by James Wyatt
“I understand,” she said. “Thank you.”
He shifted his attention to the wound in her leg, effectively hiding his face from her view. “You mentioned someone named Gaven?”
“It wasn’t bandits that attacked us,” Senya said. “It was Keven’s cousin, an excoriate of his house named Gaven.”
“I see,” the healer said. Senya could only see the back of his head. “And he loosed the crossbow that wounded you?”
Senya’s pulse quickened, and she was suddenly sure the halfling saw through her lie. “No, he wasn’t alone. There was an old man, a sorcerer I think, and a warforged, and another human with a crossbow. He’s the one that wounded me.”
“I see,” the halfling repeated. Senya felt the warmth spreading through her leg, unknotting the muscles and washing away the ache.
The healer smiled and pulled his hands away. “I think you’re ready to be moved.” He looked up and signaled to the other halflings, still avoiding Senya’s eyes. The others brought a stretcher over and gently rolled Senya onto it, then carried her over to the wagon. When they had loaded her in and carefully strapped her down, they clambered aboard, and the wagon started rolling.
Senya watched the clouds drift across the sky and wondered where Gaven was. She knew that the chance he lingered in Vathirond’s House of Healing was next to none.
* * * * *
Gaven crouched on the horse’s back, thrilling to the feel of its muscles as it galloped along the road. He hadn’t ridden in more years than he could remember, and it had taken a while to get his body into the rhythm of the horse’s stride. Once he did that, though, he felt like he was running, his muscles moving in perfect synchronization with his mount’s. The wind blew his hair back from his face and cooled the sweat from his skin. Best of all, his mind was completely submerged in the pounding hooves and flexing muscles, the rush of speed and wind. Any time his thoughts began to stray toward Rienne or Senya, he forced them back to the horse and the run.
Hours and miles sped by under the mare’s stride. Vathirond—along with Rienne and Senya—fell farther and farther behind him, and he thought as little as he could about what lay ahead. He lost himself so completely in his flight that he nearly fell from the saddle when his mount abruptly slowed.
They had reached the Mournland. A wall of gray mist hung in the air like a funeral shroud, swallowing the road ahead, and the horse would not get any closer.
“It’s all right, lady,” he murmured as he dismounted. “You’ve done well. You see if you can find your way back to the barn I stole you from, huh?”
He lifted a bag from the mare’s saddle and slung it over his shoulder. It held the scant supplies that would sustain him in the Mournland—journeybread that would keep him nourished and full, and a magic waterskin that would never run dry. He regretted the theft, but there would be enough threats to his life in the Mournland without adding the worries of starvation or thirst.
He patted the mare’s flank and let her go. She loped away from the wall of mist without a backward glance. He watched her until she was out of sight, then turned back to face the mist. He had the fleeting sense of a presence in there, something watching him. Waiting for him—impatient, hungry.
A chill ran down his back, and he drew his sword. He was suddenly struck by a feeling of awesome solitude. No one was here to cover his back, no one to share his anxiety—or to make him feel brave, like Rienne used to. No one at all, except perhaps the creatures lurking in the mist.
He checked the sky for the hundredth time, looking in vain for any sign of Vaskar. He took a step closer to the wall of mist, then extended his sword until the point sank into it. The blade met no resistance—in fact, for just a moment, Gaven felt as though something were gently pulling the sword into the mist. He stepped forward, sinking the sword all the way into the fog, bringing his face to within a hand’s breadth of the vaporous pall. His movement didn’t stir it; even his breath made no eddies in the mist.
He looked around as if taking a final survey of the living world before crossing into the land of the dead, then stepped in. The mist was cold on his skin. He stepped forward again before he dared to take a breath, letting the clammy mist into his lungs. There was an odor to it, not putrid exactly, but definitely a smell of death. The mist closed in around him, and he hurried forward, eager to push through to the other side.
Tendrils of mist coiled around his limbs as he moved, tugging at him. With every step, he felt a weight of exhaustion settling on him. He stopped, shook his head to clear it, and pressed ahead, but he began to wonder why he bothered. He could see no end to the mist ahead, and when he looked over his shoulder it seemed to stretch forever behind him. He dropped to his knees, his heart heavy, his muscles too tired to move.
An old dream filled his senses. Staggering across a blasted landscape where nothing lived. Falling to the ground, seeing his hands sink into earth that was half dirt, half ash. The taste of the air, bitter like bile.
“Have I been here before?” he asked the mist. “Or did I dream of this moment?”
He lifted one knee out of the dust and planted a foot on the shifting ground.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Either way, I’m here now.” He shifted his weight forward and pulled himself up until he stood with his chin on his chest. “And I have work to do.”
The mist began to swirl around him. He smiled as he felt the air stir—the breath of wind restored his strength. Great gusts cleared the air around him, showing him the ground at his feet and a path ahead. He walked between receding walls of billowing fog, and soon the dead-gray mist was gone.
The land around him was a desolation. He had crossed into another world—the verdant landscape of Breland was lost in the mist, far away, unreal. Beneath his feet, the ground was a layer of fine sand or ash on top of smooth rock. He saw nothing alive on this side of the mist. No trees, no birds overhead, not even weeds. The sun hung low in the east, its feeble light drowning in a distant fog. Above him, the sky was the gray of a corpse. Even the wind around him died.
Gaven stepped forward, visions from his dreams crowding his mind. Another step, and the sand around him stirred, jolting him back to his senses. Something formed itself from the ground beside him, taking on a vaguely human form, gaunt arms and a gaping mouth and eyes of sickly green fire. The sight of it sent a wave of unreasoning terror through his body, and he stepped back—right into the grasping claws of a second ghoulish creature.
“Thunder!” He wrenched himself free of the creature’s grasp and hefted his sword in his trembling hands.
A third monster surged up from the sand, and Gaven swallowed his fear. He swung his sword in a full circle around himself, biting into each one, sending three sprays of ash into the still air. The creatures didn’t flinch—they were upon him, their claws tearing his skin and pulling him in three different directions.
With a single arcane word, Gaven pulled a cloak of fire around his body, its warmth dispelling the lingering chill of the awful mists. The creatures drew back in obvious pain, giving him an opening to slip through, to put all three in front of him. As they tried to circle him, he sent a crackle of arcane lightning into his sword, then lunged to his right to intercept the creature moving around that side. The blade bit deep, and the thing’s form lost some definition, but it didn’t slow its advance. It slammed into Gaven’s shoulder, one claw cutting a gash down his chest. The wound flared with green fire, and Gaven shouted in pain. The creature clung to him, even as Gaven’s fiery armor engulfed it. It brought its face right up against his, its eyes staring into his. In an instant, Gaven thought he saw a distillation of all the pain and misery that filled the Mournland.
Desolation spreads over that land like a wildfire, he thought—like a plague. In the creature’s eyes, he saw a roiling gray mist spreading across the verdant land, leaving nothing alive in its wake. More, he felt the despair of every living thing that was swallowed in that mist, every spirit that lingered in this gravey
ard, every person who had lost a relative or friend to the Mourning. He fell to his knees, the creature still staring into his eyes.
Then he brought his sword around, cutting right through the thing’s waist, making it dissolve back into the sand.
The other two creatures came at him from opposite sides, stalking in cautiously. Gaven stood and stepped backward, a little unsteady on his feet. A soft breath of wind blew up his back, chilling his sweat, and he filled his lungs as though to draw strength from the moving air.
The creatures pounced, and Gaven exhaled. The breeze at his back swelled, and he became the wind. He stretched out his hands, and the wind blasted forth to tear at the creatures’ sandy forms. They staggered backward as the wind continued to drive at them, ash streaming out behind them. He was the fury of nature, all wrath and destruction. He smiled grimly as the power of the storm coursed through him.
A crack of thunder rent the air, and Gaven became the lightning, joining blasted earth to gray sky. His feet lifted off the ground, and the lightning shot out of his hands with the wind. The instant of the lightning strike stretched into an eternity in his mind—he was storm, and he was everywhere at once. This was power like he had never tasted before, and he exulted in the destruction he wreaked.
The instant ended. He came down hard on his back, a few paces from where he’d been standing, staring up at the clear, dead sky. He lifted his head with a tremendous effort, just long enough to make sure that the creatures were gone. Two patches of sand were blackened and smoking, but there was no other sign of the monsters. He let his head fall back on the ground.
The magical flames around his body had gone out, but his body still burned with pain where the creature had raked his chest. His dragonmark also stung, as though lightning still coursed along its intricate tracings. He groaned, tried to lift his head again, and failed.
“Welcome to the Mournland,” he said.
* * * * *
Gaven rested for only a moment—long enough for the sting to fade from his dragonmark, though the wound on his chest still burned. He struggled to sit up, every muscle in his body protesting, then slowly got his feet under him and stood up.
He looked at the sun as it disappeared below the horizon, scanned the sky again for any sign of Vaskar, then turned to look for Nymm, the largest moon. It was just rising out of a gray haze to the east, orange and round.
“The Eye of Siberys will lift the Sky Caves of Thieren Kor from the land of desolation under the dark of the great moon,” he said to himself. “The great moon’s full now. I’ve got two weeks.”
He put his hands on his knees and let his head hang.
“Two weeks to reach the Sky Caves. If I can stay alive that long.”
He found his sword where it had fallen on the ground, heaved it onto his shoulder, and started walking.
CHAPTER
25
Vaskar perched on an eruption of stone, overlooking a plain of jumbled rock and sand. He had been watching the great moon’s ascent through the sky, and his patience was rewarded as it neared its apex. A hint of shadow appeared at the edge of its disk. He clutched the Eye of Siberys tighter in his great claw and rumbled deep in his throat.
“The eclipse is beginning,” he murmured, “the dark of the great moon.” He stretched his neck and his wings to the sky and roared. “The time is at hand!”
He watched, waiting for the perfect moment, as Nymm slowly disappeared in the world’s shadow.
When its light was completely quenched, he raised the Eye of Siberys high, holding it gingerly between his two front claws. “Do your work,” he whispered. He gazed into the golden crystal, and he saw.
He saw the desolation of the Mournland and the life-leaching energies that still permeated the land. He saw the twelve moons arrayed in the sky above him, Nymm shrouded in its eclipse, and he perceived the forces aligned to make this moment possible. He saw the Sky Caves slumbering beneath the ground, and he called to them. He felt them begin to stir, responding to his call.
For a moment, he saw himself—small and insignificant among the events of the moment. But he did not like to see himself, and he certainly didn’t like feeling small.
“The Storm Dragon has emerged!” he cried. “I will walk in the paths of the first of sixteen!”
He closed his eyes, and the earth began to shake. The ground trembled so violently that Vaskar took to the sky, pounding his wings in the still air to rise above the tumult. The plain below him looked like a troubled sea, sand erupting in geysers and boulders rolling wildly in every direction. He flew in widening circles, watching the earth churn in an area the size of a large island.
Soon there was direction in the movement below him—a general tendency toward the outside of an enormous circle. The ground swelled, sand sliding and boulders rolling downhill from the center of the bulge. Vaskar flew to the edge of the swell, not wanting to be directly above whatever emerged.
As he continued his flight, the sand at the crest of the swell fell away, revealing a jagged dome of reddish stone. Slowly it rose higher and higher above the surrounding earth, and Vaskar caught sight of a cave entrance in the face of the rock, sand pouring out of it as it lifted into the air.
“The Sky Caves of Thieren Kor!” he roared.
The more rock emerged from the earth, the faster it rose, and in another moment it had broken free entirely. The rumbling thunder of the earth below came to an abrupt stop. In the sudden silence, an enormous island floated a hundred feet up in the air, rounded at the top, a jagged point at the bottom like an inverted mountain. Sand and rubble poured from dozens of holes, spilling down the sides and trickling into a great crater in the ground below it.
Vaskar tightened the circle of his flight, surveying the Sky Caves from every side, trying to decide where to enter. The cave mouths seemed to form patterns, characters of the Draconic script, but every time he tried to read them he thought they shifted, aligning themselves in different patterns. Finally, impatient, he chose a cave near the top and landed on its lower lip, scrabbling at the edge until he could get all four claws on solid ground.
“The Storm Dragon walks in the paths of the first of sixteen,” he said. “I am here. Reveal your secrets to me!”
He advanced into the winding tunnel.
* * * * *
Gaven felt the earth rumbling and hefted his sword, expecting an attack—something springing from the ground, perhaps, or some enormous monster that shook the earth with its steps. The rumbling grew until it threatened to knock him off his feet, and in that moment he glimpsed the eclipsed moon above his head.
“No,” he breathed.
Exhausted as he was, he ran. The wind cradled him and sped him on. The sky darkened as clouds rolled in—the first real clouds he’d seen since entering the Mournland—and covered the Ring of Siberys, the stars, the eclipsed moon. His steps and the wind around him kicked up a storm of sand and ash in his wake.
He occasionally glimpsed creatures moving in the night around him, from scavenging vermin the size of dogs to an enormous war construct he spotted in the distance, lumbering across the landscape. One spiny crab-spider thing snapped at him with fangs and pincers as he ran, but he didn’t slow at all, and it quickly grew tired of the chase. Nothing else came close enough to threaten him.
Rain began to fall. It cooled him as he ran and soothed the burning wound across his chest. He saw it form craters in the sandy ground and drain away.
The land around him was flat and featureless. The map he’d found in Paluur Draal and committed to memory was his only guide, and he had no better way to navigate than trying to keep his path straight in the direction he’d first chosen. The bank of gray mist hung off to his right, sometimes nearer than others, but otherwise he could see nothing to indicate where he was, where he’d been, or where he was headed. He slipped in and out of an illusion that only the ground moved at all, that he hung in the air, running in place. He lost all sense of time and distance—he could have been runn
ing for hours, days, weeks.
But then a darkness appeared before him in the distance. At first it looked like a dark cloud, a heart of a storm in the midst of an overcast sky. As he drew closer, though, it began to take shape. The first feeble daylight illuminated the clouds overhead, casting it in silhouette. It was huge, like a mountain hanging upside-down in the air above the blasted landscape. It floated over an enormous crater, the remains of the cyst from which it had burst forth.
A part of Gaven’s mind that was not quite his knew all about the Sky Caves of Thieren Kor. In a different life he had learned all he could about them, poring over fragments of the Prophecy collected in great draconic libraries. He had waited a dragon’s long lifetime for the opportunity to explore them and plumb their secrets, and when that lifetime had ended, he—that other he, the dragon of the nightshard—had made sure that what he had learned would someday be remembered.
So Gaven remembered, and the knowledge flooded back to him. The Sky Caves were ancient—they had floated above the untouched wilderness of Khorvaire when dragons first ventured forth from Argonnessen to challenge the fiends that ruled the world. Thieren Kor was a placename in the language used by the fiends, meaning “mountain of secrets.” Countless battles had raged beneath that floating mountain, in the skies around it, and within its twisting tunnels—dragons and demons tearing at each other, spilling oceans of blood to gain control of its secrets. When the dragons emerged victorious from the eons-long war, the first dragon to explore the Sky Caves in their entirety became a god, the first of sixteen.
Now Vaskar hoped to follow where that ancient dragon had led. And Gaven felt, for the first time, a surge of envy—he wanted that knowledge, and that power, for himself.
