Free Destroyer Rising by Eric Asher

to do, Bubbles? Where are we going
to find Mike? Or Vicky, for that matter. Happy said they’d be
here.”
    Bubbles barked, slammed her hips up against me, and
started running.
    “Dammit, Bubbles. Don’t run!”
    She wasn’t really running. It was more of a fast
trot, but at her current size I was damn near sprinting to keep up.
The cu sith was kind enough to flatten a path through the wheat
field, but that still didn’t stop me from tripping and stumbling
and generally cursing a lot.
    Our path took us closer to a troll than I liked when
we crested a small hill and rounded a large boulder on top of it. I
glanced down. It wasn’t a boulder. The troll’s dead face sent
shivers down my spine. Cracked flesh and empty eye sockets stared
into the burning sky. Its body was gone, either eaten or carried
away, or perhaps some other great beast had left the head here.
    I looked back to our path, at the live troll as it
twisted and leaned forward. Its flesh looked like that of a
gravemaker—dark rotten bark coated its limbs. Its eyes were
different than what we’d seen on our own plane, full of fire and
smoke. A dim orange light pulsed inside the troll, flashing out
through breaks in its skin like a visible heartbeat. The creature
lost interest in us after a time, and turned back to whatever it
had buried in the wheat.
    “Bubbles, stop!”
    The cu sith stopped so fast that I slammed into her
furry butt before collapsing across her braided tail. She glanced
back and then flopped onto the ground.
    I raised my arm to take a closer look at the series
of tiny cuts that had appeared. The wheat beneath my hand moved
when the blood dripped onto it. Tiny silver filaments rose from
miniature spikelets to absorb the small droplets. Each turned black
when it touched the blood.
    “Oh, that’s creepy as hell.” I hopped up onto the cu
sith, and we rode into the north.
     

CHAPTER TWELVE
     
    It was hard to tell how long I’d been riding on the
cu sith’s back, but by the time she stopped, I was ready to walk.
Muscles I didn’t know I had ached and my thighs screamed at me
before my feet even hit the ground.
    “You need a saddle,” I said, scratching Bubbles
behind her ears.
    A thick forest of what looked like deciduous trees
stood to the east. The canopy blended into the sky like an autumn
forest at sunset, the bark shadowed and black. Everything here
reminded me of the skin of a gravemaker, and it was utterly
unnerving.
    A different mountain range towered in the west now,
casting jagged shadows in directions the sun should not have
allowed. I wondered how much of what I was seeing was real, and how
much was my brain trying to comprehend a different world.
    Bubbles lowered her nose to the ground and began
sniffing her way to the edge of a nearby cliff. I followed her, and
nearly shouted at the sight that waited below us.
    An ocean of fire stretched from one edge of the
horizon to the other. Rolling tides of flame gently lapped at a
black sand beachhead. It was a beautiful, impossible sight. The
winds brought a comfortable warmth with them, and I didn’t look
away until Bubbles barked and bounced on her hind legs. She took
off at a sprint toward the mountains. I grumbled and started
jogging behind her.
    Wheat sprang up behind Bubbles, growing in clumps
with her every footfall, leaving a trail of paw-sized vegetation.
By the time I reached the odd formations, they had grown up to my
waist. The blasted things cut me where my skin was exposed and
started lapping at the blood. That only lasted about thirty seconds
before I got pissed and raised my arm.
    “ Modus Ignatto!” Raw power—far more
concentrated than the ley lines I was accustomed to—lanced through
me and I gasped. A sideways cyclone of fire shot forward until I
strangled the flow and cut the incantation short, leaving black
smoke to curl through the air. “What in the hell?”
    The wheat expanded, devouring every last bit of heat
and flame, chasing the wisps of smoke