ZEPHYR: Reborn With A God System

CHAPTER 5 - THE NIGHTCLAW

I couldn't sleep after all I noticed I could do. After Sylene left me standing on the practice ground, I walked slowly back to my room, and I kept looking back over my shoulder the whole way, because I could not shake the feeling that my name was following me through the dark. The corridor was empty. The shadows were only shadows. But my heart did not believe my eyes, and it was still hammering when I reached my door, I went into my room, and locked it.

I sat on the edge of my bed for a long time, going over her words. Bad things happen to you when you wander, little brother. She had seen me. She must have seen the water, and she had said nothing to anyone. I turned every piece of it over and over, looking for the trap inside it, until sleep, which had been waiting for me all night, finally pulled me down.

When I opened my eyes, I was not in my room anymore which surprised me, I was lying on smooth black stone in a place I had never been before, a wide open space with no door and no windows, and the light was wrong. It did not come from the sun. It hung low in the air like a ceiling of red embers and glowing. I sat up slowly, and the floor was cold under my hands.

"What..." I turned around, and my mouth went dry. The room behind me was not a room. It was a prison without bars, walls of black stone stretching up and up into the burning red, and no break in them anywhere, no door or crack. I got to my feet, spinning slowly, and the space was so quiet I could hear my own pulse in my ears.

"Where am I?" I whispered. "HELLO? SOMEBODY?"

The voice in my head finally answered "You are inside the trial. Your death unlocked this system, and your secret proved you could keep it. But keeping a secret and carrying a power are not the same thing. To leave this place, you must defeat what waits here. Do this, and your strength will rise. Fail, and you will not leave."

"Defeat what?" I said looking around the empty black space, and for one whole breath I thought the place was empty, that it was a trick, a dream, a fever. Then the words appeared in front of my face, written in light.

[ QUEST: DEFEAT THE NIGHTCLAW ]

[ REWARD: GODSPARK RISES. A GIFT. ]

[ FAILURE: YOU WILL NOT LEAVE ]

"What's this?" I said, stepping back from the letters. "Defeat the what? I don't even have a weapon! You dragged me out of my own bed to fight something with my bare hands?"

"Good luck, little god."

The voice in my head said then I heard a low, heavy sound behind me, like something enormous dragging its body across stone, and the ground under my feet began to shake, I turned around and then I saw it, the Nightclaw was there.

It was half dragon, half bear, and both halves of it were wrong in the worst way. It had the shoulders and the black shagging fur of a bear grown to the size of a house, but dragon scales ran down its spine in a ridged crown, and its front legs ended in claws as long as my arm. Its head was a dragon's, flat and armored, with jaws that did not fully close because of the teeth, sharp and white and too many of them. Its eyes found me across the black stone, and they were more than animal eyes.

The NIGHTCLAW opened its jaws, and the roar shook ash from the burning sky.

There was no thinking after that, I found myself running. I threw myself sideways as its claws came down, and the black stone where I had been standing split open like bread. I scrambled up and ran, and behind me I heard it turning, then its tail came out of nowhere, a heavy scaled log that swept across the ground like a scythe, and I jumped over it, the wind of it alone knocked me tumbling across the stone. I got up with the taste of blood in my mouth and my ears ringing. It had not even gotten tried.

I could feel my legs growing heavy, my lungs pulling at the hot air, and the words appeared again, hanging in the air as I ran.

[ GODSPARK: 9 ]

[ WARNING: FEAR DRAINS THE VESSEL. YOUR SPARK FADES WHILE YOU FLEE. ]

I stopped so suddenly that I nearly fell. Fade? My strength was tied to my courage? I understood, in the most horrible way, that running was not an option. Every step I ran away from it was a step toward my own death. It did not even need to catch me, it only needed to wait.

So I turned around, I decided I needed to act smart in order to escape safely.

The walls of this prison rose up at the edges of the place, tall as the towers of Obsidian Fort, and they stood close enough together to climb, to push off, to use. I had spent my whole life being too small and too weak to matter, but nobody had ever accused me of being slow.

The Nightclaw came at me with its jaws wide, and instead of running away, I ran at it, and then, at the last second, I threw myself upward. My foot found the wall. I pushed off it. My hand found the second wall, and I pushed off that one too, bouncing between the stones like a ball, higher and higher, and the monster's teeth snapped shut on empty air beneath me.

Then a knife appeared, floating in the air beside my hand. Short, curved, and green, the color of deep water, humming softly, as if it had been waiting for me longer than I had been alive. The moment my skin touched the handle, the humming stopped, and the knife was simply in my hand.

I came down on its back with both hands around the green knife, and I drove the blade down into the scales between its shoulder blades.

The blade skated off. It did not even mark the hide. The impact nearly tore my arms out of their sockets, and then the whole mountain of the monster rolled, then I was thrown across the stone, hitting the ground and rolling until a wall stopped me.

I lay there for a moment, folded around the pain, spitting dust. Get up, I told myself, because if you do not get up now, you will never get up at all. I made myself breathe slowly even with the whole sky burning. I got up.

It had not even noticed, that was the worst of it. I had hit it with everything and it had felt nothing, and now it turned its great head and looked at me, the way a cat looks at something that is not yet worth killing.

"Strike the body, and you strike stone," the voice said. "Look for what is not stone."

I looked closely at it and then I saw it. When the monster breathed, deep in its chest, under the black fur and the armor scales, something was glowing. A green light, small and steady, pulsing with its breath, the same green as the knife.

That could be the heart, the weak place.

The NIGHTCLAW opened its mouth, and this time the roar came with fire. A river of flame came across the black stone, wide as a house, and I threw myself sideways and the world went orange. Heat took the hair off my arms. The wall behind me glowed red and began to bubble like the top of a cooking pot. One breath slower and I would have been a stain on the stone.

It breathed again before I could even stand, and this time I did not dodge in time. The edge of the fire caught my forearm, a bright lash of pain, and I went down screaming. The smell of my own burning skin filled my nose. The monster walked toward me, patiently, funny enough it did not hurry, because it knew that I was finished.

But the number in my head said 9, and fading, and something in me decided that if I was going to die in this place anyway, I would rather die going forward than backward.

So I went forward slowly as the fire ended. The monster pulled breath into its chest for the next river of flame, and that was the moment, the breath, the swell, the glow rising under the fur. I ran straight at the fire's source, and when the great head came down to burn me, I threw myself between its front legs, into the shadow under its chest, where its own body blocked its own fire.

The green light was right there, beating above me like a second sun trapped under black stone.

I raised the knife with both hands, and I pushed it in with everything I had, with every beating and every hungry night and every year of being nothing.

The blade sank in to the hilt, and the light burst around me

The NIGHTCLAW made a sound worse than any roar, a long falling note, like a bell dropped down a well, and then the whole monster lit up green from the inside. I pulled the knife free and ran, and behind me the great body swelled once, twice, and came apart in an explosion of green fire and black fur and scales that dissolved before they touched the stone.

The blast picked me up and threw me, and I did not feel the hard ground as I dropped down the floor

I woke on my back on the black stone, gasping… the red ceiling was gone. Where the monster had died, the walls of the prison were melting away like sugar in water, and the words hung in the air above me…

Something small and cold pressed into my palm, and I looked down, a little vial of green liquid that hummed the same way the knife had hummed. I pulled the stopper with my teeth before drinking all of it, it tasted like cold spring water and something sweet underneath, and the ache went out of my body like a tide going out. Even the burn on my arm faded, the injury closed up too.

I looked around me and the black stone dissolved under me too, I woke in my own narrow bed, staring at the ceiling, my door still locked from the inside.

"Rest, little god," the voice said. "The next trial is already waiting."