51. Children of eannis
51
CHILDREN OF EANNIS
Gwydinion gasped as he opened his own eyes.
Neveranimas was… she was…
She was rampant. Continuously, perpetually rampant.
He suspected Peralon would give all his claws to see the memory that Gwydinion had just experienced. Perhaps if Gwydinion knew more about magic, he could use that knowledge to help Ivarion, but alas, he’d only dimly followed what Neveranimas had done.
No, that memory would’ve been helpful for Peralon, and anything but that for Gwydinion.
But… was there more than one memory?
There had to be.
There had to be a way to control the order in which he experienced the memories, but he had no idea how. Perhaps he had to know what memory to look for in the first place. Since he had no idea what was on the stone, the result was effectively random.
He also didn’t know how the memories worked. Did he experience them in real time? That would be catastrophic if he stumbled upon a memory lasting days.
Gwydinion glanced up. The jungle canopy was so thick he wasn’t even sure what time of day it was. He thought nightfall was approaching.
Overbite could see in the dark; he had no plans of stopping.
Gwydinion needed to figure out a way to throw Neveranimas off his scent, or this ride would end horribly. In her memory, Neveranimas had mentioned that all her important possessions were “soul-marked.” What did that mean? It had to be the method she was using to track the Rampant Stone, but he’d never heard the term before.
Souls weren’t the province of humans, except in terms of damnation or repentance. Soul magic was the domain of dragons seeking Ascension, trying to purify themselves in the manner of Eannis.
Gwydinion fished around in the scout satchel until he found rations and water. After, he settled back down with the stone. He paused for long enough to reassure Overbite that she was still the best girl ever (which was an unarguable fact) and turned her in a different direction, perpendicular to his original path but still pointed away from the Scarsea settlement.
He concentrated on the stone again, this time focusing as hard as he could on the term “soul-marked.”
When Neveranimas was young, her father Senuvarus summoned her to his cave.
She’d been confused and a little afraid. Senuvarus was an ancient and hoary dragon who rarely expressed interest in his spawn. When he did, he demanded the most exemplary of his children—the strongest, the fastest, the most powerful.
As Neveranimas was none of these, she rarely saw her sire.
Admittedly, Senuvarus wasn’t a social dragon, nor well-liked. He was old and mean and anyone who crossed him regretted it. She admired and feared him in equal proportion.
She fought not to tremble when she arrived to discover they were alone.
“I didn’t invite any others,” Senuvarus explained. Burning sky amber thickened the air with long streams of smoke. The flowing forms echoed her father’s body, himself a long, sinuous stream of silver flowing over his hoard: silver coins, silver jewelry, silver goblets, silver plates. Much of it had gone black from tarnish, also like Senuvarus.
Especially his heart, dragons liked to whisper when they were very, very sure he couldn’t hear.
This was another mark of pride—her father was so ancient he hoarded a singular metal. Her eldest hatch mate Kaipholumon had already claimed hoard right when Senuvarus died, but Senuvarus had shown no inclination for doing so, despite his age. Dragons whispered Senuvarus was on the verge of Ascending, but that was just a more polite way of saying everyone wanted him to hurry and die already.
Her sire stared at her, and stared, and stared some more, until finally she crawled forward and asked, “Sire, why have you called me?”
“Have you decided your hoard yet?” Senuvarus asked, which might have been the answer as well as the question.
“Not yet,” Neveranimas admitted. Others had looked at her oddly when she’d asked if one could collect magic.
Apparently not.
“Good,” he rumbled. “I’ve been watching you.”
He laughed at her when she reared back in wariness. It was not as cruel a laugh as she might’ve expected. “You’re the only one of my children who takes after me, you know.”
She tilted her head at this. Neveranimas didn’t resemble Senuvarus. Silver striped her scales in places, yes, but she’d taken after her mother, Ashanorak, a dragon of glaciers and the dry, snapping cold of winter. Neveranimas was more violet than white, but the affinity had bred true.
Seeing him so close, too, she was reminded of how small he was. She had never reconciled how such a towering presence could be confined to such a petite body.
Senuvarus waved his tail dismissively. “Not in appearance. I care not what color shines off your scales. The others are all like their mothers—bold and proud, strong and fierce.” He gazed at her with bottomless eyes. “You are the only one who inherited my love of knowledge, my contempt for weakness, and the intelligence to hide both.”
Neveranimas stilled her neck frills, uneasy. Was this a test? A trap? A passion for knowledge was no bad thing, but a passion for magical knowledge was viewed with suspicion. Most dragons thought it better to push such tasks to a rider, but that was irredeemably lazy. They were dragons.
Magic was their birthright.
Her father’s chuckle caused a small avalanche of coins to slide down the hill of silver. He’d been adding the coins for centuries, collecting them from wherever and whenever humans made them. He liked humans for that. It was perhaps the only thing he liked them for.
Neveranimas tried to be respectful. She settled on being afraid. “Why are you telling me this, sire?”
He grinned, closed-lipped and showing no teeth. “Because I want you to carry on my work when I’m dead. You’re the only one of my spawn who can.”
“When you’re dead? You’re not sick.” She lashed her tail in frustration.
He ignored her complaint. “You will collect secrets. You will tell the others you collect something else. Something innocuous. Gradaziza just died recently—say you’re taking dragonstones.”
Neveranimas froze mid-lash. She lowered her head and stared at him in a posture of questioning. Her ire at being ordered to do such a thing warred with her intrigue. “Why would I collect something you cannot taste or touch? Something you cannot admire?”
“Because I shall tell you a good one,” her father whispered, “and it’s the most precious thing I own.”
She waited.
He lifted his head from his silver pillow of ore and coin. “Eannis was not a goddess, and we are not her children. Do note the past tense, because that was not a mistake.”
She canted her head to the side. “You don’t believe in Eannis?”
“I believe a being named Eannis existed. She was responsible for what we are.” He grinned at her hiss of confusion. “She was not our progenitor, not our ancestor, nor did she create us whole cloth as she created the universe. My parents were not dragons. They weren’t even intelligent. They were nothing but animals—sky shrikes, bred large for the purpose of incubating the first true dragons.” His eyes flickered with dissatisfaction at some ancient memory. “Or rather, she attempted to create true dragons. Dragons who were like herself. And in that, she failed.”
Absurd. That was absurd. Surely he was going rampant. And yet—
If so, he was being very serene about it.
“Why?” In her stunned shock, it was the only question she could form. “Why would she do that?”
“Why indeed,” her father said. “Eannis was a being of such power that—well. ‘God’ is as close a word as any. Yet she did not make this world, or any world. She did not create magic.” He frowned. “She did poison our ability to use it, though.”
“No, that was Zavad.”
He laughed again. “No, it wasn’t. I don’t know why she did it. She wasn’t in the habit of explaining herself to test subjects.” He gave his daughter a vicious smile. “And yet somehow it was our fault when we didn’t meet her standards, when we couldn’t provide her companionship, when she was still lonely . So she left. Perhaps she continues her experiments on some other world even now, warping the native races into a parody of her own in an ongoing quest for companionship, even though she will never allow her creations to be her equals. You can be loved and feared by those who blindly worship you, but it is not the same as the love of friends.”
She thought about what he was saying, or rather she tried, coming, as it was, from the other side of a vast chasm of shock. “Does one need friends?” she finally asked.
“I never did,” Senuvarus admitted. “Perhaps Eannis’s real problem was she told herself that she wanted peers, but secretly was terrified she might succeed.”
“This can’t be true…” Neveranimas murmured.
Senuvarus laughed cruelly. “It wouldn’t need to be a secret if it was a lie. Let me tell you, child: the best secrets are never lies. Secrets are truths that hide in darkness, while lies are boldest in the sunlight.”
“Are there”—she looked up at her father—“are there any others like you? First—first created?”
“A few,” he said. “The last time I encountered one of my test siblings, she spent so much time whining about how much better everything would be if Eannis were still here that I ripped out her throat just to shut her up.” He sighed. “It made me sad, so I stopped looking.”
He stretched, raking his claws against the granite stone of the cave floor. “I will teach you everything she taught me. I will teach you the Names and the Laws and how to use them to craft sympathies and apathies. I will teach you how to move yourself in space-time and how to use soul-marks to hunt and hide. I will teach you how to see the magic, and how to make it yours.”
He sighed then, resigned, tired. “You will find it’s not enough, not nearly enough. She gave us more questions than answers, because ‘she wanted us to discover the truth for ourselves.’” His voice took on a mocking quality.
Neveranimas blinked. “Discover—but we’re not doing that! We’re not discovering anything! We’re not looking for answers!”
Senuvarus gave her a lazy, half-lidded smile. “No. We’re not. It’s not just a test of intelligence, but of bravery and will. None of what she taught me, what I will teach you, grants you immunity to the corruptive effect of magic on our bodies.” He paused. “Maybe it was supposed to be motivation.”
“Why,” she finally asked, “are you willing to teach me this? I might go rampant and kill you.”
“I have survived this long by being careful. You seem careful, too. Perhaps you’ll be the one to decipher Ascension. I no longer think I will, and I have grown tired of trying. So no, I don’t think you’ll go rampant on me, not in time, anyway.”
She was stunned into silence.
She said yes. Of course she said yes.
He did exactly as promised. He taught her everything he knew. It took shockingly little time, considering, but he’d warned her that Eannis had wanted them to figure these things out for themselves.
A week after he finished, Senuvarus turned rampant in the middle of a council meeting. He killed three other dragons before they finished him.
Neveranimas began hoarding secrets.
Hoarding secrets, and unlocking the mysteries of the universe.