Spear of Destiny by James Baldwin (room on the broom read aloud txt) 📗

meter was sitting at 10%, and her stomach rumbled audibly. “I don’t like the smell coming from that next room. It smells... dead. And mushroomy.”

Between Karalti’s description, the traceries of fungal strands reaching around the edges of the opening, and the bright glow lighting up the next room like a neon sign saying ‘go here!’, my Gamer’s Intuition began to poke at me.

“Let’s buff up,” I said, quietly. “I’ll give you what food I have in my pack. It’s not much, but it’ll get you through whatever we probably have to kill in there. While you eat, let’s talk strategy. You’ve only got one burst of Ghost Fire left: assuming there’s a boss that is designed to challenge dragons and other flying creatures, how are we going to fight it?”

Karalti rubbed her face with her front claws, hissing low in her throat. “Uhh... I-”

“If you say ‘I dunno’, I’m gonna kick your ass,” I said. “That’s baby talk.”

She huffed in a way that told me she’d been about to say that exact thing.

“I can use Wings of Deception to make a double of myself,” she said, after a few minutes. “My copies deal the same physical damage as me. I can hit something with thirty-five percent more breath weapon damage that way... and then fight them physically.”

“Right. What about magic?” I scrounged around in my pack, evicting all the food I’d saved. Macarons, sandwiches, burek, random vegetables. I pulled out an entire cabbage I hadn’t remembered picking up and grimaced. I must have picked it up out of a pot somewhere. Mmm-mmm, delicious dungeon cabbage.

“Haste makes me faster,” Karalti said. “Dirge can curse enemies and make them blind and unable to speak, so if they’re a magic user, that helps.”

“Right.”

“Uhh... Dark Focus gives me triple power on my next magical attack. The only offensive spell I have is Shadow Wave. Maybe Circle of Protection?”

I brought the spell descriptions up in my HUD with a thought: Shadow Wave

Rippling shadows disorient enemies and inflict moderate damage. Causes one or more of: Confusion, Blindness, Deafness, Rage, Nausea to living enemies. Circle of Protection II

Create a 20ft radius of protection against undead for 5 minutes, warding them back from contact with the dragon’s body while dealing 1 Dark elemental damage per second (15 MP, 10-second cooldown).

 

“Pretty sure it will work with Shadow Wave. I’m not sure what ‘moderate damage’ means, but triple that will probably end up being ‘serious damage’,” I said. “I guess that was one of those beta testing descriptions that wasn’t fully updated before we... I... joined the game.”

“Yeah! So blast them with fire, then with Shadow Wave, then pow!” She balled her foreclaws into fists and swung them forward and up. “One, two, right in the kisser! Then bite them!”

“No biting, if it’s a fungus thing.” I walked out along her wing edge with arms full of food. “Here. Chow’s ready.”

My dragon craned her neck back, looking at me coyly. “Feed me?”

I arched an eyebrow, but I held out a pastry I’d looted from somewhere in Taltos. It was perfectly preserved, thanks to the magic of virtual reality logic. Karalti gently nipped it from my fingers, followed by all the rest of it. Meat, vegetables, assorted desserts. She ate the lot, filling her food bar by four percent.

“Better than nothing,” I sighed, as I handed her my last piece of jerky. “At least you won’t starve. But I might.”

Chapter 6

I had to flatten down so Karalti could crawl through the hole in the cave wall. She got down on her belly to commando crawl underneath, using her foreclaws to pull herself forward and paddling the dirt with her legs and tail. We emerged into a narrow geode corridor, bluecrystal spires jutting out crazily in all directions. Broken crystals littered the ground, as if something large had brute-forced their way inside, cutting a route through the geode. The air was humid, laced with an unpleasant odor like burning plastic and sugar mixed together... the stench of decaying mana exposed to the air.

“I don’t like this,” I muttered, ducking a crystal spire that lanced from the ceiling. The scent of decay—flesh and mana both—was getting stronger with every step. It was also getting warmer and wetter. I kept an eye on my HUD, watching the temperature gauge slowly rise from 74F toward 90F.

“You know, I do want to see my grandma and claim my birthright and everything, but every part of this place gives me the creeps.” Karalti picked up her feet like a fussy cat as the earth turned to mud, squishing up between her claws.

“We’re probably almost there. Just think queenly thoughts,” I said. “Dignified. Mature. Elegant.”

“Blow me,” Karalti grumbled back.

There was the grinding, rumbling sound of lava in the walls, getting louder as we broke out into a glowing cavern. Karalti came to an uneasy stop as we took in the sights. It was warm and damp—not a great start. Hairlike Dragonrot grew in clusters between crops of mana crystals, feeding off the luminescent mana that beaded on the walls like dew. It wasn’t a solid blanket of filaments, like it had been in the tunnel. There was evidence that molten rock had erupted from the walls in places over decades or centuries. The fungus hadn’t grown back on the cooled lava, leaving black hills of petrified magma to sit bare. Even as we stood there, a small cavity to our left erupted, belching a ropy, gelatinous stream of magma down the wall.

At the other end of the cavern were piles of bodies. Half a dozen tulaq had met their ends here. Tulaq were a species that had gone extinct during the Aesari Wars some two thousand years ago: slender winged creatures that were equal parts greyhound, falcon, and kudu antelope. They had four long legs, elegant