Blue Diamonds (Book One of The Blue Diamonds Saga) (2 page)

"You'd let us die for your precious stones," he said. It burned him, but she was right. He did need her.

The glossy black box contained four blue diamonds, each about the size of a chicken egg. The diamonds didn't posses any power on their own. The power that they were referring to was the power that was trapped within them. The power that she trapped within them.

Many years ago, Ambrosia approached the general boasting of the power they could obtain by harnessing the dragon’s powers. She convinced Sir Williamdale that it was power that could serve the good of all mankind. In order to accomplish this feat, she would accompany him on his hunts so that she could magically capture their souls, which she would then force into her enchanted diamonds. Any skilled wizard could capture a soul and trap it, with the only conditions being the level of skill the wizard had, and what type of container he possessed. Blue diamonds are the rarest, as well as the strongest of the gemstones, so it was only natural that was what Ambrosia used to capture their dragon souls.

The trickiest part was that Ambrosia needed to be nearby the dragon the very instant the soul is released from its body, the phenomenon known to common folk as death. The soul trap spell basically snares the spirit the moment it leaves the creatures body like a net would a bobbing butterfly, as a soul is always hesitant for the first few moments. Becoming a ghost is a shocking experience, and the soul always rejects the situation at first. Although, as simple as it all sounds, it’s a feat seldom attempted by any wizard, even when the most gentle of creatures are involved.

A wizard understands that nothing living completely dies out, and that it's just the material parts that cease to operate, while the energy that makes up the soul goes on. In passing, the soul can move on to the next existence, linger aimlessly, or in situations such as the present case, be trapped and manipulated.

Even in the rare occurrence someone is powerful enough to perform this feat of eternal imprisonment, to later summon and control the soul is another matter altogether. Conjuring a soul into the physical realm is powerful magic. It’s a transition that morphs the creature and turns it into a demon version of its old self. This is noted among all wizard folk to be a risk with far more disastrous outcomes than benefits, and hence hardly worth the effort in the first place.

Even in the face of such risk, Ambrosia didn't flinch at the prospect of owning her own flock of dragons. She was by many levels the greatest wizard of her time, which spanned centuries. Living on so high a pedestal for that long of a period gave her confidence unending. Adding Sir Williamdale's warrior prowess to her talents, along with his obsession with killing the creatures, made joining his company a no-brainer.

Now, after traveling thousands of miles, and engaging in countless bloody battles together, she'd successfully trapped four dragon souls. She could have stopped at four. Four was enough to grasp the world over, but five sounded all the sweeter.

There was one massive problem with this, as far as Williamdale was concerned. In combat there is absolutely no reason to be toting around prisoners of war, let alone the ghosts of your defeated enemies. Although the sorceress was sure of her control over the gems, he was equally sure that if they were released the demons wouldn’t want to have a picnic with their captors.

Taking account of how difficult it is to kill one big lizard, four would give zero chance of victory, no matter how he looked at it. Especially when factoring in that a demon reincarnation of any creature is easily twenty times stronger then when it was living. To him, the box in her arms represented a disaster waiting to happen.

“What then, were my men carrying back to Somerlund?” The thought suddenly hit him. Williamdale had to muster every bit of self-control in his body not to scream out.

“And what of the orders," he mumbled. "The orders that I wrote for the king?”

“I wrote a new letter," she said.

"A new letter?"

"Informing him that the last dragon’s death is close at hand, and that everything is proceeding according to plan,” she said. Ambrosia then produced the original scroll that he had given to his men from a fold in her sleeve. His letter was a request to assign a high level of security to the black box until their return.

“What was in the box we sent to the castle?” asked Williamdale, snatching the scroll from her hand.

“Oh, there are four stones in the box. Only they aren’t diamonds, nor do they have souls bound to them.”

“You Foolish witch,” he hissed. “I didn't give you thirty of my men to go back empty handed. That was a full third of my men! Do you have any clue as to what you've done?” Indeed, if not for the bogus errand Sir Williamdale would have nearly a hundred of his best soldiers to contend with the dragon, instead of about seventy. When it came to battle, it was a drastic difference.

“I saved the lives of everyone who will perish, if these stones fall into the wrong hands," she countered. "Like it or not, general, I stand on the side of good.

"I'm beginning to wonder."

"Oh? Would you prefer our little weapons falling into the hands of an ogre? Perhaps a troll, or heavens help us all, a dark elf? We are defenders of the goodly folk, and I intend on keeping the scales tipped in our favor.”

Ambrosia's eyes glared with confidence, and Sir Williamdale couldn’t help but to be impressed at how such delicate, sky blue eyes could also be so fierce at the same time.

“Like it or not, sorceress,” he mocked, “I don’t agree with your deceptive tactics, no matter how sure you are of your reasoning. Let me ask you something. What makes you wise enough to handle the scales of good and evil?"

“Well then who are you, to question my wisdom?” she snapped back. “You are nothing but a machine of death. A tool controlled by your inner rage.”

“My rage fuels me, It’s true,” he said, and was slightly taken aback, wondering if that was all that she thought he was. A simple killing machine.

"I can’t deny my hate for the beasts," he said. "But even though rage fuels me, it doesn’t steer me. There is no ulterior motive. My goal is to rid the world of wrong and make it a safer place. I do good for the sake of doing good. I’m not so vain as to think I control some universal scale, only that I want less people to suffer. Maybe it would have been better if you hadn’t interfered, and we let the beasts die. I think your precious diamonds, as well as your blasted quest to influence the scales, only make the scales more complicated. Before them no damn ultimate weapon existed.”

Sir Williamdale gestured at the box with disgust, spun around on his heels, and then stomped back to his men.

He looked down at the scroll in his hand, only then realizing that he had crumpled it into a ball during their chat. He quickly flattened the scroll and shoved it under his cuirass, weary of curious looks from his men, all while attempting to mask his fluster. Unfortunately, it was not the soldier’s eyes he should have worried about.

Halfway back to his tent, what little shards of moonlight that could be seen above momentarily vanished, cloaked by a black form that whisked overhead from behind him. It wasn't hard for him to register that it came from the direction of the patch of forest Ambrosia had pointed to only minutes prior.

Only the dragon didn't come at them burrowing through the jungle as he expected, but must have climbed a tree and jumped over, aiming for the direct center of his garrison. He didn't like being on the wrong end of an attack, but the general couldn't help feeling a moment of relief that the battle would commence. The fighting came naturally, it was the chasing and the waiting that bothered him. He was a warrior, not a hunter.

Instinctively, he drew his golden broadsword, forged of the same magical elements of his impenetrable armor, and pointed it toward the flying shadow. Those who were close to him stood and drew weapons, knowing the signal all too well.

The shadow landed forty feet from him, to the rear of the gathered soldiers with a crashing of cracking wood, entwined with screams that were squeezed from the lungs of crushed men.

“Kill the beast!” screamed the general. The remainder of the men heard the call and rose in uniform to face the commotion.

“Archers fall back to my right!” he ordered, knowing they would be useless in close combat.

Ambrosia was already beside him, he realized from the chanting that reverberated throughout the forest, and the following crack of a lightning bolt that streamed by. So near was the bolt that one side of his body tingled with electricity. The shot was devastating, scoring a direct hit to an oak tree whose center exploded into splinters, causing the men to stop their charge momentarily.

In that brief instant the area was illuminated, causing great confusion. The confusion did not spawn from the lightning bolt, for the men were already accustomed to going into battle alongside the sorceress. What halted the attack was that there was nothing to charge. When the bolt illuminated the forest it was plain to see that nothing was there but a giant, uprooted tree. There was something clearly disturbing about the tree to Sir Williamdale. Something very out of the ordinary.

“My God…” Sir Williamdale’s eyes widened as the logic hit his brain. There was a massive uprooted tree, but there was no hole in the ground from whence it came.

Like it was a weed, the dragon had uprooted and thrown the tree in hopes to shift the direction of their attention. It was a strategic distraction, which immediately pumped liquid fear into the general’s heart, because he knew that the distraction had worked to perfection, and that they were now on the wrong side of a surprise attack. Without even being touched, he knew he might have just witnessed their deaths.

Williamdale spun around and saw Ambrosia frozen in an expression of terror that matched his own. He screamed for her to run, but it was too late. A thick spike, the tip of the dragon’s tail to be accurate, burst from her midsection. The dragon speared it perfectly into the center of her back. The only sound that escaped her lips was from the air being knocked from her lungs. Williamdale watched the disappointed look on her face drift away, as she was then lifted twenty feet in the air.

As Ambrosia was suspended above, a grim outline of the dragon's face emerged from the darkness, just to the left of her dangling feet. The dragon was a male, and it bore a male's mane of horns, which ran down its neck like armor, all the way down to the middle of his back.

A baby dragon, if it’s a male, begins life with a single row of four, small horns that protrude across the top of its head just above its eyes, stretching from one side of its head to the other. A new row sprouts from beneath the last every one thousand years, and continues to do so throughout the beast's life. This male, as Williamdale’s scout had incredulously reported when they began pursuit, had at least fifteen rows of the black, twisting rows of terror. Sir Williamdale was assured by Ambrosia that this was the last of the species, so it was only fitting that the biggest of the beasts would be their last.

As if to announce itself, the dragon opened his jaws and then spit out a twisting stream of fire that was half roar, half inferno. Due to his previous orders his ten archers were now the closest soldiers to the beast, and all ten of them were quickly engulfed by a horrible, hot death.

The torrent moved and shifted to Williamdale, but the speed that had earned his survival many times before proved reliable once again. Like a jackrabbit, he dove behind a nearby boulder for shelter, and not a moment too soon.

If the gods hadn't placed him next to a large stone that was jutting up from the ground, Sir Williamdale would have been cooked. The flames chased him, and then angrily whipped into the stone with the force of a breaking wave, shaking the ground beneath him. Even from behind the boulder’s protective wall, his whole body went heavy from the heat.

Once the flame subsided, the general rose to his knees in order to peek over his cover. He choked for air as he did so, because while he was safe in his nook, the breathable air around him had completely burned away. Unfortunately the dragon heard him gasping for air, and moved for his shelter.

Sir Williamdale heard the oncoming footsteps and sprinted to his left the exact moment it pounced. He knew his prey well, and rightly predicted that it would lead with a vicious head butt. The impact from the dragon’s forehead obliterated the stone shelter, sending pieces of it flying in several directions. If the general hadn't moved, he would have been out of the fight right then and there.

The general's brain worked frantically, calculating how to best avoid the dragon's line of attack as it postured to find him. From his peripheral vision he saw the glimmer of objects flicking through the air at the monster. The dragon took notice also, pulling its attention away from the general. With the absence of archers, the men had resorted to throwing dirks and spears. He knew that his brave knights had bought him the moment he needed.

Sir Williamdale then cut to his right in order to circle around, on a direct course for the base of the beast’s tail. As he reached his target Williamdale glanced up to see that Ambrosia was still skewered, and dangling on the end of the dragon's tail. Her limbs flailed like a rag doll every time she was whipped side to side. Ironically, at the end of a flapping arm Sir Williamdale saw that Ambrosia was still holding on to her precious black box as if it was a part of her.

The general could have laughed at the sight, but he had no time to waste. The night lit up with fire once again, and once again the burst of light was followed by screams of the soldiers who were chaotically trying to form a defensive wall between the bursts of light and darkness. They received assistance from the fires that were beginning to spread throughout the surrounding brush, the light from which providing them with some much-needed light in order to see their surroundings better.