“Better to push on,” the Mad Prophet disagreed. “Whatever is spinning this dream we experience, it’s being tempered by some outside influence.” He resisted another tug at the reins as the mare tried again to snatch grass. “I can’t imagine the immensity of power needed to stabilize this existence enough to allow for our presence, but there won’t be a second chance should we outstay the limit set on our welcome.”
In stark proof of concern, the ground changed again. Plains and grass flowed away, replaced by volcanic rock and a blackened, clogged sky. The air churned with smoke like stirred sludge, and the footing rippled with heat haze. Jagged stacks of porous rock notched the scarp, scoured to red veins where magma had leached glowing sores through the crust.
The horses tossed their heads, sidling, tails high and nostrils distended. Their hooves clanged on rock, a rugged array of slabbed basalt ledges, seamed with the angry flows of lava and bubbling, sulfurous mud pots.
“If this is a drake’s dream,” the Mad Prophet ventured, “what we now cross would be their preferred habitat.” He broke off, forced to cough from the acidic bite of swirled ash. “Sethvir told me once the dragons used to roll in molten rock the way birds splash their feathers in a rain puddle. Burned the dross off new scales as a snake would shed an old skin.”
Had the horses not been dull with exhaustion, main force could not have coerced them to abide such a crossing. The ground was hot enough to blister through boot leather, and singe nasal membranes at
each breath. Scoured eyes streamed hot tears. The porous, sharp edges of solidified lava slit skin at a glancing touch.
Suffering still from smoke-damaged lungs, Felirin hacked and spluttered. Then Arithon’s mare gashed her fetlock in a stumble. Though she moved lame, Dakar feared to stop. The ground was unstable. Too much could go wrong if they tarried to shift the prince’s slack form to another mount.
“If we linger, we’ll sicken,” he rasped through a raw larynx. “The fumes here are poison.”
No choice remained but push on, each stumbling stride accomplished in unalloyed misery. Through the plodding, grim labor, Dakar could not tell if the spiral they walked seemed smaller and tighter, or whether the effect was the offshoot of headache and dizziness. Feathered drifts of ash caved in to hide tracks. Canyons of etched lava confounded each effort to sight lines for orientation. He could scarcely manage the task of tugging his horse and Arithon’s forward. All hope was lost if the spiral’s last coils departed from a safe track.
At weary length, the lava flows faded to smoking pits of used ash. The stone smoothed, bleached to a powdery, fine dust as clinging as pulverized porcelain. Smoke and fumes leached away to a turbid, blank haze, and the heat ebbed to dry, cruel cold.
No moss grew; no trees. What passed for sky seemed a drumhead of cloud, stretched the flat, dull pallor of scraped chalk. Against that unmarked, monochrome backdrop, a skeleton loomed like spired iron. The ribs spanned through air in vast, gabled arches. Long, scything horns on the knobs of each vertebra spiked upright, a gigantic array of pronged tusks. The bones gleamed a glossy, unearthly pearl white, with stripped cartilage lucent as quartz.
“Dragon,” breathed Felirin. He blinked, rubbed soot from gummed eyelids. The splayed, flint black curves of three talons pierced the ground, of a size to paralyze reason. A destrier could have walked underneath without hindrance. Speechless, stunned, the minstrel stared, riveted. “Ath, the terrible size of her!”
Dakar as well felt his flesh bathed in chills. As a child, he had seen living Paravians, whom none could encounter without change. This behemoth wreckage was long dead, and yet, it commanded a presence which rankled his nerves into shivers. No feat of mortal imagination could capture the monumental grandeur of what was scribed in these glyphs of naked bone.
Braced in arched rows, such ribs could have served as the vaults of a palace; and had, Dakar recalled through a vague flick of memory. Melhalla’s last high kings had convened court and served judgment under just such a buttressed hall. The domed, copper roofs had been shingled in drake scales, a legend even before the great uprising, when the ruling seat at Tirans had been gutted by fire and cast down into ruins.
The tail, with its delicate, vaned rudder and needle-thin spines rested curled in an exquisite, neat grace that bespoke the coiled threat of a predator. Despite such vast size, no creature from any past era in Athera could react with the speed of a dragon.
“Sethvir once confided the great drakes were agile enough to brave the crosswinds in a thundercloud.” Dakar shook his head, bemused to amazement. Credibility balked at the scale of such feats. These shining remains had tasted the ice crystals combed into white cirrus, when once, clothed in glittering gold scales and wild malice, the live dragon had knifed through the riptide currents of high altitude.
The skull they encountered loomed the size of a hay byre. Its black, shadowed eye sockets did not seem empty. Even in death, their uncanny survey guarded the shadowy realms past the Wheel. They appeared alert still, broodingly hooded in massive, spiked horn, and overlapped plates of etched bone.
Felirin ventured a timorous query. “Is it so, that the relics of dragons carry a bane?”
“Who knows?” Dakar stamped back his shivering dread. The inescapable fact remained that their steps were being guided ever nearer to the colossal skeleton. “There’s truth to the saying that where centaurs fell, the stones of the earth weep in sorrow. Dragon bones are much older and by lengths more eldritch. I’ve heard the skulls of the unhatched younglings have ties to dark magecraft, but that could be taletelling, for all I know of the details.”
They rounded the serrated spurs of a forelimb. Ahead, like sheared porcelain, the long, scything fangs propped open the gates of horned jaws. Rows of incisors gnashed through the blanketing dust, razor tipped as the prongs on a whipsaw.
Nor were the three exhausted fugitives the first to arrive at the site.
Light shattered the clogged air like hurled blades, fanned through the points of knobbed bone. A figure in dark robes astride a black horse shouted in pealing urgency. He bridged the small gap where the dragon’s forked tongue had once flickered, his outstretched hands streaming power like beacons. The flux of raised forces stormed across mortal senses like the roar of impending cataclysm.
Felirin froze in his tracks, undone by dread. “Ath Creator keep us safe.”
“Not Ath at all. That’s Asandir.” Dakar shot out an arm and hauled the bard forward. The unwholesome fumes seared his throat as he croaked, “We can’t linger.”
No Fellowship Sorcerer ever burned reckless power without cause. By the singing charge that lashed his awareness, Dakar understood the danger loomed too vast to grapple. Only once before had he seen Asandir unleash his full strength, and that on the hour the Mistwraith had attacked Lysaer and Arithon at Ithamon.
Then as now, the power streamed outward in crackling rays, no brute stab of force, but the unbridled might of fine energies called down by a spirit schooled into peerless unity with every facet of Ath’s creation. The result ranged harmonics like a hammer blow to bronze, showering light in waves of continuous vibration.
“Come on,” Dakar gasped. “We’re in deadly peril.” The unshielded might of a Fellowship Sorcerer could derange mortal thoughts, even leave a man witless and paralyzed.
The spellbinder fell back upon ingrained reflex and impelled his stunned limbs to keep moving. However he cowered and shrank from close contact, he feared worse to cross the outright command of a Sorcerer raised to the flash-point pinnacle wrought from bridled chaos and immaculate intent. Dakar prodded the horses’ stumbling strides to narrow the last distance between.
Felirin hung back, stupefied, until an appeal from Asandir yoked the gray with a word that could have moved rooted granite. The horse led the minstrel, bonded in light, and a mystery outside plodding reason.
They crossed inside the proximity of the Fellowship conjury.
“Well-done, but hurry,” Asandir exhorted. “T
he currents of this dream state aren’t kindly or biddable.” His voice cut through actinic bursts of refined power as if speech had been honed by something beyond sound. “I won’t be able to temper the forces here to keep you alive for much longer.”
Dakar forced the question. “Then this isn’t Arithon’s creation of despair?”
“Never that,” Asandir flung back, strained. “Move him on. Hurry. He’s unconscious because his own trained defenses are killing him.”
But the order itself proved most difficult to carry out. The potency of the Sorcerer’s wards of themselves seemed to hamper free movement. Dakar felt as though each of his steps was dragged through shimmering mercury. The powerfield scoured his mage-sight until vision dissolved behind a deluge of silver-tipped sleet. His tired mind could not compensate.
He was vaguely aware of passing the gateway between the dragon’s front teeth. Two horses followed, their breath hot on his neck, and through that sensation, the ghost-feather touch of Asandir’s guiding hand on his shoulder.
“Keep going, as you love life!” The Sorcerer’s raw strength steadied him over the pothole of bone that yawned between the vast jawbones. “Don’t worry about shielding. I’ll see that Felirin comes to no harm.”
“The dragon,” Dakar asked. “Do you fear she’ll awaken?”
Asandir faced him, his surprise etched in glare, and his eyes the flecked gray of rinsed granite. “Ath, no. She’s been dead for two ages. You don’t see? This grimward contains the left dreams of her haunt.”
“A ghosts’s imprint?” Dakar stared, his skin ashen. “Dharkaron’s own tears! You’re saying a live one would dream the more powerfully?”
“Enough to reweave the known fabric of creation.” Asandir’s brisk push sent him onward, under the ribbed vaults of the gullet. “Go now. To leave, you must enter the inner chamber of the skull. The passage won’t be smooth or comfortable, but rest on my word. You’ll emerge unmarked in due time.”
The Mad Prophet tightened his sweaty grip on the lead reins. The horses trailed at his heels without protest, thralled to submission by spells. “You’re not coming yourself?”
Asandir shook his head. “Forty Alliance guardsmen crossed into the grimward’s sealed circle. Twenty eight have perished for their folly. If they killed game, or broke off so much as a leaf in this place, my powers could not stay their spirits from entanglement. More will be lost ere they reach my protection. For the sake of any who may live to win through, I have obligation to stay. Once I lift my influence, the dream will revert back to entropic chaos. Only another great drake could survive, and then solely because it could remake the torn structure of its being.”
The Sorcerer’s last words splashed a patter of echoes through a thousandfold crannies of chambered bone. “Dakar, caution your prince.” The admonishment filtered through the ringing reverberations of hooves striking the slagged plates of the fire vents at each side of the dragon’s throat. “Any guardsman who emerges alive from this grimward will remember his fear and cry vengeance. Be wary. Blame will fall on the Master of Shadow for all of Hanshire’s slain company.”
“Tell my prince,” Dakar grumbled. He resisted the craven urge to shut his eyes and ignore the forbidding cavern which yawned ahead
of his quaking steps. “Since when did I ever swear fealty to a madman wanted dead by half the townsmen on the continent?”
Any future concern seemed a pittance before the crossing still left to surmount. From behind, a flurried prayer as Felirin braved the dark on the tails of the glassy-eyed horses. Dakar crept into the fusty darkness. His boot soles slipped and minced across a surface like watered marble, while the unseen, vaulted cranium flung back echoes of each wheezing breath. In blind trust, the Mad Prophet hoped Arithon stayed on the mare as the lightless cavern engulfed him. Sound just beyond the high range of his hearing seemed to ripple like ribbon across his ears. Then his vision shimmered, punched through by sparks and sequins of chipped obsidian. A rash of fine prickles stabbed over his skin, and vertigo twisted his senses.
Then a magic wrapped in energies he had never known bathed all of his nerve ends in fire. Every last tie to creation unraveled. Sucked into the well of primal oblivion, Dakar realized in panic that this crossing was nothing like a guided spell transfer from a familiar Paravian focus circle. As his mind spiraled down toward the heart of null darkness, he cried out in sheer panic. He did not know how to untangle this pattern. Nor had he the clues to the necessary knowledge cached amid his muddled memories of prostitutes. No one had taught him the guidepost to relocate the haven of Athera’s known territory.
Recall
Late Spring 5653
Just before solstice, the nights in Caithwood held a soft, breathing warmth, the air thick as milk in the pearlescent moonlight which streamed through the dense crowns of old oak trees. These ancient groves had never tasted the axe blade. Nor had black soil known the bite of the plow, or the turned iron rim of the cart wheel. The pale, whorled bark of ancient copper beeches wore mottles like coin silver where the strung-floss motes speared the darkness. Rolling combers off Mainmere Bay lisped through, sea and earth joined in dialogue by the whisper of the leaves that stirred to the tireless breezes. The mockingbird’s song and the whistles of nightjars spilled liquid notes through the stillness, much as they had in Paravian times when centaur guardians had reigned, and the sunchild dancers had called down the mysteries that moved, incarnate, with the wild grace of the unicorns.
In Third Age 5653, no Athlien flutes rang through Caithwood’s glades to celebrate the joy of the season; nor did centaur horn calls reverberate under the eaves of the oaks. Yet in their absence, the low, sandy shoreline which faced Havish and the sands at Torwent did not pass unpatrolled. In furtive, tight bands, Lord Maenol’s scouts kept watch for oncoming Alliance ships.
A month past, the contents of Mearn s’Brydion’s warning had reached them, word of the coming blockade brought in by runner from Mogg’s Fen. The Caithwood clans knew of the Koriani conspiracy at Riverton which had set Arithon s’Ffalenn to blind flight. They
received the worst news with grim determination, that three finished vessels had sailed from their launching, packed with Etarran men-at-arms and sealed orders to cut off Mainmere Narrows until nothing alive could slip through. At all costs, the handful of scouts understood they must hold the coastline open, that the families set to flight from the north could stay free to seek promised sanctuary in Havish.
Never mind their strength was insufficient for the task, their numbers pared thin by bloodshed and necessity. Lord Maenol’s appeal asked no quarter, allowed space for no preference or pity.
Despite closing threat, no one thought of desertion. The Caithwood scouts kept their posts, their forest held sacrosanct by a hard-bitten few, sworn to lay down life and safety for their caithdein.
Not even the lean fisherman’s dory run in by dark escaped their exhaustive vigilance.
“Two occupants,” whispered the woman who had just sprinted in from the lookout at the mouth of the Narrows. “One passive, and the other manning the oars. Neither looks armed. We saw no glint of weapons, but then, sure’s storm, they haven’t come here to go cod fishing.”
The stern elder who captained the outpost made his immediate decision. “Watch then. They don’t leave the shingle unchallenged.” A hand signal sent two reserve scouts off on foray, with the elder himself at the fore.
By the raked dunes at the shoreline, the three clansmen crouched wary in rustling stands of sea grass, while the dory knifed in to make landfall. Its sharp prow and muffled oars formed a cut black phantom against lucent lace sheets that billowed and surged where the froth of spent breakers receded. As the curl of the surf shot the craft through the shallows, the old scout made comment. “Torwent fisherman. See the woven string bracelets? He’s also damned good with the boat.”
The man dragged his broad looms, and in dauntless competence, let his keel gently ground into sand.
The other figur
e in the stern seat clambered out, the brimmed hat he wore obscuring his face from clear view. While the inbound combers fountained over his shins, he leaned down and recovered a satchel he had tucked safely under the stern seat. An older man, he seemed an enigma, his simple, dark clothing too plain to identify a regional origin. Though his burden was not heavy, an odd hitch to his movements bespoke stiffened scars or old injuries. The hands that clasped the dory’s thwart and redirected it seaward were gnarled and bent, if still competent.
His spoken farewell did not carry. The oarsman nodded in clipped respect, then dug in his looms to hurry his return passage before the riptide raced through the Narrows. The one he had covertly delivered to Caithwood waded shoreward, his limp grown pronounced as the wet sand mired his ankles. Once on dry ground, he paused, the flat spill of the moonlight licking the hanks of white, shoulder-length hair. He tipped his face skyward. Beneath the brimmed hat, his features were cragged and intent, as if he expected an omen.
Out of the night, a raven flapped down and settled upon his raised wrist.
He lilted a greeting. The bird answered back, then sidestepped to perch on his shoulder.
“Here’s a friend.” The scout captain stood in the shoulder-high dune grass, his distrust melted into glad greeting. “Traithe?”
The Fellowship Sorcerer turned his clean-shaven chin and smiled. “My blessing, yes. You’re Maenol’s captain?”
“For Caithwood, I am.” The elder strode forward, then beckoned for the other hidden scouts to reveal themselves. While the velvet thick breeze stirred the fronds on the seed heads, and the raven on Traithe’s shoulder stretched a coal wing to preen, the older captain presented the courtesy of the clans to visiting members of the Fellowship. “How may we serve the land?”
Traithe hooked the strap of his satchel, and stroked the bird’s breast with his knuckle. “My tidings aren’t joyous. I need you to tell me where I might find Earl Jieret s’Valerient, who serves Prince Arithon as caithdein of Rathain.”