Demigods, Dates and Dragons

It was supposed to be simple. Kaleesha’s mansion was in Brooklyn. Surprise, surprise, I think more bored than bitter. A simple teleportation spell would have gotten us there in seconds and then all I, Beckendorf and the avatar of death a.k.a Silena (Olympians, if she ever reads this I’m so deep in trouble, it’ll make Tartarus look like a ball-pit) would have to do is storm the place and retrieve my amulet.
Well, things turned out a bit different. The moment we materialized in front of the mansion, seven cyclops were waiting for us.
Now, here we are, being thrown boulders at supersonic speed and all we can do is duck and pant. Beckendorf smashes the boulders with his warhammer and try to be as nimble as I can.
‘What do we do?’ I scream at Beckendorf. I can’t cast any spells yet. The teleportation took the best of me. ‘I need some time to cool off before I can start firing at them.’
‘First of all,’ Beckendorf grunts, smashing a boulder. ‘What you just said, is an oxymoron. Second, I don’t think we have that much time.’
I was ready to riposte at the moron about my oxymoron, but Silena shut us both up. She charged the cyclops.
All seven of them!
With just her shield and sword. She dashed at them, screaming some ancient Greek curse and made short work of seven freakin’ cyclops.
She slammed on the first one with her shield and stabbed him while he laid stunned. Then in a flurry of motion, she pivots and hacked the second. She jumped and stabbed the third in the eye. The fourth decided to actually attack her. She bitch-slapped him, and I am serious right here, with her shield and cut him in half. The fifth, sixth and seventh took her actually less time to deal with than the first quadrant.
When she was done, she was heaving and panting. She looks at us and shruggs.
‘What?’
I turn to Beckendorf.
‘Dude, your girlfriend is awesome.’
He smirks. ‘You should’ve seen what she did to my siblings when they said to her face that she couldn’t take the heat.’
‘Ouch!’ I snicker and rush to the mansion’s door. As I pass by Silena, I brush her helmet. Beckendorf offers her some water, when I reach the doors.
The moment I find out that the door is unlocked, danger pierces my skin. I shiver, cursing myself for thinking this might actually pass as an “easy one”. But the second I stick my head in the house and face the orange slit eyes, followed by the gluttonous roar, I slammed the door shut and look wide-eyed at my friends.
They face me, bewildered.
‘They have a dragon,’ I growl. Then I start running towards the stairs and take off as I reach the brim. I let out a warning scream.
‘Duck!’
The house front feels like it’s consumed in the sun. My skin and back of head feel immolated, as I roll on the ground. Vision’s blurry. There’s blood in my mouth and I think something must have melted in me, because I can hardly move.
Then something cool and long grabs me and pulls me away. I cough dirt, blood and gods know what else. The ringing cannot go away. Good thing I can still think up to a point, I say and face Beckendorf pulling me while sprinting towards the thick bushes of the patio.
The dude shoves me in the bushes and the brisk leaves feel like a bloody paradise against my skin. Groggily, I address Silena.
‘How are you handling the heat?’
‘Better than you,’ she purrs smoothly as Beckendorf lands by my side.
‘Alright. Cut the bickering. Dio, how do we get past this thing?’
My everything feel overheated. Plus, I’ve lost my swords, leaving my only weapons two long daggers and my arsenal of spells.
I take a look at the dragon. It’s about a hundred feet, with decrepit flesh in its wings and rots of death. And it’s coming this way.
I bite my tongue and turn to Charlie. Wearing my most sinister smile, I mutter, ‘Beck, you still immune to flames and stuff?’
He nods.
I can see Silena’s eyes turning into pool balls.
‘Excellent. Prepare yourself. We’re taking down a dragon.’
Everything in me feels like sandpaper as I stand behind Beckendorf, with my hands resting on his formidable shoulders. He holds the hammer high. The dragon is drawing near.
‘Dio, what will you do?’ Silena asks.
‘Nothing. Just rush the dragon with Beckendorf, flank it and stab it till it’s dead. And if I’m gone before I can kill it, Beck right here is free to bash it through the walls.’
I focus for the spell. Silena gives Beckendorf a long, passionate kiss. And there I am, feeling bad for being lonely and possibly dying like this, but then I remember my long-life relationship with saracm and atrocious humor. I turn to Beckendorf.
‘Beckendorf, my man, this is going to hurt you more than your hardest leg day,’ I murmur and start the conjuration. Ancient Greek with a handful of Egyptian do the trick.
The pulse of energy makes me take a deep breath. The smell of the grass becomes sharper. The rumbling of the dragon’s stomach is a storm in my ears, even though it’s still far. Its fire will wither before mine.
The charring feeling from before ruptures back. Only it’s me the one’s who’s summoning it and I send it to Beckendorf. He screams. His words come broken from the pain.
‘Dio…what…do…you…want…me…to…do?’
‘I’ll just hum If I had a hammer and you charge the dragon.’
He doesn’t say a thing. He’s a mass of steel, flames and agony. Beck lets a battle cry and crashes everything in his way to the dragon.
Part of me hates myself for doing this to him. I mimic my pain from earlier to cover Beckendorf in an armor of inhuman flames and ashes. That’s what dark magic does. It deals with pain, sheer agony and torment. And I’m inflicting it on my best friend. Talk about a friend I am.
The dragon detects us. I see its jaw dropping, preparing to hurl another fireball at us. I’m right behind Charlie, with my daggers drawn.
The big man looks like a fusion of automaton and human. He’s scarier than I could ever become.
I know it when the fireball crashes against Beckendorf. Feels like I am in the heart of a dying star. But as for Charlie...
It doesn’t even seem to slow him down. He reaches the dragon’s maw and with a cry of rage and fire and my fucking magic, Beckendorf lunges the massive hammer at the dragon’s muzzle.
The sound sends chills to me, but I don’t think much about it. I climb over Beckendorf’s shoulders, a dagger in each hand and scream, ‘Guess hoot’s back bitch.’
When I land, I start nicking the back of the dragon. Its scales are solid to block my daggers on a straight impact, but I aim directly for the chinks of them.
The beast screams. Tries to shake me off.
I roll on the ground and find myself directly under his belly. The stench wants to make me shoot my nostrils off. But I don’t slack around. Feeling the pulse drumming Hade’s song inside me, I sink my blades in the flesh behind the monster’s front kneecaps.
The monster heels, trying to squirm away. From the occasional tremor I see seizing the dragon’s body, I guess Beckendorf is tenderizing the meat. I don’t want to make this longer than it should be.
I finish the beast by driving both blades in its neck, down to the hilts of my weapons. My hands give from the effort and I barely roll away, before be crushed to death by the impending fall of the corpse.
I crawl away from the dragon’s carcass and kneel, deciding that clean air is all I need right now. I’m jittery. I can see everything like it’s moving a second too slow. I can hear almost anyone’s breathing in the patio, but I care for only one’s.
‘Beckendorf? Moan if you alive.’ I’ll never admit it but in the two seconds it takes him to gimme an answer, I think I’d have a heart attack. I want to beg for water.
‘Yo, Dio. I’m good. How about you?’ His words come through short panting breaks.
‘Well, seeing how we just took down a dragon and we can get Kaleesha, I’ll go with “I’ll just roll with that.’
I hope the incoming footsteps are Silena’s, ‘cause I’m in no shape to defend us, I think but try to raise my daggers nonetheless.
When I see Silena’s figure, I sigh relieved. She checks with me if I’m alive and then rushes to Beckendorf.
‘Sure Silena. If it’ll make your making-out time more comfortable, I can make sure I’m dead, so you can take your sweet time.
‘Drama queen,’ I hear Silena mutter as I crawl closer to them. The numbness make my legs feel useless. I catch them kissing passionately, so I do what I do best in this situations. I stare at them tenaciously, until they are uncomfortable.
Silena is the one who breaks off first. Beckendorf gives me a smile. From the looks of him, my spell took most of the damage. Whatever scraps of Warhammer armor he had on are still there but the big man looks a little messed up.
‘You alright there, Dio?’
‘I won’t lie Beck. I’ve been better. But hey, we just took down a dragon and you have survived both his fire and my spell.’ I smirk. ‘So, amazing dragon killer bros.’
He bro-fists me I fall back.
‘Did you really jump into a fight with an owl pun?’ Silena mutters dryly, putting her helmet back on.
‘Hey. I’m a son of Athena. It was either that or screaming a complex mathematical algorithm.’ I grin.
‘What are you doing?’ Beckendorf asks startled.
‘I’ve got to go in there and find this Kaleesha and retrieve the amulet,’ Silena grunts checking her shield.
‘You’re going in there alone? Not in a million years, Silena.’ His voice is darker and sterner than any other time I’ve heard Beckendorf talk.
‘By all means join me. When you get the feeling in your body,’ she teases and goes through the ruins of the mansion’s doors.
All Beckendorf and I do, is struggle to stand up and follow her. Can’t really say we do it. Silena looks at us with her scalding red eyes and smiles. She then thrusts her sword in the air, straightening her right hand and under the moonlight, I smile catching the tiny splotches of different colors.
She’s showing us her beads as a camper. A year means a bead. She’s telling us she has survived until now. And she’ll survive this and much more.
‘May my mother guide you, Beauregard,’ I whisper and watch her walk into the mansion, like she owns the place.
I turn to Beckendorf. His eyes are beady and I’m sure that these traces of water I see on his face are not sweat.
I manage to place my hand on his shoulder, although inside me I want to combust from the pain and tell him with a smile. ‘Dude, your girlfriend? Awesome!’

Notes