by James Wyatt
“Is there a problem?” Haldren said. “Do you take issue with my orders?”
Cart was the soul of obedience. He was made to be a soldier, and he would be the best soldier he could be. “No, Lord General.” He turned and strode out of Haldren’s tent, Ashara’s words nagging at his mind. You’re a hero.
Cart gave Tesh a promotion, putting him in charge of half the remaining soldiers. Cart led the other half himself. By dividing the soldiers into only two parties, Cart hoped he’d increase their chances of surviving contact with the enemy-and perhaps decrease their chances of encountering the enemy at all. He’d made their orders clear. They should kill any worg they found. To Tesh, he stressed that they should make no particular effort to find any worgs. The real purpose of the excursion was to keep the soldiers busy for two days, to make sure they didn’t kill each other. If worgs killed them, it defeated the purpose.
Cart’s team would make widening arcs around the head of the canyon, while Tesh’s group patrolled the length of the canyon itself. They’d go out from the camp for a day, then work their way back on the second day. Ashara promised him that she’d speed the artificers along so there would be work for the soldiers when they returned.
“I wish I could come with you,” she told him as he prepared to go.
“You’ll be much safer here,” Cart said. “What makes you think I want to be safe?”
“I… I don’t-”
She smiled and clasped his arm. “Good luck, Cart,” she said. “Sovereigns keep you.”
Cart led his team a short way down the canyon, to a point where they could scale the wall and begin their first arc around the head of the canyon and its terrible crystal. They stayed close to the edge of the canyon for their first pass. Cart was pleased to see the mood of his soldiers lighten, especially once they realized that they weren’t really looking for worgs. He was sure it helped that they’d put some distance between themselves and the fiend imprisoned at the camp.
But tensions grew again as the morning slipped by and they spotted the camp below. At about the time the azure monolith came into view, one soldier stepped on the heel of the man in front of him, who wheeled and shoved the offender, nearly sending him over the edge into the canyon. If Cart hadn’t lunged to grab the toppling soldier, he would have fallen. At that point, he ordered the soldiers into a wider formation and they marched in silence. He caught himself warily eyeing the crystal as it came nearer, and he noticed the others doing the same. They were not fools. They could sense the evil trapped inside.
As they rounded the canyon, it was hard to take his eyes off the blue stone below, and the course of their march always seemed to drift closer to the edge. When another soldier nearly toppled over, this time just because he wasn’t watching where he was going, Cart called a halt. He altered their course to go directly away from the crystal, widening their arc around it.
That new course led them up a narrow ridge and back down a gentler slope into a valley running parallel to the canyon. Mounds of dirt and rubble piled at the bottom of the valley told Cart immediately that something was very wrong, and he put the soldiers on guard. As they continued down, Mirra-the resourceful sergeant-pointed ahead and to their left.
“Captain,” she said, “there’s a mine shaft.”
Cart called a halt, and the soldiers stopped their march, shuffling uneasily as they came to rest. “Has anyone heard of mining activity in these hills?”
“We had to bring miners from Breland,” Mirra pointed out.
“Can’t teach a farmer to mine,” another soldier added. Aundair was known as an agricultural nation, not for its mineral wealth.
At a glance, Cart guessed that the shaft drove into the hill in exactly the direction they’d come-straight back to the crystal. Had the worgs found another way to access the object of their devotion? Could worgs dig? He’d seen dogs bury bones in the ground, but dig a shaft through solid rock? He ran his fingers absently over the plates covering his chest, remembering the wounds the worgs had dealt him. They had claws and teeth that could tear into adamantine-certainly they could dig a tunnel through rock.
“We didn’t go looking for worgs,” he said, “and we all hoped we wouldn’t find them. But I think we have, so we need to prepare.”
As he spoke, he was trying to formulate a plan. They needed more information, but his group was too large to watch the mine without alerting the worgs. Were there worgs inside? They couldn’t attack them there-the defenders would have a decisive advantage, even discounting the worgs’ innately superior strength. And Cart wasn’t about to discount that factor. He wanted to keep as many soldiers alive as possible.
He decided to gamble on worgs being inside. They hadn’t seen any worgs in the area, and he would have expected at least a single guard at the shaft if the rest of the pack was elsewhere. So he led his soldiers closer to the shaft entrance, fanning them out to form defensive lines around it. The shaft was dug into a low bluff in the side of the valley, one place where the gentle slope formed more of a wall. He hoped to close the wall with a ring of swords and spears to hold the worgs in place, but he didn’t have time. A warning bark erupted from the shaft entrance, answered by what seemed like a symphony of howls. The howls echoed in the shaft, certainly, suggesting that the worgs had greater numbers, but that knowledge didn’t keep him from fear’s grasp.
“Steady,” he said. The worgs wouldn’t erupt from the shaft unless they saw that they would soon be trapped.
And just as his soldiers were about to close the trap, worgs sprang out of the entrance and bolted for the narrow gap that remained between Cart and the rocky bluff. They came like arrows loosed from a single bow, one at a time in a stream of a half-dozen.
There was no way Cart and the soldiers with him at the front of the line could stop all of the charging worgs, and only a handful of other soldiers were close enough to help. He fell back, leaving room for the worgs to pass. The worgs weren’t any more interested in a fight than Cart was, so he let them go. As soon as they had passed the soldiers’ line, they scattered to the winds.
“Mirra,” he called, and the sergeant scurried to stand before him. “Take two squads back to the camp. Tell Haldren what we found, and come back here with miners-as many picks as the camp can spare.”
Mirra saluted and went to gather her two squads. Cart pulled the other soldiers together and started preparations to spend the night at the worgs’ den.
No one slept. Camped outside the entrance to the worgs’ shaft, the soldiers were in constant fear of worgs, and the shaft itself loomed like a constant, vigilant presence. Soldiers who glanced that way turned away quickly, and Cart felt a slow pulse that resonated in the metal cores of his limbs, a sensation that hovered just at the edge of pain. He wondered how far the shaft went-had the worgs already succeeded in clearing a path to the crystal, opening a channel for its awful presence to extend into the neighboring valley?
As soon as the sun’s light faded completely from the sky, the worgs launched their first attack. They struck at the weakest point-a relatively small cluster of soldiers a short distance from any reinforcements. It was a quick and brutal strike, leaving two soldiers dead, then the worgs retreated before any help could arrive. Cart pulled the troops closer together, and they nervously awaited the next attack.
The worgs always came just as the soldiers began to relax or grow tired, letting their attention wander and loosening their grips on their weapons. Each time, they left at least one soldier dead or grievously injured, and as far as Cart could tell, the worgs had suffered no significant wounds. As the night wore on, the attacks became less frequent as the tension among the soldiers grew, but each one took a greater toll as fatigue slowed their reactions and weakened their hands. Cart managed to bring down one worg when the beasts made their only significant mistake-attacking too close to where Cart stood guard.
With dawn’s light, Cart looked down at a row of six bodies. It could have been worse, he told himself, but that was lit
tle comfort. What was supposed to have been work to busy idle hands had become a costly engagement.
By the time the soldiers had constructed and lit a pyre for their fallen comrades, Mirra arrived with her two squads of soldiers, a platoon of miners, and Ashara, who insisted on inspecting the crystal and supervising the collapse of the tunnel.
Cart took one of Mirra’s squads into the shaft first, to ensure that no worgs remained inside. At the shoulder, the worgs were taller even than Cart, so the height of the ceiling gave plenty of room. It was the width that made Cart nervous-if they did find any worgs, it would be a series of one-on-one fights in the narrow tunnel, and the soldiers would have trouble swinging their weapons at full strength. They made it only a short way inside before Cart called a halt and withdrew to replace his axe with a spear more suited to fighting in close quarters. So armed, he advanced into the tunnel alone, holding a sunrod before him to light his way. If only one soldier could face a worg at a time, he wanted that soldier to be him.
The shaft was straight, with no branches, and ran deep into the rock of the ridge. To his surprise, he found the tunnel shored up with wooden beams. How could the worgs have brought the beams into the tunnel? To imagine them digging into the rock like dogs burying a bone was one thing-but the idea of them carrying lumber into the shaft to support the ceiling seemed absurd. He resolved to have a miner examine the construction after he had scouted to the end.
As he expected, the light from his sunrod soon sparkled blue against what seemed like a doorway cut into the rock, outlining a crystal wall. A few paces farther in, he realized that the shaft widened and rose higher before the blue rectangle, as though the worgs had built a subterranean temple to replace their scattered labyrinth in the canyon.
Steeling himself for an ambush, he advanced slowly and as quietly as he could to the end of the shaft. He found himself in the entry to an impressive chamber carved from the stone. The walls were polished smooth except around the blue doorway, where a demonic figure was chiseled into the rock. Its feline head snarled in rage, and its clawed hands held the limp form of a winged serpent. The blue crystal gleamed between its legs, framed by pillars and a lintel that were also carved from the stone. The sculpture, more than the shores, convinced him that the worgs had not built this temple.
No worgs lurked in the chamber, but as he looked around, something moved within the crystal. First he saw a silver swirl-the serpent swimming through the mineral sea. Its movements had a sense of urgency that drew Cart a little closer. Other feelings surfaced in his mind, awe and wonder, respect and compassion for the sacrifice the spirit had made, giving its own freedom to bind the evil here in the earth. Cart wanted to honor that sacrifice.
Then a shadow moved behind the serpent. Two claws took form within the shadow and tore at the serpent, pushing through the barrier it had tried to make. He felt a flash of the serpent’s fear, then an overwhelming sense of anger. The shadow pressed against the surface of the crystal, and Cart stared into the incarnate face of evil.
A tool of war, like a sword or a siege engine. Is that what you are?
Cart was trapped in shadow floating in a sea of blue. He heard a whispered voice, not in his ear, but in his mind.
What god cares about the warforged? I will be that god, and you will be my champion.
The owner of the voice had plumbed the deepest reaches of his mind and soul, the heart of his desire.
You will lift my banner, and the warforged of all the world will rally to it. And there will be war, glorious war, the glory of battle and conquest. Khorvaire will be yours.
I was made for war, Cart thought.
And what is a warforged to do in a world without war? They built you for war and then abandoned you. But you will show them what they have done. They have brought war on themselves. War now has a mind and a will of its own.
It’s true, he thought. When the humans built war machines with minds, free-willed beings whose sole purpose was war, they condemned themselves to perpetual war. Until the last warforged lies dead and broken on a battlefield, there will always be war.
There will always be war. But these humans-Kelas, Haldren, Ashara and the rest-they try to use war as a tool, an instrument of their politics. You will bring war for war’s sake, war without pretense. War with no goal can have no end, for it will never attain its goal.
The mention of Ashara’s name stirred something in Cart that seemed to drive back the shadow just the slightest bit. To her, he was not a tool. In her eyes, he was something more than a machine built to be a soldier.
Of course you are more than a mere soldier-so much more. You are a hero, and you will be my champion.
To be a hero and to be your champion seem like two different things, he thought.
You will be whatever you desire. At my right hand, your destiny will be yours to choose.
Destiny. That word brought different memories to mind, memories of Gaven at the gates of Khyber, seizing his destiny and the Prophecy by the horns and wrenching them to his own will. Gaven had convinced Cart that his thoughts of godhood were illusions, that the path to greater good did not lie with the acquisition of greater power. Gaven had forsworn the power of divinity.
Gaven cannot be the Storm Dragon. He didn’t fulfill the Prophecy of the Storm Dragon. The Storm Dragon is yet to come.
No, Cart thought.
A flash of silver drove the shadow back still farther, and Cart found himself standing before the crystal doorway, both hands pressed to its surface and his forehead leaning against it. He heaved himself backward, sprawled on the floor, and the darkness was gone.
Ashara was the first to reach him, rushing from the chamber’s entrance to kneel beside him while two soldiers behind her gawked at the carvings around the crystal door.
“Stay back from it,” Cart groaned. “Ashara, take a look, but be careful. We need to bring this temple down as soon as possible.”
Ashara ran a hand over the blue crystal, and a shadow fell over her face. She seemed to shake it off quickly, and she pulled away. Glancing around the rest of the chamber, she nodded, apparently satisfied.
“Bring it down,” she said.
CHAPTER 30
Vaneshtra has sent word,” the dragon-king’s rasping voice said. “All is prepared for our arrival.” Gaven managed to raise his head and look around. This was a different chamber than the other one, darker and a little smaller, though still larger than most cathedrals. High windows let in little light, and Gaven saw storm clouds churning the sky. The dragon-king stood at the edge of a gigantic circle inscribed into the stone floor and inlaid with crushed gemstones of various colors, combining abstract patterns with Draconic characters. Four other dragons stood around the circle. One was a deep forest green, its head pronged with vicious-looking spikes and its mouth dripping with venom. The next was black, shining in the dim light as though it had just emerged from water, its horns curving forward like the dragon-king’s and its face suggesting the skeletal appearance of the undead dragon. The third was red as autumn leaves, with great horns swept back from its proud head. The smallest of the four enormous dragons was a gleaming red-brown, with the fainest hint of a green patina as though its scales were cast from copper.
Phaine d’Thuranni knocked his face back to the ground and Gaven groaned. They had given him water, trusting that his weakness would prevent him from attacking guards who opened his cell door long enough to throw him a waterskin. He still had not eaten, and he felt stretched, like cotton being spun into yarn. A rumble of thunder from the clouds overhead reminded him, though, that he was still the Storm Dragon-there was still power in his blood and in his dragonmark, if only he could marshal the strength of will he needed to channel it.
“Step now into the circle,” the dragon-king said.
Gaven felt all the dragons move closer, as though each one exuded an aura that pressed against him, squeezing him from all sides. Then the dragon-king began a chant, its words already burned into Gaven’s memor
y. “Three drops of blood mark the passing of the Time Between. The three dragons are joined together in the blood, and the blood contains the power of creation. The Time Between begins with blood and ends in blood. Blood is its harbinger, and blood flows in its passing.”
Thunder is his harbinger and lightning his spear, Gaven thought-that was the Storm Dragon, described in the Prophecy. Wind is his steed and rain his cloak.
Another rumble of thunder made Gaven smile.
Without a pause, the dragons launched into a different chant, formed not of words but of syllables of power. Almost as soon as it began, Gaven felt the engraved circle spring to life beneath him, energy coursing along its channels and magic stirring the air.
Lightning struck the roof of the chamber, and he heard one dragon’s voice falter, then pick up the chant.
Gaven felt a surge of elation that began to overpower his fatigue. I am the storm, he thought. I am the Storm Dragon!
Another lightning strike shook the building, and a shower of gravel fell from one of the windows. Rain drove against the roof and walls, and wind swirled inside the chamber. Gaven lifted his head again, and Phaine did not push it down. The elf had his sword in his hand as if to menace Gaven with it, but his eyes were on the roof and walls. Another strike made the copper dragon falter again, and the red growled a warning even as it continued the chant. Gaven saw cracks start to form across the roof, and the swirling air lifted him to his feet.
I am the Storm Dragon. You cannot contain me!
He began to rise into the air on a column of wind, power surging through his body, giving life to his muscles. He could feel the incantation building to its conclusion, and he lifted his arms to the sky to summon the full power of the storm. Lightning hit the roof again, and it began to crumble. Had someone called his name?
The copper dragon pounced and brought Gaven to the ground beneath its claws. Flat on his back, he saw a huge stone slab break off from the roof and fall. The dragons uttered the last syllable of their ritual chant, and magic flared in a shimmering aurora along the lines of the circle.