It was a tale Tragen had told on many occasions — a tale that two days ago she would have thought preposterous. Now, she still remembered it right down to the silly dramatic flourishes he loved so much. In his honor, she would tell it as he would.
It took another few moments of marveling at her need to honor a man she, Corinna, had never even met, before she could actually begin.
“A thousand years ago,” she said, “give or take, two empires ruled over the habitable lands comprising the known world of Rhyll: two continents, one half again as large as the other, each once home to smaller nations now united through diplomacy and conquest. With only a smattering of contested islands between them, each empire viewed its opposite across the sea as the next obvious target.
“I don’t know who struck first — I’m not sure anyone does anymore. They launched their respective invasions, each made at the end of a dangerous sea voyage that left the invader too weak to gain more than a finger-hold before the defender drove them back. The stalemate touched off a long, uneasy peace. All they could do was glare at each other across a wall of water, sparring thereafter only in occasional island skirmishes.”
“A cold war,” Austin interrupted.
“Aye, now that you mention it. The inability to wage war led to investments at home. Their people grew wealthy and proud. Any domestic ills at all were, of course, the fault of the foreign devils across the sea who, some day, would be rightfully thrown down for the safety of all.”
“Names?”
“Itrusca on the larger, northern continent, Solunar the smaller. And across both, there had always been dragons. Rhyll was — and is — home to many magical creatures, but dragons were by far the greatest of these. Magic flowed through their veins as thick as any blood, as if they came from some other place entirely. I’m tempted to compare them to angels and devils; you could arguably sort them into noble and malevolent strains. They kept to themselves in those days and were seldom seen. But they were always more than legend. As beings of power, I guess it was only a matter of time before those two empires considered dragons a possible avenue to victory.
“I don’t think Solunar ever managed much in that regard. Itrusca fared far better, through magical experiments conducted in secret. If they approached the noble dragons for help, they would have none of it, so the blood of a few slain malevolents and their captured eggs became the focus of their research.
“They probed the source of the dragons’ power until, amid their progress, dissent grew among the researchers. Some, mages from an isolated province called Kish, questioned the wisdom of the experiments’ growing pace and danger. They withdrew from the project in an attempt to convince their colleagues to follow suit. Kish held a fair bit of political power, and their withdrawal hampered the pace, but the experiments continued. Perhaps if the Kish delegation remained involved and tried to guide the research more rationally, they might have prevented the disaster that followed.”
Austin had stopped chewing, listening only, with the unspoken question plain on his face. She went on, happy to have someone to tell despite the grave subject, and enjoying the act of revelation the way she might a well-received gig.
“Before the experiments, the dragon population — of both dispositions — seemed more or less constant to anyone’s reckoning. If this was a natural result of stable birth rates or a more mystical balance of migration to Rhyll from somewhere far beyond the known sea, no one knew. When they could be found to be asked, the noble dragons would not provide an answer. If the malevolents ever did,” she paused to shoot him a smile, “well, it was lost when the asking party was eaten. Yet suddenly, on the heels of a massive explosion above the Itruscan capital, this changed.
“I’m not sure why, but the malevolent population skyrocketed soon after Kish withdrew. By some accounts, the malevolents had already grown agitated shortly before, and they weren’t content to brood in their lairs. Those who survived witnessing it wrote of dragons descending on Rhyll like a hurricane of fire out of the night sky.
“Dragons swept across both continents, plundering two prosperous civilizations at the height of their power, killing all who stood in their way. I don’t know for sure what the Itruscans did that caused it. Maybe their experiments provoked the dragons’ anger, or they broke some metaphysical barrier holding draconic populations in check. It hardly mattered at that point. By all accounts, those responsible died in the first moments, and the innocents who perished after them knew only terror.
“They would have wiped the peoples of Rhyll from the world entirely, I expect, if not for their noble kin. Though the two sides always clashed before in any chance meetings, they had rarely sought each other out. The Itruscan catastrophe galvanized those rivalries. What few noble dragons existed emerged from their lairs. They called others of their kind to Rhyll from across the sea or farther, and organized the peoples of Rhyll against their destructive kin. The Dragon War was joined.”
“Straightforward name.”
Corinna chuckled. “I expect they saw little point in being obtuse.” Obtuse? she thought. I talk like that now?
“I’m sorry to say the nobles’ help wasn’t enough. Though the nobles had the benefit of organization, the malevolents were far too many. For every noble defense of one region, two burned elsewhere. Battles between dragons often turned so inevitably destructive that collateral damage marred any victories they achieved. Itrusca and Solunar both fractured into smaller nations, which were then plundered one at a time. The nobles’ numbers eroded, and with them, any hope for a victory. It seemed as though any defeat of the enemy would be bought with the lives of all who remained to defeat them, dragons and people alike.
“It was near the war’s end that the greatest of the noble dragons arose. Honestly, I’m not sure if she appeared right then, or she was always there and that’s simply how they tell the story, but her name was Aurkauramesh. She was the most powerful of all, on either side. Her mere presence was said to make the enemy tremble, like a goddess of all dragons had taken form to fight.
“Strong as she was, her might alone couldn’t win the war. With help from the remaining Kishians and what few other mages survived in Rhyll, Aurkauramesh made one final gambit. The malevolent horde couldn’t be destroyed, not by those who remained to oppose them. It had to be shut away, delayed, to buy Rhyll time to recover enough strength to gain a chance of winning.
“The ritual took days to complete. I wish I could have been there, to witness what she did.” She sighed, catching a faint smile on Austin’s face that reflected hers before she refocused. “Not that it wasn’t a terrible time. Many of the noble dragons who remained sacrificed their lives in the ritual’s defense, or purely to power the magic itself. When Aurkauramesh had finished — well, those few lucky enough to remember the experience told of a cacophony of dragon screams radiating throughout Rhyll as the magic erupted.”
“Maybe that part wouldn’t have been so fun to experience,” Austin said.
“Aye. It was said to have lasted hours. When it faded, so had most of the dragons.” She paused, considering how to explain. “Aurkauramesh, in lay terms, created, well, a fold in reality. The fold drew the malevolents into it, and sealed it behind them.” She folded a section of the bedspread over her hand to demonstrate. “But like I said, it wasn’t a victory. They weren’t destroyed, only in stasis until a time when the magic would eventually fail. Aurkauramesh held the seal shut herself, but after the strain of establishing it, the cost of maintaining it was too enormous for her to do anything else. She lay as a sleeping guardian, weakened and forever focused in an unending trance that left her oblivious and vulnerable. She made a great sacrifice. The thing is, no one remembered it.”
Austin appeared engaged already, but she paused again to further focus his attention.
“I said the sealing ritual used Aurkauramesh’s power and that of the other nobles, but that wasn’t all it took, and shutting the dragons away wasn’t the only result. While their power
was definitely a factor, the spell worked hand-in-hand with the memories of all in Rhyll. Memory — it has a potency of its own. It’s more linked to reality than most people know, and magical creatures especially are tied to that. The first effect of Aurkauramesh’s spell was that, the moment it was cast, the memory of the Dragon War vanished from the minds of nearly everyone in Rhyll. Even the memory of the malevolents’ very existence was wiped, and the malevolents became, for lack of a better term, detached from reality. That alone wouldn’t have stopped them, but it was enough to let them be swept into the fold Aurkauramesh had made.
“Those memories didn’t return, either. Oh, people remembered living through something terrible. They still recalled themselves, and loved ones. But almost no one, despite the obvious destruction, quite remembered the Dragon War.”
A shout and a crash came from somewhere outside. Corinna bolted upright and dashed to the window. A young man in a blue hat was on his bum in the middle of the parking lot, surrounded by assorted canned goods. They rolled lazily along the ground beside him.
He was laughing, as was the dark-haired woman giving him a hand up. Corinna watched for a moment longer to be sure nothing was amiss, and then returned to her bed with a dismissive head shake to Austin.
“It’s nothing,” she told him. “Where was I?”
“Almost no one remembered the Dragon War. I was about to ask about that ‘almost.’”
“Aye.” She shifted on the edge of the bed, getting comfortable again.” Some few did remember. A small circle of wizards in Kish kept their memories, entrusted with the task of watching over Aurkauramesh. In the following years, they studied the seal. Mnemonicraft, too — essentially ‘memory magic’ — which was completely unknown to them before. It was slow going, but they learned. They did what they could to maintain the seal, shore it up when it got weak, and — they hoped — take some of the burden from Aurkauramesh to give her a chance to heal.”
“They guarded her, but more than that, they guarded all knowledge of her, of the Dragon War, everything. See, the same memory loss that jogged the malevolents enough to be captured also served to keep them in stasis. The more people who knew of them, the greater the pull back to Rhyll, and the harder for Aurkauramesh to keep them at bay. Think of it like a door; it doesn’t matter how good the latch is if the door itself rots away.
“So Kish turned isolationist. It wasn’t hard; they were a nation on a peninsula. They suffered among the least in the war and most of the mages left alive in Rhyll at the time were Kishian, so they were quite self-sufficient. The rest of Rhyll rebuilt itself around them.
“Kish did help in what ways they could, but they allowed few outsiders to cross their borders. They caught anyone entering without permission, erased all memory of their time within Kish, and released them with a warning not to return. Those who guarded Aurkauramesh became known as the Sentinels. Not even their countrymen knew quite what they protected, only that it was deeply important. Kish’s leaders, who shared the secret, created traditions and arrangements to ensure the Sentinels would always hold respect.”
“Rhi was from Kish, wasn’t she?”
Corinna smiled. “Aye, Austin. A Sentinel, and the youngest. And quite chuffed about it.”
Austin seemed to drift to some private place for a moment until his gaze returned to hers, hardened. “So assuming I believe any of this, what’s it got to do with what’s going on now?”
“Assuming you believe? You think I’m just having you on while some git is trying to kill us? This is important.”
She felt the urge to ask if he trusted her, but she discarded the impulse. It wasn’t a fair question. So why did she want to ask it so badly?
“I want to believe.”
“Well, that’s a start, isn’t it?” She smirked. “What’s it got to do with anything? Well, over the centuries, people began to remember — or not remember so much as piece it together from odds and ends. A bunch of dragons don’t destroy civilization without someone wanting to write a bit of it all down, do they? As the rest of Rhyll rebuilt itself, knowledge of the Dragon War, if not the full mess of details, gradually crept back into awareness.
“The Sentinels knew it was bound to happen. They couldn’t recreate what Aurkauramesh had done, couldn’t wipe things clean again, but they did what they could to reinforce the sealing. This was amid all their other troubles, of course. It’s not like everyone was always keen to let Kish exist in peace. They did a good job, for centuries, until the sealing weakened to the point where something more had to be done. Despite the Sentinels’ efforts, the strain on Aurkauramesh had grown too great for her to hold out much longer. They needed to reinforce the seal, but it wasn’t in their power to redo what she had created. So they found a new way.
“You remember that rift I told you of in the car? It was newly discovered at that point. I can’t explain exactly what they did without giving you at least a hundred hours’ worth of magical instruction, but in lay terms, they tied a knot.”
“You can explain a little more than that. I’m about to get a PhD in physics. I’m not the slowest kid on the block.”
It wasn’t the same thing, but she didn’t bother to say so. “I think I said not all the malevolent dragons got sealed away. A few escaped, fleeing to their lairs when they lost the advantage of numbers. Yet being of similar natures, they still held a mystical connection with the ones who were trapped, in a sense. There’s a term someone I know in Glastonbury uses all the time. Do you know what a ‘microcosm’ is?”
“Something small that’s representative of something larger. Like a fractal? A single piece of the whole being a smaller copy of what it came from?”
“Never heard of a fractal, but that sounds about right. One malevolent dragon could — with a little magical manipulation — represent the entire sealed-away mass. One was caught, subdued without killing it. Then, as a microcosm of those already locked away, they magically bound it in a prepared container and, as the final step, pitched it through the rift. One dragon sealed in a small space, linked to many sealed in a large space. Both connected, both slightly removed from Rhyll — reality all looped about and bound together in a metaphysical knot, or a lock on a door. I realize it all sounds like a bunch of codswallop, but no matter what bloody metaphor you pick, the end result’s that so long as the bound dragon remains bound, and out of Rhyll, the others Aurkauramesh imprisoned can’t escape.”
Austin frowned and cast a troubled glance at the dingy motel carpet. “So that’s what the crystal is. That’s why it’s really here?”
“Aye. The Draig Crystal, they called it. They still thought the rift was just a timeless limbo when they pitched the crystal through it. Another little pocket dimension, somewhere it’d be safe, where no one could retrieve it. When they figured out the timelessness was only a distortion, that the rift led to a place other than nowhere — well as I said, almost a century had passed. No one knew for sure what might happen if the dragon escaped the crystal while outside Rhyll, but they couldn’t just let it go and hope for the best. That’s why we came, to find the crystal and make it safe.”
ELEVEN
“Only make it safe,” Austin asked. “Not release it?”
“Of course not to release it, didn’t you hear what I said?”
Austin glanced about, as if straining to hear something too far away. “Just making sure I understand. So what happened? Maeron came with you? With Rhi, I mean?”
“There were five, all volunteers. The expedition was Maeron’s idea. At the time he was Kish’s ambassador to Treger — that’s the nation where they found the rift, remember. Rhianon’s mentor Tragen, Kel, Kitrina, and Tennant. Tennant had no magic, but they knew magic didn’t work right here; no sense in bringing only people who could use it, right? They did manage a little, when they first came through; the same way they kept working the magical devices that discovered where the rift went. Sort of an after-effect bubble that extended Rhyll’s properties to this world. Almost li
ke a magical flare, I suppose, fired through from Rhyll. It burned out fast, but it was enough to get a bearing on the crystal and learn English from a passerby’s memories.”
Austin stiffened. “Like what Maeron did to me?”
“Crikey, no, not that. Done from a distance, not even a tap on the shoulder. They didn’t hurt anyone. Not until they found the crystal. Not until Maeron betrayed them. But I’m getting ahead of myself. After the bubble wore off, their magic didn’t work anymore.”
“I don’t understand, why not, if — ”
“It’s just the way it goes here. Like if there were another world where gravity didn’t exist except under certain circumstances. It took six months to find the crystal, all without the use of magic. Or so they thought. During that time, Maeron grew secretive, vanishing now and again to return with some clue to lead them further on. He’d discovered a way to make his magic work, experimenting little by little, learning clues to guide the search.”
“How?”
Corinna shifted, holding Austin’s gaze, considering how much to tell. “I don’t quite know, but something to do with death. He told Rhianon, right before she used the amulet, that he could harvest the energy of the dying and somehow use it to fuel his magic. He had murdered people, behind the others’ backs. Each time I think he learned a little more about how that kept the magic going.”
Austin drew back from her.
“That’s not how I do it, Austin,” she said in response. “That’s not how Rhianon did it.”
“Then how?”
She started to answer, and then smiled, unable to resist the fun of testing him. “How do you think?”
“Something to do with the crystal,” he answered after a moment, to her delight.
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