Edge of Destiny
Page 1
T he moment before the
axe-rifles fired, Logan Thackeray
swept his hand out in a fan.
A blue aura bled from his fingertips into the air, solidifying it in a curved wall before the scouts.
“Fire!” the charr centurion roared.
The axe-rifles boomed and vomited smoke and lead. But the shots struck the ethereal membrane and sank into it and were eaten away. Bullets showered rust to the ground.
The leader of the charr stared, his jaw dropping. “You’re full of surprises!”
“I’m Logan Thackeray. I protect those who are mine.”
“I’m Rytlock Brimstone,” the charr shot back. “I kill those who aren’t.”
“I recognize your blade. Did you say Rurik Brimstone?”
“Rytlock,” the charr snarled.
Logan shrugged. “I just figured since you stole Prince Rurik’s sword, you probably also stole his name.”
Rytlock lashed the air with the burning blade. “The sword’s mine now.”
“After this fight,” Logan said, whirling his war hammer in a figure eight, “Sohothin will once again be in the hands of a human.”
“During this fight,” Rytlock spat, “Sohothin will once again be in the guts of a human.” He looked back at the charr around him. “Turn those damned rifles around and chop them to pieces!”
ALSO AVAILABLE IN THE
GUILD WARS NOVEL SERIES
Ghosts of Ascalon
Matt Forbeck and Jeff Grubb
Pocket Star Books
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by ArenaNet, Inc. All Rights Reserved. NCsoft, the interlocking NC logo, ArenaNet, Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, Ghosts of Ascalon, Edge of Destiny, and all associated logos and designs are trademarkes or registered trademarks of NCsoft Corporation.
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First Pocket Star Books paperback edition January 2011
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Cover art by Kekai Kotaki
Cover design by AJ Thompson
Map cartography by Robert Lazzaretti
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 978-1-4165-8960-0
ISBN 978-1-4391-5604-9 (ebook)
To Eli, the ardent player;
To Aidan, the ardent listener; and
To Gabe, who named his hamster Rytlock
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to everyone at ArenaNet, especially Will McDermott, Ree Soesbee, Jeff Grubb, James Phinney, Randy Price, Stephen Hwang, Colin Johanson, David Wilson, and Bobby Stein. A special thanks to Jeff Strain, Patrick Wyatt, and Mike O’Brien, the founders of ArenaNet and creators of Guild Wars.
Thanks also to Pocket Books and Ed Schlesinger, and to fellow authors Matt Forbeck and Jeff Grubb.
And thanks especially to Jennie and the boys, for putting up with me as I fight dragons.
Time Line
10,000 BE: Last of the Giganticus Lupicus, the Great Giants, disappear from the Tyrian continent.
205 BE: Humans appear on the Tyrian continent.
100 BE: Humans drive the charr out of Ascalon.
1 BE: The Human Gods give magic to the races of Tyria.
0 AE: The Exodus of the Human Gods.
2 AE: Orr becomes an independent nation.
300 AE: Kryta established as a colony of Elona.
358 AE: Kryta becomes an independent nation.
898 AE: The Great Northern Wall is erected.
1070 AE: The Charr Invasion of Ascalon. The Searing.
1071 AE: The Sinking of Orr.
1072 AE: Ascalonian refugees flee to Kryta.
1075 AE: Kormir ascends into godhood.
1078 AE: Primordus, the Elder Fire Dragon, stirs but does not awaken. The asura appear on the surface. The Transformation of the Dwarves.
1080 AE: King Adelbern of Ascalon recalls the Ebon Vanguard; Ebonhawke is established.
1088 AE: Kryta unifies behind Queen Salma.
1090 AE: The charr legions take Ascalon City. The Foefire.
1105 AE: Durmand Priory is established in the Shiverpeaks.
1112 AE: The charr erect the Black Citadel over the ruins of the city of Rin in Ascalon.
1116 AE: Kalla Scorchrazor leads the rebellion against the Flame Legion’s shaman caste.
1120 AE: Primordus awakens.
1165 AE: Jormag, the Elder Ice Dragon, awakens. The norn flee south into the Shiverpeaks.
1180 AE: The centaur prophet Ventari dies by the Pale Tree, leaving behind the Ventari Tablet.
1219 AE: Zhaitan, the Elder Undead Dragon, awakens. Orr rises from the sea. Lion’s Arch floods.
1220 AE: Divinity’s Reach is founded in the Krytan province of Shaemoor.
1230 AE: Corsairs and other pirates occupy the slowly drying ruins of Lion’s Arch.
1302 AE: The sylvari first appear along the Tarnished Coast, sprouting from the Pale Tree.
1319 AE: Eir Stegalkin forms a band of heroes known as Destiny’s Edge.
EDGE OF
DESTINY
Prologue
DREAM AND NIGHTMARE
The flames were beautiful. They looked like autumn leaves—red and gold, rattling as the wind tore through them, breaking free and whirling into the sky.
The village was flying away. Thatch and wattle and rafters all were going up in ash.
Caithe watched the village and the villagers burn.
She was too late. Everything was fire.
Still, it was beautiful.
Caithe, sylvari of the Firstborn, dropped down from the boulder where she had crouched and stalked slowly into the burning village. Like all of her people, Caithe was slender and lithe, the child of a great tree in a sacred grove. She was one with the natural world. Even her travel leathers bore the vine motifs of her homeland. Caithe pushed silvery hair back from wide eyes, watching for signs of life in the burning village. Only the flames lived. She listened for voices, but only the fire spoke.
Caithe didn’t fear the fire. She was young and strong, voracious and indomitable and curious—just like fire. It had drawn her here. It was interesting.
Who had started it? How? Why? What had this village been called?
“I love a bonfire,” came a voice—deep and dark, feminine and familiar.
Caithe turned to see a sylvari woman garbed in a black-orchid gown as if this were some fancy ball. Caithe’s eyes narrowed. “What are you doing here, Faolain?”
Faolain gave the suffering smile of an addict. “The fires drew me.”
“A moth to a flame.”
“Just like you.”
In fact, Faolain and Caithe were nothing alike. Faolain’s hair was jet-black, as were her nails and her eyes. They had been that way from the moment the two women emerged together from the Pale Tree. Faolain had been all about questions, and Caithe had been all about answers. They were dear to each other an
d set out together to explore the world. But Caithe’s spirit had grown straight and true like a young tree while Faolain’s had grown twisted like a poison-ivy vine.
“Did you set this fire?” Caithe asked.
Faolain threw back her shock of black hair and breathed smoke through flared nostrils. “A nice idea, but no. It was destroyers—magma monsters.”
Caithe shook her head grimly. “They boil up everywhere.”
“The Elder Dragon Primordus is taking back the world.”
A loud moan came from a burning barn nearby. Caithe rushed to the door, hauled it open, and stared within. The hayloft boiled with black smoke, and the threshing floor was mantled in fire. Against the far wall lay a blackened figure that could hardly have been alive—except that it moaned.
Caithe wove among the flames to reach the man and dropped to her knees. His eyes were gone, his face, too—just cracked bark over oozy muscle. His lips were half-fused. “Burning beast . . . burning beast . . . burning . . .”
“I will help you,” Caithe said.
“Such sweet words,” Faolain whispered, kneeling on the other side of the man. “Hope is like oil on the fires of misery.”
“Is my skin peeled off?” the man groaned. “Is it?”
“Yes,” Caithe said gently.
Faolain laughed. “Oh, you’re cruel.”
“They came from underground,” he muttered. “They scrambled up. Roaches. Black, with bodies of fire—”
“Destroyers,” Faolain said.
“We’ll get you to a chirurgeon.”
“Chirurgeon?” Faolain gripped Caithe’s arm and grinned. “You’re doing this for me, aren’t you?”
“What? No! It’s for him.”
“He’s dead already. You’re only tormenting him for my sake.”
“No! I’m not.”
Faolain’s eyes blazed. “You want me to feel for him. You want me to feel empathy.”
“No!” Caithe said. “I mean, yes, of course.”
“Help me!” the man sputtered, his lip splitting.
“I will,” Caithe said.
Faolain’s eyes slid closed, and her jaw clenched. “You can’t win me back.”
“I’m not trying to win you back.”
“Come with me, Caithe. Join the Nightmare Court.”
“I’m saving him!” Caithe yelled, reaching beneath the blackened figure and hoisting him from the floor. Caithe strode toward the barn doors.
But Faolain rose in her path and set her hand on Caithe’s chest. The touch of her palm blazed like fire. Then a different sort of heat bloomed across Caithe’s chest. She pulled back to see the farmer’s throat fountaining, severed by Faolain’s dagger.
“What?” Caithe cried, staggering back and falling to her knees. “You killed him?”
“I released him. Come with me.”
“I will never turn to Nightmare.”
Faolain’s eyes flashed. “My touch—and the sacrifice of this man—have awakened darkness in you.” She turned away. “You will be mine again soon.”
PART I
GATHERING HEROES
FOOLS AND FOLLOWERS
Don’t move!”
The huge wolf snapped his head upright, eyes blazing.
“Stay exactly like that.”
No one else in the world could order Garm to sit still. He was, after all, a dire wolf—five feet tall at the shoulder and twenty stone, with jet-black hackles and fire-red eyes. He was made to lope and chase and drag down. Not to sit still. Not to listen. But he did.
For Eir Stegalkin, he did.
Garm flicked a glance toward the norn warrior. She was tall, too, her hand rising to the rafters twelve feet up and snagging a mallet that hung there and bringing the thing down in her brawny grip. Her eyes darted toward Garm, who glanced forward again and tried to look fierce.
It wasn’t that he feared this woman and her big hammer, which she swung just then with terrific force, pounding a massive chisel and striking a wedge of granite from a huge block. Garm hazarded a look at that block, amorphous and pitted from chisel strokes. Soon, it would be a statue. A statue of him. But that wasn’t why he sat still.
He sat still because she was the alpha.
The mallet fell again, the chisel bit, the block calved. More chunks of stone crashed to the floor, first in wedges and then shards and chips and finally a shower of grit.
Garm’s figure was taking shape.
Eir stepped back from the sculpture and dragged an arm over her sweating brow. Her face was statuesque, her eyes moss green. She had drawn her mane of red hair back out of the way, bound by a leather thong. The leather work-apron she wore freed her arms but protected her chest and legs against stone shards. An intense look grew on her face, eyes etching out the shape in the stone. “This could be my masterpiece.”
Garm looked around the log-hewn workshop at her other sculptures—a rearing ice-bear, a great elk with sixteen-foot antlers, a coiling snow serpent that stretched from floor to rafters, and of course her army of norn warriors captured in stone and wood. They hadn’t started out as an army, but individuals who had come to be immortalized before going off to fight the Dragonspawn—the champion of the Elder Dragon Jormag.
Now only their statues remained.
“Hail, house of Stegalkin!” came a shout at the door. A norn warrior thrust his head in—long hair like a horse’s tail and a face like what might be beneath. “By the Bear, the place is packed!”
Someone behind the man hissed, thumping his shoulder, “Them’s statues!”
The warrior in the lead nodded, his hair flicking as if to shoo flies. “Course they are. Statues. That’s why we’re here.” He paused to hiccup. “Soon, one of them will be me. I mean, I’ll be one of them. I mean, I’ll get my own. By the Raven, you brew it strong, Uri.”
Eir stood there unmoving except for the vein that pulsed in her temple. “Patrons.” With mallet and chisel in hand, she strode toward the door.
Garm broke from his pose to lope at her heels.
The man in the doorway nearly stumbled off the threshold.
Eir said, “You have come full of . . . courage, but it smells of hops.”
“Yes!” the man enthused, glancing back at a group of twenty or so norn warriors swaying in the courtyard. “I am Sjord Frostfist.”
“Sjord Foamfist?” she mispronounced, raising an eyebrow.
“Exactly. And I have come by Snow Leopard and Raven and Bear—by every living beast—to declare war on the Dragonspawn!”
Eir nodded. “You’ve come to the wrong place. I am not the Dragonspawn.”
Sjord laughed. “Of course you aren’t. You are norn, like me.”
“Not quite like you.”
“No! Of course not,” Sjord said, suddenly earnest. “You’re an artist. While I carve up monsters, you carve up rocks.”
The warriors laughed.
Eir’s fist flexed around the mallet handle as if she were about to carve Sjord himself.
“No offense meant, of course. Somebody has to make statues of us.”
Garm looked to his master, wondering why she didn’t just kill the man. She could. This man and all the others. Or Garm could. With just a word from her, he would tear the man’s throat out, but Eir never gave the word.
“You want a statue in your image.”
Sjord put his finger to his nose, indicating that she understood exactly.
“Pick any you wish,” she said, gesturing to the statues behind her. “Brave young fools just like you, who gathered at the moot and drank and decided to save the world. I’ve met you before, a hundred times. Each of these men went to fight the Dragonspawn.”
Sjord’s grin only widened. “Then we understand each other.” He thrust a bag of coins into her hand.
Eir stared levelly at him. “Take your money. Go rent a room. Go lie down and sleep. You cannot defeat the Dragonspawn.”
Sjord stepped back, affronted, and the warriors behind him raised their eyebrows. “Y
ou are saying we should give up? You are saying that our people should get used to fleeing our homelands? Why do you oppose a man who would fight our foe?”
“I do not oppose you. I warn you.”
“Warn me of what?”
“You cannot defeat the Dragonspawn. You will go to fight him but will end up fighting for him.”
Sjord shook his head. “I will fight him and kill him, and you will commemorate what I do. There is your payment.”
Eir slipped open the drawstring. The bag held a small fortune in silver. She sighed. “Come, Sjord Frostfist. Let us select the block of wood that will be your memorial.”
“Monument,” he corrected. “And, it will be stone, not wood.”
“Silver buys wood. Gold buys stone.”
Sjord scowled, hanging his head. “Wood, then.”
Eir pressed past him and strode into the courtyard, with Garm loping behind. “Fir is better than stone, anyway,” she said, passing a row of blocks and boles along one wall. “Fir is alive. It grows out of stone. Its roots break the stone into sand.”
“Yes,” Sjord said, the hopeless twinkle returning to his eyes. “Which of these great boles will become my statue?”
“This one.” Eir stopped beside a fir trunk three feet wide and ten feet tall. “This one will immortalize you.”
Sjord stared at it as if he could see his own figure trapped in the wood. He slowly nodded. “Good, then. Carve me.”
Eir nodded grimly, hoisting the huge bole and planting it on the ground in the center of the courtyard. “You, stand over there.”
Sjord moved into position and gestured excitedly to his comrades, who gathered around, quaffing from their flagons.
“Don’t move!” she ordered.
Sjord snapped his head up, trying to look ferocious.
Garm sympathized.
As the man posed, Eir returned to her workshop. A few moments later, she emerged, wearing a carving belt filled with dozens of blades, from axes and hatchets to knives and chisels. The band of warriors gazed in awe as Eir strode up before the fir bole.