by James Wyatt
He patted the mare’s flank and let her go. She loped away from the wall of mist without a backward glance. He watched her until she was out of sight, then turned back to face the mist. He had the fleeting sense of a presence in there, something watching him. Waiting for him-impatient, hungry.
A chill ran down his back, and he drew his sword. He was suddenly struck by a feeling of awesome solitude. No one was here to cover his back, no one to share his anxiety-or to make him feel brave, like Rienne used to. No one at all, except perhaps the creatures lurking in the mist.
He checked the sky for the hundredth time, looking in vain for any sign of Vaskar. He took a step closer to the wall of mist, then extended his sword until the point sank into it. The blade met no resistance-in fact, for just a moment, Gaven felt as though something were gently pulling the sword into the mist. He stepped forward, sinking the sword all the way into the fog, bringing his face to within a hand’s breadth of the vaporous pall. His movement didn’t stir it; even his breath made no eddies in the mist.
He looked around as if taking a final survey of the living world before crossing into the land of the dead, then stepped in. The mist was cold on his skin. He stepped forward again before he dared to take a breath, letting the clammy mist into his lungs. There was an odor to it, not putrid exactly, but definitely a smell of death. The mist closed in around him, and he hurried forward, eager to push through to the other side.
Tendrils of mist coiled around his limbs as he moved, tugging at him. With every step, he felt a weight of exhaustion settling on him. He stopped, shook his head to clear it, and pressed ahead, but he began to wonder why he bothered. He could see no end to the mist ahead, and when he looked over his shoulder it seemed to stretch forever behind him. He dropped to his knees, his heart heavy, his muscles too tired to move.
An old dream filled his senses. Staggering across a blasted landscape where nothing lived. Falling to the ground, seeing his hands sink into earth that was half dirt, half ash. The taste of the air, bitter like bile.
“Have I been here before?” he asked the mist. “Or did I dream of this moment?”
He lifted one knee out of the dust and planted a foot on the shifting ground.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Either way, I’m here now.” He shifted his weight forward and pulled himself up until he stood with his chin on his chest. “And I have work to do.”
The mist began to swirl around him. He smiled as he felt the air stir-the breath of wind restored his strength. Great gusts cleared the air around him, showing him the ground at his feet and a path ahead. He walked between receding walls of billowing fog, and soon the dead-gray mist was gone.
The land around him was a desolation. He had crossed into another world-the verdant landscape of Breland was lost in the mist, far away, unreal. Beneath his feet, the ground was a layer of fine sand or ash on top of smooth rock. He saw nothing alive on this side of the mist. No trees, no birds overhead, not even weeds. The sun hung low in the east, its feeble light drowning in a distant fog. Above him, the sky was the gray of a corpse. Even the wind around him died.
Gaven stepped forward, visions from his dreams crowding his mind. Another step, and the sand around him stirred, jolting him back to his senses. Something formed itself from the ground beside him, taking on a vaguely human form, gaunt arms and a gaping mouth and eyes of sickly green fire. The sight of it sent a wave of unreasoning terror through his body, and he stepped back-right into the grasping claws of a second ghoulish creature.
“Thunder!” He wrenched himself free of the creature’s grasp and hefted his sword in his trembling hands.
A third monster surged up from the sand, and Gaven swallowed his fear. He swung his sword in a full circle around himself, biting into each one, sending three sprays of ash into the still air. The creatures didn’t flinch-they were upon him, their claws tearing his skin and pulling him in three different directions.
With a single arcane word, Gaven pulled a cloak of fire around his body, its warmth dispelling the lingering chill of the awful mists. The creatures drew back in obvious pain, giving him an opening to slip through, to put all three in front of him. As they tried to circle him, he sent a crackle of arcane lightning into his sword, then lunged to his right to intercept the creature moving around that side. The blade bit deep, and the thing’s form lost some definition, but it didn’t slow its advance. It slammed into Gaven’s shoulder, one claw cutting a gash down his chest. The wound flared with green fire, and Gaven shouted in pain. The creature clung to him, even as Gaven’s fiery armor engulfed it. It brought its face right up against his, its eyes staring into his. In an instant, Gaven thought he saw a distillation of all the pain and misery that filled the Mournland.
Desolation spreads over that land like a wildfire, he thought-like a plague. In the creature’s eyes, he saw a roiling gray mist spreading across the verdant land, leaving nothing alive in its wake. More, he felt the despair of every living thing that was swallowed in that mist, every spirit that lingered in this graveyard, every person who had lost a relative or friend to the Mourning. He fell to his knees, the creature still staring into his eyes.
Then he brought his sword around, cutting right through the thing’s waist, making it dissolve back into the sand.
The other two creatures came at him from opposite sides, stalking in cautiously. Gaven stood and stepped backward, a little unsteady on his feet. A soft breath of wind blew up his back, chilling his sweat, and he filled his lungs as though to draw strength from the moving air.
The creatures pounced, and Gaven exhaled. The breeze at his back swelled, and he became the wind. He stretched out his hands, and the wind blasted forth to tear at the creatures’ sandy forms. They staggered backward as the wind continued to drive at them, ash streaming out behind them. He was the fury of nature, all wrath and destruction. He smiled grimly as the power of the storm coursed through him.
A crack of thunder rent the air, and Gaven became the lightning, joining blasted earth to gray sky. His feet lifted off the ground, and the lightning shot out of his hands with the wind. The instant of the lightning strike stretched into an eternity in his mind-he was storm, and he was everywhere at once. This was power like he had never tasted before, and he exulted in the destruction he wreaked.
The instant ended. He came down hard on his back, a few paces from where he’d been standing, staring up at the clear, dead sky. He lifted his head with a tremendous effort, just long enough to make sure that the creatures were gone. Two patches of sand were blackened and smoking, but there was no other sign of the monsters. He let his head fall back on the ground.
The magical flames around his body had gone out, but his body still burned with pain where the creature had raked his chest. His dragonmark also stung, as though lightning still coursed along its intricate tracings. He groaned, tried to lift his head again, and failed.
“Welcome to the Mournland,” he said.
Gaven rested for only a moment-long enough for the sting to fade from his dragonmark, though the wound on his chest still burned. He struggled to sit up, every muscle in his body protesting, then slowly got his feet under him and stood up.
He looked at the sun as it disappeared below the horizon, scanned the sky again for any sign of Vaskar, then turned to look for Nymm, the largest moon. It was just rising out of a gray haze to the east, orange and round.
“The Eye of Siberys will lift the Sky Caves of Thieren Kor from the land of desolation under the dark of the great moon,” he said to himself. “The great moon’s full now. I’ve got two weeks.”
He put his hands on his knees and let his head hang.
“Two weeks to reach the Sky Caves. If I can stay alive that long.”
He found his sword where it had fallen on the ground, heaved it onto his shoulder, and started walking.
CHAPTER 25
Vaskar perched on an eruption of stone, overlooking a plain of jumbled rock and sand. He had been watching the great moo
n’s ascent through the sky, and his patience was rewarded as it neared its apex. A hint of shadow appeared at the edge of its disk. He clutched the Eye of Siberys tighter in his great claw and rumbled deep in his throat.
“The eclipse is beginning,” he murmured, “the dark of the great moon.” He stretched his neck and his wings to the sky and roared. “The time is at hand!”
He watched, waiting for the perfect moment, as Nymm slowly disappeared in the world’s shadow.
When its light was completely quenched, he raised the Eye of Siberys high, holding it gingerly between his two front claws. “Do your work,” he whispered. He gazed into the golden crystal, and he saw.
He saw the desolation of the Mournland and the life-leaching energies that still permeated the land. He saw the twelve moons arrayed in the sky above him, Nymm shrouded in its eclipse, and he perceived the forces aligned to make this moment possible. He saw the Sky Caves slumbering beneath the ground, and he called to them. He felt them begin to stir, responding to his call.
For a moment, he saw himself-small and insignificant among the events of the moment. But he did not like to see himself, and he certainly didn’t like feeling small.
“The Storm Dragon has emerged!” he cried. “I will walk in the paths of the first of sixteen!”
He closed his eyes, and the earth began to shake. The ground trembled so violently that Vaskar took to the sky, pounding his wings in the still air to rise above the tumult. The plain below him looked like a troubled sea, sand erupting in geysers and boulders rolling wildly in every direction. He flew in widening circles, watching the earth churn in an area the size of a large island.
Soon there was direction in the movement below him-a general tendency toward the outside of an enormous circle. The ground swelled, sand sliding and boulders rolling downhill from the center of the bulge. Vaskar flew to the edge of the swell, not wanting to be directly above whatever emerged.
As he continued his flight, the sand at the crest of the swell fell away, revealing a jagged dome of reddish stone. Slowly it rose higher and higher above the surrounding earth, and Vaskar caught sight of a cave entrance in the face of the rock, sand pouring out of it as it lifted into the air.
“The Sky Caves of Thieren Kor!” he roared.
The more rock emerged from the earth, the faster it rose, and in another moment it had broken free entirely. The rumbling thunder of the earth below came to an abrupt stop. In the sudden silence, an enormous island floated a hundred feet up in the air, rounded at the top, a jagged point at the bottom like an inverted mountain. Sand and rubble poured from dozens of holes, spilling down the sides and trickling into a great crater in the ground below it.
Vaskar tightened the circle of his flight, surveying the Sky Caves from every side, trying to decide where to enter. The cave mouths seemed to form patterns, characters of the Draconic script, but every time he tried to read them he thought they shifted, aligning themselves in different patterns. Finally, impatient, he chose a cave near the top and landed on its lower lip, scrabbling at the edge until he could get all four claws on solid ground.
“The Storm Dragon walks in the paths of the first of sixteen,” he said. “I am here. Reveal your secrets to me!”
He advanced into the winding tunnel.
Gaven felt the earth rumbling and hefted his sword, expecting an attack-something springing from the ground, perhaps, or some enormous monster that shook the earth with its steps. The rumbling grew until it threatened to knock him off his feet, and in that moment he glimpsed the eclipsed moon above his head.
“No,” he breathed.
Exhausted as he was, he ran. The wind cradled him and sped him on. The sky darkened as clouds rolled in-the first real clouds he’d seen since entering the Mournland-and covered the Ring of Siberys, the stars, the eclipsed moon. His steps and the wind around him kicked up a storm of sand and ash in his wake.
He occasionally glimpsed creatures moving in the night around him, from scavenging vermin the size of dogs to an enormous war construct he spotted in the distance, lumbering across the landscape. One spiny crab-spider thing snapped at him with fangs and pincers as he ran, but he didn’t slow at all, and it quickly grew tired of the chase. Nothing else came close enough to threaten him.
Rain began to fall. It cooled him as he ran and soothed the burning wound across his chest. He saw it form craters in the sandy ground and drain away.
The land around him was flat and featureless. The map he’d found in Paluur Draal and committed to memory was his only guide, and he had no better way to navigate than trying to keep his path straight in the direction he’d first chosen. The bank of gray mist hung off to his right, sometimes nearer than others, but otherwise he could see nothing to indicate where he was, where he’d been, or where he was headed. He slipped in and out of an illusion that only the ground moved at all, that he hung in the air, running in place. He lost all sense of time and distance-he could have been running for hours, days, weeks.
But then a darkness appeared before him in the distance. At first it looked like a dark cloud, a heart of a storm in the midst of an overcast sky. As he drew closer, though, it began to take shape. The first feeble daylight illuminated the clouds overhead, casting it in silhouette. It was huge, like a mountain hanging upside-down in the air above the blasted landscape. It floated over an enormous crater, the remains of the cyst from which it had burst forth.
A part of Gaven’s mind that was not quite his knew all about the Sky Caves of Thieren Kor. In a different life he had learned all he could about them, poring over fragments of the Prophecy collected in great draconic libraries. He had waited a dragon’s long lifetime for the opportunity to explore them and plumb their secrets, and when that lifetime had ended, he-that other he, the dragon of the nightshard-had made sure that what he had learned would someday be remembered.
So Gaven remembered, and the knowledge flooded back to him. The Sky Caves were ancient-they had floated above the untouched wilderness of Khorvaire when dragons first ventured forth from Argonnessen to challenge the fiends that ruled the world. Thieren Kor was a placename in the language used by the fiends, meaning “mountain of secrets.” Countless battles had raged beneath that floating mountain, in the skies around it, and within its twisting tunnels-dragons and demons tearing at each other, spilling oceans of blood to gain control of its secrets. When the dragons emerged victorious from the eons-long war, the first dragon to explore the Sky Caves in their entirety became a god, the first of sixteen.
Now Vaskar hoped to follow where that ancient dragon had led. And Gaven felt, for the first time, a surge of envy-he wanted that knowledge, and that power, for himself.
He roared, giving vent to the frustration that had simmered in him since he felt the earth rumble and saw the darkened moon that had propelled him across the Mournland. The brooding clouds thundered in answer to his roar, and lightning danced around the floating mountain. And the wind that had blown at his back swirled in a whirlwind around his feet, lifting him into the air. Higher and higher it carried him, until he stepped forward and alighted in one of the many mouths of the Sky Caves of Thieren Kor.
“Vaskar!” he shouted, sending echoes dancing through the twisting network of caverns. He tensed, gripping his sword in both hands, expecting an attack at any instant. All that emerged from the darkness before him was his own voice in a hundred fragments.
Gaven limned his blade with a pale blue glow, lighting the cave ahead, showing him three tunnels converging on the same mouth-one leading up and to the left, one up and to the right, and one more or less straight ahead. The tunnels were like the boring of some enormous worm-round, smooth, and wide. Stretching his arms wide, he could not touch the walls on either side, and the walls curved together far above his head. He started along the right-hand passage, following it as it wound in an upward spiral. At each branch, he bore right, ensuring that he could find his way back to where he started if the need arose.
After the fourth bra
nch, he found himself teetering at the edge of another cave mouth, his momentum almost carrying him over the brink. He threw himself backward, sending his sword clattering to the floor and sliding toward the cave mouth. He stopped it with his foot then scooted forward to grab it. He got back on his feet and turned around, continuing to follow the right wall.
The next cave opening didn’t catch him by surprise, but it did make him stop and think. He’d been blindly following the right wall, as if it would lead him to some destination. But what was his destination? He didn’t recall any mention of a specific location within the Sky Caves that might be important-a vault of knowledge or library of some sort. Finding Vaskar seemed like a hopeless endeavor, especially if the dragon were trying to avoid him-he could never hear or see the dragon before Vaskar noticed his approach. So what was he trying to do?
He moved back into the passage he’d just left. The walls were striated in broad patterns of dark and light stone, which he had noted only casually before. As he examined it more carefully, he realized that there was a definite shape to it. He couldn’t see it all at once, but as he moved farther in to the tunnel, the parts formed a whole in his mind, a Draconic character representing either a hard th sound or the sixth of some sequence. He continued slowly along, reading more characters-short “a” or a moon, a “sh” sound or a beast, or horns. Thash, meaning storm-or the horns of the sixth moon, the crescent phase of Eyre.
He stopped, retracing the tunnel he’d been following in his mind. He turned and followed it again, his eyes closed, trying to visualize the path he was walking. It, too, took shape in his mind-another Draconic character, a long e sound or the number nine. Was that part of another sequence, or an attachment to the word and phrase he’d already pieced together? The number nine could be part of a calendrical expression connected to Eyre’s crescent phase. Or thashe would turn “storm” into an adjective-he had a feeling there might be a “dragon” attached to that somewhere. Or this character could be connected to other symbols formed by the other passages of the Sky Caves.