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

on, and waited until Vash had situated himself. Like me, he didn’t bother with flight harness and straps. When he signaled the go-ahead, I patted Karalti on the shoulder and assumed the position.

“Hang on tight! I bet it’s gonna be rough up there.” Karalti tossed her head, shook her wings, and launched herself into the sky.

The first stage of our journey was to warp to the entry to Matir’s Dragon gate. We appeared over a half-frozen waterfall that plunged down into a pitiless glacial crevasse. Across the giant sinkhole were two enormous obelisks that stretched from the subterranean depths to a height greater than the nearest mountains: The Thunderstones. The monuments hummed with power, drawing blasts of lightning from the storm that swirled overhead. The Mark of Matir began to tingle and pulse under the skin of my hand.

“Woahhhh!” Karalti corrected herself as a howling slap of snowy wind sent her drifting to one side. There was so much turbulence that she didn’t even have to beat her wings to stay airborne—just hover.

“Incredible, aren’t they!” Vash shouted. Even though he was shoulder to shoulder with me on the saddle, I could barely hear him over the tempest.

“Sure are!” I called back.

“I’m going to try and teleport up above this storm!” Karalti was struggling to keep her wings from bending over as gusts of wind slashed at us, driving her toward the rocks. “Annnnd... brace!”

The world inverted to a black point, where we hung bodiless for a few seconds before erupting into a clear starry sky. Karalti pumped her wings, her chest swelling as she began to compensate for the thin air. We were just shy of 18,000 feet—only three thousand feet under her maximum flight ceiling.

“Where to from here?” I asked Vash.

“Let me see…” Vash pulled out a compass, using it to orient himself. When he was facing the right direction, he used his thumb and forefinger to square it with the stars and moon: a difficult job, as Karalti bounced on the massive turbulence spiraling up from the stormclouds below. “And… there. I’m almost certain that’s the right way.”

A golden pathing indicator appeared in my mini map. Karalti veered in that direction, alternating beating her wings and gliding. It was truly freezing up here: fine branching trees of frost formed on the front of my helmet, and turned to condensation on Karalti’s burning hot scales.

“You okay?” I asked, resting one hand on the back of her neck.

“I’m fine as long as I keep moving.” She sounded like she was talking through gritted teeth—uncomfortable, but determined as she labored toward our destination.

I glanced at her stamina. She was already a quarter down. “I don’t like it, but I think you need to burn another Teleport spell to get us forward. As soon as we spot a good landmark, warp to it. We’re dealing with this rough weather better than we did four levels ago, but it’s sucking your stamina like crazy.”

“Tell me about it.” She darted through a particularly vicious lash of air, pulling her wings in and teetering to the side. “Help me spot a landmark and stare at it, like how we did in Lahati’s Tomb: try and keep it in your mind’s eye as I enact the spell. The ice is in my eyes, and I can hardly see.”

Frost was rapidly creeping in around the edges of my visor, but I could still see well enough to cue my darkvision and zoom in on the horizon. There, the clouds broke against the sides of the mountains, and the land gave way to narrow, scalloped plains. I used Karalti’s horns like an iron sight, focusing on our intended position. “Okay, and… go!”

She enacted the spell, and I kept the image of our destination in my mind as clearly as I could. The teleport seemed to stretch on and on... and just when I started to worry, we burst out into clear, arid air. The plateau rolled out ahead of us: starkly arid and eerily beautiful, like the surface of Mars. The moon lit seemingly endless field of swelling, snow-covered hills. It was -42 degrees out here, double the negative temperature I could withstand thanks to Iron Body, and just under what Karalti could reasonably tolerate.

Vash reached out to grip my arm. His expression was stricken.

“By Burna’s big black arse,” he said, hoarsely. “I’m home.”

I gazed over the plains as Karalti descended, and felt my heart swell. As the dragon’s shadow cut over the ground, it stirred a herd of wooly rhinos into a restless, thundering charge. A huge flock of white vultures ringed a glacier-blue lake, roosting beside water that reflected the moon like quicksilver. A narrow icy river trickled down the length of a fractalline ravine far below, zig-zagging its way toward the distant ocean. It was the kind of place you found in Iceland, or parts of Tibet. For some strange reason, the sight of it filled me with a deep sense of homesickness: a longing for a place I’d never been.

“Stay sharp, Dragozin.” Vash urged, as he pulled his goggles off and unwrapped the scarf he’d bound around his face. He spoke Tuun now, his voice gruff and unusually serious. “We’re nearly there. I know not what we’ll find behind those hills.”

“Where is everyone?” I asked him.

“After thirty years, with the pass to the Churvi Territories and Bas beyond that blocked by landfill? Who knows? There were never that many people up here to begin with,” he said.

“The other Tuun didn’t help you and Saaba when you were kids?” I saw what I thought was a Tuun camp, with darkened yurts and fences, but when I blinked, there was nothing but rocks and weird, creeping shadows.

“No. They drove us away.” Vash was expressionless now, gripping the saddle with both fists. “And I hold no grudge against them for it. They were