Were this another battle, the Founder would have torn the airship pilot open to make an example of him, but time was of the essence. The look of terror on the mortal's face as he grabbed him by his lapels, and his pitiful scream and the demon threw him out into the subzero mists would have to suffice.
The machines of this age frustrated him. The ship's wheel was familiar enough. The levers and switches, however...
"One flying beast to another...how do you dive?" A pallid hand tapped a series of levers until he wrapped it around the black knob closest to the wheel.
"Down, beast!" He pushed with such force that the lever snapped. He felt the vibrations in the floor rattle clear up his spine as gears shattered against the paneling below deck. The dirigible lurched forward, and its nose tipped into the mists. The cabin windows clouded over with maddening spiderwebs of frost. Like an army of ghosts the icy vapors howled as they rushed into the cabin where the door had been, encircling the demon.
"The fury of the sun...trapped in an orb of a thousand winters, now shattered..."
He was interrupted by the uncontrolled chattering of his own teeth. He felt a tingling, a sickness hanging in the mists. A sickness that wilted the powers waiting just beyond the veil.
"The bomb that Darien warned me about. Yes...it poisons the air..." He frowned. He had once been entombed in ice as punishment for squandering love. He had once lost his wings and his might when his dying organs were replaced with those grown for his human progeny, to the point that he was in all respects mortal...and helpless. Now he stood to suffer both catastrophes at once...and then be destroyed by the Fires of Apollo in another crater.
He glanced at one of the dials, wiping the frost off the glass cover. It seemed to say they were already below the ground level before the glass shattered.
"This is the end of enough! I saw this city fall the first time and I'll not see it fall again! The fools know not what is still buried beneath this pit waiting to arise and again consume this world!"
To Bloodwing, the fallout from the Reality Enforcement Device seemed like a thickening layer of grime that obscured the glowing runes engraved in his psyche, the ancient Ereb'ai script that when uttered with proper diction and force of will unleashes the chaos of the underworld. He fought the growing numbness to curl his fingers in an arcane gesture. It was the first spell he had learned as a child...it should not be this heard, he thought...
"FIRE!"
He smiled as blue flame danced around his arm. All turned bright in a deafening roar.
Koen clutched Ash's emerald disc so tightly the blade dug into the palm of his hand. The muscles in that hand itched as he heard Ash's voice in his mind, attempting to calm him as the ice crystal surrounding their force bubble gave way to billowing flames. Koen's young battalion clustered even tighter around him, to the point where he battled to draw every breath.
[[It is most fortunate for you and your companions that hydrogen flames are orange, and not yellow.]]
As the sky over the crater blossomed in orange flames, Darien fell back as the ice fell from his clothes in huge chunks. When the ice from his goggles evaporated he saw Yagi was already on her tip-toes reaching into the circuitry of Hans' massive suit of powered armor.
Of course, he thought. This whole time no one had realized she was a shoggoth when they brought her (in her previously amorphous shape) to the Steamlands from Antarctica. She was the only organic in the entire crater who didn't need some form of protection from the inhospitable temperatures.
He immediately realized that the blanket of flames that stretched across the dome of the crater was descending. It had already engulfed the spot of high ground where Koen and his child soldiers had sought shelter. The flames were rolling down in his direction.
"Oh dear G-d, no..."
He sprinted to where the two girls, Sprog and Blue, had just been thawed by the searing heat. He gathered them close and fell over them, using his own body as a shield as the inferno claimed everything.
1 comment:
Unsettling echoes here of the recent fire which cost the lives of a whole firefighter company. As usual, you seem to have written our heroes into certain doom...eagerly anticipating whatever weird twist will save them!
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