Free Inferno (Play to Live: Book # 4) by D. Rus Page A

alive and kicking?"
    Aulë twitched in his grip but didn't back off. "Yes, I'm alone, so what! When the Last Battle comes, Great Eru will summon me again!"
    Struggling to turn his neck, Aulë looked over the kneeling dwarves who were pouring their hearts out in prayer. "I'm sorry, my children... Your time hasn't yet come..."
    Reality shuddered again, ringing like a hundred thousand broken crystal glasses. The god's figure slackened and blurred, losing brightness and color.
    He was disembodying! Wretched Bigfoot! A god's disembodiment caused his altar to lose one level. In our case, it meant simply resetting it back to zero, leaving us with fuck-all and presenting us with another enemy race.
    Plan B!
    I yelled at the top of my voice right into his fading eyes already staring into the eternal void, "Aulë, I'll summon Yavanna for you!"
    For an instant, the celestial spheres stopped their quivering. The last spark of understanding in Aulë's eyes glinted with frustration and hope. "Come again!"
    "Please stay with us! Help us stand up for the right cause! And I will summon Yavanna, your beloved wife, from the depths of eternity for you!"
    Actually, I'd already been considering summoning his better half as our answer to Lloth in our struggle for Elven hearts and minds. The mighty goddess who'd created all fruits and growing things, animals and birds. As the one who'd made the forests of the Middle Earth, she was a ready-made patron goddess to worship for all the Elves, especially the druids.
    "You think you can do it?"
    I cast an apologetic glance at the Fallen One. Okay, so I hadn't put him in the picture. I had this passion for keeping trump cards up my sleeve. Carefully I pulled the second fragment of the Heart of the Temple from my pocket.
    "There! All we need do is finish decorating the Temple to her liking — with plants and emeralds and all sorts of flowers, you know. How many times out of those fourteen incarnations have you actually been together?"
    "Only once," he whispered, coming back to reality while shedding a solitary tear onto the floor.
    A huge translucent gem bounced over the marble tiles. This time I didn't goof up. Promptly covering it with my foot, I stashed it away in my pocket together with the second Heart fragment.
    Then I brushed my hands free of dust and proffered one to him. "Let's do this again, shall we? I'm Max, the First Priest of the Dark Pantheon. Pleased to meet you."
     
    Chapter Four
     
    T ime: Ten days after the clan's return from the frontier raid.
    Place: The Remote Post situated in the bottleneck passage between the Dead Lands and the Valley of Fear, three hundred feet away from the castle of Tianlong — the ever-vigilant guard of the First Temple.
     
    Three guards were sheltering from the scorching midday sun under a flimsy awning. Apparently, the clan's leader could afford neither money nor the manpower to build something more substantial, all of his resources tied up in the restoration of the mammoth hulk of his Super Nova castle.
    So far, the watch had been uneventful. They had only stopped a few lone wishfuls wanting to join the clan, an uneasy ranger who couldn't fool anyone with his apparent attempt to map out the area, and a cheeky warrior who'd demanded they let him through because "he had things to do over there and it's a free world, ain't it?" They'd just let the idiot through without even trying to talk him out of it.
    Tianlong had welcomed the rare chance to have some fun. He told the skeletal archers on his walls to hold their fire, then opened his enormous jaws just slightly. The dragon had plenty of mana but not enough entertainment. He gobbled up the daring warrior's identity and digested it whole, providing himself with enough food for thought, then spat out the hapless freedom seeker onto the dusty sand. Once he'd recovered a bit, the warrior scrambled back to his feet and began poking at a small flat charm, activating a portal artifact. He hadn't even said goodbye to