Dark Prince & the Doe

Chapter Forty-seven: The Prime

Chapter Forty-seven: The Prime

Calden

Crumpled tarmanze bodies lay strewn across the ground. In one vicious blast, Larken had brought nearly a fourth of the tarmanze to the ground. The remaining beasts clustered up high on the ceiling, hanging upside-down by their claws, tittering worriedly, and shuffling their wings.

Calden stood back up shakily, just as his brother bent over. Lurching forward, Calden barely managed to snatch his sword right out from under Larken's greedy, thieving claws. Larken's nose wrinkled as he snarled and snatched his own ruined sword off the ground like a petulant toddler.

Dust settled around them. Calden touched the tip of his blade to where the Wind Shield should be. Nothing. Larken's blast of lightning must have broken the enchantment. Not surprising, it was Arcastra – they were lucky to not all be dead.

Calden stepped over the border of debris. Soldiers were regrouping in front of the carriages, rubbing at their ears or working their jaws back and forth. One man wiped blood from his earlobe, pain radiating through his face. Many were trying to calm the enflamed tinderhorses who were highly aggravated by this whole event.

Kanar stood in front of two carriage tinderhorses who were snapping their teeth and bucking their heads. Calden approached him, leaping over a decapitated tarmanze.

"Is everyone alright?"

"It's too soon to tell," Kanar said, holding his hands up. "Woah, woah. Calm." One of the tinderhorses took that message to heart while the one beside it only began to fight against the straps more furiously, snorting sparks and smoke.

"Where's Kiren?" Calden asked and Kanar looked up, Calden followed his gaze.

"You!" Kiren yelled, pointing at Calden from atop the heavy black carriage. His fine jacket was bloodstained and one of the sleeves was half torn off. Calden flinched as his brother stomped across the roof. "You reckless idiots! Arcastra! Are you both insane!"

Calden glanced guiltily back at Larken, who was staring unblinkingly at the tarmanze on the ceiling. "It worked," Larken said quietly, bobbing his head in rhythm with the disconcerting chirps. "Would you rather have spent all afternoon shooting them down one by one?"

Kiren dropped down from the carriage, and stalked towards them. Calden swiftly stepped out of the way, nearly tripping over a tarmanze's wing. Kiren tore off the rest of his tattered sleeve and held it in one hand.

"What! If! You! Had! Missed!" Kiren whipped his sleeve at Larken, lambasting him with each screamed word. Quite a few of the soldiers stopped decapitating downed tarmanze just to watch out of the corners of their eyes.

"I didn't," Larken said, his eyes still roaming across the ceiling.

"Calden was standing right next to you! You could have killed yourself or any of us if that lighting branched off."

Larken stepped forward and met Kiren eye to eye, snarling right in his face. "It. Didn't."

"You are unbelievable!" Kiren yelled and chucked his sleeve in his face. Larken brushed it away with one hand and stalked off. "Where do you think you're going?"

"To kill their prime."

The tarmanze were chirping louder, it was turning into a furious rhythm. The shock of having lightning shot at them was beginning to wear off, their surprise would soon turn into anger and anger into fury.

"They will keep bothering us till we kill it," Calden grumbled, squinting at the darkness above. He tried to spot the biggest, darkest tarmanze of the bunch, but none really stood out. "They'll pester us all the way to the Azure Caves if we don't."