Sons of a Soul Split: Chapter Sixteen

By: Brianna Lee Hubler

Copyright © 2025 Brianna Lee Hubler. All rights reserved.

All Fire and Fury

__________Melihrene galloped eastward, beyond the scanty evergreen wood, into a lush, tropical greenwood. The threshold between these woodlands perpetuated a foreshadowing but invisible fog; felt but unseen. With each eastward hoof stamp, the crisp and cool air of the early morning heated incrementally, like the stagnant water in a soup pot. The environment grew mysteriously hot and humid. The horse’s mane and tail frizzed. Uuinora’s dampened clothes clung to her skin. The leather patches of her armor sweltered. These would have sunburned her bluish skin, if there had not been a cotton suit between her armor and her Elvish hide.

__________ “Sparklers’ country,” Uuinora cursed.

__________She undressed her top layers. Beneath the patches of leather armor and her cotton shirt, she wore only a strip of thin, soft fabric. The fabric strip was as wide as a scarf and as long as a sash. Positioned under her armpits, it striped across her upper back and wrapped around her chest. It crossed itself at her sternum and was tied off at the back of her neck. It kept her bodice in place whenever she drew back upon her bowstring. Here, in this humid, jungle clime, where she stalked her target, it allowed her skin to breathe as much as it allowed her arms to move.

__________Beads of sweat streamed down from the makeshift, fabric cover. They poured over Uuinora’s prominent abs and dribbled onto her belt. Uuinora rolled her crimson eyes, as she dabbed her belly and forehead with a raggedy handkerchief. Then her gaze dipped to her lap.

__________My thighs will be red and raw with road rash, if I ditch my trousers too, she decided.

__________Next, she wound her hair around her fist and clipped it up in a bun. For once, she nearly looked civil, like a farmer’s wife in summertime; dressed down to wash clothes and scrub dishes in the creek. For the irony, she smiled wickedly and fantasized of her pending kill.

__________The wannabe housewife’s shadow turns and smothers its caster, snuffs out that brilliant flame burning from a mock-angel’s sword, and finally, darkness quiets the countryside, she mused.

__________Meanwhile, Melihrene panted and snorted. The scent of his mate, Ashtohka, tickled his nose and sped his pulse when he galloped within range of her. His eyes locked onto the mare, while the gaze of the Dark-elf huntress targeted the mare’s riders.

__________Uuinora snarled, as she drew out her longbow. She had expected one but there were two. She fit two arrows to her bowstring. She aimed for both riders, drew back her bowstring, and loosed her arrows expertly. Since an Inshaudia rarely misses, the Dark-elf woman celebrated her victory before it was sure.

__________She hollered, “Two firebirds with a double-shot!”

__________Her arrows propelled through the foliage. Their headwinds shook the jungle’s ensemble of vibrant, green leaves, beefy, hanging vines, and flimsy, dangling mosses. Colorful birds cawed capriciously. They swooped upward from their perches and scattered above the jungle’s banana-leaf canopies. The whiplashing of foliage, and the avian uproar, garbled Uuinora’s triumphant shout. These also detracted from the whizzing of her flighted arrows. This paradox (the assassin’s noisy silencer for primitive missiles) would have forwarded her strike to its fatal fulfillment, if the keen ears of the famous, Flame-elf scout, Ausehriel, were any less attuned to the whistling winds.

__________“Be wary,” he warned, “for the wind speaks!”

__________Ausehriel body-slammed his sister, Nica. He shielded her with his body, as he yanked her off her horse, and they crashed into the groundcover together. Uuinora’s twin arrows passed over their heads, but Nica’s frightened horse buckled when her riders jettisoned. The reins snapped and whipped the mare’s neck and shoulders. The saddle and its saddlebags lurched sideways and unbalanced her stride. Her spindly racing legs stumbled under the bloated weight of her barrel-shaped belly, as it was heaved sideways, along with the belt around her middle. The jerking of the thick waistbelt of the heavy saddle stressed and snapped the metal prong of its buckle. The buckle broke, and the belt loosened, as the mare tumbled. Ashtohka rolled atop Ausehriel’s back, before she dropped her saddle, righted her legs, and fled.

__________Melihrene whinnied and bucked. He threw Uuinora and charged after his mate.

__________Nettle and thorns striped and stung Uuinora’s exposed skin, with the mindless ferocity of a drifting jellyfish’s dangling tentacles. Dins rattled against her skull, like cacao beans inside a maraca. Stubbornly, Uuinora disowned these pangs and peeled herself off the ground.

__________Meanwhile, Nica heard a series of unsettling crunches and cracks spurt from the body that lay atop hers. “Eternals, no!” she screamed. “He’s my brother!”

__________“Isn’t that sweet,” Uuinora taunted. “Like mother like son.”

__________Those words stilled and silenced the jungle, but only for Nica’s eyes and ears.

__________“Grant me the amber touch of burning coals,” she compelled. Her internal flame rocketed flares through her bloodstream. Through the loving arms that once held her sons near to her heart, she shot a portion of the warmth of her soul to her palms.

__________With her palms aglow, Nica tore the laces of her brother’s tunic asunder, lifted his undershirt, and pressed her palms to his bare chest. The warm compress quickened Ausehriel’s dying pulse and rekindled his shrinking internal flame, but it was no more effective than the snug, linen bandages that sometimes kept the impaled from bleeding out. It was fielder first aid from one firebird to another, which could neither mend Ausehriel’s fractured frame nor numb the agonizing pain that riddled it.

__________Uuinora fitted another arrow to her bowstring.

__________“Play possum,” Nica whispered. “I’ll send for a doctor.”

__________Ausehriel’s voice was diminishing. “Soar for your sons,” he pled. “Don’t look down.”

__________Meanwhile, Uuinora aimed and pulled back her bowstring. She loosed her arrow seconds too early, as Nica wrapped her arms around Ausehriel and rolled him onto his back. The arrow plunged into the groundcover next to the pair of firebirds.

__________Nica shook her head. Not while a phoenix lay prone. Not before I build your nest.

__________Uuinora squinted, pursed her bluish lips, and readied another arrow.

__________Nica pulled the near-miss arrow free from the foliage. While its shaft and feathertails burned, its arrowhead ignited. The poisoned arrowhead had been shaped with the cyanide-laced chitin of a lapdog-sized millipede. Exposed to Nica’s enchanted palms, it burst aflame and crackled angrily, like a stoked campfire. With the arrowhead blazing through the gaps between her fingers, the Flame-elf heroine spun and faced the cocky Dark-elf assassin head-on. Then, as if the blazing arrowhead were a misshapen shuriken, Nica pitched it and fled. It clumsily spiraled through the air; to pierce its target’s heart—and bleed the shadows from it—or to strike the brush—as a misplaced match—and burn this swatch of jungle to ashes.

* * *

__________More precisely than Uuinora’s arrows jetted from her bow and burrowed inside hearts, Vujeera’s warning loosed from his lips and tunneled through Fruyr’s earholes to his thoughts. The concentrated vampire’s blood that Fruyr drank streamed down his throat and seeped into his bloodstream. Like heavy rainfall, vampiric vigor poured into the miasma wellspring within Fruyr’s heart. It exceeded the capacity of that reservoir and overflowed it. Fruyr’s veins puffed. His fingers and toes tingled.

__________What have I done? Fruyr wondered. What should I do?

__________He twirled his fingers and tapped his toes. His internal flame jived. Jazzed like an avid coffee drinker, Fruyr ambled shakily. His heart pounded violently against his chest, like a caged animal bashing the bars of its prison. His thoughts were flooded with the urgency to act; to cast spells and alleviate the intensity of the power coursing through his veins.

__________Vujeera offered a wicked grin that pulled his lips back and flashed his fangs.

__________“I’m curious,” he taunted. “How quickly will you give in?”

__________“I won’t,” Fruyr resolved, but he was as edgy as a hot kettle before it whistled.

__________“Then your blazing eyes will burst your brain like a balloon,” Vujeera mocked.

__________Fruyr’s heated aura radiated with a startling intensity. Vujeera’s frigid, tomb-like bedroom suddenly sweltered like the interior of a furnace. The compounded flames within Fruyr’s honey-yellow irises blazed as luminously as liquid gold.

__________Fruyr rubbed his eyes, because their sockets stung. His fists leaked jets of two-inch flames, as if he clutched a golf-ball-sized star in each hand. Those tiny flares burrowed into his flesh, like earthworms in potting soil. Fruyr’s skull ached beneath his fire-resistant skin.

__________“The Fire-bound don’t burn,” Fruyr rationalized, but the strength of his voice waned. He second-guessed the role of his internal flame. He doubted whether it served him, and he feared that he served it. Was the sigil of the Eternal Flame that emblazoned his heart a badge or a brand? Were Faomekatheermor their elemental deity’s honorary soldiers or its meaty cattle?

__________Warm bodies raised for slaughter, Fruyr commiserated. Men and bulls.

__________“Exactly,” Vujeera interjected. “Your body recycles the flames that will roast it.”

__________Fruyr furrowed his brow. Like a cloud of smoke coughed from the wildfire within, his headache blinded his mind’s eye. He was unsure whether the vampire affirmed his ardent avowal or his silent misgivings. Either was irksome and uninvited.

__________“Want a mouth full of ashes for your unruly tongue, Snake?” Fruyr threatened.

__________Vujeera waved his hand dismissively. “An empty threat,” he yawned. “It grows back.”

__________“You swigged a pint of my magicked blood to bolster your regen’,” Fruyr scoffed.

__________“You can’t strike my nerves as matches, Sparkler,” Vujeera goaded. “What’s your angle?”

__________“I downed a shot of yours for mine,” Fruyr claimed. “Now, we’re even.”

__________Vujeera laughed. “Never were; never are,” he condescended. “You’re nothing more than a mosquito restrained under my thumb, who can’t pry your straw-shaped mouth from my carnal chalice, now that you’ve tasted the fine wine of the Bloodfeast.”

__________Like a boxer, Fruyr ducked his head, tucked his elbows, and raised his fists. His fiery gaze targeted Vujeera. “I sought you out to settle the score,” he threatened. “Not to join you.”

__________Without turning his back or glancing over his shoulder, Vujeera clutched the rim of his alchemy table and hoisted himself atop it. He crossed his legs, stabbed a knee with his elbow, and rested his chin upon the heel of his palm.  His crimson eyes targeted Fruyr, with a stillness akin to the lidless gaze of a local owl, who spied a lost mouse.

__________“Haven’t you ever heard the phrase: ‘If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen?’” Vujeera teased.

__________“The same goes for you,” Fruyr countered. The flares between his furled fingers combusted. The flames engulfed his fists, as if they were the oil-soaked rags wrapped around the heads of torches. “But there isn’t a cookfire that I can’t withstand.”

__________“My vampiric blood is like stagnant water,” Vujeera dismissed. “It stomachs floods of foreign miasma, so the wellspring within never runs dry.”

__________“What are you getting at?” Fruyr probed, but his hair combusted as his fists, and the pressure of the infernal heat pounding against his skull dizzied him.

__________Atop the desk, the fingers of Vujeera’s unoccupied hand crept like the legs of a spider, as they searched for his scalpel. “My heart can take the heat,” he claimed, “but yours is an all-consuming fire that will feast until you burst.”

__________“You’re only a leech in that pond of yours,” Fruyr insulted. “Don’t pose as the mythic Jörmungandr!”

__________Vujeera’s eyes widened, and the corners of his lips twitched, as if he were about to smile.

__________ “That might be a trait we have in common,” he jeered.

__________The fiery elf-child armed his flaming fists. He struck the smug vampire across the jawline, but then his vision inexplicably blurred. Fruyr stumbled and fell against Vujeera. He was conscious but dazed. His body was as feverish as a fireplace. His senses were diluted, and his limbs were as limp as a straw doll tossed atop a burning log.

__________“You should have stayed out of my kitchen, Hotshot,” Vujeera stoked.

__________First, the young vampire wrapped an arm around Fruyr’s back and caught the Flame-elf boy as he fell. Vujeera tightened a vampiric hand around Fruyr’s shoulder, like the buckle of a cross-belt. His other hand gripped his scalpel and stabbed the elf-child in the gut. Next, Vujeera hoicked the thin blade out, as ruthlessly as he thrust it into Fruyr’s hide. Then, he yanked Fruyr’s shoulder backwards and tossed the bleeding elf-child onto the floor. Finally, he raised the flat of the blade to his lips and licked it clean of Fruyr’s blood, as avariciously as any human child licks the brownie batter from a rubber spatula.

__________Crimson eyes aglow from the tantalizing treat, Vujeera’s chilling gaze meandered to the standing mirror that rested near his wardrobe. He studied his reflection.

__________Where Fruyr punched him, his jaw was misaligned, his pale skin was mottled and charred, and he sported the flames that earlier jetted from his opponent’s fists. Vujeera reached behind himself, grabbed a jar of clean water from his alchemical supplies, and dumped it over his head. Once the flames extinguished, he scratched and rubbed his cheek to reopen his cauterized wounds. He watched, as his vampiric blood realigned his jaw and reconstructed his face.

__________Meanwhile, Aerkidic landed on Fruyr, folded her wings, and puffed out her feathers. Nestled atop his velvet tunic, she craned her neck, dipped her head, and pointed her almond-shaped beak at the hole in his gut. As smooth as polished amber, and as bright as hot steel, a tiny hotspot plugged the hole and capped the bleeding. Alarmed, Aerkidic lifted her head, chirped, and took flight. She perched on Vujeera’s shoulder and pecked his ear.

__________Vujeera flicked her beak. “Stop that!” he demanded. “What do you want?”

__________In the standing mirror, Vujeera’s reflection distorted, until the more daunting vestige of the Lord of the Undead replaced it. Like the warm, clear gelatin harvested from boiled bones, the solid, glass sheet of the mirror melted as goop, but it clung to its frame and marginally retained its shape when Draiden passed through it. Once the Lord of the Undead stepped onto the floor of Vujeera’s bedroom, the glass resolidified.

__________Draiden crossed his arms and puffed out his chest, but his oversized crown slanted over his ear. He rolled his charcoal eyes, adjusted his crown, and fixed his stance. “I wanted you to play nice with the little, lost puppy,” Draiden responded, “but you’ve only taught him to play possum.”

__________Vujeera shrugged and gestured to the desk underneath him. “We were playing alchemists before he decided to play cops versus robbers,” he defended, “but then he couldn’t decide whose side he was on, or what to do with the power he stole.”

__________“On the surface, neither side ever does,” Draiden chided, as he marched over to Fruyr.

__________Draiden spitefully swung his foot into Fruyr’s backside. The tips of his toes struck where Uuinora’s axe-swing marked the recklessly stubborn elf-child, until he swallowed that shot of concentrated vampiric blood that recently sealed and smoothed his injured flesh. The leftover stitches from Draiden’s handy needlework snapped, like dry roots.

__________“Mmph,” Fruyr winced and groaned.

__________“Get up, Lazybones!” Draiden insulted. “You owe me a dogfight.”

__________“He’s wrecked,” Vujeera sneered. “Frozen at the unguarded fork between bloodthirsty and berserker.”

__________“Really?” Draiden humored. “Isn’t the housefire still burning?” 

__________“Left for leechdom. Right for raving. Backwards for backstabbing,” Fruyr babbled riotously. He clutched his stomach, sat up on his knees, and peeled his feverish eyes open. Since the supercharged flames in his irises blurred his vision, his undisturbed ears echolocated the targets of his infernal gaze. He glowered at his naysayers and hissed through another pained breath: “Unpromising paths.”

__________Draiden gawked and cleared his throat to hold back a chuckle. “Travesties wherever the pendulum swings or the foot falls!” he extoled. “Since when does a gut punch masquerade as a backstab?

__________“I bushwacked him when his bravado rusted his iron will,” Vujeera gloated.

__________Draiden scowled. He lifted his oversized crown off his head, slipped his short arm through its open center, and hung the crown over his shoulder.

__________“So,” he complained, “the dice were loaded, and the deck was stacked?”

__________“What if they were?” Vujeera challenged. “All is fair in love and war, isn’t it?”

__________“I’ll even the odds in this game of cheats…”

__________“Another of your misplaced chivalries, Usurper?”

__________Draiden smirked. “The very first reenacted.”

__________While the young vampire spectated, the child-sized Lord of the Undead climbed into the preteen elf-child’s lap. Robustly, Draiden gripped Fruyr’s weary shoulders. Suddenly, a refreshing chill washed over Fruyr’s feverish frame, like a mouthful of iced water swallowed on a hot, summer day.

__________Kimio? Fruyr vainly hoped in his blindness and vertigo. Are you with me in this?

__________As if they were a pair of headbutting bucklings, Draiden bashed his forehead into Fruyr’s.

__________The thwack sobered Fruyr from his stupor. “Ouch!” he expressed. “What was that for?”

__________“Are you as deaf as a dalmatian?” Draiden provoked. “You owe me a dogfight!”

__________Vujeera laughed. “Kinder than you deserve!”

__________Draiden crawled off Fruyr’s lap and straightened. He offered Fruyr a hand up. The smelting-hot glow, which blurred Fruyr’s vision when it burned behind his pupils, dimmed within Fruyr’s irises and haloed Draiden’s wrists and forehead. The same glow vanished from the scalpel wound beneath his palm, along with the injury itself.

__________Fruyr apprehensively accepted Draiden’s firm handshake and rose to his feet.

__________“Kalinvaud isn’t a joke,” he affirmed, as he released Draiden’s hand. “I won’t hold back.”

__________Draiden smirked and parried: “As a drifting moon once taunted a roaming star when they competed to brighten the unlit heavens.”

__________Vujeera shook his head, jumped down from his desk, and whistled.

__________The shrimp concocted every slipup, the vampire acknowledged. Baited every move.

__________As the volcanic heat pounding against Fruyr’s skull receded from the forefront of his thoughts, his mind’s eye reopened. The lifeblood link between Fruyr and Vujeera had been reinforced when he tasted Vujeera’s blood in kind, even though all the vampiric venom was distilled from the sample he drank. Since Fruyr’s thoughts were clearer now, he sensed the mental and physical presence of the Sireling; less like a ghost subtly haunting him and more like a python slithering up his spine.

__________Whose moves? Fruyr questioned.

__________Yours, mine, and ours, Vujeera listed.

__________How? Fruyr objected. We’re not puppets.

__________Everything we’ve done to ‘settle the score’ has levelled his playing field.

__________With a high-pitched cackle, as crisp and eerie as a crow’s, Draiden interrupted the silence that settled over the room while the two other boys conversed telepathically. Their eyes flocked to him when their ears perked at the noise. Their faces paled and their expressions blanked. They were downtrodden, as if their mothers eavesdropped and disapproved.

__________Does he hear us? they distressed.

__________“When the mongrel arrived, there were oodles of playtime left for us,” Draiden announced, “but now, our playdate is drawing to a close.”

__________“Because we lit an iron grenade that’s about to burst,” Vujeera accepted. “You better follow your master into the ring, Pup.”

__________Fruyr growled, “I’m not a dog, and I’m nobody’s slave!”

__________“You owe three life debts,” Draiden countered. “I’ve come to collect mine.”

__________Vujeera walked up to Fruyr and patted him on the back. “The booster shot won’t last much longer,” he coaxed. “Take him on while my blood’s got your back.”

__________Fruyr crossed his arms and tossed his nose into the cold air.

__________“I could take you both any day,” he bragged.

__________Draiden spun his finger beside his ear. “Who speaks of days in an eternal nightscape?” he mocked. “Most nights, it wouldn’t be a fair fight. I’d squash you.”

__________“Smacked down like the mosquito you’ve become!” Vujeera affirmed.

__________“Whose side are you on?” Fruyr complained.

__________Vujeera grinned and flashed his fangs. “Mine alone.”

__________Fruyr scoffed and rolled his eyes. He addressed Draiden, “Let’s get this over with.”

__________“Ready to let off some steam?” Draiden teased. “Follow me through the mirror.”

__________The Lord of the Undead plopped his oversized crown down upon his cherry-red locks, and then he spun to face the standing mirror. Without ducking his head, he skipped across the room, leapt through the mirror, and slid out the other side. Then, he waited impatiently, as his taller opponent stumbled through the enchanted passageway. The glass sheet resolidified once Fruyr passed through.

__________But in Vujeera’s bedroom, Aerkidic perched atop the frame of the standing mirror. Her sharp, black talons coiled along the rim. Their piercing tips jabbed the resolidified glass sheet below her. The punctures were no larger than pinholes, but thin, wiry cracks rained down from them (top to bottom), until the mirror shattered into thousands of shiny, transparent splinters.

__________Alarmed, Aerkidic squawked, puffed out her feathers, and lifted her wings. She uncoiled her talons and launched from her perch. In frantic figure eights, she looped in and out of the empty frame.

__________“Come down and calm down!” Vujeera directed. “If the punk’s torchflames are hotter than the pyromancer’s, there’s not a zombie from the palace to home that can infect him.”

__________Distressed, Aerkidic conducted another series of swoops and dips.

__________“Is this the airborne version of pacing the floor like a mother hen?” Vujeera enthused. “They’re flightless, you know?”

__________Aerkidic shrieked, like an unfriendly falcon. She dove her lowest and then swooped her highest. But she paused briefly at the midpoint, to present her fierce talons and her widespread wings, before the judgmental gaze of her young, vampiric critic.   

__________“Give it a rest,” Vujeera pressed, but the bird ignored him again.

__________So, Vujeera stepped back and sifted through his tools, until he located a thin, silver whistle meant for corralling unruly canines. Like his uncle’s clock, it was a token of his clan’s otherworld escapades. Long ago, its mesmerizing tune charmed anyone whose mystic core resonated with the spirit of a wolf.

__________After Lord Draiden cursed the clan to endure a millennium or more of undying shadows, the whistle was tossed into a crate of miscellaneous trinkets from the clan’s golden era, which were all together forgotten about. Later, Vujeera rediscovered the crate in the cellar. From there, he pocketed the whistle and concealed it amongst his treasures. He waited for a moment when its taming enchantment proved desirable. Aerkidic was not a canine, but she was a loyal, animal companion; not too different from a faithful hound.

__________When Vujeera blew the whistle, Aerkidic glided by the mirror frame, in a wide, deliberate arch, and perched upon his shoulder. As she nestled against his neck, he sat down on the edge of his bed. He stroked her bright-red feathers and surveyed his windowsill. From outside his room, the chilling breeze swept inside and ruffled the curtains of his open window. The Sireling predicted that at least one more interloper would visit his chamber before the Even’morn.

* * *

__________Eight heavy chains, sturdy enough to contain a berserk behemoth, squeezed shut the blackened-steel door to Lord Draiden’s underworld arena. The chains met in the center of the door at a tombstone-sized lock. Together, the chains and lock mimicked a mammoth, metal spider; a lifeless guardian of the sacred haven for the undead that lay beyond.

__________“Recoil,” the Lord of the Undead commanded, and the spider obeyed.

__________Behind the door, something clicked and something else whirled. The hooks that served as the metal spider’s claws slithered out from where they gripped the rims of the door. They retreated underneath the belly of the spider. That night, if someone had flipped the elaborate lock over, it would have appeared that the door’s guardian spider had been slain, even though it had not once breathed a living breath.

__________“Rise,” Draiden directed.

__________The massive door creaked, as the gap between it and the floor grew inch by inch. The more that the door slid upward into the slot above it, the more that it appeared as though the legless spider propelled upward along an unseen, spidersilk cord.

__________Another zombie? Fruyr panicked. Even though he had not carried it since the day before the housefire, he reached for his saber. His fingers swiped through the air, matching the sweep of a quickdraw and slash tactic.

__________Draiden snickered and pointed to the lock. “You’re jumpier than the spider,” he criticized, “because that one isn’t about to animate. I was talking to the door behind it.”

__________Fruyr growled. “Lay off me already!”

__________“Before or after I launch fireballs at your crabby face?” Draiden taunted.

__________Fruyr buried his fingers in his hair, as if he considered ripping it out in clumps. The Lord of the Undead was as short and as impish as a schoolboy. Everything was laughable to Draiden, because nothing was immune to his devilish wit. He was a profile puppeteer: sacrilegious, crass, and crafty. He tugged on Fruyr’s tightly wound nerves like marionette strings. The more the seemingly younger boy toyed with the preteen elf-child, the more that he wanted to grasp the wires, yank the prankster off his pedestal, and bury him in the refuse that he lorded over.

__________The Flame-elf boy glowered at the gap rising between the massive door and the palace floor. With his back straightened, and his head held high, the gap would be impassable, until it stretched another foot in height. To energized Fruyr, its pace was slower than the ebb and flow of the merciless tides. Like any Faomekatheer, he embodied Fierey (Fire): It was not a patient element, and he was not a patient child. It was equally a proud element. Fruyr would not bow his head before the enemy until the start of the match, not even to duck under the rising door and enter the arena.

__________“The posturing peacock holds us at an impasse,” Draiden insulted, flicking his wrist in a snappy arc from Fruyr to the gap. “All to flash his fantail feathers.”

__________With a cheeky grin, Fruyr patted Draiden’s red mane.

__________“Because,” he refuted, “I won’t lower myself to your level.”

__________Draiden’s eyes widened, and he burst into laughter. “That’s right, Stray!” he taunted. “Gnash your teeth before the King of the Discarded! I’ll throw you a bone.”

__________The Lord of the Undead cartwheeled through the gap. Once he entered the arena, the standing torches that ringed the battlefield spontaneously combusted along his whirling path of footsteps and handstands. The torches alit two-by-two (one to Draiden’s left and another to his right), until they joined at the center, where the ring’s blazing arches kissed, and the fingers of the topsy-turvy pyromancer crossed the threshold of the furthermost of four ornamental squares. These squares represented the four corners of a compass, but they did not point to any classic bearings, because the underworld spanned far beneath any semblance of magnetic north.

__________Fruyr’s spine tingled. Those aren’t paintings, are they?

__________“You can’t go lower than upside-down!” Draiden beckoned. “Step up to the plate, Stiff!”

__________Fruyr shrugged his shoulders and turned over his palms. The heat of his internal flame rose and flooded his heart. His broiling blood prickled against the lining of his veins. The flames behind his pupils stretched to fill his irises. Sparks danced between his fingertips.

__________Surging again, he realized. Faster and fiercer.

__________Earlier, when Fruyr imbibed that tincture of concentrated vampire’s blood, it boarded his Elvish bloodstream and hitchhiked to his fiery heart. There, it was like heavy rainfall that pelted a lake that was blocked by a dam. Since the dam cracked from the pressure of the added water weight, Draiden redirected some of the runoff, but the bloody rain continued to fall, and the perilous cracks in the stone grew longer, until these burst a bigger hole in the dam. This was akin to how Aerkidic’s talons shattered the face of the standing mirror. If Fruyr’s miasma reservoir was the flooded lake, then his body was the fractured dam, and its collapse was imminent.

__________This is a blood fever, Fruyr accepted. Treated with bloodletting or spellcasting.

__________He rubbed his temples, as the flames behind his pupils burned against his skull. As if he could offset the rising ache with a sinking gaze, he callously inspected his burning hands. When he trained at Faomekatheer bootcamp, his platoon commander marched him and his compatriots to a local sheep fold. The commander escorted a shepherdess outside the fold, and then penned his platoon of elf-children among the sheep. He masked them with handkerchiefs to muffle their chanting, confiscated their weapons and tools, and barricaded the only gateway in or out. He directed them to sheer the sheep without razors, scissors, or sheers.

__________Not permitted to interfere with war efforts, the shepherdess oversaw her flock from a nearby watchtower. She grew green around the gills and wet under the eyes, as the amateur recruits snapped their fingers and combusted her hand-raised livelihood. Cottony white, brown, and black fleeces—meant to be spun into thread and woven into sellable cloth—burned to grisly ashes that blew away with the wind.

__________Throughout the countryside, the ashen breeze spread the odor of singed wools and echoed the yelping bleats of startled, injured, and underdressed sheep. Most of the recruits were rookie casters, with limited self-control and unsteady aiming. They were unaccustomed to nonverbal spell triggers. Thus, while the troupe perfected their technique, the shepherdess’s flock suffered third-degree burns and a dozen gruesome fatalities.

__________Since elves rarely consume meat, the commander sold the charred mutton to a mortal butcher. While the Elvish troupe onlooked, the mortal butcher cleanly chopped the corpses. As a consolation prize, the commander compensated the shepherdess with the funds gleaned from the wholesale of her sacrificed sheep.

__________Back at basecamp, the shamefaced elf-children buried their honest tears behind their shaky hands, but pragmatic Fruyr neither cried nor shook nor cared, because war bred suffering, and they knowingly practiced the art. From the myths among mortals, the butcher had blabbed the tale of Aries to engage his Fire-bound onlookers. Aries was a fearless, golden ram, who spirited two endangered children away from their jealous step-mother. In the end, one of those children sacrificed his rescuer to the god who sent him. So, what if a dozen Ovis aries were slaughtered for the sake of a dozen or more elf-children in the grander scheme of survival? For Fruyr, there was no contest. He was too headstrong and too lighthearted for sorrowfulness. Later, he confessed his apathy to Kimio, because he selfishly preferred to allow his more compassionate twin to feel for them both.

__________Albeit unwillingly, Kimio had not tagged along when the fiendish hands of graverobbing phantoms dragged Fruyr underneath the mists of the Shadowlands. While Fruyr was alone in the Gravespawn Realm, he could not easily siphon his stresses to his favored sounding board, but he could siphon them through his burning hands and strike any target expertly. The rookie soldier honed that technique when his commander tested his stalwart mettle against a flaming flock of afflicted sheep. So, Fruyr smacked his hands to the flat of the blackened-steel door before him.

__________He whispered, “Melt.”

__________Like a dormant candlewick struck by an ember, the ebony door spontaneously heated and glowed. Fruyr jumped backward from the superheated door, for molten steel poured onto the floor; as if the slot above it was the gaping mouth of a silvery waterfall, or the dribbling maw of a metallic dragon. Once this metallic rain ceased, Fruyr raced forward and leapt across the molten puddles that it left behind. These cooled as shimmering knolls when Fruyr passed over them, and then his feet found their place within the square across from topsy-turvy Lord Draiden.

__________“Finally!” Draiden exclaimed, as he backflipped off his hands and onto his feet.

__________Fruyr rubbed his temples and grumbled, “Let’s get on with it.”

__________The rivals stepped out of their squares and walked along an arm of the ornamental compass, until they met—a few paces apart—at the star-shaped center of the compass rose. There, they bowed cordially to each other, and then rose together. Each boy fixed his eyes upon the other and stared unblinkingly at his opponent.

__________“State your terms,” Fruyr commanded in his native tongue.

__________“We duel as rivals,” Draiden replied in kind.

__________“Like salamanders?” Fruyr coaxed cleverly, referencing the sleek, medium-sized dragons.

__________“Yes, those,” Draiden replied, verifying his weapon of choice.

__________Fruyr tapped two fingers against his wrist. He asked, “Until when?”

__________Draiden pounded a fist against his chest twice, over his heart.

__________He answered, “Until the fire within smolders.”

__________“For what prize?” Fruyr investigated.

__________“Your passport and position here,” Draiden nominated.

  __________“My ticket out?” Fruyr wagered.

__________“Only if you can best me,” Draiden accepted.

__________Finally, the young duelists shook hands, because they had exchanged oaths and closed a deal between themselves. They parted and returned to their squares. If there had been velvet curtains behind the melted door, these would have been drawn back, as the battle commenced, but such aesthetics were absent here; upon this nigh colorless stage.

__________Draiden livened the mood of the room with a promise kept. With a silent spell, he raised his hand and formed a fiery orb in the crook of his palm. As if his hand quaked like that of an old sage, he shook it, and the orb grew, until it filled his hand and met his halfway furled fingertips. He pitched the orb at Fruyr’s face.

__________Fruyr sidestepped the blow, but as one of his feet slid over the edge of his square, the floor shook unexpectedly. The square that he stood upon raised a ruler’s length above the field, as a short pillar. When Fruyr’s foot tread the air instead of the floor nearby, he stumbled. Then, as he attempted to regain his footing, Draiden’s fiery orb swept past him, and the newly formed pillar dropped back down into the floor. Fruyr fell atop his square, gritted his teeth, and pressed his flaming fingertips to the floor. Like whirling inchworms, sparks leapt from Fruyr’s fingertips and tumbled towards Draiden.

__________The Lord of the Undead shielded his face with crossed arms but open palms. He peered through the triangle formed between his wrists, and then he swept his arms aside. Fruyr’s flaming, inchworm army parted, scattered, and cooled as cinders.

__________Fruyr pushed off the floor, jumped to his feet, and spun. Displaced cinders puffed like spores and swirled around Fruyr from his feet to his scalp.

__________“Rekindle as a firestorm,” he commanded.

__________The pillar rose beneath Fruyr again, as the swirling cloud of cinders ignited. Flames swirled around Fruyr, as a ribbon dancer’s streamers. To his invoking, these resembled dragon hatchlings. So, Fruyr reached through the gap between a pair of twirling flames and pointed to Draiden. With a sinister smile, he ordered, “Swarm him, bite him, and gnaw him.”

__________Draiden cackled, as the flames surged towards him. The pillar beneath Fruyr dropped again when his dragon hatchlings tackled his opponent. Fruyr flopped to the floor, while the square under Draiden’s feet rose as a second pillar.

__________“Isn’t too different from being lapped by a litter of puppies,” Draiden mocked.

__________As a pyromancer, Draiden was no more susceptible to burns than his Fire-bound rival. So, the child-sized Lord of the Undead pinched one of the flames, as if it had a scruff. He lifted it and stroked it. As his unburnable hand glided across it, it absorbed the other flames around it and morphed into an ethereal hound. He dropped the pup unceremoniously, and with the tips of his toes, he kicked it towards Fruyr.

__________He shouted, “Sic him!”

__________The pillar beneath Draiden’s feet dropped as soon as the back paws of his pet launched off the edge of his square. He crossed his arms and watched, as the ethereal hound sprinted and pounced. Fruyr rolled just out of reach of the beast’s claws. Its fiery paws landed upon the vacated square. Fruyr peeled himself off the floor, as beside him, his pillar rose two-feet higher. The ethereal hound sat upon Fruyr’s square and howled, displeased that it had missed its mark. Fruyr raced to another square, as the beast leapt down from the pillar and pursued him.

__________Once Fruyr stepped inside the next square, he spun around and faced the hound.

__________“Fetch these!” he yelled.

__________The flames leaking from Fruyr’s fingertips, streamed into his palms, tangled, and wove together, like yarn balls. As fast as he could make them, Fruyr hurdled these fireballs at Draiden’s infernal pet. For a few paces, the hound dodged them, but when a fireball neared its snout, the hound snapped at it. It bit down on the fireball, swallowed it, and suddenly grew larger. During the tussle, the square beneath Fruyr’s feet rose as a third pillar. Having suspected this, Fruyr had secured his stance and braced for the lift, but he had not anticipated Draiden’s hound’s latest trick.

__________It charged and bashed its head into the pillar, like an enraged bull. The pillar shook and skyrocketed from the impact. Fruyr dropped his ammunition when he steadied himself against another fall. His next two fireballs plopped onto the floor and splattered like raindrops. The ethereal hound pounced on these, lapped them up, and doubled in size. Then it jumped backward, as the pillar dropped into the floor.

__________“Flaming stilts keep me aloft!” Fruyr panicked.

__________Instead of straightening his legs, he pushed his hands through the gap between them, because he instinctively feared the bashing of his skull against the stone floor below. The stilts that should have jettisoned from the arches of his feet, shot from his palms, like spears. For a moment, these suspended him above the floor. The spear tips of his flaming stilts stabbed into the floor and scattered stone shards across the compass rose, but Fruyr’s legs were unsupported. He could not fling his feet over his head while his arms were between them. His legs dropped, and the muscles in his arms flopped from the strain.

__________I was right, Fruyr regretted. Luck ran out, just like magic. 

__________“Whoops!” Draiden expressed. “Better catch him.”

__________With one hand, he twirled his wrist, as if he turned a crank. With his other hand, he urged his infernal pet to leap forward. Fruyr’s flaming stilts detached from his palms and spun together, like the currents of a whirlpool. As Fruyr tumbled, the ethereal hound tackled the whirlpool and absorbed it.

__________Fruyr dropped onto the beast’s overgrown haunches. The flames of its body unraveled, like the wrapping of a mummy, as Fruyr’s Fire-bound skin absorbed them. The ethereal hound yowled, while Fruyr thrashed about in a cloud of disappearing flames that were once its belly. It died crying, but by its sacrifice, Fruyr gained precious seconds. He shielded his face with his arms, pulled his knees to his chest, and braced for a bone-shattering crash.

__________Boom! Fruyr’s shins rapped the stone floor, like a pair of butcher’s mallets. His tibias were the steel heads. The flesh over them was the meat tenderized against the block. His legs were smashed. The snapping and splintering of his bones echoed throughout the chamber, along with an involuntary, shrill and girly scream, which belittled his budding manhood. Shamefully, Fruyr lost his first Kalinvaud, shattered his Elvish pride, and absorbed the flaming body of his opponent’s hellhound into his overcharged heart.

__________The fire within Fruyr surged its fiercest. Although he was a Faomekatheer, bound forever to the Element of Fire, he feared his Bond consumed him. Would he perish from the inside out, scorched by the firestorm of his soul that ofttimes protected him while others burned?

__________He should have. He might have. He didn’t. Another bond tugged at his heartstrings and counteracted his demise: The lifeblood link between elf-twins. Elsewhere, in a medicinal ice bath, Fruyr’s Water-bound double soaked his body and chilled their shared blood. When he introduced Fruyr’s internal flame to its crystallized rival, Kimio dispelled Fruyr’s magicked heart of its elemental cancer. Fruyr lay upon the arena floor, numbed of the pain that wracked his body by a listless stupor. He slept without dreaming. He lived without knowing.

__________Across the room, the Lord of the Undead chaunted: “Tonight, the lion lay beside the lamb, until the Even’morn.”

__________Then, Draiden strode to Fruyr, kneeled beside him, and rolled him onto his side. He examined Fruyr’s smashed legs and gawked. The elf-child’s fair, tan skin was mottled with purplish bruises, red patches of bloody and swollen flesh, and white nibs of splintered bones that poked through wherever his skin split. Since Fruyr cushioned his head with his arms when he fell, his arms were as grossly battered as his legs. Without mystic medicine, Fruyr would neither stand his ground nor lift his saber as a duelist ever again.

__________“I wasn’t fast enough,” Draiden bemoaned. “Doctor Fozlin get in here!”

__________Within the bounds of the underworld realm that he ruled, Lord Draiden’s most trusted manservants, Doctor Fozlin and Nameless, were always around the corner. Even when he shook them off his tail for a spell, their shadows loomed nearby. They would sooner squeeze into a hidden nook together or contort themselves to fit inside a magician’s box than leave his grim highness unguarded. Their persistence was almost suffocating, as if the ageless lord were a jack-in-the-box. His henchmen smacked down the lid of that box whenever the clown popped out. Although he was as impish as he was snide, Lord Draiden did not like being demeaned as a clown. Nevertheless, the mishaps compounded between the ageless lord and his foreign guest employed Doctor Fozlin’s talents tonight.

__________The spindly doctor had pasty skin, sunken cheekbones, and overstretched pupils. His eyeballs were almost too large for his face. For too long, he stole cadavers from their graves and experimented in the darkness of overworld caves. Long ago, this warped his demeanor. His executioners discovered him in this deplorable condition and promptly drowned him for dissecting the dead. In undeath, the malnourished and skeletal semblance of the graverobbing, overworld cave-crawler persevered eternally.

__________At his lord’s beckoning, Doctor Fozlin scurried into the sanctum, lifting the skirt of his robe with one hand, and waving a stack of papers over his head with the other. “You must sign these, your lordship!” he insisted. “Our miasma-stream-drones are threatening to revolt, unless we decrease the mobility of the portal.”

__________Draiden cocked an eyebrow, frowned, and gestured to Fruyr.

__________“Later, Foz,” he curtailed. “My playmate’s pending paraplegia.”

__________Doctor Fozlin cleared his throat and stuffed the papers in a sleeve of his robe. He gripped his shoulder to prevent them from slipping out, as he bent to examine Fruyr. “Oh, it’s worse than I thought! Our allies will chop us for all that’s gone awry,” the doctor wailed. “Isn’t this the boy who belongs to Miss Uuinora? What’s happened to him?”

__________“I broke his limbs when I broke his fall,” Draiden admitted.

__________“A very serious slipup, indeed,” Doctor Fozlin agreed.

__________The doctor unbuttoned Fruyr’s tunic and lifted his undershirt to assess his vitals. Splattered across Fruyr’s torso, the doctor discovered a myriad of fresh burns and blisters and scalds. These spiraled outward from the boy’s chest. The doctor gasped, “How has the Fire-bound burned? His skin should have absorbed the heat upon contact.”

__________“It did,” Draiden argued. “He burned from the inside out.”

__________“He survived a fatal dose of Elemental Overflow?”

__________“Miraculously,” Draiden confirmed.

__________“The angels of Faedolzephus must have loaned him a feather.”

__________“True love, holy magic, miracles… None of that belongs here. It’s not in the recipe—”

__________“Justly, your lordship!” Fozlin interrupted. “Shall we send him home then?”

__________Draiden bit his lip and shook his head. “You don’t throw out the battered piñata, until it’s spilled all its goodies,” he compared, “so let’s not unclip this flamboyant mongrel’s leash too soon… Can you repair him?”

__________“Ideally, yes,” Fozlin admitted, “but then what?”

__________“He’ll be promoted from watchdog among vampires to underworld legate.”

__________Aghast, Fozlin squinted, and his chin quivered. “An outsider with an insider’s title?” he stammered. “Unnerving. Abnormal. Irregular, your lordship!”

__________“I promised him a place in my kingdom,” Draiden clarified, “and I intend to deliver.”

__________“My apologies, your lordship, but I fear you’re acting on a whim.”

__________“I wouldn’t be the Lord of the Undead, if I didn’t,” Draiden chuckled, and then stood. He straightened his posture, smoothed his regal robes, and fixed his lopsided crown. “Now, a good zombie would carry Legate Fruyr to his laboratory without another question proposed.”

__________“As you wish, your lordship,” Doctor Fozlin relented. Absent-mindedly, the doctor released his grip upon his shoulder and lifted the newly dubbed legate with both hands. His stash of important papers flew out of his sleeve and scattered everywhere. The undead doctor swore against his clumsiness, but then he gritted his teeth. He shuffled his gravely injured patient atop his forearms. He twisted his wrists and dipped to collect the dropped papers with his bony fingers.

__________“Leave it!” Draiden shooed. Irritated, he gathered the loose papers himself.

__________Fozlin scurried off with his patient, while Lord Draiden combed through sheets of poorly translated, legal jargon. Although it displeased his grim highness, the tedious, political affairs of his realm—the posturing, the petitions, and the paperwork—were as much his stately duties as unraveling its most stimulating mysteries. The sooner Draiden read the drones’ petition and signed his agreement or dissent; the sooner he could burst the piñata.