The Titan of Twilight ttg-3

by Troy Denning

  The Titan of Twilight

  ( The Twilight Giants - 3 )

  Troy Denning

  Troy Denning

  The Titan of Twilight

  Prologue

  Through the still winds I sweep, silent as death. Below, the Vale: a crooked gorge of rock and snow forever clad in dusk’s ashen winter livery. One beat of my umbral wings, and I sail half its immense length. The forlorn halls of Bleak Palace pass beneath my breast, a grim memorial to my ancient hubris. Two beats, and a craggy wall looms ahead. An insufferable yearning as cold as it is deep shudders through my tenebrous body. I long to soar over the cliff top, to fly into blue midnight and let slip this eternal eventide.

  Instead, I dip a wing and bank. I circle back the way I came, as I have done a thousand times more than there are stones upon the land, and I listen to your voices. For an immeasurable eternity, they have poured through my head in an endless, ghastly rain-all the profane things you whisper when no one is listening, no one but me:

  “Of course, you don’t have to, my dear! But if you like this shiny necklace…”

  “… where the lady stores her jewels-and if you want the key, I need my money…”

  “… tonight, my love. Strangle her while she sleeps, and we’ll always be…”

  Does it surprise you to know I am listening? It shouldn’t. Your sinister whisperings come to me from all the black corners of your dark, distant world; at times they fill my head with such a profane, raucous rustling that I cannot hear my own thoughts.

  And even I–I, Lanaxis, the Titan of Twilight; mother-murderer and eternal prisoner of shadow; founder of Ostoria, Empire of Giants-even I cannot silence your voices. The gods have proclaimed that I must listen, and I dare not defy them. They are trying to tell me something-something momentous, I am sure.

  Unbalanced? Demented? Will you call me mad?

  Listen.

  Aren’t my words ringing inside your head?

  Yes, yes! Now you understand. We’re all mad, each of us. The voices make us that way; deranged and maniacal, quite possibly dangerous-but you more than me. I am, after all, chosen of the gods.

  And suddenly I, Lanaxis the Chosen One, am sitting alone upon the crumbling steps of my palace, staring, as is my habit, into the eternal dusk above. Where the moon should hang is an enormous green eye. For a moment I am bewildered; then I realize what has happened: I have slipped free of the moment and settled in the past, sometime during the Time of Troubles, when the gods walked the land and chaos ruled Toril. It is, as always, impossible to know the date more exactly.

  And truly, it doesn’t matter. Time has lost its meaning. Since long before the first human kingdoms arose in the south lands, twilight has hung in this vale. The dusk is as perpetual and still as the heavens themselves. Never does night fall, nor the sun rise to herald a new dawn. There are no days by which to tally the tenday; no tendays to track the months. In this valley, the season never changes. The years pass without notice; they blur into decades; the decades into centuries; the centuries into decades of centuries. Life has become an endless series of moments that add up to nothing.

  It is no wonder that I have slipped the currents of time, that I flit in and out of the eternal river like a dipping gull.

  A bird’s shadow appears on the snowy ground ahead. I look up and see a roc, as large as a cloud, soaring across the vale. Well do I remember the flavor of the raptor’s meat-lean and wild, with a spicy tang that tickles the roof of the mouth.

  I leap up and hurl a splintered pillar at the bird. As swift as a lightning bolt, the shaft flashes across the sky to bury itself in the raptor’s breast. The creature screeches and reels. It dives, talons extended to exact revenge, but even a roc is no match for a titan’s spear. The life seeps from its wings, and it rolls over to plummet toward me in a limp bundle of feathers.

  But the gods would deny me even this simple feast. As the bird’s shadow sweeps across my head, the great carcass dissolves into glimmering golden twinkles. A cold, tingling energy seeps into my body. Black, incorporeal feathers sprout along the edges of my arms, and my feet change into the talons of a great, shadowy raptor. Overwhelmed by the urge to launch myself into the sky, I beat the air with my umbral wings and rise into the purple twilight.

  Thus is the shadowroc born, and still I have not decided whether it is the gift of the gods or their curse. How I long to flee this valley! How I yearn to soar over distant lands and see what has become of the world my brothers and I ruled!

  Now I am with them again: Nicias and Masud, dynast of cloud giants and khan of fire giants, and also Vilmos, paramount of storm giants, Ottar, jarl of frost giants, and others too numerous to name. We stand beside the bubbling waters of the Well of Health, in the longest and most majestic colonnade of Bleak Palace, the largest and most exalted of the citadels of the Sons of Annam.

  I have slipped far into the past, to that fateful moment I live again and again, to the moment I have already endured a thousand times and am doomed to suffer ten thousand times more. My brothers will not meet my gaze, and I know it falls to me alone to save Ostoria from our mother’s faithless treachery. I feel the Mother Queen’s rumbling approach, and the poison is quick from my hand to the well.

  Othea arrives, her shadow plunging the entire colonnade into twilight. She is as large as a mountain, with hips like hillocks and a bosom of craggy buttresses. Her eyes are black, like caves, and her white hair billows off her head like a plume of snow.

  I bid my two-headed servant, the ettin, to carry a chalice of water to Othea, but she will not drink. Her craggy mouth twitches at the corners, and she declares my brothers will drink with her. My mind fills with a white haze, thoughts sailing through it like wind-driven snow. A warning to my brothers would be a warning to Othea. Perhaps she knows what I have done? Is she testing me, to see if I will sacrifice my brothers to poison her?

  I must. I will play this game to the end. Othea is the wife who cuckolds her husband, who loves her paramours’ bastard races more than she loves us, who would give our empire to the children of her lovers.

  I command my servant to bring chalices for my guests, and with my own hand I fill each cup. The tray shakes in the ettin’s grasp. The ettin knows what I have poured into the well, but neither head speaks. They carry the goblets to my guests. I watch my brothers drink.

  Yes, Othea drank too. I have slipped the moment again. I am once more the shadowroc, flying back and forth in the Vale, a lump of ice where my heart should be. The sensation is very clear to me, even thousands of years later; as my brothers fell dead, the blood in my veins turned to half-frozen slush. I began to shiver uncontrollably, my skin grew icy and numb, and the tears rolling down my cheeks stung like windblown sleet. I thought I had saved Ostoria.

  Of course, I was wrong. Othea had already laid her curse on me, as she told me with her last, rattling breaths: her shadow will lie over Bleak Palace forever, filling me with a cold, sick regret for what I have done. I am free to leave, but when I do-this is the true treachery-when I do, I will become mortal. I will grow old and infirm; eventually I will die. The choice is mine: to spend eternity in cold twilight, or to sacrifice my immortality.

  I have endured longer than Mother expected, I am sure.

  It has not been easy. I have sat paralyzed for whole centuries, staring at a single stone between my feet, caught in the grip of a despair so profound that I remained in Othea’s shadow only because I lacked the will to flee. But I did endure, and now I know I was never truly alone. The gods were watching over me; it was they who kept my feet rooted to the stones when I could think of no reason to remain. They have decreed a special destiny for me, and the time is close when I will fulfill their purpose.r />
  I can tell, for they are speaking to me again. Your voices are ringing in my head, and the message is growing clear:

  “Please, whatever you desire-but I beg you, spare them. Save my little ones…”

  “… you understand what we want…”

  Yes, I understand. The world is full of evil-evil that has arisen from the destruction of Ostoria. The task the gods have set before me is clear: I must save Toril. I must reestablish the Empire of Giants and restore harmony to the world.

  But I cannot rule this empire myself. After my mistake-I did not hesitate to poison my brothers, but it was a mistake-I am not fit. The king must be someone destined to rule, in whose veins flows the divine right of dominion. It is my duty to ensure that he is born.

  I know who the mother is to be.

  “Bring princess here?” The question comes from Goboka, a foolish ogre who has come to my vale seeking the powers of a shaman. “What princess?”

  Goboka stands before me: a tiny, loutish figure lost in the vastness of my audience hall. I sit upon my throne, cloaked in a magic mantle of purple shadow. I have forgotten why I started concealing myself from mortal visitors-perhaps it was shame over my fall-but the habit has served me well. The giants have come to think of me as a sort of sacred spirit, and they do my bidding as if by divine command.

  “The princess will… be born next… year,” I explain, barely forcing the words out. I have managed to slip through time to the exact moment of Goboka’s visit, and I must strain to explain what I want. Time builds a certain momentum as it rushes forward, and changing its course-even when the moment is recent-is no easy matter. “You must… bring her here no later than… her nineteenth birthday.”

  Again, your voices:

  “Why us? What have we done…?”

  “… she’s a beautiful filly, but for that price…”

  “There are plenty of women who would…”

  No! Only her. Only Brianna of Hartwick may bear the child! She is descended of Annam’s last son, who was ordained by the All Father to become king of giants and rule Ostoria with wisdom and justice. True, Othea robbed the child of his birthright-but she did not kill the seed. The seed lives on, awaiting but a wisp of divine breath to bring it to life again.

  I will be that wisp.

  “I beg your pardon,” says Julien, the ettin’s handsome head.

  We are standing together, my servant and I, in the moments before they are to leave Twilight forever. Beside us bubble the black waters that once we called the Well of Health, but have since named the Pool of Despair. Goboka has failed-through the eyes of my eagle familiar, I have seen Brianna’s bloody axe and watched his headless body sink beneath a mountain mire-and I have just told my servant what I expect of them.

  “You can’t ask that of us!” Julien insists. “Othea cursed us, too. If we go after the princess, we’ll die!”

  I nod my head sadly. “Someday-but not until you grow old.” I give the ettin a suit of magical armor I have forged for their misshapen body, and also a vial of powder I have mixed to ensure their success. “The armor will disguise you as a handsome human prince, and the powder will make Brianna fall in love with you.”

  “Why we need magic powder for that?” demands Arno, the ettin’s ugly head. “Any woman love us!”

  Love.

  Is it not love that licenses treachery? This is so, and for me more than others. Do you think it is for my own sake that I poisoned the Mother Queen? Or for myself that I abide this murky prison? I endure for the sons and daughters of my dead brothers.

  The mother-murderer suffers for the good of Toril.

  Lanaxis the Chosen perseveres so that the giants may set the world to rights-and the time is nigh when they shall. True, the ettin died, but it would be wrong to say that he failed. He did better than Brianna knows; better, even, than I should have expected.

  Now I stand on my palace balcony, my vacant gaze fixed on the icy wastes beyond the balustrade. But it is not the dusk-stained snows I see, nor the wind’s cold hiss to which I listen. In the window of Brianna’s throne room-the princess has become queen, but it would be foolish to ask me when-in the window perches my pet, his keen eyes and sharp ears serving me as his talons never could.

  The queen’s belly is swollen with child. Before her looms a milky-eyed firbolg with a mane of flyaway hair and a pelt of white beard.

  “I have dreamed your birthing,” he says. “You will bear two sons, one handsome and one ugly. It would be better for the Ice Spires if the ugly one never has a name.”

  Brianna’s knuckles whiten. The change is almost imperceptible, but the eyes of my familiar are too keen to miss it “I am to kill my child-on your word?”

  “Majesty, I am sorry. If the ugly one grows to manhood, the giants will fill the Clearwhirl with the blood of ’kin and men.”

  “I, too, have dreamed.” Brianna’s voice is sharp with anger. Good. “But not of twins and wars. I have dreamed of a land ruled by children-”

  “But Majesty, you’re no seer! Your dream has no meaning!”

  The queen rises, glaring. “In Hartsvale, my dreams are the only ones that have meaning!”

  Your dreams and mine, Brianna. Your dreams and mine.

  1

  Gorge of the Silver Wyrm

  Tavis Burdun felt the detonation before he heard it: a faint quiver in the soles of his feet, followed instantly by a feeble shock wave breaking against his back. A muffled karumph rolled up the gorge from someplace far behind him, sweeping last night’s snowfall off the craggy precipices, and he smelled whiffs of some mordant, caustic fume. There was a slight lull, then a deafening crack as an enormous ice curtain broke free of its cliff and crashed down on the far side of Wyrm River.

  “Halt the Company of the Royal Snow Bear!” Tavis boomed, addressing the long column of warriors ahead. Even without the roar of shattering ice, he would have had to yell. A fierce boreal wind had been howling down the gorge since dawn, filling the canyon with a whistling keen as eerie and cold as a banshee’s wail. “Halt the horse lancers! Halt the footmen and front riders!”

  As the company sergeants relayed the commands forward, Tavis turned and looked back down the canyon, raising his hand to halt the elegant sleighs coming toward him. He saw nothing unusual, only the icy, rutted road that the queen’s entourage had followed into the dusky Gorge of the Silver Wyrm. To one side of the route lay the broad ribbon of Wyrm River’s frozen surface, with a sheer granite cliff looming above the far bank. To the other side rose a steep, craggy slope flecked with the stumps of a felled pine forest A web of precarious footpaths laced the barren hillside, stringing together the rock heaps that spilled from the mouths of the canyon’s fabled silver mines. Atop a few of the mine dumps stood a handful of tiny figures, weary miners who had crawled from their dank holes to watch the queen’s procession. If they felt any concern over the muffled blast, their motionless forms did not betray it.

  The royal sleigh, the first in the procession, continued to come toward Tavis. It was drawn by the queen’s favorite horse, Blizzard, a white-flecked mare with a snowy mane and a disposition as fierce and unpredictable as her namesake. The beast did not halt until she reached Tavis’s side, where she cast an angry glare into his eyes and snorted sour-smelling steam into his face. He grabbed the horse’s bridle and pushed her head away, then fixed his attention on the sleigh’s fur-swaddled driver. The young man was a lanky border scout with a yellow beard, twinkling gray eyes, and a touch of larceny in his ready smile.

  “Avner, keep a taut rein on the Queen’s Beast,” Tavis advised, calling the petulant mare by his favorite nickname. “I don’t like her look.”

  Before the young scout could reply, a muffled voice sounded behind the fleece curtain that enclosed the sleigh’s passenger compartment. “Tavis? What was that horrible crash?”

  “Falling ice, milady.”

  A mittened hand drew the curtain aside, revealing the striking form of Tavis’s wife, Queen Brianna. She w
as a tall, big-boned woman with robust features and a chin as strong as a man’s. Even her white fur cloak could not conceal the fact that she was enormously pregnant. She filled three-quarters of the booth, with a belly so swollen she could barely close her coat. There were dark circles under her eyes, for her condition made sleep difficult, and her cheeks were puffy and red from the bitter cold-but Tavis hardly noticed these flaws. He saw only her maternal radiance, the most ravishing of any beauty.

  “Falling ice?” Brianna asked. “It sounded more like a falling mountain, Lord Scout.”

  Tavis pointed at the enormous ice blocks scattered along the far bank of Wyrm River. “There was some sort of blast behind us. It shook an ice curtain off the canyon wall.” He nearly had to yell to make himself heard over the wind. “The road’s not blocked, but we shouldn’t go on until I know what happened.”

  “In that case, we may continue.” The speaker rode into view and stopped his gray stallion on the far side of Brianna’s sleigh. He was the earl of the Storming Gorge, Radborne Wynn, a stout old man wrapped in a cloak of silver ermine. With a tuft of ice-caked beard and a long mane of gray hair, he looked as august and feral as the mountain goats that roamed the canyons of his wind-blasted barony. “A tunnel wizard’s spell caused the blast”

  “You told me there would be no mining magic while Brianna is in the canyon!” Tavis barked. “Didn’t you issue the command?”

  Radborne responded with an icy glare. “The wizard responsible will be severely punished, Lord High Scout,” he said. “I assure you, there is no need to speak to me in such tones.”

  The high scout clamped his jaw shut and looked away, running his eyes over the craggy slopes as though he had not heard the comment. He had learned not to apologize to nobles-such overtures were interpreted as signs of weakness-but the earl had a point. Tavis had been anxious and short-tempered the entire journey-though with good reason, he thought.