Prophecy, Child of Earth (21 page)

'And so it will be with me. When finally I tire of living, when the pain of it has gotten too much to bear, I will lie down to rest with no will to rise again; that will be my ending. Then my body will decay here, within my lair, my blood seeping into the earth and one day forming the veins of copper that men will mine and form into coins and bracelets.

'Do you like copper, Pretty? It is really nothing more than the spent blood of dragons of my kind, just as the vein of gold that formed your locket once ran in the veins of a golden dragon. Emeralds, rubies, sapphires—nothing more than the clotted life's blood of ancient dragons of various sub-races, various colors. It is what we leave behind in the hope that Time will maintain our memory, but it never does. Instead, it serves only to adorn the breasts of women and the empty heads of kings.

'But if you remember me, Pretty, really remember
me
, not the legends, not the history, then in a way I will go on, at least a little. I will achieve a little of the immortality, the eternity, that I did not gain because I am without a soul, because I stayed within the Earth and did not touch the sky."

The words of the great beast were spoken wistfully, with only a trace of melancholy, but to Rhapsody's enchanted heart they were the saddest she had f'

ever heard. Grief welled up within her, consuming her, and without thinking she leapt from the rowboat and threw her arms around Elynsynos's foreleg, weeping.

'No," she choked, strangled by the strength of the pain in her heart. "No, Elynsynos, you are wrong. You shared a soul with Merithyn; I'm sure a piece of it is with him now. You had children; surely that is a form of immortality. And you
have
touched the sky; you are touching a child of it now. You have touched my heart so deeply that the bond will always remain. I'll be your soul if you need me to be."

Tenderly the dragon caressed the Skysinger's golden hair with one of her foreclaws. "Careful, Pretty; you do not want to rename yourself. There is a power in you that might make it real, and then you would be enslaved to me. But I am glad to know that I do have a soul, and that it is so Pretty."

The dragon patted Rhapsody again, and the Singer sat back down on the boat.

"You are right about my children," she continued, "though they seem so distant, so alien that I hardly think of them as my own, especially Anwyn.

'The races without souls sometimes have a great desire to have progeny of some sort, because it grants them a form of immortality. That is why the F'dor made the Rakshas. It wanted progeny, but of course the Rakshas is a bastard child, because the F'dor would have had to break open its own life essence to make a child totally its own, and that would have weakened itself more than it was willing to allow. Is that not the way with every parent? One trades a piece of one's soul to achieve a little immortality?"

'I suppose," said Rhapsody, brushing a strand of hair off her face. "I never really thought of it that way before."

'There are many reasons, selfish and unselfish, that children are brought into the world. The F'dor wanted the Rakshas to do its bidding in the world of men. It is a toy, a tool to be used to accomplish its ultimate goal."

'What is that goal, Elynsynos? Is it looking for power? To rule the world?"

Elynsynos chuckled. "You are thinking like a human, Pretty. To understand the motives of the F'dor you must think like a F'dor, as much as that is even possible, for they are forces of chaos and their intentions and actions cannot be readily predicted. F'dor use men as tools to achieve their ends as well. They do not seek to rise to power and rule over the masses or oppress their enemies; they are very single-minded. All they contemplate is ruin and death, and the friction of conflict that gives them power and pleasure. Their ultimate goal will destroy even themselves, as they seek to consume the Earth. They will then exist only in the Underworld, and in nightmares. As will we all."

Che words of the dragon echoed through the dark cave, leaving a thudding silence when the reverberation ceased. The flames that illuminated the chandeliers flickered across the Singer's face, suddenly ghostly pale in the darkness.

Elynsynos lowered her head slowly until she was eye to eye with Rhapsody.

There was a look of sympathetic understanding in her eyes, though the expression on her enormous face was solemn.

'What is it, Pretty?" she said softly, her voice as quiet as the hum of cricket's wings. "What are you remembering?"

Rhapsody closed her eyes, wrestling with the memory of the most frightening nightmare she had seen during her sojourn within the Earth. Achmed had woken her from her restless sleep, had taken her to a vast tunnel at the bottom of which he could hear an immense beating heart, pulsing in the slow serpentine rhythm of hibernation.

Something terrible rests in there, something more powerful and, more
horrifying than you can imagine, something I dare not even name. What sleeps
within that tunnel, deep in the belly of the Earth, must not awake. Not ever.

He had been afraid to speak, to give voice to the words of the ancient story; it was the first time she remembered him not being insolent or arrogant. It was the first time she saw fear in his eyes.

In the "Before-Time, when the Earth and seas were being born, an egg was
stolen from the progenitor of the race of dragons, the Primal Wyrm. That egg was
secreted here, within the Earth, by the race of demonic beings born of elemental
fire. The infant wyrm which came from that egg has lived here, deep in the frozen
wastes of the Earth's interior, growing, until its coils have wound around the very
heart of the world. It is an innate part of the Earth itself; its body is a large pan of
the world's mass. It sleeps now, but soon that demon wishes to summon it, and will
visit it upon the land. It has the power to consume the Earth; that was the intent of
the thieves who put it here. It awaits the demon's call, which I know for certain is
intended to come soon. I know this, because he planned to use me to help bring this
about.

What if it didn't hear the call'
? she had asked.
If we could obscure the call, keep
the beast from hearing it properly, or feeling it, perhaps it would just stay asleep
and not answer. At least for a little while
.

They had taken steps to prolong its slumber, had placed a musical web in the tunnel, spinning endless discordant melodies, aimed at interfering with the call of that demon. Achmed had warned her that the solution was only a temporary one.

Even then, Rhapsody, you will only be buying time. Tou will never have the
power to destroy it completely, nor I, nor any living soul.

'It sleeps still," said Elynsynos, shattering her thoughts and causing her heart to pound. The dragon had read her mind. The great beast chuckled at the look of panic that crossed Rhapsody's face. "No, Pretty, I cannot discern your thoughts, except when you are thinking about the Sleeping Child."

Rhapsody blinked. "I wasn't," she said. "I was thinking about—"

'Do not put words around what you were remembering; I know what you saw within the Earth. You were thinking about something just now that only dragons and F'dor know about, something infinite and ancient that is a holy abomination in the lore of my kind. You saw it by accident. You are now one of a very few living beings that even knows it exists.

'The entity that was in your thoughts a moment ago is our antithesis of your Life-Giver. It was the First Child of our race, kidnapped as an egg and raised by beings that were our opposite—where we cherish the Earth and all its riches, the F'dor seek to consume it for the fulfillment of their own ridiculous lust. That child is no longer a wyrm; the F'dor have poisoned it, pos ed it much as they would a human host. It is part of the Earth now, a vast art and will one day rise and claim that Earth as its own. If that is our destiny, then so be it. But it is a sacred mystery, one that no dragon gives voice to, except in the song of prayer. We pray that the First Child will remain asleep—that is what dragonsong is for. A lullabye to the Sleeping Child."

'The Sleeping Child," Rhapsody murmured. "Those words had a different meaning in the lore of Serendair. In our legends the Sleeping Child was Melita, a star that fell from the sky. It fell into the sea near the Island, taking much of what was once land with it into the sea forever. But the sea did not quench it. Instead it lay beneath the waves, roiling in unspent fire, until finally it rose—Her voice began to waver, and she stopped. When she could control herself again, she continued. "It rose and took all of the Island back to the depths with it, this time in a hail of volcanic fire."

'Perhaps that name, however it is used, foretells the death of our respective races," suggested Elynsynos. "Merithyn used to sing me a song from your homeland that spoke of the Sleeping Child. Would you like me to tell you the words?"

'Yes, please."

The great beast sat up straighter and cleared her enormous throat with a mighty cough. The sound rattled the chandeliers above them and sent backward waves of frenetic ripples across the lagoon, pounding in the same furious rhythm as Rhapsody's heart. When the dragon spoke, her voice was no longer the harmonically diverse tone that she had originally addressed Rhapsody with, but a deep, melodic baritone, a sonorous voice the carried with it the sound of magic, the ring of ages past. Merithyn's voice.

The Sleeping Child, the youngest born Lives on in dreams, though Death has
come To write her name within his tome Ant) no one yet has thought to mourn.

The middle child, who sleeping lies, Twixt watersky and shifting sands Site
silent, holding patient hand-) Until the day she can arise.

The eldest child rests deep within The ever-silent vault of earth, Unborn as yet,
but with its birth The end of Time Itself begins.

The words echoed off the cavernous walls and hung in the stale air, rever-erating in the silence. Rhapsody said nothing, fearing if she uttered a sound p own heart would shatter. Finally the dragon spoke.

'When my daughters were born, their eyes were closed, like kittens," Elynsynos said. Her multitoned voice had returned. "They seemed asleep, and I thought for a moment that they were the three children in the prophecy, but of course that could not be right. I knew what the eldest born was—as any dragon would.

Merithyn had referred to the Sleeping Child off the coast of his—your—homeland.

That would be the middle child, I presume."

'So there is another?" Rhapsody asked nervously. "Another Sleeping Child? The youngest-born?"

'Apparently," said Elynsynos, smiling. The sight of the massive maw wreathed in a grin, swordlike teeth glittering in the pale light, was both endearing and gruesome. "It would also appear that each of these sleeping children might become a tool of the F'dor, something to help bring about the end of the world, to allow it to be consumed in one way or another."

'I had prayed that the ascension of the middle one, the Sleeping Child that took the Island, was the end of all that," Rhapsody said. "We thought the F'dor that planned to summon—" her words choked off as a warning look came violently over the dragon's enormous face. "We thought the F'dor Ach-med had known of in the old world was dead. Its last remaining servant, one of the thousand eyes it had called the Shing, told us that before it dissipated. It said the F'dor was dead, man and demon spirit. And that meant what—what we feared it might do would never come to pass."

The massive serpent stretched, causing a hailstorm of lights to flicker off her millions of copper scales. "The demon he knew may well have been destroyed as you thought. That does not matter—any F'dor would know the secret of the Wyrm, would know how to summon it if it becomes powerful enough."

'And the other you spoke of, Elynsynos? Was that a different demon? Not the one Achmed knew of?"

'I do not know. There may have been another that escaped when the star beneath the waves erupted. It is hard to say, Pretty. There are not many of them left over from the dawn of Time, but they come without warning, and hide within the host, biding their time, gaining strength as the host does. When they become powerful enough, they take on a another host with more potential, usually one that is younger than the body they currently reside in. A F'dor can only take possession of someone weaker than itself or similarly strong; it cannot subsume someone of greater power."

Rhapsody nodded. "Do you know who it is, Elynsynos?"

'No, Pretty. It has changed hosts often over the years. I can sense it when it is near, but it has remained far away, probably knowing that. It could be anyone.

'If there is but one thing you remember about what I have told you, let it be this: they are consummate liars, and that will work against you, as a Namer, since you are sworn to the truth. Their greatest power is in using their victim's advantages against him; in our case, they were able to play upon the dragons'

naturally destructive nature and turn it from something benign into a weapon to achieve their own wanton ends. It will do the same to you, only what it will target will be your truthfulness. Beware, Pretty. They are like a guest in your lair that you cannot see has stolen from your hoard until it is too late."

'Llauron told me a prophecy Manwyn once related about an uninvited guest,"

Rhapsody said. "Could that have been about the F'dor?"

The air around the dragon hummed, signaling her intense interest. "I do not know this prophecy."

Rhapsody closed her eyes, trying to recall the night in the forest Llauron had related it to her. Achmed and Grunthor had been there as well. She rummaged in her pack and pulled out a small journal where she recorded some of the lore she had learned in this new world. "Here it is," she said.

Among the ladt to learn, among the firSeeking a new ho<)t, uninvited, in a new place.

The power gained being the
fir-It,