Edge of Destiny

by J. Robert King

Eir handed out hardtack and jerky. “We’ll have to begin again tomorrow. We need rest.”

  Big Snaff arrived in much the same way as Big Zojja. The asura genius climbed from his cockpit and lay down with the others.

  “It’s going to get cold tonight,” Caithe said.

  “Cold?” Rytlock asked.

  “The desert gets cold at night. I wish we had something to burn.”

  “I’m burning,” the charr said. “Sit next to me, and you’ll be plenty warm.”

  The group didn’t say much more as the stars came out above them—millions of them. Their blue light seemed to drag the heat out of the sand. As night wore on, the companions shifted closer and closer together, sharing warmth.

  At the darkest corner of night, Rytlock drew Sohothin and laid it on the sand between them to keep them all warm.

  One by one, they dropped off to sleep.

  They were awakened by the first, knifelike rays of the sun as it pierced the eastern sky. All awoke then except Zojja, who was already standing, eyes closed and hands reaching out to sense the sanctum. “It’s right before us. Somewhere right here. In a grain of sand, but which?”

  Logan dug his hand into the grit. Sand drained through his fingers, falling in little piles. “A thousand thousand crystals, and one of them holds a sanctuary.”

  Snaff soberly watched the grains tumble. “Reminds me of poor old Sandy.” He suddenly struck his head. “Sandy! Of course!”

  “What?” asked Logan.

  “Sandy was made of billions of grains of sand—not one,” Snaff explained feverishly. “We could hide him in the arena because everyone could see him without even knowing it. It’s the same with the inner sanctum. It’s not in a single grain. It’s in all of them! Zojja was right—we’re in the middle of it! Just open your eyes!”

  As they all stared around them, the cloaking magic eroded.

  The sand moved—grains fusing to become crystals and crystals fusing to become gems and gems to become rods and columns and walls and colonnades. Diamond pillars rose all around them, and great archways formed to join them. The arches, too, expanded into a dome the color of the sapphire sky. Walls solidified between archways, and beneath them, the sand became a floor as smooth as glass.

  In moments, where there had been only trackless desert, there was now a gigantic sanctuary.

  “Weapons out, everyone!” Eir commanded as she nocked three shafts to her bow.

  Out came the other weapons—the fiery sword and the spinning hammer and the white-bladed stilettos. Snaff and Zojja scrambled up the legs of their golems and hastily buckled themselves in, powering up the massive machines.

  “We’re here,” Zojja whispered incredulously. She peered down one of the golden colonnades that led away from the central dome. “We’re in the sanctum of a dragon.”

  “And she’s here as well,” Eir warned, “somewhere.”

  The companions turned back-to-back, gazing out at the beautiful palace.

  On one side of the main dome was a crystalline tree. Its leaves were formed of emeralds that glowed with their own light. On the other side hung a huge spear of quartz, suspended above a pedestal. Its blade, too, seemed to glow from within. Each of the three great archways from the main dome led to a golden colonnade. Two of the colonnades extended to distant entrances, beyond which stretched the desert.

  But the third colonnade was dark.

  From it, an ancient voice emerged as dry as sand: “At your peril do you wake a dragon.”

  “Form up! On me!” Eir shouted as she drew back her bow and pointed the arrows toward the darkness.

  Garm posted himself before her, black hackles jutting and eyes blazing. Rytlock sidled up on Eir’s right and Logan on her left. Caithe took her place just behind Eir, ready with her daggers, and Big Snaff and Big Zojja lumbered up to either side of the group.

  The companions stood, ready to attack, but they couldn’t see the dragon—only claws the size of the asura and enormous eyes floating in the darkness.

  The beast spoke again, her ancient voice rattling through them. “I know why you have come.”

  “We’ve come to stop your master from rising,” Eir responded.

  A laugh answered, quiet but shaking the sanctuary: “You cannot stop it.”

  “But we can kill you!” Rytlock roared, charging with Sohothin raised.

  Suddenly, out of the darkness, crystalline scales and fangs and claws burst from the colonnade and smashed into Rytlock and his companions, hurling them down. Eir hadn’t even time to loose her arrows before the beast’s rocklike head struck her and Garm and threw them across the floor. Logan swung his hammer against the massive shoulder of the beast in the moment before it flung him to the floor. The dragon bashed against Big Zojja and Big Snaff, who toppled and crashed to their backs. Only Caithe escaped the dragon’s assault, flattening herself as the wyrm rushed by overhead.

  Destiny’s Edge skidded like toys across the floor.

  Gigantic wings grasped the air. Glint wheeled within her sanctuary and landed on the other side. Before her, the companions lay stunned and gasping. Glint towered over them. Her head was mantled in crystalline spikes, sharper than swords, and her body was a mass of muscle and scale. Each leg was as wide as a millennial oak, and each foot was tipped in razor claws. Most horrible of all were her wings—stretching from one side of the sanctum to the other.

  “Form up!” Eir shouted as she staggered to her feet.

  Her friends struggled to gather.

  Glint reared on her hind legs and roared. The sound solidified the air.

  The companions fell again.

  Only Eir remained standing, gripping her ears to block out the roar. As soon as the dragon’s shriek ended, Eir snagged three new arrows from her quiver and nocked them and drew back her bow. These were explosive charges, designed to pierce dragon armor. “You will not raise your master!”

  Glint’s eyes flashed fury, and her front legs pounded the floor. She stalked forward, claws scoring the marble at her feet. “I have no wish to raise him.”

  Eir’s hand didn’t waver, but neither did she shoot. “You can’t deceive me, serpent!”

  “I can’t—but a wretch from the Nightmare Court can?” asked Glint.

  Eir’s bow trembled as the dragon stalked toward her. “We kill dragon champions!”

  The dragon halted, gazing at the explosive arrows aimed at her eye. “Soon, you will get a chance to kill a true dragon.” With a sudden lash of her tail, she batted the bow and arrows away. They skidded out of reach.

  Eir’s hands trembled, numb, but she remained standing.

  “How little you remember,” growled Glint. “How little you know.”

  “We know who you are!”

  “Do you?” roared the dragon, rearing up and spreading her wings through the vault. “I am Glint, Keeper of the Flameseeker Prophecies, Protector of the Forgotten, Foe of the Lich Lord, and Downfall of the Titans! Three thousand years ago, I was set here as a guardian of the world. Three hundred years ago, I welcomed heroes such as yourselves, hailing them as the Chosen who would destroy the titans and save the world. But did they remember? Did not the very heroes that I sent return to battle me again? And now you come to slay me?”

  “Do you know who we are?” Eir shouted back. “We are Destiny’s Edge, Slayers of the Dragonspawn, Ruination of Morgus Lethe, Damnation of the Destroyer of Life. We have crippled Jormag and Zhaitan and Primordus in their very lairs, and we will not stand aside while you raise yet another Elder Dragon to ravage the world!”

  “I know who you are, Eir Stegalkin.” Glint dropped her foreclaws to the floor again and stared into Eir’s eyes. “I know the fight you have fought and the damage you have done to dragonkind. More, I know the fight that is ahead of you, and your vanishing hope of success.”

  “We will succeed!”

  “If you stand together, you will,” Glint said, watching as the other members of Destiny’s Edge straggled to gather around Eir. “All seven
of you, if you stand together—you can win.”

  Eir stared unblinking into the eye of the dragon while her comrades formed up around her. “Why would you tell us this?”

  “Because your battle is not against me. As before, I am your ally.”

  “You would help us stop the dragonrise?”

  “No one can stop it. But I will fight beside you against my master.”

  “Tell us his name!”

  The dragon’s massive eyes slowly slid closed, then opened again to focus on Eir. “His name is Kralkatorrik.”

  The name crackled through the air, as if it were crystallizing.

  “Why would you fight against your very master?”

  Glint nodded in thought and turned away. Her voice sounded ancient and hollow. “Long ago, I lived in a dragon-dominated world. I saw how they feasted on all flesh, on all minds, on all life. I saw how they ate until there was nothing left to eat, and then fell, sated. The darkness of those days slowly gave way to a new dawn—a bright world that did not remember the rapacious beasts. From that time to this, I have feared one of those sleeping dragons. My master, Kralkatorrik.

  “But three hundred years ago, the dragons’ bellies were empty, and their minds were awakening. Three hundred years ago, the sons of men fought me before they understood that I was their ally.”

  Eir’s brow furrowed. “Why would you ally with humans against your own kind?”

  The dragon’s great eyes went gray. “I can hear the thoughts of creatures. I am an oracle. I heard their plots against my master, stopped them before they reached him, killed them in their tracks. But I also felt their agony, their loss. It grieved me.

  “At first, for centuries, I defended my master. But I could hear his thoughts, too, and I knew that if he rose again, all good things would come to an end.” Glint blinked, staring at Eir. “Now is that time. Even now, Kralkatorrik is rising.”

  Eir gritted her teeth. “Then we will ally with you. Your master will rise to face Destiny’s Edge and a dragon such as himself!”

  Glint shook her head. “If you call me a dragon, you must call him a mountain. If you call me a monster, you must call him a god. Even as I fight beside you—and I will—we will be battling a hurricane.”

  “How can we battle a hurricane?” Eir echoed.

  Glint bared her fangs. “I will show you.”

  DRAGONRISE

  Tyria should have known. The signs of the dragonrise were everywhere:

  The earthquake that shook Rata Sum.

  The tidal wave that carried ships into the streets of Lion’s Arch.

  The geysers that erupted in the tundra beyond Hoelbrak.

  The pall that hung over the Black Citadel.

  Tyria had been wracked by such terrible birth pangs before.

  The people should have guessed that a dragon was rising.

  Ferroc Torchtail’s hackles rose. He didn’t like the look of that mountain—how it hulked there—spiky, scaly, massive . . . unnatural. He certainly didn’t like that his warband was marching toward it. He had a feeling of doom.

  The last time he’d felt this way, a landslide had buried his centurion.

  It had been a year earlier, when Centurion Korrak Blacksnout was marching his legion through a narrow defile in the Blazeridge Mountains. Ferroc was posted in the rear, the position of ignominy—far from the initial charge and the first kill and (as it turned out) the landslide that crushed the leaders. Blacksnout’s decapitated body was found on the other side of the landslide.

  In shame, Ferroc and the rest of his legion had returned to the Black Citadel. For months, they’d gotten the worst assignments.

  This one was no different: go investigate a strange mountain.

  Locals said the mountain was moving. They said it grew every night. It shook, it rumbled, it sent down landslides.

  Oh, good—landslides.

  Land was sliding even now. Boulders rolled end over end down the slope and leaped as their edges caught the mountainside. They trailed dust behind them.

  Ferroc’s warband was marching to fight what—boulders?

  “Why are we still heading toward it?” Ferroc wondered aloud.

  Legionnaire Kulbrok Torchfist sneered over his shoulder, “To find out!”

  “Find out what?” Ferroc asked. “How it feels to be crushed by a twelve-ton boulder?”

  “To find out why the mountain is rumbling.”

  “Why do mountains rumble?” Ferroc mused, ticking off possibilities on his claws. “Maybe they’re volcanoes. Maybe they’re fault lines. These are reasons to march away.”

  Kulbrok cast a piercing look at him. “We’re charr. We march toward such things.”

  Ferroc nodded. “Yessir.” But he let his pace slow ever so slightly, allowing Kulbrok to stride out ahead and the other charr to sift past. He was going to end up in the rear of the column again. The place of ignominy.

  The place of survival.

  “Aha! There’s something to fight!” shouted Kulbrok, a good fifty yards ahead by now. He lifted a great sword and pointed toward a crack in the side of the mountain.

  The crack was bleeding—not blood, but creatures. A big, fat Gila monster waddled from the crack, only to get bigger as it emerged. Now the size of a crocodile, now the size of a marmox, now the size of an elephant—why was it getting bigger? And beside the giant Gila monster scuttled a horned lizard. It, too, was growing. Its scabrous skin swelled outward, and its eerie face grew larger and stranger, and its blood-spitting eyes became crystal-shooting eyes.

  They were no longer creatures of skin and scale. They now were crystalline monsters. Jagged spikes jutted out all around their heads and all down their backs and sprouted from their gigantic tails.

  “Does anybody else see those things?” Ferroc asked.

  “Charge!” Kulbrok replied.

  The centurion bolted ahead, followed by his lead warband. Swords darted up and down in their pumping fists.

  Ahead, the horned lizard reared up. Crystals shot from its eyes and hailed across Kulbrok and his warband. Many fell, but others ran on. Kulbrok crashed against the raised muzzle of the beast and fell beneath it. Throat spikes gored him. A few warriors rammed swords into the horned lizard, but the blades clanged off its stony flesh. The lizard whipped its spiked head from side to side, impaling the charr.

  “Didn’t anyone else see that thing?” Ferroc repeated emptily.

  Other charr attacked the giant Gila monster—with a worse outcome. It waited for them to strike, ducked back, then lunged to snap them up like so many beetles. Poisonous teeth clamped down on bodies and bones, armor and weapons. With horrid gulps, the giant Gila monster swallowed warrior after warrior.

  “Charge!” shouted Legionnaire Longtooth, leading another warband toward the monsters.

  But they no longer faced just a horned lizard and a Gila monster. Now vast snakes emerged from the cleft—king rattlers wider than a charr and longer than a warband. They, too, had rocklike bodies and bad tempers.

  They ate Longtooth and his soldiers.

  Ferroc had slowed to a halt, marching in place. At least he wasn’t backing up—a fact that changed when he realized that giant horned lizards and Gila monsters and rattlesnakes were nowhere near as terrifying as whatever would create giant horned lizards and Gila monsters and rattlesnakes.

  Who cared what came out of the cleft? What was coming out of the mountain?

  The witnesses had been right. The mountain was moving, shifting, growing.

  One of the foothills shuddered. Gravel and sand sifted down its side, revealing rows of horns. Beneath one curve—a curve that looked suspiciously like a giant eyebrow—opened something that looked suspiciously like a giant eye. More rocks shifted, and another eye appeared, surrounded by horns.

  “Do you see what that thing is?” Ferroc shouted.

  “Attack!” commanded another charr, charging up the hill. A dozen warriors followed.

  Before they reached the thing, an enormous snout s
huddered up out of the mountainside and bared great fangs. Fire bloomed out of the mouth, engulfing the charr.

  As the horrible breath poured over them, they solidified like statues.

  By all rights, the charr warriors should have died, but they were still moving—twisting, becoming something different. Fur became scales, hackles became spines, and everything seemed made of crystal. They no longer looked like charr, but like . . . giant stone monsters. And they turned around and stalked toward the remaining warbands.

  Ferroc was unabashedly backing away now. Whatever was happening on this strange mountain, it was beyond him.

  Then the titanic head broke free of the mountainside and rose on a muscular neck. The neck looked as if it would stretch from one end of the Black Citadel to the other. It was rooted in powerful shoulders of stone, and wing nubs, and actual wings. With an earthquake, the gigantic wings cracked free of the encasing ground and rose ponderously into the air. Those wings stretched to the unseeable distance on either side of the mountain.

  They blocked out the sun.

  Across the ridge, spikes of stone flexed slowly.

  Rocks sloughed from scaly ribs.

  Talons cracked out of bedrock.

  The dragon rose from the mountain.

  It was the biggest living thing Ferroc had ever seen. It was the mountain—a thousand feet high with a wingspan that shadowed the world.

  The dragon inhaled its first breath in millennia and then released it in a titanic shriek.

  The sound crossed all registers, pounding Ferroc’s chest and hurling him back. He hit the ground, his ears bleeding. He tried to scream, but no air was left in him.

  The sky had no room for another scream.

  Then it all went silent.

  Ferroc staggered to his feet and looked up.

  The dragon was spreading its crystalline wings. They became the sky. Sinews flexed, and bones folded, and miles of wing gathered the air. A sandstorm roared out. It struck Ferroc and hurled him across the wastelands. He crashed to the ground—how strange not to hear the sound of it!—and felt his bones break.

  He was going to die.

  An Elder Dragon—a creature of legend that Ferroc had never thought to see with his own eyes—was rising above him.