Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

Last Vow

Adam slammed the controls forward, thrusters on full burn, cutting like a comet across a field of devastation. Debris whizzed past him on either side coming dangerously close to fracturing his wings, but he rolled and spun his jet in ways no pilot should have been able to, but with the pressure of his hands he coaxed the hunk of metal to life transforming it into a powerful creature of beauty, like a dragon flying at the whim of his command.

Inside his head, the pain and the panic had died to a dull throb at the base of his skull. The frontal cortex of his brain was silent and dead, holding nothing more than the whistling of wind. The flying wasn't a conscious effort, but a deep instinct that went further than his basal brain stem, and further than the very basic neurons in his spinal column.

Like this was the very thing he had always been meant to do.

Ahead of him two tendrils converged in on each other, churning downward to block out the light of the stars, swirling in dark spirals as they tried to grasp and crush him. He cut in a sharp corkscrew passing through the rapidly closing gap and erupting out on the other side. Another tendril burst up to meet him. He screamed in rage thumbing the trigger on the side of the joystick and calling down a hail of fire and an eruption that blew chunks of shadow apart with a ball of light.

More tendrils burst upward from the darkness, until it seemed like Apollyon himself was focusing all his energy on stopping Adam's ship. Weather that was the case or not, he could not stop fighting.

A tendril shot towards him from the left, and he dropped sharply in vertical, forced to spin left as another tendril shot at him from ahead.

They were closing in around him.

There was no way he could make it out.

And then.

Light.

It was gentle, but still powerful, caressing his skin with a fiery gold luminance like the noon day sun. Adam turned his head, just in time to see the form of a man coalesce into existence at his side, running across the field of black in time with the speed of his jet. It was nothing more than a silhouette, marked out by a few simple lines of light and dark to distinguish its features.

And then more light.

He turned to his other side just in time to make out another form running at his other side.

A wolf, or perhaps a dog. It ran with incredible fluid strides, matching the pace of his jet and the man that ran on his left. Its head was low and its ears were back. Its long tail streamed out behind it.

A wall of blackness rose up in front of him.

No way through.

But then the human silhouette drew back its hand, a fiery spear of light appearing between its fingers briefly before it through. For a moment it was nothing more than a streak of blackness to cut through the dark, but when the speartip met blackness, what followed was an explosion of light ripping outward and tearing a hold in the black. With a silent bark or howl, the wolfdog raced forward over a field of stars and leapt before Adam's ship through the rapidly closing hole widening it with another eruption of light.

The human figure spun on the spot, massive hand cutting around behind Adam's ship, and like a man throwing a discuss, Adam was whipped around in a circle so incredibly fast the edges of his vision blackened and faded.

And then the figure let go.

The airframe of his jet screamed at the sudden acceleration, metal bending and warping around him.

Inside his suit fealty went critical as the incredible pressure built up threatening to kill him.

The hole ahead was closing fast.