Resurgent Shadows (Successive Harmony Book 1) (26 page)

Kaelie lovingly traced the curve of the arm she had just finished carving into the ice between the monolithic busts of the Mother-Goddess. The Council of Elders had finally given their consent to carve the life-sized effigy to her once-mother, albeit reluctantly. Their reluctance had irritated her, and she had rashly reminded them that as the first Keeper, Aeolin was the most Beloved of their Mother-Goddess, worthy of their reverence and respect. As Keeper, she was assured a place in Faerin’s arms. The Elders could not claim such an assurance.

She had relished the thrill of victory when they had assented to her request and grinned smugly at the memory of her father’s disapproving look. The weeks of petitions and frustrating meetings with the many stuffy Elders had been worth it just to see the king’s arrogant dismissal of her efforts.

“Three hundred years have not cooled your head enough to let the past be the past.” Rolaen spoke in her mind, a hint of sarcasm coming with the thought.

Kaelie smiled faintly and picked up her chisel and the thin metal knives she used to work the ice. It was an old game between them now. The proud white dragon disapproved of her unforgiving disdain for her father, the King. It stemmed from an ancient wound, though still fresh when looked at in the terms of the aylfin life span.

Kaelie sent her thoughts back along the ever-present thread that linked her to her eternal companion. “In three hundred years he has not once called her his wife. I know he still loves her, but his sense of pride and duty keep him silent and formal. She may now be the Keeper, but she is still my mother.”

Rolaen did not answer, but she could sense his resigned frustration at her oft-repeated diatribe. According to the words of Faerin, the Mother-Goddess, Aeolin was no longer her mother. She was the Keeper, once-mother to Kaelie and harbinger of the Dragonsworn.

Kaelie sniffed petulantly and glanced over her shoulder where her mother sat before the altar, feeding the flames of the soul-fire. She didn’t understand why Aeolin was still feeding the flames. The egg had not made a sound nor had there been any other signs that the dragonling within still lived. And yet her mother insisted that the creature lived on, searching the world for the one who would become her Dragonsworn, bond-partner and companion in arms. Aeolin no longer ate, no longer spoke, and no longer moved. The egg was her life now and it consumed her, leaving her old and shriveled like a hag.

Kaelie turned back to the sculpture and a tear dropped onto her seal-skin gloves.

Rolaen sent a wave of comfort and strength back along their connection. “She is the Keeper,” he said softly. “She knows what is about. Have faith in her.”

“I just don’t understand!” Kaelie thought desperately. Kaelie appreciated his gesture, but it did little to comfort her. He knew more than what he told her.

In the beginning it had bothered her that Rolaen could conceal things from her when her mind was an open book to the dragon, but she had long since come to accept and understand it. The dragons were fierce and ancient creatures, possessed of an ancient instinct and knowledge that was not meant for mortal minds.

A sudden high pitched squeal made Kaelie jump. She looked around and saw nothing that could have made the noise. The squeal sounded again and Kaelie leapt to her feet in shock and surprise. The egg had moved!

“Rolaen,” she shrieked mentally, running over to stand near the altar where she could see both the egg and her mother. “It’s hatching!”

The egg wobbled and shook in its bed of sand, and the soul-fire flared. Flames rose up around the egg, blue-white fire licking the stark white surface with a loving caress. Aeolin shuddered as the soul-fire burned higher. Her eyes glazed over and she slumped onto the ground.

Kaelie shouted in alarm and rushed to her once-mother’s side, cradling Aeolin’s head in her lap. The Keeper’s breathing was rapid and shallow as the squeals grew louder and more frequent. Kaelie reached out for Rolaen, but his mind was surprisingly closed to her. She felt panic creep up and seize her mind, a feeling unusual for her aloof aylfin nature. She shook her mother’s still form in an effort to wake her, but Aeolin remained unmoving.

Rolaen’s voice entered her mind, sharp and powerful.

“Come, Kaelie! We have far to fly this night!” Kaelie sucked in a sharp breath in surprise. She had never heard such urgency in her companion’s voice before, not even when they had battled the Black Dragonhosts before the Breaking.

“I can’t leave her!”

“If you ever want to see her alive again you must come with me now! She has spoken with me and I know where we must go!”

Only centuries of trust and intimate companionship with Rolaen forced her to move, gently placing her mother’s head into the snow and ice that covered floor.

“Where are we going?” she asked, slipping out of the room as the egg rocked and shook amidst the flames.

“My daughter has found her Dragonsworn. We go to fetch him. I have sealed the egg chamber and the others will keep the Watch. We must hurry!”

Rolaen dropped from the sky and landed in the ice with a powerful crunch.

Kaelie leapt up onto his massive, quivering leg and scampered nimbly up his spines into the saddle on his back. With a powerful heave of his thick leg muscles Rolaen launched back into the sky. His wings pounded a quick staccato beat as he flew northward, the wind whistling through Kaelie’s hair.

“We must hurry!”

*              *              *              *

Caleb shut himself in the sunlit room and slumped backwards against the door, letting gravity carry him to the ground. He pulled Faeranir from his back and flung it across the room. The quiver of arrows quickly followed and scattered silver metal shafts across the floor. He tore the star-iron coat over his head and tossed it aside as well. Tears streamed down his face. His body was bruised from where he had been hit by the golgent in the underground passages, but only the areas not covered by the mail bore any real wounds. The tears didn’t come from the pain of his wounds.

Blood dripped from his fingers. Caleb scrubbed them on his undershirt in a frenzied effort to get it off. He tore the garment from his back and spat on his hands to try and remove the stains that marked him as a killer, a murderer. He scrubbed until his hands were raw and sore, kept scrubbing long after Thomas’s blood was washed clean. His mind screamed at him that there was more blood on his hands. Rachel. Thomas. Benson.

Strangely, the woman’s face passed through his mind as well, smiling and grateful, allowing him to hold onto the baby that reminded him of Benson so much that he wasn’t sure if the child was a comfort or simply a reminder of his own previous guilt and shame.

There was almost nothing left of the ragged undershirt, so he tossed it away and sank sideways onto the ground, wrapping his arms around his knees and clutching Rachel’s ring as he rocked. Rachel’s death was on his hands. It was his fault. Benson was killed by his hand as surely as Thomas had killed those men and women below. Thomas, at least, had been insane—lost inside a world of his own making, and trapped in the alternate reality of his inner turmoil and imagination. Caleb didn’t have that argument. He had acted out of his own volition, his own needs and wants and desire. He was a murderer—a cold-blooded killer.

Rationally, he knew his family’s deaths were not his fault. He’d begun to come to terms with that when Sigvid had confronted him during the attack on this very city. But this wasn’t something that went away so easily. The pain was overwhelming. Everyone he cared about, everyone he’d come to love, somehow died. Why did he always live?

Memories washed over him and threatened to consume him. For the first time since Rachel had been killed, Caleb did not fight them. He welcomed them. He
embraced
them. He sobbed and cried for hours as memories of his past life and his guilt replayed themselves over and over again—until he had no more energy left to cry. No one had disturbed him, leaving him to his own internal torments.

He didn’t know if he had drifted off to sleep or not, but he dreamed. Of Rachel, of the Dragonlords, and of the end of the world.

He dreamed of a cliff, overlooking a nighttime valley. A blond-haired man with pointed ears peered over the edge of the cliff, a massive White Dragon sitting behind him in the snow. Vile chanting echoed up from the valley below. A simple star of red fire was etched onto the ground in the valley below. A black, columnar candle sat at the point of each arm. Five figures stood within the triangle formed by each of the star’s five arms. Three were Dragonlords, the heart of Chaos. Their dragons lay against the far valley wall, soaking in the vestigial warmth that remained in the stone. Caleb noticed with a start that one was black. He’d never heard of Black Dragons before. Then again, he’d never heard of White Dragons either. The other two figures wore black cloaks. Wizards. Caleb felt the man’s hatred for them in particular.

Above them, a darkened moon turned slowly red.

On a rose quartz altar in the middle of the pentagram lay an old, wizened man. His limbs were bound by blood-stained chains and his frail, wrinkled chest was bare, covered only by the thin white hair of his beard. The man’s face was serene despite his precarious position. His eyes were clear and unafraid, though they seemed oddly fixated on one of the black robed wizards who bore a strange symbol of a fiery red fist etched into his robes.

The man on the cliff ignored the wizards, though it was they who chanted and who held the spider-shaped sacrificial knives aloft. The man in the middle was who he’d come for.

“We won’t survive this, you know,” the man said to his dragon.

“We knew we never would,” she replied. “There will always be another champion to take up the call. They will embark upon the path, as we have.” Caleb heard her words, even though he knew she hadn’t spoken aloud.

“We will be remembered then, by him at least.”

The chanting grew louder and more pronounced. Caleb sensed that this ritual must not be allowed to finish. The black-robed wizards raised the blades of their knives to the sky as the moon turned completely red.

The old man on the altar flinched as the blades pierced his chest and were then pulled free. Darkness seemed to coalesce around the blades. The wizards released them, but the weapons remained suspended in the air. They burst into a silent, black flame as the moon began to shine with a deep, red glow. The burning horror roiled and twisted in a convoluted, slimy mess that continued to grow with each passing second.

With a shout of anger and hatred at the thing that was growing in the valley, the man on the cliff leapt onto his dragon’s broad, spiked back. He drew his long, curved blade and gripped the dragon’s saddle as she launched into the air. The other dragons looked up at the man’s shout, launching into the air to intercept the sudden attacker. The man dropped from his dragon’s back as she turned over, flipping once in the air before landing on the ground. The White was larger than any of the other dragons and so held her own in the struggle against the smaller enemies as they came together in the air.

The man dropped to his knees and plunged his sword into the ground. The blade of his sword began to glow with a soft white light and he pulled it free with a single fluid motion. The mass of slime and shadow took on the form of a shimmering red-brown tear in the sky, as if the universe itself bore an open, festering wound.

“Look, Jarome,” one of the Dragonlords said. “It’s that aylfin that’s been following us.”

“You’re too late,” Jarome said with a laugh, safe within the fiery pentagram.

The man whipped his arm back and let his sword fly. It spun through the air, end over end, glistening with pure white light. It hit the line of fire that made up the star with an explosion of red and black sparks but continued onward. The Dragonlords’ eyes widened in shock as the blade sunk into the chest of one of the wizards. At the same moment, the white dragon dove into the tear in the sky, disappearing within its depths.

The tear seemed to shake in the sky and suddenly imploded, rocking outwards in a cascade of colors and shadows. The earth shook as the black-robed wizard fell, clutching the sword in his chest with bloodless hands. White light shot outward from the blade, beams of solid energy shooting in all directions. A beam shot out and hit the pointy-eared man in the chest and he screamed. It was a scream filled with pain, but Caleb also sensed a great peace in it as well. The man had fulfilled his purpose. Sayrin had been contained. And now the man longed to join his dragon in death.

The Dragonlords scrambled for their dragons, and the remaining wizard ran off into the blackness as best he could amongst the earthquakes and omnipresent black. A landslide of falling rock and earth slid across the valley floor, burying half the pentagram under soil and sand. The man smiled as he looked upon the face of his Goddess and welcomed death.

*              *              *              *

Caleb sat bolt upright with a scream, clutching at his chest. His heart raced and his blood pounded in his ears.

In his dream he’d watched a rip grow in the sky, emanating evil like the sun sent out light. It had been so real. The Dragonlords and the wizards with them were the hands of Chaos. They were to blame for the deaths of millions. They’d broken the world. He’d witnessed the event which had started at all.

He blinked.