Defiant Necromancer (Book 2 stubbed)

I should feel lucky to be facing him like this, Aoife thought. A necromancer’s true strength is in his army. Everyone knows it. And he has only one of his creatures to support him. A fraction of his power. I could devour him. It would be funny to make Chad admit to the others that I was the one to actually defeat the necromancer he set off to pursue. Not that I care about their opinions, but Chad does. And he is due a little humbling.

“Why did you attack my family?”

The necromancer’s voice was cold and hard, but with an air of wounded feelings. Something clicked for Aoife.

Right, Chad thought that the women were the necromancer’s mates. He is taking this as a personal affront. Well, every moment he is talking is a moment we are not fighting… a chance for me to heal a little more.

She decided to engage with him, to try and stall a little.

“Why did you hide and force us to pursue them instead of fighting you?” Aoife asked. “While I enjoyed my battle with the huntress, you were the one we were after.”

“I wasn’t hiding.” His voice seemed to have gone even colder. “I was elsewhere.”

“You could have fooled us. We were lurking around the port for several days. If you had simply come out and made yourself available for combat, we would not have pursued the others.”

He stared at her, and Aoife became very conscious of the flow of mana through her body. The necromancer could probably see what she was doing, diverting as much of her energy as possible into healing. When he spoke again, he did so in a very low voice that the dragon barely caught, talking to himself. “Oh, I understand. You’re stalling. You must be surprisingly weak for a dragon. I don’t know what Kistana thinks she sees in you.”

The necromancer started pulling mana from his core, toward his hands. The mummy did the same thing from his side.

Aoife could tell the battle had begun.

She opened her mouth and began gathering fire. She was at under half her health, but she would defeat the necromancer.

It was a mistake for you to fight me at all, she thought.

“What has the Hero promised you in exchange for your aid?” the necromancer quickly asked as they both charged their attacks. “I’d double it. People would surrender to me without fighting if they saw a dragon’s wings overhead…”

“I am not for sale!” Aoife replied around the gathering fire. She inhaled, a fraction of a second from blasting him.

Quicker than she could unleash her own flames, the necromancer threw three balls of concentrated green energy at her. A second later, Aoife blasted fire at him. Her stream of flames caught one of his energy balls and destroyed it, but the other two struck her in the abdomen. Her scales had only partially begun to recover from the damage Kistana had done to them, so the blasts hit mainly raw flesh, including places that had been freshly bleeding.

The necromancer, meanwhile, threw himself to the side and dodged the fire. Aoife turned her head to follow him, ignoring as best she could the feeling she had in her abdomen - as if the flesh unprotected by scales was beginning to rot, while the scales were crumbling away around the impact sites - fresh scales, decaying in spaces where her injuries had just begun to heal over.

That energy of his is concentrated death. I must destroy him quickly.

She kept shooting flames and had almost caught the necromancer with her fire breath when she saw a flicker of movement from the mummy to her other side. That was her only warning before a pillar made of soil struck her under the jaw and forcefully closed her mouth.

She broke the pillar in two with one claw, reached around, and grabbed for the mummy. But the undead darted out of range at the same time that she sensed more bursts of green energy from the other side.

Aoife quickly pivoted, picked up the earthen pillar with a claw, and threw it into the path of the green energy blasts. The thrown pillar thankfully blocked the energy attacks completely. They dispersed on contact. The necromancer was forced to duck under the pillar, which struck with a ton of force behind him, kicking sand up into the air.

The dragon breathed fire into the space where she saw his outline, thinking this time, she had him. Then, somehow, a stream of flames burst through the sand to meet hers.

Was he not a necromancer after all? Where is this fire magic coming from?

To her further surprise, his flames and hers collided and seemed equal in ferocity. She pushed more mana into her flames, but the necromancer responded by doing the exact same thing. The two streams balanced each other out in a pushing match that neither one appeared able to win. Aoife’s eyes widened in shock.

No normal flames could match a dragon’s, even a relatively young one such as herself.

“I’ve fought a stronger dragon before!” he called over the roaring clash.

The necromancer’s taunt unnerved her, because it felt true. He had fought a stronger dragon than her and by some method had come away with the secret of how to conjure a dragon’s flame for himself.

He must be older and more experienced than he looks, using his power to maintain a youthful appearance. How vain.

As she was thinking about whether to try pouring even more energy into the beam clash, another pillar struck under her chin. Her jaws snapped shut, and she felt the necromancer’s flames rake across her chest.

“Argh!” she groaned.

She reached down with a claw and quickly threw a great fistful of sand to obscure the mage’s vision, then jerked back from the line of his flames and turned her body to look for the mummy that kept interfering.

As Aoife found him, she saw he was gathering a large quantity of mana in his chest cavity. She reached out with both claws and grabbed him before he could move out of the way.

Got you!

She raised a talon to sever his neck, then felt the same force that had seized her wings before. Now it grabbed her by the claws instead.

She jerked her head back and saw the necromancer’s hands glowing. He was the one doing this. Helplessly, she felt it as her claws were forced open, and the mummy slipped free.

She opened her mouth and breathed flames at the necromancer, and he was forced to run to the side again. She started turning her head to follow him with the stream of fire. Then she felt a hot gas strike her nostrils from below.

What is that?

She had breathed in a little of it involuntarily before she realized something was happening, but as her eyes darted to look at what she’d just inhaled, she saw it was an ominous glowing cloud, streaming from the mummy’s jaws.

Aoife felt as if her lungs were being melted, and she instantly broke off her flames and lunged for the mummy again. This time, she didn’t try to pick him up. Instead, she just swung her talons with full force. She managed a clean hit and ripped his body neatly in half.

Her own flesh felt like it was boiling from the inside, but she forced mana into her chest, trying to heal the injuries as they were inflicted, to keep herself in the fight.

As she circulated mana, she felt the cold touch of metal against her feet.

What?

She looked down, and a set of glowing chains crept rapidly along her limbs, up her tail, around her chest and wings. For the first few seconds, she didn’t understand what was happening. Only when the flow of mana was cut off from around her chest, and the pain overwhelmed her.

What are those chains?

Her healing continued, but at a natural, biological pace rather than boosted by her primitive magic. The chains seemed to be restricting her ability to use her mana. Not completely, but enough to cause serious problems.

She tried to break them with her claws, but they seemed to be quite strong as well as increasingly tightly wound around her body.

She opened her mouth to breathe flames on the chains, but the same iron grip that had seized her wings before - and then, briefly, her claws - now snapped her jaws shut. Then it slammed her head first into the dirt.

Sand went up her nostrils and into the corners of her eyes. It didn’t injure her at all, but she felt the sting of humiliation. She tried to jerk her head up, but the necromancer’s grip on her skeleton was stronger than her own muscles, at least in this one key area. The rest of her was more or less bound in place as he held her, head down, with his power.

I lost, Aoife thought, a bit shocked. In just a few minutes. He had even forced her into a posture of submission, stomach down, tail end up, chained, with sand chafing at her wounds.

Dragons did not cry - she was far too proud for that - but the pain of the sand pressing up into her raw, semi-decayed, recently burned flesh was quite exquisite. Like torture.

The humiliation was something else, though. She had only ever lost fights to other powerful creatures, and only very rarely, in her few decades of life. The Hero was the sole human who had ever bested her, and there were obvious caveats to that. She had been in poor condition, she had been in her human form, and he was the Hero, chosen by both Vika and Astara to bear their powers, an existence that even dragons had to respect to some degree.

She could still tell herself that she was strong. Now, though…

She felt something make contact with the side of her stomach, and the suddenness of it distracted her from the feeling of defeat.

The soft touch had landed in one of the places where she was uncovered by her scales. Her eyes darted downward, and she saw the necromancer. He had placed his hand gently on her abdomen, and again, she didn’t understand what was happening. Even with her bound, why would he risk moving so close? Then the sensation began to creep through her body. Slow paralysis, spreading outward from where the sensation originated, where the necromancer had placed his hand.

No, stop!

She felt the muscles protecting her torso weaken and then grow slack. Her vital organs began to turn numb. He still had that mystical grip over her jawbones, so she couldn’t bathe him in fire.

She tried to writhe and shift her body, but then she felt another grip, holding her by the bones in all of her limbs. She realized that the second influence grasping her wasn’t the necromancer. The direction of the force came from her other side, from the mummy. The creature had been ripped in half, but it wasn’t like a human. Being dismembered apparently did not keep it from performing some of its functions.

“You win,” she managed to hiss through her clenched jaws.

It felt like she had used the last bit of air in her lungs to say it. As she spoke the words, the paralysis hit her lungs, and it grew harder to hold in air.

The necromancer looked her in the eyes, and the worst thing struck her. He didn’t show anything on his face. There was no rage, like when Chad beat her bloody. There was no lust, like when she fought off the last dragon who tried to mount her. There wasn’t even an expression of triumph. It was as if she was just an obstacle for him to remove.

“Stay down, then,” he said coolly. “Until we’re done dealing with your companion. Or get up and die if you prefer. But I won’t give any more chances.”

He pulled his hand away, and the paralysis immediately began to recede. She could breathe again. He turned and began to move quickly toward where the others he had come with had gone.

“May I know your name?” Aoife called after him.

But the necromancer did not stop to answer her.

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