Chapter 33: Between Stone and Flesh

  Crash.

  Boom.

  Pffuuush.

  Wood splintered. Earth burst. Air was torn apart.

  The destruction did not end.

  The cave salamander was not chasing Iris — it was annihilating its path to him. Everything that stood between it and the fleeing eye was erased. Trees broke under its weight like dry matchsticks. Roots were ripped from the ground. Boulders burst apart beneath its paws.

  It saw nothing else.

  No forest.

  No ground.

  No direction.

  Only Iris.

  The floating, fleeing eye was in that moment the only thing existing in its world. Prey. Target. Food.

  Its massive body hurled itself forward, muscles working brutally beneath the dark scales. Its feelers probed the air like furious antennas, searching, locking on. Every leap made the ground tremble. Every impact sent pressure waves through the forest.

  It was no longer a hunter.

  It was a natural disaster.

  And Iris was the point upon which that storm focused.

  Where Seraphis read the ground, Iris read the sky.

  He saw wind before it reached the leaves, muscle tension before it discharged, and the path of every movement while it was still forming. For him, the world was a mesh of lines, of light and shadow, of currents that revealed where the next strike would fall.

  Crack. Crack.

  The massive jaws of the lizard snapped shut — only centimeters behind Iris. The teeth clashed together like colliding stones.

  Iris evaded at the last moment. Not from reflex, but from calculation. He had seen the current — the minimal displacement of air, the shift of weight in the neck muscle, the trajectory of the jaws before they had fully closed.

  “Shit…”

  Another impulse.

  From the churned chaos, a massive boulder broke loose, torn from the ground by the lizard, hurled through the air. Iris saw the trajectory immediately. A clean curve. Rotating. Fast.

  He corrected his position minimally.

  Half a meter to the left. Slightly lower.

  The rock raced directly toward the lizard.

  Crunch.

  The cave salamander bit down. With a single brutal closing of its jaws, the meter-high stone shattered between its teeth. Fragments rained to the ground. Dust exploded. It spat out the remains in the same motion, as if they were worthless crumbs.

  No slowing.

  No hesitation.

  Iris accelerated again, skimming just above the treetops — but not too far. He must not lose the distance. If the lizard lost interest, everything would be pointless.

  Another bite.

  And another.

  The jaws shot upward, to the right, to the left. Every attack an impact. Iris saw the trajectories — every single one. Air currents. Muscle tension. Neck rotation.

  He evaded.

  By a hair’s breadth.

  Several times pressure waves brushed him, tugged at his flight path, made him stagger — but he recovered each time at the last moment.

  “I won’t be able to keep this up much longer…”

  He forced himself to remain calm.

  “At least its movements are so headless that I can read them. Wild animals without control are still the most predictable.”

  Behind him another tree trunk exploded under a misdirected bite.

  Ahead of them, at some distance, a roughly twelve-meter-high rock rose upward. It tapered to a sharp point at the top, almost like a massive needle, and at its base it had barely more than four meters in diameter. Not a solid mountain — rather a stone thorn thrust from the ground.

  Iris registered it immediately.

  The angles.

  The height.

  The distance.

  An idea formed.

  In a single instant he analyzed the flight path, the speed of the cave salamander, the remaining distance to the tip.

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  “Seventy-six percent,” he muttered. “More than manageable.”

  He accelerated.

  The wind tore at him as he steered directly toward the stone thorn. Behind him the cave salamander crashed through the undergrowth, no more than two body lengths away. Its breath was hot, damp, bestial.

  Iris pulled steeply upward and shot up the rock face.

  The salamander followed.

  With brutal force it clawed into the stone, tore chunks free, scales scraping against rock. Its mass worked its way upward, faster than a creature of that size should.

  Higher.

  Still higher.

  Until they reached the peak.

  But Iris did not stop.

  He shot onward — directly into the sky.

  The cave salamander, blind with hunting instinct, launched into a leap.

  With a tremendous push of its hind legs it catapulted itself from the rock. Stone splintered under the force. Its massive body left the ground and shot forward.

  It flew.

  For a breath the monster hung weightless above the peak.

  Iris was only a hair’s breadth away. He could feel the warm, foul breath of the lizard, the displacement of air from its jaws, already opening.

  Then he turned.

  And screamed.

  The shrill, conical sound struck the lizard head-on. Its feelers twitched uncontrollably. Its skull vibrated under the frequency. Too shrill. Too high. Too penetrating.

  Unbearable.

  Its body twisted reflexively in mid-leap.

  And lost control.

  The tip of the rock shattered first beneath its weight — a crash, a splintering — but the core beneath remained standing. Sharp. Tapered.

  The rock had caught it from the side.

  The stone tip had not gone straight through its chest, but had bored diagonally beneath the left shoulder through its flank. A fragment of its jagged end protruded from the opposite side of its flesh, blood-smeared and unnaturally still.

  It was lodged deep inside it, angled slightly upward, like a stone barb holding it fast.

  Its massive body hung skewered upon it.

  Its upper torso had tipped forward, its head low, its jaws open, blood and saliva dripping from them. Its hind legs no longer touched the ground; they kicked in the air, searching for support.

  A dull, wet impact.

  It hung.

  Impalement.

  Its enormous body writhed wildly, tearing against the stone tip, forelegs and hind legs thrashing frantically through the air. Its scream tore through the forest. Blood ran down the rock.

  It tried to free itself.

  But every movement drove the tip deeper.

  And its regeneration…

  It worked.

  But it could not close.

  The stone blocked the tissue, held the wound open, prevented the edges from drawing together.

  For the first time, its body was trapped.

  The more violently it struggled, the further its own body worked itself down over the stone tip.

  At first only a jerk.

  Then another slip.

  With every desperate kick it dragged itself further downward. The rough rock structure acted like a barb in its flesh. Every muscle spasm, every panicked attempt to push itself free, made it sink another piece lower.

  A cruel cycle.

  Where at the beginning only about forty centimeters of the tip had protruded from its flank, now more than a meter of jagged stone extended from its body. Blood ran in thick streams along the protruding rock, dripping heavily downward.

  Its body tensed unnaturally.

  It looked as if it might tear apart in the middle at any moment. The stone pressed against its inner structures, forced muscles and organs apart. Again and again it slipped a little deeper.

  It was long no longer serpent-shaped.

  At the point of impalement its body had grotesquely swollen. The tissue was stretched, distended, nearly inflated and twice as wide as before. The regeneration worked at full speed — but it did not close; it congested. Flesh tried to form around the rock, bulged outward, was torn open again.

  A bestial roar burst from it.

  The pressure waves made dust rain from the rock walls. Birds burst panic-stricken from the treetops. Even the air seemed to tremble.

  Its feelers lashed uncontrollably through the air, searching for hold, orientation, anything. Its gills snapped frantically, wide open, trembling, as if trying to force oxygen where none helped.

  Even its color receptors failed.

  Its body flickered.

  Dark gray —

  violet —

  black —

  for a moment nearly transparent.

  But even in the transparent state the agony was visible. The inner structure showed beneath the surface, distorted, under strain. One could see the stone boring through it. One could see the pulsing of its overwhelmed tissue. And hear it.

  Its roaring, its screeching, the metallic scraping of claws on stone.

  Blood sprayed with every movement in short, uncontrolled bursts. It spread in dark arcs through the air, finally gathering at the base of the rock and running down the mountain in red trails.

  It hung there.

  Trapped between regeneration and destruction.

  And the harder it fought, the closer it brought itself to the point where its own body would tear it apart.

  Iris still hovered above the rock, motionless in the air, observing the cruel spectacle beneath him. Flying away seemed like a poor option. Too great was the danger that the cave salamander, in the event of a sudden breakout, would find its way back to the dwelling cave — there, where Seraphis was likely desperately trying to keep Ursula alive.

  “Okay… this is going significantly better than I had hoped. That should give me enough time—”

  He paused.

  “I’d better hold the edge. Before I summon something.”

  Below him the sound of overstretched skin grew louder.

  A repulsive cracking followed — bones giving way under unnatural pressure. The tearing of flesh mixed with it. Wet. Heavy. Tough.

  With every panicked twitch the salamander sank further.

  Ever deeper.

  By now more than one and a half meters of the stone tip protruded from its body. The rock was dark with blood, and with every movement it visibly vibrated inside it.

  The lizard’s colors flickered faster.

  Dark gray. Violet. Black. Transparent. Black again.

  Faster and faster.

  Its body stretched in a hideous manner. The swollen tissue at the point of impalement pulsed beneath the surface. Its regeneration worked like mad, trying to close, to repair, to stabilize — but the stone blocked everything. The energy congested. Flesh built pressure without escape.

  The tension reached its maximum.

  A deep, unnatural tone vibrated through its body — as if something inside it were bursting.

  Then—

  BOOOOOOOM.

  A detonating blast tore through the forest.

  Not a simple rupture.

  An explosion of flesh, blood, and pressure.

  The salamander burst sideways under the tremendous internal tension. A shockwave swept through the treetops. Pieces of skin and bone shot through the air like projectiles. Blood sprayed apart in fountains meters high.

  A wet, brutal splashing followed as the two halves of its body struck the ground — the front part on one side of the mountain, the rear on the other. Entrails and torn organs flew in heavy, smacking arcs through the air, striking rock, trees, earth.

  The ground turned red.

  The rock steamed.

  The blast was so violent that even Darek — far away at the other end of the forest — instinctively spun around. Despite the connection to Iris, the shock hit him like a blow to the chest. He almost stumbled mid-sprint.

  “Woow… not bad, Iris,” he muttered breathlessly as he continued running. You have to give him that… he impresses me every single time.

  Iris evaded the falling chunks of organs with two or three precise movements through the air. A slimy piece sailed close past him. Another shattered beneath him on the rock.

  Under normal circumstances his eye might have shown a broad, self-satisfied gleam.

  But he was not naive.

  Not foolish.

  He had known from the beginning that even a torment like this would not kill the cave salamander permanently.

  Below him muscle remnants still twitched. Blood gathered. Tissue had already begun to react again.

  Above him the sun darkened further. The moon had now swallowed nearly half of it. The light became pale, gray, as if the forest were slowly being washed out.

  Iris lifted his gaze to the sky.

  At the current pace the solar eclipse would be complete in approximately eight to twelve minutes.

  Darek and Aria should reach the swamp in five minutes.

  He was well on schedule.

  Slowly he turned away from the battlefield.

  “Time to get moving.”

  But deep inside he knew—

  This was far from over.