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  Karalti – Queen Dragon

  Level 8 Sub-Adult Queen Dragon

  Strength: 60

  Dexterity: 76

  Stamina: 55

  Will: 32

  Wisdom: 18

  Intelligence: 22

  HP: 1271

  MP: 80

  Affinity: Darkness/Life (Path of Alacrity)

  EXP: 7941 (419 to next level)

  Lexica: 18

  Spells: 5

  Skills:

  Acrobatics: 12

  - Aerial Acrobatics: 15

  Dive: 10

  Laden Flight: 15

  Perception: 20 (+5 with rider)

  Abilities:

  Gift of the Blood: Allows a dragon to utilize magic and other supernatural abilities.

  Eviscerate: A power attack with the front claws.

  Ghost Fire: 249-344 Fire damage; sticky fire that burns underwater and deals ongoing damage to enemies (86 Fire damage per round for 5 rounds).

  Bite: 255-511 damage.

  Gore: A dragon’s unarmed attacks do double damage and cause Bleeding.

  Tail Attack: Blunt-force strike that flings enemies under 400 lbs.

  Split Turn: Burn 5 mana points per second to immediately change momentum while rolling. This allows for 90 degree and 180 degree turns in any direction. 2 bonus Lexica.

  Spells:

  Bioscope: Analyze an enemy and learn their strengths and weaknesses. (4 MP, 10 sec cooldown)

  Sense Aether: Detect and assess magical effects, artifacts, and locations. (4 MP, 5 sec cooldown)

  Dark Focus II: Triple power of next magical attack. (18 MP, 25 sec cooldown)

  Dirge: A curse that slowly damages enemies every turn and has a chance to cause the Deaf and Mute debuffs. (16 MP, 25 sec cooldown)

  Haste II: Dramatically increases speed for 1 min per spell level (16 MP, 30 sec cooldown)

  “Holy shit,” I said. “You’re right.”

  “Uh-huh.” The dragon gently rested her jaw on my shoulder “You’ve been working yourself sick, Hector. C’mon. Let’s go home.”

  “There’s no such thing as working too hard.” My stomach growled, and I rolled my shoulders to try and distract myself from the pangs. “You get your next Path Ability at Level 10. Come on: if we kill one more monster, we’ll go up again and be that much closer to our goal.”

  “Hector. No. Just stop.” Karalti couldn’t roll her eyes – like a bird, she had to turn her head to look in different directions. To express irritation, she rapidly flickered her inner eyelids. “We’re going back to the castle, and you’re going to go to bed and eat some food while I go out and hunt.”

  “But we-” Whatever I was about to say was cut off by a vibration in my ear. The curved holographic screen still hanging in front of me said: [Incoming PM: Suri].

  “Hello, light of my life.” I tried not to sniffle after picking up the call. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing good.” My girlfriend’s lovely honey-and-smoke voice was tight with stress. “We have a situation. Where are you?”

  “We were grinding up on the plateau-” I turned my head to cough as Karalti perked up in alarm. “-’S’cuse me, sorry about that. We’re four miles north of Vulkan Keep.”

  “Two full-grown dragons with riders just appeared over Taltos,” Suri said grimly. “They’ve got a hostage, and they’re demanding to speak with you.”

  A nasty, icy thrill that had nothing to do with the cold crawled down through my guts. Dragon Knights. There was only one thing they were here for. I looked up at Karalti.

  “Hector?” Her horns flattened against her skull, even as she crouched and extended a wing to let me onto her back. “What’s wrong?”

  “The Order’s caught up with us.” All thoughts of leveling vanished as I caught the saddle straps and hauled myself up. “We have to get back to Vulkan Keep, now.”

  Chapter 2

  Dragons.

  We heard their unearthly, bone-rattling shrieks from half a mile away, and as soon as we came within range of Vulkan Keep, we saw them. The pair of dragons – one white, one blue – were the size of jetliners, easily three or four times Karalti’s length. They wheeled in the sky high above Taltos, their wings large enough to blot the sun overhead. As we crept our way along the mountainside, the blue dragon split the air with a brilliant violet-white thunderbolt, which struck Talto’s clock tower and blew the roof off in an incandescent flash. The act was petty, contemptuous; like was spitting on the city.

  Karalti stuck to the shadows, where she dipped in and out of sight, then cut over Vulkan Keep’s curtain wall and into the fortress itself. The Keep was in pandemonium. Soldiers ran in formation through the gardens, splitting off to seal gates and doors. In the melee, my supernatural eyesight picked out a tall, strikingly beautiful woman with a flaming mop of red curls, dark coppery skin, and an impractically large sword. She was calmly and effectively directing panicked civilians to shelter.

  “Head for Suri!” Bent down low over the saddle, I waved an arm at her before remembering that she couldn’t actually see us yet.

  “Okay, but Hector... I think...” Karalti trailed off, unusually hesitant. “I think those dragons are my brothers.”

  “Well, yeah.” I leaned with the dragon as she angled her body into a tight corkscrew glide toward the ground. “All the dragons from the Eyrie are your sibs, right? Your mom laid all the eggs.”

  “I mean... I think they’re my clutchmates.”

  “No way, Tidbit. Those are some grown-ass dragons. Do you know how much EXP it takes for a dragon to reach full maturity?”

  “Nope.”

  "It’s a six-figure number, something close to like… two hundred thousand experience. To go from hatchling to thirty, they’d have needed to pull in something to the tune of thirteen thousand EXP per day, every day, for a month. We couldn’t even scrape together seven thousand in four days, and we worked our asses off.”

  We stopped talking to concentrate on the descent. Suri went into action as soon as she saw us, chasing people off to give us somewhere to land. When the garden was clear, the dragon backwinged and flapped to a stop, throwing up dirt from the planters and nearly crushing one of the Volod’s rose beds.

  “Hector!” Suri ran to us, yelling to be heard over the shouts and tolling bells, the rattle of gates and the rumble of wagons. “Ignas says to hide Karalti in the inner keep! He has a plan to deal with the dragons!”

  The little Queen’s neck swelled, and she snorted a cloud of burning steam. “No! I’m not hiding from anyone!”

  “Me either. And they won’t talk unless they see Karalti. Get on!” I offered the Spear down to Suri, blunt end first. “Brief me on the way!”

  Suri reached for it, but Karalti took an absent step to the side, her crown of horns flattened down against her skull.

  “Karalti, I know you’re not exactly Suri’s biggest fan, but really? Now?” I almost snarled.

  “No... it’s not her.” The dragon extended one wing down to Suri, listening to something I couldn’t hear. “Hector... they want to land.”

  “Land? They’re communicating with you?” I offered Suri the assist a second time. She caught the spear and used it to steady her climb to the dragon’s back.

  “Yeah. But they sound weird. Like...bad weird.” Karalti shuddered.

  “Tell Ignas what they want,” I said to her.

  “Okay.” Agitated, Karalti ducked her head, leathery wings flicking against her sides. After a minute or two, she bobbed her head. “Ignas says that fits with his plan. We need to draw them to the Vulkan Parade Ground, and then we have to hold them there, keep them talking.”

  “Roger that.” I reached back to pat Suri’s thigh. “Hold on. Suri, put your forehead down on my shoulder for takeoff.”

  “Okay, lover boy.” Suri clung around my waist, the front of her body molded to my back in a way that would normally be intensely distracting. Unfortunately, I couldn’t enjoy the sensation, because as we took to the air, I go
t my first real look at the invading dragons.

  The blue and white were full-grown, even larger than the old Knight-Commander’s dragon, Talenth. But Karalti was right – they were weird. Normal Archemian dragons were velociraptor-like bipeds, with long narrow wings and gracile limbs taut with corded muscle. They had bright, holographic hides that rippled with color on the ground, and that were mirrored in the sky – a form of natural camouflage. Neither of these dragons were properly bipedal, and neither of them were holographic. The white’s scales were blotched with grayish spots, like white jasper, the blue’s the sickly color of bread mold. Both dragons were abnormally large, with distended forelimbs, clubbed, twisted horns, and asymmetrical features. The white dipped a wingtip and began to lumber his way toward the Parade Ground, revealing the rider. I drew a sharp, startled breath.

  It was Lucien fucking Hart, one of my least-favorite people in Archemi.

  Ten levels ago, my would-be murderer had been a slim, roguish man with a punchable face and chin-length sandy hair. Now, the hair was shaved short in a high and tight, and the rest of him looked like he’d been stuffing that face with steroids and hitting the gym. He was buffer than me, arms and chest bulging in top-of-the-line armor. Medium armor, the kind a ranger or some other dex-tank might wear. He carried two curved swords over his back and a crossbow at his hip, and he looked about as smug as I’d ever seen him. That was saying something, because Lucien had always been pretty fucking smug.

  It took longer for me to identify the woman riding the blue. She was dressed in the stiff, high-collared armor of the Mata Argis. Her long blond hair was bound back in a severe twist at the nape of her neck. She had dark bluish lips, deep bruised eyes, and a crazed, haunted expression that chilled me more deeply than the river water had. It was Violetta, the woman who had gone through the Trial of Marantha with us.

  “Oh my fucking god.” I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. “No way.”

  “What?” Suri clutched me in a death grip, white-knuckled as Karalti banked and began her descent toward the parade ground. “What did you say?”

  I brought up my HUD to PM her so she could hear me over the roar of the wind, but just as I did, the blue banked, and I spotted Violetta’s passenger. “Oh Jesus.”

  It was Rutha. The beautiful Court Sorceress of Ilia was a ghostly shadow of her former self. She wore rags that offered her no protection from the frigid wind, bound and buckled to the saddle like cargo. She was slumped, her head nodding against her chest. Her glorious long white hair had been rudely hacked off, and she was deathly underweight.

  “Baldr.” Just like that, my disbelief condensed into something black and empty and cold. A dark, savage part of me stared at the pair of dragons, like a predator waiting behind my eyes. I squeezed the Spear so hard my knuckles cracked. “You motherfucker.”

  “Hector?” Karalti’s voice broke through the jangling black noise, sweet and frightened. “They say they’re going to land.”

  “Tell them that we’ll land first.” My tone was flinty. “This is our turf. They follow our rules.”

  “Are you mad at me?” She asked, in a small voice. “The bad men are here because of me.”

  “I’ve never been mad at you for this. Ever.” I gripped down with my knees, urging Suri to lean with me.

  Karalti swooped over the wall surrounding the Parade Ground. This morning, the ground had been crowded with airships, cargo, and personnel. Now the huge square plaza was almost empty, hastily cleared of ships and people. We saw a rank of soldiers running across the pavement. They split off into gateways just as a formation of hookwings burst out of the tunnel connecting the parade grounds to Vulkan Keep. His Majesty, Volod Ignas Corvinus III, was in the lead, riding a glossy black dinosaur almost as large as Cutthroat. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, lean man, dressed like a rogue in matte black plate over layers of soft leather. To his right was a formation of Knights of the Red Star, dragoons whose red lamellar armor gave them a samurai-like appearance. To his left rode the intimidating knights of the Order of the Dragon, heavy cavalry who served as his bodyguards. Knowing Ignas, he wouldn’t only put his trust in plate armor. There would be stealth characters already stationed in the Parade Ground, invisible to the naked eye – rogues from the Nightstalkers, and his right-hand Mercurion assassin: The King’s Blade, Ebisa.

  Following up at the rear was a single hookwing carrying two people. The man holding the reins looked like a cartoon villain, with a thin face, an oiled, pointed beard and a pair of spell gloves. It was the Court Sorcerer, Simeon. Holding onto him was a pretty, petite Mercurion woman with a cute bob of hair and big blue-on-blue eyes: our friend and favorite Artificer, Rin. Two small walking tanks bounded behind them like a pair of metal wolves.

  “Everyone’s here!” I shouted back to Suri. “Hang on and lean with me!”

  She nodded quickly. The woman’s arms were so tight I could feel the pressure through my armor. Karalti coasted toward the ground, then gracefully back-winged to land neatly on the pavement. Once we were on the ground, Suri let go with a shuddering sigh.

  “You alright?” I asked over my shoulder.

  “I’m gonna leave the sky to you from now on.” Suri pressed a shaky kiss to my neck, then let go to slide down Karalti’s offered wing. “Felt like I was gonna fall the whole time.”

  “You get used to it, but yeah. It isn’t for everyone.” Once she was down, I stood up on the dragon’s back and waved to Ignas.

  The new king of Vlachia jerked his chin in greeting and trotted up. He reined in his wild-eyed, foaming hookwing just in front of Karalti. His posse flowed in around us, forming ranks to either side.

  “Lovely way to end the morning, don’t you think?” Ignas called up to us. “Ready, Tuun?”

  “As much as we’ll ever be.” I gave him a grim, thin-lipped smile.

  The Volod turned his pale eyes skyward. “Lady Karalti, if you would be so kind, please tell our unwanted guests that we shall now receive them.”

  Karalti arched her neck and dropped her muzzle down, posturing like a swan as she concentrated. A few minutes passed, and then a windstorm picked up across the plaza as Lucien and Violetta descended. The enormous dragons were clumsy compared to their queen sister, their lumbering descent kicking up dust and rocks into a stinging whirlwind.

  Before they touched ground, I sensed that something was very, very wrong. Whether they breathed fire, ice, acid or lightning, all dragons emitted intense heat while flying. These ones… not so much. Instead, the wind of their creaking wings blasted us with cold, and as they came to a halt, I saw frost condense on their scales. Up close, they were even more horrific than I’d thought. Their warped horns curled back in so far their tips had embedded themselves into the bone of their skulls. Their eyes were filmed over with cataracts, and their jaws were misshapen, too many teeth jutting at angles so bad that neither of them could close their mouths properly.

  My eyes narrowed. “Karalti. Can you Bioscan these guys?”

  “Sure.” Karalti darted her nose forward, light pulsing between her scales. She didn’t have to speak her Words of Power aloud. The Bioscan bought Lucien’s dragon into focus as it crouched, and a holographic panel jumped to life to one side of my HUD: a column of bar graphs and numerical data which my narrator tried to read to me, her voice skipping and warping:

  ??724q244fphttttodsl-009Solonkratsu [‘Vesper’, White Dragon]

  Sex: M

  Level 55

  HP: ?????/?????

  Weak Against ?????

  Immune to ?????

  Level 55? Well, fuck me with a spoon. The distorted voice made my skin crawl, but the glitched code string was oddly familiar. I swallowed around a sudden spike of fear as Lucien stepped around the side of his dragon’s neck, leaning out as he grinned down at us. Violetta pulled Rutha out of her harness and held a knife to her neck. The elfin sorceress swooned, unconscious, while Violetta stared daggers at me with dead, dull blue eyes.

  “Well, this is quite
the reception, isn’t it?” Lucien called, his voice laced with cheerful venom. “Is that the Queen? Good grief, I thought she’d be bigger by now.”

  As soon as his attention shifted to Karalti, that cold emptiness rose back up and quenched the fear. Lucien was a mediocre, cowardly piece of shit, and levelling hadn’t changed that. His cheating only proved the fact.

  “Well, if it isn’t Lucien fuckin’ Hart.” I grinned back toothily. “Nice Baldr cosplay. Must have taken a lot of hard work.”

  Lucien rolled his eyes. “I see you still think you’re funny. We’re here to-“

  “And by ‘hard work’, I mean ‘cheating like a motherfucker’. Just to be clear.” I raised my voice and talked right over him. “What the hell happened to you two? And what the fuck happened to your dragons?”

  He sneered. “I thought that’d be obvious. We leveled up, gained prestige and positions of power, and now we’re here to advise you as to how things will work going forward. For those who don’t know me, I am Lucien Hart, the Wing Captain of the Order of St. Grigori.”

  “Ignas says to keep them talking.” Karalti’s telepathic voice was level, but tight with stress. “They’re almost ready.”

  “Wing Captain? You? Jesus Christ.” I forced myself to not stare at Violetta and Rutha, to keep their attention on me. “Let me get this straight: the pair of you just illegally entered a sovereign nation’s airspace, turned up at this heavily fortified castle, and now you want to tell the monarch of said nation what to do?”

  “And what are you going to do about it? Vesper and Tempest are fully grown dragons. They could raze this hovel to the ground,” Lucien boasted. “Or are you blind as well as stupid?”

  Vesper and Tempest? Those didn’t sound like the kinds of names the Solonkratsu used. The dragons were unnaturally still, wheezing as they breathed. I gestured at them. “I honestly have no idea what I’m seeing here. What the hell did you do to them? They look fucking awful.”

  “Looks can be deceiving,” Lucien said smugly. “What level is your dragon? Six? Seven?”