Veil of the Dragon (Prophecy of the Evarun) (21 page)

“I know where the Dragon dwells.”

“Then finish what you came to do, and strike down the Dragon that succors their suffering.” Al-Thinneas nodded and held his stare. “I promise upon my life they will be led safely from here.”

Chaelus nodded back to him. The voices of prophecy and the often-lost battles of faith passed through the soul of Al-Thinneas. They passed in ways that Chaelus understood. Not so from the much quoted words of the spirit that possessed him, but from his own battles, those both won and lost, and bound by the unfinished sacrifice that they both knew waited ahead for each of them. Chaelus reached out and touched Al-Thinneas’ face.

They stood, Al-Thinneas holding Al-Aaron limp within his arms. He nodded once to Chaelus and then he turned away, as the billowing darkness returned.  

Amidst the dying lights of the cenotaphs, those that still remained, dwelt another shadow. Chaelus walked towards it.

The press of the Dragon’s shadow engulfed him, taking away his very breath. Its darkness was complete but it was only the shadow of the reckoning he knew he had yet to behold. 

It was loneliness. It was the loneliness that for men like Al-Thinneas was born of faith, and for him was born of prophecy. Against the silence of its bower, Chaelus listened to the grating whisper of the Dragon’s minions. It felt like coarse sand against his skin. 

At the heart of darkness, the dead water of the cenotaph was darker still. 

Chaelus stepped into it. It held him like chains. The cold press of its shadows turned against him.

The dark water faded, illuminated from within by a cold, pale gray light. Gray sands swirled beneath it.

Chaelus looked back to where he had just been, to the distant cries of his friends, there where the darkness still remained. He imagined he could see through it all. He imagined that he saw, once more, those he knew he would never see again.

Chapter Twenty

Magedos

Voices sounded upon the wind.
T
hey sounded like the voice of madness itself
, blowing cold
against
Chaelus’
skin as they called out to him. He couldn’t understand their words but he understood their sound, and he did
n’t
need the knowing of the Giver to do so. It was the sound of souls that had already been lost.

He
braced himself against the sands billowing a
round
him through the pale gray haze. The pitch beneath Ras Dumas’ tower
above him
had perished,
perhaps
along with his friends, the Servians
,
as well.

Or perhaps it was he who
’d
died. Perhaps he
’d
died again. Either way, aside from the voices upon the wind and the spirit of the Giver which possessed him, he was alone. Chaelus lifted Sundengal before him
, t
he light of its steel
made
mute by the haze.

Coarse, dark sand shifted against his feet where the cenotaph had been. Only a ring of flat stones now pressed up from beneath, smooth save for the sinuous glyphs etched deep into the
ir
face
s
.

Above him dark mountains, the Karagas Mun, re
ar
ed up into a cold, bleak sky
;
the harsh edge
s
of their barren black stone melting into the turning clouds that reached up beyond his vision. A single narrow pass broke their length, the mountains keeping it hidden within their shadow. It was the valley of Magedos, the place where the Giver fell, the place where the Dragon would be defeated.

Dark holes, pits, stared back at
Chaelus
like eyes upon a pale face from where they lay scattered across the ground towards the valley’s narrow horizon. Monstrous shadows writhed beyond the valley
in a swirling haze
. They were like the wyrms from the cenotaphs
;
vestiges of the Dragon
,
ye
t were themselves as tall as mountains. The sand and stones, even here, shook
at
their tremor. 

The bleached and splintered bones of things larger than a man trembled
across the open pits.
Drifting sand swirled around them. A tumbled cairn of stones marked the nearest of them.

Sundengal
held
a wyrdling weight. 

The wind
t
ore through Chaelus like a banshee, its sands burning into the exposure of his flesh as it calle
d
him by name from beyond the darkened spine. He shielded himself from the sand, but he could not tear his mind from
its
voice. The wakening of fear ravaged through him with every utterance of his name.

“Chaelus.”

“Chaelus.”

“Help us.”

The oppression of Magedos filled Chaelus’ vision, perhaps because of the dim storm
-
wrought light that
lay
against it, perhaps because of what it was.
Either
way
,
its power
pressed
upon him. He felt both the sharp press of the wind and
the
pleading of its voices. 

The weight of Sundengal grew. It pulsed like a living thing in his hand. 

Chaelus fell to his knees.  The sand shifted beneath him.  He clenched his eyes from the pain and burning of the Dragon’s Fire racing through him. Tears filled them, but he choked them back. 

I have indeed passed on
once more
,
he
thought.
Once
more my own death passes before me.

“It’s a necessary one
.
”
T
he voice and presence of Talus swelled within him. 

Chaelus stiffened even as he diminished against it. 

“But you aren’t alone,” Talus said.

The world blurred. Chaelus fell beneath the Giver’s thought, and then
fell again
to his memory.

Gray stones trembled beneath the burgeoning red sky as the Dragon and its minions rose in multitude and dark ire upon the horizon.

Dumas and Malius waited patiently beside Talus. Dalamas did not. The youngest of his followers, Dalamas raised his mailed fist like a shield as the first shadows of the storm fell against them. “We stand only twelve with you, my Teacher, and already it comes. How can we defeat an enemy such as this?” 

Talus smiled as the first sands tore against his skin. The first and the last of the ones he had chosen stood with him still, though each with their own doubts, and the purpose that had been given to them. Only remnants of the Dragon’s shadow still lingered within them. 

“You can’t,” Talus said. “One more sacrifice remains.”

“What more sacrifice would you ask of us?” Dalamas cried out against the sands.

“Go, Dalamas,” Talus said. “Take Dumas and go from us. Tell the others that the Dragon comes. Malius, take up Sundengal and come alone with me.”

Gravel crumbled beneath Talus’ boots as he sought a path ahead of them to a place where the sky narrowed between the dark peaks above. A cairn stood like a sentinel before one of the now emptied pits of the cenotaphs. Held between its piled stones, a strip of thin bleached funeral cloth, left behind by the Evarun who had worshipped here before, lifted upon the growing wind.

Talus took the gossamer from the stones as the measured stride of Malius came up from behind him. 

“What yet remains, my Teacher,” Malius asked, “before our victory over the Dragon?”

“Our surrender remains,” Talus answered. “Your surrender. Bind up your blade in this, so that the others may know of your trust in me, so that they will bind theirs as well, just as you, my favored one, are bound to me.”

“I don’t understand, Teacher. Already the Dragon flies towards us. How can we surrender? Your words sentence them – all of us – to our deaths.” A splinter of fear broke across his voice as the sound of his drawn steel echoed against the canyon walls. Just as the prophecy had said it would.

“To follow me,” Talus said, “is a death they must freely accept.”

Malius’ hands shook as he took the gossamer from Talus. Talus winced. It hurt so to understand what his friend could not. Already and so soon, the shadow grew within him. The Dragon had already cast its veil upon him.

“And what if they don’t?” Malius asked. 

“Then I cannot help them,” Talus replied.

“You would betray us here, before we face the Dragon itself?” Fear grew in measure within Malius’ voice. 

Talus stepped closer to the edge of the cenotaph’s well.  If only Malius could see his lack of faith. If only he could know what it held for him, for all of them. “I am afraid that it is you who will betray me.”

“Forgive me, Teacher,” Malius said. “I cannot serve you in this.”

Talus looked up to the constant light as the roar of the Dragon billowed over him. The pain of steel pierced Talus’ side. He sucked in his breath. It was just as the prophecy had said it would be. And so it would be for the next as well. His voice, to his surprise, barely wavered.

“My return is your forgiveness.”

The memory and presence of Talus fell away as the rust
-
colored sky blurred back into muted haze.

Chaelus lifted his pounding head from the sand. The stone cairn still remained before him, before the well
next to where
he had fallen. He had come here in his vision. It
was
where he had died. The burning of his fever deepened.

No. 

Magedos. It was the place where the Giver fell. The place where Talus died.

Not I, thought Chaelus; him. But I will die here too, here in the place where my own father took the Giver’s life, where his father took his Teacher’s life.

It numbed him and it tore at him, all of it. It did so because Chaelus knew it was true.

He had seen it with his own eyes.

Chaelus stared at the now pounding weight of Sundengal still clutched within his hand. The sword of his father, the blood of the Giver still borne within it, the same blood that now pulsed within him, blood born of prophecy. In far too many ways all of it had become one.

Chaelus stood. His knees trembled. He looked down into the well’s abyss, just as Talus had once done. Yet only silence answered him against the dull haze reflecting from the surface of the water below. It trembled as small stones, set loose from their precipice above, broke across its surface.

The wind whipped harder against him. The peal of his own name deafened him as the legion of voices turned into one. 

“Help us.
”
 

“Chaelus!”

“You
are
the Giver.”

“Help us!”

The surface of the water quivered and distorted his reflection upon it.

“Chaelus.”
Another voice, a more familiar voice, caustic and sweet, the voice of Magus, the voice of the Dragon, whispered from behind him.
“Will you heed their cries, my love.”

***