A Pirate for the Dead Goddess (Legends of Rahasia Book 2)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Ode plunges her sword into the heart of the first Lune warrior...

And, as she severs torso from legs, she discovers something horrible.

A clockwork heart

The first body falls split into two pieces, exposed thin tendrils sparking with lightning. Skin made from thin sheet metal. Painted, they look real. Up close, they're all just robotic fakes.

"They're mechanical men." Ode looks incredulously to the Queen of Thieves, also in the process of removing her knives from a severed, gear-filled head. "What human could do something like this?" She raises her sword and, as she's asking this question, guts another of them.

Ratu has to bend almost entirely backwards to avoid the whiz of a fireball from one of the witches. She retaliates with a thin throwing knife, spearing the enemy witch's hand. "I've heard rumor of a man called the Alchemist. A slave to the Lunes, a genius that they kidnapped from a merchant ship." Ratu kicks another mechanical man in the face, lightning sparking and combusting over all his metallic torso. "He's also mad. Forgotten everything of his past life."

"Looks like my mother-in-law abandoned her mechanical army just to play with her shiny, new Alchemist toy." Ode pauses, grinning with pride as the first of her undead army slams into one of the mechanics. A witch screams as three overpower her. The undead, countless from the desert sands, had clawed their way to the surface. The pirate crew, undoubtedly from some accident at sea that Lucky would soon inform her of. Old warriors who'd died long before Rahasia was even built, when spears were fashioned of bone and wood instead of bronze.

"The witches are living, though." Ratu trails off. Ode notices her fight pattern alters whenever she encounters a witch, hitting them at pressure points, or otherwise maiming instead of flat-out execution. "They're just young girls. Village girls, running from persecution for their magic."

Ode has one of these witches in her free hand even now, held by the throat. The poor girl kicks, wheeling desperately with her feet in the air.

I was like them once.

The goddess of death sighs, throwing the girl, unconscious but not dead, to the ground.

She lifts her arm, slamming her sword against the Lioness Gate so it rings supernaturally above the din. "Where is the Witch Queen? I challenge her to end this fight now!"

A shorter young woman steps forwards. Her veils flow behind her, pushed back from a shaved head and brows. She blinks, hairless even in lashes, at her goddess adversary.

"You betrayed my Mother Goddess." The girl holds her hands out, and the sands shift beneath Ode's feet. Ratu leaps away at the last second, slamming her elbow into the nose of a running witch. But everything soon disappears from Ode's view.

Caught in the middle of a sandstorm. Seeing the bald girl's eerie, piercing eyes even through the dust particles. But soon, even those disappear.

"You must die, false goddess!"

***

Hey Pirates,

Mechanical men with clockwork hearts... so.

Ancient robots and witches.

Army of undead.

I see you, steampunk-necromancy. I see you.

-Sophia