by James Wyatt
Darraun looked puzzled as Gaven spoke, but when he’d finished he burst into laughter.
“What?” Rienne said.
“What a web of lies Vaskar must be weaving. It’s funny: I always thought Haldren was a conniving manipulator who could bend almost anyone to his will given a moment of conversation. I never stopped to think what kind of dragon joins forces with a man like that.”
“Exactly the same kind of dragon,” Gaven said.
“Right. When I was camped with Haldren’s forces, after the dragons joined up, I remember wondering what part these dragons thought they played in the Prophecy. I assumed they wanted to help Vaskar fulfill it. But now I think those dragons are over in Thrane, just waiting for Haldren’s dragons to come into sight so they can initiate the ‘clash of dragons’ long foretold.”
“So then what do Haldren’s dragons think they’re doing?” Rienne asked.
“He’s brought them here with some other piece of the Prophecy,” Gaven said. “I’m sure of it. There’s something at the edge of my mind-‘where dragons flew.’”
Gaven closed his eyes. He remembered seeing his reflection, touching glass, starting as though he’d touched a fire. The reflection in the mirror-an image of desolation.
The vision that had sprung to his mind in his father’s house, in the shadow of death. He whispered the words that had come to him: “Vultures wheel where dragons flew, picking the bones of the numberless dead.”
“Gaven?” Rienne had come around the wheel and laid a gently hand on his back.
He opened his eyes, but he could not see the world around him any more-only his vision. Words and meaning from the Sky Caves of Thieren Kor took shape in his mind, expanding that fragmentary premonition of doom: Dragons fly before the Blasphemer’s legions, scouring the earth of his righteous foes. Carnage rises in the wake of his passing, purging all life from those who oppose him. Vultures wheel where dragons flew, picking the bones of the numberless dead.
Gaven shuddered and shook his head, and saw Rienne’s face staring up at him in deep concern.
“He brought them here with a lie,” he said finally. “They think they’re fulfilling a part of the Prophecy whose time has not yet come. But they believe it guarantees their victory.”
CHAPTER 46
Senya had trouble keeping up with Cart and his patrol. Her thoughts kept dwelling on her imminent reunion with Haldren, and she did not press her steed as hard as the others did. She would have to flirt with him, flatter him-ultimately seduce him in order to assuage his anger. It was a ridiculous game, but one which she had enjoyed and excelled at for years. She no longer had the heart for it, and thinking about it repulsed her.
Cart and the knights who rode with him gave up any pretense of being Thranes. They stripped the Silver Flame from their shields, and Cart doffed his helmet. They rode north through Bramblescar Gorge, a narrow valley choked with the dry, thorny plants that gave the place its name. Layer upon layer of dark slate formed the rough walls of the gorge, cut away by an ancient river that had since run dry. On their left, the lowest hills of the Starpeaks rose up toward the towering heights beyond, sheltering the valley from rain and blocking the evening sun. On their right, the first green shrubs and trees of the Silver Woods crowned the rocky walls. Except for the steady drumming of hoofbeats, the air was still and silent. Nature seemed quieted by the impending battle.
Senya barely noticed when they passed a clump of sentries posted at the southern end of Haldren’s camp. Cart’s pace slowed to an easy walk as they made their way among the clusters of soldiers preparing for their last night encamped. Senya’s horse no longer needed urging to keep up with the others, and Senya came to the command post far more quickly than she wanted to.
“Lord General!” Cart dismounted in front of the grand pavilion Haldren had erected for himself-a tribute to his greatness, Senya was sure.
Smile, Senya told herself. You’re glad to see him again.
She forced a smile onto her face then tried to make it look genuine.
“Enter.” Haldren’s voice was gruff.
Wonderful, Senya thought dryly. A foul mood will make this so much more pleasant.
Cart waited while Senya dismounted, then held the flap of the pavilion open for her to enter before him. Steeling herself and refreshing her smile, she stepped once more into Haldren’s presence.
“What is it, Cart?” Haldren stood over a small table, and he didn’t look up from the large map spread out before him.
“Reporting from patrol, sir,” Cart said behind her. “See what I found.”
Haldren glanced up, his face taut with irritation. His face softened and he straightened when he saw Senya.
“Hello, Haldren.” She made her voice husky, alluring, and she forced her face to keep smiling. Tears welled in her eyes.
Haldren strode around the table to stand in front of her. He clasped her shoulders and let his eyes wander over her face. A soft rustle told her that Cart had stepped out of the pavilion.
“Did he harm you?” Haldren said.
It took a moment for Senya to realize that he meant Gaven, not Cart. She shook her head.
He threw his arms around her and pressed her to his chest. She reached around him to caress his back before she realized that his intention wasn’t amorous. His body shook with sobs.
“I’m sorry,” he moaned, burying his face in her hair. “I came back as quickly as I could, but he’d already taken you away.”
Taken me? Senya thought. Ten Seas, the old fool thinks Gaven kidnapped me!
She clenched him tightly.
“I would have searched the world for you,” Haldren said.
The tears broke free of her eyes and streamed down her face.
The old fool loves me, she thought. The idea seemed totally foreign to her.
Haldren’s heart soared alongside the dragons as he watched them take to the sky, bright under the morning sun. Riding at his right hand, Cart nodded approvingly, appraising the number of dragons and their strength and size. They numbered nearly a score. Had so many dragons been assembled in a single cause in the entire course of human history? Only Senya, on his left, cast a pall over the moment.
“These dragons and their Prophecy,” she muttered. “What do they think of our march here below, I wonder? Are they serving our needs, or are we cards in their hands? Are we playing the dragons, or are they playing us?”
“This is not some tavern game of chance, Senya,” Haldren scoffed. “This is war.”
He raised his voice so the other commanders around him would hear, and lifted a fist into the air. “The dragons lead us to victory, swift and certain!”
A chorus of cheers from behind him washed away the shadow cast by Senya’s doubts, and Cart signaled the other commanders to begin the march. Haldren smiled, satisfied that his plan was unfolding perfectly. An army larger than he had ever commanded during the war marched before him, and its vanguard was an invincible flight of dragons. Before the sun reached its zenith, this great legion would spill out of Bramblescar Gorge onto the Starcrag Plain, and according to Cart’s reports, they would meet Thrane forces at the border before nightfall. His conquest of Khorvaire was about to begin!
And fate had given him a token of his coming victory by returning his Senya to his side. Though she was clearly troubled by her ordeal, he was confident that she would return to him fully before long. Everything he desired was within his reach.
They rode in silence at a slow walk behind the marching legions. As the narrow gorge widened he was able to survey the full strength of his forces. His banners fluttered in the wind of a brewing storm, the formations of his soldiers bristled with spears, and the earth thundered in concert with the sky under the boots of tens of thousands of marching feet. Haldren’s thoughts were full of glory-victory on the battlefield, the conquest of all Khorvaire, his coronation as emperor of a new Galifar, Senya at his side. What could stop him?
Bursting with pride, he watched the col
umns of troops begin their advance across the Starcrag Plain as he had ordered, each rank perfectly aligned behind the one before, exactly in place. These were the best troops that Aundair had to offer, and they served only him, not a soft and foolish queen in far-off Fairhaven. The other commanders-Lord Major ir’Fann, Lord Colonel ir’Cashan, Rennic Arak, Kadra, even General Yeven-had all acknowledged the brilliance of his strategy. They had all agreed that victory was sure, and praised him as the greatest general Aundair-no, Khorvaire-had ever known. The Thranes would be the first to fall, but only the first in his long campaign of conquest. After this initial victory, he knew he could count on the support of Arcanix and even House Cannith. The wheel was in motion, and nothing now would stop its inexorable turning.
“Lord General?” Cart’s voice was quiet, but something in his tone told him that there was a problem. How could there be a problem?
“What is it, Cart?”
“Look to the sky, Lord General.” Cart pointed up into the distance, in the direction the dragons had flown.
Haldren squinted in the direction Cart had pointed, then cursed his aging eyes and called for a spyglass. Peering through the lenses, he could clearly see the tight clumps of dragons-his dragons-advancing toward the Thrane forces arrayed against them, far across the plain. “What? I don’t see-”
But then he did. More dragons lifted into the air, and they were behind the advancing Thrane lines. They closed with his dragons with murderous speed, and the sky erupted with fire and lightning as the two groups of dragons met. They swooped and dove at each other, tearing with fang and claw, great bursts of deadly energy erupting from their mouths. Some fought on the ground, wings and tails buffeting each other.
Haldren’s hands trembled as they clutched the spyglass tighter, pressing it to his eye as if looking harder would reveal a different interpretation of what he saw. But there was no other explanation: the Thranes had dragons fighting for them as well. At least a score of them.
Senya’s soft voice behind him hit him like a pronouncement of doom. “A clash of dragons signals the sundering of the Soul Reaver’s gates.”
As if responding to her words, the earth began to shudder, answered by a rolling crash of thunder across the sky.
CHAPTER 47
At the beginning of time, one legend said, the great dragon Siberys danced through the void, setting the stars in their places. Khyber prowled behind, consuming stars as fast as Siberys could scatter them. Eberron sang, apart from the others, and life began to blossom in the void.
Finally Siberys turned to confront Khyber, to stop the dark dragon from consuming the stars. The two dragons fought, tearing at each other in their hatred. At last Khyber arose victorious: Siberys was torn asunder, her body broken into numberless fragments. Then, thirsty for blood, Khyber wheeled upon Eberron.
Where Khyber lunged, Eberron snaked aside, around. The bloodless battle, the fierce dance continued for eons, neither dragon gaining ascendancy over the other. At last, Khyber grew tired, and Eberron enfolded and imprisoned Khyber in her own body. The struggles of the primordial dragons had come to an end.
Both dragons slumbered after their long warring, and hardened into earth. And so the world was born, Eberron forming its surface and Khyber its dark depths. The fragments of Siberys’s broken body encircled Eberron in a great ring that shone in the night. The Dragon Above, the Dragon Below, and the Dragon Between. Always Eberron stood between the Dragon Above and the Dragon Below.
Some parts of the Prophecy suggested that one day the divisions between them might be healed, but an event of such grand proportion was little more than a distant dream. Once in a very great while, though, the gulf could be bridged.
Gaven raced the Eye of the Storm toward the Starcrag Plain, following the path of a dry gorge between the Starpeaks and the forest to the east. Rienne and Darraun rested below, recovering from the dragon’s attack. Gaven wasn’t sure what he had to do, but a burning urgency spurred him on. Could he stop Haldren’s advance, prevent the clash of dragons and save Khorvaire from another terrible war? Failing that, could he prevent Vaskar’s ascension?
He didn’t know. And yet, somehow, he was satisfied. He was acting-he had made the decision to intervene in these events, to try, at least, to make events work out for the better. He vastly preferred that to a life spent floating on the currents that carried him. He would set his own course, choose his own destiny.
Destiny is…
The highest hopes the universe has for you. Like… like my mother wanted the best for me.
The memory of Senya’s words made him think again of his father. Arnoth had wanted only the best for him, even if his idea of what was the best didn’t often match Gaven’s. Why had Gaven not realized that until his father was gone?
The valley he’d been following opened out into the wide expanse of the Starcrag Plain, and Gaven saw the battlefield for the first time-with his eyes. It was hauntingly familiar as the landscape of his nightmares. The northern lands had whispered to him of their past and their destiny, hinting at the Prophecy and the words of creation hidden in the hills and trees. The Starcrag Plain screamed centuries of anguish. This was not the first time the plain had been a battlefield-ancient cairns, piles of weathered stones, littered its edges, and the ground itself spoke to him of horrors past and horrors yet to come.
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 s
omething 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.
