Free The Alterra Histories: The Fire King by C. S. Marks Page B

warriors were enduring. He was filled with confidence, for there were no enemies here that he could not contend with. When one of the Night-fliers turned a blast of flame upon him, he crouched beneath his dragon-shield, well protected in his scaly armor. He cast a discarded spear straight at the beast, impaling it through its wide-open mouth, felling it at once. Nothing could stand before him as he broke through into the inner chambers of the fortress. With each step forward, his confidence grew. Léiras was wrong, Faelani was wrong—they were all wrong. He had nothing to fear.
    He finally broke into Wrothgar’s inner sanctum—a chamber of dark, polished granite with a large fire-pit in the center of the floor. Wrothgar, who was said to appear from within flames, was nowhere in evidence. The polished walls of the chamber gave Aincor an excellent view of his own magnificent, formidable figure, and he could not help but admire it for a moment. Then he called out: “Wrothgar! Come forth and face me! Come forth from your wet, slimy hole, you coward! I’m waiting.”
    He heard a sound from the portal at his back, and glanced over his shoulder to see that Asgar and Aldamar had come in behind him.
    Aldamar looked around the chamber, his apprehension evident. Aincor knew that neither Aldamar nor Asgar had ever seen Lord Wrothgar, and they had no idea of what to expect. Aincor had, of course, seen Wrothgar as a shriveled weakling—a pale, unhealthy travesty that was only vaguely human—but no vision of Wrothgar was binding. He could appear to be whoever and whatever he wished. Aldamar seemed to know it. “Keep your wits about you,” he whispered to his friend, Asgar. “Do not underestimate the Shadowmancer.”
    Asgar’s answer made Aincor’s heart swell with pride. “My father will make short work of him. I’m not afraid!”
    Aincor kept calling out to his enemy, naming him “coward” over and over while brandishing his blades. Finally, the summons was heard— four more portals opened in the seamless black walls, and the three warriors stood surrounded by five dark entryways, all but one inhabited by a different, horrific vision. The first portal, the one through which the Elves had entered, was simply as it had been—a doorway back to the battle-ground.
    In the second, a terrible winged creature with a long snout full of teeth and scales like a dragon wielded a great, two-handed sword. It made no sound other than a deep, guttural moan. Its beautiful golden eyes filled with malevolence, narrowing as they fixed upon their prey.
    The third was filled to bursting with a pale, rotting giant. Its eyes, clouded over like dead moons, held no expression whatever. Its massive muscles flexed beneath decayed, stinking skin of mottled grey.
    The fourth portal showed a robed, hooded figure shrouded in black. Only its skeletal hands were visible, sending forth tendrils of mist. The Elves could hear shrieks and moans of agony around it, as though from a thousand unhappy victims.
    Finally, the fifth portal was only darkness, but that darkness held both intelligence and awareness that could not be hidden. Whatever that black, featureless thing was, it was most definitely alive. Alive and hungry. Aldamar and Asgar dreaded the thought of approaching it.
    Aincor spun on his heels, regarding each fearsome vision in turn,then threw his head back and laughed aloud. “This is what you send to face the mightiest of all warriors? Some dragon-thing, an impotent Bödvar, and the Mother of all Ulcas? THIS is what you send to face me? Where are you hiding, Black Flame? I will waste no more time with underlings. Come forth! Come forth and face me!”
    He looked around at the walls of the chamber, which now appeared to be rippling as though with searing heat; any object reflected in them was grotesquely distorted. He wondered whether any of the creatures looming within the portals were real. The dragon-creature certainly seemed lively enough as it