Chapter Twenty-Nine
C HAPTER T WENTY -N INE
The west wind sighs, all moons die.
Bakun, dreaming of his lost love,
rises to eat the world above.
The nursery rhyme that Talasyn had first heard children chanting in a hand-clapping game on the streets of Eskaya now beat an ominous chorus in her head. All those other dragons, she’d thought they were the largest creatures she would ever see, but they were nothing compared to this behemoth; while most of it remained submerged within the volcano of Aktamasok, the part that was visible could have crushed the whole of Iantas castle in a single constricting coil.
The pain in her right arm was still there, but she could barely feel it through the waves of adrenaline racing through her. Everything in her was focused on the World-Eater, on the myth come to life.
Bakun lunged for the yacht again. Alaric listed the vessel sharply to the right, and the colossal jaws snapped at empty air with a force that reverberated like a thunderclap. The Enchanters’ moth coracles had made it to a relatively safe distance, and Ishan was pleading with Talasyn over the aetherwave to follow them.
Talasyn deactivated the transceiver, cutting the daya off. “If we flee, it’ll take wing to chase us and we’ll never be able to stop it,” she said to Alaric. “We need to make sure it doesn’t leave the volcano.”
He arched a brow. “I’ll just fly around its head like a gnat, then, shall I?”
“Yes, just be your usual irritating self,” she retorted. As inappropriate as their bickering was for the situation, it had a grounding effect. It was something familiar to cling to—something real .
Alaric grumbled under his breath, but did as he was told. The yacht wove around the volcano in haphazard circles and Bakun’s neck wove with it. The white dragon was fixated on the ship’s every movement; it snarled and snapped, predatory and alert. One massive forelimb emerged from the chasm, its claws hooking over the crater’s rim, tearing at earth and rock.
It was apparent that this dragon had no compunctions about harming anyone of Nenavarene blood.
But the others—the ones that had escorted the yacht to Vasiyas, the ones that had so far been hovering nearby or resting on the slopes—all rushed to Talasyn’s defense. The night air filled with wings, and fear struck her heart when they started closing in from above; they were all so small compared to the World-Eater. She couldn’t let any of them die.
She rattled off a hasty plan to Alaric. He looked markedly unimpressed, but he sailed them downward. Bakun’s violet gaze followed them briefly, but then flickered to the host of oncoming dragons. It reared back its head and inhaled at the same time that they did.
A wall of orange flame lit up the night, shooting toward Bakun, bigger than worlds and brighter than suns. Yet it was utterly dwarfed by the tidal wave of amethyst magic that burst forth with another scream from the white dragon’s lips.
Fire and Voidfell hurtled at each other in what promised to be a disastrous collision. The air groaned with the rush of it, the veil between aetherspace and the material realm shattering. Half a second before the two energies could meet in the middle, however, a new shield of black-and-gold magic blossomed between them—from the yacht below.
The eclipse sphere washed over the volcanic peak, caging Bakun in.
The flames from the smaller dragons crashed harmlessly into the barrier and fizzled out. The void blast rebounded off the interior walls, and several splinters of it rained down on the yacht—pummeling the second sphere that Alaric and Talasyn had created within the larger one to protect themselves.
“And now we’re locked in here with the bloodthirsty dragon that breathes death magic,” her husband groused.
“Alaric,” Talasyn said very sweetly, affection and annoyance warring within her, “shut up.”
Bakun was thrashing against the barrier, crying out every time the combined magic scraped at its hide, but still determinedly searching for a way through, even as black gashes appeared across its snow-white scales, ichor dripping down like ink. Talasyn had no idea what the next step was. She and Alaric couldn’t keep up the shield forever—only until the end of the eclipses. When she looked up, she saw that the edge of one moon was already visible, glowing a muted silver through the sphere’s haze.
Talasyn made herself look away—only for her gaze to collide with Bakun’s.
The World-Eater had veered to face her dead-on. Its snout was now level with the yacht, at a distance that was much too close. The rest of its body went still as it tilted its horned head, as though trying to get a better look at her.
She felt it again, that same strange connection in the swirling depths of ancient, aether-touched eyes.
Something called out to her, some urge—whether instinct or compulsion, she couldn’t tell. It tugged at her senses like the beating of battle drums.
Did she dare trust it?
What other option was there?
Alaric spoke, terse and deep. “I think we can kill it. Look at the wounds on its scales, from where it touched the barrier. If we attack it with eclipse magic—”
What he was saying made sense. Killing Bakun would mean cutting off the only source of the Voidfell in all of Lir, but it would ensure that Dead Season never happened again. What was the death of one old thing to save the lives of millions?
And yet—that urge. It grew more and more irrepressible the longer she looked the ancient dragon in the eye. It beckoned to her the way the Light Sever did.
How could she call herself an aethermancer if she didn’t trust her magic? What if she and Alaric could save everyone— and this one thing, too?
Swallowing, Talasyn unraveled the Lightweave encasing the yacht. It fell away from the strands of its shadowy counterpart, and the smaller sphere winked out of existence.
“ You —” Alaric broke off, as though too many choice reprimands had sprung to mind and he couldn’t decide where to start. He stepped between her and Bakun, the outline of his war scythe materializing in his gauntleted fingers.
At the sight of the Shadowforged weapon, Bakun let out a warning snarl and faint plumes of void magic wafted from between its teeth.
Talasyn placed a hand on Alaric’s arm.
“It doesn’t want to fight,” she told him, still locked into a staring match with the World-Eater. “Not really, I don’t think. No beast wants to fight.” It was all the primal need to protect territory, to perpetuate the species, to defend the self. Even wolves went for the easiest prey when they had a choice.
“You’re asking me to trust this thing with your life,” Alaric growled.
“No.” Talasyn smoothed her fingers over his armguard. As soothing a gesture as she could make, given the circumstances. “I’m asking you to trust me .”
He didn’t banish his weapon, but he stayed where he was as she approached Bakun, her steps cautious over the yacht’s wooden deck. Strands of Lightweave peeled away from the main sphere to gather around her like a cloak. Or a shroud. Her magic protecting her the best it could. Her hair stirred in an unnatural wind.
Talasyn stopped walking when the tips of her boots bumped against the yacht’s interior hull and she could go no further. Bakun leaned in slightly, closing up another few inches of distance. She could see every ring on the ivory horns that curved back from its skull, every ridge of the scales that lined its crocodilian face, every crater in its irises. Every star in its slitted black pupils. Without the veil of eclipse magic to obscure it from her sight, something inside her was dragged headlong into whatever lurked in its amethyst eyes.
Aether and memory. It all came down to aether and memory. It was the same here, under the roof of swirling magic and sevenfold eclipse, as it had been that day on the sun-warmed beach when she felt one soul—or shadow of a soul—move through her and Alaric and the sleeping dragon.
Everything was connected, even if sometimes by the skin of one’s teeth.
Within the circle of sariman blood and Rainspring and Tempestroad, everything was amplified.
Even the bleeding of the past into the present. Even an aethermancer’s tether to the currents of what came before.
You know this, Alunsina, said an inner voice that was Talasyn’s own but also not, that was one voice and yet hundreds upon hundreds of voices, a multitude of images racing together like star lines in the dark, their splinters spiraling backward into the rivers of time, red sun, seven moons, an unbroken line of Nenavarene queens who hung the earth upon the waters, speaking to her, speaking through her, from the Sky Above the Sky.
At the dawning of the world, you were there.
You have seen the first dragon’s heart.
Talasyn fell into the same odd vision she’d sporadically been having, but this time the shape of it was solid and clear, the images at last clicking into place in her mind. What she saw wasn’t the future, but the past. The Eversea, darker and deeper, its islands not as defined as they would become by her time. A winged shadow rippling over land and water, white scales undulating through the heavens. A stooped elderly woman, with emeralds woven through her long silver hair, clinging with one gnarled hand for purchase, not to a snow-covered mountain ridge, but to the rough crags of a dragon’s brow. Her other hand rising in the air, fingers stretching shakily, reaching for the crimson orb of a younger sun.
“Not long now,” the old woman murmured, closing her eyes as she soared over the world.
The dragon she was riding let out a harsh cry.
The memory lasted long enough to catch on Talasyn’s heart. Long enough for her to understand.
Then she was back in the present, within the molten sphere, and Bakun was staring at her, its dread jaws moving in a guttural approximation of human speech.
“ Iyaram? ”
There had been no eighth moon. That was a fairy tale spun by the ancestors to explain the vulana stone as much as the phenomenon of eclipse.
But there had been a woman. The first Zahiya-lachis, whose name the dragon had learned to say. Whose death had caused it to rage.
“No, World-Eater.” Talasyn spoke in Nenavarene, in a voice that rang loud and clear within the shimmering black-and-gold walls. “It’s not time yet. Go back to sleep.”
Bakun screamed again. A sound that was somehow as deep as the caverns of night and yet so high that it made the hairs on the back of Talasyn’s neck stand at attention. She was looking down the length of its forked tongue, set into the lilac membranes of its gaping mouth, each razor-sharp tooth that jutted out the size of a grandfather tree. Hot, sulfurous breath engulfed her.
And then the World-Eater rose .
More and more of Bakun emerged from within Aktamasok’s crater. One glistening coil slammed against the side of the yacht, and as the shockwaves of the impact jostled them, the amplifiers burst. The cores within them, having strained for so long, dissolved in an explosion of metalglass and destabilized magic.
The dome of Lightweave and Shadowgate over the volcano flickered, then winked out of existence.
Two more shards of moons had returned to the heavens. In the wan glow they shed, Talasyn saw the wild light of freedom in its eyes as Bakun soared upward.
She didn’t know whether it was instinct or madness this time, the thing that made her do what she did next. Perhaps it was fear—fear of what the creature would wreak if it was let loose over the land. Alaric was trying to re-form the shield, but she leapt from the edge of the yacht and onto Bakun’s neck, using the ledges of the thick scaled hide to pull herself up. She scaled the dragon the way she scaled the ladders and bridges of the vertical mudbrick city where she’d once lived. Higher and higher, air and sky—
A rope of shadow magic wrapped around one of the great spikes running along the leviathan’s spine, and suddenly Alaric was beside her. Beneath the waves of black hair blowing across his newly scarred face, the vein in his temple looked fit to burst. “I swear to the gods , Talasyn!”
“You didn’t have to come along,” she pointed out.
Together they climbed. They climbed the seesawing length of scaled ledges rolling unsteadily until they reached the top of Bakun’s head, where they were in less danger of being thrown off. Clinging to the base of one horn while Alaric claimed the other, Talasyn looked behind and below to see white wings unfold from the crater and through the air. Bakun roared as it shot up into the sky, into the half-lit heavens, leaving behind the Enchanters’ coracles, the smaller dragons, the barren ridge of Aktamasok. The wind currents almost blew Talasyn clear off, and she held fast to Bakun’s horn, flattening herself against the curve of it.
With the creature’s veins thrumming beneath her feet, with her arms around its horn, Talasyn could feel its desire for carnage—she could almost taste the Voidfell on her tongue. Bakun hadn’t left its caverns since it went into its first long sleep. It had been content to wake every thousand years and push out its breath in a ceaseless exhale while still remaining underground.
Until tonight. Until it felt something push back.
Now it stretched its wings, unimpeded by rock and dirt, its body burning like a gigantic furnace. It felt invincible, triumphant. It wanted to swallow the world, it wanted to see her again, it wanted to breathe out —
“No.” Talasyn dug her heels into Bakun’s hide. It huffed, then sailed higher. Higher than airships went. Higher than eagles could go.
It was like riding a mountain, or standing on top of it and feeling it grow, bringing one closer and closer to where the great ships of the ancestors sailed. The chill of the increasing altitudes slammed into Talasyn, quickly followed by … rain?
No— mist .
She spat out a mouthful of cloud. She had a feeling that Alaric would have laughed at her if he weren’t similarly drenched. At first she could see him only in brief flashes of starlight, and then more clearly, the shape of him solidifying in the glow of the moons slowly returning to the sky. Their eyes met as they soared above the world, through pale crescents and silver mist, on ancient wings.
But there was scant opportunity to bask in the marvel of it all—Bakun tossed back its head, giving Talasyn a harrowing jolt that lifted her feet into the air before she tightened her grip on the horn, her teeth clenching from the effort. The dragon screamed again, unleashing a fresh wave of void magic that arced straight up. The clouds fell apart in pulsating streams of violet so bright that their flashes remained etched in her vision long after they had subsided.
Another scream. Another wave. Again and again, eternal. The Voidfell roaring through dragon lungs like chasms, spilling out of a throat that could wrap around the moons. The sky blazed with amethyst fire for miles around.
The World-Eater screamed until it was hoarse, then it kept on screaming, its neck lashing wildly with each new surge of void magic.
And even though the amplifiers were long gone, fragments of ancestral memory remained in Talasyn’s soul. Amidst the cold and the stars they stirred, called forth by Bakun’s cries.
By its lament.
Talasyn moved her scarred right arm as though in a trance. She stroked a shaking hand over the ridge of the creature’s brow. Tears were streaming down her face. Were they hers—or Iyaram’s? Perhaps it didn’t matter. Back then, during the war, she’d never cried. Nenavar had changed that about her as well. And perhaps that, too, was all right.
“It’s not time yet,” she repeated softly. “I’m sorry.” The dragon stilled, hearing her crystal-clear through the beating of its wings, through the howl of wind and the echoes of Voidfell. “Everything ends,” she continued, “even the long night, even grief.” She glanced at Alaric through blurry eyes, and he looked as though he could understand her—if not the words in the Dominion tongue then the tone in which she spoke them. Some things went beyond language. Some things, like loss and hope, were the same all over the world.
“One day all lands will sink beneath the Eversea,” she told Bakun, in a near-whisper now, “and we will meet again. Go back to sleep, World-Eater. Wait for me. ”
The dragon turned around, with a roiling of great scales. It tucked its wings slightly against its sides and plunged into a steep descent.
Talasyn’s arms ached and she was bitterly cold, but she held on because she had no choice. They dived back to earth, breaking through the cloud cover. The sevenfold eclipse was almost over, and the moonlit panorama of ocean and islands rose up to meet them, vague shapes coalescing into their true forms with each second that rushed by. Specks became dragons and moth coracles, shadowy fields became rainforests, and the sea of darker black in their midst became the yawning volcanic crater.
And they were heading straight for it. Straight into it.
As Bakun began sinking into the abyss headfirst, Alaric conjured a grappling hook of shadow magic and flung its barbed ends at the crater’s rim. He swung over to Talasyn’s location, scooped her up by the waist, and then ran up the slope of curving, fast-falling ivory. He jumped off the tip of the dragon’s horn, and then they were dangling from the high rope of his magic, her arms around his neck, the two of them rocked every which way in the mighty gusts of the World-Eater’s passing.
Bakun descended and descended. The white dragon’s return to the crater went on for an age. But eventually the last of it vanished into the darkness, the rumbling faded away, and all seven of Lir’s satellites wreathed the sky above in their shining fullness.
Moonlit silence and moonlit stillness prevailed, broken only by the hum of approaching coracles, by dragons peering over the crater and then gliding away once they saw that Talasyn was in one piece.
“Never do that again,” Alaric snapped.
“What?” Talasyn mumbled against his chest. “Ride a millennia-old dragon who tries to destroy the world every thousand years because it’s still carrying a torch for my ancestor?”
He sighed. “This country is infuriating.” His hand around her waist raked a claw down her hip, a clumsy caress. “Almost as infuriating as you.”
She fought back a smile. They were still hanging precariously from the crater’s rim, with nothing but miles of darkness below their feet, and yet somehow she wasn’t worried. Alaric would never let her fall.