A Snippet of Book 5 of The Age of Dawn
(Note: this is totally unedited work)
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Walter was sick. He felt strange, hungry, and the world wobbled. His vision blurred at the edges. He couldn’t figure out what was wrong. His heart hammered through his skull. His back tingled under his dusty shirt. Shouldn’t he have been wearing armor like Grim? No, didn’t really need it he remembered. He couldn’t look weak in front of Grimbald, needed to be strong for him, for everyone that clung to life in this dying world.
“Smells stronger,” Grimbald said over his shoulder.
The musty scent of Death Spawn was overpowering, filling his lungs with their choking stink. Walter babbled something in return. The passageway seemed to be flowing under his feet. The stones underfoot twinkled with iridescent crystals. He stifled a wince and the urge to hunch over. A bead of sweat glimmered from the the end of his nose and crashed into the ground, sounded like a thunderclap in his ears.
Grimbald hissed something over his shoulder, but the words were meaningless. Grimbald looked at him with mounting concern, but Walter waved him off. He struggled to keep himself upright, staggering on behind. The hallway filled with the heat of a smith’s furnace and the burning stench of sulfur. He almost walked into Grimbald, but he’d moved on and Walter thudded into the wall. He snorted in air that felt all too warm. Grimbald’s powerful arms raised him up from the ground. He turned to look inside the cavern.
The world snapped into focus for a brief moment. The cavern beyond was a massive demon’s mouth with stalactites for teeth. Six black columns converged up the center, high into the swirling shadows above. At the bottoms of the columns, blood-red fires burned. The fires crackled and popped, burning their images into Walter’s watery eyes. Black smoke and exploding sparks spilled from their gaping mouths. Clumps of sticky iron dripped from ceramic containers, speckling the ground with hot embers. Smelted metal rolled through narrow channels on the dark stone floor.
The demon’s mouth was filled with flitting shadows. Fires winked and clawed feet scraped along the floor’s polished stone. The air was hot, humid, and doubled in weight. The beasts worked tirelessly at the furnaces, unaware of their intrusion. Chisels clanged on iron, hammers beat into shields, swords hissed on barrels of water. Walter caught the face of a Cerumal examining a sword, looking it up and down like a prized possession. The gibbering and squawking of Cerumal in the darkness beyond penetrated his mental haze.
“Fuck. Fuck. Shit,” Grimbald whispered beside him. He went on, saying more Walter couldn’t comprehend.
On one side of the room were at least fifty weapon racks, overfilled with gleaming instruments of death, reflecting the anger of the fires. Walter’s jaw hung slack and he blinked and blinked, trying to clear the water from his eyes.
Grimbald said something but all Walter heard was the clanging of steel. He felt as if he’d slipped back into the Shadow Realm, maybe catching a glimpse of the closest thing to it in this realm. His breath came in ragged gasps and his sinuses burned with smoke. He wasn’t sure when he’d tugged on the Dragon, but welcomed its violence like an old lover. He took a sure step forward, staring at them, eye pulsing with fire. Veins and tendons leaped from his forearms and the muscles tightened. “Stay,” he managed to croak to Grimbald in a second of clarity. A second in which he likely saved the man’s life for a second time.
His eye bulged and his jaw clamped down. His teeth felt as if they were on the verge of cracking. He wasn’t sure when he’d started moving. The mouth of a furnace yawned open and his flaming hand rose up, clawing around the back of a leathery skinned neck. The Cerumal shrieked, eyes going wide. A mad grin touched Walter’s lips. His arm hammered down, smashing the Cerumal’s maw onto an anvil. Blood sprayed from its nose and hissed on the molten iron in the channel below. Walter flicked his fingers and a telekinetic push of the Phoenix sent the beast inside the furnace, shrieking as it cooked.
Shapes turned, squawked and shrieked to each other in their hideous language. A few wisely went for the weapon racks, unaware of who their foe was. Their names were already spoken for. Their blood was his for the releasing. A shape ran for him, something gleaming in its hand. A sword of fire sprang to life from Walter’s stump. He lunged forward, rammed it through its gut and jerked the sword up, splitting the creature in half from stomach to gray tufts of hair. It’s blood sprayed over Walter’s face, bathing him in fresh warpaint.
He laughed and laughed, dousing the few that had gone for weapons in an angry conflagration. They would pay for what they did to him. They would know the taste of pain. Something jumped on his back, ramming steel in an out of his ribs, pulsing with blue light. He reached around his back with a new found strength, wound his fingers into its leather apron and hoisted the beast onto his shoulder. Its dagger clanged onto the stone below. Its legs squirmed and its claws raked his face, spilling blood into his mouth. He walked it over to a barrel, shrieking in his ear, dashed its head against the iron reinforced side. Its head cracked apart with a pop, spilling brain matter onto the ground.
He heard a gibbering from behind a crate and waited, fireball burning the air at his side. The Cerumal finally found its courage and leaped over from the other side, heavy maul raised up in two hands. Walter blinked and the fireball collided with its face, turning its head into charring flesh and sending its body flopping like a doll onto the hot floor. Walter gasped and pain lanced through his side. He’d been run through with a spear, the end poking out the other side.
He grinned and the Cerumal’s scowling lip twitched. He hacked through the wooden haft and his fist hammered into the beast’s jaw. He moaned and let the sword puff away. He pulled the end of the spear out the way it had gone in, sticky with his blood. He growled, hurled the broken spear and it thudded into the Cerumal’s chest. The Cerumal squawked, stumbled back a few steps, then screamed when it fell into a container of molten iron.
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