Knights of the Platinum Dragon: A D&D Story

Chapter 6: The Pack Lord

As sensation returned to Logan's legs again, the first thing he felt was pain stabbing into his calves, his thighs, his back and even his feet, as though red-hot nails beyond count were being driven into his flesh. The air was shrieking into his ears so loud that it was deafening, his eyelids locked shut.

Leaning to one side, he tried to move his right leg, hoping feverishly that he would still feel it move. Raw agony spiked in every muscle as he did this, so much so that he cried out, making the pain from earlier seem like a pittance. However, underneath it all, Logan felt his knee rise up and bend, and inside his plate boots, he could still flex his toes.

The relief he felt gave him a small relief from the pain, and that relief grew again as he felt something squirming in his arms like a rabbit caught in a snare. Peeling his eyes open and releasing his grip, his taught muscles easing, he saw a ball of gold hair and green leaves roll out from against his chest and onto all fours on the floorboards.

"Finnan..." Logan managed to gasp. However, as he did that, the sight of the halfling suddenly blurred, the edges of Logan's vision darkening until they were almost black. The pain continued to burn all through his body, sapping his strength as though it were clawing at his flesh.

He tried to shift and push himself upwards. 'The battle is not done yet...'  he told himself in his head, but as he tried to rise, his arms ached for a second before all sensation left them, and he collapsed to floor, sight blurring once again as his jaw slammed back down and his cheek was pierced by needle-thin splinters.

Through the blur, though, Logan made out Finnan's face turn his way, a field of cream rising up from under a great mass of gold. And then he heard a childlike voice cry out "Arabella!"

Just then, Logan felt a warm caress slide across his skin, the sensation parting the agony that plagued him like a plough pushing aside soil. Every nerve of his tingled in the most pleasant way, and were he not in this situation, it might have made him smile.

The comforting feeling spread across him, reaching down to his toes and out to his fingers, and as it did so, he felt his strength returning. Within moments, his sight had cleared and pushing himself to his feet was no harder than it had ever been.

As he rose, he felt another sensation – a gentle hand on his cheek. And when his gaze flicked up, he met a pair of turquoise eyes, a button nose and a pair of full lips.

"Are you alright?" Arabella asked him.

Logan was mesmerized for a split-second before, in the corner of his eye, he saw the gleam of light on metal, and turned to see his longsword being handled by Technus, the massive cleric having retracted his shield, bent down and lifted the weapon up by the blade. His metallic fingers had no risk of being cut, and as he rose, his red bionic eye ran up and down the sword, as if inspecting it greedily.

Anger flashed within him then, and all he said to Arabella was "I'm fine," before he marched towards the enormous cyborg that had almost killed him and Finnan. Technus looked up just in time for Logan to close his fingers around the leather-wrapped grip and pull, the steel whining while sparks flared in the air.

Technus' sole living eye widened a little at that, while Logan's were staring daggers - he was of half a mind to punch the mechanical monstrosity then and there, but he remembered that Ren was in trouble.

That came first.

Without a word, Logan scooped his shield from where it had been dropped and ran for where the door had once been, stepping over the pools of pink and crimson and scattered pieces of rusted weapons that had once been gnolls. Twisting to the left, he saw that the stairs back down to the Cockatrice's makeshift docks were still intact and wasted no time hurrying down them, his armoured boots clunking heavily and quickly as he rushed downwards.