Creation Mage 6 by Dante King (red scrolls of magic .TXT) 📗

I snorted. “You might have a point there,” I said, thinking of how domineering the pink-haired woman probably could have been back in Gertrude’s bedchamber, had it been just a bit bigger.

Mallory tucked her shining bright golden hair behind her ears and took a deep breath. She faced the door, her cobalt eyes running along yet another inscription that was worked in rusted metal over the arch. She pointed it out to Leah and me.

THERE ARE NO GREATER DEMONS THAN A PERSON’S OWN

THERE ARE NO FOULER MONSTERS THAN THOSE WE BECOME

“There’s another nice cheerful one that you can put on a bumper sticker,” I muttered, scanning the writhing metal words.

“Who wouldn’t want to go inside after that?” Leah asked enthusiastically. Her tone did not change, but I figured she was probably being sarcastic. I hoped she was, at any rate.

“Monsters and demons,” Mallory said. “It would be a dull world without them, would it not?”

I was about to hit her with a sardonic retort, but then I perceived that she was right. When it came down to it, if we did not have the monsters, we would not have their direct opposites, we would not have the flip side of the coin.

“We would not have the angels without them,” Mallory said softly, almost to herself.

“Damn, is that what we are, then?” Leah guffawed.

I considered all the crazy shit that we had pulled in the last few months. A lot of it—well, most of it—had been pretty damn crazy, and involved fighting and killing and blowing stuff up, sure. But, crucially, all that had gone down because we had been trying to do good things. None of our manic adventures had taken place because me or any of my friends had any nefarious purpose in mind. We had been reactionaries.

Maybe, we were the angels, if we had been fighting the demons.

“The Celestial Realm must really have been scraping the bottom of the bargain barrel if that’s the case,” I said.

The two women laughed.

“Okay,” I said, making my black crystal staff appear in my hand and patting the pocket in which my mother’s vector, disguised as a white crystal, resided. “Let’s go in and shake the tree and see what falls out.”

It took our combined efforts to heave the door open. It creaked gratifyingly as it swung open, splitting in half down the middle to reveal the space beyond.

The space beyond was, I was happy to see, a huge open area lit by the light of the midday sun. It was a courtyard, perhaps as large as a football field, paved in a circular pattern of well-crafted and well-laid slabs of alternating light and dark stone. Its four edges were enclosed, walled in but decorated with leaping columns of masonry.

It looked like it had once been a gallery of sorts—perhaps it still was. There were statues dotted about the place; some quite fresh looking, others weathered and worn to the point where they seemed like blank stone mannequins. The statues were not all human. They were not all humanoids. Some were more beast than elf or man or nymph.

The monster sat near the rear of the courtyard; a great, brooding foul thing.

It was like nothing that I had encountered in my experiences in Avalonia. Like nothing I had ever seen. That wasn’t to say that it was the grossest thing that I had feasted the old eyeballs on. I think that top honor was still held by the Abomination, which was a hideous creature that made you cherish every moment that you weren’t in its company. This thing, though, was definitely new to me.

The three of us walked further into the courtyard. I was half expecting the door to boom theatrically closed behind us, but it remained open. It was almost tempting us to tuck tail and run.

There was no chance of that.

As we approached, our footsteps crunching on bits of loose stone and crumbled plaster from the statues and busts set on plinths all around us, the monster looked up and we were able to get a decent look at it.

“A liderc!” Mallory breathed from next to me. “I have not heard tell of one for a long time. I can’t even think of when I last heard rumors of such a monster still existing.”

“Liderc?” I asked. “What the hell is a liderc when it’s at home?”

“A Nightmare,” Mallory said, an unfamiliar trace of grimness in her tone.

The monster was crouched like a bad dream at the far end of the courtyard. It was vaguely humanoid in shape: massive, lumpy, and gray as slate. Its back was covered in thick, bristling spines like a porcupine, which stuck through the roughly beaten steel and iron of the back and breastplate that it wore. Its arms were long and ape-like, ending in three-fingered hands tipped with vicious claws. Its legs were thickly muscled and looked like they were built for pouncing.

It was the thing’s head, though, that really captured the attention. The head was an amalgamation of orangutan and bat. It had large, twitching ears, a squashed nose with enormous nostrils, and bulbous eyes, which could have been scooped straight out of a tarsier’s head and inflated about a thousand times. Teeth like shards of broken black glass filled its mouth.

I narrowed my eyes at the enormous beast. It must have weighed a few tons and been about twenty-five feet tall. It rocked backward and forward, the tiny pupils of its protuberant eyes fixed on us, gibbering quietly to itself. Drool hung in thick ropes from its slavering, many-toothed jaw. Hideous open nostrils were crusted with yellow goo.

“Handsome son of a bitch, isn’t it?” I said, wrinkling my nose as the monster’s smell was wafted toward