The inner courtyard burned high and hot, a huge teardrop of white flame like a candle, magnified. Men threw their hands before their eyes, unsuspecting villagers quailed and shrieked in fear at this new apocalypse, trees bent and flocks of birds took to the air in shock. The very ebb and flow of the world became disturbed as sulfrous energy rent the air.
And within the fire, Lindír screamed and burned. Even when she dared open her eyes against the onslaught, the glare rendered her half-blind. She was immersed in red and yellow brilliance, the ground fading away into nothing, and even the figure of the pyromancer appeared only as a vague shape in the distance, arms outstretched as she rose slowly off of the ground. Lindír’s scales steamed and cracked at the onslaught of pure, impossible heat; but they held, if only barely. Her wings were a different story, the thin membrane of skin burning away in torturous agony. The pale skin over her heart, unprotected by scales, turned immediately black, and stung for only a moment before all nerves were charred into nothing.
Lindír had to escape the impossible heat, or she would die. That sense of impending death was everywhere, in every fiber and every sinew, every organ and every nerve. Bravado failed, hatred failed, even fear was blasted away by the pyroclastic onslaught of burning soul-stuff. Her wings, though stripped of flight, still bore enough strength that she could plant them in the earth as she scrambled backward. Her hands flew to her chest, attempting to shield her weakness. Through the rush of flames came a sound like the wind across the tundra: the old pyromancer was screaming.
“Do you have any idea what you did to me!” she howled through the flames. “I made my womb into the alembic of your ascension, used my body as a vessel, and it destroyed me! And you still refused to be what you were meant to!”
Lindír retreated and retreated, but the heat only barely abated. The claws clasped to her chest sank into the skin as fat melted and boiled, her eyes stung with steam, heat exhaustion strangled her muscles. Instinct drove her backward, seeking any end to the flames; but there was none. With each passing second the furnace of her mother’s soul poured forth greater and greater heat. The very soil of the castle courtyard had gone black and turned to dust, reduced to its finest components. Were it not for Guthrún’s control, her flames could have reduced the walls of the castle to liquid slag, charred every human around into cinders from sheer radiance. But her attention was entirely focused on Lindír.
Indeed, the all-encompassing streaming of flame, the outward radial burst of elemental sulfrous fire from the very depths of the pyromancer’s soul, began to concentrate itself. The space behind her began to cool, the stream to divert. In great arcs, the flame turned upon Lindír with the cunning agility of a sea serpent.
It was then that Lindír found her back to be against the castle walls. This was a benefit as much as it was a curse; there would be no more running unless she could find the gate, but by pressing her flank against the stone she could earn some respite from the heat. This she did. Lindír turned, tucking one pain-wracked wing under her stomach, and lurched forward, seeking to remain out of the hottest part of the flames. It was a pathetic chase, Lindír circling the edge of the courtyard while her mother lazily turned the spotlight of most intense flame to match her. For moments at a time, the dragon would escape the nucleus of the flame, and feel relief to be merely burned as opposed to incinerated, only for the stream to catch up once again. And all the while, the pyromancer screamed.
“Nine months, Lindír! Nine months of caustic elixirs, of ritual burning, of yellow ichorous injections and purest alchemicals, and still you failed to come out right! I birthed you, you ruined my body and tormented my mind, and this is all you are? You were meant to be pure, to be sulfrous soul, not this base flesh!”
Exhaustion sank in, and pain became ever more distant. Lindír’s desperate flight slowed. Death closed around him, and once more he became eerily aware of the Under-Queen’s prophecy of damnation. The screams and the roar of the flames faded into the background, the feeling of hot ash beneath Lindír’s feet and the searing pain across his skin but unimportant details. He slowed, lacking now the strength to avoid even the hottest and most directed part of Guthrún’s infernal attack.
Lindír fell to the floor, his legs finally rendered useless by exhaustion physical, mental, and spiritual. He buried his chest in the ash and dust, shielding it from the worst of the fire, and tucked all six limbs close to his torso. Laying his chin down upon the earth, Lindír prepared to either outlast his mother, or else to be killed by her.
“I wanted my children to live forever, and this is how you repay me! You return here to gloat over the woman whose life you destroyed and you expect us to grovel at your feet! You should be the one groveling; grovel, grovel, Lindír, grovel, you wretch, and maybe I won’t take back the life that you stole from me!”
Guthrún screamed and screamed, her howling voice melding with the never-ending onslaught of flame to produce a single scream of a soul on fire. Die, die, die she told Lindír, die for his failures, die for his crimes against home and kindred. But Lindír could not die. He was not trying to avoid death, indeed had surrendered himself to it, but yet his flesh refused to give up and perish.
And if Lindír’s body would not die, then why not resist? He lacked the strength to move, and even if he had that strength there would be nowhere productive to use it; pressed to the earth, Lindír lay crouched in the safest place around. But he had one tool left, one foolish symbol of resistance. Lindír was as much a creature of fire as any pyromancer. Countless times had he loosed that flame, be it trapped within his cell, or against an unsuspecting village, or on Solseyja, and never once had it burned him. Why not, then, seek refuge from Guthrún’s flames in his own? It was a mad hope, a foolish one, one that any scholar worth his salt would have rejected at once. But Lindír was no scholar.
The fire in Lindír’s belly obeyed his command, and grew with the steady certainty of a forge under the care of the bellows. His throat seized, tongue spasmed, breath left him, and the fire spilled forth. At the first moment, the foolishness of his plan was revealed: the heat redoubled, and Lindír coiled and thrashed around himself in a new agony.
But then, imperceptibly, something began to change. The pain of the fire was still pain, but it was no longer Lindír’s enemy. No longer did she feel her flesh sear and shrivel. Instead, as her own orange flame slowly drowned out the yellow-white of her mother’s, Lindír found herself invigorated by the pain, strengthened by it. The steady exhalation of the fire in Lindír’s belly pushed back, meeting the pressure of Guthrún’s magic and then exceeding it. She could not breathe, nor barely see, but as the pain of the heat became a surprise ally, Lindír found it in herself to rise.
This scheme would not last forever. With a stream of fire issuing from her throat, Lindír could not breathe, and soon she would drown once more. It did not matter. She took a step toward her mother, then another. The two flames met in a vast wall, mingled and were driven aside, providing Lindír with enough of a shield to advance one painful step at a time. To no purpose, Lindír resisted, towards no goal, she walked. Her heart beat frantically and her throat screamed with a need for air, but neither would receive the respite they so desperately required, not so long as Guthrún stood. A fantasy played across Lindír’s mind that perhaps she could take her mother down with her, engulf them both in flames so intense that neither dragon nor pyromancer could live. It was an absurd fantasy, but it allowed Lindír a few more seconds of endurance before the flames, at last, died.
All was quiet and dark. Guthrún still hovered in the air at the center of the courtyard. She no longer glowed with the light of a roaring fire, but instead with the fading glimmer of embers. Then the truth was revealed: Guthrún the Maimed was not suspended at all. The Queen of Hvalheim fell to the burnt ground just as surely as anything else.
Lindír stood a while in silence, testing to see whether she would retain the strength to stand. Her eyes slowly reacclimatized to the dark of night, having become used to the blinding flame. The pain receded, but did not vanish; there was not a scale on Lindír’s body which had not been burned, and the damage to her wings and to the scaleless skin on her chest was incredible. Eventually, she staggered forward to investigate her mother, who was lying on her back with eyes to the stars.
Guthrún the Maimed was in far worse a state than Lindír. Her skin was charred black and grey, oozing pale liquid through long cracks in the dried-out tissue. But there was no pain in her expression, nor a recognition aimed at Lindír as he approached, even though her chest still rose and fell with labored breath. She had lit her soul on fire in order to burn Lindír out; and in so doing, she had burned her soul to inert ash.
Lindír tried to laugh, though with his burnt throat and exhausted lungs it came out closer to a hacking, choked cackle. He had outlasted her. And now he would be the death of her. Standing over his mother’s body, Lindír snapped down, aiming to sever the neck with one swift bite. He missed, and instead his jaws clamped down upon her chest, tearing huge chunks of burnt meat and shattering ribs as he retracted. He lunged again, tearing at her lungs and ripping out organs, devouring parts of her and spitting out others, until the whole of her chest cavity had been flayed open before him. She was dead, utterly dead. A small flare of triumph lit in Lindír’s chest; but he was far too exhausted to celebrate his victory.
There was something metallic embedded in her flesh. A small thing, smaller than her hand, with the shape of a broad arrowhead but made from a single flat plate of an unnameable golden alloy. Lindír picked it out of her with his lips, tossing it aside to be added to his hoard at a later date.
“Mother!”
Lindír raised his head, baring his teeth at the too-familiar voice. Ásgeir stood by the gate to the inner keep, his tall frame silhouetted against the candlelight from within. His sword was at his hip. Instead of a weapon, he held slung over his shoulder an unfamiliar device; it was made of the same strange golden alloy as his mask, but of an alien form, a long length of heavy chain, with a strange sundial-like object at one end and an arm-long stake at the other.
Lindír paid it no mind. “You’re next, brother,” he growled.
“You buzzard! You murderer!” Ásgeir roared.
And then Ásgeir, the Masked Prince, showed his true strength. For when in rage he struck his sibling, he did not strike with the strength of a man. No, he attacked with the speed of an arrow, the fury of a lightning bolt, and the power of an enraged god.
There was between them most of the breadth of the innermost courtyard. Ásgeir crossed it in three steps. Wherever his foot struck the earth, it kicked up a cloud of ash, cutting a deep divot in the burnt soil and sending him skipping forward with impossible speed. At the final step, while Lindír was still reeling at the sudden burst of speed, Ásgeir leapt, screaming madly as he swung his fist in a wild arc, hammering into the side of Lindír’s skull with enough force to send the dragon rolling across the ground.
Lindír heard a dull thud reverberating noiselessly through his skull and chest. For a moment, all his senses were befuddled, his brain knocked off-kilter. When consciousness returned, there was a new agony throbbing in the side of his skull. He could only barely hear from one side, and a thin trickle of warm fluid flowed from his ear-hole.
