Chương 404: 12.1

Jewel swept high through the air, midway to skimming the firmament of the heavens, daring the Magarskan fliers to try and rise to meet her. But whatever the equivalent of a Magarskan General in Air had learned to not waste their numbers against trying to climb into white hot wyrm doom. However that did not mean that Jewel's presence was an all encompassing dominance! The Magarskan's had found a way to answer the problem of fighting a Tyrant Wyrm.

Jewel was not as swift as a Gryphon Rider in anything but a dive, she could reach and sustain altitudes and positions in air and turn sharper than the largest of the Magarskan Gryphons. But against the war flocks her maneuverability was at best matched and at worst completely overwhelmed. She could only turn her head so far, spread her fire so wide and push the destructive flames so far.

Their talons and beaks were mostly inconsequential bruising but hundreds of bodies clinging to her coils and wings could overwhelm all the lift of her flame! And when one, two or sometimes three of them got purchase on her mouth? It was like being buried in a fury of talons, beaks and feathers. They could drive her down into the ground, they had once pushed Jewel right into the midst of the Magarskan soldiers, and she had found near-death waiting for her!

Every single contingent of Magarska's armies were armed with at least a tenth of their number wielding the distinctive edges and long poles of Wyrm hunting spears, she'd been driven down and then swept up only once with those forces and felt the bite of their blades find purchase between her scales and her own blood spilling down her flanks before she could muster enough of her flame through her hide to halt their blows.

The ground in the thick of it was death for Jewel, the immediate sky above the battlefield was now a gauntlet and a trap. Only the heights above the easy reach of the warflocks were anywhere Jewel could take position and play her role. And so high up her Wyrmdoom could either be a defensive sweep to prevent an attempt to overtake her or carefully controlled spears which had to be directed and timed to erupt amidst the army. And even then she could not keep her position so high.

For every moment she did not press on the warflocks they could drive away her vastly outnumbered Gryphon Riders. Which continuously drew her back into the riskier altitudes, to protect her flyers, the Magarskan's could not dare to ignore her. Jewel saw the sweeping movement of the war gryphons in the air sweep and flow, trying to block her from clearly seeing beneath them to the formations below, to obscure the lay of the battle and attempts to maneuver and twist around her own forces.

The need of the warflocks to shield the army from Jewel had also prevented them from spreading out and surrounding the realm's army with their superior numbers. But this fourth battle was continuing the pattern, with each she had driven Magarska's armies back, killed hundreds of their men, thousands of their Gryphons. But her own army was bleeding too. Since their first engagement by the General's last count she had lost almost five thousand men to either desertion or death on the battlefield.

And Magarska's losses, while initially strong, were slowing with every time they clashed. The foolhardy charges against her had all but stopped, whatever over eager captains and levy they had having winnowed themselves away against Jewel and her forces, Of those that remained? Their bloodied forces were now far harder to deal with. On the scale of the whole fielded armies, everything she tried they found counters too.

The only respite from their alacrity in moving against her like some singular vast beast was the vulnerability from their commanders. Even against the sheer numbers of fliers that Magarska could field in the air, the old ways of the Viznove Gryphon Riders held true. Strike down the captains and their ancestral enemy falters, stalls, freezes in place paralyzed by their discipline or even falling back from a front until the wayward soldiers could be absorbed by another leader's formation.

Her flame could service if she was left unmolested but the strikes of proper Gryphonbows upon the enemy brought rippling confusion and delay in the acts of the Magarskan army. As her Father and Mathias General had promised. Alas Murad's army knew this as well as she and her captains did, they targeted the Gryphon Riders almost as viciously as they did Jewel! She spotted Alexander about to be flanked by another Gryphon Rider.

Her father was lining up a shot, but the two of them were as always very badly outnumbered in the air. She dove hard, hearing the booming calls from the enemy's gryphon rider spotters that wheeled around the flock. The rider that had been about to engage with Alexander pulled back and away from his attack, speed bleeding off. Her Father loosed an arrow and it struck in the enemy Gryphon's flank, blood spraying over the clashes below.

But it was not enough to take him from the air, Jewel prepared a missile of her own, rolling the flame in her mouth, forming the carefully delayed pattern over her teeth. Then spat the burst of searing white projectile towards the fleeing attacker. Another chorus of booming calls from the scouters echoed. The wounded Gryphon spun, Jewel's aim missed and the intended blow disappeared into the cloud of obscuring dust which covered where Magarskan soldiers met the Realm's men.

She dared not release another attack into that cloud. The risk of striking her own men was too great. They suspected that over a dozen had fallen from such in the last engagement. There were two confirmed knights with Cantor Reborn's heraldry burnt through by wyrmflame in the preceding battles. Still Alexander was safe, and now her dive was going to be punished.

She filled her coils with her flame, arresting the dive with splaying wings, hard pushes on the air, momentum catching, pulling back up as the wind roared around her and the screaming howls of men, horses and gryphons rose from below. More booming calls from the gryphon rider scouts. Reporting on her movements, the converging war flocks of the lesser gryphons poured towards her, some of them suffering lethal blows from the larger steeds of her riders as they passed them.

The smell of blood and viscera churning into muck below briefly filled Jewels nostrils before the downdraft of her wings banished all scents of the earth. She filled her chest with flame, feeling the strain on her lift as she diverted some of her flame for a defensive screen, but sharp shrill whistles that had been drowned out before rang even as her ascent slowed. And with those cries the flocks pulled sharply up and away from her. Like waves in water splashing along a shore.

They had both learned Jewel's wroth could not be countered, but they did not need to face it. Nor waste their forces and lose their advantage for no gain. More booming calls at the horizon, presently above her, but soon they would be below again. She could not linger, the longer she was so low in altitude the more that they would try to sweep up and flank her or cut off her access to the sky. It was infuriating, all the worse for how she could see they were trying to cloud her judgement!

The armies would clash for another two hours at most, then once again Magarska would retreat, Jewel's men would be slain or wounded, There would be more losses suffered on her enemy's side. But every battle they bled her worse and worse. If it was not cutting her own flesh it was going for her Gryphon Riders! For her family! She finally reached altitude, the place that they would no longer dare risk to try and surround or assault her.

Where she could offer lances of white flame to discourage engagement on the mostly obscured battlefield. But also where all of the scouting Gryphon Riders could see her, circling and weaving back and forth on the edges. Call out and signal to the flocks and the soldiers below what she was doing, when she dived, where she was sending strikes. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. She tilted as if to dive towards one as she had already tried before.

But as before the rider pressed his steed's wings and so pushed whichever of the infuriating spotters she was preparing to descend on away. The tilt of her wings could make the churning swarm of the lesser gryphons spin like a living storm cloud in impossible wings. Jewel snarled to the roaring wind. She spoke in the rough, raw and unrestrained way she had found could pass for something like a wizardly missive." Hewer Of Wheat! Begin!" Jewel did not tilt her wings, she did not prepare herself in any external way.

No, instead she glided as she had so far, taking position over the churning chaos of the battlefield at the place that had been decided beforehand. Where Mathias' general had deployed his troops as lightly as could be spared. Where the Weird of farms would prepare the ground and further draw back what soldiers could be spared. A soft spot in their lines that she hoped Magarska had taken as an opportunity to press with their hardest forces. Jewel took in a great breath of air, then curled herself in.

Wings folding over herself. Flame rushing from her flesh and core to only the coursing reinforcement of her bones, scales and the flesh between her wing phalanges. There were none of the signals she had heard booming from the spotters. A new one instead echoing out across the sky. Possibly it was a cry of confusion? Surely they had not the foresight to prepare beforehand for what was about to happen. Jewel furled up into as tight a ball as she could, every scrap of flame holding and reinforcing her scales.

And not a single speck of it holding her aloft. Like a stone Jewel fell with all the weight of the hundreds and hundreds of pounds of bone, meat and scale that was a Tyrant wyrm thirty feet long and with just as wide a wingspan, her body was as thick around as an ox at her widest point. And she fell with her body tightly coiled into a ball very quickly indeed. The war flocks tried to descend on her, but their bodies splashed against her like water as she fell through them.

The brief moment like crashing ice against her scales. Then she struck earth and bodies of men, horses and beasts and again like so much water she felt them splash off of her. The strain of her flame holding her scales, the terrible jolting on her insides where she had failed to properly brace her flame wrenched, tore, bruised with agony. Her vision behind her eyes turned searing bright white and then darkened to absolute black.

She spun felt what were surely bodies but seemed little more than rain upon her wings and back. And then felt herself grow still. Her ears still insisted she was moving, but the world around her was stable. Her body trembled, shook, screamed with pain, she could feel tears inside. But as she had when facing the Terror Boar, Jewel moved anyway. She pulled air into her neck and down into lungs, felt thick blood and whistling cavities that were strange and new.

Then raised her head high, wings flaring, neck arched, each limb planting in the red and black muck. Ears flicking about, but the spinning tumbling slosh and something inside left her deafened. Her eyes refused to see. Staying dead and black even as she opened her lids. That was no matter, even without ears the world spoke to her, even as her eyes struggled to focus she could still see. Her muscles and bones had remained intact, but inside, things felt wrong, oozing, sloshing.

She'd landed far harder than she expected. That was fine. There was a plan, a strategy, even blind she could feel the men around her, feel the whispering words of the Farming Weird. Everyone who stood around the devastation she had dug into the battlefield should be an enemy. Metal sang and moved at the ends of dead stalks of trees. Her eyes began to sting, her head started to ache, her ears began to ring with horrible furious noise, but nothing was clear. That was fine.

Jewel turned her head towards the most crowded masses of moving men? Meat, bone, breath, blood, metal, leather, wood. They were running towards her, preparing to lower their spears. Trying to surround. Jewel parted her lips, opened her jaw, felt blood pool and run like rivulets between her teeth and then spoke a word that was not a word, yet a command, a denial, a refusal.

She'd said the word so many times before and yet in that ruinous painful chaos as her vision refused to do anything but swim in a riot of colors, her nose spoke in whispering screams and her ears stabbed and burned into her head it was so much clearer than it ever had been before. Flame? No, Jewel spoke. And the word was " Cease". And all before her voice obeyed, coming apart dutifully into ever smaller flecks of form until they had dutifully finished their unbecoming.

Light suddenly stabbed into her head, filled her eyes, and poured into her skull. Wrenching painful agony like if Gem had taken a boiling kettle and for unfathomable reasons jammed its spout into her sockets and let the boiling heat scour into each of them! Her throat seized, every muscle straining to try and move against where she willed it to to stay, scales trembled, meat flexed, bones and joints yearned to bend but she held them firm.

Her lungs bubbled and when she exhaled she felt the blood welling up into her mouth and out of her nose. But Jewel stood stoic and firm, as she should, holding her position. Wanting to scream, her body tried to yell in agony but that was not the plan. That was... Her ears hurt, sound hurt, light hurt, head hurt. Everything hurt so much! It was like arrows stabbing into her neck, driving up and into her head. Like metal suddenly trying to crawl out of her sockets.

Jewel no longer wanted to scream, the feeling was so much worse, she breathed, felt air rush into her lungs and then ooze through her own blood as it was pooling and sloshing inside of her! But still she stood as if nothing was bothering her, only the shuddering waves of her scales even hinting at how much pain kept trying to course through her. The bodies of men that had not heard her word of command were moving away. The skies full of flapping bone, meat and feathers taking flight with them.

She allowed herself to close her eyes hard, to squeeze her lids closed and then slowly open them. Sight came, but it burned, stung even as the shapes resolved themselves. Magarska was... Retreating again, hours ahead of their habit so far. Her muscles shook and trembled from the waves of agony welling up inside. She could taste her own blood on her tongue and swallowed hard. That hurt too of course, her flesh gurgled and bubbled in her coils distressingly.

Something about the feeling reminded her far too much of the River Vah and how it wanted to flow around her. But it was happening inside. She swallowed again and it slid down her throat, weirdly. She tried to speak but felt her flame trying to move towards a spell and had to clench her throat (which was of course painful) to avoid uttering a sorcery. The Weird of Farms plodded up to her, the only one who seemed willing to approach, unbothered by the wet bog of blood and innards that had been made by her passing.

Or the gray ash that carved a path out of the furrow she'd dug in crashing." Well then, that worked quite well I think." She tried to speak, found more pain in her neck, coughed up something lumpy and swallowed it back down with another painful squelch. Took in a whistling breath then tried again. The only word that could encompass what she was experiencing all through her insides."

Hurgtz" The Weird of Farms looked her up and down then with a wooden pole that he was only just holding, poked her in the side in her middle where she didn't have ribs." Owz" The Hewer of Wheat made a snorting sound of a deeply unimpressed sort, it sounded quite a lot like Bethica actually, then he turned the emptiness under his wide hat to fix her wincing expression with something that somehow still felt like an admonishing glare.

"Stupid countess wyrms that don't hold their insides still when falling out of the sky say what?" Jewel was relieved to find she could glare down at him, her face and skin felt fine now actually, her eyes as well, but having it spelled out like that it was obvious the mistake she had made, and what the Weird wanted her to say as penance." Zwhahgt" With a nod he prodded her side again. It was somehow even more painful than the first time.

"I'll see about a broth to help stitch your innards up."