Martin Ivenstrand clutched at Tristan Steward’s arm as the ocean of Firbolg rolled like a tidal wave down onto the Krevensfield Plain.
“I though you said they had been decimated!” he shouted above the deafening clamor.
“They—they were,” the Lord Roland mumbled. “They—”
The dukes had just enough opportunity to run for cover as a column of Bolg soldiers stampeded through where they had been standing, screaming a war cadence, bent on destruction.
Rhapsody stood at the top of a torn swale on the plain. All around her cacophony reigned. The ground rumbled with the vibration of war, the thundering of horses; it was all she could do to remain upright in the fray. Amid the shrieking and clashing that filled the air she could hear a frighteningly familiar tattoo, a cadence of horrifying crescendo coming ever closer.
She looked up, trembling. In the near distance a swirling storm of dust and black clods of earth blasted skyward into the air beneath a tangle of galloping hooves, moving closer with each passing second. From within that approaching storm the bloodstained warrior of her nightmares was riding down on her, blue eyes gleaming ferociously, beating his straining mount with merciless urgency. The veins in his neck and forehead protruded from a face clenched in grim concentration.
It was Anborn.
He was shouting something, screaming really, but Rhapsody couldn’t hear him over the din. He leaned slightly off the saddle to the right, stretching his arm out to her. Behind him the horizon was black with motion too distant and frenetic to discern. Rhapsody held out her arms, preparing to be swept up and onto the horse before him.
As she did the sky above and around her darkened, the searing heat of battle suddenly purged by a rush of wind that chilled her to the bone. As if time had slowed, she saw the veins in Anborn’s neck stiffen, his teeth bare, as he opened his mouth in a great war scream, drowned out by the noise all around her. His eyes had moved from her face to the sky above her.
She looked up just as the slashing claw of the dragon that blotted out the sun above struck with blinding speed, snatching her from the ground, crushing her in its talons, taking her into the sky in the twinkling of an eye, like the helpless prey of a raptor.
85
Ashe was standing on the rise of a broken hillside, urging the remaining Cymrians out of the ruins of the Moot, when he felt Anwyn appear in the sky.
A great blast of energy shocked the air, leaving it dry, almost brittle, in his nostrils. A rolling wave of heat followed by the dark blotting out of sunlight appeared above him a moment later; the dragon had been hanging, formless, in the ether overhead, preparing to strike, and when she took shape the action sucked all the elemental lore that was extant in the air into the creation of her shimmering form. Great jointed wings as wide as two oxcarts each and claws like curved swords appeared first, most solidly, followed by the mistier, wyrmlike body of the beast, which glided over his head, then struck like a snake at the ground on which Rhapsody had been standing. A split second later the serpent took to the sky, the ground beneath her bare and unoccupied. Anborn galloped through the space where she had been, then reined his mount to a crashing halt, staring around wildly.
A word from the past, an agonizing scream of the soul, tore from Ashe’s throat.
Noooooooooo.
From deep within him, in the place where the Rowans had carefully sewn a piece of a star to save his life, the birthplace of his dual nature, the awakening of his own dragon spirit, Ashe felt the change begin. The wyrm within his blood rushed forth like a brushfire, bellowing as it came.
“Here!” it screamed in his voice and its own, the primal, multitoned sound of the wind within his gullet. “ANWYN! Here!”
Grunthor, his face bleeding, the cheekbone partially visible, tore his way to Ashe, who was focusing on the objects in the sky and roaring menace and revenge in some wordless wyrm speech that caused every vein to protrude. The giant thought he could see a shift beginning to be visible even beneath Ashe’s armor and the cloak of mist that roared now, rampant, like the crashing waves of the sea.
He grabbed the smaller man’s shoulder and a clump of the copper hair, and pulled him free of the sliding shale of the crumbling Moot, holding him suspended at eye level. Ashe’s eyes did not meet his. He was instead wrenching his body to keep his target in view, writhing, slithering in Grunthor’s grasp, and growing heavier as each second passed, his body turning almost vaporous.
“ANWYN! Here! HERE!”
“Hear!” Grunthor roared in Ashe’s face. The Lord Cymrian’s eyes, vertical pupils slit in the madness of his wyrm rage, struggled to break free from the Sergeant’s grasp; when the Bolg did not drop him he reached for his sword.
Grunthor had had enough. He released the hair and wrapped his whole arm around Ashe, putting his claws firmly into the Lord Cymrian’s throat.
“Be still! Stop your rampage. Be a man! Be a king, or Oi’ll rip you apart right here!”
Ashe blinked. He looked up at the stern visage of the Bolg commander, and felt the dragon’s hold within him break. He swallowed, trying to force his voice.
“I have to get to her. I can’t fail her again.”
Grunthor, face-to-face with the man, found himself staring into eyes blue as a glacier, could see the deep vertical pupils contracting in fear. In the same heartbeat he knew that the Cymrian lord’s terror was only for Rhapsody. And in that moment his anger melted away in the face of the same fear he felt for the same beloved woman.
He set his jaw, grasped Ashe’s forearm roughly, and held the Ring of Wisdom up before the Lord Cymrian’s dragonesque eyes. “What does it tell you?” he demanded above the sounds of anguish and panic flooding over them in the caustic wind that rose, heavy with burning cinders, from the floor of the Bowl.
Ashe’s face went slack, the aspects of the rampant dragon’s rise diminishing somewhat from his features. His brow unfurrowed, and he looked from the ring to the black sky above, then back to Grunthor’s expectantly solemn face.
“If I take on Anwyn in an air battle, Rhapsody will die,” he said, calm returning to his voice.
Grunthor growled brusquely. “What else?”
“Anwyn no longer cares. If I attack her and hold back to spare Rhapsody, we will both die.”
“Right. So be the lord we named you. If she’s to die, let her last sight o’ you be more man than dragon. Command them.” He gestured impatiently at the swirling mass of panicking humanity below them. “It’s what ’Er Ladyship would want.”
Ashe stared at the Firbolg giant one moment more, then nodded. “Yes,” he said heavily. “It’s what she would want.” He turned back to the Moot below him, the crowds still pressing blindly in the panic to exit. He saw a cluster of Nain near the egress and shouted to them, his voice carrying over the clamor.
“Men of the Forge!” he shouted in their language. “Hold this rise!”
The Nain, hearing the ringing command, turned from their flight and stared up at their new High King, waving now at a group of peasants, directing them ahead toward a break in the wall. The Mountain Knives fell in, attacking the sea of dead warriors with a vengeance, steeling themselves against the likelihood that some of the rotting corpses were those of their own ancestors.
In desolation Ashe looked up into the sky.
A sickening rush of air slapped Rhapsody hard as the dragon banked, dangling her over the Krevensfield Plain, bloody and pockmarked as a leper’s face.
Her arms were squeezed against her sides in the grip of the wyrm’s talons, cutting off her access to the sword. It dangled impotently from her swelling wrist; she could feel the fire lapping at her leg and skirt as it brushed against her. Dangling above her head, out of reach and wrapped around the first knuckle of the dragon, was the Cymrian horn, its housing cracked.
Anwyn clenched her fist, grinding the air from Rhapsody’s lungs, bruising her ribs.
“A pretty sight, isn’t it, m’lady?” The harsh voice of the dragon scratched her ear
s. “Look well on your people—see where you have brought them. Child of the Sky! How do you like the view from up here?”
Another sudden turn of air; Rhapsody struggled to maintain consciousness as the dragon beat her wings and spun, making the world go black for a moment.
The dragon’s great strength was too much for her. She fought futilely to break free, even to move a tiny bit, within the clutch of the talons, to no avail.
“Damn your soul, Anwyn!” she shouted, wrenching her shoulder in an attempt to free the sword.
“Too late.” The wyrm matriarch chuckled, a deep, throaty laugh that carried with it the sound of grinding glass and bone.
“End it,” Rhapsody choked as the beast swooped teasingly near the ground, then dove into the sky again. “They were—your—people—serve them! Save—them.”
“They betrayed me,” the dragon hissed, hovering over the fray where man and Bolg fought the remnants of men and Bolg. “All of them, at one time or another, they all betrayed me. Just as you have. And—”
A whirr of silver sound, three times. Bright blood, acid red, splashed across Rhapsody’s face. The beast gave a sickening lurch, and loosed a scream of pain and rage. Rhapsody felt Anwyn’s grip slacken as a severed talon dangled from a single tendon, then tore off, spinning as it plummeted to the earth below, along with the silver horn, freeing Rhapsody’s sword arm.
She grabbed on to the bony forearm above her to keep from falling herself. There, wedged in the knuckle, was the back end of a glossy blue cwellan disk, buried up to the middle, behind two others, no doubt; Achmed’s weapon discharged its ammunition in threes.
The dragon screamed again, shaking its leg violently, flying in sickening spirals and strafing the ground, vomiting fire.
Rhapsody wrapped her arm tighter around the leg, then thrust the sword into the webbing between the bones of the dragon’s wing. The burning blade slipped into the wyrm’s flesh as if it were canvas, tearing a blackened hole. Anwyn roared in agony, and began to flex her claw and beat the injured wing violently, trying to dislodge the prey that was now her tormentor.
Rhapsody’s stomach rushed into her mouth as the great beast spun in the air again, making her vision go black. She knew she could not survive the fall from the sky, and now thought that the longer she could keep the dragon away from the fray, the farther from the battlefield they could be when they finally fell, the safer those on the ground would be. In her hazy mind, the answer came to her, the thing the dragon would fear most.
She summoned her breath and began to shout.
“Anwyn ap Merithyn, tuatha Elynsynos, I rename you the Empty Past, the Forgotten Past. I consign your memory to those who have gone before you, wretched beast!”
“No!” the dragon screamed.
From his perch atop the broken rise, Achmed reloaded the cwellan, his thin hands sweating as he pulled back on the spring, reset the heavy rysin blades that had been designed centuries before by Gwylliam expressly for the purpose he was about to employ. He waited until the dragon was on the downswing of her dive, as close to the ground as possible. He signaled to Anborn, who galloped beneath the dragon as she banked and hovered in the air above, dodging to avoid being scorched by the erratic firefall of her breath.
Anborn spurred his horse.
Achmed aimed for the prismatic eye, blue as the fire at the heart of the Earth. He sighted the weapon, made allowances for the speed at which the wyrm was traveling, and spoke a small prayer to whatever was holy.
Then he fired.
The recoil from the cwellan made a sickening crack against his shoulder, sending waves of pain through his body.
Even from a distance he could feel the slice of air, the ripping of eye tissue.
Could see the dragon rear up, roiling in agony.
Saw the blazing blade in distant hands, tiny against the black smoke of the sky, disappear as Rhapsody drove Daystar Clarion once more into the beast, this time beneath the upstretched wing. The great claw opened, and her body fell out. She rolled down the monster’s armored stomach, dragging the sword through its flesh along with her as she tumbled through the air, then pitched downward to the ground below, the sword falling far away, like a burning ember from the sky.
Anborn spurred the horse again mercilessly. Man and animal were locked in a death race, a desperate dash to interdict the hurtling body that fell from the sky. In his ears he heard the words of Manwyn, the Seer of the Future, spoken at Council so long ago, could hear them repeated in the voice of Rhonwyn, as the Future became the Present.
If you seek to mend the rift, General, guard the Sky, lest it fall.
Guard the Sky, lest it fall.
Lest it fall.
He could see Rhapsody’s body tumbling to Earth, almost within his grasp; the Bolg king had timed his shot well. With one last kick he urged the horse forward as she hurtled into his arms, catching her, plucking her from the air, rolling with her, man and horse, amid the sound of grisly snapping and waves of shock that resolved a moment later into pain that blinded him with its intensity, bringing with it the sweet relief of unconsciousness.
Distantly Rhapsody could hear Grunthor’s voice bellowing her name. Disoriented, she tried to move, but found she was trapped, crouched on her hands and knees, with heavy weight, weight far too burdensome for her to breathe beneath, let alone lift, draped across her back and shoulders.
The voice got louder, came nearer. She felt the shifting of weight, the moving of the burden, then was lifted up in the air into arms, warm and familiar. She opened her eyes to see the great green face of her friend staring down at her in panic.
“Yer Ladyship? Ya all right? Ya alive there?”
She nodded, unable to catch her breath. Her body ached with the shock of her head moving.
“Thank the gods,” Grunthor murmured, leaning his forehead against hers.
A blast of fire erupted behind them, and the giant dove beneath a mound of torn earth. The dragon, injured and angry, was flying in great circles now, bleeding acidic gore onto the earth, raining her furious breath down on them.
Rhapsody’s blood boiled.
“Enough of this,” she said, angrily brushing the clods of earth and brambles from her tattered dress. “Where’s Achmed?”
“Behind you,” came the sandy voice. “As I always will be.”
Rhapsody turned to see the Firbolg king coming to her side. She opened her arms and embraced him quickly, then pointed to a broken rise at the edge of the Moot.
“Come,” she said to her two friends, scanning the sky angrily. “We’ve got one more bloody prophecy to fulfill, damn it all.”
“Hrekin,” said Achmed sullenly. “This had better be the last one.”
86
The sounds of battle strife rent the air as the Three crawled over the broken chasms that had once been the smooth green fields of the steppes leading to the Krevensfield Plain. Bodies of the long-dead and those more newly in the state littered the ground. The light from the sun was gone now, obliterated by the fall of night and the death that hung, like bitter earth, in the air and on the wind that swept the battlefield.
Rhapsody had found her sword by its glow not far from where she fell and sheathed it; now the Three crept in darkness through the ruins of the Great Moot, the broken symbol of Gwylliam’s dream of peace, the place where a once-great nation had met in Council, planning and building an empire that had stood for a moment, shining brightly in the history of man, only to fade and crumble like sand beneath the selfish lust for power and dominion.
Within the Moot Ashe still stood, fending off the remains of the fallen, holding back the tide of death while his people escaped. He was surrounded and alone, as he had been that day on the Krevensfield Plain when he stood to defend Shrike.
Achmed slung the cwellan and sighted it on the grisly remains of soldiers that were attacking the Lord Cymrian.
“Ashe!” he shouted across the Bowl of the Moot.
Ashe turned and looked at him.
“Want help this time?”
Between swings of the sword, the Lord Cymrian nodded.
Achmed fired. The bright disks whirled like firesparks through the air, slicing across the gusts of wind and into the tattered necks of the corpses on Ashe. In the wink of an eye Achmed had reloaded again, and again, sending a hailstorm of cwellan disks whizzing around Ashe, causing the bodies to fall like chaff to the ground.
Then the Three hurried back behind a rocky outcropping as the dragon strafed through, bleeding and spinning, roaring in anger that shook the base of the mountains. The sky blazed with orange light as the fire from her breath struck the ground, blasting shards of rock and dust into the night. Rhapsody stamped out Grunthor’s greatcloak, which had ignited in the blast.
“Ashe!” she shouted as they climbed toward the Summoner’s Rise. “Get out of the Moot!”
She followed the Bolg up the rock ledges, over the rubble that had once been seats carved into the earth, scraping her bare knees and the tatters of her gown on the boulders that still supported the long, flat ledge of granite from which she had called the Council into being.
When they reached the top Rhapsody stared in dismay at the distant fields, roiling still in battle. The Firbolg army had joined forces with the soldiers of Roland, and they, along with every living Cymrian soul, were still battling, still dodging the dragon’s wrath, still holding the land that had been in their blood for centuries, beating back the nightmares of the Past.
She looked down into the fractured Moot, split in twain from the emergence of the fallen. A great rift bisected the floor of the gathering place where only this morning the Cymrians had been celebrating the dawn of their new era. She turned to Achmed and Grunthor.
“There?” she asked.
The two Bolg nodded in answer.
Behind her she heard the crumbling of stone, the rushing of panting breath. Achmed swung the cwellan and pointed into the shadows. A moment later Ashe appeared, bloody and torn, with the black earth of the grave smeared on him. Rhapsody’s eyes filled with tears; tattered as he was, he was every inch the Lord they had named him.
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