Arc 6: Chapter 13: Wyrmblighted
A single bolt of lightning wreathed the sky, and in its flash the nightmare lifted its head high and revealed a forked tongue as though tasting the storm. Nearly two hundred knights and more than a thousand bystanders stared, trapped in a lasting moment of eerie stillness.
It had no wings, and eight limbs to support its ungainly mass. The first two looked disturbingly like human arms, twisted and stunted to curl over a bulging pot belly set below an emaciated chest. Two tails whipped the air, viscous strings of bloody membrane connecting them. A crown of sickly yellow horns weighed down its arrow-shaped head, no two grown in quite the same shape. Its scales grew in a patternless chaos, even bursting from one eye socket like a cancer. The remaining eye looked white and blind.
Indeed, it did not seem to notice the rest of us. The creature’s head swayed back and forth, almost drunkenly, an unbroken hiss escaping its parted jaws to produce a sound like building steam.
I spoke to the knight next to me, keeping my voice low. “Take some of these others with you and get the emperor and empress out of here. Start clearing the stands.”
The lordly knight remained still a moment. Though the bearded mask of his helmet hid his face, I sensed he was stunned.
“Do you hear me?” I said more urgently. “Start evacuating the Coloss, now.”
He startled. In that same moment, one of the knights lost control of his animal. It reared, screaming, and the wyrm’s head tilted towards it.
Everything went wrong. People up on the walls started shouting. So did the tourney knights. One baronet began to shout prayers at the creature like it were a demon he meant to banish. The dragon stilled its swaying, then in an almost ponderous movement its towering neck dropped like a felled tree.
But not because that pious knight’s invocation had hurt it. The neck fell, and crushed the praying man beneath it along with his chimera.
Its milky eye stared out at us, and the thing that had been Jocelyn chuckled.
Its six twisted legs began to work like an insect’s, propelling the creature’s mass forward at shocking speed. Dust and gravelly island rock erupted around it as it crawled on its belly, keeping its horned head low to the ground. Its maw opened, snapped shut over a fully armored cockatrice, dislodging its rider only to crush him underfoot. Blood splattered knights more than twenty feet away.