Most of these battles were occurring hidden away in the gloom now, but Roger and Mary could still hear the many cries and screams of death and destruction, echoing all around them.
Then Roger saw the Enemy himself. A huge, bloated Fire-Worm, a Lord of the Erf’s Core. He was right below them and urging his mindless minion armies onwards to sacrifice their worthless lives by the many thousands for his war-crazed cause.
Then he noticed a small band of youthful, True Dragons, much smaller versions of Mavis, not yet fully grown, but who were valiant and steadfast. These were merely a troop of Dragon Cadets who were now bravely battling the Minion foes, despite their being vastly outnumbered. Their backs pressed up hard against their Cone-Academy’s curving rocky wall; defending their home and their kin against the hopeless odds of advancing Minion-worms.
Roger cried out in horror, seeing they were being relentlessly harassed and surrounded, the Minion-worms hissing and spitting torrents of their vile acid poisons down upon them.
Then, in a great burst of burning slime, one of the Core Lord’s huge Millipede Monsters, suddenly attacked them from one side, and slaughtered them all, with but a single blast.
Roger gaped in shocked disbelief, as he flew on by. The Dragon Cadet’s melting corpses burning as one bright and gruesome bonfire below him and briefly lighting up similar scenes of horror going on all around him. This indeed was a bloody battle to the death; one for the total annihilation and extermination of all True Dragon-kind!
And these vile vermin, both the Masters and Slaves, these were all of the devil-spawned races of the Un-Kind, the cruel creatures of the Core. And all mindlessly committed to the utter destruction of their most hated ancient enemies, the True Dragons of the Dragon’s Erf.
These Fire-Worm Lords of the Core, Roger could see, even in the deepening, red gloom, were easily spotted; they were huge lumbering, Pythonesque creatures; Or more accurately, elongated, armor-plated Crocodiles, hundreds of feet long. Each burning with a fierce, red glow in their chests; Their very hearts being but pumping cores of molten hate, much like their core-furnace homes, deep down within the hot and hellish realm of the Erf’s Core.
“Their plan, as you can here see, children, was to douse the living veins of our light-producing crystal web with their vile, black slimes, thereby darkening our Dragon World,” Mavis calmly explained, as they flew across the ravaged battle-scape that unfolded its ever-flickering, fiery horrors, below and above them.
The Dragon Queen grimly continued her narrative on the evils unfolding before their very eyes. "And so, with superior night-vision and vaster numbers, they would wreak havoc among all of Dragon-kind; and all other creatures of the Under-Erf kept under our Dragon Peace, from the Dinosaurs to Diatoms. They had planned well, luring our King away in defense of several other Under-Erf Cavern-Worlds. Only our Home Guard remained to defend the realm.”
“The Core Lords knew that with the True Dragons gone, nothing could stand in their way, and they would be free to spread their evil reign throughout all the Under-Erf, just like an incurable disease. Spreading its rabid infection from Cavern-World to Cavern-World.”
“Or just like an apple being rotted away by a worm from deep inside it!” Roger said.
“Yes. Exactly!” Mavis said.
The companions of the Egg continued onwards, skimming over the ever darkening and battle-scarred plain, and below them Roger now saw a Tyrannosaurus Rex. He felt scared out of his wits for a second, but then he realized that he wasn’t actually there; Not physically, so he knew he really didn’t have to feel scared at all. But somehow, he still felt very uneasy. Roger, from a very young age, had always had a strange fascination, as well as an admiring horror and fear, of the ruthless Tyrannosaurus Rex, the King of the Dinosaurs.
This courageous colossus of a Dinosaur was now busy battling a giant Centipede of the Core, twice the size of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. The giant, armored grub was built like a battering ram; But one that lumbered along on a hundred, skittering red legs. Its segmented green and black body glinted in scaly armor-plates. Its shiny and bulbous, black head, ending in red, fang-like mandibles that were snapping open and shut and viciously biting at the T. Rex’s flanks, trying to gouge bloody chunks out of him.
The Tyrannosaurus Rex wasn’t having any of it though. Its tiny, fierce eyes glowed red with raw rage, as it swung its great bludgeoning tail, like a giant’s club and striking the ramming Giant Centipede in its side, toppling it over onto the ground. The Rex roared above its prey and thereby making its one deadly mistake. By such gleeful gloating, it delayed from seeing to the giant grub’s final dispatch unto death, for just a second too long.
As the King of the Giant Lizards roared its boastful battle-cry, a swarm of Fire-worm Minions poured in towards him too, and then crawling in a deadly, squirming mass, right up his legs, and along his ramp-like tail. Each worm was busily biting, stinging and poisoning as it went.
The Dinosaur King was momentarily distracted and in those precious moments the fallen Giant Centipede found its legs again and turned and lunged upwards, once more. This time its jaws found the flesh it craved; steel-like pincers tearing into and gripping the Rex’s throat.
Between the marauding mass of malevolent Minions and the grim, gory grip of the Giant Centipede, it looked like the mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex’s valiant battle was over for good.
However, the Minion worms and the Monster Grub hadn’t counted on the one thing they had no knowledge of whatsoever; they hadn’t planned for the intervention of… Love!
As the valiant King roared out in pain, bleeding from several wounds and staggering and desperately trying to release himself from his foe, his very irate mate, Madam Tyrannosaurus Rex, suddenly appeared, charging as if from nowhere, out of the hellish, smoky-red gloom.
She immediately struck at the Centipede, still firmly and stubbornly attached to her poor husband’s throat. Her huge, dagger-like teeth slashed at the Centipede’s blunt head, as she flung herself upon the mindlessly, murdering brute with the savage intensity that the female of the species rises to whenever their loved ones are being threatened or harmed.
Quickly, the Giant Centipede loosened its grip, now having half its head slashed away and spewing out a foul, steaming ichor from its terrible wound. In fact, it barely functioned at all, but its tiny brain, even tinier than the Tyrannosauruses’ famously walnut-sized one, had also been sliced in two. The garish, giant grub slowly slithered to the ground and then quivered and quaked… and then went totally, raving mad; wildly thrashing about, convulsing and coiling uncontrollably… in its final, fearsome death-throes.
Meanwhile, the Dinosaur King of the prehistoric Lizards had recovered his balance and his dignity too, and voraciously set about lashing Minions from his blood-splattered body, clawing away the many Fire-worm Minions foolishly clinging to his torn and tattered hide.
As Mavis and the children continued on their way over the darkening plain, the last thing Roger saw of this touching vignette of mutual, marital bliss was the husband and wife team of Tyrannosaurus Rexes, bravely beating away at each other’s flanks with their mighty tails, swatting away the very last of the verminous minion hordes.
They flew on in silence. Nothing could have prepared them for the carnage they were witnessing. The world about them was a hell-ridden rendition of a Devil’s dream. There were now islands of flame where volcano Dragon homes had erupted, and it was by the light of these the children witnessed the continuing horrors of the battle of the Black Cavern.