The Dark Lord Nimi

Year 906 of the Sixth Age…


“Destiny, fate, chance, they’re all just excuses people use for taking credit for there victories, and not they’re failures. It’s the things we do that make us who we are.”

Far in the distant flat world of Kai-Chi a disgruntled black smith raises an old sword out of a chest. He’s had it for half his life, and it has become the bane of his existence. The weapon, for all its quality, simply refuses to take an edge. He has tried everything to sharpen it, spent hours with it on the wet stone. It is a good sword, finally made and perfectly balanced, but it can not be sharpened. The blacksmith became an expert in forging weapons as he tried to find a way to make this blade sharp.

Finally, he sets it down on the work bench and tumbles his anvil onto the hilt. Then he grabs his biggest mallet and slams it down on the blade, breaking the weapon in two. It will not sharpen and it will not melt, but at least it will finally break.

* * *

“Where the hell did it come from?” Hunter snarled as he ran down the hall after Sapphire and Hokori.

“Watch your tong!” Hokori yelled back. “You’re a full fledged Slayer Dragon now, you can’t walk around screaming obscenities constantly.”

“Theirs a god damned Dark Lord out there wrecking havoc on the world of life,” Hunter seethed. “And you’re giving me pointers on my speech patterns?”

“We don’t know where it came from!” Hokori grunted. “It just showed up all of a sudden and now the town it arrived in no longer exists. But it’s a full Dark Lord, not just a peace!”

The three crossed the marble courtyard and reached the inner wall. There was a dampening web over the courtyard that kept anyone, even them, from using magic outside the keep, else they would have simply flown to the Eerie. This wasn’t the time for pomp and composure, people were dieing by the thousands every second. A Dark Lord had been unleashed in a small dimension in the outer rim.

Three dragons touched down ahead of them in the street. Dragons in Arindell were not an uncommon sight; there was a whole flight of them defending the city from above. But they never landed, or at least weren’t supposed to ever land within the city limits.

It was a rule the dragons often laughed and joked about. When Uther had convinced the ancestors of these dragons to keep their Eerie here and defend Arindell, they had agreed to this rule out of respect for the Pendragon. Now the rules laid down by Uther were more like guidelines, followed only as the dragons saw fit. They no longer respected the Pendragon as they once did, and guarded Arindell more out of respect for their ancestors than any obligation to the laws of man.

That, and nobody wants to have the job of telling a fire breathing dragon where he can and can’t land.

Hunter reached out to grab a hold of the dragon’s iron scales and pull himself up onto its sleek back, but stopped suddenly as a thought struck him. They frequently rode dragons out of the valley, since no teleportation magic worked. Portals could be opened from time to time, but it was very difficult. When there was time they rode the train out to the foothills, beyond the range of the teleportation shield. But there wasn’t time now, they had to reach the Dark Lord before it broke the dimension.

“Wait a sec!” Hunter yelled to Sapphire and Hokori. He backed away from the dragon for a moment and then jumped—teleported—toward the dimension above them. There was the familiar elation of speed and compressed distance, and just as he expected he hit the shield and bounced down into one of the foothill towns.

Just as when he had tried to jump into Arindell on his first visit to the city, he landed in a ring surrounded by three full rows of bowmen, all armed with heavy cross bows and cruel enchanted bolts, and all jangling with chain mail and leather. Hunter knew the drill, he was supposed to just drop and freeze, or he would rapidly become a human pincushion.

He didn’t have time. In the thirty or so seconds it would take to stop and explain himself a thousand people would die. As the men tensed to louse there bolts Hunter sent a long whip of blue energy out and knocked every last one of them over. With there heavy mail and helmets they wouldn’t be hurt by the fell, and the sleep spell would give them some much needed rest.

Hunter sprinted the fifty feet to the clear line of the shield, downing his mystical Rising Dragon armor as he went, and then jumped again, this time to the dimension where the Dark Lord waited.

Sapphire and Hokori wouldn’t be far behind, but maybe he could buy them some time.

He touched down in the far off world and gasped. There was the monster, looking like an octopus trying to mate with a lobster, standing dead center in a huge metropolis. Hunter threw his nagi-nata angrily into the ground, knowing it would do him no good against this foe.

It was a lower tech dimension, there were no buildings over four stories, and every roof was thatched save for a very few tiles. The Dark Lord was the biggest thing in sight, in all its awful glory. Long waves of energy were streaming towards it from the surrounding area. Hunter could see the thick, lush forests surrounding the city being drained of life.

He had expected to see hoards of screaming, running people.

All that littered the streets were burned bodies.

“DISCATCHU AZURE!” Hunter unleashed a razor bolt of lighting at the Dark Lord, which was hardly fazed by the desperate attack. It was gathering strength; there was no time to wait.