Wherever the currents of magic met the surface of the world, they buckled and twisted like colts in heat, breaking the earth and burning the air with its power. Hundreds of the asur died in the opening moments of the cataclysm, and hundreds more were soon to follow them as the waves of destruction and unfettered magical energy spread out from the Isle of the Dead.
Piece by piece, Ulthuan was tearing itself apart.
“How does it feel, old ghost, to know that I have undone your great work?” yelled Morathi.
She shrieked to the misty air, for she stood alone on the glassy plain of basalt. Howling winds surrounded her, yet the space within the vortex was silent, an eye of a hurricane of magical energy that was unravelling before her eyes.
Crackling shapes moved in the mist, mighty figures that shimmered and faded as they endlessly described complex patterns with their hands. The motions required of the great ritual were complex and exacting, and these mages had been weaving them for thousands of years, never changing and never stopping.
Except one had stopped.
Morathi laughed and brandished a golden-bladed dagger of strange design above her head. Coagulating blood dripped from its edge onto the body at Morathi’s feet. It decayed at a furious rate, skin and hair flaking from bone that powdered in an instant. In moments, even that was scattered by the wind until all that was left was an empty robe of silver weave.
“It took me hundreds of years to learn how to shield my thoughts from you,” she said. “Hundreds of years, thousands of lives and an age of searching for the right weapon to slay your all-powerful mages.”
Morathi stalked the plain, shouting to the empty air, gloating, though there was no one over whom to gloat. Her body was slathered in old blood, and her black steed pawed the hard ground as though here under sufferance. It was eager to be away, and its wings ruffled at its flanks.
“You scared me once, I’ll admit that,” said Morathi. “When last we spoke, I was afraid of you. I believed you when you said you would destroy this place rather than allow me to take it. What a fool I was! You had no power then, and you have none now.”
“Is that what you think…?”
Morathi spun, and there he was, just as she remembered him.
Caledor Dragontamer, if this revenant could still be called such, was ghostly pale, his skin near translucent. The meat of his muscles wriggled on his skull, and his eyes were black coal, devoid of life and sanity.
“It is what I know,” said Morathi, gesturing to the empty robes. “One of your precious cabal is dead by my hand and your ritual is broken.”
“Always so literal, Morathi,” said Caledor. “It is one of your greatest failings.”
Morathi scowled, knowing the old ghost was simply trying to make her angry.
“You look terrible, Caledor,” said Morathi. “You were once a fine specimen of an elf, tall, broad-shouldered and handsome, but all that is left of you is a skeletal wreck.”
“I am reminded daily of how deathly I look,” said Caledor. “I think it amuses him.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Morathi. “To whom do you talk on this dead island?”
“Why, Death, naturally,” said Caledor, as though she had asked a particularly obtuse question. She smiled and threw back her head to laugh.
“I believed you mad before. Now I know it.”
“Mad? A distinct possibility,” agreed Caledor. “Mad, but not stupid. I created the vortex, and I told you once that I would not allow you to have it.”
“I do not want it, I am here to destroy it.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
Caledor laughed. “That is your answer for destroying a world? Why not?”
“That you desire it saved is enough for me to want it destroyed.”
“How petty you have become, Morathi,” said Caledor, sounding more disappointed than angry. “Death may not suit me, but immortality suits you even less. You may hide behind a fair face, but your heart is rotten to the core. I warned Aenarion about you, but he would not listen. Too wrapped in grief to see the corruption behind your mask of beauty. What would he think were he to see you now?”
“Aenarion is dead, Caledor,” snapped Morathi. “As you should be. We are not so different you and I, for we have both cheated death.”
“Not so,” said Caledor. “As you say, I am an old ghost, nothing more.”
“Then I am done with you,” said Morathi. “Your vortex is coming apart and Ulthuan is doomed. My vengeance is complete knowing that you will die with it.”
Caledor shook his head. “All those thousands of years, and you still do not understand…”
“Understand what?” shrieked Morathi.
“That I will never let that happen,” said Caledor.
“There is nothing you can do to stop it,” answered Morathi. “It has already happened.”
Caledor smiled. “One age ends, another begins. You do not realise what you have done, what you have begun.”
“And what is that?”
“A new age,” said the old ghost.
Reclined upon his padded litter atop the Tower of Hoeth, Teclis closed his eyes and ran his hands across the obsidian moonsphere. For six hours he had attempted to send his spirit eyes within its impenetrable surface. It was said the secrets of the future were locked within its impossibly dense structure, the course of every possible event encoded in the complex lattice of its formation. Most likely that was not true, but Teclis had never been one to allow the impossibility of a task deter him from trying.
Not even Bel-Korhadris had been able to unlock the secrets of the moonsphere, and generations of Loremasters had similarly failed to discover what lay within. It had been gathering dust in the archive chambers of the Tower of Hoeth for hundreds of years, forgotten by all save the most dedicated of scholars.
Teclis did not know what had compelled him to send one of the Sword Masters to fetch it, but he had little else with which to occupy his time. The potions that had kept him strong as a youth now did little to sustain him, and only sufficed to take the edge away from the constant pain that wracked his limbs. Though the healers remained optimistic, Teclis knew he was dying, his weakened frame finally succumbing to Morathi’s sorcery.
He had observed the battles raging at Lothern and before the walls of Tor Elyr, lamenting every death, and rejoicing in each turn in the asur’s favour. He wept as the fire consumed Belannaer, then laughed as he saw the book from which the old Loremaster read. His spirit soared as he felt Tyrion’s rejection of the Sword of Khaine’s influence, even though he knew it was but a temporary reprieve. Such a dread shard of the murder god’s power would not easily surrender its most treasured son.
That was a struggle for another time, and Teclis savoured this small victory.
His eyes snapped open a moment before the surge of magical energy roared up through the tower. Like magma boiling up from the heart of a volcano, raw power filled every stone in the White Tower and blazed from the golden finial where the Sword of Bel-Korhadris would sit in times of peace.
Teclis surged to his feet as the unbridled power of magic poured into him, reknitting torn flesh, mending ruptured blood vessels and making whole necrotic tissue in his heart and lungs. In an instant, his flesh was reborn, healed more fully than any potion could hope to cure. His body was still the frail shell of flesh it had always been, but the hurt done to him in the fires that burned the tower was undone as surely as though it had never happened.
The moonstone fell from his hands and fell to the patterned marble floor of the tower.
It cracked open in the storm of magical energy that blazed through the tower, and Teclis looked upon its internal structure with eyes that shone with titanic power. Greater than any wielder of magic in this or any other age, Teclis saw the insane geometries within the moonsphere and laughed as he saw the fate of a million futures mapped out.
Teclis spoke a word of power and his plain robe was instantly transformed int
o one of cobalt blue, ivory white and shimmering gold. A shining sword and moon-topped staff appeared in his hands, and upon his head, a crown of gold and sapphire glittered with lambent light.
Fire billowed around Teclis, but did not touch him.
He roared with the sheer joy and terror of commanding all the magic in the world.
Then he vanished.
Imrik was no more, and yet he could hear song.
Who could be singing in this place of dreams, where ancient minds slept away the cares of the world? He had sung songs of glory once, but no one had heard them and he had stopped when he had run out of will to give them voice. His life was a flickering ember, a dying spark lost in the darkness.
No, not darkness…
Fire, blazing fire, surrounded him. What had been a fading glow now leapt to life as a great song enfolded him. It was the greatest song in the world, yet he knew he would never be able to do it justice were he to live long enough to recount this event. It had no words, no melody and no tune, just an exultant evocation of wondrous times of glory when Ulthuan was young and still cooling from the molten fires of creation that had shaped it.
Light pulsed from the heart of the world, billowing up in great waves that filled the air with hot thermals of the purest magic. On these winds flew the first dragons, the chosen children of the gods and the inheritors of all that magic could achieve. These were the glory days, when anything was possible, and impossible was a concept that simply did not exist.
Imrik saw all this and more.
Days of glory where cycles of the universe were but the blink of an eye. Voyages between the stars, where a dragon’s wings could carry it to distant suns with a single beat. Imrik saw fierce battles fought between rival dragons that snuffed out worlds and birthed them anew in the fires of their great wars. It was an age undreamed and unknown, a secret history known only to dragonkind, and told to him now by the mightiest of dragons.
Imrik found himself face to face with a vast eye. It was the size of a star, and he a mote in its eye, yet still it saw him. All that had been lost in his endless wanderings was remade by the music of the oldest dragons. They sang songs unknown to the elves and younger dragons, and bore Imrik up through the white heat of their dreamings, where no mortal was ever meant to venture.
Imrik cried out as he opened his eyes and found himself once more in the vast cave beneath the mountains. His wasted flesh was whole once more, the effort of singing the songs of awakening undone by the magic of this last song. What the power of the elves could not achieve was child’s play to the dragons.
Steam and ashen smoke filled the air and the ground shook with violent tremors.
Imrik rose to his feet as mighty shapes moved and shifted in the steam.
Dragons. Hundreds of awakened dragons.
A huge beast with a body that glittered as though constellations were captured in its scales loomed over him. Its vast head dipped, and its eyes shone with ancient fire.
We are the dragons of Ulthuan, and we come to fight!
CHAPTER TWENTY
SACRIFICES
The vortex was unravelling, and it was madness to run into its collapsing heart, but that was what they were doing. Eldain and Caelir ran side by side, with Rhianna matching them stride for stride. Howling winds tried to push them back and random flares of raw magic burst with painful brightness all around them. Their skin glistened with magic, and even their breath sparkled with the nearness of such boundless creative energy.
Eldain’s blood shone like painted rubies, and though it had long since dried on his armour, it ran as though fresh from the vein, eager to become something. The life-giving properties of the vortex tugged at their flesh, urging it to change, to reshape itself and take advantage of this magical boon.
What else could you be? What might you become?
The lure was strong, and colours swirled around him in washes of brightness: reds, golds, white, orange and lilac. Colours that had no names, and which the mages and wizards of the world had forgotten, bled into existence, their power magnified in this place of confluence.
Rhianna staggered under the effect of so much magic, like a reveller after too many goblets of dreamwine. The power here was intoxicating and overwhelming. It overloaded the senses until nothing else mattered. Caelir was lifted from his feet by the force of the magic, laughing like a maniac as febrile energies coursed through his body. Their headlong run into the vortex was halted in an instant, and all three came to a dazed halt as their senses swam in the myriad complexities of the vortex’s power.
Magical energy surrounded them, passing around and through them, drawn to their mortal desires and flesh by the beat of their hearts. It bathed them and filled their bodies with limitless potential. Against such power, what could three mortal elves achieve?
Eldain held out his hands.
“Hold on to me!” he yelled, the words taking shape as colour and light as soon as they left his mouth. His hair whipped around his head and he saw a thousand spinning concepts at play in the air above him. Dreams, nightmares and the amorphous things in-between. The vortex was a towering loom of potential, a thundering engine of creation that could make the impossible commonplace, the unreal solid.
He felt Caelir take his hand, his brother staggering as though bowed under a heavy load. Rhianna took his other hand, and they followed his lead as he pushed on into the vortex. There was no way to tell if he was heading in the right direction, for nothing in this swirling morass gave any clue to forwards or backwards, left or right. Such mortal constraints held no sway here and for all Eldain knew he might be walking in circles.
Caelir cried out, waving his free hand at some terror only he could see. Rhianna wept tears that flew off like tiny winged jewels, and screamed meaningless words to the howling winds. No sooner had one emotion seized them than another would replace it. They laughed, danced with joy and tried to pull away from him to chase invisible heart’s desires.
Eldain dragged them after him, like a master with two recalcitrant hounds.
They screamed and raged and cried into the vortex, assailed by visions of things only they could know. Eldain wondered why he was unaffected by the power of the vortex. Were his dreams so banal and mundane that they were beneath its notice?
Perhaps it was because he had no dreams left, and wasn’t that all magic was?
Wasn’t that what made magic wondrous? That it could make any dream reality?
The magic of the vortex could reach deep into the furthest recesses of a heart and make real anything it desired. It was the power at the heart of creation, and there was nothing beyond its ability to conjure into being. Yet all Eldain saw was the raging heart of the disintegrating vortex, its lightning spalls, its fiery unmaking and the destruction being wrought on the landscape by its death throes.
Though every step was a battle, like walking in a dream where everything is arrayed in opposition, Eldain struggled onwards, dragging Caelir and Rhianna behind him. He bowed his head against the fierce magical winds and concentrated on simply putting one foot in front of the other. The ground beneath his feet was no longer the glassy plain, but a swirling sea of luminescent colours that was solid only because he believed it to be so. No sooner had the thought taken shape than the ground became soft and spongy.
Eldain gritted his teeth and willed the ground to solidity, and grinned as it instantly transformed into marble flagstones that ran with silver light. Understanding the potential of the magical gale buffeting him, Eldain lifted his head into the wind.
“Be still and grant me passage!”
The wind dropped immediately and the swirling colours parted before him, as though he walked through an invisible tunnel of force that bored through the maelstrom of raging magic. He knew better than to believe he was the master of this power, and hurried onwards to where he saw a pale stillness ahead. Caelir and Rhianna came with him, blinking and panting as the delusions beguiling them vanished.
“How…?” gasped C
aelir.
“What did you do?” said Rhianna.
“I’m not sure,” said Eldain. “But the way is clear.”
They moved onwards, the passage through the howling vortex sealing behind Eldain as he walked towards the eye of the hurricane. He did not ask what they had seen in the magic, for there was a haunted look on both their faces that spoke of some dreams that ought never to be dragged into the light.
At last they emerged from the swirling vortex and found themselves standing at the edge of a glassy plateau of shimmering rock. The funnel of the vortex towered above them, its top lost to sight in thundering storms of magical discharge as the power it was intended to contain flooded back into a world unready for it.
In the centre of the plain stood Morathi and another elf who looked more like a cadaver than a living being. Her back was to them, and Eldain saw the same dread weapon that had so terrified him before the battle at Tor Elyr had begun strapped to her back.
“Morathi…” hissed Caelir, drawing his sword.
She turned at the mention of her name, and smiled as though greeting a long lost friend. The gaunt elf beside her looked up into the storm raging above him, and Eldain saw his eyes were black and lifeless, his face like a skeleton with a thin layer of flesh pasted over it. He wondered who this was and what terrible fate had seen him trapped in such a place. The old elf seemed pleased to see them, and began moving his hands in esoteric patterns that left glittering trails in the air.
Rhianna gasped as she drew the unchained magic into her body, her hands crackling with power as she whispered the first syllables of a spell. Caelir went left, and Eldain went right. Morathi faced Rhianna with a withering look of contempt. She spared a glance for the old elf of no less contempt.
“This is it, Caledor? This is the best you can summon to your defence?”
Eldain pulled up in shock at Morathi’s casual use of the name.