Storm Dragon: The Draconic Prophecies - Book One

by James Wyatt

  In the present moment, he saw the regimented lines of Haldren’s forces marching across the plain toward the waiting Thranes massed along a line he presumed was the border set by the Treaty of Thronehold. He saw dragons wheeling above the plain, clawing and biting at each other, blasting fire and icy frost from their gaping jaws. The battle had already begun—the clash of dragons. He was too late to prevent it.

  He gripped the helm and blinked hard, struggling to keep his vision focused on the scene before his eyes, to clear away the memories of his nightmares. Haldren’s forces marched onward, heedless of the dragons battling furiously in the air and on the ground between them and the Thranes. They shouted as the Eye of the Storm soared over them, then shook their spears and shields when it was past.

  Then Gaven saw his nightmares come to life. Thunder rolled overhead, and the earth groaned in answer. Rienne raced to the deck, and Darraun trailed after. The airship drew near the center of the plain, dangerously close to a pair of blue dragons swooping and tearing at each other, and the earth below began to crack. Eberron was opening a path—small and brief, but a bridge nonetheless—for Khyber and Siberys to touch once again.

  At first the crack was a midnight scar across the face of the plain, its blackness drawing in and swallowing what little sunlight filtered through the storm clouds above. Then an awesome, unholy light began to grow in its deepest core, and the earth trembled again as the light swelled in the depths and began to erupt toward the surface, to reach for the sky. For a moment it seemed like an enormous, many-tentacled beast formed of the most brilliant light, oozing out of the fissure in the earth and sending exploratory tendrils in every direction.

  Then the light burst forth and roared heavenward with a sound like a titan’s sword being drawn from its sheath, sharp metal cutting through the air. It stood tall and straight, stretching from the fractured plain up to the clouds, and the clouds melted away from it, churning and swirling in a storm of protest as the light broke through.

  “On a field of battle where dragons clash in the skies, the earth opens and the Crystal Spire emerges,” Gaven said. “A ray of Khyber’s burning sun forms a bridge to Siberys’s heights.”

  “What does it mean?” Rienne asked, her face twisted in horror. Her body was half turned away from the Spire though her eyes were glued to it, as though she wanted to look away but couldn’t quite force herself to.

  “It means the Soul Reaver’s gates are sundered,” Gaven said. “His monstrous hordes are about to spill out of that rift and tear into the armies on both sides. Nobody will win this battle.”

  “You called it a bridge,” Rienne said. “Does that mean it has something to do with the Storm Dragon’s ascension?”

  “You said it in the City of the Dead,” Darraun said. “You said, ‘the Storm Dragon walks through the gates of Khyber and crosses the bridge to the sky.’”

  Gaven nodded, only half listening to Darraun. His nightmare continued to unfold before his eyes. Darraun muttered a curse, and Rienne gripped Gaven’s arm, convincing him that the scene was not merely another waking dream.

  The creatures that began to exude from the rift could not have existed in a sane world. Some resembled earthly beasts, but they had been so twisted by the corruption of Khyber that they were barely recognizable. Tentacles sprouted from their sides or backs or protruded where their mouths should have been. Joints bent in obscene ways. Faces erupted from wounds in their skin and then retreated back into horrible bodies. Others could not be compared to anything natural—they were mounds of flesh or agglomerations of bone covered with parchment skin, or slimy things that slithered on pale bellies or skittered on innumerable legs. Blank eyes stared out from pale gray faces, and hundreds of humanlike eyes covered an oozing mass of half-congealed blood.

  Worse, somehow, than the sight of the creatures vomiting from the gulf was their sound—part keening, part lunatic babble, part predatory growl. It began quietly as the first monstrosities emerged, but it grew louder with each successive wave, building until it drowned out the other sounds of the battlefield and battered at the walls of Gaven’s sanity. He couldn’t form words with that babble assaulting his mind, and he couldn’t hope to be heard above the cacophony if he did.

  A blast of lightning engulfed the ship, followed by a deafening crash as an enormous copper-scaled dragon smashed into her hull. The impact knocked Gaven off his feet and slammed him against the bulwarks. The ring of elemental fire surged out to engulf the dragon’s body, charring its flesh and making the airship buck and roll. The dead dragon plummeted down, pulling the Eye of the Storm down with it.

  Gaven leaped up to grab at the helm, desperately hoping to regain control of the airship before she crashed to the ground. He sensed the elemental’s acquiescence to his will, but then he felt the impact rumble through the hull. He had slowed their fall, but he was too late to stop it. Timbers groaned and then cracked, the ring of fire sputtered and went out. The airship lurched backward, jerked to port, and was still.

  Rienne had kept her feet through it all, and Maelstrom was already in her hand. She swung it through slow repetitions of the whirling patterns of strikes and blocks she favored in battle. The sword seemed to sing in her hand, adding a voice of storm and steel to the mounting clamor around them. Darraun pulled himself to his feet and slid his mace out of the loop in his belt. Gaven looked up at the darkening sky, calling out to the brewing storm. If he was to be a force of destruction, best to use that power in a cause like this—to help protect the soldiers of both armies from the slaughter that surged toward them. If Vaskar was determined to be the Storm Dragon, let him face the Soul Reaver.

  In the blink of an eye, the hordes of the Soul Reaver swarmed over the bulwarks of the grounded airship, and Gaven forgot himself and his friends in the storm of battle. Eyes wide open, he plunged headlong into the nightmares that had plagued him for twenty-six years.

  Roaring with horror and fury, he swung his greatsword back and forth, cutting through alien flesh, shattering bone, spilling blood and ichor onto the deck. Shouting arcane syllables, he created fire and lightning to sear his foes, summoned invisible and irresistible forces to push them back, cast spells to guide his blade to the vital parts of tentacled things that refused to die. Bile rose in his throat as unspeakable horrors stared him in the face and spat oozing slime onto him in their death throes. He lashed out in reflexive fear to sever tentacles that grasped at him. The wailing ululation of the horde battered at his ears and at the ramparts of his will, threatening to break his concentration and reduce his resolve to quivering terror. And all the time the storm’s fury built around him, torrents of rain and hail, blasts of wind, and eruptions of lightning that tore great holes in the teeming carpet of aberrations that covered the Starcrag Plain.

  Without warning, the battlefield fell silent, and the raving legions paused. Gaven’s ears rang in the sudden quiet, and he seized the opportunity to check that Rienne and Darraun were still alive. But the respite was brief. A moment later, every monstrosity raised its voice in a shriek, lifting arms and tentacles and limbs into the air, and the onslaught resumed. Gaven roared and spun his blade in a wide circle. A whirlwind followed his sword through the air and forced the nearest creatures back, giving him room to assess the battlefield.

  He glanced up at the Crystal Spire, towering above them a bowshot away, a radiant beacon through the driving rain. He saw what had made the creatures pause: a figure hung suspended in the shaft of light, roughly human in size and shape. It was smaller than many of the creatures he had already slain, but even at that distance, it projected an aura like a low grumbling roar, tearing at the very roots of his sense and will. Long tentacles thrashed the air around its face, and clawed hands stretched up to the sky.

  “Tearer and reaver and flayer of souls,” Gaven whispered.

  The hordes renewed their assault, and Gaven lost himself in the battle again.

  * * * * *

  Haldren surveyed a battlefield over which he
no longer had any control, clutching his reins until they bit into his palms. The full extent of Vaskar’s duplicity had made itself clear: in addition to bringing dragons to fight on both sides of the battle, Vaskar had convinced him to launch his assault against Thrane on this field—here, above the prison of the Soul Reaver. Haldren had known Vaskar would have to face that foe in the end—Gaven had seen the Eye of Siberys used as a spear to defeat the creature. But he had not expected to provide the stage for that battle. Not only had Vaskar undone the advantage he had given Haldren, but he had actually consigned both armies to slaughter at the hands of the Soul Reaver’s aberrant legions. Now Haldren would be forced to watch Vaskar’s moment of triumph, his ascension to godhood, in the air above the spectacle of his own crushing defeat. And rather than having an ally among the gods of the world, Haldren would have a bitter enemy. It was too much to bear.

  His eyes wandered over the field, straining to see the magnitude of the carnage through the driving rain. To his right, ir’Fann’s infantry was falling under a renewed press, which meant that his pikemen had been overwhelmed. Near the middle of the field, a clump of Kadra’s knights stood in a tight circle as the aberrations advanced over the corpses of their steeds. He lifted his spyglass and saw Kadra Ware herself lying at the center of that circle, bloody and unmoving. To the left, ir’Cashan’s troops fled toward the sheltering hills. A group of knight phantoms, well-armored infantry riding conjured steeds of smoke and shadow, ranged back and forth along the rear, looking in vain for a place where their aid might turn the tide of battle. There could be no doubt: the field was lost. Lord General Haldren ir’Brassek had never known such a crushing defeat.

  He lifted his eyes to the radiant column at the hub of the spreading devastation, and saw for the first time the tiny figure suspended in its light. He pressed the spyglass to his eye again. The Soul Reaver. Hatred welled up in his gut like bile, and he cursed under his breath. “Kill Vaskar for me, damn him.” The creature stretched its shriveled arms upward as tentacles writhed out around its face, and Haldren imagined it urging its subterranean hordes to greater fury as they swept over their foes or calling down the storm to add its wrath to theirs.

  “And damn the rain,” he said aloud. “Can I not at least see my defeat through clear eyes?”

  “It’s Gaven,” Senya said, pointing at the excoriate’s grounded airship. “The storm battles for him.”

  “You still believe his lies? You still think he’s the Storm Dragon?”

  Senya turned her gaze to meet his angry glare. “That’s our only hope.”

  “Then hope is lost,” Haldren said, biting back his rage.

  Cart rumbled on Haldren’s right. “We’ll see soon enough,” he said. Haldren turned to look at him, then followed his gaze back to the towering shaft of light.

  A blast of lightning engulfed the Soul Reaver. For an instant, Haldren thought that the storm had lashed out at the monstrosity, but then he saw the lightning’s source: Vaskar had begun his attack.

  “The Bronze Serpent,” Senya said. “He’s doomed to fail.”

  “Good,” Haldren spat.

  CHAPTER

  48

  The dragon’s roar cut through the wails of the Soul Reaver’s hosts. Gaven drove his sword down through the double head of a waist-high monstrosity and glanced up at the Crystal Spire. Vaskar had come to face the Soul Reaver, hoping to bring about the fulfillment of the Prophecy. The sounds of the battle fell away, even the howls of the monsters around him, leaving a strange stillness, and the words of the Prophecy rang in his mind:

  The Bronze Serpent faces the Soul Reaver and fails.

  But the Storm Dragon seizes the shard of heaven from the fallen pretender.

  Had Vaskar accounted for those words? Did he even know about them? Gaven had spoken them to Haldren, but not in Vaskar’s presence. Would Haldren have repeated them to the dragon, when they upset him so much?

  It didn’t matter, he realized. Vaskar was doomed to fail, which meant that the Soul Reaver’s hordes would continue to pour forth from Khyber’s darkness. Every soldier in the Starcrag Plain would fall beneath them. The monsters would pour into Aundair and Thrane—they might raze Thaliost, or Daskaran across the river. They might reach Stormhome. The idea of Haldren conquering Khorvaire was terrible to contemplate, but the thought of the Soul Reaver spreading his tentacles across the north was much, much worse.

  Vaskar was doomed to fail, and that meant the Storm Dragon would have to do what the Prophecy demanded of him: seize the shard of heaven and drive it through the Soul Reaver’s heart.

  No one could do that but him.

  The aberrations crowded closer. Growling, Gaven impaled one of the larger, shambling monsters, left his sword hanging in the wound, and swung his hands together to create a clap of thunder that drove the smaller creatures back. Then he grabbed the sword from the teetering bug-thing and leaped aft, toward the helm.

  “Clear the deck!” he shouted. He seized the wheel and willed the elemental out of its quiescence.

  “Can she fly?” Rienne called back. “That was a rough landing.”

  “I’ll make her fly.” The wind howled, and the airship lurched, then she slowly lifted off the ground.

  The elemental resisted Gaven’s control at first, protesting as though the damage to the hull had wounded or weakened it. Fly, damn you.

  Rienne and Darraun fought hard to carry out Gaven’s command. Rienne nearly stopped using her sword, instead relying on a constantly shifting stance to overbalance the creatures that came charging toward her and throw them overboard. Maelstrom came to bear only in the one instance where a tentacle wrapped around her leg as its owner hurtled overboard, threatening to drag Rienne off the ship as well. A swift, sure blow from Maelstrom freed her from its grasp and sent the creature plummeting to its doom. Darraun swung his mace, magically enhanced to slay the aberrations of Khyber, beating them back under a constant hail of blows until they had nowhere to go but off the ship.

  The Eye of the Storm teetered higher, rising above the din of the battle and the gibbering hordes below. Gaven let the winds carry her in a wide circle around the Crystal Spire as the ship swirled faster and faster around the bridge of light. That circular path provided Gaven with a clear view of the continuing battle between the Soul Reaver and Vaskar—be he Storm Dragon or doomed Bronze Serpent—as it raged in the midst of the great column of light.

  It would be more accurate to say that Vaskar raged, Gaven thought. The battle was not too different from watching Rienne fight a drunken Eldeen wild man. The Soul Reaver remained calm, moving very little in response to Vaskar’s charges, his circling flights and desperate lunges. Each time Vaskar closed in, an invisible force pushed him aside, preventing him from making contact. Gaven couldn’t see the Soul Reaver make any counterattack, but it was clear that Vaskar grew more tired with each passing moment. His frustration also built with every failed lunge. He roared and spat lightning at the Soul Reaver, but though the lightning at least touched the creature, it didn’t seem to cause it any pain or distress. To his surprise, Gaven felt a twinge of pity for the dragon—he was so misguided, and ultimately so ineffectual, just as he tried to seize tremendous power.

  Vaskar pulled back and floated motionless on the building gale for a moment. Carried by the wind, the airship swirled closer to him, and for a moment Gaven thought the dragon would attack the Eye of the Storm to vent his frustration. Then Gaven saw a flash of gold: from somewhere on his body, Vaskar had produced the Eye of Siberys. He fumbled with the dragonshard in claws too large to serve as hands, and Gaven saw that Vaskar had clumsily bound the shard to a straight, polished staff, making a spear to slay the Soul Reaver. He was desperate, Gaven realized, and was pulling out his weapon of last resort. The dragon didn’t expect it to work—and he was right. Vaskar was already defeated.

  Gaven jerked the wheel hard to port and took the Eye of the Storm out of the cyclone.

  “What are you doing?” Rienne said.
<
br />   “I need to get off this ship,” Gaven said, “and I’m not going to make Darraun try to fly her in that storm.”

  “No,” Rienne said, “I mean, what are you doing?”

  The airship had cleared the worst of the storm and flew smoothly again, despite the staved-in timbers of her hull. “Darraun, can you take her from here?” Gaven said.

  “I can try,” Darraun answered. His hands clenched the wheel, and Gaven released it. The ship bucked slightly, then leveled. Darraun nodded, but didn’t try to speak again.

  “Gaven,” Rienne said, “what are you doing?”

  Gaven pulled off his scabbard and untied the ash staff he’d bound to it. Touching the staff sparked a torrent of memories—stumbling, half crazed through the Mournland, climbing the storm-blasted tree to pull off the branch, a dream: a yellow crystal pulsing with veins of golden light, carved to a point and bound to a blackened branch, plunging into a body that was shadow given twisting form.

  “It was my hand on the spear,” he said, more to himself than her. “It seems I will play the part of the Storm Dragon after all.” He stood with the staff in his hands and slung his sword and scabbard back over his shoulder.

  Rienne lay a hand on his back. “Play the part,” she said, “but write it as you go. You are player and playwright.”

  He looked into her eyes and cupped her cheek in his hand, running a thumb along the curve of her lips.

  “I don’t know how I could ever have doubted your love,” he said. “I never will again.”

  “Come back to me.”

  “I will.” He kissed her, savoring the taste of her breath, and then jumped over the bulwarks.

  A fresh gust of wind caught him up and carried him away from the airship, back to the storm that whirled around the Crystal Spire. Lightning flared and roared around him, and the rain became hail, as though the storm had been holding its full fury back until that moment. Gaven willed himself forward, toward the Soul Reaver, and the wings of the storm carried him there.