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“You are not welcome here,” Scylla said, in a voice that burbled from somewhere deep beneath the ocean. I held my tongue. Talk about stating the obvious. One of her tentacles reared up over her head, poised to strike, like the tail of a scorpion.
Fenrir came first. With a snarl, the great wolf launched at me, the sword clenched in its jaws dripping with slaver. I couldn’t tell if I had more to fear from its huge fangs or the vicious blade it somehow wielded with the finesse of a swordsman. I flinched, ready to flatten myself against the ground, shadowstep if need be –
But Fenrir collided with thin air, its huge body making a wet thump against an invisible wall. It whimpered as it slid against the wet ground. I could feel the vibration of its massive bulk crashing on the rock. Fenrir clambered to its feet and bared its teeth at me, eyes burning with feral rage. Bastion called out to me, his hands outstretched as he maintained his barrier.
“Look alive, Graves. They mean business.”
Blue fire filled the edge of my vision as Prudence activated her magic, bathing her wrists in brilliant azure flame. A second wolf joined us, this one our ally, standing on two legs and bristling with fur as black as the hair on Gilberto Ramirez’s head. I reached for my backpack, flipping it open, hearing Vanitas roar furiously in my mind as he swept into battle. With my hands I summoned spheres of pure flame, hoping against hope that I could build fireballs strong enough to resist the constant pelting of rain. There was always the Dark Room, I thought. A last resort.
My heart pounded with excitement, but mainly with fear. Between the five of us, we’d fought against gods, stood toe to toe with the Eldest themselves. But we’d never been quite so outclassed, outnumbered. Great Beasts that I couldn’t even name were emerging from the rock, rearing up from the waters, and the things that soared through the storming sky, the things that breathed fire and lightning hadn’t even descended yet.
I lobbed a ball of flame at one of Scylla’s tentacles, its grotesquely long body thrashing in the waters. Dustin Graves wasn’t going to succumb to doom. Magic flashed across the outcropping of rock, streaks of white, orange, and blue arcane energy.
This wasn’t the end, I thought, even as Fenrir loped towards me, its fur matted with blood and rain, its fangs as long and wicked as knives. This couldn’t be. Fenrir snarled, then leapt. I thrust my palm out, calling on the Dark Room.
But Fenrir hesitated, catching itself in its assault and skidding against the rock, then backing away. The darkness never came, even as I called for it – at least not from my body. Instead a great shadow shrouded me, as if a cloud had passed across the domicile’s poisonous sun. Fenrir gazed up at the sky, its eyes filled with something like malicious glee. I looked up, too, and couldn’t find the voice to scream, even when a massive, scaled hand closed its cold, wet fingers around me.
&nbs
p; The ground sped away, my friends shrinking as I ascended. Bastion reached a hand out towards me, shouting something I couldn’t hear or understand, but I was too far for his magic to reach. I looked down at the enormous hand that held me, at fingers that ended in yellowing talons like old ivory, at reptilian skin covered in scales that shimmered, first like shards of emerald, then sapphire, an iridescent mosaic of sea blue and green.
I could have squirmed, forced my way out of the thing’s hand. But then what? Fall to my death? Would the thing that owned the hand squeeze and crush me if I so much as tried to escape? Being lifted away from the conflict, I could have almost believed that this was better. My friends could handle themselves without me.
“Vanitas?” I thought, reaching out to him with my mind. No answer. I’d never been so far away from him on the field of battle that our telepathic connection would be severed. I had to be hundreds of feet off the ground. I told myself not to let the thought of it flood my insides with terror.
I looked up into the enormous, gaping maw of the beast that had “saved” me, and I knew that it was worse. This was much worse. I realized right then that I had never before truly known what it meant to despair.
A skyscraper. Imagine that a skyscraper had come to life and somehow sprouted great, sinewy limbs that ended in wicked talons, had grown a long, reptilian face with eyes as huge and as menacing as a pair of suns. I had never felt smaller, weaker. I had never felt less important.
“You,” the thing said, in the voice of a woman, in the voice of a dragon, in the voice of a tempestuous ocean. “I know you. The thing of dust.”
“Dustin Graves,” I said, barely able to speak without stammering. “My name is Dustin Graves.”
“No,” the thing said. “You deserve no name. You are a man, formed out of dust, and to dust shall you return. A speck of nothing. Only dust.”
Well, I thought. That was convenient. I breathed deeply, remembering exactly who I was, and what I was. A speck of dust on a rock spinning aimlessly in the universe, a pointless evolutionary accident by all accounts. But what did that matter? I had a mind, a heart, a soul. Above all, I had a mission: to speak to the Great Beasts and beseech them for all of their power against the Eldest.
She was right. I am dust, I thought. And that was what I said.
“I am Dust.”
Chapter 16
“Strange,” the she-serpent said. “For once a man-child shows humility and understanding in his position. Perhaps you will live long enough to tell the great Tiamat why you have intruded on her domain.”
My blood froze. Tiamat was many things, both the mother goddess of the Babylonian pantheon, and a reviled dragon turned away by her own divine children, a swirling beacon of chaos. Above all else, she was angry.
Tiamat blinked, sheer membranes closing and opening across the awful, slick surface of her eyes. She appraised me with the venomous, calculated patience of a snake, slitted pupils watching and waiting. The sound of her breathing was like the rush of violent winds through some huge cavern, the noise of it mingling with the rumble of storm and thunder around us. Far, far below, where I couldn’t even hear, my friends fought for their lives.
Don’t look down, I thought to myself. Don’t do it. But you know me well enough by now, a little stubborn, a little stupid. I swallowed as I dared to look below us, my stomach swooping as I saw nothing but the great, glistening bulk of Tiamat’s torso, her scales glittering like jewels. It grew out of the fog like a gargantuan stalk. I could hardly see the water or the rocks, only faint pulses of magical colored light as spells fired from under the canopy of clouds.
Tiamat’s reptilian jaws parted, her thunderous voice emanating from behind teeth like spires of smooth, yellowed rock. “There is a reason you have come, little speck. Speak it, while I have patience still.” Her breath smelled like the ocean, like a hurricane.
“The Eldest,” I said. “We’ve come for your help. Loki of the Norse gods told me to seek out the Great Beasts, to ask if you would lend your power in this greatest of battles. An agent of the Eldest has come to life – one of their avatars – and we – ”
The sky around us rumbled with thunder and flashes of lightning as Tiamat laughed, as her claws tightened around my body. I held my breath. Any tighter, I thought, and she could crush me into paste. I needed to choose my words.
“You must think us fools. Loki has no power here. Just because his children are among our allies doesn’t give them any greater influence. And you would have the Great Beasts risk our hides for the sake of little humans? Little specks of dust? The gall. The absolute gall.”
