55. Choices
Chapter 55
Choices
18 th Day of the Blood Moon
Berona – Winter, Year 3081 After Doom
“This depicts the first ever taming of black lions by Thrandon Firehand, before Loria was even a kingdom – four hundred and nine After Doom, I believe.” Fane stood with his hands clasped behind his back, fingers interlocked. The wall before him was adorned with a tapestry woven in fine threads of gold, crimson, and black, accented by thin embellishments of pure white.
Eltoar was silent at Fane’s left shoulder. The elf had taken the loss of Catagan as a personal failure. Near enough a hundred thousand had died. Almost every living soul within the city. Some reports said the city’s garrison had surrendered and the elves had slaughtered them anyway, while others insisted the garrison had fought till the end, refusing to yield the city to the foreign invaders. Fane found it unlikely that the elves had refused the garrison’s surrender, but it was not a rumour he was going to stop.
“As it moves on,” Fane said, pointing from the left side of the tapestry and then across its length, “it traces the Lorian history from the first king, Orden Ubbein, all the way to now. Every thread of it was woven by hand. One of the largest of its kind created without the Spark. A true testament to human craftsmanship and dedication. I wouldn’t have the patience for it.”
“Is there a point to this?”
Fane raised an eyebrow and examined his old friend. The frustration was precisely what he had hoped for. “Understanding our past, understanding where we came from, is important, do you not think?”
“This is not where I came from.” Eltoar matched Fane in clasping his hands behind his back.
“But it is where you are now.”
“I will take Helios to wing and recall Lyina,” Eltoar said, ignoring Fane. “The elven dragons haven’t left Catagan since the city was taken. I will set sentries on watch with signal fires in a perimeter around Catagan. They will not catch us off guard again. Voranur can go to muster more spears, men and women across the lakelands who have been displaced from their homes. Once they see him waving the banner, they will flock. Salara and her Draleid will be reluctant to face all three of us in the open sky. If we force it, storm the city with everything we have, we can end this?—”
“We are losing this war, Eltoar.” Fane’s words echoed in the silent chamber. “We are losing it, and if something drastic does not change, everything we have built, everything we have sacrificed, will have been for nothing. All that was lost at Ilnaen and in the years that followed.”
The mere mention of Ilnaen had a tendency to leave Eltoar speechless. That was a wound Fane chose to prod with the utmost caution. It was a useful trigger when called upon, but a delicate one. A single candle could light a room but, if left unattended, could burn that same room to the ground. “We could never have planned for this, old friend. Even if we take the city. Even if we rip every last one of their dragons from the sky, put their soldiers to the sword, and burn Queen Vandrien alive, our losses would be incalculable. And all three of our Draleid would not leave the field of battle. We would succeed only in wiping the elves from the conflict, and ourselves in turn. With the burning of Aonar added to our injuries, we are now short on gold as well as iron and food. The Uraks would obliterate what was left of us while the rebels feast on the carcass. We are a wounded animal, and the blood is drawing everything that thinks it has a chance.”
Eltoar turned to face Fane. “And I’m sure what comes next is the plan you have devised, as you always do.”
Fane snorted through his nostrils, giving a half-smile. “I have always prided myself on my understanding of the world and the people within it. On my ability to navigate whatever the traitor gods could throw against me. But I fear, in this, my friend, I have failed. I cannot see a path forward from this place where all Epheria is not on fire. Everything we have done was to create a stronger, better world. A world we were promised by The Order… But we stand at a juncture now. Our Draleid are whittled to just three, our armies wounded, our cities burning, our coffers and stores at the end of their lives. We face too many foes on too many sides. Our defeat at Catagan was unequivocal, and now the elves are in the heart of our lands with a fervour in their blood. The rebels attacked the High Tower itself – the beating heart of the Circle. The Uraks feed off the Blood Moon as we do. And so we lose ground with each day. With the Heart of Blood, I could bring Efialtír through the veil between worlds, end this war… perhaps even bring life back to the dormant eggs. But without it, I fear all may be lost.”
“Bring life back to the eggs…” Eltoar’s stare grew hard as steel. “You keep saying this, but is it possible? Truly? Or are you simply dangling hope before my eyes?”
Fane nodded slowly. “It is possible, I swear it by the blood in my veins. If there is any hope of it, we must find the Heart, and we must do it before the Blood Moon sets.” He shook his head. “If we don’t, the world will have seen the last of the dragons and the last of the Lorian Empire.”
Eltoar’s expression remained unshifting, but Fane could see the loss in his eyes. He could see it in the way Eltoar’s shoulders slumped just a fraction, in the way that the most powerful individual Fane had ever known refused to make eye contact.
Guilt, shame, regret. Fane could feel all three wafting from the Draleid. “It is I who am to blame, old friend. I and I alone.” Fane shook his head and turned to pick up the goblet of Etrusian wine he’d left on a nearby table. He folded his arms and sipped at the beautiful liquid, savouring the taste. “I should have guarded the Heart more carefully. Shouldn’t have been so careless, so trusting.”
Fane studied Eltoar’s face as he spoke the words. He was almost precisely where Fane needed him to be. “We sacrificed so much, and now, due to my hubris and my complacency, we risk it all. How different everything would be if I’d not allowed it to be taken from beneath my nose. Perhaps our skies would be full and our lands peaceful.”
Eltoar brought his hands around to his front and reclasped them, then let out a long, weighty sigh. “We succeed together, and we fail together, my friend. I am sorry for my dour mood.” He shook his head. “Salara was my apprentice. I should have seen her ploy coming. I, too, have grown complacent, and we suffered for it. My pride does not take that wound well. And if I am honest, the thought of facing her in battle does not sit well with me either.”
“No matter what she has done in the past four centuries, Salara is no match for you and Helios.”
“It is not my death I fear. It is hers. Enough of my kind have died at my hand. It does not sit weightless upon me.”
Something moved within Fane. Before The Fall, he had grown to consider Eltoar a true friend. And in the years that followed, that had only strengthened as they’d fought side by side. But when the dust had settled, when the war was all but won, when dragon bones littered the lands and rivers ran red with blood, Eltoar had withdrawn into himself. They had spoken often, and their friendship had never waned, but Eltoar was not the same. He had never spoken of his regrets, never said a word. He was a warrior, and he pushed forwards. This… this admission was something Fane could use. “You did what you needed to do. Nothing more. Nothing less.”
Eltoar gave a short sigh through his nostrils. “All great things require sacrifice?”
“Indeed.”
“But where is the line we draw?” Eltoar lifted his head and stared into Fane’s eyes. “Where is the point in which we realise we have sacrificed too much and gained too little?”
“What brings this on?” Fane gestured to a second goblet, offering Eltoar wine. It wouldn’t take much more.
The Draleid stared at the goblet for a few seconds before allowing Fane to pour. “Think not of it,” he said as he took the goblet and drained half in a single mouthful. “My mind wanders of late. Losing Pellenor, seeing Salara, the word of an egg hatching, I… My apologies. I shouldn’t trouble you with this.” He shook his head again and drained the goblet, making to leave. “These are my wounds to bear. My mistakes. My burdens.”
Fane placed his goblet on the table and grabbed Eltoar by the arm. “Brothers in battle are brothers in life, Eltoar. Sit. I will have more wine brought. We will talk into the night if we have to. I would not see your heart bear the weight of this all.”
“No. I have no desires to drown my sorrows. There is too much to be done to wallow.” Eltoar held Fane’s gaze. Something shifted in the Draleid’s eyes, a change, a thought. “We will win this war. I will not allow everything we have done to be for nothing. I cannot allow it. Do you understand me? I cannot.”
“I have heralds and Chosen and hundreds of mages scouring the continent in search of the Heart.” Fane held on to Eltoar’s arm as he spoke. “If we can find it before the Blood Moon sets, we may yet save the lives of millions and change the face of Epheria forever.”
Eltoar turned to leave.
“Where are you going?” Fane asked, the answer already confirmed in his mind. He knew by the look in Eltoar’s eyes that he had found his thief.
“To win this war.”
Eltoar walked through Berona’s northern gates and out into the motley collection of hastily constructed shelters that many of the refugees had taken to building after the city had reached its limit. In the dark of night, the trodden paths of mud and dirt were empty save for a few souls who huddled around fires. The sight of it cut into Eltoar. This was everything he’d been trying to stop. The wars, the death, the suffering. It was always the common people who paid the heaviest price. Always.
By Alvira’s time, The Order had waged wars for no reason other than building favour and filling their coffers. And while the gold and silver piled high, the council members and those too ignorant or blind to see the truth revelled in their power. But Eltoar saw the truth. He saw the fields of charred corpses. He watched mothers and fathers weep as they held the bodies of their children. He heard the cries of the mutilated and the maimed. Eltoar had walked through the aftermath of every battle, forced himself to look and to listen, forced himself to understand the cost. Alvira had too, and she had wept and drowned her misery in wine. And though she would protest, voice her dissent, she would always, inevitably, obey. She was a truly good soul, but she was blind, and her heart was weak.
Images of her headless body circled in Eltoar’s mind. Killing Alvira was the darkest of all his memories. Fane had insisted upon it. Alvira needed to die for The Order to fall. And Eltoar needed to be able to sacrifice the things he loved to forge a better world for the people he wished to protect. And he did sacrifice, because when everything was said and done, his purpose as a Draleid was nothing more than to keep the people of Epheria safe. At his core, that was all he was meant to do.
And now, there he was, four hundred years later, the same crimson moon in the sky, everything he’d ever loved dead, and those same people were still the casualties of someone else’s war. He could not allow all that sacrifice to be for nothing. He could not allow Alvira’s death to be for nothing.
The black mountain that was Helios shifted as Eltoar reached the outskirts of the dwellings, his back rising higher than the city walls, his wings blocking out all light. The crimson in the dragon’s wings glistened in the pale pink light of the Blood Moon, seeming to almost shimmer. Shocked voices rose in the night as the dragon shifted, the ground trembling beneath his weight, a low rumble resonating in his throat.
Rain began to sprinkle from the grey clouds as though roused by the great dragon, moonlight shimmering in the droplets.
Torches shifted on the walls, soldiers moving about to get a better look as Helios lowered his head to greet Eltoar. Helios let out a puff, and a gust of warm air washed over Eltoar’s entire body.
Eltoar didn’t speak. He simply pressed his forehead against the scales of the dragon’s lower jaw and ran his hand along a horn longer than his leg. They did not need words. He closed his eyes and pulled their minds together. Everything blended into one. The world did not exist beyond the pair of them.
Memories flashed through their shared mind. Hundreds of dragons and Draleid dying. Killed. Murdered. Slaughtered. All at their hands. The images were blood and fire. Together they had burned cities to the ground and laid waste to armies of thousands.
Pain. Loss. Anguish. Misery.
All done for a reason, for a purpose. To create a better world. A world where Draleid and dragons were not used like pieces on a board by kings and queens who cared little for anything or anyone but themselves. People who sat on thrones or in ornate chairs of marble and gold they refused to call thrones.
Eltoar and Helios had done things they both knew were terrible, monstrous even. Because they had been willing to sacrifice their own honour to protect the people of Epheria. If history called them monsters, so be it. But they had sworn to be guardians of those not strong enough to stand for themselves, they had given their solemn vow… just as the rest of The Order had.
Images of the soldiers burning at the Battle of the Three Sisters flowed from Helios to Eltoar, and he answered with thoughts of Catagan and of all the eastern cities, burned to ash.
If they did not do what needed to be done, then every sacrifice they had made would be in vain. The people they had tried to protect would be ground to dust.
“It’s time, old friend.”
A high-pitched sound pulsed from the dragon’s throat, followed by a low rumble. A blurred image of a white dragon held in Helios’s mind.
“We will protect them. I promise you.”
More images followed of Vyrmír and Salara and the other dragons and Draleid loyal to the elves of Lynalion.
There were two wars raging. The war for Epheria. And the war for the survival of dragons and Draleid as a species.
“We will cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, we must make haste. Every hour counts.”
Once Eltoar had mounted Helios, the dragon took a few steps from the city, cracked his mighty wings, and took flight.
Leaves and twigs swirled in the air, thin trees bending and bowing in the dragon’s wake.
They flew for hours, north, over the Kolmir Mountains. They passed the rubble of what had once been Fort Harken, torn down by the Urak hordes, its inhabitants harvested for their Essence. Reaching the river Talinik, they headed northeast.
Even through Helios’s eyes, the city of Catagan was nothing but a speck in the distance. Reports had already come in that the elves were reconstructing the city. Some had claimed that as many as fifty dragons soared through the skies over the city. Eltoar doubted that number. If the elves had that kind of advantage, they would have pressed it, Blood Moon or no.
Even so, he dared not fly closer, instead pulling Helios higher through the clouds, emerging on the other side to an endless canopy of grey and white tinged pink with the moon’s light.
The air was thinner that high, breaths shorter. But the sight itself was worth it a thousand times over. It was a different world altogether. A world without war, without death and loss.
It was peace. Peace and solitude, those were two things Eltoar and Helios had little of in their lives.
After a time, and with much regret, they dipped back below the clouds, the darkness of night lifting. By the time the discordant peaks of the Sea of Stone came into view, the warm light of the rising sun was spilling over the horizon. The mountainscape was the largest in all Epheria by a great margin, stretching north as far as even Helios could see, hundreds upon hundreds of miles in all directions.
When he was nothing but a young apprentice, his master had taught him that the Sea of Stone was created during the great wars before even the Blodvar. Master Ochra had said that the mountains were formed in the wake of a dying god, the world reclaiming the god’s bones and blood for its own.
There were, of course, a thousand theories as to how the Sea of Stone came to be, but Eltoar had always preferred his master’s. The thought that the mountains had come from the body of a dead god was a comforting one. It meant that gods could die.
They dropped lower as the mountains swallowed the ground beneath them. The peaks were so high and wide that even Helios could become lost in the spaces between.
Helios spread his wings as wide as he could, over five hundred feet from tip to tip, and even still could not span the valley between the rock faces.
The dragon alighted in an arid basin, where two thin streams trickled from within the mountain.
Eltoar slid from Helios’s back before the dragon’s talons had touched the ground, allowing himself to drift in freefall before whipping threads of Air about himself and landing as gently as a feather.
Helios lowered his head and pressed his snout into Eltoar. The dragon’s lower jaw alone was larger than Eltoar was tall.
“We must be completely aligned,” Eltoar said as he pressed his head into Helios’s scales. He clenched his hands into fists and rested them on either side of his head. He could sense Helios’s uncertainty.
“For four hundred years, we have held it and we have watched. What would you have us do?” he whispered.
Helios let out a low whine, the vibration thrumming through Eltoar. The sound spoke of regret, of sorrow, but also of acceptance.
“If you think it is the wrong choice, I will stand by you with all my heart.”
The dragon shook his head, a rumble in his chest.
Eltoar drew a slow breath in and held it in his lungs, looking up into his soulkin’s ruby eyes. “Myia nithír til diar. We can only do what we think is right. I will speak to the others first.”
Leaving Helios in the basin, Eltoar walked across the dried and cracked ground to where a single small shrub with red flowers was nestled against the rock face of the rising cliff. He had planted that same shrub there a long time ago.
He reached into the satchel around his shoulder and produced a small green stone veined with black and white. Opening himself to the Spark, Eltoar funnelled threads of Spirit and Fire into the keystone. The white veins illuminated with a bright light, seeming to shift and flow like small streams within the stone.
In the span of a heartbeat, a passageway appeared in the rock, twice as wide as Eltoar was tall. The passageway stretched off into the mountain, smooth as glass on all sides. Fane knew of the eyrie Eltoar had carved into a peak in the Sea of Stone fifty or so miles west, where Eltoar had moved hundreds of eggs over the centuries, but he didn’t know of this place. This place had been created for a single, specific purpose.
I will not be long .
Helios rumbled in the back of Eltoar’s mind.