Mechanical Gods (lgbtq+)

Chapter Thirty-Five: Freed

     Aiden felt the same dull heat emanating out of his hands.

     The same feeling he experienced with Iago.

     He watched it glow on his palms, growing brighter. The smell of ripening apples, peaches, and wet dirt invaded Aiden's nostrils, and there was a moment of weightlessness that permeated in the air as if everything had cleared by the cold and the heat, akin to the clearing of the sinuses when humans had a pesky stuffy nose from a cold.

     Sam and Spot gasped beside him, helping and screaming. He looked over to them, but flames didn't consume them. They were pointing at something else.

     Aiden looked up. Suddenly, a wall of snow and ice bombarded the creature's body like a battering ram, lifting it off the ground as light as a feather. The ugly beast beat its wings in powerful swoops against the rolling tide of white, but it couldn't disperse them away fast enough as it pummeled it's hide, no doubt piercing deep within that it might feel like a thousand knives stabbing all over your body.

     Reeling its head back, the beast roared and blasted fire in desperation against it, melting the snow into a puff of mist and vapor. But the fog suddenly paused its descent toward the earth and hovered against gravity, and then, for some wild and outrageous regard for physics, the mist and vapor all converged to form a massive round glob of water that matched the size of the beast's head.

     The ball of water rammed its way inside the beast's throat, extinguishing the brightening blue flame inside.

     The creature choked, frantically trying to catch a breath as it flew above the rim of the volcano. The rest of the ice and snow at the slopes of the crater joined its brethren in the attack, lifted by an invisible force, and battered the creature again further to the sky. A fierce battle ensued.

     "You did it! Now! Let's get to the door!" Screamed Sam. Not waiting for the others, he was the first one to rush toward it. "Quick! Before that thing comes back to us!"

"He has a point!" Added Spot, following Sam's trail in the same frantic rush toward the red door.

Aiden glanced at the sky one more time, and not wanting to waste the luck dealt with him, he ran down the slopes on the tail of the others, hoping he could reach the door just in time before the beast found a way to tackle whatever Aiden had done to distract it.

     The vents littered around the crater groaned and trembled. Thousands of horrifying slit-shaped arching eyes watched deep in the darkness, and they yapped in unison like a crescendoing orchestra as they rushed toward them.

     "Crap! What now?" Aiden hissed under his breath as he hastened toward the red door, feeling the thousands of eyes gathering around them.

     Sam was the first on the door, bursting through it with all his weight. Spot followed after him. A thousand pairs of hooves thundered behind Aiden. It sounded closer than ever as if they could kiss the nape of his neck.

     Aiden jumped inside as the creatures before the creatures lurking in the dark could pounce on him, and the red door swung shut.

     Darkness enveloped them.

     "What the heck was that?" Aiden asked the two.

     "A dragon?" Sam huffed, trying to catch his breath.

     "As I said, Iago's defenses. He could pull it from what is in your scripts and databank and tamper with it," Spot said.

     "My databank..." Aiden trailed off.

     The movie: Kill the Princess. Tyler's guilty pleasure. Aiden remembered it now with him sitting on that couch back at Tyler's apartment, transfixed at what he saw on the screen in front of him. The giant pet dragon of the Tyrannical uncle of Princess Butterfly. He watched it last Christmas with him and recognized the thousands of arching glowing eyes of the goblins that the two muscle-bound fairies battled in one brutal, gory massacre sequence.