The fading dream tob-3

by Keith Baker

  “Why?” Thorn said. “Why would the Citadel do such a thing?”

  “Because your Citadel is just one more toy in the hands of my enemies,” Sarmondelaryx told her. “The Chamber had plans for me, but I knew far too much. They knew I’d never be their pawn. And yet they needed me to serve them. The Angel of Flame. The Devourer of Souls. I’ve fought dragons and demons alike. I’ve laid waste to nations and scattered armies. I didn’t realize just how organized they’d become or guessed that they could hold me even for a moment. Far less that they could push my thoughts into my own Preserving Shard and bind your soul to my body.”

  “I’m not Nyrielle…?” Thorn said, her voice breaking.

  “No. You’re just a ghost who doesn’t even know where her bones are buried.”

  “Who?” Thorn said. “In the Citadel? Who did this to me?”

  “I’d tell you if I knew, just to watch you suffer,” the dragon replied. “Just know that your Citadel is one more pawn in the games of the Chamber. There are dragons walking your halls, and it is they who decide the fate of your nations, not your kings or your soldiers.”

  “All right…” Thorn said. And slowly she let the stammer fall from her voice. “All right. I think you’ve told me enough. You can go now.”

  “What?” the dragon roared. “You think you can dismiss me?”

  Thorn looked right in her eyes. “I think I just did. Go. I’m done with you.”

  Sarmondelaryx laughed and her laughter shook the tower. “You? You are done with me? You are nothing. Less than nothing. And I am Sarmondelaryx. The Bane of Thrane. The Angel of-”

  “No,” Thorn said. “You’re not.”

  The laughter stopped.

  “You’re just a dream,” Thorn said. “Plucked from both of our minds. You may have her memories but you’re nothing. Fly away. See what happens when you pass over the fortress walls. Who knows? Perhaps you’ll continue to exist, drifting through the dreams of others. Or perhaps you’ll simply fade away.”

  “No…” Sarmondelaryx said. “I won’t let you do this to me.”

  “And what are you going to do about it? You said it yourself. I am you. This is your body, and you’re just a dream waiting for the dreamer to wake. Even if you could kill me in this place, you’d only be killing yourself.”

  “No!” the dragon roared.

  “Enough!” Thorn said. “Go! Just get out of my sight.”

  Sarmondelaryx looked back at her, and there was a gleam of desperation in the dragon’s burning gaze. “We can bargain, you and I.”

  “Oh? And what do you possibly have to offer me?”

  “Power,” the dragon said. “Vengeance. Those who bound me killed you to do it. They murdered the man you loved just to make the story real. You can’t possibly fight them on your own. With my power, you can strike terror into their hearts. You can make them pay for all that they’ve done to you.”

  “And what would I have to do?”

  “Release me. Give me my body again. Join with me. Let us become something new, Thorn and Sarmondelaryx together.”

  Thorn knew the idea was madness, that she had no way of knowing if anything Sarmondelaryx had told her was the truth. And yet… she thought of Lharen, the man who’d given her his heart and who’d been ready to give his life for Breland. She thought about Nyrielle Tam, the dreams a young girl once had. And in that moment, there was a part of her that wanted that vengeance for both of them.

  “Drego told me I wouldn’t last if I merged with you. That you’d dissolve my personality.”

  “In time, surely. But how long did you ever expect to live, Thorn? You’re mortal. You could last a decade before you fade completely. And in that time, you will see your enemies fall.”

  Thorn thought about it, about how glorious it had felt when she’d battled Drulkalatar. How wonderful it would be to see those responsible fall. Thought they might share a thirst for vengeance, but there was little else she had in common with the fiend before her. Just a moment past, the dragon had spoken of slaughtering armies and devastating nations. As long as Thorn held her contained, that could never happen again.

  She remembered the words of Drego Sarhain when she kissed Cadrel at the Silver Tree: You may be doomed, but do not go easily, Nyrielle. And don’t fall to the likes of this one. She didn’t know if there was truly anything of Drego in those words. But she was going to stand by them.

  “Go,” she told the dragon. “You can’t fight me. You have nothing I want. Go now and maybe you’ll find a home in someone’s nightmares.”

  Sarmondelaryx hissed. Yet she’d had time to think as well, and she’d come up with a new weapon.

  “You’re clever, little one. I can’t kill you without killing myself. And yet…” she moved her foreclaw, placing a talon against Drix’s stomach. “I can certainly kill the boy.”

  Surprised as she was, Thorn almost laughed. “Perhaps you missed the last week of my life,” she said. “But I think you’ll find it’s not that easy.”

  “Perhaps,” Sarmondelaryx rumbled. “And yet here we are, standing in a circle designed just for that purpose. The eight shards of Ourelon’s Gift around us. If the fallen fey was right, I might even spread the Mourning in the process. I can’t kill you. But him? I’d kill him just to make you suffer.”

  Her talon shifted and Thorn moved. Reaching out, she set her palm against the dragon’s claw and pulled. She called on all her anger, all her strength, and sought to drag the spirit down into the prison of the Preserving Shard.

  It was like nothing she’d ever experienced before. When she’d swallowed Toli, Daine, even the eladrin guard, it was instinct and desperation. When she’d forced Sarmondelaryx back into her chains down beneath the streets of Sharn, the dragon was weak, barely released. The nightmare was something else, a Sarmondelaryx who’d had time to savor the sensations of life again.

  Thorn felt wings sprouting from her back. Her neck stretching as her tail thrashed against the floor. She grappled with Sarmondelaryx as an equal, two dragons struggling on the top of the tower of nightmares.

  “You can’t defeat me,” Sarmondelaryx snarled. “Tonight you finally go to your rest, little ghost.”

  Thorn couldn’t spare a moment to answer; the battle took every thought. She was the real one. She had the body. She’d thought that would give her the edge. And she did have a fierce strength that her enemy couldn’t match. Yet Sarmondelaryx was drawn from Thorn’s nightmares, from her very fears of falling to the dragon. And Sarmondelaryx had fought dragons before. She used her tail and wings in ways that had never occurred to Thorn. Within moments, she had caught Thorn’s throat between her jaws, pinning her head and increasing the pressure with each moment.

  The battle was all in her mind, in her soul. Thorn was still standing with her hand pressed against the dragon’s claw. And in her other hand, she was clutching a piece of jewelry, a silver brooch shaped like a crescent moon with an opalescent crystal resting between the horns.

  The Stone of Dreams.

  With her last surge of strength, Thorn slammed the brooch against her chest. There was a burst of pain. She could feel flesh and bone part, feel her blood merging with the stone. She could feel the stone itself studying her… and accepting the bond.

  New energy flowed through her. In her mind, a burst of force pilled out around her, sending Sarmondelaryx sprawling. Thorn opened her jaws, and a cone of light shone from within. Sarmondelaryx froze in that light, howling in frustration as her form became soft and indistinct. Her time was done. Her strength was gone. She was a fading dream caught in the morning light.

  And in a moment, she was gone.

  The light went with her, and suddenly Thorn was falling again, falling into the welcoming dark…

  “Thorn?”

  There was blue sky above when she opened her eyes, and the golden ring of Siberys glittered in the sunlight. For a moment Thorn wondered just how much she’d dreamed; then she saw the shattered walls around her, the chunks of ru
bble from the dragon’s wrath.

  “Thorn? Can you hear me?” Drix was kneeling next to her.

  “Yes,” she said. Her throat was rough and dry, and there was a terrible pain in her chest. “What happened?”

  “The dragon was about to crush me. I couldn’t see all that you did, but there was a flash of light and then… the dragon vanished. Everything else… it changed. You’ll see when you look over the edge. The things in the courtyard-they’re gone.”

  “You mean… I did this?”

  “It’s difficult to analyze energies of such magnitude,” Drix said. “But I don’t think you were responsible. For a time we were on two separate planes of existence simultaneously. Your defeat of Sarmondelaryx coincided with a disruption of that planar juncture. The fey we were fighting, the forces that were assembling, even the bulk of the buildings have likely shifted back to Dal Quor. All that’s left is a shell.”

  “That sounds like something Steel would say,” she said. It hurt to breathe too deeply.

  “It is,” Drix said, holding up the dagger. “I found him on the floor. He’s told me all sorts of interesting things.”

  “Really?” Thorn said. “Well… it’s good to have friends.”

  She forced herself up on one arm, feeling a sharp pain as she did. She looked down and saw the sun gleaming off the silver brooch that lay between her breasts. Despite the pain, her skin was smooth around the crescent moon. The stone gleamed with an inner light, and she thought she heard a whispering voice, too faint for even her keen ears to catch the words. Then light and voice faded.

  “Lovely,” she murmured, brushing one finger across the cold stone. “I’m sure that’s just what I needed.”

  “We can go now,” Drix said. “I’ve packed everything, and I made all the preparations while you were sleeping. It should work just fine. Probably. Well, maybe.”

  “Leave how?” She sat up and saw a circle traced in chalk among the rubble with tiny dragonshards scattered around the edges.

  “It’s a temporary teleportation circle,” Drix said. “It should get us back to Ascalin. I was able to send a message to Lady Tira. By now there should be people there waiting to take us back to the Silver Tree.”

  “You sent a message to Tira?” Thorn said. “And you’re just going to connect to the Orien network with… chalk?”

  Drix smiled. “I know, it sounds crazy. It helps when you’ve got some stolen dragonshards from a gate anchor point to work with. And it’s even better to have a half dozen fey artifacts to play around with.” He pulled down his collar, and Thorn could see Lord Joridal’s emerald amulet hanging around his neck. “If I had a little more time to experiment with them, I think I could do all sorts of interesting things.”

  “At least you’ve managed to keep from getting them stuck in your skin,” Thorn said.

  “Yes, it’s strange, how that happened for you. Steel thought it might have had something to do with us still being merged with dreams at the time.”

  “It’s nothing I haven’t dealt with before,” Thorn said. She sighed, feeling the pain grow as she took a deep breath. She rose to her feet. “Let’s go. Somehow I’m thinking the Silver Tree is the quickest path to a strong drink.”

  Drix grinned. “I should warn you: this may be a little bumpier than your usual Orien ride.”

  A few moments later, the tower was empty. A light wind blew plaster dust down toward the barren courtyard below.

  CHAPTER TWENTY — SEVEN

  The Mournland R haan 3, 999 YK

  Not quite what I’d hoped for,” Thorn said. She was standing at the gate of the Silver Tree, looking out over the pale landscape. At a glance, nothing had changed from the moment they had first arrived.

  Drix grinned. “I thought you were the one who didn’t believe the story.”

  “I didn’t. I still don’t. Still, after everything we saw… I was beginning to hope that prying that stone out of your heart might just change everything.”

  “And it did,” Drix said. He let his fingers drift across his chest, passing over the place where the crystal shard had been. “It’s going to take more time.”

  That was what Tira had told them after the ceremony was completed and Drix was able to stand. Initially the tinker had been heartbroken when the green fields of Cyre weren’t restored. Then Tira told them that the results were all that she’d hoped for. That she knew that the decay of the Silver Tree had stopped; it might take time for it to return to full health, but it was on the right path. And as for the Mournland, she was confident that all would be well in just a century or two. With Tira casually dismissing a century, Thorn could see why Shan Doresh had thought a few years a paltry amount of time to devote to his scheme.

  “So it’s going to be a hundred years before we know if there’s any truth to the story,” Thorn said. “I guess it’s something to look forward to.”

  “There’s lots of things to look forward to,” Drix said. “Why are you leaving so soon? And why like this?”

  Thorn looked out over the Mournland, and her thoughts drifted back to her last conversation with Lady Tira, deep in the roots of the Silver Tree.

  “So everything she said was true.” Thorn had been standing at the gates of the Silver Tree, staring out across the pale landscape.

  “True enough.” The Stone of Life had glowed on Tira’s golden crown, but her face was still hidden beneath the long veil. “You are the soul of Nyrielle Tam, bound to the body of Sarmondelaryx. An old spell, and a powerful one. Certainly the work of dragons.”

  “The Chamber-”

  “I can only tell the truth of you, so I cannot tell you who among your Citadel might have been involved. But I have heard of this Chamber. For tens of thousands of your years-even before Shan Doresh challenged the giants of Xen’drik-the dragons have remained in isolation on Argonnessen. There they study a matrix of truths, a map of possibilities that can foretell the future-or create it. For generation after generation, they were content simply watch it unfold. Now there are those who seek to use it. To choose the paths the future takes. The dragons of this Chamber walk among your kind, hidden in human form. And they are not the only ones.”

  “No?”

  “You have met demons before. I can feel it. The most ancient among them have long sought to control the Draconic Prophecy. More of your history than you can imagine-your Last War, Galifar, even the birth of the Khoravar race-has been shaped by this struggle between the Argonnessen and these Lords of Dust. You are a pawn in that war. There are certain things the Chamber wants the Angel of Flame to do. Your battle with Drulkalatar Atesh was surely in their schemes. They knew they couldn’t control Sarmondelaryx, and so they bound your soul and your memories to her. To create an Angel of Flame they could more easily control.”

  Thorn nodded. Drego’s words beneath Sharn made all too much sense. As a Lantern, she’d done her best to serve Breland, but what other powers had she truly been serving?

  “I can tell you this,” Tira said. “You have changed the balance of things by bonding with the Stone of Dreams. It may give you the power to contain Sarmondelaryx indefinitely. But I fear this gift comes with a heavy price.”

  “Oh?”

  “Shan Doresh could not be so easily defeated,” Tira told her. “He-”

  “You weren’t there,” Thorn said. “There was nothing easy about it.”

  “It doesn’t matter. He was in his place of power. Stripped of his stone, he could be laid low for a time, yes. But no simple dream could destroy him completely nor could that defeat alone return his citadel to the realm of dreams. I fear that it was his choice to flee once the stone bonded to your flesh. Even I don’t understand how you’ve bonded with it so easily and what it will do to the stone if it is removed by force. Weakened, confused, and knowing that we had found him, I believe Shan Lian Doresh chose to flee, to remove his people and his citadel to a place we could not follow. I am certain he will return when he is ready. He will find a new home for his citadel in
this world and reconnect with those agents he has scattered throughout your kingdoms. And when he is ready, he will return for his stone.”

  “Well, that’s something to look forward to,” Thorn said.

  “There’s still more,” Tira said. “Even I know little of the Draconic Prophecy, but I know both you and Sarmondelaryx are a part of it and that this is why the Chamber has used you in this way. And I am certain that your finding the stone was another part of their plans for you.”

  “It’s never easy, is it?”

  “No,” Tira said. “And for you, it never will be.”

  Then she was standing at the gate of the Silver Tree. She had a portable hole, filled with all the supplies she’d need to cross the wasteland. Every one of the ghaele had offered to carry her back to her homeland, even the frosty Lord Syraen, but she wanted to walk.

  She’d found that the ease with which she’d tapped into the Quiet Stone had been one more aspect of walking in dreams. She knew what powers lay within the stones she carried, but she still had a long way to go to master them. She knew what she was. She knew what she could be, if she chose. Could she return to her work for the Citadel? Or was there a greater battle in her future, one that could, ultimately, do more for Breland than her work as a spy?

  “I need time alone,” she said to Drix at last. “I’ve got much to think about before I reach Breland.”

  “What will you do when you get there?” Drix said.

  Thorn thought about the life of Nyrielle Tam, about the mother who abandoned her, the father who died in the war, the brother who’d told her stories when she couldn’t sleep. She remembered her conversation with Drego Sarhain just before she cut his throat and the dream she’d had when she kissed Essyn Cadrel.

  “I need to find my family,” she told Drix. “And then I think I’ll go looking for a demon.”