Spear of Destiny James Baldwin (free romance novels .TXT) 📖

necks, and narrow heads with horns and graceful feathered crests. They were also extremely dead, with frayed leathery skin stretched over their bones, their lips pulled back from their fangs in rictus snarls. Shelves of beautiful white mushrooms grew out from their chests, fringed with blue.

The corpses of the ancient humans who had ridden here with the tulaq were heaped in a pile some distance away, partly entombed by ancient black stone lava flows. And behind those corpses, slumped against a corroded door that hissed and spat sparks of magical energy, were a pair of young dragons. They were about two-thirds Karalti’s size, fifty feet from mutated nose to leathery tail. One was blue, the other a dull mustard yellow—and both of them had been destroyed by Dragonrot. Bulbous fungal growths obscured their eyes, their scales flaking off around huge knotted clusters of mushrooms. But something about them was uncanny. The tulaq and humans were barely more than mummified skeletons, preserved by some weird cocktail of aerosolized mana and heat. The dragons still had most of their flesh intact.

“No!” Karalti let out a mournful cry, pacing forward.

“Wait, wait!” I pulled back on the edge of her saddle. “Look at the damn ground!”

Karalti stopped in her tracks, peering at the floor. There was a rising section of earth where she had just been about to put her foot. Even as we watched, glowing cracks appeared... and then subsided, as the fissures in the small lava dome cooled and resealed into stone.

“Can’t you feel that? There’s lava everywhere around us,” I said. “Watch the walls. This whole place is unstable.”

“Maybe, but these people have been here a long time.” Karalti ducked her head and hunched her shoulders as she carefully stepped forward. “I don’t know if that door’s even going to work. Do you think maybe the Spear will open it?”

I squinted at it. The last time I’d seen a door like this was back in Ilia, in the ruined Aesari city of Cham Garai. It was made of a very hard golden metal—Aurum—with lines of magical channels mapped like veins across its surface. The mana channels came together at a single point, a receptacle for a crystal that was just about the same size as the ones embedded in the blade of the Spear of Nine Spheres. The embossed image of Matir’s sigil framed the hole: a nine-pointed star with a spiral at the center.

“You know, it just might. But we’re going to have to move those dragons,” I said, frowning at the scene ahead. The damp smell of mingled mana and decay was thickest here, burning the inside of my sinuses with a nasty chemical smell. “Do you think maybe- HRRRGH!”

Something thick and prehensile cut my question short: A long pseudopod that snapped around my chest and hauled me up into the air with frightening speed.

“Hector?” Karalti turned, mouth agape, and let out a yelp as it pulled me, kicking and struggling, up into the cavernous dark of the ceiling. “Hector! What the hell!?”

“I don’t know what the hell!” I sputtered. The cavern above was completely dark—and I couldn’t see what had grabbed me. But before I could comprehend what kind of trouble I was in, I glimpsed movement at the back of the cave. The two dragons, lumbering to their misshapen feet like marionettes.

“Behind you!” I shouted.

Karalti whirled as the [Infected Sporemaidens] lurched toward her, stumbling over the cooled lava flows and the bodies on the floor. My dragon shrieked, and any thought of strategy deserted her as she instinctively backed away and blasted the first one with her final gout of Ghost Fire.

[Ghost Fire is super effective!]

[Karalti deals 3676 damage to Sporemaiden!]

[Sporemaiden: 17,963/20,639 HP].

I struggled against the tentacles clasping my arms to my sides. They were reeling me in toward a half-seen mass of glowing pseudopods, a short rubbery mat that oozed a decidedly digesty-looking acidic substance.

“Noooo, no, no. Nope. Nuh-uh.” I slipped one arm out, enough to call the Spear of Nine Spheres to hand. The soul-bound weapon materialized in my palm—cold, at first, until I called the elemental power in it and the haft and blade burst into boiling scarlet flames. The tentacles shriveled away from the heat, lighting up the full length of the monster overhead.

My eyes bugged, and not just from the crushing pressure around my ribs. It was another dragon. A much larger dragon. A much more infected dragon. The [Rotmother]’s ghostly white body had meshed into the ceiling of the cavern, barely recognizable as anything other than a gooey mass of fungus, tentacles, and slime. The mat of dripping blue rhizomes coated both sides of her gaping ribcage.

“Aww, shit.” I struggled harder, giving myself enough room to plunge the Spear into the nearest pad of spongy flesh, one-handed. The blade cut into the corrupted dragon like butter, and the tentacles shuddered and sagged back down ten feet or so—but they didn’t release me.

[Fire is super effective! You deal 960 damage!]

[Rotmother HP: 27,813/28,773]

I cast a frantic look down to the fight below: Karalti was circling back from the pair of Sporemaidens, who were lunging for her with teeth and claws.

“For the love of... Use Wings of Deception! Split them up!” I shouted telepathically, snarling aloud as another tentacle snapped around my spear arm and tried to force the weapon away.

Karalti yelped as she danced away from one dragon’s slashing front claws. Big as she was, she was fast for her size—and she’d been studying martial arts. She couldn’t use her special Baru abilities in dragon form, but as the yellow Sporemaiden surged toward her, Karalti blocked the dripping claws with one wing and headbutted the dragon right in the head with her own. The soft fungus-riddled tissue caved under the impact, sending the animated corpse staggering back. It tripped awkwardly over the dead tulaq, its HP