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Altaired Beast Chapter 10: Death Addled
Credit to alty for bouncing off me; this whole story belongs to he as much as I, as this story was written in tandem.
Remmy and Pierre and Nagoya belong to me
Alton and Joanne belongs to alty
CHAPTER 10
Death Addled
The Dragon sailed down on broad, black-iron wings to the stage, scattering coins and treasure about with a thrash of its tail as it descended. Nagoya looked on from her throne-side cage as the beast landed in front of her rescuers, wings unfurled and gleaming golden axe held back for a swing...
"DODGE!" yelled Pierre, the axe already in motion as he dove forward to the ground.
Remmy, a few steps behind, ducked his head in like a turtle and barely missed the axe by a feather. Alton rolled to the right, and Joanne touched her stomach flat to the rocky floor in front of her.
Alton got to his feet and barked a war cry as he charged the dragon, grabbing hold of the axe handle and its right elbow to keep it from swinging again. Pierre attempted to jam his rapier between its abdominal scales, and Remmy and Joanne cast their respective enchantments: a bolt of lightning from Remmy to Pierre's blade, and a strength boost from Joanne to Alton, who tried to wrest the axe from the beast.
The sword crackled and popped with magical electricity, but quickly fizzled out. And despite the strength boost, the dragon lifted Alton off his feet with one arm grasping the axe; the other plucked the rapier and cast it to Pierre's side. "A lovely tickle," it remarked, before bringing the axe down where Pierre stood. The swan rolled and acquired his sword again, and the big bird slammed flat to the ground next to the partly buried axe, his arm still gripping the handle.
"You don't have the strength to match me, champion," the Dragon spoke down to Alton, then directed his gaze to the rest. "You were all fools to come here."
"Can't expect angels to do all the work," quipped Remmy. "Joanne, now!"
A torrent of fire explodes from Joanne's staff and engulfs the dragon's face, effectively blinding it. As raised a hand to shield its face, the flow of flames suddenly stopped and ...reversed, flowing back into an empty bottle held by Remmy. He pointed it directly at the dragon's face.
It felt a tingle as the last of the flames flowed past his face, as if the fire and heat itself began to pull and drag its snout towards the bottle. But the dragon's maw split open rather than taper into a point, and a bright flash preceded a terrible wave of noise as lightning dashed past the bottle's event horizon, sending Remmy skidding back towards the blocked cave entrance. The bottle went into a tailspin and spewed fire like a hellish champagne bottle before falling over the side of the arena, and Remmy laid face down. He did not get up, and his satchel was not on him.
"Remmy?!" Joanne cried out and looked back, then turned her attention back to the Storm Dragon in time to watch it grab her by the torso with one hand, arms pinned, while the other grabbed her tail end.
"Clever gambit, my dear. That deserves a long, tortured death."
The dragon pulled her apart slowly, enough to make her cry out in pain as she felt her length stretch agonizingly.
Fortunately, relief came quickly as the Storm Dragon suddenly added his own roar of pain, feeling an axe breach its back scales and carve into flesh. Alton managed to pry the momentarily forgotten golden axe from the ground and find his mark, causing the dragon to release Joanne's tail. The other grip was released when Pierre, having bounded over Alton and the Dragon both, drove his rapier under the scales of the dragon's left wrist. "Flee, Joanne!" he yelled, trying to pry his weapon back out.
Pierre flew as the Dragon whirled about, hanging on by the hilt as it grabbed Alton with the other hand. It squeezed Alton violently and brought him around to face him, albeit upside down. It opened its mouth and shocked the champion full in the face with a bolt of lightning, leaving his body limp and his head half-charred before flinging him behind it, somewhere towards the throne and Nagoya's cage.
The motion threw Pierre to the ground with his sword dislodged from the beast's wrist, and from there he could see Alton descending... but not where. A feeling of hopelessness crept into his breast, and his face flashed with shock for a moment before his attention returned to the abominable tyrant before him.
"You evil creature..." he growled with his beak clenched. "I won't allow you to win."
The Dragon raised its bloody axe and grasped with both hands as it gave a roar like laughter. "You alone, then? Very well, 'hero'... try to stick me with that toothpick as much as you can!"
Pierre nods, accepting the challenge. His fancy firepoker lashes out; midsection, head, head, foot, head. Each time knocked aside, blocked, or on the mark yet slowed by a forcefield; but the sword is undisarmed. The Storm Dragon all but yawns, grips the blade all around in his palm, and tries to yank it away. Pierre, sensing an opportunity, pulls it back; applying just enough force by the blade's direction to sting a little.
"Peh. That's a weak...what the..." The Dragon opens his palm, and slowly realizes he's been cut; a paper cut, to him, but an exposed wound nonetheless. "That barely...why does it hurt so MUCH!"
"The humble paper cut. More painful than the actual damage done, but as much a threat of distraction as-" Pierre ducks while placing his sword horizontally, and the threat of more pain stops a punch cold an inch away. He doesn't get away unscathed, being punted shortly after. Even failing to land on his feet he gets the feeling that it could have been so much worse.
"I will not be denied and insulted like this by fowl creatures!" booms Storm Dragon, lightning coursing through air and ground both to cook Pierre's goose. Sword aloft, he allows his enchantable blade to absorb the Dragon's own lightning from the air; hops to avoid the low voltage and plunges his sword down first to ward it away or absorb it, too. He isn't certain which happened to it, but he looked up to see the axe coming down over him. The arena cracked violently.
"Come on, get up..." Joanne taps at Remmy's cheek. "Get up." A little harder. "Get up!" Three smacks. She's about to stop playing nice, but decides that might be too loud. Instead, the snake looks for other solutions. "Satchel, no, where...fuck, fuck, Remmy...Remmy first. Any other bottles on person?" She coils her tail around his body and quickly finds bottles around his belt, and one tucked in his breast. She grabs them up. "Let's sssee here...potion, lotion, pain...can't potion him if I can't be sure he'll drink. What about this then..." She uncorks the pepper flakes, and sprinkles some into his mouth, and a little into his beak -
He turns over suddenly, making a weird snoring noise. "Hhhhhhhhhhhhh! N- not into the nose! That shit hurts even birds in the nose! It's like a salted wound!"
Alton's limp body crashed beside the dragon's rock throne. Nagoya beheld his lifeless body with shock from her cage, and she looked back down to see the heroic swan knight locked in battle, now alone, against her hulking captor.
She shut her eyes against the tears that threatened to escape it. Now was not the time. This is the chance she had been waiting for: to be something other than a damsel in distress, a princess to be rescued. Even in captivity, she aimed to turn the tide of the fight back against the Lord of Storms.
"Oh, thank the gods!" Joanne exclaimed. "You're awake now. Sorry about that, Remmy, but we need you awake. Alton and Pierre are... are..."
She looked back to see Pierre executing a flurry of jabs and swipes with his blade against the seemingly unphased tyrant, but Alton was nowhere in sight. Recognition sucked the air out of her lungs, and her eyes went wide.
"Alton... ?!" she gasped. He couldn't be dead. Not now, and not behind her back. Not when she could have done something.
"Champion," Nagoya called out to Alton, her tone commanding even as she strained to reach him with palms outstretched, "I cannot permit you to leave this battle, not even in death! Now, get up! Rise!"
An orb of light pulsed into life above Alton, radiating a strange warmth through his body. A heat without heat, cooling and vitalizing like an otherworldly sun. It grew and grew as the princess seemed to feed it with her own life force, until she threw her hands down and the orb plunged into Alton's breast, jumpstarting his heart like a mystic defibrillator.
He gasped deeply and hoarsely. Nagoya's spoken words and command swam through his mind as he made himself to stand, regarding her as she panted and seemed to hang from the bars of the cage lest she collapsed. "Princess," he said.
"You... hah... must go, Champion. Help them... there's... no time," she uttered, pointing down to the arena.
Alton nodded. He looked down at the arena, regarding the Storm Dragon's axe, and then looked back up to the wall of weapons he retrieved it from.
"On my way, Highness."
The arena cracked with a thunderous thud. The golden axe missed Pierre narrowly, and the Dragon twisted himself around to see Alton standing there defiantly: hulking twice as large as before, he carried a look of grim determination in his eyes... and a great Silver Axe in his hands.
Alton didn't give the beast a chance to quip about his return. He charged toward the Dragon and commenced a berserker's barrage of swinging steel, blocking and cutting and trading blow for blow on more even ground than before.
The match went on for less than a minute. Grunting, growling and furious, the Dragon erupted another torrent of lightning from its mouth in an attempt to stun and overwhelm the agile brute, but Alton's reflexes never faltered, and the Silver Axe proved a dependable container for such a discharge. Seeing an opening, Alton bounded over the dragon's outstretched neck and whirled in midair, making a devastating contact before it could raise its neck back up.
A shrieking ping rang out with the crash of lightning. The thick plate of steel covering the back of the dragon's neck had caved in from the impact, but even with the axe's weight and sharpness, the scale remained unbroken. Nevertheless, the Dragon's eyes bulged out and mouth went agape with a cry of pain and shock, the discomfort like nothing he'd experienced before.
"You...ancient hero!" The Dragon roars, frustrated. "You refuse...to stay...dead! I won't have it from you! Today...right here...your legend ENDS!" He breaks away, flaring his wings; taking to the sky, and practically sparkling with electricity all over his body. "I'll happily destroy this lair with you all within...and make your kingdom my new lair!"
Pierre and Alton can only look up and watch in horror as lightning begins to rain down. Raising their weapons in defense, Alton's axe takes the brunt but still sends shocking shivers down his body. Pierre seems miraculously unharmed, his sword taking well to the lightning as if intentionally enchanted...but the lair is indeed beginning to crack upon the floor, blast by blast...
There suddenly comes a loud scream from Joanne, her arm stretched towards the Dragon. And the lightning stops...as the Storm Dragon speaks. "I quite loved that scream of agony, but. What. Did. You. Do?"
"You know how lightning works, with leads that essentially send a signal back?" Remmy asks, reaching all over Joanne's body, shifting her snakeskin and trying to ensure separation that magic can recognize.
"Yeah. What, you want me to send him a spell?" Joanne asks back, shuddering and shivering and trying to aid in the shed while still keeping the skin over her body as much as possible.
"I think it's possible. He hasn't blasted us with overly-powerful magic in a way we've been able to effectively respond to, but if we can prepare properly...I think we can hit him with his guard down." The owl begins to enchant the skin itself: granting it conductive properties, moreso than the rest of her body. Not to resist, but to carry the lightning towards the ground without burning her body too much. "And your spells are often more directly powerful than mine."
"Do you have any potions for-"
"I lost most of my potions, equipment, and satchel. I don't have much to enchant to capture. I have a different idea for the one I just filled, though." Pulling out a different vessel, he begins to enchant the contents and vessel itself. His neck swivels upwards. "Do you know any gravity spells?"
"Can I cast a vortex upon him, like we do on glasses?" Joanne asks, gripping the jar of cold mist and prying away a portion of earlier owl magic.
Remmy's eyes bug out. "How did you-"
"I'm full of surprises~" the snake grins with a wide mouth, holding the enchantment as an orb. "We can study together later. In fact, we will study together later, because if this works, I'll want to learn gravity spells. And because you'll owe me."
She suddenly reaches up with her left hand, not holding the essence of attraction, as lightning comes down around her. Remmy puts up a shield spell; Joanne grips a bolt and screams, clapping the orb into the bolt and letting go.
She collapses, her bronzed, bruised skin having done the job.
"Enough," Remmy says to himself. "She did enough." He throws a jar enchanted to be brittle yet sharp like ice, full of Joanne's iceberg mist further enchanted to be cooler, colder. Snap-freeze cold. Propelled further with wind. And pulled straight to a gleaming target in the dusty, dark skies.
It shatters on contact, and would have even if the Storm Dragon had caught it. Covered suddenly in freezing, suffocating cold, the Dragon begins to fumble his flight…
"...What. Did. You. Do?"
The Storm Dragon felt something wrong in the air. Something wrong... with the air, how it felt on his scales. It was a subtle sensation, as if the magic in his body became more active somehow. More heightened and charged, it pulled at the air around him, looking to attract other magic to it like a magnet. That's when he felt the cold bite through his scales...
The cloud of enchanted, sublimated ice Remmy had released from the shattered bottle swirled and rushed up to engulf the mad tyrant. He felt the sweltering heat and moisture of the air around him immediately condense into frost as the frozen air consumed him, obscuring his vision and dulling his senses. He thrashed about and struggled to stay afloat, causing a gentle hail of cracked ice to gently fall below him, but his wings remained stiff; he could only flap them at the base, where the wings attached to his back.
"IMPUDENT WITCH! I'LL TEAR YOU TO PIECES!!"
Alton looked at Joanne and regarded her loose, burnt skin, then back up now to the furious Dragon now half-frozen and stumbling in the air. Time to bring you back down, Beast, Alton thought to himself. He dashed into position under the beast and behind it, held the Silver Axe with one hand and twisted his torso. He kept his eyes on the Dragon, his left arm tensing from the weapons weight at full extension, and then snapped his torso back around and flung the axe into the air.
The axe hit its mark. It shattered through the thin, unarmored, brittle membrane of the Dragon's right wing, sending it into a staggered freefall back down to the arena while the silver axe fell to the far side of the volcanic chasm.
A crash-landing is almost too much to hope for, but the Dragon lands much harder than expected. As if in tantrum, he slams the ground with his weaponless arms; roaring in pain and rage and making Alton unsteady; Remmy falls on his face as Pierre steadies himself.
The swan's life flashes before his eyes as the Storm Dragon all but teleports to Alton in a thundercrack and lightningflash, seemingly just past him. It's all Alton can do to not allow his neck to get bitten or snapped; he waves Pierre away to defend the mages in a singular instant where he isn't fighting for his life, and the owl and swan join company one last time.
"Please tell me we can seal him-"
"We cannot."
"...come again."
"I lost the bottles. And used the last one as a makeshift weapon. Nothing else I can actually use."
"He's too powerful. Can we even kill him?"
"We can seal him in many things around, but connecting him to the volcano would kick the can down the generation and make him worse. I do not know how we're supposed to-"
"Not my question. Can my sword...can it kill him?"
"I...I don't think it...DUCK!"
Evidently the Dragon had tired of Alton. The hero...battered, bruised, broiled, and barely hanging on. And without the hero of olden legend...loosed a bolt to kill the remainder alive. Only Pierre raising his sword to guard saved them, hungrily drawing in the magical strike...
Remmy looks at the sword with fresh eyes, and to Pierre.
Pierre's head slowly turns to Remmy to ask for ideas, but sees a thoughtful expression.
Remmy gulps, but nods to the fencer, who nods back as the owl casts protective hexes and jinxes and spells upon his ally, before retreating to Joanne, having spent much of his magic and hoping not to die before he can use the rest to stabilize and heal her.
Pierre steps forward to finish the fight.
The dragon scowls, scoffs, smirks.
The beast makes a lightning-quick lunge at Pierre, but only succeeds at closing its massive claws over where he once stood.
"I sparred the king victorious. The old man is more swift than you!" Pierre taunts.
"I shall devour your king!" the conqueror roars, spreading wings and flapping back for an assisted pounce.
Again the Dragon crashes down into an empty space. With the swan's alacrity in both mind and body now at its peak, he could not be touched.
"I won't give you that chance," Pierre retorts, jumping back quickly as the other wing swings around to swat him. "You're not leaving here at all."
The Storm Dragon snarls, swivels to face the bird, and opens wide; breathing a storm of invisible lightning leads. Each one touches the sword, flashing a jagged line of lightning through the air, punctuated by screams from the princess.
Pierre stands upright and drags his sword briefly along the rock to discharge, untouched.
The Dragon growls lowly, staring down at the unshaken swan with a menacing, bitter scowl. The look in his eyes is different. No longer furious, it seems to be weighing his combatant--or more accurately, his words.
"You seem more confident than you ought to be. You could not hope to kill me, and you have nothing to seal me with like you did those wasted Altar Beasts."
He plants his claws into the granite in front of him and brings his head lower, almost facing Pierre head-on. "So, little hero, what do you think you can do to stop me?"
"I'm jealous of you. You have teeth. You can smile better than I. I can barely smirk." Pierre runs a wing across the length of the blade, suffering a slight tingle across his feathers. "Come. Let us end this; I shall bring your dark powers to heel, or you shall send me straight to hell." The swan prepares to lunge, himself.
The Dragon gave a deep rumbling chuckle in response. "To hell with you, then..."
Eyes wide and jaw open, the Dragon dashes forward. Pierre lunges forward and to the side, but the beast twisted his neck and followed him in an instant. The jaws, in that instant, snapped around him from the sides, but Pierre had already jumped up and out of harm's way, except for a bundle of tail feathers.
"Agh!" he yelped, then wasted no time to twist himself free and bring his blade tip to swipe across the Dragon's eyes. A superficial cut was the best he could manage before jumping away.
The bestial roar of pain and anguish proved the target effective. Pierre can barely afford to wince as the Dragon is upon him once again, mouth leaking wrathful lightning.
"You DIE!!!"
Pierre can see the move in the Dragon's one eye. The beast intends to bite his head clean off.
A fireball explodes against the beast's snout. Small and ineffectual, the Storm Dragon stopped short and growled angrily, the distraction giving Pierre the moment he needed to duck and roll away, literally saving his very long neck.
Joanne laid against the rock-slide blocking the entrance, her staff outstretched. Remmy had tended to her as well as he could and had finished with Alton when the Dragon's eyes landed on them, the tear ducts themselves conducting arcs of electricity between them.
Pierre stood between his party and the beast now, stoic and sword pointed at it.
"Ha ha ha... haHAHAHAHAHAHAHAaaa! You wretched crusaders! You have all earned nothing less than all my strength and fury, enough to bring this entire mountain down on all of us!"
"You may be able to tame my lightning, Swan who would be Prince," he shouted maniacally as light leaked from his scales, "but I challenge you to withstand an unfettered maelstrom of celestial fire!!"
The world in front of Pierre became light and noise emanating from the terrifying tyrant, now shining with a thousand streams of lightning striking the ground and filling the volcano. The swan held his ground and his sword to the storm, focusing all his effort on his and his party's survival.
"Can you save them, hero, or only yourself?" The Dragon's voice boomed over the din of his body having become a living power plant.
"AND FOR HOW LONG!?"
Despite the swan's valiant last stand, the lightning storm already overwhelmed his enchanted blade and turned it red-hot. It could absorb no longer, and now only deflect the lightning away… but not for much longer.
"Don't worry about us!" Remmy calls, his eyes and Joanne's locked together and having a whole conversation in an instant.
Joanne and Remmy's hands reach out towards Alton, bronzing their classical hero's feathers as their shield. He widens his stance and takes the barrage, screaming as much in challenge as pain.
The owl takes two hands of the snake and enchant the air above them as she cups then; she stabilizes the diffuse spell as if he had enchanted a proper vessel, even as she wraps her tail around the great heroic bird's leg; unaffected and unafraid. Remmy grabs the other and tingles as a far lesser jolt passes through him than the enchanted warrior.
"You're lucky I need you to heal me after this stunt," Joanne says, having wrapped around and around Alton, fully off the ground. Her upper back to his front, her left arm and his reaching out together.
Pierre trusted his friends and stood his ground, determined to keep the sword held up against the searing onslaught until it melted in his feathery hands. The flood of celestial fire began to prick his body all over--most of all, his beak, neck and arms. Between the constant shocks and the blade's now-burning temperature, he found it difficult to keep blade as well as his own stance steady; and yet, even through the pain, the swan marveled at the blade's refusal to soften into slag. It gave him the courage to keep holding steady.
Meanwhile, the lightning stream began to peel skin from Joanne, even as Alton tried to cover and shield her with arms and hands. In excruciating pain, they could not look forward anymore, shutting their eyes and gritting their teeth, but never lowering their hands. The spell had to go through, against the pressure... and there was one step left to finally reroute it.
Remmy lunged himself towards Pierre, cringing against the holocaust. The swan felt the old mage's familiar wings cover his own as he struggled not to lose grip on his rapier. "This is it, boy!" he yelled into the swan's ears, "You MUST hang on now, for as long as it takes!"
Pierre felt the tingle of magic flow from Remmy's now seared wingtips into his own, and then through into the blade. As he held on, his outstretched arms began to stagger and sway less and less against the flow of power. The red glow dissipated, replaced by shimmering, golden white against the white-blue of the Dragon's sustained power discharge. Rather than overwhelm it, the onslaught of lightning began to flow around the rapier's blade in a whirling motion.
Joanne's hand grasps hold of a bolt, with Alton's hand around hers; both yelp but grit their mouths as Joanne redirects the bolt to her spell orb, held in pristine shape above her hand until now. The moment the bolt touches, it attempts to equalize; absorbing the orb and siphoning it into the source. The bolt, unfulfilled, drops straight down and barely misses her hand while carrying extra gravitic force with it.
All in an instant, and only for a second, the barrage of electricity slows, and Alton and Joanne buckle under sudden extra gravity.
The river of lightning that had moments ago washed over them started to pull away and curve from behind Pierre & Remmy to right in front of them. Exhausted and charred, Alton fell against the sudden gravity to his knees, one hand on the ground to support him while the other held Joanne up. Both watched in sudden awe as the furious torrent of lightning twisted and swirled in front of Pierre and into his blade.
"Joanne," Alton croaked, "... is what we're feeling right now... what it feels like?"
"Yeah," she said, her voice hoarse as well, "it's exactly what we're looking at.."
Pierre spares no glance to Remmy, but still has to ask. "Reach forward...or pull back like I'm fishing?"
"Grant him no quarter," replies the wizened mage.
Pierre began to step backwards, and the 'maelstrom' he'd been promised had now swirled into a airborne whirlpool of magic, draining from the depths of the Dragon's maw–and his body–into his rapier. It shined brighter and brighter as it drank more of the lightning, until both the source of the light and its termination glimmered evenly.
The Dragon attempted to pull back, but found his muscles sluggish. It felt an inexorable pull toward the swan's tiny toothpick of a blade, such that it took all his titanic effort just to stay in place. The force of the magic pull dragged him toward Pierre and his sword all the same. The Dragon dug his claws to the ground and tried to clamp his jaw shut, but it couldn't stop its own magic from fleeing its body. Soon, the last of its magic drained into the blade completely, leaving his body gray and dark just as a glowing tail of light slurped into the pointy tip.
Still, though, the Dragon felt itself being pulled. And for the first time, there was fear in its voice.
"W-what... is this?!" the Beast demanded–a futile last grasp at control.
"What is happening to me?!!"
The Dragon's large, steely snout suddenly clamped shut, reducing the ferocious beast to muffled protests. Unable to speak, it felt its nose and teeth begin to pull and stretch forward, tapering into a beak-like shape the closer it came to the tip of Pierre's rapier. The unnatural warping of the Dragon's head and neck sounded at once like a steel girder under stress, and a wooden ship's hull being pressed by the ocean around it: a metallic squeaking of steel scales overlaying the deep, rubbery pulling noise of warped dragon meat.
With as much force, and force of will, he can muster...the Storm Dragon opens his mouth, and feels his body slide around the rapier like a sheath...or a sword-swallower. Thin and compressed, tapering just in front of his long tail and his legs, which hang nearly-uselessly off of the blade.
He manages the tiniest of relieved smirks…
His body relents, absorbed into the sword from all sides with an odd sigh, green-dulled-to-gray slowly fading to silver from grip to point as his head tapers beyond the blade and enters the handle. Pierre's hand shudders as the grip begins to shiver and mutate in his grasp, silver blade taking in the last of the Dragon's limbs at the tip.
Pierre let out a breath, and both fowls stared at the dragon-infused blade: the silver turned to a verdant green streaked with thin, jagged light-blue lines running down into the hilt. Draconic legs merged into the loop rings while a serpentine tail fused to side ring, just over the ricasso. The crossbar was subsumed by a pair of wings--one wing partly revealing the rear quillion--and terminated by scaly hands turned upward.
The hilt became rough and scaly, as if the neck of the dragon, and slightly sharper spines ran along one side. The pommel morphed into a molded facsimile of the Dragon's head. Horns pointed back towards the grip, yet diagonally away from the axis. Mouth, closed, yet still some fangs visible. Eyes like gemstones. A snout with tiny molded nostrils...
"If you had told me someone forged this sword...I'd tell you they spared no expense..." Pierre says, reverently. "Tell me. Does this mean it's over?"
Remmy offered his wings to examine the transformed blade. He gripped the handle, testing the weapon's weight, and then ran his feathers across its edge. After a moment, he hands it back.
"It requires more study, but the Storm Dragon appears to be no more. By our efforts, he has been bound to and intertwined with the matter of the blade itself. He is a blade now, and I doubt if there is a way to reverse the transformation."
Pierre lets out a whistle. "What could that mean for rebuilding the Altars, then?"
Remmy shrugs. "It too requires further study." He smiles. "Thankfully, there are now options, and we have plenty of time. Let us clean up here and return along our path - and the first stop may well be available to aid such study, as well as the rest we absolutely need after this. Go free the Princess. I have some brave heroes to heal."
Remmy and Pierre and Nagoya belong to me
Alton and Joanne belongs to alty
CHAPTER 10
Death Addled
The Dragon sailed down on broad, black-iron wings to the stage, scattering coins and treasure about with a thrash of its tail as it descended. Nagoya looked on from her throne-side cage as the beast landed in front of her rescuers, wings unfurled and gleaming golden axe held back for a swing...
"DODGE!" yelled Pierre, the axe already in motion as he dove forward to the ground.
Remmy, a few steps behind, ducked his head in like a turtle and barely missed the axe by a feather. Alton rolled to the right, and Joanne touched her stomach flat to the rocky floor in front of her.
Alton got to his feet and barked a war cry as he charged the dragon, grabbing hold of the axe handle and its right elbow to keep it from swinging again. Pierre attempted to jam his rapier between its abdominal scales, and Remmy and Joanne cast their respective enchantments: a bolt of lightning from Remmy to Pierre's blade, and a strength boost from Joanne to Alton, who tried to wrest the axe from the beast.
The sword crackled and popped with magical electricity, but quickly fizzled out. And despite the strength boost, the dragon lifted Alton off his feet with one arm grasping the axe; the other plucked the rapier and cast it to Pierre's side. "A lovely tickle," it remarked, before bringing the axe down where Pierre stood. The swan rolled and acquired his sword again, and the big bird slammed flat to the ground next to the partly buried axe, his arm still gripping the handle.
"You don't have the strength to match me, champion," the Dragon spoke down to Alton, then directed his gaze to the rest. "You were all fools to come here."
"Can't expect angels to do all the work," quipped Remmy. "Joanne, now!"
A torrent of fire explodes from Joanne's staff and engulfs the dragon's face, effectively blinding it. As raised a hand to shield its face, the flow of flames suddenly stopped and ...reversed, flowing back into an empty bottle held by Remmy. He pointed it directly at the dragon's face.
It felt a tingle as the last of the flames flowed past his face, as if the fire and heat itself began to pull and drag its snout towards the bottle. But the dragon's maw split open rather than taper into a point, and a bright flash preceded a terrible wave of noise as lightning dashed past the bottle's event horizon, sending Remmy skidding back towards the blocked cave entrance. The bottle went into a tailspin and spewed fire like a hellish champagne bottle before falling over the side of the arena, and Remmy laid face down. He did not get up, and his satchel was not on him.
"Remmy?!" Joanne cried out and looked back, then turned her attention back to the Storm Dragon in time to watch it grab her by the torso with one hand, arms pinned, while the other grabbed her tail end.
"Clever gambit, my dear. That deserves a long, tortured death."
The dragon pulled her apart slowly, enough to make her cry out in pain as she felt her length stretch agonizingly.
Fortunately, relief came quickly as the Storm Dragon suddenly added his own roar of pain, feeling an axe breach its back scales and carve into flesh. Alton managed to pry the momentarily forgotten golden axe from the ground and find his mark, causing the dragon to release Joanne's tail. The other grip was released when Pierre, having bounded over Alton and the Dragon both, drove his rapier under the scales of the dragon's left wrist. "Flee, Joanne!" he yelled, trying to pry his weapon back out.
Pierre flew as the Dragon whirled about, hanging on by the hilt as it grabbed Alton with the other hand. It squeezed Alton violently and brought him around to face him, albeit upside down. It opened its mouth and shocked the champion full in the face with a bolt of lightning, leaving his body limp and his head half-charred before flinging him behind it, somewhere towards the throne and Nagoya's cage.
The motion threw Pierre to the ground with his sword dislodged from the beast's wrist, and from there he could see Alton descending... but not where. A feeling of hopelessness crept into his breast, and his face flashed with shock for a moment before his attention returned to the abominable tyrant before him.
"You evil creature..." he growled with his beak clenched. "I won't allow you to win."
The Dragon raised its bloody axe and grasped with both hands as it gave a roar like laughter. "You alone, then? Very well, 'hero'... try to stick me with that toothpick as much as you can!"
Pierre nods, accepting the challenge. His fancy firepoker lashes out; midsection, head, head, foot, head. Each time knocked aside, blocked, or on the mark yet slowed by a forcefield; but the sword is undisarmed. The Storm Dragon all but yawns, grips the blade all around in his palm, and tries to yank it away. Pierre, sensing an opportunity, pulls it back; applying just enough force by the blade's direction to sting a little.
"Peh. That's a weak...what the..." The Dragon opens his palm, and slowly realizes he's been cut; a paper cut, to him, but an exposed wound nonetheless. "That barely...why does it hurt so MUCH!"
"The humble paper cut. More painful than the actual damage done, but as much a threat of distraction as-" Pierre ducks while placing his sword horizontally, and the threat of more pain stops a punch cold an inch away. He doesn't get away unscathed, being punted shortly after. Even failing to land on his feet he gets the feeling that it could have been so much worse.
"I will not be denied and insulted like this by fowl creatures!" booms Storm Dragon, lightning coursing through air and ground both to cook Pierre's goose. Sword aloft, he allows his enchantable blade to absorb the Dragon's own lightning from the air; hops to avoid the low voltage and plunges his sword down first to ward it away or absorb it, too. He isn't certain which happened to it, but he looked up to see the axe coming down over him. The arena cracked violently.
"Come on, get up..." Joanne taps at Remmy's cheek. "Get up." A little harder. "Get up!" Three smacks. She's about to stop playing nice, but decides that might be too loud. Instead, the snake looks for other solutions. "Satchel, no, where...fuck, fuck, Remmy...Remmy first. Any other bottles on person?" She coils her tail around his body and quickly finds bottles around his belt, and one tucked in his breast. She grabs them up. "Let's sssee here...potion, lotion, pain...can't potion him if I can't be sure he'll drink. What about this then..." She uncorks the pepper flakes, and sprinkles some into his mouth, and a little into his beak -
He turns over suddenly, making a weird snoring noise. "Hhhhhhhhhhhhh! N- not into the nose! That shit hurts even birds in the nose! It's like a salted wound!"
Alton's limp body crashed beside the dragon's rock throne. Nagoya beheld his lifeless body with shock from her cage, and she looked back down to see the heroic swan knight locked in battle, now alone, against her hulking captor.
She shut her eyes against the tears that threatened to escape it. Now was not the time. This is the chance she had been waiting for: to be something other than a damsel in distress, a princess to be rescued. Even in captivity, she aimed to turn the tide of the fight back against the Lord of Storms.
"Oh, thank the gods!" Joanne exclaimed. "You're awake now. Sorry about that, Remmy, but we need you awake. Alton and Pierre are... are..."
She looked back to see Pierre executing a flurry of jabs and swipes with his blade against the seemingly unphased tyrant, but Alton was nowhere in sight. Recognition sucked the air out of her lungs, and her eyes went wide.
"Alton... ?!" she gasped. He couldn't be dead. Not now, and not behind her back. Not when she could have done something.
"Champion," Nagoya called out to Alton, her tone commanding even as she strained to reach him with palms outstretched, "I cannot permit you to leave this battle, not even in death! Now, get up! Rise!"
An orb of light pulsed into life above Alton, radiating a strange warmth through his body. A heat without heat, cooling and vitalizing like an otherworldly sun. It grew and grew as the princess seemed to feed it with her own life force, until she threw her hands down and the orb plunged into Alton's breast, jumpstarting his heart like a mystic defibrillator.
He gasped deeply and hoarsely. Nagoya's spoken words and command swam through his mind as he made himself to stand, regarding her as she panted and seemed to hang from the bars of the cage lest she collapsed. "Princess," he said.
"You... hah... must go, Champion. Help them... there's... no time," she uttered, pointing down to the arena.
Alton nodded. He looked down at the arena, regarding the Storm Dragon's axe, and then looked back up to the wall of weapons he retrieved it from.
"On my way, Highness."
The arena cracked with a thunderous thud. The golden axe missed Pierre narrowly, and the Dragon twisted himself around to see Alton standing there defiantly: hulking twice as large as before, he carried a look of grim determination in his eyes... and a great Silver Axe in his hands.
Alton didn't give the beast a chance to quip about his return. He charged toward the Dragon and commenced a berserker's barrage of swinging steel, blocking and cutting and trading blow for blow on more even ground than before.
The match went on for less than a minute. Grunting, growling and furious, the Dragon erupted another torrent of lightning from its mouth in an attempt to stun and overwhelm the agile brute, but Alton's reflexes never faltered, and the Silver Axe proved a dependable container for such a discharge. Seeing an opening, Alton bounded over the dragon's outstretched neck and whirled in midair, making a devastating contact before it could raise its neck back up.
A shrieking ping rang out with the crash of lightning. The thick plate of steel covering the back of the dragon's neck had caved in from the impact, but even with the axe's weight and sharpness, the scale remained unbroken. Nevertheless, the Dragon's eyes bulged out and mouth went agape with a cry of pain and shock, the discomfort like nothing he'd experienced before.
"You...ancient hero!" The Dragon roars, frustrated. "You refuse...to stay...dead! I won't have it from you! Today...right here...your legend ENDS!" He breaks away, flaring his wings; taking to the sky, and practically sparkling with electricity all over his body. "I'll happily destroy this lair with you all within...and make your kingdom my new lair!"
Pierre and Alton can only look up and watch in horror as lightning begins to rain down. Raising their weapons in defense, Alton's axe takes the brunt but still sends shocking shivers down his body. Pierre seems miraculously unharmed, his sword taking well to the lightning as if intentionally enchanted...but the lair is indeed beginning to crack upon the floor, blast by blast...
There suddenly comes a loud scream from Joanne, her arm stretched towards the Dragon. And the lightning stops...as the Storm Dragon speaks. "I quite loved that scream of agony, but. What. Did. You. Do?"
"You know how lightning works, with leads that essentially send a signal back?" Remmy asks, reaching all over Joanne's body, shifting her snakeskin and trying to ensure separation that magic can recognize.
"Yeah. What, you want me to send him a spell?" Joanne asks back, shuddering and shivering and trying to aid in the shed while still keeping the skin over her body as much as possible.
"I think it's possible. He hasn't blasted us with overly-powerful magic in a way we've been able to effectively respond to, but if we can prepare properly...I think we can hit him with his guard down." The owl begins to enchant the skin itself: granting it conductive properties, moreso than the rest of her body. Not to resist, but to carry the lightning towards the ground without burning her body too much. "And your spells are often more directly powerful than mine."
"Do you have any potions for-"
"I lost most of my potions, equipment, and satchel. I don't have much to enchant to capture. I have a different idea for the one I just filled, though." Pulling out a different vessel, he begins to enchant the contents and vessel itself. His neck swivels upwards. "Do you know any gravity spells?"
"Can I cast a vortex upon him, like we do on glasses?" Joanne asks, gripping the jar of cold mist and prying away a portion of earlier owl magic.
Remmy's eyes bug out. "How did you-"
"I'm full of surprises~" the snake grins with a wide mouth, holding the enchantment as an orb. "We can study together later. In fact, we will study together later, because if this works, I'll want to learn gravity spells. And because you'll owe me."
She suddenly reaches up with her left hand, not holding the essence of attraction, as lightning comes down around her. Remmy puts up a shield spell; Joanne grips a bolt and screams, clapping the orb into the bolt and letting go.
She collapses, her bronzed, bruised skin having done the job.
"Enough," Remmy says to himself. "She did enough." He throws a jar enchanted to be brittle yet sharp like ice, full of Joanne's iceberg mist further enchanted to be cooler, colder. Snap-freeze cold. Propelled further with wind. And pulled straight to a gleaming target in the dusty, dark skies.
It shatters on contact, and would have even if the Storm Dragon had caught it. Covered suddenly in freezing, suffocating cold, the Dragon begins to fumble his flight…
"...What. Did. You. Do?"
The Storm Dragon felt something wrong in the air. Something wrong... with the air, how it felt on his scales. It was a subtle sensation, as if the magic in his body became more active somehow. More heightened and charged, it pulled at the air around him, looking to attract other magic to it like a magnet. That's when he felt the cold bite through his scales...
The cloud of enchanted, sublimated ice Remmy had released from the shattered bottle swirled and rushed up to engulf the mad tyrant. He felt the sweltering heat and moisture of the air around him immediately condense into frost as the frozen air consumed him, obscuring his vision and dulling his senses. He thrashed about and struggled to stay afloat, causing a gentle hail of cracked ice to gently fall below him, but his wings remained stiff; he could only flap them at the base, where the wings attached to his back.
"IMPUDENT WITCH! I'LL TEAR YOU TO PIECES!!"
Alton looked at Joanne and regarded her loose, burnt skin, then back up now to the furious Dragon now half-frozen and stumbling in the air. Time to bring you back down, Beast, Alton thought to himself. He dashed into position under the beast and behind it, held the Silver Axe with one hand and twisted his torso. He kept his eyes on the Dragon, his left arm tensing from the weapons weight at full extension, and then snapped his torso back around and flung the axe into the air.
The axe hit its mark. It shattered through the thin, unarmored, brittle membrane of the Dragon's right wing, sending it into a staggered freefall back down to the arena while the silver axe fell to the far side of the volcanic chasm.
A crash-landing is almost too much to hope for, but the Dragon lands much harder than expected. As if in tantrum, he slams the ground with his weaponless arms; roaring in pain and rage and making Alton unsteady; Remmy falls on his face as Pierre steadies himself.
The swan's life flashes before his eyes as the Storm Dragon all but teleports to Alton in a thundercrack and lightningflash, seemingly just past him. It's all Alton can do to not allow his neck to get bitten or snapped; he waves Pierre away to defend the mages in a singular instant where he isn't fighting for his life, and the owl and swan join company one last time.
"Please tell me we can seal him-"
"We cannot."
"...come again."
"I lost the bottles. And used the last one as a makeshift weapon. Nothing else I can actually use."
"He's too powerful. Can we even kill him?"
"We can seal him in many things around, but connecting him to the volcano would kick the can down the generation and make him worse. I do not know how we're supposed to-"
"Not my question. Can my sword...can it kill him?"
"I...I don't think it...DUCK!"
Evidently the Dragon had tired of Alton. The hero...battered, bruised, broiled, and barely hanging on. And without the hero of olden legend...loosed a bolt to kill the remainder alive. Only Pierre raising his sword to guard saved them, hungrily drawing in the magical strike...
Remmy looks at the sword with fresh eyes, and to Pierre.
Pierre's head slowly turns to Remmy to ask for ideas, but sees a thoughtful expression.
Remmy gulps, but nods to the fencer, who nods back as the owl casts protective hexes and jinxes and spells upon his ally, before retreating to Joanne, having spent much of his magic and hoping not to die before he can use the rest to stabilize and heal her.
Pierre steps forward to finish the fight.
The dragon scowls, scoffs, smirks.
The beast makes a lightning-quick lunge at Pierre, but only succeeds at closing its massive claws over where he once stood.
"I sparred the king victorious. The old man is more swift than you!" Pierre taunts.
"I shall devour your king!" the conqueror roars, spreading wings and flapping back for an assisted pounce.
Again the Dragon crashes down into an empty space. With the swan's alacrity in both mind and body now at its peak, he could not be touched.
"I won't give you that chance," Pierre retorts, jumping back quickly as the other wing swings around to swat him. "You're not leaving here at all."
The Storm Dragon snarls, swivels to face the bird, and opens wide; breathing a storm of invisible lightning leads. Each one touches the sword, flashing a jagged line of lightning through the air, punctuated by screams from the princess.
Pierre stands upright and drags his sword briefly along the rock to discharge, untouched.
The Dragon growls lowly, staring down at the unshaken swan with a menacing, bitter scowl. The look in his eyes is different. No longer furious, it seems to be weighing his combatant--or more accurately, his words.
"You seem more confident than you ought to be. You could not hope to kill me, and you have nothing to seal me with like you did those wasted Altar Beasts."
He plants his claws into the granite in front of him and brings his head lower, almost facing Pierre head-on. "So, little hero, what do you think you can do to stop me?"
"I'm jealous of you. You have teeth. You can smile better than I. I can barely smirk." Pierre runs a wing across the length of the blade, suffering a slight tingle across his feathers. "Come. Let us end this; I shall bring your dark powers to heel, or you shall send me straight to hell." The swan prepares to lunge, himself.
The Dragon gave a deep rumbling chuckle in response. "To hell with you, then..."
Eyes wide and jaw open, the Dragon dashes forward. Pierre lunges forward and to the side, but the beast twisted his neck and followed him in an instant. The jaws, in that instant, snapped around him from the sides, but Pierre had already jumped up and out of harm's way, except for a bundle of tail feathers.
"Agh!" he yelped, then wasted no time to twist himself free and bring his blade tip to swipe across the Dragon's eyes. A superficial cut was the best he could manage before jumping away.
The bestial roar of pain and anguish proved the target effective. Pierre can barely afford to wince as the Dragon is upon him once again, mouth leaking wrathful lightning.
"You DIE!!!"
Pierre can see the move in the Dragon's one eye. The beast intends to bite his head clean off.
A fireball explodes against the beast's snout. Small and ineffectual, the Storm Dragon stopped short and growled angrily, the distraction giving Pierre the moment he needed to duck and roll away, literally saving his very long neck.
Joanne laid against the rock-slide blocking the entrance, her staff outstretched. Remmy had tended to her as well as he could and had finished with Alton when the Dragon's eyes landed on them, the tear ducts themselves conducting arcs of electricity between them.
Pierre stood between his party and the beast now, stoic and sword pointed at it.
"Ha ha ha... haHAHAHAHAHAHAHAaaa! You wretched crusaders! You have all earned nothing less than all my strength and fury, enough to bring this entire mountain down on all of us!"
"You may be able to tame my lightning, Swan who would be Prince," he shouted maniacally as light leaked from his scales, "but I challenge you to withstand an unfettered maelstrom of celestial fire!!"
The world in front of Pierre became light and noise emanating from the terrifying tyrant, now shining with a thousand streams of lightning striking the ground and filling the volcano. The swan held his ground and his sword to the storm, focusing all his effort on his and his party's survival.
"Can you save them, hero, or only yourself?" The Dragon's voice boomed over the din of his body having become a living power plant.
"AND FOR HOW LONG!?"
Despite the swan's valiant last stand, the lightning storm already overwhelmed his enchanted blade and turned it red-hot. It could absorb no longer, and now only deflect the lightning away… but not for much longer.
"Don't worry about us!" Remmy calls, his eyes and Joanne's locked together and having a whole conversation in an instant.
Joanne and Remmy's hands reach out towards Alton, bronzing their classical hero's feathers as their shield. He widens his stance and takes the barrage, screaming as much in challenge as pain.
The owl takes two hands of the snake and enchant the air above them as she cups then; she stabilizes the diffuse spell as if he had enchanted a proper vessel, even as she wraps her tail around the great heroic bird's leg; unaffected and unafraid. Remmy grabs the other and tingles as a far lesser jolt passes through him than the enchanted warrior.
"You're lucky I need you to heal me after this stunt," Joanne says, having wrapped around and around Alton, fully off the ground. Her upper back to his front, her left arm and his reaching out together.
Pierre trusted his friends and stood his ground, determined to keep the sword held up against the searing onslaught until it melted in his feathery hands. The flood of celestial fire began to prick his body all over--most of all, his beak, neck and arms. Between the constant shocks and the blade's now-burning temperature, he found it difficult to keep blade as well as his own stance steady; and yet, even through the pain, the swan marveled at the blade's refusal to soften into slag. It gave him the courage to keep holding steady.
Meanwhile, the lightning stream began to peel skin from Joanne, even as Alton tried to cover and shield her with arms and hands. In excruciating pain, they could not look forward anymore, shutting their eyes and gritting their teeth, but never lowering their hands. The spell had to go through, against the pressure... and there was one step left to finally reroute it.
Remmy lunged himself towards Pierre, cringing against the holocaust. The swan felt the old mage's familiar wings cover his own as he struggled not to lose grip on his rapier. "This is it, boy!" he yelled into the swan's ears, "You MUST hang on now, for as long as it takes!"
Pierre felt the tingle of magic flow from Remmy's now seared wingtips into his own, and then through into the blade. As he held on, his outstretched arms began to stagger and sway less and less against the flow of power. The red glow dissipated, replaced by shimmering, golden white against the white-blue of the Dragon's sustained power discharge. Rather than overwhelm it, the onslaught of lightning began to flow around the rapier's blade in a whirling motion.
Joanne's hand grasps hold of a bolt, with Alton's hand around hers; both yelp but grit their mouths as Joanne redirects the bolt to her spell orb, held in pristine shape above her hand until now. The moment the bolt touches, it attempts to equalize; absorbing the orb and siphoning it into the source. The bolt, unfulfilled, drops straight down and barely misses her hand while carrying extra gravitic force with it.
All in an instant, and only for a second, the barrage of electricity slows, and Alton and Joanne buckle under sudden extra gravity.
The river of lightning that had moments ago washed over them started to pull away and curve from behind Pierre & Remmy to right in front of them. Exhausted and charred, Alton fell against the sudden gravity to his knees, one hand on the ground to support him while the other held Joanne up. Both watched in sudden awe as the furious torrent of lightning twisted and swirled in front of Pierre and into his blade.
"Joanne," Alton croaked, "... is what we're feeling right now... what it feels like?"
"Yeah," she said, her voice hoarse as well, "it's exactly what we're looking at.."
Pierre spares no glance to Remmy, but still has to ask. "Reach forward...or pull back like I'm fishing?"
"Grant him no quarter," replies the wizened mage.
Pierre began to step backwards, and the 'maelstrom' he'd been promised had now swirled into a airborne whirlpool of magic, draining from the depths of the Dragon's maw–and his body–into his rapier. It shined brighter and brighter as it drank more of the lightning, until both the source of the light and its termination glimmered evenly.
The Dragon attempted to pull back, but found his muscles sluggish. It felt an inexorable pull toward the swan's tiny toothpick of a blade, such that it took all his titanic effort just to stay in place. The force of the magic pull dragged him toward Pierre and his sword all the same. The Dragon dug his claws to the ground and tried to clamp his jaw shut, but it couldn't stop its own magic from fleeing its body. Soon, the last of its magic drained into the blade completely, leaving his body gray and dark just as a glowing tail of light slurped into the pointy tip.
Still, though, the Dragon felt itself being pulled. And for the first time, there was fear in its voice.
"W-what... is this?!" the Beast demanded–a futile last grasp at control.
"What is happening to me?!!"
The Dragon's large, steely snout suddenly clamped shut, reducing the ferocious beast to muffled protests. Unable to speak, it felt its nose and teeth begin to pull and stretch forward, tapering into a beak-like shape the closer it came to the tip of Pierre's rapier. The unnatural warping of the Dragon's head and neck sounded at once like a steel girder under stress, and a wooden ship's hull being pressed by the ocean around it: a metallic squeaking of steel scales overlaying the deep, rubbery pulling noise of warped dragon meat.
With as much force, and force of will, he can muster...the Storm Dragon opens his mouth, and feels his body slide around the rapier like a sheath...or a sword-swallower. Thin and compressed, tapering just in front of his long tail and his legs, which hang nearly-uselessly off of the blade.
He manages the tiniest of relieved smirks…
His body relents, absorbed into the sword from all sides with an odd sigh, green-dulled-to-gray slowly fading to silver from grip to point as his head tapers beyond the blade and enters the handle. Pierre's hand shudders as the grip begins to shiver and mutate in his grasp, silver blade taking in the last of the Dragon's limbs at the tip.
Pierre let out a breath, and both fowls stared at the dragon-infused blade: the silver turned to a verdant green streaked with thin, jagged light-blue lines running down into the hilt. Draconic legs merged into the loop rings while a serpentine tail fused to side ring, just over the ricasso. The crossbar was subsumed by a pair of wings--one wing partly revealing the rear quillion--and terminated by scaly hands turned upward.
The hilt became rough and scaly, as if the neck of the dragon, and slightly sharper spines ran along one side. The pommel morphed into a molded facsimile of the Dragon's head. Horns pointed back towards the grip, yet diagonally away from the axis. Mouth, closed, yet still some fangs visible. Eyes like gemstones. A snout with tiny molded nostrils...
"If you had told me someone forged this sword...I'd tell you they spared no expense..." Pierre says, reverently. "Tell me. Does this mean it's over?"
Remmy offered his wings to examine the transformed blade. He gripped the handle, testing the weapon's weight, and then ran his feathers across its edge. After a moment, he hands it back.
"It requires more study, but the Storm Dragon appears to be no more. By our efforts, he has been bound to and intertwined with the matter of the blade itself. He is a blade now, and I doubt if there is a way to reverse the transformation."
Pierre lets out a whistle. "What could that mean for rebuilding the Altars, then?"
Remmy shrugs. "It too requires further study." He smiles. "Thankfully, there are now options, and we have plenty of time. Let us clean up here and return along our path - and the first stop may well be available to aid such study, as well as the rest we absolutely need after this. Go free the Princess. I have some brave heroes to heal."
Category Story / Fantasy
Species Avian (Other)
Size 50 x 50px
File Size 23.1 kB
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