Veil of the Dragon (Prophecy of the Evarun)

by Tom Barczak

  Michalas sloughed listless into her arms. His eyes weighted back into his head. His breathing fluttered.

  Al-Mariam felt the sharp sting of detritus. Her cloak flew about her. Winds buffeted. Then, as quick as it had come, the sudden wind died. Black mist wrapped about her feet.

  Al-Thinneas cried out. He looked past her, his eyes opened wide. He set Al-Aaron down to rest beside the two who had been raised from the wells of the cenotaphs. Al-Thinneas’ Gossamer Blade flew into his hand.

  Al-Hoanar readied his own blade as well, such as he could within the grip of his shattered arm. Beside him, Obidae murmured a chant beneath his lips, his spears held loose within his hands.

  Tendrils of not mist but thick, acrid smoke spiraled up amongst the Khaalish encircling them. Their ghost-scribed faces washed pale with their fear of it. They waved at it and stabbed at it with their spears, but it was smoke and ether and it laced up between them, wrapping around them, whispers of it gathering at last into columns, eleven of them all told, that stretched high above.

  Al-Mariam passed her hand across her brother’s cheek. She touched the reddened corners of his eyes, wet from where her own tears were falling, beneath where the Dragon’s crown, that was wreathed beneath the scars upon his brow, had been changed to ash.

  Chapter Twenty One

  Fallen

  Chaelus spun towards the voice.

  Only sands blew where the dark water of the Shinnaras should be. Beyond the plain the ground rose again, to the low white ruin of the Line; its broken remains scattered, worse than Chaelus remembered, stretching out upon the jagged horizon. Beyond it, the gray world of the Pale continued.

  Near a breach in the wall, a shadowed figure sat on a stone, its face veiled by the blowing sands.

  Chaelus’ cry stole across the wind. “I have come for you, Dragon!”

  The ghostlike pallor of the Shinnaras plain rushed past Chaelus. The winds bit at him like locusts. He held his arms up in defense against them. His stomach turned, until only the fallen stones of the Line remained between him and the Dragon, sitting before him.

  Sand borne upon the wind burned Chaelus’ eyes, deepening the veil between them.

  He raised up Sundengal.

  “Do you know why you’re here?” the Dragon asked.

  “I’ve come to destroy you,” Chaelus answered. “I’ve come to restore what you’ve broken.”

  “No, Chaelus.” The Dragon stood. “You’ve come for something else.”

  Chaelus leveled Sundengal. The calm of the Giver extended through his hand and held the blade without tremor. “You won’t deceive me. Not this time.”

  “The kingdom you seek is already lost,” the Dragon said. “So too are those you’ve come to save. You, my love, have been sent as a meaningless sacrifice, sent to die again by those who call themselves your friends.”

  “Then death can come again,” Chaelus said. “And I’ll take you with me.”

  The Dragon sighed, the sound coarse like the blowing sands. “Do you know the meaning of the mark I placed upon you?”

  “You marked me because you fear me, because you knew what I’d become.”

  “No,” the Dragon said. “I marked you because you are special, my love. The child Al-Aaron was right about one thing. It’s upon you and you alone that all things depend.”

  “I won’t let you deceive me again.”

  The veil of sand lifted. In the gray light, the silver childlike face of Magus shimmered.

  “I’ve never lied to you,” the Dragon said. “I have only told you what others wouldn’t. Wasn’t it I who served you all those years? Wasn’t it I alone who served you while your so-called friends did nothing to save you? I am the only one who ever tried to.”

  The Dragon raised its gloved hand towards the gap in the wall. “But if you don’t believe me, then look with your own eyes and see.”

  Beyond the gap, thunderclouds turned, rolling upon themselves, blanketing the Pale beneath their shadow. Beneath them, the stones of the ruined city heaved. Liquid black rock rose from the ground, crawling out across the Pale. The tower that had stood above them was gone, its white stones cast down under the churning blanket of darkness.

  As if in answer, the domed and painted courts of the Theocracy, too far to be seen, somehow stood dark before him, beyond the heights of the Albanjan. Their lights were gone, their veil already cast aside, as their own darkness swept towards him.

  Between them stood a single white tower, his tower, the one his father ruled from before him. But had never seen it like this before. It was graceful, slender and tall, rising above the churning haze like a star against the night sky, the roar deafening beneath it as the storm clouds of stone broke against its walls.

  Chaelus stepped away. “There is one tower that still stands against you.”

  “It will soon fall like the others. It will fall just like the one before it did.”

  “The tower is me.”

  “No, my love. It belongs now to the one you left behind.”

  Chaelus saw a vision of blood struck red upon the fallen snow. Guilt shadowed his whisper. “Baelus.”

  “Know that he suffers this for you. Despite what you have heard, your brother loves you and he waits for you. But he won’t last much longer. He can’t bear to suffer this for long.”

  “Why do you show me this?”

  “Because I, unlike your friends, my love, would offer you a choice. I would help you end this. Come with me, and together we can save your brother.”

  Magus reached out his hand.

  Chaelus drew back and raised Sundengal between them.

  “What of the suffering of your friends? Join with me and the suffering of those you left behind, those you love, will end. Even now they die as they wait for your sacrifice. Don’t let them. I don’t wish for your death. I don’t wish for theirs. It’s your life that I need. It’s theirs. Help me save them.”

  “No.”

  The Dragon lowered its hand. “Then you choose the same fate your father did.”

  A sullen red glow flooded Chaelus’ mind and vision. “You killed my father slowly, just like you killed me. I won’t let you do it again.”

  “I didn’t kill your father. You did.”

  “Enough of this,” Chaelus said, stepping closer.

  “He was offered a choice, like you, but he did nothing. Instead he chose to place his faith upon the dead words of prophecy. Consider the sacrifice he made for you, only to die by your hand.”

  “I said, no!” Chaelus’ hand erupted with the Giver’s blue flame. Its power poured out from him. Sundengal held the light upon its length as it arced across the silver mask.

  Bits of soft metal flew away.

  The Dragon crumpled before him, seated on its knees, its hands held out before it. The Dragon looked up, the child mask still hanging to its face, a cleaving nearly splitting it at an angle across its middle from brow to cheek.

  The Dragon lifted its hands to the rent mask, grabbing it. With a horrible sound it peeled away.

  Chaelus stared, helpless, held in place by the pale face and dead eyes of his father.

  ***

  Breathing was the only sound; his own and the breathing of the Angel who held him.

  The Angel had his mother’s face – no, his sister’s face. She smiled back at him. The Angel looked so much like Mariam. He had never noticed it before now.

  Michalas smiled back as the Angel touched her hand to his cheek.

  She was a glowing flame against the endless night behind her. Yet it wasn’t the night. It pulsed, felt more than seen, like waves in the ocean. He floated in its waters. It quivered around him.

  Michalas felt the sound of his breath, and the breath of the Angel against it.

  “Your task has nearly ended,” the Angel said.

  The Angel pointed away, to the center of the living darkness where the night sky remained. Twin blue stars flickered so that all the other stars fell dim to compare. Around the night sk
y, at the edge of the swirling darkness, eleven pillars of red flame burned. But one of them burned less so. The center of its flame was tinged with blue.

  “Yet one more task still remains.” The whisper of the Angel floated in his ear. “There is one more promise yet to be fulfilled.”

  “Ras Dumas.”

  The answer of the Angel was silence.

  Michalas opened his eyes, little more than slits, and waited as the normal darkness of the world returned before him.

  Yet it wasn’t all darkness. The candle flames of the souls within the cenotaphs close by still burned with the glow of the innocent. And he could feel his sister’s breath, her arms wrapped tight around him. Twin blue flames captured the gossamer blades of Al-Hoanar and Al-Thinneas from where they stood beside him.

  The glow from the swords washed across the faces of Obidae and the hundred-odd Khaalish warriors who still protected them. They were all that was left of the army of a thousand that moments before had stood against them, before they were turned by the will of the Giver, and before the teeth of the Dragon had consumed them.

  Beyond them, the glow washed across the ram’s head visage of Ras Dumas’ helm, and the ferral masks of the other ten Servian Lords who stood with him.

  The eleven Servian Lords encircled them, hovering at the edge of the abyss. Black smoke drifted around them; their battle armor scarred and bitten from an age that had long since passed, the glory of its past darkened by the shadow which bore them. Upon the brow of each masked helm was set a crown.

  The Dragon’s dark spirit burned with red fire from behind the eye slits of their armored veils. Yet, beneath the mask of Ras Dumas, somewhere very deep, in a place that the Dragon’s fire hadn’t yet consumed, the other fire burned as well.

  It was why the Angels had asked him to return. It was why they’d told him to stay.

  Carefully, Michalas pressed away his sister’s arms. They resisted him, like deep roots set within the soil, until at last they gave way.

  He stood. Amidst the startled, awed cries of the Khaalish he made his way between them until he stood before his old master. Michalas bowed his head.

  “My Lord Dumas.”

  No reply came from the flames burning within the shell before him. The only sound was the echo of his voice against burning steel.

  Michalas bent down on his knee. “I delivered your message, just as you asked me to, my lord. The Servian Knights, they are here before you now. They’ve come to your aid, just as you asked them to.”

  The Servian Lord standing next to Ras Dumas turned towards Michalas. Its red flame burned as cold as fallen snow.

  The mask upon its face bore the head of a dragon, the mark of Ras Dalamas, first in line of the Servian Lords after Ras Malius. The glow from the cenotaphs diminished against it. Its breath buffeted the black smoke around it. “We are the Fallen. We have risen once more.”

  The raking of steel broke against him as Ras Dalamas drew his sword. The blade widened at its tip like a fang. Black smoke whispered against it as he lifted it high above his head.

  “No!” Al-Thinneas cried out. He stepped before Michalas.

  Ras Dalamas stopped and lowered his sword, pointing it towards Al-Thinneas. “You are a fool. The blade of your Order has broken. The fire that wields it is useless against us.”

  “It is your circle that has broken,” Al-Thinneas said. “The promise the Dragon made to you can never be met until you are twelve once more, and twelve you shall never be.”

  The Dragon’s fire within Ras Dalamas flared. The glow of it trembled like a kettle about to turn. Ras Dalamas’ voice descended to a chastened whisper. “A promise made by the blood of the Fallen can never be broken. Already we can taste the sweet ardor of its sacrifice. When it is made at last, our circle will be complete, and so too will our return.”

  The cold red flame within Ras Dalamas expanded until the smoke around it was consumed. A burgeoning echo of silence descended, pulsing through the air like a heartbeat.

  Al-Mariam’s grip and cry seized Michalas, pulling him away.

  Al-Thinneas held his Gossamer Blade upright before him. The blue glow which dressed it rained over him like a veil.

  The blade of Ras Dalamas rose again.

  It sliced invisible through the air. Only the crumpling sound of Al-Thinneas’ body as it fell sounded against its muted call, his head having already struck the stones beneath his feet.

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Malius

  “No. No. No. No!”

  Chaelus staggered back, stumbling. Sundengal slipped from his grasp.

  Malius, his father, rose from where he had fallen, drawing the crimson wrappings of Magus away. His long gray hair smeared the blood from the cut alongside his mouth where the edge of Sundengal had found him.

  “You’re dead,” Chaelus said.

  “Your new wisdom becomes you, my son,” Malius said. He smiled. The blood cast his face in a cruel parody of the man he had once been. “Did you believe you would only kill me once?”

  “It was you?” Chaelus choked on the pain and tears of his sudden realization. “When the Dragon whispered its poison into my ear, it was from your lips?”

  Malius smiled. “I did it to protect you, my son. I did it to protect you in a way I could never do while I lived. I did it to prepare you for the choice you’re faced with now, because the way that stands before you, my son, it is a dark way.”

  “Yet here you are, standing within its shadow.”

  “Your friends, these Servian Knights, the ones even I once claimed as my own, the truth that you seek isn’t theirs. They will turn away from you just as they turned away from me. Already, in your absence, they conspire and plot their ways against you.”

  “No,” Chaelus said. “I’ve already seen the truth. The spirit of the Giver has shown me. I’ve stood in the flesh of his footsteps. I’ve waited alone with you in the darkness of Magedos. I felt it when you put your sword through his side.”

  “Then at least I am no longer alone in that,” Malius said.

  “It’s you, father, who turned away,” Chaelus said.

  Malius stared at Sundengal where it lay upon the broken ground. The light of the burgeoning storm branded it with ire. Sands blew like the passage of time across the length of the blade.

  “Too long have I suffered for the curse of a moment,” he said.

  Sundengal’s veil of blowing sand was not unlike the gossamer which bound the swords of the Servian Knights. Beneath it, the ghosts of blood and snow still remained, and they yielded nothing else before them.

  “I can’t remember your death,” Chaelus whispered.

  “Yet still it was. But I hold no blame for you, my son.”

  Malius turned and spread out his hands upon the cracked and pitted stones of the Line. His eyes held a covetous and distant stare as they looked out across the illusion of the Pale.

  “You are my redemption,” he said.

  Chaelus stepped back. The Giver’s own words, spoken similarly once to Malius, haunted him.

  “I knew it when I first saw you, held within your mother’s arms.” Malius’ voice softened. “She was of Forgotten Blood, exiled from her own kind. Just as you were born of my blood, you are born of her flesh, and so too, the lost power of the Evarun flows deep within your veins.”

  “And so you marked me.”

  Malius continued to stare out across the shrouded leagues. The tower, and his brother Baelus who held it, had nearly fallen. It was only a matter of time until it did.

  “So that you would rule this new kingdom with me,” Malius said. “So that you would help me to create it anew.”

  “What of Baelus?” Chaelus asked. “What would you have of your other son?”

  Malius wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth.

  “I don’t need him anymore.”

  “Have you whispered the same to him of me?” Chaelus asked. “His blood’s no different than my own. Or do you merely use us as you did
our mother?”

  Malius struck him in the face with his fist like a hundred stone.

  “Your wisdom no longer suits you,” he said. “You seek too much with it.”

  Chaelus looked in surprise through the arrows of pain that struck him. Not all of them were real, not all of them were bound within his flesh. Some of them were bound within his memory. He stared past them, past the blowing sands to the blood and the snow and the memory unfolding before him, at once unbidden and reclaimed.