Realms of Shadow - Lizz Baldwin [35]
Ascalagon ceased laughing. His smoky, bottomless eyes narrowed, and he lurched forward from the treeline. Darkbriars cracked under the strain. Zossimus took a step backward.
From somewhere within the trees to his right, he heard Pleeancis exclaim, "Uh oh."
"Shade?" boomed the dragon, his voice low and dangerous. "A native from the city of invaders dares come to my abode to ask of me a boon? A boon! Insolent cur!" Ascalagon threw back his head and roared. The noise was as a roll of thunder. "Here is your boon, mage!"
Jaws wide, Ascalagon exhaled a cloud of seething black energy. The force was enough to paste Zossimus's robes to his body. Blackness swirled about him, and he flinched. When the dragon's breath met the protective sheath of positive energy about Zossimus's person, the contact caused an explosion of golden light, no doubt the most light this dark place had ever seen. The energies sparked and sizzled, opposites at war. Unharmed, Zossimus took the opportunity to incant the words to one of his two most powerful spells.
"Essare telpim."
The world stopped. Silence descended. Around him, the black death of the dragon's breath weapon hung unmoving in the air, frozen in time. The dragon towered above him, a colossal statue of scaled flesh. A halo of motionless golden motes surrounded Zossimus's body.
Zossimus knew he had less than a minute-relatively speaking. To Ascalagon, it would seem as though no time had passed. Unfortunately, Zossimus's spell did not allow him to affect anything other than himself while it was in effect, so he could not yet use the special candle. Instead, he took the opportunity to better prepare for combat. In the end, he had only one spell that would serve his purpose. It was his most powerful, but he needed to weaken the dragon a bit first.
Moving quickly and deliberately, he stepped out of the cloud of the dragon's breath and backed away, perhaps thirty paces. Far enough, he deemed. With deft hand gestures and a sure voice, he renewed all of his protective spells, and also cast a glamour that created six rapidly shifting phantasms of his person, all shifting about his real body. He hoped they would confuse the dragon and attract some of its attacks.
He was out of time.
Sound returned with the rush of an incoming tide. For a fraction of a heartbeat, Ascalagon appeared confused at Zossimus's abrupt movement.
"Get him, Boss!" Pleeancis screamed from the safety of the trees.
Zossimus pulled a pinch of sulfur from his robe, cast it to the wind, and began to cast.
Ascalagon roared, flapped his great wings once, and leaped forward out of the trees to cover the entire thirty paces as quickly and surprisingly as a bolt of lightning. Taken aback, Zossimus stumbled backward, fumbled with the words to his spell, and lost it from his memory. A wall of scales and shadows surrounded him. Fangs and claws ringed him in, seemed everywhere.
Enraged and roaring, the dragon lashed like a mad thing at Zossimus and the illusionary images. The thrice-damned thing moved like whirlwind! A claw ripped through an image and tore great clods of sod from the earth. A backhand lash sent another image to oblivion. Another claw attack, another image. Fangs descended, snapping. Zossimus leaped sidewise and the jaws annihilated another image. Even as he tried to create some distance between himself and the dragon, a claw caught Zossimus full in the chest.
Only his protective spell saved his life. With skin as hard as stone, the eviscerating claw strike only tore a deep, but non-lethal gash down his torso. The impact, however, sent him flying through the air toward the trees, where he crashed into the brush with a groan.
Pleeancis shouted from across the clearing. "Oh, you'll swim up to your snout in Hell's turdpool for that one, dragon."
Zossimus clambered to his feet and began again to cast. He had only two images remaining.
Ascalagon was upon him again. Trees cracked under the dragon's weight as he crashed into the woods. A shower of leaves and limbs fell to earth.