Fragment Twelve: A Horrific Frothing Sound

 
Chapter 10 (continued)

Dradicus and Dennagon look around inside the tower. A giant orb falls from the roof and smashes the floor. It’s apparently the same orb Dennagon saw back at the Lip of Astinor. If that is supposed to mean something, the context is lost on me.

Arxinor flies away as the orb explodes and out comes a bunch of Evil.

Liquid flesh bubbled. A horrific frothing sound filled the atmosphere. Sloshing, slushing, slashing and burbling, it gurgled about, rolling in and out of its own figure like some species of macroscopic ameba (page 278).

Eventually it takes the form of some sort of remotely humanoid figure. It holds it’s hand out, and Dennagon starts bleeding human blood. Wait, what? It then throws Dennagon against the wall. After a moment Dennagon recovers and starts shooting at it.

The shots only slowed it down before it threw an overhead smash attack (page 279).

Seriously, Eng? An overhead smash attack? I have this feeling Eng spent parts of this book playing an overly violent video game and then just described the on-screen violence to create the action sequences of this book.

They fight for a bit, but the sapiens are basically impossible to kill. Dennagon decides his only chance is to use his spellbook:

Flipping it open to its middle pages, he mightily forced himself to read (page 280).

How does one mightily force oneself to read?

The burst of light makes all of the sapiens retreat. Dradicus tells Dennagon go for it, that he’ll hold them off. so Dennagon flies out the window.

The top of the Lexicon tower is at the edge of space, which is a little odd, since there really isn’t an “edge” of space the way you might think of it. Drekkenoth and Lyconel (who has almost finished her transformation to Technodragon) are hanging out.

Drekkenoth orders Arxinor to check the defenses. He flies up and bangs into the glass [?] ozone [??] layer and manages to break through it. O…kay. Not sure what is going on there, since other dragons have been up to space and didn’t have to break through a layer of ozone made of glass. He then starts flying toward the Moon.

He was expecting to travel several million miles to reach the moon, for his data chips told him that was the distance to him (page 282).

The moon is ~238,000 miles from Earth.

However, to his delighted surprise, he arrived at his destination in less than five seconds (page 282).

I…honestly have no idea what the fuck Eng is going for. Are we supposed to think that his data is wildly inaccurate, even though this book has been making a big deal of how accurately the dragons supposedly understand physics and the world they live in? And we’ve already established that dragon speed tops out around 1,500 miles per hour, meaning that it would take around 6 ½ days to reach the moon, not five seconds.

And assuming the moon is, indeed, 238,000 miles from earth, then Arxinor was traveling at slightly over 200 million miles per hour, which stretches my suspension of disbelief just a little bit.

There’s an entrance in the surface of the moon which opens for him. A beautiful light comes out. He has a moment to enjoy it before it fries him in ash. Well. That’s a little anticlimactic.

The light from the interior of the moon spreads out. Lyconel’s cyborg parts are supposedly too advanced to be be affected by the light, so Drekkenoth tells her to retrieve the remains of the Lexicon. She’s about to, but then Dennagon flies in, because now the dragons can fly in this windstorm. Drekkenoth mentally orders Lyconel to attack Dennagon, so she does, and they fight.

[There’s a brief interlude with Dradicus, who is hiding from the sapiens. In a moment of high tension, something tickles his nose and he sneezes, but the sapiens don’t notice. Then he finds a small bag. Inside is some gold. Unfortunately, the sapiens are also designed to detect the presence of gold, which hasn’t been mentioned or alluded to before.]

Back to the moon, where Eng continues waxing pretentious:

Corridors of solid gravity warped the fabric of space throughout the Moon’s interior mantle. Translucent, they composed a maze network of spherical boundaries that wrapped radial around the core like layers of a fruit (page 287).

Yep.

Dennagon and Lyconel fight. He can’t defeat her, so he flies up, smashing against the glass layer that now protects the ozone or something. Lyconel fires after him, which smashes the glass, allowing Dennagon to fly through into the ‘void’ beyond it. He mentally waxes rhapsodic about having reached space, and then heads toward the moon.

Inside the moon, Dennagon follows the energy to its source, which is emitting a lot of mana. He decides this must be the location of the Lexicon. Lyconel attacks. Her talons are surrounded by a field of radiation.

Incredibly blinding, colossal macroscopic electrons that had been magnified by the limitless range of her sentience orbited around the central energy as if it were a quantum nucleus of mountainous proportions. The gargantuan atom, blown up to the relativistic universe, was a super-charged plasma shot she had been saving for this moment, fully loaded and ready to fire (page 291).

…right. How on earth will Dennagon escape from this perilous trap?

he buried his claws into a chunk of the wall, ripping out a sizeable piece of solid gravity. Positioning it before the illuminated winds, he warped the line of the light rays’ motion, creating a geodesic that bent into a concentrated laser. Expeditiously, he aimed right at her head (page 291).

Blah blah, the laser hits Lyconel and temporarily disables her.

Grabbing Technodragon Lyconel before she could restart her Windows 1201 AD operating system (page 291).

Windows 1201 AD operating system? What the fucking fuckity fuck have you been smoking, Eng?

They go flying in, and Lyconel crashes into Drekkenoth, and they go flying to the ground, Lyconel “deactivated”. Drekkenoth pulls out a giant pair of swords that somehow repel all light. Dennagon pulls out a sword that he got from the Supersurface Cave network, made out of solid diamond. They square off.

There’s a very dramatic fight scene where the swords are moving so quickly they create vacuums behind them. It goes on for a while, until Dennagon leaps up in the air.

He landed atop Drekkenoth’s crown, jamming his blade into the cranium and scourging off a whopping chunk of the skull (page 294).

Naturally, this doesn’t kill him. Drekkenoth breaks Dennagon’s sword and knocks him to the ground by Lyconel’s body. Quickly, he thinks through his vast stores of knowledge. Then he stabs a claw into Lyconel’s brain, hits the implanted CPU and breaks it, which frees her mind from the Technodragon mind control. Lyconel blasts Drekkenoth in the chest with her giant plasma cannon, then rolls around to shield Dennagon from the radiation. Wait. I thought dragons were immune to radiation. Wasn’t this something that the plot specifically called out, just seventeen pages ago?

Unfortunately, that took whatever was left of Lyconel’s energy, and she dies.

…this would probably mean something if I felt even the slightest interest in Lyconel or cared remotely about her wellbeing, but I don’t. So much for that!

Back to Dradicus, who is being chased by the sapiens. He pauses in front of a window, dangling his bag of gold. He asks the sapiens if they want it, then chucks it out the window.

“Go get it RIGHT NOW!” (page 298)

This works. The sapiens dive out the window to retrieve the gold. Dradicus chuckles to himself about how naive and gullible these creatures are, and then watches as the sapiens scoop the gold out of midair very quickly and then turn around to come back.

Dradicus, you’re a fucking idiot. I hope you know that.

Previous……………………………Home……………………………Next

  7 Responses to “Fragment Twelve: A Horrific Frothing Sound”

  1. I… I seriously want whatever he is on.

  2. Be careful, you might wake up after weeks-long bender to discover that you’ve written “Dragons: Lexicon Triumvirate”!

  3. Ain’t nobody got time for that!

  4. That’s why I would imbibe under strict supervision.

  5. Oh man, this is incredible entertainment. I’ve laughed so much at the truth of your words. This book is fucking ridiculous.

  6. The moon is ~238,000 miles from Earth IRL but in the D:LT-verse there are two moons so maybe the other one was closer?

    Frankly, the flight to the moon is sort of moot after references to a “sizeable piece of solid gravity” so I will continue my existing headcanon that this is a story in which the laws of physics are out to lunch and the universe has collapsed into a chaotic mess where anything can happen and nothing makes sense.

    It makes for a shit story obviously, but at least it explains all the inconsistencies in distance, speed, etc. Yes, Dennagon could fly at 1,500 MPH and survive a nuclear blast a few chapters ago but now he’s foiled by strong winds, knocked out with a rock to the head, and at risk of radiation poisoning. Pity there are no observed regularities to how the universe works.

    You know, I may have taken the devil’s advocate thing too far. Now I’m envisioning a heavily rewritten D:LT about the characters lamenting the inconsistency of their world and yearning for reliable laws of physics, yet unable to entirely conceptualize what they’re missing. “The Lexicon” is their term for the coherence they’re making a futile effort to impose on their world; a sort of placeholder term for something they know they want and need but can’t describe. They call it “The Lexicon” out of cruel irony; though they can vaguely understand the concept, they lack the language to communicate it, leaving them unable to find allies or discuss plans.

  7. “How does one MIGHTILY force oneself to read a book?”
    You tell me, man. You are the one who acomplished the herculean task of finishing and reviewing this book.