by James Wyatt
“What in the Realm of Madness do you think you’re doing?” Haldren, looking scorched from the lightning blast but keeping his feet, barred their way now, giving voice to Gaven’s thoughts. But he was addressing Cart. “Do your duty, soldier!”
“I am,” Cart growled. He ran at the Lord General, his metal-plated feet clanking against the steel floor, lifting his axe above his head. The fibers and cords in his joints creaked and stretched with his effort as he buried the axe head deep in Haldren’s shoulder, shattering bone and cleaving flesh.
Gaven watched entranced as blood flecked the cracked lips he had seen through their prison doors so many times. Cart, too, seemed momentarily fascinated, or perhaps appalled by what he had done. Then they were running again, and Gaven leaped over Haldren’s body as the life spilled out of it, ran ahead as soldiers scattered out of his path.
A shadow passed over him, and then the dragon-king blocked his path. Black fire burned in the dragon’s mouth, and his bony wings spread as wide and high as the walls of the forge would allow.
Gaven would not back down. He heard Cart behind him, ready to fight—a hero in his own right, finally seizing his destiny. Together, they could escape, against all odds. Gaven raised his hands to the sky, and lightning crackled down from the metal ceiling to flow into him. He glowed like a shining white beacon in the red light of the Dragon Forge. Then he lowered his arms to point at the dragon-king.
The roar of thunder was deafening and the lightning burned its path into his eyes. Malathar reared up with the force of the blast, writhing as lightning danced along the edges of every bone, sparked in the runes carved into his ribs, and doused the black fire in his mouth. His forelimbs fell back to the ground, and for a moment Gaven thought they would collapse under him, but the dragon-king fell into a crouch instead, ready to pounce.
“I am Malathar the Damned,” he said. “Even you cannot stand before me, Storm Dragon.”
Storm Dragon! The dragon-king recognized him as the figure of Prophecy, and still thought to face him in battle? Wind whipped around Gaven as he drew breath for another lightning blast.
Malathar breathed first, crackling black flame engulfing Gaven, searing his skin and sapping his strength still more. It was the excruciating pain of his dream, wracking his body and bringing him to his knees. Suddenly Gaven saw the dragon-king for what he was—one of the most ancient creatures in the world, preserved beyond even the tremendous natural lifespan of a dragon for what might have been hundreds or even thousands of years. Inconceivable power was bound to his blackened bones.
The pain ebbed, and Gaven somehow found strength to regain his feet. He glanced back at Cart—
Just in time to see Phaine d’Thuranni slide his blade out of Cart’s back. Cart dropped to his knees, his eyes on Gaven, but the spark had already gone out of him. He fell forward, onto his face, and was still.
In Gaven’s moment of shock, a bony claw coiled around him again, pinning his arms to his sides and lifting him off the floor. The dragon’s touch was icy cold, and Gaven’s strength and will drained out of him as Malathar carried him back to the far side of the forge.
PART
IV
Thunder is his harbinger and lightning his spear.
Wind is his steed and rain his cloak.
The words of creation are in his ears and on his tongue.
The secrets of the first of sixteen are his.
At the dawn of the Dragon Above he rises, and lays claim to what belongs to him.
The blood of the evening sky is his, joining day to night, what is above to what is below.
In twilight he becomes a pilgrim, seeking what he has lost, what lies beyond his grasp.
His storm flies wild, unbound and pure in devastation, going before the traitor’s army to break upon the city by the lake of kings.
In the darkest night of the Dragon Below, storm and dragon are reunited, and they break together upon the legions of the Blasphemer.
The maelstrom swirls around him.
He is the storm and the eye of the storm.
His is the new dawn.
In him the storm cannot die.
CHAPTER
35
Aunn. He decided to use his real name, even if he wasn’t prepared to show his true face or admit his nature. It felt strange—like his name alone was a secret and revealing it would make him vulnerable. But he was willing to expose that one weakness, at least, as a sign of the new life he intended to begin.
He emerged from the tunnel and felt a strange air in the Labyrinth. There was … an expectancy about it, a sense that the Labyrinth itself was waiting for the hordes of Kathrik Mel to pass through it. It did not feel malevolent but eager, welcoming. It took Aunn hungrily in and wanted more. He couldn’t help hurrying along, stumbling as though the ground were pushing him onward.
Left at every branch.
Farren’s instructions were easy enough. Still, as Aunn wound his way through the canyons, he felt like he was going around in circles, though it might have been an ever-widening spiral. Always left. Farren had not said how far he would have to travel—the vague word “soon” might have meant a few hours, but as he spiraled always to the left he suspected it might have meant a day, maybe two. There could be no sense of progress, no idea that the mountains might be nearby or that he was getting at all closer.
He rounded a bend, chose another left branch, and came up short. Rubble blocked his way, the result of a landslide—a recent one, it seemed, for smaller rocks still tumbled down the pile. Panic seized him. If he couldn’t follow Farren’s directions, he wasn’t sure he could find his way out of the Labyrinth. Perhaps he could scramble over the rubble and continue on the other side? He hurried forward, but the ground seemed to buckle beneath him, sending him sprawling on his face.
When he looked up, he saw a pair of booted feet before him. There had been no warning sound of crunching gravel—the figure must have just appeared. Half-expecting another visitation of the Traveler, he scrambled back and looked up at the man’s face.
The man was tall, and he held himself proud and strong like a nobleman. His dark hair was cut short and sprinkled with gray at the temples. His warm brown eyes looked at Aunn, and Aunn realized that he was looking at his own new face. He had never seen it in a mirror, but the eyes—
The eyes were wrong, or at least they were not as Aunn had envisioned them when he sketched them in. Had he done them wrong? There was a hardness to them, an edge of cruelty. No, that would have to change.
“Who are you?” the vision asked—the Traveler’s eternal question of him.
This time he had an answer, one he would stand by. “I am Aunn.”
The man’s warmth vanished into anger as he took in Aunn’s face. “You’ve stolen my face! You’re a fiend of the Wastes!”
This was no vision of the Traveler. Was it possible Aunn had given himself a copy of this man’s face without ever having seen him? Or had he seen this man before? His thoughts felt muddy. He couldn’t remember. Even the strange man’s clothes and armor were identical to his—it didn’t make sense.
The strange man roared in fury and ran at Aunn, his hands raised like claws before him. A vision flashed into Aunn’s mind—a monster like a horned bear, fire in its eyes, a gaze that was fixed on him as it rushed toward him. He felt again the freezing cold of Frostburn Cut, the icy grip of fear he’d felt when he saw this monster before.
“We are in the Demon Wastes now,” Vor said. “Do not trust your senses.”
The man had become the bear-thing, massive claws raised to tear Aunn to shreds. An instant before those claws reached his throat, he brought his mace up and smashed it into the monster’s face, knocking it aside. It sprawled against the canyon wall, changing back into a human form as it fell and rolled. Aunn followed it, raising his weapon.
The man chuckled and turned his face to Aunn. It was Vor’s face now. “Well done, Kauth,” he said. “You penetrated my disguises.”
Aunn
stopped short and nearly dropped his mace. It couldn’t be Vor, but how did it know Kauth’s name? How did it recognize him as Kauth? Was this the Traveler after all?
“You tried to lead me to my death,” Vor said, his chuckle turning into a snarl. “If you had but known the extent of my power …”
“No,” Aunn said. “I saw you dead. You’re not Vor.”
“You’re right,” Vor said, and his face melted away. Dania stood before him.
It was a nightmare, just like the fevered dreams of his illness, but Aunn was sure he was not sleeping. “What are you? Kalok Shash—the Silver Flame? Incarnate in the paladins—”
Dania roared, and the beast’s massive paw slashed across Aunn’s face, knocking him to the ground. “Paladins? Me and Vor? Not at all, Auftane, not at all.”
“There was holiness in you both. So much good.”
“Evil can wear the guise of good when the need arises.”
“Evil—you—you’re the fiend of the Wastes … You’re dredging my memories!”
“Perhaps I am a fiend,” Kelas said, “but does it follow that I am not also Dania, and Vor, and Kelas? Think about it, Haunderk. I’ve been with you all this time. I have guided you all your life. I’ve made you what you are.”
Aunn cowered on the ground, terrified that what Kelas said might be true. Kelas could be an incarnation of evil. He was capable of such cruelty. But could he have been Dania? Vor? No, it couldn’t be—
“Where did I fail, Haunderk?” Kelas loomed over him, powerful and intimidating. Aunn cringed, awaiting the inevitable slap or kick. “What flaw in your education allowed this … this conscience to take root in you?”
Conscience.
Kelas said the word like it was the name of the most loathsome, despicable creature he could imagine. And Aunn remembered exactly how it had come about. He stood up, face to face with Kelas.
“You did fail,” he said. “You taught me detachment, taught me not to love. But you didn’t teach me not to care. You made me hate you, and you never punished me for hating you. Hatred is just as strong as love, Kelas, and my hatred for you is my greatest strength. Because I hate you, I care—and because I care, I learned to love.”
Kelas laughed—a low chuckle that grew into a great, booming laughter that echoed in the canyon. “Then you have learned to fail,” he said, his face suddenly grim.
Then the bear-beast leaped at Aunn again, knocking him to the ground. With its massive paws pinning him down, its fiery eyes met his gaze. As it spoke, droplets of spittle fell on his face and seared his skin. “I am everything you’ve ever cared about. Except for Kelas, it’s all been a sham. My evil is the only thing that’s ever been real in your life, changeling.”
Despair sank into Aunn’s chest like the weight of the fiend’s paws, and he waited for its teeth to close around his neck. Instead, it brought its mouth close to Aunn’s and drew a deep breath.
Aunn’s lungs screamed their protest as the demon sucked every last scrap of air out of them and still continued its inhalation. His vision swam, and darkness closed in at the edges. The paws lifted off his chest and Aunn felt his body rise off the ground with the force of the monster’s breath. He closed his eyes.
He was a husk, left with nothing inside him but his despair. Kelas had been manipulating and controlling him his entire life, and Kelas was an incarnation of evil. Everything else had been a lie—Dania, Vor, and Farren. The ideals of the paladin that had seemed so virtuous, they were nothing but a quick path to a noble death. And now his own death, hardly so noble, was upon him. Kalok Shash would not burn brighter, he felt sure. If it existed at all, it would soon be extinguished.
In the midst of the blackness, Dania lay atop him as she had in his fevered dream. She moved against him, smiled at him, and asked, “Why do you resist me?”
“I can’t anymore,” he said. “Take me.”
A blast of white fire shattered the darkness, and air poured into Aunn’s lungs. Hope seeped back into his heart as well, and as his eyes regained their normal vision he saw the bear-thing scrabbling at the ground, trying to get its feet under it again. When it did, it vanished from sight, and a moment later Aunn felt its absence.
But there was still a presence with him, a presence that had taken root in his soul and flowered at last into that burst of fire. It was Dania’s smile and Vor’s courage, Rienne’s care and Gaven’s fierce power. It was a flame burning against all the world’s darkness, a purifying fire.
Who are you?
He knew, with every last spark of his soul he knew. He smiled and answered, “I am Aunn.”
Then he climbed up and over the rubble that had blocked his path.
The Demon Wastes lay behind him and the Shadowcrags rose up ahead. Aunn turned for a last look back. The Labyrinth had not changed since his first view of it—an endless maze of winding canyons, scorched as if by the acidic touch of corruption, all spread out beneath a blood red sky. But it felt different. He had approached it with dread, afraid of losing his soul. But he looked back on it with a strange mixture of grief and … something else, something that was hard to name. He lost Vor there. He led Sevren and Zandar to their deaths. He helped kill Durrnak and the orcs under his command, and finally left all of Maruk Dar to the hands of the Carrion Tribes. That grief and remorse might have overwhelmed him, except that he had gained something as well. Vor had warned him to abandon hope, but instead he had gained a shred of hope.
A thin plume of smoke to the right caught his eye, and he wondered whether it was a sign of Maruk Dar’s fate. As he watched, more plumes arose, and more, until they were joined into a great billowing cloud of black smoke rising up and spreading out to cast a deeper pall over the whole Labyrinth.
Maruk Dar is burning, Aunn thought. I should have been there to die in its defense.
He fell to his knees and watched the smoke and occasional flashes of fire rising above the canyon walls. He thought of Farren, probably one of the first to die as he tried to shield the city from the onrushing hordes. He thought of Dakar and the woman with him, and the other Carrion Tribe “converts” among the Ghaash’kala. They, too, were probably early victims, sought out for special punishment by those they had deserted. Or perhaps they turned on the Ghaash’kala, hoping to redeem themselves and rejoin the winning side in the conflict. And what of young Ghaarat, who had just sworn his vow to defend the Labyrinth? How long would a boy last in battle against the Carrion Tribes, even a boy of the Ghaash’kala?
Farren had allowed him to escape the sack of Maruk Dar. Farren had ensured that he would be alive at that moment, able to look back on the billowing smoke that told of the city’s destruction. Farren had broken his vow and allowed Aunn to escape the Labyrinth, and for one purpose: to warn the people of the east, of the Eldeen Reaches and perhaps Aundair and Breland. The Carrion Tribes were on the march, their sights set on the cities of the east, and it fell on him to try to stop them.
Aunn felt the weight of that burden as he lurched to his feet. He gave one last look toward Maruk Dar and said, “Kalok Shash burns brighter.” Then he turned his back on the city and set off to find his way back into the Shadowcrags.
CHAPTER
36
Gaven was barely aware of guards putting new chains on his wrists and removing the ones that had bound his hands together. Winches rattled on either side, and the chains pulled his arms up and out, then harder until his shoulders burned with pain. The pain jolted him from his stupor.
Kelas stood before him. “Storm Dragon,” he said, snarling with contempt. He reached up and ran a fingertip across the dragonmark at Gaven’s neck. “Will the storm still obey you after this? I wonder.”
He turned away, reaching into his coat, and produced a dragonshard larger than his fist, at least the size of the Eye of Siberys. Its substance was light red, and a swirl of blood coiled in its heart—an Eberron shard. Kelas set the stone into a fine gold setting, and adjusted an array of fine metal arms around it, cradling it aloft and apa
rt from the rest of the forge’s workings.
“The Dragon Forge is a refinery, of sorts,” Kelas said, satisfaction in his voice. “It’s made to separate gold from dross.”
“To purify the touch of Siberys’s hand,” Malathar whispered behind him, “by removing it from the tainted flesh on which it is written.”
Gaven gazed at the dragonshard with growing horror. Eberron shards were often used to contain magic—wizards recorded spells in them or attuned them to specific spells to make wands or even the relatively mundane everbright lanterns. Could it contain his dragonmark?
Kelas placed his hands on a golden orb below the dragon-shard and gasped as silver flame leaped out from the orb to engulf his hands. He trembled with what might have been torment or ecstasy, his eyes rolled back in his head, and the dragonshard flared with crimson light.
The light washed over Gaven, searing into his dragonmark, and then the pain struck him.
The worst of it was over. The chains binding his wrists held Gaven as he hung, limp and drained. His skin still burned where his dragonmark had been, blood oozing from the raw skin it had left behind. The manacles bit into his wrists, and he lacked the strength to find his feet and take the weight off his arms. He could barely lift his head to look around.
Kelas cackled with delight as he lifted the enormous dragon-shard from its golden setting and gazed into its depths.
“It’s here!” he crowed. “The dragonmark is perfectly preserved within the shard!”
Gaven could just make it out. What had been a mostly formless swirl of darker red within the pinkish stone had taken on a definite shape, but he did not recognize it as his mark. Then Kelas turned it slightly in his hands, and Gaven gaped. There they were—the familiar lines of his dragonmark, the Siberys Mark of Storm. There was a depth to the mark in the stone, so it changed when viewed from different angles. Kelas moved it again, and Gaven caught a fleeting glimpse of another shape before Kelas turned away, blocking his view. There was meaning in the depth of the mark, Gaven was certain. Through a haze of pain and weakness, a knot of resolve formed in his gut—he had to get that dragonshard, to untangle the Prophecy he’d carried on his skin.
