Dragon Forge: The Draconic Prophecies - Book Two (25 page)

Rienne’s hair became a mass of snakes, then a knot of tentacles reaching for him. She was the Soul Reaver then, an abomination, a tentacled head crowning a slender body, great claws on shriveled arms grabbing at him, blank white eyes staring into his and whispers of malice flooding his brain. Gaven rolled on top of it, pinning it to the ground. His hand clenched the spear whose point was the Eye of Siberys, embedded in the Soul Reaver’s chest. His mouth full of slime and bile, the creature’s tentacles raking across his face, he thrust the spear down into the Heart of Khyber.

Through his own hand.

The blood from his hand became a spear of lurid red light, jabbing up from the depths of the earth to pierce the sky. Scarlet filled his vision, and he floated in blood.

Three drops of blood mark the passing of the Time Between
.

A ring of silver, a serpent coiled into a circle, shone brightly in the field of red. The red turned to sapphire blue, and the silver ring burst into blinding argent flame. A sword slid through the ring, and then it became a stream of blood, mingled silver and black, flowing out through the ring of fire. Searing flames burst to life around Gaven.

The Time Between begins in blood and ends in blood. Blood is its harbinger, and blood flows in its passing
.

Pain like he had never imagined woke him from his sleep.

Rienne stood in darkness. A hard floor, smooth as glass, was cool against her bare feet. The only thing she could see was Maelstrom, suspended in the air before her, the blade pointing up and shining a faint beam of light upward into the darkness. She reached out and grabbed the hilt, savoring the touch of the leather wrapping its hilt. With ground beneath her feet and Maelstrom in her hand, she was solid, rooted.

Maelstrom jerked her arm upward and then lifted her off the ground. She floated in a void. Maelstrom was all—all she could see, all she could feel.

Dragons fly before the Blasphemer’s legions, scouring the earth of his righteous foes
.

Carnage rises in the wake of his passing, purging all life from those who oppose him
.

Vultures wheel where dragons flew, picking the bones of the numberless dead
.

Rienne recognized those last words—Gaven had recited them on the airship as they approached the Starcrag Plain.

But the Blasphemer’s end lies in the void, in the maelstrom that pulls him down to darkness
.

Rienne’s feet found solid ground again, and the world burst into light—into the tumult of a battlefield. Dragons flew overhead, their flames and lightning blasting the armies on the ground. A banner fluttered in the wind, bone white, marked with a twisted rune. Maelstrom was alive in her hand—did she control it, or it her? Together they cut through soldier after soldier in a languid dance of annihilation.

She cut a swath through the soldiers until they fell away before her. Then a demon stood before her, his sword burning with blood red fire.

Darkness again, the brief awareness of Gaven’s arms around her, and then she fell back to sleep.

Lissa waited in the antechamber until her feet ached from the hard stone floor and her eyes drooped from sheer exhaustion. After days of hasty travel, she wanted nothing more than to collapse into her bed and sleep for the better part of a day. But duty demanded this one last thing of her.

The door swung open and two soldiers clad in armor made of blackened bone escorted her into the chamber of the dragon-king. She entered silently, but as she approached, the great dragon’s skeletal head turned and rose up on its bony neck. Lissa fell to her knees and dropped her face to the floor.

“Why do you come before me?” The dragon-king’s words were a whisper, spoken without breath or voice.

One did not mince words with a dragon-king, though of
course one used the more formal diction of the dragons. “My lord and king, I have found what you have long sought.”

“What is that?”

“The touch of Siberys’s hand.”

The dragon-king shifted from his recumbent posture to put his feet on the ground. “Then the Time Between has begun,” he said, his eyes fixed on the stars that shone through the open dome of his chamber. He deigned to grant Lissa one more glance. “You have done well.”

She scrambled to her feet and fled the chamber before the dragon-king’s pleasure turned to wrath.

The visitor appeared human, but Kelas knew she was not. He greeted her in the ruined sanctuary of the cathedral, which was unsettling once he realized that the large room gave her space to assume her natural form, if she desired.

She was tall and slender, almost willowy—beautiful, even sultry. Her shining silver hair and eyes hinted at her true nature, and she wore a shimmering gown of the same silver color. Her movements were smooth and graceful, and they gave him the mental image of a dragon soaring on a mountain updraft. Could she be planting such visions in his mind? A subtle method of intimidation—reminding him of what he was dealing with?

“Greetings from Malathar,” she said, “dragon-king of Rav Magar.” Her voice was clear as a tuning fork, melodious and stately. She gave the slightest bow.

Kelas bowed a little more deeply. “Malathar honors us with his greetings and his messenger,” he said, his Draconic perfect and smooth. He smiled warmly—a smile that had begun many successful seductions, though in this case he hoped only for a successful negotiation. She was the first envoy from the dragons, the first response to his widespread inquiries, and she had come all the way from Argonnessen. He had hoped against hope for a response from some lone dragon in Khorvaire. But a dragon-king of Argonnessen?

“Malathar has heard of your efforts and would like to help you bring them to completion.”

A surge of excitement rose in Kelas’s chest, and he struggled not to let it show on his face. “I am most honored,” he said.

“Malathar will send you three dragons to fuel the furnace of your forge.”

“And in exchange?”

“In his beneficence, all Malathar asks in exchange is the privilege of providing its first subject.”

“Its first—?” Kelas’s mind raced. It was impossible—he was building the Dragon Forge to have only one subject.

“The city of Rav Magar has a most unexpected visitor,” the messenger said. “He bears the touch of Siberys’s hand in the Mark of Storm.”

The Siberys Mark of Storm? Kelas couldn’t keep his face impassive any longer. Could Gaven possibly have traveled to Argonnessen? Or did two Siberys heirs of House Lyrandar walk the earth? It didn’t matter.

“Please convey to Malathar my grateful acceptance of his generous offer.”

Sleep eluded Gaven for the rest of the night. From where he lay on the floor, Rienne still slumbering against his chest, Gaven could read a few of the snippets of text on the walls, but he realized that the importance of the shrine had nothing to do with the words or pictures it contained. Sleeping in the shrine—sleeping in the holy presence of the Prophecy—induced prophetic dreams. That explained Lissa’s matter-of-fact assumption that Gaven and Rienne would sleep in the shrine.

He looked down at Rienne’s head, at the hair flowing behind her across the floor. Was she dreaming as well? What visions was she seeing?

The memory of his own dream made him shudder, and Rienne shifted slightly, pressing closer to him. His nerves tingled with the lingering echoes of the pain that had jolted him from sleep, but her soft warmth soothed him. With her at his side, he
felt he could face whatever the Time Between held in store for him and whatever horrors would come after. His eyes welled with tears, and he touched his lips to her forehead.

He heard footsteps outside the arch, and then a sound—something between a series of clicks and a throaty growl. He recognized the sound as part of the dragonborn vocabulary of social interactions, though he had no inkling of its specific meaning. A dragonborn figure appeared in the doorway, silhouetted against the moonlit sky. Gaven tensed, stretching a hand toward his sword where it lay nearby.

Lissa’s quiet voice put Gaven at ease. “Gaven,” she said, “can you step outside, please?”

Gaven glanced down at Rienne, sound asleep. Smoothly and gently, he lifted her arm and set it on her own side. Then he lifted her head, laid it on the floor, and got quietly to his feet. Lissa stepped back outside the tiny shrine as he padded out the door.

“What is it?” he said, and then he saw the soldiers. Eight of them stood in an arc around him, wearing plate armor and carrying heavy swords. He wheeled around to the door—he needed his sword, and Rienne—but his path was already blocked by two more soldiers. Total silence, obviously magical in origin, fell around him just as he started to shout.

No matter, he thought. He felt lightning start to surge in his blood, and shadow draped the city as a stormcloud appeared across the moonlit sky. The entire city of Rav Magar would know the fury of the Storm Dragon.

Just as he started to turn, a heavy pommel slammed into his head, bizarre in its silence. He fell against the shrine’s wall but forced his eyes to stay clear. He spun to face his foes and staggered forward a few steps, struggling to focus enough to channel the lightning out from his body. A dragon had joined the soldiers, azure-scaled, with an enormous horn at the end of its snout.

The lightning burst out from his arms and engulfed the dragon, dancing across its hide and sparking at its horn and in its mouth. It stretched its mouth wide in what might have been a mocking smile, and its own lightning danced over its tongue and teeth. Instead of sending a return strike at him, the dragon
leaped into the air and clapped its wings, and a concussive blast of air buffeted Gaven—like thunder without the crash. He fell to his knees, motes of light dancing across his vision. Two more hard blows smashed into the back of his head, one after the other, and the blackness swallowed him.

C
art couldn’t tear his eyes from Caylen’s tome where it lay on the ground. When a worg growled to his right, he reacted too slowly—it came in low and bit at his leg before he wrenched his gaze away from the slender book. He swung his axe down, but the creature sprang back out of his reach and howled.