Reddish rocks and burning gloom
Smile in the face of certain doom.
The volcanic rock was loose and crumbly under the prisoner's feet, making his steps awkward. Six guards escorted him; two tightly gripping his arms on either side, and four walking behind, swords drawn and pointing at his back. All of them wore the new black armour, shimmering with a sickly iridescence in the dull red light. Their swords were black as well, and sharper than sharp: they could have cut the very mountains apart.
Sirannor stared straight ahead as they guided him down the mountain slope. No other prisoner would have required such an extreme escort, but he had attempted to escape multiple times, leaving a trail of broken noses, smashed legs and twisted arms in his wake.
He allowed himself a faint smile, despite the bruises swelling his face and the dried blood tracing a line from a gash on his scalp. They had tortured him, of course. Not for information: there was nothing the General wanted from him other than his extermination. No, they had simply wanted to break him.
They had failed.
The Old Quarter had already torn out Sirannor's soul, had laid it bare before him, and he had taken it back and walked away feeling at once wearier and stronger than he ever had. There was nothing that Dreikan or his men could do to hurt him, no pain left that they could wrench from him. And he had certainly never been afraid of death.
Above him, beyond the red sweep of the Aegis, the clouds were heavy and mixed with roiling smoke from a nearby volcano. The air was thick, suffocating, filled with floating particles of ash. His lungs and nostrils burnt from the noxious fumes, and there was a strange energy around him, like a pressure building, as of something immense that gripped the world in its huge fist. Tremors passed through the ground every now and then and the soldiers kept looking around nervously, hurrying him onwards.
He was about to meet a Dragon, but that was not the cause of the anticipation or foreboding.
Today, I am going to die, he thought.
He knew it as surely as he knew that those thunderclouds would break, that the volcano would erupt, and that the Aegis was soon to fail. Death was holding a hand out to him, and he was walking forward to take it.
Here on this hell-blasted island, on these red-stained rocks: here was where his life was going to end.
And if the last thing he saw was the jaws of a Dragon, opened wide to take him, so be it.
It was as it should be.
They reached the centre of the valley, and the guards forced him to his knees. One of them dropped the heavy iron ball that he'd been carrying, which was attached by a chain to Sirannor's right ankle. His hands were shackled behind his back.
They had stripped him of his Freeroamer uniform and badge, exposing his torso in order to inflict their various insidious injuries, but Dreikan had given him back his long coat in a sign of mock respect.
Sirannor did not know if anyone still respected him, or if Dreikan's lies and deception had worked. Perhaps the other Freeroamers believed that he had killed Cimmeran. He hadn't, though he was relieved that the servant was dead.
It didn't matter, any longer. He had never wanted to be a hero. He had become a soldier because he had seen no other point to life.
How wrong he had been.
he had seen no other point to life.
How wrong he had been.
The soldiers walked away, leaving him alone in the barren valley. But one of them hesitated, for just a moment, turning to him as though to say something. Then he changed his mind, shook his head and went after the others.
Sirannor stared ahead, not bothering to glance back at the soldier. Some of them weren't happy about this arrangement, he knew. They did not like to see a veteran ex-officer, even a disgraced one, being fed to a Dragon. Dreikan's plan to discredit him may well backfire.
But they had orders, and no one was going to stop what was about to happen.
He looked up at the mountains surrounding him: three cone-shaped peaks like giant sentinels. Two of them were old, weathered and dead, but the third, directly opposite him, was alive and watching, waiting. It rumbled, hungrily.
Sirannor supposed the volcano factored into Dreikan's plan, as well. If it erupted, it would catch the Dragon in its flow.
Dragons were impervious to lava – indeed, they were known to bathe in it on occasion – but if the flow hardened around it, the beast could possibly be immobilised. The harpoons would help to bring it down and pin it in place, allowing the soldiers to hack away at it with their swords.
He expected they would have an easier time of it than he had.
Sirannor closed his grey eyes. Many years ago, he had brought down a Dragon in a valley very much like this one, with a harpoon very much like the one that sat at this moment on the bluff behind him, though made of ordinary steel, not some extraordinary, unknown metal.
There had been nothing special about that weapon, and there had been nothing elegant or glorious about the Dragon's death.
He had lured the Dragon to a valley with bait – as Dreikan was now sadistically doing – and had told it to its face that he was there to kill it.
The Dragon had asked why, and Sirannor had told it straightforwardly: because he could.
The Dragon had laughed.
It had not been a mocking laugh, or even an amused laugh.
It had laughed because it had known he was right.
Sirannor had harpooned it, right into its jaws, but that had been intended mostly as a distraction, to enable his men to throw ropes and nets over it, vast swathes of them, tangling it up so effectively that it could not fly.
The Dragon fought; it struggled. Hundreds of men died, burnt to death and crushed in its fury, but eventually, somehow, they had brought it down, tied it up so that it could not move.
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Swords were useless against the beast's hard, gold-red scales, but this fact had not deterred Sirannor. He strode up to the Dragon and begun methodically hacking away at its mammoth neck.
It took him three months to kill it.
Every day, at dawn, he approached the Dragon, greeted it, then proceeded to chip away at its throat. He worked at it all day, and in the evening, he bid the Dragon good night and returned to his camp.
He went through hundreds of weapons and tools in his attempt to penetrate those impossible scales. He blunted and twisted them all. Yet ceaselessly he worked at it, refusing the help of others, ignoring those who thought he was crazy; his effort to kill the Dragon became the only thing in all of existence.
And finally, he noticed the smallest hint of a dent.
And, tiny bit by tiny bit, the dent expanded.
Then, finally, he found flesh; he drew blood.
He kept going.
He woke up in the morning; he greeted the Dragon as though they were old friends. The Dragon's jaw was bound so that it could not answer back. It only stared at him with its enormous, brilliant, burning eye, like a child of the sun.
It lay there, motionless, silent, as he chopped into it; deeper and deeper, through muscle, through sinew, through bone. Small cuts, but so, so many of them, and so much blood.
In the evening, he said good night to it, and retired to sleep in his tent.
He did not know when the Dragon had died, only that one morning, he noticed that its eye did not glow so fiercely. He greeted it anyway, and continued to do so every day after, labouring in the heat of the crimson sun.
Until one day, he suddenly found that he had cut all the way through. He had stood there, on the blood-drenched rocks, in his gore-spattered armour, and looked up at the Dragon. He gazed upon the magnificent creature that he had slaughtered, slowly and painfully, and felt nothing but tired.
He wondered what the hell the point had been.
Then he became angry. He was furious at the Dragon for allowing itself to be killed this way. It should have fought harder! It should have burned Sirannor where he stood arrogantly on the ridge, it should have been smart enough to know that it was walking into a trap...
And then Sirannor realised something devastating.
The Dragon had been holding itself back. It had killed and injured many soldiers, but it could have killed more. It could have escaped those ropes.
But it hadn't, because it had wanted to die.
A creature as powerful, intelligent and full of burning life as a Dragon had wanted to die. It was tired, as he was. Tired of imprisonment, tired of starvation, tired of looking up at the same red sky for a thousand years, tired of waiting for things to change.
Sirannor placed his hand on the shining golden scales of the Dragon's head, and understood that he had not truly wanted to exterminate it, he had simply sought to escape the unbearable pain of Sereth's death, and the terrible knowledge that he was left with a daughter he couldn't care for. He had taken his anger at life out on the Dragon, and the beast had welcomed it.
When he returned to the camp, he was hailed as a hero for slaying the Dragon. There were celebrations, and talk of promoting him to General.
Sirannor decided to leave the army the next day. He stole one of the newly-forged moltmetal breastplates, making sure that someone saw him do it, and was apprehended when he disembarked the ship at Sunsee.
Kneeling there on the jumble of rough, volcanic rocks, listening to the restless volcano, feeling the hot, stinking air pervade his skin and burn his wounds, Sirannor did not bother to wonder whether a Dragon would come to claim him, would once again come willingly to meet its doom.
He knew that it would.
* * *
Arzath clutched the white stone railing of the balcony and retched over the side, coughing up black blood. He shivered as though freezing, even as hot, bright midday sun flooded over him from a flawless blue sky.
His head swam and the sight of the drop below made him vomit again, though there was little in his stomach to force out. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he closed his eyes, waiting for the feeling to pass.
He was deteriorating rapidly. The trigon had advanced from his hands and claimed his arms, now worming its way through his chest, seeking his heart. He continued to use his magic anyway, monitoring Requar's progress every day.
Outwardly, there were hopeful signs; the trigon appeared to have retreated entirely into his chest, congealing in a dark mass around the wound, around his heart. The Sword of Healing had slowly repaired all of his non-trigonic wounds, and seemed to be keeping the trigon itself more or less at bay.
Inside his mind… it was hard to say. The swirling red storm of madness had gone, at least. But all that remained was a gaping, empty cavern with a few pitiful, flickering motes of memory floating around, like lost fireflies.
Arzath's initial elation at successfully activating the Sword had faded into doubt.
Opening his eyes, he lifted his head, staring through strands of his hair at his own ruined, black castle on the other side of the valley. No sign of life could be seen there, and hadn't been for some time. He assumed all of the Griks and Murons were either dead or had moved on.
Sometimes, he felt like going back there. Just giving up, walking over to the castle and sitting there in the charred ruins to await a fate worse than death.
Requar wasn't going to regain consciousness in time to help him, if he ever did. Despite Arzath's best efforts, his brother's mind had been destroyed, and there wasn't enough left to salvage. Some basic, instinctive functions were intact; his brother still screamed, occasionally, but whether he was going to end up as a coherent Human being at the end of it all was debatable.
Flint is right, he thought feverishly. I am achieving nothing, merely hastening my own death and prolonging Requar's miserable existence... and for what reason?
A soft sound interrupted his thoughts and he went still, apart from the involuntary trembling.
He recognised that sound. He had heard it many times while sitting in his throne room, waiting impatiently for his minions to appear.
Arzath did not turn around, merely continued staring across the valley. A soft breeze rifled through his hair and cooled his sweat-soaked skin. He could feel that his face had become gaunt, that his tired eyes gazed out from darkened hollows. He was beginning to look, and feel, almost as dead as Ferrian did… and that was not an encouraging thought.
“If you've come to kill me,” he said quietly to the warm summer air, “you may be disappointed.”
There was a hissing sound from somewhere behind him.
“We had an… arrangement...” a soft, but harsh voice whispered. “You have failed to honour it.”
Arzath smiled as he stared out at his castle. He wasn't the only one whose future lay in ruins.
“I never intended to help you,” he answered coldly. “Or those idiotic Griks.” He turned around.
Three Murons perched on the roof above him, like giant black gargoyles. One of them wore a necklace of bones around its neck. Arzath's eyes fell upon a shard of redstone amongst the gruesome trophies, and thought of the Grik leader, Kyosk.
He caught Varshax's eyes without fear.
The creature's yellow eyes were narrowed in fury. All three Murons crouched low, tense, ready to pounce on him. He could feel hatred radiating off their black scales, hotter than the sun.
“For all your supposed intelligence,” Arzath told them, “you really don't understand lies, do you? You believe that truth is more dangerous and far more painful.” He smiled. “You are correct.
“You approached me as I was travelling through Arkana. You came to me because you were desperate, because you needed someone to read your precious books, and perform the magical spells within them. Murons cannot breed: they can only be created by magic.
“You do not fear death. But extinction is something that you cannot accept.”
He stared up at them, still smiling. “I made a similar promise to the Griks. Told them that I would restore them to the magnificent race that they believed themselves to be. They, as you, accepted my word. But I wanted your assistance for my own purposes, and nothing more.”
The Murons shifted restlessly, hissing venomously. Saliva dripped from Varshax's jaws. His clawed hands clenched and unclenched.
Arzath leaned back nonchalantly against the balcony. “Kill me if you wish,” he offered, spreading his arms. “Pluck my eyes from my head. Rip my heart out of my chest and eat it if you so desire. I will not stop you.
“But please, do enjoy the taste of trigon as you do so...”
Two of the Murons leapt.
But not at him. They soared away over the valley, their great dark wings stirring a wind over him as they went.
Varshax remained. Arzath could tell that the Muron wanted to tear him to pieces, to do exactly as Arzath had just described, that he longed to.
But both of them knew that it would take only one Muron to be infected to wipe out the rest of its kin.
They stared at each other for an endless moment, both unflinching.
Arzath was the first to turn away. Wearily, he pushed himself away from the railing and walked slowly and unsteadily back through the open doors into Requar's chamber.
For a moment, a shadow blocked out the sun.
Arzath stopped and turned slightly, looking over his shoulder, but there were no Murons to be seen, just a sunlit valley ringed by grey mountains.
He was certain that they wouldn't be back.
Turning around, he made his way across the room and suddenly froze.
For several seconds, he just stood where he was, in shock.
An empty bed lay before him.
Requar was gone!