Remember The Past

The sun bled out along the western edge of the great plains, and the band moved toward the low rise Floyd had chosen an hour before. Two dozen humans, give or take; the count changed month to month, and no one spoke of the changes. They were a ragged procession of knobbed spines and swollen joints, wrapped in cloth so old and filthy it had lost all color, gone the grey-brown of the dirt itself. Some wore the remnants of sacks. Some wore skins of animals that had died of sickness, because the healthy ones were too fast to catch. Lice moved openly in their hair and in the seams of their rags, and no one bothered to pick at them anymore except the children of the band, who were not children in years but in mind, born in the pits and released into the wild like chaff thrown to the wind. Their ribs showed through their skin. Their bellies were tight and empty. Their eyes never stopped moving along the horizon.

They dug without being told. That was the ritual of dusk, as fixed as the setting of the sun. The strongest of them, which was not saying much, broke the earth with a rusted spade head lashed to a femur, and the rest came behind with flat stones and cupped hands and their own cracked fingernails, scooping the dry plains soil out and piling it in a ring. The hole grew like a grave meant for many. It was always the same dimensions, learned through years of terror; deep enough that an orc scout running past would at worst see only disturbed ground, wide enough to fit them all if they packed themselves like salted fish, and not one handspan larger, because a larger hole took longer to dig and longer to cover and the dark did not wait for the slow.

Floyd did not dig anymore. He was permitted this one mercy on account of his age, which no one knew exactly, least of all Floyd, but his face was a map of deep-cut ravines and his hands shook when he was not gripping something. Everyone agreed he was the oldest human any of them had ever seen or heard of. He stood watch instead, his milky left eye toward the fire-glow that sometimes lit the northern sky where Torvakul walked, his good eye on the work.

When the hole was ready they climbed down into it one at a time, the youngest ones first, tucked into the corners and against the walls, then the older ones folding themselves over and around each other, knees in backs, faces in shoulders, arms wrapped around each other. The smell was terrible yet none of them noticed it, the way a man does not notice his own breathing. Floyd went in near last, lowered by two of the young men, and settled into the spot at the center they always kept for him, because his old bones went cold first.

Then the last two dragged the woven mat of grass and brush across the top, and pulled the loose soil over it by ropes of braided rags, and wormed themselves in through the gap at the corner. They pulled the gap shut behind them.

Darkness. Total, warm, breathing darkness. Two dozen hearts slowing together under the skin of the world.

They lay that way for a long while, listening to the plains above them. Wind in the dead grass. Somewhere very far off, a sound that might have been thunder and might have been something laughing, and every body in the hole went rigid until it faded, and then softened again by degrees.

It was Mara who finally spoke, one of the infertile mothers sent to live on the plains, a woman grown with the shy halting voice of someone who had learned as a toddler that noise brought pain. She was pressed somewhere near Floyd’s left side, and her whisper was so quiet it was almost only breath.

“Floyd. Would you tell it again? The golden kingdom?”

Floyd was quiet a moment. Then he spoke into the dark, his voice pitched low, the voice of a man who had spent a lifetime learning exactly how loud a buried hole could safely be.

“Anyone object to hearing it again?”

No one said no. No one ever said no. Somewhere in the press of bodies, someone shifted closer.

“All right, then,” Floyd said. “All right.”

He let the silence sit for a breath, letting the dark become a place where something other than fear could live.

“Just thousands of years ago,” he began, “Gyra was a place of war. Not war like the raiders make, burning and passing on. War that never stopped. War that men were born into and died in without ever seeing a year of peace, and their sons the same, and their sons after them. This was the age of magic, when the power of the banished gods ran through the world like floodwater, and every hand that could hold it, held it, and turned it against its neighbors.”

His voice found its rhythm, worn smooth as a river stone by a hundred tellings.

“There were three great factions then, one for each of the gods, each one made of the races that god had shaped with their own hands. The children of Avadryn; that was us, the humans, and with us the angels who led, and the giants who broke walls, and the dwarves who forged. The children of Jorduth; the elves and their dryad elders, the fae quick as thoughts, and the archons on their glass wings. And the children of Torvakul; orc and goblin, troll and demon, hungry for everything and satisfied by nothing.”

“Each faction believed Gyra belonged to it. Each one had reasons, and prophecies, and grievances a thousand years old even then. And so they warred. Understand me; when I say they warred, I do not mean armies met in a field and one of them won. I mean the whole world was the field. I mean there was no place a man could stand where the war had not been or was not coming.”

He described it the way he always did, slowly, building it stone by stone in the dark for people who had never seen a city or a banner or a field of wheat.

“The Torvakul factions came out of the wastes and the deep places in hordes that blackened the land. The orcs fought in tides, wave after wave, and behind them the trolls came like walking siege towers, tearing down in an hour what dwarves had built over generations. The goblins went where the big ones could not, into the tunnels and the wells and the granaries, poisoning and burning, and above it all the demons rode the night wind, and where their shadows passed over a town, fire followed. They took no land to keep it. They took land to ruin it. Their god was gone but his hunger lived in them, and they fed it with everything they touched.”

“Against them stood the children of light. The angels commanded from the high air, and I am told, though I never saw it, that an angel host in full descent looked like the dawn falling out of the sky, a thousand wings catching the sun, and the sound of it made brave men weep and cruel men run. The giants marched under them with hammers the size of trees, and each giant’s third eye was said to see the truth of things, so no illusion or demon-trick could turn them. The dwarves gave the faction its bones; walls that shrugged off troll and spell alike, blades that held their edge through a hundred battles, engines that threw fire back at the things that loved fire. And we humans, we were the flood of it, the numbers, the stubbornness. We died faster than any of them and we came back faster too. The angels called us Avadryn’s mercy and Avadryn’s grief in the same breath.”

“And between the two, while against the two, stood the children of the great tree. People think, because Jorduth was the god of balance, that Jorduth’s children were peaceful. They were not peaceful. They were patient, which is a different and far more frightening thing. The elves fought from their forests and their forests fought with them; a legion could march into the green country and simply never come out, swallowed root and branch. The dryads were the oldest things walking, old as some hills, and when they finally moved to war it was like the land itself rising in judgment. The fae you never saw at all. You only saw what they left; a general dead in a sealed tent, a war ended by a single vanished map. And the archons hung above the treeline on their triple wings, watching everything with those faceted eyes, keeping their terrible ledgers of balance, deciding which side had grown too strong and must be cut back like a hedge. They did not fight to win Gyra. They fought so that no one else could win it. And for centuries, no one did.”

Someone in the dark exhaled slowly. Floyd went on.

“But here is the part the young ones never believe. The factions did not only war with each other. They warred with themselves. The orc chieftains slaughtered one another over the favor of Torvakul, and demon princes fed whole goblin nations into their feuds like kindling. The elf kings and the dryad elders broke into a hundred quarreling courts, each certain it alone understood the balance, and the fae played them all against each other for reasons no one living ever learned. And ours; do not imagine ours were clean. Human kings sold human cities to buy angel favor. Dwarf holds shut their gates and let human valleys burn rather than spend their sons. There were angels, even angels, who fell to pride and set their own hosts against each other in the high air, and the feathers came down for days after, they say, like snow. Every faction was a fist, and every fist was full of knives turned inward.”

“Thousands of years of it. The rivers ran foul, the fields grew bones better than barley, and the world ground itself down like a millstone with nothing between the wheels but people.”

He paused. This was the turn, and every body packed into the hole knew it was the turn, and the darkness itself seemed to lean in.

“And then,” Floyd said softly, “out of that broken, bleeding, war-torn world, something was born that had never been born before. An angel came into the world carrying a piece of Avadryn’s own divine spark inside her, a live coal of the goddess herself, and she was born for one purpose. To end the wars. To unite the factions, every last one, and raise up from the wreckage a kingdom so just and so bright that the world would remember why it had been made at all.”

His voice dropped to almost nothing, so that even packed shoulder to shoulder they had to strain toward it, and he gave them the name that they all held close to their hearts.

“Her name was Sarah.”

Mara’s whisper came again, the same question she asked every time, part of the ritual now. “What did she look like, Floyd?”

“Ah,” Floyd said, and there was a smile in the sound of it, though no one could see his face. “What did she look like… My grandmother’s grandmother never saw her, and hers before that never saw her, so understand I am handing you a coin that has passed through many pockets. But the stories all agree, and when stories that old agree, there is usually something true at the bottom of them.”

“They say Sarah stood taller than any human woman, though she was not a giant, and that you could not rightly say what color her skin was, because it changed with the light like opal; purple in shadow, bronze at dawn, white as a struck flame when her wrath was up. Her hair was the color of the last moment of sunset, that red-gold that only lives for a breath before the dark takes it, and it moved when there was no wind. Her wings, now. Every angel has wings, feathers like a bird. Sarah had six. Six wings, each one broader than a ship’s sail, and the feathers were not white or grey like Isaiah’s, but every color fire makes and a few that fire never learned. When she folded them around herself she looked almost like a woman wrapped in a burning cloak. When she opened them, men fell to their knees.”

“Her eyes were the mark of it, though. Angel eyes are one color through and through, no pupil, no iris. Sarah’s eyes were the sun. To look into them was to look into noon on a cloudless day, and no one, not king nor demon nor dryad elder, could hold her gaze longer than a heartbeat. They say she wept only once in her immortal life, and that her tears burned holes in the stone floor, and that the stone was left glowing for a year.”

“And in her chest, under the skin, the spark of Avadryn herself sat where a heart should be, and at night you could see it, a soft light through her ribs, like a lantern behind a curtain. That is what they say she looked like.”

He shifted, old bones settling, and his voice took on weight.

“Now. How does one angel end thousands of years of war? The bards of the golden kingdom, when there were bards, told it as if she talked the world to peace, all wisdom and gentle words. Sarah did offer words first. She flew to every court and every horde and every hidden green kingdom and she asked, once, politely, for peace. And they laughed at her, those who did not try to kill her outright. So then she showed them the other way.”

“There was a battlefield in the south, the stories name it Kelvar’s Reach, where an orc horde and a human host and an elven wood-legion had met in a three-way slaughter, a hundred thousand strong all told. Sarah came alone. She rose above the battle until she was only a bright point in the sky, and she opened all six wings, and she reached up. They say the sun answered her. Light came down out of the noon sky in columns, artillery called from the sun itself, each strike a piece of daylight condensed to a spear point, and where they fell the earth turned to glass and the glass turned to vapor. She did not strike the armies. Hear me. She struck around them. She ringed a hundred thousand soldiers in fire from heaven, boxed them in with pillars of sunlight, melted their siege engines and their supply trains and the very hills they meant to hold, and when the light stopped falling and the thunder rolled away, she descended into the middle of that glassed and smoking waste and said, in a voice they say every soldier heard as if she stood at his own shoulder; I asked politely once. There will not be a second war after this one. Choose which side of it you die on.”

“She did that, or things like it, eleven more times. Eleven battlefields unmade. Not one survivor. Wars ended with a single strike. Against a power that can call the sun down and chooses mercy, there is no war to be fought. There is only the question of terms.”

“So they came to terms. All of them, in the end, even the demon princes, even the archon courts. And here is where Sarah showed she was more than a weapon, because a weapon can end a war but only wisdom can end the next one, and Sarah had both.”

“She divided the land. To Torvakul’s children she gave the badlands, the deserts, the red mesa country in the far south and west; hard land for a hard people, land that suited them, land no one else wanted, and she was too clever to pretend otherwise. So she sweetened it with the one gift that people would truly treasure. The kingdom’s condemned, its murderers and traitors and worst men, would not rot in cells. They would be carried to the edge of the badlands and released, and the tribes could hunt them across the wastes as they had always hunted, and settle their own quarrels through the chase instead of through war. It sounds cruel to you. It was cruel. It was also the first promise anyone had ever made Torvakul’s children that was kept, and they valued it more than gold.”

“To Jorduth’s children she gave the green world entire; every deep forest, every swamp, every jungle from the northern pines to the southern fever-country, and with it a single promise written into the founding law. No army would ever march on their lands again. Not the kingdom’s, not anyone’s, not for any reason, not ever. The elves and the dryads asked for nothing else. That was the whole of their price for peace, to be left in balance, and Sarah paid it without hearing a second offer.”

“And to Avadryn’s children, to us and the dwarves and giants and her own angels, she gave the cities and the open country, the farmland and the ports and the roads. And our promise ran the other way, outward; that every race, every single one, orc and fae and troll and dwarf alike, would walk free in our markets and trade under the same law and the same protection as any human merchant. Our wealth would be everyone’s wealth. That was the genius of it, children. She did not just divide the land. She tied the three factions together at the purse, so that war would cost every faction more than any victory could pay.”

“Then she built the heart of it. On the great plains, these same plains we lie under this very night, there ran a river, and Sarah named it the River of Honor, and on its banks she raised three cities, one for each faction, close enough together that a man could walk between them in a day. That was the whole purpose of them. When faction quarreled with faction, and they always would, she knew that, the quarrel would come to the three cities and be argued and judged and settled with words on the riverbank, instead of with a hundred thousand dead in a place like Kelvar’s Reach.”

“And because she knew she could not sit every judgment herself, and because she knew no faction would ever fully trust a judge with another god’s blood in the room, she did the thing that no one before or since has ever done. She divided power itself. Sarah reached into the flow of magic, into the gods themselves, and she drew out two sparks to match her own; a spark of Torvakul, black and burning, and a spark of Jorduth, green and slow and deep. And she chose one appointee from each of the three peoples to carry a spark and speak for their kind beside the river.”

“For Jorduth’s children she chose an archon, Lseynda, wisest of the balance-keepers, and set the green spark in her, and Lseynda’s faceted eyes ever after showed the turning of the seasons in them. For Torvakul’s children she chose a demon, and here is a hard truth the bards liked to skip; she chose well. Rendul was his name, a powerful demon, a terror of the old wars, and Sarah chose him exactly because the tribes feared and respected him, and she set the black spark in him.”

“And for Avadryn’s children, for us, she did the thing that tells you everything about what Sarah was. She did not keep the spark of Avadryn for herself and rule as a god. She gave it away. She took the light out of her own breast, the spark she had been born carrying, her heart’s own fire, and she set it into the chest of the angel she trusted above all others, her friend, her general, her right hand through every year of the uniting. Isaiah.”

The name moved through the buried dark like a cold draft, and bodies stirred against bodies, and somewhere someone drew breath to speak and thought better of it. Floyd let it lie.

“Three cities on the River of Honor. Three sparks in three chests. Peace on every border for the first time since the gods were banished, and above it all, Sarah, asking nothing for herself, keeping nothing for herself, watching over what she had made.”

He exhaled slowly in the dark.

“Thus started the age of the golden kingdom.”

When he took the story up again his voice had changed. The weight had gone out of it. This was the part he told the way other men, in other ages, had told of becoming a part of Avadryn after death.

“Now I will tell you what the world was like, after. And I want you to listen with more than your ears, because none of you have seen anything I am about to describe, and I need you to build it behind your eyes.”

“The wars ended, and the first thing that happened was the simplest thing. The fields came back. Land that had grown nothing but bones for nine hundred years was turned and planted, and it turned out that ground fed on centuries of the dead is terribly rich, and the harvests came in so heavy the first generation did not have barns enough to hold them. They built the barns. Then they built bigger ones. There was a time, children, and I am not telling you a pretty lie, when the problem the kingdom argued about most was too much grain. Bread was so common that the poorest beggar in the meanest alley ate it fresh, every day, and what went stale was fed to pigs, and there were pigs. Fat ones. Everywhere.”

“The roads went out from the three cities like roots from a tree. Dwarf-cut stone roads, crowned so the rain ran off, wide enough for two wagons to pass with room for a rider between, and they ran to every corner of Gyra. A merchant could load a wagon in the northern ports and drive it south for three months through open country, alone, unarmed, sleeping beside the road with his coin box for a pillow, and arrive with everything he started with. Think of that. We dig a hole and bury ourselves at night for fear of what rides the dark. That man’s only fear was rain on his cargo.”

“And on those roads, everyone. That was the wonder of it. Orc drovers walking cattle to human markets and stopping to water them at elf wells. Goblin tinkers, whole families in painted carts, mending pots in dwarf holds and paid honest coin for honest work. Fae messengers who could cross the kingdom in days, carrying love letters and birthday gifts, because that is what a fae’s speed was for when no one needed it for war. Troll roof-raisers, hired by the day in every human town, because a troll could set a roof beam in an afternoon that ten men would need a week and a scaffold for, and they were paid double and fed triple and sung to while they worked, because a singing crew was good luck.”

“The three cities on the River of Honor grew until they nearly touched, until you could not say where one ended, and the stories say that from the river at night the lamps of the three of them together looked like the sky had fallen down and settled on the plain, too many lights to count. The markets of the Avadryn city kept Sarah’s promise every single day. Under one roof, and the roof itself was giant-built and high as a hill, you could buy elf silk and orc steel, dwarf gems and archon glasswork, swamp medicines from dryad herbalists that could pull a man back from death’s own doorstep, honey and dates out of the badlands, fish from both oceans packed in mountain ice and still bright-eyed. A human girl could apprentice to a goblin locksmith. A demon could sit in a riverside wine house and argue philosophy with an angel until dawn, and the only thing anyone held against either of them was losing the argument.”

“There was law, and the law was the same size for everyone. That may be the strangest thing I will say tonight. A rich man who wronged a poor one was judged the same as a poor man who wronged a rich one, and the sparks saw to it. Isaiah judged with mercy, and Lseynda judged with balance. The condemned went south to the badlands as promised, and the tribes hunted them across the red country as promised, and I will not pretend that was gentle, but it was the bargain, and it was kept, and the badlands stayed at peace with everyone else except for themselves for the first time since the making of the world.”

“The green country kept its promise too, and no army ever crossed its borders again, and because no one came with axes and torches, the elves opened their forests another way, on their own terms. There were paths a traveler could walk, marked with white stones, and along those paths the deep woods let themselves be seen. Dryads old as the hills would sit with human children and tell them what the land remembered from the age of the gods. People took wedding trips there. Into the elf woods. For pleasure.”

“Sickness fell back, because healers of all kinds shared what they knew, and angel light-craft and dryad root-lore and dwarf surgery and even goblin poison-knowledge turned to medicine could, together, mend almost anything. Children stopped dying, or near enough. Families had five, six, eight children and kept them all, and did not think it a miracle, because it happened in every house. People grew old the way I have grown old, but in feather beds, by warm fires, with grandchildren stacked on their knees, and when they died at last they died fat and tired and satisfied, and their souls went back into the light of Avadryn like a coin dropped in a full purse.”

“There were festivals. I have saved these for last because they are my favorite. Every year when the harvest came in, the three cities held a festival that ran for nine days, three days hosted by each city in turn, and the whole kingdom came. Giants carried children on their shoulders, whole crowds of children at once, so they could see over the multitude. Angel choirs sang from the open air, hanging in the sky, and demon drummers answered them from the ground, and the two musics were made to fit together, written that way on purpose, sky and earth in one song. There were orc wrestling rings and elf archery greens and dwarf ale halls with doors cut human-high and goblin-high both. On the ninth night they set the river itself alight with floating lamps, one lamp for every soul who had died that year, and the whole River of Honor went down to the sea as a ribbon of light, and every race stood together on the banks to watch it go.”

“That was the golden kingdom, little ones. Not a story-place. A real place, real as this dirt over our heads. Human kings ruled it, chosen by Avadryn’s own light, one after another, good ones and middling ones and even the middling ones were better than anything that came before or since. The sparks kept their charges. The promises kept their shapes. Children were born, grew, loved, worked, grew old, and died, generation upon generation upon generation, and not one of those generations dug a hole at night.”

He was quiet for a long moment, and the darkness waited, because it knew, they all knew, how this part ended, the way you know the last note of a song.

“The golden kingdom lasted a thousand years.”

Silence.

“That can’t be the end,” Mara whispered. “That can’t be where the story stops. What happens after? How did it fall?”

The dark around her went stiff. Someone had said a thing that should not be said.

“Quiet, girl.” That was Denn, an older man packed somewhere near the wall of the hole, his voice a scraped whisper. “You know better.”

“I only asked.”

“You asked for the true ending,” another voice said, a woman, Hesse, tired and flat. “The true ending is not a story for the dark. You do not speak of his coming with your eyes about to close. The words call to him. Everyone knows the words call to him. You speak the fall of the kingdom into the night, and the night carries it, and he hears his own name in your voice, and he comes walking up the inside of your dreams to see who is telling tales about him.”

“That’s not…” Mara began.

“It is,” Denn said. “It is exactly. My mother told the fall once, at dusk, when I was smaller than small. That night my father woke screaming and never told anyone what he saw, and he was not the same man after, not ever. You want the sad ending, look around you. The world has enough sadness as it is.”

Floyd let the whispers settle before he spoke, and when he did, he took Mara’s side in tone but the others’ side in judgment, gently.

“They’re right, girl. Not about all of it, maybe. But right enough. Stories are doors, and that one opens onto him. We do not open doors onto him while we sleep in a hole in his own plains.” A pause, and his hand found her shoulder in the blackness and pressed it once. “The kingdom stood a thousand years. Let it stand. Sleep.”

And because there was nothing else to do, and because the warmth of two dozen bodies pulls the mind down whether it consents or not, they slept, packed together under the skin of the world, and if anyone dreamed of fire, they kept it to themselves.

Morning came grey through the corner gap when the watchers pulled it open, and the band birthed itself back out of the ground one body at a time, blinking, stretching cracked joints, chewing strips of root as they scattered the ring of soil and dragged the mat away and made the ground look like ground again. Then they walked. That was the whole of most days; walking, spread in a loose line across the endless yellow-grey grass, eyes on the horizon, following water and rumor.

Mara worked her way up the line until she walked at Floyd’s elbow, matching her pace to his slow one, and for a while she said nothing, which was its own kind of announcement. Floyd waited her out.

“It’s daylight now,” she said finally. “The sky’s wide open. Tell me the fall. Just to me. Quiet. The others won’t hear.”

“No.”

“Floyd.”

“No, girl.” He said it without anger, watching the horizon roll. “And not for Denn’s reasons, or not only. Look around you.” His hand, spotted and trembling, took in the line of stooped figures, the empty land, all of it. “Look at what we carry every day just by being awake in this world. Hunger. Sores. The counting we do at dusk and the counting we do at dawn, hoping the numbers match. That is our whole ration of pain, and it is already more than a person is built for. I will not ladle more onto your plate for no better reason than curiosity. The fall of the golden kingdom is the saddest true thing there is. Knowing it will not feed you, will not warm you, and will not save you. It will only take up room inside you that you need for other things.”

Mara walked with her jaw set, and he could feel the argument in her, and he could feel her deciding not to make it. She was pit-born; she knew better than most that some knowledge is only weight.

“Fine,” she said at last, not meaning it, and then, quieter, meaning it a little more, “fine.”

They walked. The grass hissed. Somewhere far off to the north there was a smudge on the sky that might have been weather and might not, and every eye in the band checked it once a minute without any face turning toward it.

“Then answer me a different thing,” Mara said. “Why here? Why the plains? He walks the plains. Everyone knows he walks the plains, we’ve all seen the fire on the sky at night. There’s a whole world out there past the edges of this grass. Mountains. The coasts. Jungles and swamps and even the badlands. Why do we stay in the one place where he is?”

Floyd was quiet for ten paces, and she thought he might refuse this too, but this was not story. This was survival, and survival he would always teach.

“Because the plains are the only clean ground left,” he said. “Him and the three cities, those are the only places his own poison doesn’t pool. Everywhere else, girl. Everywhere else is worse than him.”

“How can anything be worse than him?”

“Because he is a where,” Floyd said. “He is over there or he is over here, and if he is over there, you can be over here, and live. What he did to the rest of the world is an everywhere. When he broke the kingdom, he did not just poison the land past the plains. He soaked it. He worked a corruption down into the ground itself, into the air, into the dark, a deep fear magic, older than any spell the ages of magic ever knew. It never sleeps, it never thins and you cannot be away from it, because once you stand on corrupted ground, you are inside it.”

“What does it do?”

“It waits for night,” Floyd said. “On corrupted ground, when the sun goes down, any soul that sleeps unguarded is his. He drinks it out of the sleeper like marrow from a cracked bone, and the body wakes up empty, or doesn’t wake at all. There is one way through a night on that ground, only one. Someone must stay awake. One soul, standing watch, not over the camp; over the sleepers’ souls themselves. And the watcher does not simply sit and fight yawns, girl. Understand me. The watcher bears him. All the hunger that would have gone into the sleepers comes to the one awake instead, all night, every hour of it, his agony poured through one living soul like fire through a pipe, so the others can rest.”

Mara had gone pale under the dirt on her face. “But then you just… take turns. One person suffers a night, the rest sleep, you trade off. People could live that way.”

“For a while,” Floyd said. “For a while, and that is the cruelest part, that it almost works, and bands who flee the plains always think they will be the ones it works for. But his agony is not only pain. Pain alone, people can pass around like a waterskin. His agony is him. It has his nature in it. It corrupts what it touches, the way rot moves through fruit. Every night of bearing it leaves a residue in the soul that no dawn washes out. The watcher grows angry and does not know why. Grows suspicious. Starts hearing contempt in plain words, starts seeing theft in innocent hands. And the next watcher the same, and the next, because everyone must take a turn, so everyone rots together, a little more each round. I have seen the end of it, girl. Once, when I was young and we found what was left of a band that had tried the eastern hills. Brothers who had shared a mother’s lap opened each other’s throats over a strip of dried meat, that is what the residue does, that is where it always goes. Brother against brother, mother against child, until the last one left alive stands watch alone over corpses, and then sleeps at last, because there is no one to watch for, and is eaten anyway. Every band that leaves the plains ends in one of those two ways. Consumed all at once, or consumed slowly, from the inside, and made to do his work on each other first. He prefers the second. It amuses him.”

They walked. The grass hissed against their shins, and ahead of them the line of ragged backs rose and fell with the ground.

“So we stay,” Floyd said. “We stay on the one clean floor in a poisoned house, and we share it with the poisoner, and we dig our hole at dusk and pray his path and ours don’t cross, because a small chance of him is better than a certainty of what he left everywhere else. That is the whole of it. That is the map of the world, girl, and I am sorry it is the map, but you are grown now and you should have it true. There is no place left to go. The green country is corrupted. The coasts are corrupted. The mountains, the ports, every mile of those dwarf roads I told of last night, corrupted, all of it. The kingdom is a bone pit, the badlands answer to his queen, and the three cities…” He stopped himself, and his jaw worked, and he did not finish that sentence. “The world only contains suffering now. Everything that was once good in it has been tainted by evil; every field, every river, every road, every people. All of it his, one way or another. The golden kingdom was real, girl. I need you to keep knowing it was real. But it is the only heaven anyone will ever see, and it is behind us.”

Mara stopped asking. Not just about the fall; about all of it. The questions in her went somewhere deep and folded themselves up, and Floyd watched it happen from the corner of his good eye. Every person in the band had a folded place like that. Hers had simply taken longer to form than most.

They walked the rest of the day in the manner of the plains; spread thin, silent, moving from nowhere to nowhere with the patience of people whose only destination was dusk. Twice the line stopped dead without a word passing, everyone crouching low in the grass over some flicker at the edge of the world, and twice the flicker turned to nothing and they rose and went on.

The rise Floyd chose that evening sat in a shallow bowl of land with good sightlines and bad memories; they had camped near here two seasons back, or somewhere like it, everywhere like it. The digging began the way it always began. Mara worked at the edge of the hole with a flat stone, and her eyes kept coming up off the dirt, sweeping the darkening grass, and coming back down.

She drifted over to Floyd where he stood his old man’s watch.

“Floyd.” Barely a breath. “I feel like we’re being watched.”

He didn’t tell her she was tired, or young, or frightened by the day’s talk. He stood very still, his good eye moving slowly along the whole rim of the world, north to east to south, the grass going grey as the light died, nothing moving out there but wind.

“So do I,” he said. “Since midday.”

That was all. There was no plan to make. The plains gave you nothing to hide behind and nowhere to run to; the hole was the plan, the only plan there had ever been. He caught the eyes of two of the stronger men and tipped his chin at the horizon, and they nodded and dug faster, and the whole band felt the change move through it the way a herd feels weather coming. No one spoke of it. Everyone just kept working.

They went into the ground quickly that night. Young ones to the corners, the folding of limbs, the settling of bodies into bodies. Floyd was lowered into his center place. The mat came over, the soil hissed across it, the corner gap sealed. Darkness, warmth, the smell of them all together, twenty-some hearts finding a shared rhythm.

No one asked for a story. Mara lay with her cheek against someone’s shoulder blade and her knees in someone’s back, and she listened to the plains through six inches of earth. Wind and grass and wind, until listening slid into sleep without her noticing the border.

She was running.

It was night on the plains, but a wrong night, the grass silver-black and around her thighs instead of her shoulders, the sky starless and low, close as a ceiling. She was running and she did not know where. There was no camp behind her and no refuge ahead, no direction that meant anything, only the running itself, her legs reaching and reaching through grass that dragged like water. She did not know why. She could not remember starting to run, could not remember what she had seen. There was no shape behind her when she looked. It had no face and no sound and no distance. It was not gaining on her. It was already everywhere she was about to be.

The fear had no thought in it. It was older than thought, a blackness poured into her from the soles of her feet upward, filling her like a vessel; the fear of the rabbit in the shadow of wings, of the child in the pit dark, of the soul alone in the last hour of the world. Her heart was tearing itself apart in her chest and her breath would not come, the air had gone thick, gone solid, she was drowning in the open night. The grass leaned in over her from both sides, the ceiling of the sky came down and down and…

She woke.

Dark. Weight. Bodies.

For one merciful half-second she knew where she was; the hole, the band, safety. Then her chest hitched and found nothing. The air was spent, breathed a hundred times, hot and wet and thick as wool, and her lungs pulled and pulled against it and came up empty. She was buried. She was packed under the earth beneath the weight of the dead and the dying, an arm across her throat, a knee in her spine, hair in her mouth, and she could not breathe. She writhed against the press of sleeping bodies, small trapped movements, someone grunting and shifting against her, and the panic wound tighter with every failed inch. Some sliver of her, the trained sliver, the pit-born sliver, kept her from screaming; even drowning, even dying, you did not make noise in the night. So she suffocated in silence, straining her face upward toward the mat she couldn’t see, and her whole being narrowed to a single wordless want, bright as a coal in all that blackness.

Air. Please. Peel it back. Just peel back the top of the hole and let me breathe.

Her wish was granted.

The mat tore away, soil raining down through sudden space, and the night sky poured in cold and vast; and filling half of it, blotting the stars, a face looked down into the hole. Grey hide like weathered stone, a rhino’s horn jutting from the heavy skull, eyes small and wet and shining with pleasure. The troll gazed down at the pile of humans pressed together in the earth like grubs under a lifted rock.

It smiled.

The chains were not iron. Iron would have been a mercy. These were links of solidified shadow, cold in a way that had nothing to do with weather, and they did not bind the wrists so much as pass through them, hooked somewhere behind the bones, somewhere in the soul itself. Where the links touched skin, the skin went grey and stayed grey. The chain ran through all of them in a single line, a dozen humans stumbling across the endless grass, and at its head walked the orc, holding the leading length loosely in one fist the way a child holds the string of a toy, and around them, before and behind and beside, the six trolls.

A dozen. They had gone into the ground as two dozen, give or take.

Mara did not let herself count the difference anymore, because counting it opened the door in her mind where the memories lived. Behind that door it was always the third night, when Denn had stumbled once too often and a troll had simply reached down and lifted him off the chain. They tore off him limbs and passed pieces of Denn between them, chatting in their rumbling tongue like men sharing a loaf on the road. Denn was alive for too much of it, so impossibly much of it. She had dreamed it every night since. She would dream it every night she had left. Hesse had gone the same way on the fifth day, and two of the pit-born on the sixth, pulled off the line for stumbling, for slowness, for the crime of being the nearest meat when a troll’s stomach spoke. Each time the door in Mara’s mind opened a little wider. Each time she pushed it shut with less strength than the time before.

For the last two days a wrongness had been growing in the air, in the ground, in the marrow. A pressure, like a storm that never broke. It came from the northwest, and it thickened with every mile, and no one had to be told what it was. The soul knew its enemy. The dread lay on all of them like wet cloth, made the heart labor, made the eyes want to weep without any thought attached to the weeping. His presence, still below the horizon, already inside them.

Mara walked second from the back. Behind her, at the very end of the chain, came Floyd.

His legs had gone out a week ago; not all at once, just a fading, until one morning they would not hold him for the first hour, and by that evening not at all. The trolls had noticed. Of course they had noticed. But some cruelty in them, or some order, kept them from taking him, and Mara understood, in the door-in-her-mind way she understood things now, that an old man’s meat was not the point of Floyd. Something ahead of them wanted numbers. So she had wound the slack of the shadow chain around her own forearm, and looped her arm through his, and for seven days she had dragged him, half carried him, his feet trailing and pushing weakly at the grass, his weight growing lighter and heavier at once, lighter in the body, heavier in her arms. She did not speak of stopping. He did not speak of being left. Both of them knew there was nothing to say on either subject.

The trolls halted them at dusk in a fold of ground beside a dead stream. The chain was staked with a spike of the same dark shadow-stuff driven into the earth, and the dozen humans folded down onto the grass where they stood, in line, like a dropped rope. No hole tonight. No hole any night now. The corrupted chains, Mara had gathered, made them his already; the magic had no need to eat what was already served.

The trolls made their camp with the ease of creatures that feared nothing on the plains. A fire was built from grass and bones. Meat was cooked that Mara did not look at. The orc sat apart, sharpening something, and the trolls’ voices rolled and boomed across the little camp, careless, jovial, and proud. Mara lay in the grass with Floyd’s head pillowed on her arm and found she could understand more of the troll-tongue than she wanted to, because a week of terror is a fast teacher.

Tomorrow, one of them was saying. Tomorrow, before the sun is high, we crest the black rise and see him. See the fire of him walking. The others rumbled and thumped the ground. Twelve souls to lay before him, one said. Then the biggest of them raised a shank of meat toward the orc sitting apart in the dark and boomed out a thanks to their sharp-eyed friend who had found the burrow of humans, who had felt the little rats watching and watched them back, who had marked the digging place from a mile downwind. The orc raised a hand without looking up from his whetstone. The trolls laughed like rockslides.

Mara closed her eyes. The pressure from the northwest pressed on the backs of them.

“Mara.”

Floyd’s voice. She had thought him asleep, or gone somewhere past sleep; he had spoken perhaps ten words in three days. His head shifted on her arm, and in the last light of the trolls’ fire she could see his face turned up toward her, the ravines of it, the milky eye and the good one, and the good one was clear tonight, clearer than it had been in weeks. Steady. Almost calm.

“Would you like to hear it now?” he said, quietly, beneath the troll-laughter, just for her. “The fall of the golden kingdom.”

She looked at him. All the reasons he had given her on the walking day rose up between them, that pain was already overflowing their plate, that the knowing would not feed her or warm her or save her. Yet she understood what he was telling her by offering. There was no more saving to be done. There was nothing left the story could cost either of them. Tomorrow they would crest the black rise, and the only thing Floyd had left to give her, the only inheritance of the last free humans of the plains, was the truth.

The fire popped. A troll laughed. The northwest pressed down.

“Yes,” she said.

Floyd was quiet a while, gathering himself, and when he began it was not where she expected.

“First,” he said, “I have to unsay something. I lied to you, girl. To all of you, every telling, all these years. Not in the big shape of it. The kingdom was real, the peace was real, the festivals and the roads and the river of lamps, all of it real. But I told it to you the way you tell a story to people who need heaven to have existed once, whole and clean. And it was not whole. It was not clean. There was a worm in the golden apple from the very first day, and I fed you the apple and never spoke of the worm, and now I will, because you are about to see where the worm went, and you deserve to know it was always there.”

“The three cities on the River of Honor. I told you of the markets and the judgments and the choirs. I told you almost nothing of the third city, Rendul’s city, the city of Torvakul’s children, and there was a reason for that. The people of the kingdom had a name for it that was never written in any charter. They called it the city of evil.”

“Think, girl. Think about what I told you and what it actually means. Rendul carried a spark of Torvakul in his chest. Not a symbol of the god. A live coal of him, a piece of his actual nature, burning in a demon’s breast day and night for centuries. Rendul was strong, but no soul can carry a piece of the devourer inside it and stay untouched, and no city gathers around such a soul and stays a city like other cities. Behind its walls, Torvakul’s children kept Torvakul’s ways, softened, hidden, dressed in law, but his. There were rites in the deep parts of that city that Sarah’s law would have burned out of any other place in the kingdom. There were debts collected in flesh. There were cellars. People spoke of the sounds that came off the river at certain moons when the wind blew from the third city, and then they stopped speaking, because it was not wise to be a person who spoke of it.”

“People disappeared. That is the plainest way to say the worst thing. A dockhand who owed the wrong money. A traveler who took the wrong bridge after dark. A girl who was pretty but attracted the wrong attention. Over the years, over the centuries, a slow steady trickle of the kingdom’s people walked into the third city, or were carried into it, and did not come out. Everyone knew. The magistrates knew. The merchants knew and priced their routes around it. Mothers in the first city, the golden city, the city of choirs, taught their children rhymes about which streets not to cross, and the rhymes were older than the mothers.”

“Sarah knew. Isaiah knew. Lseynda knew.”

He let that sit in the dark between them. Beyond the fire the trolls rumbled at some joke.

“They knew, and they turned their faces away, and here is where the story stops being a story about villains and becomes a story about the price of things. Because ask yourself what they could have done. March into the third city and drag Rendul’s people into the light? That was war. That was the end of everything, the whole thousand-year peace unmade in a season, the hordes pouring out of the badlands, Kelvar’s Reach again on every horizon. Sarah had built her paradise on a bargain, and the bargain, under all its fine words, was this: the children of Torvakul would keep the peace of the kingdom outside their walls, and inside their walls the kingdom would not look. A tithe of the vanished, paid quietly, forever, so that everyone else could have the festivals and the fat harvests and the lamps on the river. The golden kingdom was a bright house, girl, and it was built over a cellar, and the light upstairs was real, and so were the sounds from below, and the people upstairs learned the great skill of all comfortable people everywhere, which is not hearing.”

“It was not even a settled bargain. It was a war that never admitted it was a war. Orc warbands would come up out of the badlands, testing, always testing, and fall on merchants and pilgrims on these very plains, and the kingdom’s riders would answer, and the raids would be called banditry and the answers would be called justice, and everyone agreed to call it anything but what it was. In the third city, Rendul held his own people’s leash with one hand and held the spark down inside himself with the other, and Sarah and Isaiah and Lseynda spent their centuries in a subtle balance with him, pressure and release, threat and gift, keeping him just strong enough to rule his kind and just weak enough to need the kingdom, so that the whole of Torvakul’s people would stay mostly complacent. For nine hundred years and more, that balance held. It is, when I let myself think about it coldly, the most extraordinary thing anyone ever did. They juggled a live coal for nine centuries.”

“And then Rendul grew old.”

“I do not know if demons age the way we age. I think what aged was his grip. The spark was not a possession, you see. It was a wrestling match, every hour of every day, a piece of the god of hunger straining forever toward its own nature, and Rendul held it, and held it, and held it, for longer than any soul was ever asked to hold anything. And at some point, in some year no chronicle marks, he understood he was losing. That soon the spark would wear through him like water through stone, and take him. Rendul did the only thing he could do to live another day.”

“He gave it away.”

“He went out into the badlands, to the strongest of the warbands, a raider host that had spent a generation eating the other tribes, and its war-leader was a demon woman named Kortul. Young, as demons count it. Born in the wastes, raised in the endless hunting, blooded before she could speak. She had never seen the three cities. She had never sat in a wine house or heard the choirs. War with the other tribes was her craft and her language and her faith and the whole furniture of her mind; it was all she had ever known, all she had ever been given to know. Rendul set the spark of Torvakul into her chest and laid his burden down, and I have wondered all my life whether he understood what he was doing, whether it was despair or surrender or the coldest treason ever committed, and I will die not knowing, likely tomorrow.”

“What Kortul knew was this. She had been handed a god’s own fire, and she had one craft. So she practiced her craft.”

“She brought war back to the golden kingdom. She led her host up out of the badlands onto the great plains, these plains, and she fell on everything that moved. Caravans, pilgrim roads, the river towns, the festival traffic. Nine hundred years of peace had made the kingdom soft in exactly one place, the place that mattered; it had no armies left worth the name, only riders and watchmen, and against a spark-bearing demon at the head of the hardest warband the wastes had ever forged, riders and watchmen were straw. For a season she roamed and burned and there was not much of anything to stop her.”

“So the sparks answered the spark. Isaiah and Lseynda together, light and balance, the two of them at the head of what host the kingdom could raise. It is told as a great victory and I suppose it was. They met her on the plains and broke her host and drove her, the two of them against her alone at the end, spark against spark. They could not kill her, but they banished her, hurled her back into the badlands and sealed the marches behind her. The kingdom lit lamps, sang, and called it finished.”

“Kortul stood in the red waste with her host scattered and her wounds smoking, and she swore revenge. Then she did the thing that no one, not Sarah, not anyone, believed a creature of the wastes could do.”

“She got patient.”

“Thirty years, Mara. Thirty years she vanished into the deep badlands, and where every bearer before her had wrestled the spark, had fought to hold it down, Kortul sat with it. Listened to it. Learned from it, as a student from a master. It taught her gladly, because she was the first bearer in history who wanted what it wanted. Year over year she went down into it, mastering what Rendul had merely endured, and somewhere in those thirty years, in the deepest part of that long listening, she found the thing Sarah had hidden. The truth about the sparks that Sarah had buried under all the ceremony, the truth that made them too dangerous to ever fully explain, even to Isaiah, even to her own.”

“The spark was not a connection to the god. It was the god. A piece of his very soul, still living, still him. The gods were never destroyed, girl, only dissolved, scattered into the magic, and a spark was a seed of that scattering, and a seed, given the right soil, grows. Sarah had handed out pieces of sleeping gods and trusted that no one would ever learn to wake them. Kortul learned. She learned that with enough power, with enough souls, the seed could be planted. The scattered whole could be called back through it, gather, and pour into the world again. The spark could pull the god through.”

“So she came out of the deep waste, and she united the tribes. All of them. The warbands that had knifed each other over waterholes since before the kingdom was born, she gathered them under one banner, and do not imagine she did it with speeches. She did it with the spark burning open in her chest for all to see and the voice of their own god rolling out of her mouth. They did not follow her. They followed him, wearing her.”

“And they marched. Out of the badlands, into the kingdom’s soft southern country, and they began to slaughter, and this time the slaughter was not raiding, not even war. It was harvest. Every soul that fell, Kortul caught. That was her mastery, the thing thirty years had bought; she had learned to reap. The dead did not go back into the flow of magic, did not return to their gods. She gathered them, soul upon soul upon soul, thousands, tens of thousands, towns and cities of them, hoarding the stuff of the dead like a dragon hoards gold, and the kingdom could not understand at first why this invasion felt different, why the land behind the horde went not just quiet but hollow.”

“And when she had enough, when the hoard of souls was deep enough, she worked the thing she had spent thirty years learning. She took that mass of harvested soul-matter and she shaped it, packed it, forged it into a vessel, a body fit to hold a god entire. And through the spark, through the seed of him she carried, she called.”

“Torvakul was made anew.”

“His whole self, girl. Everything that had been banished into the magic at the world’s first war, every scattered mote of the god of hunger, unbanished, gathered, drawn down out of the flow and poured into that vessel of stolen souls, and Torvakul stood on Gyra whole again for the first time since the age of the gods. Not summoned. Returned. Complete.”

“The kingdom tried to answer in kind. Understand that; they did try. When word came of what walked behind the horde, Sarah understood instantly what Kortul had found, because it was her own buried secret turned against her. She, Isaiah, and Lseynda began the same working from the other side, two sparks, two seeds, Avadryn and Jorduth called back to fight him. But a summoning like that is built on harvested souls, and the kingdom did not murder its own people. So they scraped and gathered what souls the willing dead and the old relics could give. It was slow. Kortul had spent thirty years and a hundred thousand lives, and they had weeks. They did not have enough time. It is as simple and as terrible as that. The good could not do quickly what evil had done at leisure, because the good would not pay evil’s price.”

“The horde came up the plains to the three cities with their god walking in the midst of them, and everything I told you of him now was true then; he fed as he came, every death made him stronger, every burned town poured into him, so that the thing that reached the River of Honor was greater than the thing that had entered the kingdom, and growing with every hour. Sarah rose to meet him. Sarah, who had called artillery from the sun, who had ended thousands of years of war alone, six wings and eyes of noon, with Isaiah at her right hand and Lseynda at her left and every soldier and angel and giant the kingdom had. It did not matter. I will not pretend there was a great last battle whose turning hinged on some failure. There was no hinge. He was a god, whole, fed on a nation, and they were merely fragments and an army of mortals. There was nothing Isaiah could do. There was nothing Lseynda could do. There was nothing Sarah could do.”

“Torvakul took the golden kingdom. The city of choirs burned for eleven days. The river of lamps ran with blood and viscera. A thousand years, Mara. A thousand years of festivals and fat children and lamps on the water, and it went down in less than a season, and the last of it in a single day.”

“Lseynda fell somewhere in the ruin; the stories lose her, and I hope they lose her because she died fighting. Sarah’s end no story I ever heard dares to tell, and there is a mercy in that, or a horror; I have never decided which. But Isaiah. Isaiah Torvakul took alive. He wanted Isaiah alive.”

“Isaiah carried the spark of Avadryn. The seed of her. And Torvakul had watched Kortul’s working; he knew now what the sparks were for, knew what his enemy’s fragment could be made to do in the right hands, and his hands were the strongest hands there had ever been. He did not need thirty years or a harvested nation. He was a god entire, glutted on a kingdom of souls. He held Isaiah down in the wreckage of the golden city, and he reached into the spark in Isaiah’s chest. He worked the calling himself, from the outside, through her own seed, and he dragged Avadryn back into the world.”

“Not to fight her, girl. Understand. She came through raw, unready, a goddess poured hastily into being with no vessel forged for her and no host at her back, blinking in the smoke of her children’s burning city. He had all the power in the world, all the time in the world, and he could have kept her out forever. He pulled her in on purpose. He summoned the mother of light into the world for one reason only.”

“So that Isaiah would see it.”

“He killed her right in front of him. Slowly, they say, though who could have witnessed it and lived to say, I do not know; perhaps the story needs no witness, perhaps the world itself remembers. The mother of light, the goddess of every soul in this chain, unmade in the ashes of her own kingdom while her last angel was held there and made to watch every moment of it. When it was finished there was no flow of magic for her to return to, no scattering into seed and spark. Torvakul ate her whole.”

Floyd’s voice had worn down to almost nothing, a thread in the dark under the troll-fire’s mutter.

“That is the fall, girl. That is the whole of the worm and the apple. And Avadryn’s death was the marker stone; her dying marked the start of the age of evil, this age, our age, and it made the thing we live under permanent. While she existed, even banished, even scattered, there was a balance somewhere in the deep of things, a door that might someday open. He closed it. He ate the door. With the mother of light unmade, there is no power left in Gyra or beyond it that can ever rise to him. Torvakul knew it. He did it to make sure that he would reign supreme forever.”

–

The cave lay beneath the roots of the mountains, deeper than any dwarf hold had ever delved, a hollow in the world so vast that its ceiling was rumored rather than seen. No corruption had reached it. Perhaps even the fear magic feared what slept there.

The dragon filled the cavern. Its body lay coiled twice around itself and still ran the length of the great chamber, a mountain inside the mountain, ridged and vaulted like a range of hills grown scales. Each scale was the size of a tower shield, deep bronze shading to black along the spine, dulled by centuries of dust and dripping stone, and yet where a rare thread of light from some crack far above touched them, they gleamed like old coins at the bottom of a well. Its wings were folded along its flanks in pleats of leather broader than sails, and where they had lain unmoving for so long, pale blind mosses had colonized the folds, so that the beast seemed half becoming geography, a creature the mountain was slowly digesting into itself, or perhaps the other way around. The head alone was the size of a farmhouse; the skull long and horse-like beneath crown after crown of horns, some swept back like a rack of blades, some broken to stumps in wars no living memory recorded. Its eyes were shut, each lid a slab of hide that could have roofed a barn. Chains of old smoke stained the stone above its nostrils, and with every breath, drawn perhaps once in a minute, the whole cavern inhaled with it, dust stirring in slow tides across the floor, as the exhale rolled back out warm and mineral, smelling of ash and deep time. Between its foreclaws, each talon a curve of black horn taller than a giant, the floor had been polished glass-smooth by the mere shifting of its sleep across the ages.

Near the base of its neck, where the tower-shield scales diminished to the size of mere doors and the hide between them showed in seams, a figure worked in absolute silence.

Yerdon was young for an archon, but the misery of the world had made him look old; his three sets of wings were folded flat and dull against his back. His antennae were crinkled with use. His faceted eyes caught what little light there was and broke it into patient green fragments. He knelt in a seam between two scales with the tools of a surgeon laid out on black cloth, and with a hollow silver needle longer than his forearm he drew the dragon’s blood, slowly, letting the pressure of that vast slumbering heart do the work rather than pulling. The blood came thick as honey and shed a faint heat, glowing dimly through the glass like coals seen through ice. Vial after vial he filled, stoppered with wax, and packed into a cradle of straw, and never once did his hands hurry.

Around him, scattered back at what they clearly hoped was a survivable distance, a handful of elves and fae stood watch, and terror sat on every one of them like a second skin. The elves held their bows unstrung, useless things brought for comfort, their moss-hair grey with cave dust; the fae had pressed themselves against the stalagmites, wide eyes enormous in the dark, long fingers wrapped around the stone. Every drip of water from the distant ceiling made them flinch. None of them looked at the dragon directly for more than a moment, the way one does not stare at the sun, or at a sleeping king.

At last Yerdon eased the needle free, laid a pad of grey moss over the seam, and held it until the wound sealed itself, which took only moments; the beast’s flesh closed like water. He packed his tools without a sound, then turned and made a single small gesture to the others, a flick of two fingers toward the far tunnel. Dismissed. The relief that went through them was almost audible. They filed out swift and silent as smoke, the fae first, not one of them looking back.

Yerdon remained a moment longer. He turned to the great wall of the sleeping neck, and he bowed, low, formally, as one bows to an elder power, and when he spoke it was barely more than a shaped breath.

“Thank you, old one, for your blood. It will be instrumental in the death of Kortul.”

The dragon slept on. Yerdon took up his cradle of glowing vials and left the mountain’s heart.

Weeks passed. Water dripped. Dust settled in tides with the great slow breathing. The dragon slumbered, and the mountain kept its secret, and nothing in that darkness marked the turning of days.

Then another figure came, alone.

Isaiah entered the cavern the way a man enters a cathedral he once burned; slowly, and without lifting his eyes more than he must. The centuries had not been kind. His brown skin had gone ashen at the temples, his white hair hung lank, and his wings, white-feathered still, were kept bound tight to his back as if he no longer trusted himself with them. His golden eyes were the only bright thing left of him, and they were bright the way fever is bright. He carried no tools. He walked the length of that sleeping mountain of flesh with his hand hovering a span above the scales, not touching, reading, until at last, high on the shoulder where some ancient wound had knitted crooked, he found what he sought; a scale sprung loose at its root, lifted from the hide like a shingle after a storm.

He worked it free with terrible patience, easing it back and forth, a hair’s width at a time, his jaw tight, sweat standing on his forehead in the cold, and when at last it came away in his arms, broad as a shield and heavier than iron, the dragon’s breath paused, one long dreadful moment, and then resumed. Isaiah stood motionless through all of it with his eyes closed.

He carried the scale toward the tunnel cradled against his chest like a child. At the threshold he stopped, and turned his head, and spoke back into the dark, quietly. There was something in his voice that had not been in the archon’s; something ragged, something owed.

“This will help me kill Kortul, so consider your debt to Avadryn paid in full.”

Then he was gone, and the dark closed up behind him.

More weeks. The drip of water. The tides of dust. The dragon slumbered as it had slumbered through the fall of one age and the rise of another, and the mountain held it, and time moved at the bottom of the world.

And then Zardul came.

He did not enter the way the others had entered. His boots rang on the stone. He was a demon in the full pride of his strength, broad through the shoulder as a troll though built to a man’s proportion, his hide the deep grey of storm cloud, tusks capped in black iron, horns swept back and banded with rings of the same. His leathery wings were half spread even in the tunnel, too arrogant to fold, and his reptilian eyes ran over the sleeping colossus not with awe but with appraisal, the look of a buyer in a market. Coils of something dark hung looped over his shoulder, links of worked shadow that drank the cave’s faint light, and they shifted on their own, restless, eager.

He walked the dragon’s length once, unhurried. Then he stood before the farmhouse skull, planted his feet, drew breath into that great grey chest, and shouted.

The word he used was in no tongue of the living races, a syllable of the old dark, and it struck the sleeping mind like a spear.

The dragon woke.

It woke the way the world ends. The eyes came open first, twin furnaces of molten gold each taller than Zardul entire, and then the cavern itself seemed to detonate as the beast surged up out of its own coils, wings bursting from their pleats in an avalanche of dust and dead moss, the roar that came out of it a physical thing, a pressure that cracked stalactites from the unseen ceiling and sent them down like javelins. Fire bloomed in its throat, lighting the whole hollow mountain orange, and it struck at the small grey figure before it with the speed of something a hundredth its size.

The chains were already moving.

They left Zardul’s shoulder like living things, black links unspooling impossibly, multiplying as they flew, and where they touched the dragon they held, not by strength of metal but by strength of curse, hooking into the deep places the way the slave chains had hooked into Mara’s band, behind the bone, into the soul. The great head slammed sideways against a binding it could not see. The wings hammered once, twice, wind screaming through the cavern, and the chains sang and held. Fire came down on Zardul in a flood that should have unmade him, and he stood in it, wings raised as a shroud, and walked forward through the flame, paying out more chain from his hands, the links pouring from his palms now as if his blood itself had learned the shape of them. The dragon thrashed, and mountains of muscle heaved against anchors of shadow bolted into the world’s own dark. Stone shattered. Dust fell in rivers.

It fought for a long time. Longer than anything had fought Zardul in a century.

But the chains did not tire, and flesh does. By slow degrees the thrashing shortened. The roars dropped to snarls, the snarls to a deep continuous growl like the mountain grinding its teeth, and at last the great body sank back to the polished floor, pinned at neck and wing and haunch, sides heaving, one molten eye rolled down to fix on the demon standing in the settling dust. The hatred in that eye was hot enough to light the dark on its own.

Zardul looked up into it and smiled around his iron-capped tusks, easy, unhurried, a craftsman pleased with his morning’s work.

“Good,” he said. “You’re awake. It’s time, old one. You and I are going to go kill Kortul.”

Credit: Grant Howard

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