The Lost Runes Saga [Epic Fantasy]

FORTY-SIX

After doing some checking to make sure he knew the position of all runes, he closed his eyes, touching a hand to the cart's floor. The runes appeared in his mind, drifting back and forth. The system Alvarn built was ingenious, and Vidar didn't have to move his hand at all to trigger the four stakra runes.

"This is it," Vidar said, grinning down at Alvarn, who stood at a safe distance, shifting his weight from left to right, holding the staff in both hands in front of him, using it for support. The nervousness on his friend's face made Vidar grin and shout, "Let's do this!"

With the dragons almost over Halmstadt already, Vidar drew in a breath and moved the circles representing the stakra runes on top of each other in his mind before triggering them, making sure the width of each opening matched. The cart trembled and creaked, swaying a little, but it did not rise above the ground.

Cursing under his breath, Vidar widened the triggered openings and felt a sucking feeling in his stomach as air rushed against the top of his head. They took to the air, flying. Rend whooped in joy and Vidar opened his eyes, seeing the ground disappear beneath them.

Alvarn grew smaller and smaller as the distance between the cart and the streets of Halmstadt increased at an alarming rate. Vidar screamed and shivered, the cold air turning all the more freezing the higher they climbed. A bird flew past, almost crashing into them, but veered off in the last second with an annoyed squawk.

Adjusting the thrust, he leveled them out. Below, the entire city of Halmstadt was spreading out beneath them, cradled between the sea to the west and a massive forest to the east. Vidar held on to the leather strap for dear life. Rend, the mad bastard, stood holding a rope tied to the cart. He let out another whoop of excitement while Vidar struggled to keep the cart from toppling over. Calm, he needed to stay calm. His vision spun and nausea bubbled in his gut and throat, like on the boat with the dennermen.

Vidar was without a doubt outside of his element, but he didn't have time to get himself settled, because the dragons were upon them. Rend screamed and waved at the massive shapes circling Halmstadt right below the cart. As far as Vidar could tell, none had spotted them yet, and rather than flying higher, they were circling downward, getting closer to the ground. Up there in the air with them, it was obvious each of the massive beasts carried a rider on its back. The dragons themselves differed in size and color, with the largest, a true colossus with white and gray scales, eclipsing the size of Vatrfjall, while the two smallest of the bunch, both with a light green tint, looked almost like babies compared to Rend's now dead dragon. All five of the dragons moved like predators through the air.

"Too high," Rend shouted, waving for them to descend, and Vidar nodded, concentrating.

The dragon's essence in the stakra runes was running out, and Vidar rejuvenated them as he adjusted the thrust again. With that, they soon began dropping in altitude. Wind buffeted them from all directions, making the cart shift this way and that. Already, they were far from Runes Aplenty and Alvarn, somewhere far below.

Even as they descended, two dragons spewed fire upon Nordstan and Fyllinge, while one of the smaller dragons veered off toward the sea to harass a few ships that'd braved the waters despite the coming threat.

"They're attacking," Vidar breathed, the wind snatching the words away as soon as they left his mouth.

Even from that distance, Vidar saw arrows taking to the air from Nordstan. So many arrows. They all missed, falling short of their mark. Experience told him that the second salvo would be more precise, and if a dragon succumbed, those who remained would never cease their attacks. They needed to act with haste.

Vidar leaned forward and triggered the trumpet contraption, and sound blared with enough volume to even drown out the screaming wind. He looked on in a mixture of horror and excitement as the dragons turned their attention to them. Their blank, dark eyes fixed on the hovering cart. Rend's screams didn't carry far, and the blaring stopped when the stakra rune ran out of essence.

With their source of sound spent, Vidar triggered the logiz rune. Fire burst outward, giving them a small push, and they soon drifted southward. The flames, more than the sound, seemed to attract the dragons' attention. One of the smaller ones turned and flapped its wings, heading over, along with a larger dragon, light blue like the sky.

Rend whipped his head around and shouted at Vidar, "Friends!"

"I hope so!" Vidar screamed back, "They better be!"

The two dragons approached at incredible speed, again climbing to a higher altitude, forcing Vidar to spend more essence on making the cart rise higher into the air. Soon, the dragons' heads came level with the cart, then rose above it, and the two colossi looked down at him. Rend kept shouting, waving his arms about, but in the chaos, it must have been impossible for the other dragon riders to hear him. Vidar ripped the metal cone from the now useless sound contraption and held it out to Rend, who took it and screamed through the opening on the bottom, magnifying his voice to an impressive degree.

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From atop the back of the smaller dragon, a man appeared. Older, black hair streaked with white. The sun reflected in his violet eyes. He screamed something back, but the wind, the dragons, and the flapping of their wings as they hovered made it impossible for the words to carry, and the man was too far away for Vidar to get a proper read of his expression, but from what little he could see, it seemed to Vidar that the gesturing was happy and excited rather than showing anger. The dragon banked sideways, angling its rider toward the cart.

Vidar rejuvenated the stakra runes again. While he was doing so, the other dragon moved closer to hover in place with mighty flaps of its massive wings. Vidar saw no trace of a rider atop it. The smaller dragon's still-massive bulk shifted and turned until the dragon looked almost close enough to touch.

The man looked excited, a wide and encouraging smile splitting his face as he reached a hand out to Rend.

"You're not going to jump, are you?" Vidar leaned in and asked.

Rend turned again, shouting through the cone. "I jump! Talk! Friend!"

Vidar shook his head, bemused. Rend didn't have an ounce of self-preservation, and before Vidar could reply, he dropped the rope and hurtled himself into the air. An eternity seemed to pass before Rend landed on the dragon's back. The other rider grabbed Rend's coat, pulling him up to the saddle.

Rend turned and waved, his face flush with excitement, but Vidar barely registered that his new friend had made the jump, because a terrible heat was building at his side. He looked over at the other dragon and saw fire building in its throat.

Before he could even react, the dragon released a torrent of fire, flames spewing from its throat and enveloping Vidar and the cart. Algiz runes flared to life, the bluish shimmer protecting him from the flames. Heat still reached through to a small degree, and Vidar hunched down under his coat, gritting his teeth as he found the cart being pushed to the side by the flames, closer to its original position over Runes Aplenty.

Rather than retaliate, Vidar held up a hand to the massive dragon once the attack ceased. The cart still drifted, but not by much. He saw Rend slamming his hand down on the older rider's back again and again, waving, pointing at Vidar, and shaking his head. But the older rider ignored him as the much larger dragon gathered itself, another bout of flames alight in its throat. The algiz runes would not hold against another such attack.

Panic surged through Vidar. Screaming, he triggered the leftover stakra runes from Alvarn's previous experiments. The cart lurched forward, escaping the torrent of flames. It worked, and he escaped certain doom, but just as his friend warned, the cart wasn't built to move like that, and it threatened to tip over, then back, as Vidar leaned, compensating with his weight to keep the wobbling cart level.

Not giving up on killing Vidar, the dragon readied itself to release a third burst of flames. Movement at the edge of Vidar's vision made him look. At first, he saw nothing, but then the sunlight glinted off the metal tips of the arrows not tipped with dragon's bones. A hailstorm of arrows rose from the ground and hurtled through the air, slamming into the sides of both dragons. Unmoving as they were, both of them had made for easy targets.

The fire in the massive dragon's mouth winked away. At that moment, Vidar thought he saw the dragon's eyes widen, perhaps in surprise or pain. His first reaction was that of victory. Rather than burn him alive, the dragon would suffer the same fate as Vatrfjall. Then he thought better of it. If a dragon died, that meant the sliver of possibility that was a peaceful resolution turned to ash.

"No, no, no!" Vidar screamed as the dragons banked and lost altitude.

Vidar's cart, still wobbling, ran out of essence. He reached down to rejuvenate them, then stopped himself. Perhaps there was still a way to salvage this. A slim chance, but slim was better than none.

He drew in a deeper breath, then threw himself into the air with a shriek of terror. Vidar hurtled like an arrow, darting through the air, far faster than the still-struggling dragons. From above, he saw the backs of the dragons, with Rend and the older rider still clinging on to the small one, but an empty saddle on top of the other.

He gained on the falling dragons and closed the distance as the ground below almost seemed to reach up to grab them. Using the stakra runes to guide him toward the larger dragon proved difficult, and he made himself spin and twist before overcoming the challenge and reaching the massive bulk of the larger dragon. It screamed and reached for him, its taloned feet missing by a hair's breadth. Even then, the wind from the strike made Vidar lose balance and tumble through the air for another moment before realigning with the side of the dragon's torso. There, he found the arrow.

Tipped with dragon bone and inscribed with styrka runes, it was the perfect weapon to slay its target. Rather than pull it out, Vidar kicked the arrow free. Touching such a weapon was a mistake you only made once.

He didn't know if this would be enough for the dragon to right itself, but he wasn't done yet. Another dragon remained, this one with riders still on it. Vidar kicked off and triggered the stakra runes on the bottom of his feet.

His boots blasted off his feet as the thrust from the bottom of his bare soles pushed him toward the smaller dragon. From all appearances, it was dead already, limp in the air with Rend and the older man holding on for dear life.

The ground was close now. Too close.

Vidar only saw one way the three of them lived through this, and there was no time to explain, so he tackled them both, pushing the riders off the dragon and into the air, where he held on to them for dear life. They screamed in terror, but Vidar ignored them and positioned himself just right so their weight was on top of his shoulder. Not for the first time, he wished for a broader frame.

Vidar triggered the stakra runes again, focusing on keeping his legs straight to absorb the impact. The speed of their falling lessened, but it was not enough. They were still falling at a speed no one could ever survive. Desperate to slow them down further, Vidar used more and more of the dragon's essence in the stakra runes, clawing at his heartwell to extract more once the runes ran dry. Dragon's essence flushed through Vidar's entire system, rejuvenating all runes tattooed into his skin before flushing along all pathways, carried by his blood to encompass the entirety of his body.

The three of them slammed into the thatch roof of a wood building, crashing through it at a still far too great velocity. Algiz runes sparked to life and barriers sprung up all around him for protection. Rend's and the other dragon rider's weight still crushed him from below as they broke through the floor inside the house, tumbling down onto a table, all three of them screaming, their voices hoarse and ragged as their descent came to a sudden, pain-filled stop.