head of a destroyer. The creature’s outer skin solidified. Another blow ripped the skin loose. The magma monster stood there shivering as if it had been flayed. A new shell of rock began hardening on its amorphous form. “Oh, no, you don’t.” Logan struck again. The shell cracked, and magma gushed out across the ground.

Rytlock meanwhile plunged steel gauntlets into the chest of another rock creature and tore the thing in half. “I love these gloves!” he exulted. Just then, a second destroyer bashed into him, flinging him to the ground. It rushed him, but Rytlock lifted his foot, planted it on the steaming torso of the thing, and flipped it overhead to break on the lava field. Rytlock struggled to his feet as a third destroyer charged him. It would have tackled him and set him on fire except that Caithe plunged a powerstone-stiletto into its neck. It froze up like a statue and broke into a thousand pieces.

“Thanks,” Rytlock said.

A destroyer charged Eir, grabbing her arm and burning it brutally. She cried out, kicking the monster back. As it staggered, she dropped her bow and grabbed an axe and buried it in the destroyer’s lava-gushing head.

Still, she swooned back, her arm blackened where it had touched her.

More destroyers surged up, but a great deluge poured down upon them all—a sudden rain that healed Eir’s burns and Rytlock’s bruises and every wound they had suffered so far. The rain also solidified the rock monsters around them, letting axes and hammers do their work.

When the work was done, the comrades turned within a circle of smoldering stones to see Zojja, drenched but grinning. “A healing rain, don’t you think?”

“Thanks,” Eir said, turning with an axe in each hand. She brought them down in a brutal rhythm, slaying destroyers two at a time. But the tide of magma monsters was unending, and the Destroyer of Life still commanded the caldera, still sent red-hot shafts down into the battle.

One iron arrow struck Big Snaff’s left hip, melting the joint. The golem teetered sideways and crashed to the ground.

“Damn it!” shouted Eir.

Rock monsters hurled themselves onto him. They would have torn him apart if Zojja hadn’t laved the fallen golem with conjured water.

The Destroyer of Life next turned its bow back on Eir, loosing a shaft that moaned as it fell.

She heard it just before it struck and ducked down, seeing the iron arrow impale Big Snaff’s foot. Somehow, the metal caught fire.

“Primordial flame!” Eir realized. “The core of the Destroyer’s power.” She turned toward Rytlock. “Give me a gauntlet!”

Rytlock ripped the powerstone-enhanced weapon from the chest of a destroyer, shucked the glove from his hand, and flung it to Eir.

She grasped it and shoved her hand within. Then she reached down and snatched the white-hot arrow from Big Snaff’s foot. The primordial arrow screamed in the clutch of that frigid gauntlet.

Eir spun about, nocking the blazing-hot arrow on her bow and drawing back. The bow burst into flame. She sighted on the Destroyer of Life and released.

The scarlet shaft soared up beneath the vault of the magma chamber.

Crying out, Eir dropped her bow, which flamed for a moment before it was wholly consumed. It fell to ash.

The primordial arrow was falling now toward the dragon champion.

“Come on!” Eir said through gritted teeth. “A little luck . . .”

The shaft descended to smash into the Destroyer of Life’s face. Primordial fire pierced through to primordial fire. A holocaust erupted from every joint of the beast. The flames roared, going red-hot and white-hot and blue. Then came a deafening crack. The rocky figure of the Destroyer of Life blasted apart. Hunks of basalt cascaded all around,