Jorey whistled. “Who are you?!”
The gnome grinned and cocked her eye up at the man. “I,” she said with a flourish and a bow, “am Kristafrost.”
After retrieving Magda and Keira from the kitchens, Kristafrost took them across town and past the main tower spire. Gawkers on the streets stopped to stare at the gnome and elf but didn’t stare too long when they saw Jorey’s shotgun.
“Aren’t you worried someone will see you?” Jorey asked the gnome.
“No. They don’t know that I’m me. They’re expecting some fearsome warrior.” She chuckled. “Probably looking for a man.”
She led them through some alleyways until Eszhira knew she couldn’t have retraced her steps on her own. They ducked into a network of shanties, all connected together with short wooden roofs. Through doorway after doorway they passed by inhabitants and sometimes through empty rooms, until the makeshift tunnel led to a wooden door in a better-crafted wood and plaster building.
Kristafrost led them inside. “My private entrance,” she said. “The back half of the Rusty Gear. A tavern and inn that serves as my guildhall.”
“You’re in a guild?” Jorey asked.
“It’s a secret guild,” she said. “I call it the Secret Society of Secret Investigations.”
“That’s a long name.”
“You can call it SSSI for short.”
“What do you do?”
“Find out stuff. Trade secrets. Sometimes use secrets.”
“Your trade is information,” Jorey clarified, his voice tinged with excitement.
“Yes, this is what I said.”
“I…” he started. “My son. Arlen. They took him just before Darkfall. He is wolven.”
“Ah,” Kristafrost said.
“I mean, can you help us find him?”
“I’m sorry,” Kristafrost answered sadly. “I can guess what tower he was brought to, but if he was taken to one of the training towers… all the towers are sealed by magic. If he’s in there, chances are he hasn’t survived.”
Jorey cast his eyes to the floor.
“All you can do now,” Kristafrost added, “is hope. I promise, we will look for him. If he’s not in the towers, we’ll find him, but it will take time.”
Jorey nodded. “I… thank you,” he mumbled.
“Please, it hurts,” Eszhira said. The voices in her head had grown loud once more and her temples throbbed. She fell to her knees. “I need the milk.”
They stayed there in the Rusty Gear as guests of SSSI, protected from the outside world. Eszhira was not the only one. Kristafrost had been rescuing other women as well, those who would come with her. There weren’t many.
Kristafrost kept Eszhira locked away again under guard, making sure she wouldn’t run away to find Malahkma’s Milk. Jorey watched her. Eszhira cursed the gnome, screaming that she had been better off with Skole.
Her skin seared with burning agony, and her joints, particularly her elbows and knees, throbbed with aching pulses that made her whimper. She spent most of her time huddled on the bed, curled up into a fetal position on her side. She vomited frequently, yet they kept bringing her fresh food and water. Magda cleaned her room every time she vomited, ignoring the obscenities that Eszhira hurled at her. The scraping of the mop and broom raked through her brain like dagger accents to her headache.
After a week, the physical symptoms of withdrawal started to abate. She stopped cursing them, accepting them as saviors and not captors. By the second week, her symptoms had subsided to a manageable level, and she was allowed into the common room to eat and drink with the others. The danger of her running away had passed, but she was still not trusted out on her own. Besides, wandering the streets freely was not safe, drug addiction or not.
They ate and drank in the common hall relatively free from worry. They hid within Red Panther territory, a vice guild hostile to Malahkma. From what Kristafrost told her, Skole had more immediate worries from the Assassins Guild than the loss of a few women, even if one of them was elven.
Artalon’s population was almost completely human, but every week that had passed since Darkfall changed the world. It wasn’t only Artalon that had relied on Karanos’ rune-magic, but every city, every town in the Empire. The entire foundation of Artalonian society had crumbled in an instant. There were still darklings in the Empire, dwarves who had left their kelds, gnomes who had made their homes in towns and villages, even the rare sidhe whose ancestors had left the high-elven cities. Everyone wanted answers, so Dirt City started to see more non-humans in the mix of travelers seeking those answers from the capital.
And finding none.
It was the end of July when the sidhe came to the Rusty Gear. Not every high elf had left the city. Not all of them had the magical skill to transport them to the far-off sidhe cities. The lower-level administrators had been left behind. Some had even chosen to stay behind, unwilling to abandon homes and friends. These were in the minority, but it meant an occasional sidhe survivor would be seen in Dirt City, away from the areas where Templars held sway. Sidhe weren’t popular with Templars these days.
This particular high elf drank with them and ordered a full dinner, having more than enough money to pay. He sat at a crowded long table, shoulder to shoulder with the other patrons, ordering bourbon from Tavenport for all of them. The men at the table welcomed him heartily, and soon they filled the room with loud blustering.
“Can you believe it?” the elf was saying. “Artalon!”
The men seemed to humor him. The bourbon kept flowing.
“I don’t know,” the elf said. “I mean… I don’t know. Something must have gone wrong. Xandelbrot said you couldn’t travel back in time… but forward? The future hasn’t happened yet, so why can’t we go forward?”
“One-way trip,” one of the men grunted. He and his friends laughed.
“I must have been thrown into the future,” the elf said.
“Yeah. The future,” they said. One of them added, “If you were going to travel to the future, you sure picked a bad time to show up!” They laughed.
Eszhira sat in the corner away from the center of the room. The elven man had not noticed her. She drank wine. She found getting drunk took the edge off the remaining physical cravings and her mind off the worst of it… the insidious desire and belief that because she felt better, she could have some more Malahkma’s Milk… just a little bit. Manageable this time. At least the Fae voices in her head didn’t want to be banished, and now they whispered against such desires. Between them and the wine, she was able to drown the impulse.
“It is rumored,” the elf said, “that you have elves unlike me. Not like we did in my time.”
“No,” the men said. “We wouldn’t know about that. Elves are elves.”
Of course they knew her. She had been eating and drinking in the common room with some of these men. They were protecting her.
But something about this elf seemed familiar. Something made her want to go talk to him.
No. Run. He is dangerous!
She ignored them and walked forward to the long table. She stood in the center, across from the sidhe.
“He means me,” she said.
The elf looked up at her. They made eye contact.
Something buried within her so deep it had almost disappeared jolted awake. A small spark of green light in her soul surged and reached out to him. It seemed as if it awakened an answering purple light within him, a light only the two of them could see.
His eyes changed. What had been brown became fractured, and slices of deep purple chiseled into his irises to touch his black pupils.
“Ah!” he exclaimed as if understanding something for the first time. “Graelyn. So that’s what has become of you.”
Suddenly, in no more than an eyeblink, she found herself alone with him in a grand hall filled with lush red carpet, red walls, and ornate golden carvings framing the wall panels. A golden throne sat in the middle of the room atop a dais, carv
ed to look like interlocking stag antlers.
The rest of the brown in his eyes retreated, and only the deep violet remained, glittering with intelligence.
“Graelyn,” he said again.
Eszhira dropped the wine bottle to the ground. “Where am I?” she stammered.
“At the top of God Spire,” he said. “You have restored my sanity—for how long I don’t know—but the remnants of Eldrikura inside me respond to the essence of Graelyn in you.”
Eszhira stared at him.
“You don’t understand what I’m saying,” he said.
“No,” she shook her head. “Not at all.”
He considered. “I see.” He looked into her deeply, seeming to pierce her very soul. The Fae within her were quiet, as if watching and waiting themselves, staring back at him through her eyes.
“I am the avatar of Eldrikura, the Violet Dragon,” he explained, matter-of-factly. “She died, and the last pieces of her spirit are dying within me. When that happens, I will fall to madness, for all that will remain will be the mortal elf, and he was broken a long time ago. The aspects of his psyche can no longer function on their own.
“You are something new. You hold pieces of dead Fae from an Otherworld that no longer exists. Your memories are not your own; your knowledge is theirs. Your identity is held together by a spark of Graelyn’s essence. I suspect you are not alone, and there are many more like you that have manifested throughout Ahmbren.”
“What do you want with me?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Nothing, I suppose. But you have given me an opportunity I otherwise wouldn’t have had. When your spirit touched mine, you stopped my mental disintegration, at least for the time being. I wonder… I wonder with enough of you if I may go on living.”
Something felt wrong, but she didn’t know what. What Valkrage said made sense. The Fae were silent, but she could feel their presence. Something within the green core of her soul, which she could now sense once more, trembled. “I don’t think I… I don’t think she,” she corrected herself, referring to the Green Dragon, “trusted you.”
“I’m not surprised,” he replied. “None of my siblings were willing to do what it took to defeat Klrain. It doesn’t matter now. The Black Dragon is dead. Follow me.”
She accompanied him to the great pavilion that opened out under the sky onto a balcony high above the city.
“I will gather your people to us,” he said. “This city needs guidance. Maybe the Green Dragon, through you, can restore what I have broken.”
Valkrage uttered a few words in a language she did not understand. He outstretched his right hand, and a straight wooden staff materialized in his grasp, holding a glowing purple gem at its top.
He lifted the staff with both hands and, all the while chanting those strange words, plunged it into the balcony ledge. He released the staff, and it remained upright, planted firmly in the stone. Its purple gem glowed and flashed a strange light, and then a pulse of energy expanded rapidly, flowing out over the land.
THRUM!
“There,” he said with satisfaction. “That should do it.”
THRUM!
THRUM!
31 - Dragonholm
It was mid-August when the ratling airship sailed high over Aradheim and crossed the southern border of Dragonholm. Aradma, Tiberan, and Rajamin peered over the starboard rail and looked down at the land below. The green expanse transitioned into brown and gray mountains, displaying a stark decline in vegetation until the ground became black and gray ash. The air grew warm, as if the mountains themselves were hot. The rugged land ahead of them smoldered, and wispy trails of smoke drifted into the sky.
“What happened here?” Aradma asked.
“I don’t know,” Rajamin said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
As they flew, the mountains grew taller and more scorched, as if the rocks themselves had burned away. The burned landscape continued as far as the eye could see, a sea of black char. Craters lined the slopes, their rocks glowing in the bowl. They had to climb high to crest the mountaintops, and the sharp crags, canyons, and valleys made it difficult to see details on the ground.
A blanket of dark clouds loomed thick over the center of Dragonholm, the sky growing dark as they sailed under it. In the heart of the land, a great mountain had been gutted so that its sides formed a shell surrounding a massive crater a half-mile wide, as if some meteor from the heavens had waged war on the mountain itself.
“Raj, tell the pilot to take us over there,” Aradma told the priest.
“Are you sure that’s wise?”
“I want a look.”
“If you insist.” The ratling scurried off to the poop deck and passed on the instructions to the pilot.
They swung right in a big arc, turning over the heart of the crater. Aradma saw something glinting down there, amid strange formations in its middle.
“Stop!” she shouted. “There’s something down there!” She thought about shifting into the falcon and flying down on her own, but she had only recently begun to sense that the baby growing inside her had developed enough that changing form might be dangerous. Her fingers went to her belly. She wasn’t showing yet, and she hadn’t told her companions. She wondered how they would take it. Even Odoune did not know. His duty was to his people, so she had refrained from telling him lest he turn away from that path. More than that, half-breeds weren’t supposed to have been possible. The Matriarch might have taken this for yet another one of her signs, claiming that she herself was the other parent. There was no way Aradma would have allowed her child to be used to feed the Matriarch’s delusion of a manless race. And what if the baby were male?
Tiberan stole a loving glance, and she smiled back at him. Why was she afraid to tell him?
The airship circled around the crater.
“Well?” Rajamin asked. “Aren’t you going to do your bird thing?”
She shook her head. “I’d like a landing craft.”
He raised his eyebrows but didn’t question.
“Good,” Tiberan said. “I want to go with you.”
She nodded.
The small skiff, made buoyant by a narrow cylindrical balloon embedded horizontally in the craft’s underside, descended with the three of them on board. The shelled mountainsides blocked the surrounding land from view as the skiff floated down into the crater. Aradma gasped. As they approached the bottom, the forms she had seen from above revealed themselves. Three mounds of gargantuan bones lay scorched in crevices, arranged in a triangle. A third crevice was empty. The empty impression formed a larger triangle with two of its mates, one of the bone mounds crumbled in the center of the three.
The skiff landed, and she stepped out onto the ash of the crater floor. It was warm but not hot on the soles of her bare feet. She approached one of the mounds, rounding it to see the thing’s head.
“A dragon,” she said in awe. The skull was pristinely smooth and black from whatever fire had doomed it. It was larger than any creature she had seen in the jungles of Vemnai, its size even dwarfing the tyrannosaurs. Its teeth alone were as tall as she, and she could have climbed into its eye socket with enough room to stretch out and take a nap if she wanted to.
She hesitantly reached out and touched its surface. Her fingertips brushed ash and dust away, revealing a surface as smooth as glass and as black as polished obsidian. Its empty eye stared at her. She felt a wave of sadness touch her, and her eyes grew moist.
“Who was this?” Tiberan wondered aloud. Aradma had no answer.
“Look at this,” Rajamin said. He pointed to the ground at their feet.
Their footsteps had disturbed the ash, and a light glinted off of something previously hidden. The ratling bent down and examined the shiny thing.
“Oh my!” he exclaimed. He held up a tear-shaped, purple dragon scale, roughly the size of his hand. He breathed on it and wiped it clean with his white robe, leaving dusky ash smears on the fabric. The purple scale gleamed
, pure without a single scratch. It was an inch thick at its center and had a strange depth to it, a rich gradation of hue layered into its form.
“I think I know where we are,” whispered Rajamin in hushed tones.
“Where?”
“Wait,” he said. “I want to make sure.”
He scurried over to one of the other bone piles, rummaging around the ash until he found another scale. He held it up to the light and cleaned it, rushing back to the elves. This one was gold and radiated a gentle warmth.
Aradma started to feel sick.
The skeletal remains in the center were even larger than the first two. They walked over to it together. Aradma bent down this time, pushing her fingers through the ash. Her hand fell upon a scale so cold she flinched. She picked it up, and its icy chill pierced her fingers to the bone. “It’s cold,” she said.
Rajamin took the scale from her and wiped the ash off with his sleeve. It remained black. Aradma took it back and stared into it, mesmerized by its inky depths that seemed to descend forever. When the cold grew too painful, she dropped the scale to the ground.
“The Black Dragon,” she said.
“Yes,” Rajamin agreed. “And Eldrikura and Archurion. But where is the Green Lady?” He retrieved the scale and tucked it away in his robe.
She stared up at the Black Dragon’s dead skull, feeling for a presence, but there was nothing. Klrain was nothing more than a lifeless husk now.
Rajamin directed the crew to descend, and he had the ratlings comb through the ash, searching for more scales. They filled a single chest with black, purple, and gold scales of varying sizes.
“That’s enough,” Aradma finally said. “What do you plan to do with these? I hope you don’t think to sell them.”
Rajamin shook his head. “You misunderstand me, lady. The Archdragons are—were—gods. These are sacred.”
“Even the Black?”
When Dragons Die- The Complete Trilogy Box Set Page 30