Dragon Forge: The Draconic Prophecies - Book Two (41 page)

“There was holiness in you both. So much good.”

“Evil can wear the guise of good when the need arises.”

“Evil—you—you’re the fiend of the Wastes … You’re dredging my memories!”

“Perhaps I am a fiend,” Kelas said, “but does it follow that I am not also Dania, and Vor, and Kelas? Think about it, Haunderk. I’ve been with you all this time. I have guided you all your life. I’ve made you what you are.”

Aunn cowered on the ground, terrified that what Kelas said might be true. Kelas
could
be an incarnation of evil. He was capable of such cruelty. But could he have been Dania? Vor? No, it couldn’t be—

“Where did I fail, Haunderk?” Kelas loomed over him, powerful and intimidating. Aunn cringed, awaiting the inevitable slap or kick. “What flaw in your education allowed this … this
conscience
to take root in you?”

Conscience
.

Kelas said the word like it was the name of the most loathsome, despicable creature he could imagine. And Aunn remembered exactly how it had come about. He stood up, face to face with Kelas.

“You did fail,” he said. “You taught me detachment, taught me not to love. But you didn’t teach me not to care. You made me hate you, and you never punished me for hating you. Hatred is just as strong as love, Kelas, and my hatred for you is my greatest strength. Because I hate you, I care—and because I care, I learned to love.”

Kelas laughed—a low chuckle that grew into a great, booming laughter that echoed in the canyon. “Then you have learned to fail,” he said, his face suddenly grim.

Then the bear-beast leaped at Aunn again, knocking him to the ground. With its massive paws pinning him down, its fiery eyes met his gaze. As it spoke, droplets of spittle fell on his face and seared his skin. “I am everything you’ve ever cared about. Except for Kelas, it’s all been a sham. My evil is the only thing that’s ever been real in your life, changeling.”

Despair sank into Aunn’s chest like the weight of the fiend’s paws, and he waited for its teeth to close around his neck. Instead, it brought its mouth close to Aunn’s and drew a deep breath.

Aunn’s lungs screamed their protest as the demon sucked every last scrap of air out of them and still continued its inhalation. His vision swam, and darkness closed in at the edges. The paws lifted off his chest and Aunn felt his body rise off the ground with the force of the monster’s breath. He closed his eyes.

He was a husk, left with nothing inside him but his despair. Kelas had been manipulating and controlling him his entire life, and Kelas was an incarnation of evil. Everything else had been a lie—Dania, Vor, and Farren. The ideals of the paladin that had seemed so virtuous, they were nothing but a quick path to a noble death. And now his own death, hardly so noble, was upon him. Kalok Shash would not burn brighter, he felt sure. If it existed at all, it would soon be extinguished.

In the midst of the blackness, Dania lay atop him as she had
in his fevered dream. She moved against him, smiled at him, and asked, “Why do you resist me?”

“I can’t anymore,” he said. “Take me.”

A blast of white fire shattered the darkness, and air poured into Aunn’s lungs. Hope seeped back into his heart as well, and as his eyes regained their normal vision he saw the bear-thing scrabbling at the ground, trying to get its feet under it again. When it did, it vanished from sight, and a moment later Aunn felt its absence.

But there was still a presence with him, a presence that had taken root in his soul and flowered at last into that burst of fire. It was Dania’s smile and Vor’s courage, Rienne’s care and Gaven’s fierce power. It was a flame burning against all the world’s darkness, a purifying fire.

Who are you?

He knew, with every last spark of his soul he knew. He smiled and answered, “I am Aunn.”

Then he climbed up and over the rubble that had blocked his path.

The Demon Wastes lay behind him and the Shadowcrags rose up ahead. Aunn turned for a last look back. The Labyrinth had not changed since his first view of it—an endless maze of winding canyons, scorched as if by the acidic touch of corruption, all spread out beneath a blood red sky. But it felt different. He had approached it with dread, afraid of losing his soul. But he looked back on it with a strange mixture of grief and … something else, something that was hard to name. He lost Vor there. He led Sevren and Zandar to their deaths. He helped kill Durrnak and the orcs under his command, and finally left all of Maruk Dar to the hands of the Carrion Tribes. That grief and remorse might have overwhelmed him, except that he had gained something as well. Vor had warned him to abandon hope, but instead he had gained a shred of hope.

A thin plume of smoke to the right caught his eye, and he wondered whether it was a sign of Maruk Dar’s fate. As he watched, more plumes arose, and more, until they were joined into a great
billowing cloud of black smoke rising up and spreading out to cast a deeper pall over the whole Labyrinth.

Maruk Dar is burning, Aunn thought. I should have been there to die in its defense.

He fell to his knees and watched the smoke and occasional flashes of fire rising above the canyon walls. He thought of Farren, probably one of the first to die as he tried to shield the city from the onrushing hordes. He thought of Dakar and the woman with him, and the other Carrion Tribe “converts” among the Ghaash’kala. They, too, were probably early victims, sought out for special punishment by those they had deserted. Or perhaps they turned on the Ghaash’kala, hoping to redeem themselves and rejoin the winning side in the conflict. And what of young Ghaarat, who had just sworn his vow to defend the Labyrinth? How long would a boy last in battle against the Carrion Tribes, even a boy of the Ghaash’kala?

Farren had allowed him to escape the sack of Maruk Dar. Farren had ensured that he would be alive at that moment, able to look back on the billowing smoke that told of the city’s destruction. Farren had broken his vow and allowed Aunn to escape the Labyrinth, and for one purpose: to warn the people of the east, of the Eldeen Reaches and perhaps Aundair and Breland. The Carrion Tribes were on the march, their sights set on the cities of the east, and it fell on him to try to stop them.

Aunn felt the weight of that burden as he lurched to his feet. He gave one last look toward Maruk Dar and said, “Kalok Shash burns brighter.” Then he turned his back on the city and set off to find his way back into the Shadowcrags.

G
aven was barely aware of guards putting new chains on his wrists and removing the ones that had bound his hands together. Winches rattled on either side, and the chains pulled his arms up and out, then harder until his shoulders burned with pain. The pain jolted him from his stupor.

Kelas stood before him. “Storm Dragon,” he said, snarling with contempt. He reached up and ran a fingertip across the dragonmark at Gaven’s neck. “Will the storm still obey you after this? I wonder.”

He turned away, reaching into his coat, and produced a dragonshard larger than his fist, at least the size of the Eye of Siberys. Its substance was light red, and a swirl of blood coiled in its heart—an Eberron shard. Kelas set the stone into a fine gold setting, and adjusted an array of fine metal arms around it, cradling it aloft and apart from the rest of the forge’s workings.

“The Dragon Forge is a refinery, of sorts,” Kelas said, satisfaction in his voice. “It’s made to separate gold from dross.”

“To purify the touch of Siberys’s hand,” Malathar whispered behind him, “by removing it from the tainted flesh on which it is written.”

Gaven gazed at the dragonshard with growing horror. Eberron shards were often used to contain magic—wizards recorded spells in them or attuned them to specific spells to make wands or even the relatively mundane everbright lanterns. Could it contain his dragonmark?

Kelas placed his hands on a golden orb below the dragon-shard and gasped as silver flame leaped out from the orb to engulf his hands. He trembled with what might have been torment or
ecstasy, his eyes rolled back in his head, and the dragonshard flared with crimson light.

The light washed over Gaven, searing into his dragonmark, and then the pain struck him.

The worst of it was over. The chains binding his wrists held Gaven as he hung, limp and drained. His skin still burned where his dragonmark had been, blood oozing from the raw skin it had left behind. The manacles bit into his wrists, and he lacked the strength to find his feet and take the weight off his arms. He could barely lift his head to look around.

Kelas cackled with delight as he lifted the enormous dragon-shard from its golden setting and gazed into its depths.

“It’s here!” he crowed. “The dragonmark is perfectly preserved within the shard!”

Gaven could just make it out. What had been a mostly formless swirl of darker red within the pinkish stone had taken on a definite shape, but he did not recognize it as his mark. Then Kelas turned it slightly in his hands, and Gaven gaped. There they were—the familiar lines of his dragonmark, the Siberys Mark of Storm. There was a depth to the mark in the stone, so it changed when viewed from different angles. Kelas moved it again, and Gaven caught a fleeting glimpse of another shape before Kelas turned away, blocking his view. There was meaning in the depth of the mark, Gaven was certain. Through a haze of pain and weakness, a knot of resolve formed in his gut—he had to get that dragonshard, to untangle the Prophecy he’d carried on his skin.

Still chuckling with pleasure at his success, Kelas placed the dragonshard in another setting embedded in the apparatus, this one made of glass pipes and studded with gemstones.

“Wait,” the dragon-king whispered, and Kelas froze. “I must examine it first.”

“You’ll have your chance,” Kelas snapped.

Malathar lifted his head to loom over Kelas. “I will. And it will be now. Or at my command, the dragons that fuel your forge cease their work.”

Kelas stood looking up at Malathar, fists clenched at his sides, his face growing deeper red. The dragon-king returned his stare blankly. Finally Kelas broke. He lifted the dragonshard from its setting and handed it to Malathar, who held it gingerly between his two front claws.

Gaven found his feet and strained for a better view of the shard as the undead dragon held it, to no avail. A movement at the corner of his eye drew his attention to Phaine, who also gazed at the dragonshard with longing. Several pieces of the puzzle fell into place in Gaven’s mind.

Malathar and the other dragons helped Kelas build the Dragon Forge because of their interest in the Prophecy, and particularly in the Time Between. They had fulfilled their vision of that Prophecy, with three spillings of blood joining the primordial dragons in pairs. Gaven’s blood joined the Eye of Siberys and the Heart of Khyber. The Ramethene Sword spilled symbolic blood—the magical energy that powered the forge—to join the spawn of Khyber with the spirit that bound it, which must somehow represent Eberron. And Gaven’s blood again joined his Siberys mark with an Eberron dragonshard. By their reading, the Time Between must be drawing to a close, and the Time of the Dragon Below beginning.

More than fulfilling the Prophecy, though, Malathar sought to learn more about it, particularly as it was scribed on the skin of Khorvaire’s dragonmarked heirs. He had said that the Prophecy was defiled by being written on the skin of meat, and that the Dragon Forge would purify it. He wanted to study the marks separated from the skin of the mortals who carried them, and the Dragon Forge allowed him to do that.

Phaine’s interest in the dragonshard was more surprising, but Gaven suspected it arose from the same intent. The elves of Aerenal had almost as much interest in the Prophecy as the dragons, and House Thuranni might be making a study of it for their own ends. Or perhaps Phaine—or all of House Thuranni—wanted to understand dragonmarks better, or even to control the power of the other Houses’ marks. Could they harness the magic contained in a dragonmark that was held within an Eberron dragonshard? If so, they might be able to compete with all the other Houses—build
and operate their own lightning rail, open their own message stations, control the weather and pilot airships and galleons.