First Lord's Fury (Codex Alera 6)

The Queen's voice buzzed with steely undertones. "Yes."

"Grampa Doroga," Tavi mused. "I am not your father. It means more than blood."

"You are close," the Queen said, her words clipped and sharp. "For all practical purposes, it is a fact."

The stone beneath Tavi's feet quivered. He focused some of his attention downward. Though Garados was deadly dangerous, it was not swift. He should be able to leap clear if he was paying attention.

"Not quite," Tavi said. "If I were your father, you'd be the heir to the Realm."

"I am already the heir of this Realm, and after that, this world," came her answer, from the mist. "All that is left is for you" - her voice suddenly changed, coming from immediately behind him - "is to die."

He spun and barely got his sword up in time. Steel rang on steel, and again sparks bellowed forth in a thundercloud of their own, illuminating the mist around them with flashes of red, blue, and green light.

Her speed was incredible. Even without furycrafting, the vord Queen moved with blinding swiftness. Tavi had drawn upon all the windcraft he could to expand his perceptions, and it was barely enough to allow him to defend himself. Similarly, her strength was unbelievable, easily greater than a large Cane's, and Tavi found himself forced to draw strength from the earth simply in order to meet her attacks with enough power to stop them.

In retrospect, he thought, it probably wasn't one of his most insightful tactical decisions.

Within seconds of Tavi's drawing upon the earth for strength, the mountain was wrenched with a spectacular thundercrack of sound, so loud that it knocked both Tavi and the vord from their feet. In front of Tavi's widening eyes, the peak of the mountain abruptly split, a sudden crack running from the summit down to Tavi and beyond him. Within a heartbeat, the crack had widened, with rock and stone grinding and screaming. Tavi rolled rapidly to one side, an instant before the crack - well on its way to becoming a crevasse - swallowed him whole.

The mountain groaned with an enormous basso voice, and rocks began to fall around them. Most of the falling material consisted of pebbles, but among many of those were other stones, more than large enough to kill a man if they fell on him. Tavi regained his feet and dodged a falling rock. From the corner of his eye, he saw the vord Queen simply bat a stone the size of an ale keg away with her free hand.

A red glow suddenly suffused the walls of the crevasse, the light welling up from within, and Tavi sucked in a sharp breath of surprise. He had not realized that Garados was a fire-mountain.

A medium-sized stone clipped his ribs, and though the armor absorbed the blow, he staggered and barely got out of the way of the next bounding stone. On the other side of the crevasse, the vord Queen turned toward him and crouched to leap, her sword held up and ready to strike - when a fountain of liquid fire shot forth from the crevasse, sending molten stone high into the air.

Tavi turned from that at once, bounded into the air downslope as strongly as he could, called up a windstream...

... and realized, an instant too late, that he was covered in a layer of dirt and dust.

The wind furies he managed to summon were far from strong enough to lift him into the air, and after an extra second or so of hanging at the apogee of his jump, he was on his way back to the ground - to the steeply inclined, stony ground of Garados. His heart leapt into his throat. If he should lose his balance, there was virtually nothing to stop him from bouncing all the way to the base of the mountain, while falling boulders and rocky outcroppings conspired with gravity to grind him to paste.

He planted his right boot on a stable bit of rock and pushed himself up into another leap, frantically calling the wind - not to bear him aloft this time but merely to nudge him a foot or so to one side, so that his left boot could land on the next piece of stable shelf he spotted. There was no time to think, only to react, and so Tavi found himself running at full speed down the precipitous slopes of the mountain, bounding like a mountain goat and accelerating with a rather alarming ease. It wasn't until a few seconds later that he realized that he was actually beginning to outrun some of the falling stones, and he rather felt that the entire situation was shaping up to be quite exciting all the way up to an abrupt, ugly sort of end.

Behind him, there was a sound. A sound so deep and enormous that he did not hear it so much as feel it shaking his teeth. It rose and rose until it topped out in a gargantuan, basso brass horn sound, and Tavi risked a glance over his shoulder to see what had made the noise.

It was Garados.

The mountain's entire top had lifted, rocks melting and collapsing and rearranging into the features of an enormous and ugly humanlike face. Burning red pits substituted for eyes, and its mouth was a great, gaping maw without visible lips or teeth. The entire mountain shook, and Garados twisted left and right, its vast, broad shoulders tearing free of the mountainside. Tavi's brain seemed to stutter and trip as he saw the great fury in motion. He simply could not believe he was looking at something so unthinkably large.

He barely turned back around in time to make his next step. A falling stone the size of his fist hammered his calf, and he cried out in pain - and kept bounding, guiding his leaps with his weakened windcrafting.

Garados lifted one leg clear of the mountain, and Tavi had to scramble to leap off what looked like a kneecap the size of a steadholt. A few steps later, a broad foot rose out of the mountain and came sweeping down toward Tavi as if he had been an annoyance, an insect to be smashed and never considered again.

Tavi bounded frantically down the slope, trying to get out from under the enormous foot, and suddenly felt that he had an entirely new appreciation of the word hubris. He heard someone laughing hysterically as a vast shadow fell over him, and recognized that the voice was his own and that he had an impossible half mile of ground to cover, at least, to be clear of the enormous fury's descending power.

He realized with a cool and practical certainty that he simply wasn't moving fast enough. There was no way he was going to get clear in time.

Ehren stood up slowly from his seat beside Count Calderon on the citadel's bench at Garrison. He watched as a mountain - as the mountain - rose from its resting place in the form of man, twice as tall as the mountain itself had been, unthinkably huge. Sheer distance clouded its features into haze, though Ehren could see that it was built heavily, disproportionately, a being of ugliness and spite and horrible power.

"Bloody crows," Ehren breathed, as he watched that far-distant form move, raising a foot as a man might to crush an insect. "What is that?"