43. Even in the Shadow
Chapter 43
Even in the Shadow
18 th Day of the Blood Moon
The Burnt Lands – Winter, Year 3081 After Doom
Arden knelt with his hand on the N’aka’s rib cage, his blade slick with blood. They were the strangest creatures he’d ever laid eyes on. Recesses where ears should have been, dark grey skin tight as a drum, hind legs all thickly bunched muscle.
The third set of limbs that protruded from the sides of their deep chests seemed entirely unnatural, with dark scythe-like talons stretching half the length of his arm. If there had been no other evidence of Efialtír’s effect on this place, these creatures would have been enough.
He wiped the blood from his blade on the creature’s hide, then slid it back into its scabbard as he stood. Fifty of the N’aka lay dead in the sand around him, knights of The First and The Second standing amidst the bodies. They’d been prowling in the dunes since not long after the knights had arrived, far braver than they had been when the sun had been up the last time Arden had crossed the wasteland. Though they had still waited for the sun to sink behind the mountains before attacking.
Calen had said he would reach the city by sunset on the fifth day. That was some hours past. Arden would have worried if Calen hadn’t been late to just about everything in his life, including his own birth.
“I hate this place,” Lyrin whispered as he approached, staring over Arden’s shoulder. Sweat rolled down the man’s nose and streaked his brow. Even in winter’s grasp, the Burnt Lands were a furnace. “The Taint coats every grain of sand and covers every rock and stone. Just being here makes my skin crawl.”
Arden turned to face the city.
Browned and broken walls rose in patches, sand stretching in paths through gaps the size of houses in the stonework. The highest points were at least two hundred feet, crenellated battlements mounted at the top. Some sections of wall stood like islands, surrounded by sand and half-buried rubble. It was clear that at some point, monstrous towers had intersected the walls at set intervals, but now only a handful remained. Enormous platforms sat at the towers’ tops, large enough for dragons, the remnants of mighty support beams bracing the bottoms. Through the openings in the wall and above the parapet, ruined towers and buildings climbed towards the sky, broken and battered.
Ahead, Kallinvar, Ruon, Ildris, and Sister-Captain Arlena stood about a jagged rock that protruded from the sand, their gazes all fixed on the city. The decision had been made not to enter until Calen arrived. None wanted to spend a second longer within the broken walls than they had to, which Arden understood. He hadn’t been there the night the Blood Moon had risen. He hadn’t watched his brothers and sisters be cut down, their souls torn from the world – but he had felt it. He had felt each and every one of them die.
They had scouted the outskirts around the walls and found signs of Bloodspawn and Lorians alike, but with the sand and the heat, it was difficult to tell how long ago anything or anyone had passed through.
“How does the armour feel?” Varlin approached from the left, her helm receding into her armour, white cloak fluttering at her back. Valtaran tattoos ran down the shaved sides of her head, the hair from the top pulled into a long plait. She looked past Arden to Brother Kevan, who stood behind him.
“Strange.” Brother Kevan looked down at the dark green armour that covered his body. As he did, the metal melted and pulled back over his fingers, exposing hard, calloused hands. The man was midway between his thirtieth and fortieth summer, his long black hair streaked with grey. “It weighs nothing, like a second skin… and yet…” He allowed the metal to flow back over his fingers, flexing them as he did. “I’ve never felt so strong in my life.”
“It takes a while to get used to.” Varlin gave Kevan a half-smile. “It all does. Though I’d argue the Rift takes the longest.”
“Well,” Lyrin interrupted. “Coming back from the claws of death and gaining eternal life in the service of a god was the difficult part for me, but we all have our things.”
Varlin glanced at Lyrin, then back to Kevan, giving an upturn of her lip. “If a squirrel could talk, Brother Kevan, its name would be Lyrin.”
“And if a sword had a sense of humour, it would be funnier than Sister Varlin.”
“Kevan…” the newly anointed knight whispered, shaking his head softly.
“It gets easier,” Arden said to Kevan as Lyrin and Varlin mocked each other back and forth. “All of it does.”
Kevan gave Arden a placating smile that faded faster than it had appeared.
“I was two years in the knighthood before I stepped back through the Rift after taking the Sigil. You’ve had to do it in only a span of weeks. It can be overwhelming.”
Kevan shook his head, staring off at the shattered walls of Ilnaen. “That’s a word all right.” He paused, letting out a short sigh. “The city of Ilnaen,” he whispered, just loud enough for Arden to hear. “Not in a hundred years would I have believed you if you’d told me I’d lay eyes on Ilnaen’s walls. Not in a thousand. You’re a Southerner?”
“Mmm.” The use of the word ‘Southerner’ chafed at Arden.
“Where I was raised, we were taught this place was the root of all evil. This city was the seat of The Order’s power. It was from here that they burned and slaughtered at their whim. From here they orchestrated wars and wove lies. The death of this place was the beginning of peace.” Kevan gave a laugh, catching the look on Arden’s face. “Don’t look so shocked. I was raised smarter than to believe tales woven by the victors of war.”
“And yet you joined the Inquisition.”
“We live in a world of ever-shifting grey,” Kevan said, quoting the words of his vow.
Arden grunted.
“The beauty of living today, Brother Arden , is we can look on the past with knowledge we never had. Just because something isn’t the right decision now doesn’t mean it wasn’t the right decision then. We do what we can with what we have. I made my choices, and if not for you and this knighthood, I would have died for them, and that would have been a fair enough death.”
Before Arden could answer, Lyrin turned his head towards the sky, prompting Arden to do the same.
High above, in the perpetual twilight that was the Burnt Lands, Valerys soared, white scales stark against the night.
Valerys levelled out, spreading his wings wide and riding a current. Calen’s hands rested on the leather straps tied around Valerys’s neck and over his chest to carry the supplies. He pulled his breaths in slow, a contrast to the beating of his heart, which thumped like a galloping horse.
The horizon bled crimson, the red moon bright in the dark sky. The city of Ilnaen lay before him.
Calen had lost count of the number of times he’d seen a place so much larger than The Glade he’d scarcely believed it. The first time he’d seen Camylin, Calen had been but a boy. The sheer size of it had left him silent for almost an hour. The white walls and gargantuan towers of Midhaven had taken his breath away. But even they had paled in comparison to the legendary cities of Belduar and Durakdur, to which even the bards’ tales had failed to do justice. Arisfall, Berona, and Aravell had all held their own wonders, their own awe.
But even in ruins, broken and shattered, Ilnaen surpassed them all. It had to have been three times the size of Berona, perhaps more. Past the sundered remnants of the old walls – sections of which still stood higher than Midhaven’s tallest towers – the ruins of old structures spread into the distance as far as the eye could see. Their damage was too great, and too much time had passed to tell what most of the buildings had one day been.
Thump.
The heartbeat of the lost city resounded in Calen’s mind, and the familiar ringing noise filled his ears, low but rising. His vision flicked, blurring, colours shifting. He didn’t fight it this time, he leaned into it. If he truly was a druid, if he truly could see glimpses of the past, maybe, just maybe he could see something that might help the present.
The sound of the rushing wind dulled until all Calen could hear was the low, rising noise and the beating of three hearts: his own, Valerys’s, and that of the city itself.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
On the third beat, the light of the world blinked and darkness consumed him. A moment of panic flared in Calen’s heart. He exhaled slowly, calming himself.
The ringing stopped.
Light spilled from the edges of Calen’s vision, pure and golden. It rolled over the mountains to the east, flowing like a river across the land, illuminating the world itself.
The city of Ilnaen was whole. Its white walls stood tall as mountains, glistening as though polished. Towers broke the walls at regular intervals, each almost fifty feet wide and topped with platforms large enough for even Avandeer to land. Enormous banners hung just below the battlements, white-backed with the symbol of The Order displayed in black and ornamented with elaborate patterns of gold that wound into roaring dragon heads.
Four towers in the city stood above all. One at the northern edge, one to the east, one to the west, and one near its centre, attached by a bridge to a fortified keep that was larger than Belduar’s entire Inner Circle. He allowed his gaze to linger a little longer on the western tower. That must have been the tower Aeson spoke of: the western hatchery. The place where Alvira had first met Eluna.
The outer towers stood at least four hundred feet tall, maybe taller. But the tower at the city’s centre rose higher again, with a domed golden roof that sparkled like glass in the sun. The Tower of Faith, the tower where Alvira and the council had died. Therin had spoken of it often in his teachings. And Calen remembered viscerally the dream in which he’d seen through Vyldrar’s eyes. He could still feel the dragon’s fear as Helios tore him from the side of the tower, the fear of not being able to protect her, of leaving her alone in the world. And he remembered the moment the dragon had died, the moment his soul had shattered. That moment would stay with him for the rest of his life.
The land around the city was lush and vibrant, rivers flowing through dense vegetation and woodland, wide-open plains of grass crawling towards the mountains.
A roar sounded above Calen, followed by a dragon twice Valerys’s size with scales of polished silver flecked with ruby. The creature’s wings were a pale red, its horns the colour of sun-bleached bone.
The dragon soared past Calen and Valerys, sweeping a gust in its wake. Three more roars sounded, each belonging to another dragon that streaked past Valerys on the right and left. The dragons varied in size and colour, one not much larger than Valerys himself with ochre-brown scales, black wings, and long spindly limbs. The four dragons twisted and turned in the air, weaving about each other with abandon.
Something about the way the dragons moved spoke of pure joy. As he watched, he began to notice that even more dragons flew above the city and in the sky beyond. And just as many lazed about atop the platforms, deep in sleep. So many. Maybe a hundred, maybe more. The sight of such a number in one place sent a feeling of elation through the bond, so strong that Calen wasn’t sure if it originated in himself or Valerys.
A blood-chilling, earth-rending scream erupted, followed by another, and another, and another. The world flashed and shifted before his eyes. The sky bled red light, rain sheeted, and arcs of lightning tore through dark clouds and crashed into the buildings below. Columns of fire plumed across the night, crashing over scales and melting steel. Below, the city burned, flames consuming everything.
A crack sounded, and a tower fell, collapsing inwards and sinking into the flames.
Calen’s heart stopped as a shriek rang out and an enormous grey dragon buried its claws into another less than half its size and ripped its neck clean from its body, blood spraying. While the two halves of the smaller creature fell towards the city, the grey dragon rained fire over a stretch of wall.
Everywhere Calen looked, dragons ripped each other apart, fire and lightning flashing.
And then, for a moment, it all stopped. The Blood Moon was gone, the golden sun returned. The roars and shrieks quieted, the wails of the dying fading. The city was as it had been minutes before: pristine, peaceful, and full of wonder. The banners flapped in the wind, and dragons soared on the breeze.
Calen’s heart had just enough time to find hope when the world shifted and the city was ablaze once more. Four dragons ripped through the air, tearing strips from each other, rending scales and slashing wings. Jaws wrapped around necks, legs, and tails. Talons sliced into bellies. All the while, the Draleid who sat on the dragons’ backs wove tapestries of the Spark, whips of Air and Fire, arcs of lightning, shards of rain frozen into missiles.
A rush of wind gusted past Calen’s face, and he looked down to see the same beautiful silver-scaled dragon he’d seen earlier. The creature thrashed and shrieked as three others fell upon it with tooth and talon. Its pale red wings flapped helplessly, wet with blood, the membrane shredded. The other dragons tore at its belly, slicing the wondrous creature open, innards spilling into the sky. It unleashed a blood-chilling screech as another tore its wing from its body and buried a talon in the wound.
Calen pulled his gaze away, unable to watch, his stomach turning.
Once more the world blinked, and the red sky turned to warm marigold, birdsong replacing dying shrieks, the soft glow of lanterns supplanting the blazing flames.
A dragon soared past, scales and wings like a painting of the night sky, savage horns dark as stone. The scales along its snout and chest were lighter in colour, pale as the bellflowers in Verna Gritten’s garden. The creature was equal parts power and beauty, devastating and regal. When it angled its wings and swooped back around, Calen finally saw the face of the Draleid on its back.
Aeson Virandr.
The man couldn’t have seen much more than his twentieth summer, his skin smooth and unmarked by time, not a trace of grey in his hair. He wore the white plate of The Order, twin swords with ball pommels on his back.
A sudden realisation touched Calen that the dragon upon which Aeson rode was Lyara. The sight of her twisted in Calen’s chest. She was beautiful, truly beautiful.
Again, the world snapped and turned to blood and fire, continuously shifting and changing as Calen followed Aeson and Lyara through the raging battlefield in the sky. Nothing could have prepared Calen for the carnage that ensued.
Aeson and Lyara only flew where the fighting was thickest. They threw themselves into the heart of everything. One after another, they tore traitors from the sky. They were relentless, savage, brutal. But for every foe they slew, they watched two of their kin die.
And then something changed in the air, in the light, in the very fabric of everything. He could feel it. A flash of blinding light consumed Calen’s vision.
Screams followed. Screams, and shrieks, and wails, and roars.
As the light dimmed, Calen watched Lyara climb towards the sky, tearing upwards with every drop of strength in her body, flames licking at her tail, lightning flashing in the night. Across the city, hundreds of winged shapes did the same. Friend and foe were forgotten as the flames rolled over the city like a tidal wave, growing with every second, taller and wider. Everything in its path died. Every man, woman, elf, Jotnar, Urak, dragon – everything.
Any dragon who did not rise quick enough was devoured, vanishing into nothing, their dying screams swallowed whole.
Calen trembled, his heart breaking, tears streaming down his face as he watched what he had always known as ‘The Fall’. He knew now how utterly and completely inadequate that name was.
This was not a fall. It was not even a battle. It was slaughter and carnage, destruction and death on a scale incomprehensible to both heart and mind. This was everything dark and hopeless about the world.
The flames rose higher and spread relentlessly to the east and west, the light filling Calen’s eyes. Everything shifted one final time, and Calen found himself once more staring out over the ruins of the city he had just watched burn, sand glittering pink in the wind.
He slumped forwards, pressing his chest against Valerys’s warm scales, chest heaving, his brow slick with cold sweat. The dragon’s mind pulled at him, their pain shared, their agony bleeding from both hearts. Valerys had seen it too, seen the butchery – or at least he had felt it through Calen.
“I’m here,” Calen whispered.
Calen looked out over the city before them, overlaying the beauty of what he had seen atop the rubble of what remained. All four of the great towers were shattered. Of them all, the eastern tower retained the most of its original height but was still a shadow of what it had once been. The keep at the centre was now a mound of brown rock, with worn slits for windows and sand spilling from every crack. Its splendour was gone, its memory reduced to nothing. And the Blood Moon looked down over it all, mocking with its red light.
With a heavy sigh, Calen lifted himself so he sat upright. Everywhere he looked he saw echoes of the vision. He supposed that’s what they were – visions. Visions of the past.
Valerys banked left, the air shifting around Calen, the wind blustering against his face and through his hair. They were to meet Haem and the knights by the walls near the western hatchery tower.
Alvira’s second letter to Eluna had said she’d left ‘everything’ – whatever ‘everything’ was – at the place where they’d first met. And according to Aeson, that was the western hatchery tower. Though it was now nothing but rocks and rubble.
They found the knights precisely where they’d said they’d be, a host of fourteen, each garbed in that strange green armour.
Sand whipped in spirals as Valerys alighted at the foot of a dune, talons sinking. With the sun set, the air held the same chill as it had in the clouds, Calen’s breath pluming before him. He’d forgotten how swiftly the heat fled the Burnt Lands as the night rose.
Valerys leaned forwards, extending his winged forelimb, and Calen slid from his place at the nape of the dragon’s neck. He landed with a thump, his pulse still racing.
“Brother.” Haem marched towards Calen, his armour turning to liquid as he walked, flowing over his body and vanishing into his chest. He grasped Calen’s forearm, then pulled him in close, squeezing him in a tight bearhug. Haem let out a relieved sigh. “You had me worried.”
Calen savoured the embrace before answering. After the events of the last two years, he’d learned to savour the moments with the ones he loved. “The storm at Land’s End was unrelenting, and Valerys was still weak after Aravell. We spent the night in Fort Saldar.”
Haem pulled back and stared into Calen’s eyes, a soft smile on his lips. “You’re here now.”
The rest of the knights gathered round as Valerys lowered his head and nudged his snout into Haem’s chest, a soft rumble resonating in his throat.
Grandmaster Kallinvar greeted Calen with a grim expression, Ruon and the other knights of Haem’s chapter at his side. N’aka bodies decorated the sand, fifty or more at least.
“Any sign of the Uraks or the Lorians?” Calen asked.
Kallinvar shook his head. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not here. And even with the tear mended, the Taint still clings to this city like a parasite. We will not be alone here.” He gestured towards the packs strapped to Valerys’s chest. “I hope your armour is in there.”
The absolute silence of Ilnaen made Arden aware of every breath he drew, every step he took, every rasp and clink of steel as he moved. Sounds echoed in the city, bouncing off the sand-stained rock and along the exposed paved path where the winds had cleared the cracked stone. If Bloodspawn or Lorians did await them within the city’s depths, they would have heard them coming the moment they’d passed the walls.
Arden eyed the rooftops and the vacant windows, looking for shifting shadows or any signs of movement.
A whoosh sounded as Valerys swept overhead, whipping up sand in his wake, his massive white wings glinting like rubies in the moon’s light.
It had been agreed that the dragon would scout overhead while Calen and the knights searched the ruins of the western tower. At the least, if something came for them, they would have warning.
“He seems different,” Lyrin whispered, gesturing to Calen, who walked ahead, the purple glow of the runes in his armour washing over the sand.
Lyrin was right. Calen did seem different. Colder, harsher, more distant. He’d not spoken a word more than he’d had to before entering the city, and now he walked in silence, entirely focused on the western tower.
It seemed every time Arden laid eyes on his brother, the young man had changed and grown. He was barely recognisable from the boy of sixteen summers Arden had left in The Glade. That boy had been sweet and gentle, if a little headstrong. He’d looked to Arden for everything, never straying too far.
Arden remembered on his fifteenth summer, Calen had helped their mam make him an apple and blackberry tart, but Calen had mistaken salt for sugar. Calen had only been eleven at the time, and he’d stared up at Arden, expectation in his young eyes, a beaming smile spread across his face, the last of his baby teeth having been knocked out when he fell from a tree the week prior.
The image of Calen’s gap tooth smile caused Arden to laugh. He’d eaten three slices of that tart while Calen had watched and refused to take a slice for himself because the tart wasn’t for him. It was only when Freis had tasted a piece and her eyes had bulged that she’d asked Calen to help her with the washing and gestured for Arden to get rid of the tart’s remains.
Arden had vomited not fifty feet from the house, right into Tach Edwin’s roses. He’d not had the heart to tell Calen.
Calen was a man now, and that broad toothy smile was rarer than gold. He was a man weighed down by the things boys did not have to know. There came a point, Arden had realised, where all children discovered the darkness in people, where they saw what living things were willing to do to each other. That point was the death of innocence. He’d hoped to keep Calen ignorant for a little longer, to shield him, but the gods had other plans. He’d tried to do the same for Ella, but she’d always been too sharp, always noticed things more quickly than others. She’d understood the world long before Arden had hoped she would.
That sweet boy still existed somewhere in his brother, he was sure of it. But it was somewhere deep, somewhere in the darkness.
Even in ruins, the western hatchery tower still rose some two hundred feet, deep gouges raked all through the stone. After the centuries, the sand had stained the white walls a pale brown, scorch marks still visible where the lightning had struck. The top was shattered and broken, while the courtyard surrounding its base was a mix of rubble, sand, and bones.
Slabs of stone twice the size of Calen jutted from the ground, skeletons and armour peeking through the sand that cradled them.
A massive skull, five times as high as Calen was tall, rested near the tower’s base, a crack splitting the bone around the right eye. The body was nowhere in sight. Here and there enormous ribcages and a variety of enormous bones lay strewn about, discoloured by the many centuries in the sand.
A wave of sorrow flooded him, pushing from Valerys’s mind to his. The dragon circled overhead but saw the devastation through Calen’s eyes.
Calen took a few steps forward and brushed his boot across the sand, exposing a small piece of The Order’s sigil that had been inlaid in black stone. The centre of the sigil was no more. A crater, half-filled with sand, sat in its place.
Thump.
Calen’s vision blurred, and that same sound – the beating heart of Ilnaen – hammered in his mind.
The world shifted again, and Calen was staring down at the same sigil, but this time it gleamed with orange-red light, blood smeared across its polished surface. Calen lifted his gaze to see fires blazing around him as Uraks, humans, elves, and Jotnar hacked each other to pieces.
Everywhere he looked, steel sliced through flesh and blood sprayed. The roar of the flames and the clang of clashing steel dulled the screams and howls. Calen had seen battle, many times now, and he always thought it was chaos. But he’d been wrong. This was chaos. There was no rhyme nor reason to the killing, no purpose, just slaughter.
Elves in golden armour butchered each other without prejudice while Uraks drove black steel through anything that moved. Even warriors in the white plate that Calen recognised as The Order Highguard carved each other apart. On the left side of the yard, two Jotnar fought back to back against a clutch of Battlemages with glowing red gemstones hanging around their necks.
A shriek rang out above as a bolt of lightning slammed into a dragon’s flank in a brilliant flash. The creature tumbled through the sky, one wing streaking flames, trying in vain to recover its flight. The air shivered with a scream, and a large dragon with dull purple scales slammed into the other and smashed it into the side of the tower.
Chunks of stone came loose, crashing into the ground around Calen, crushing bodies in bursts of gore and bone.
The larger dragon ripped the other away from the tower’s wall, talons sinking into its soft underbelly as jaws wrapped around its neck. The two dragons spiralled downwards, scales cracking and shattering, blood raining down over the fighting below.
A terrible cracking sound was followed by a roar, and the larger dragon ripped its foe’s head clean from its neck, leaving both parts to crash to the ground at the base of the tower. Even then, the larger dragon had taken too many wounds and was falling too fast. It twisted and splayed its wings, then smashed into the side of a tall white structure at the edge of the yard. The creature crushed three score beneath it. Sixty lives snuffed out in an instant.
Calen looked back towards the base of the tower, finding himself staring into the open red eye of the smaller dragon’s severed head. The left eye stared straight at Calen, lifeless and empty. The right eye was a gaping wound of blood and gore. The creature’s tongue lolled out through its jagged teeth, blood dripping from the end.
As he stared slack-jawed into the creature’s only remaining eye, the red iris flecked with gold, the world blinked.