Epilogue
EPILOGUE
Pilgrimages to the Cauldron trailed off considerably after “Saint” Ivarion was no longer there to gaze upon. A few shrines endured, but the heat and caustic fumes were making fast work of those structures. Soon, nothing would remain.
Thus, there were no visitors at all when a small one-person flyer landed at the lip of the caldera. A man exited, who wore shirt and trousers, boots, masked hood, and gloves, all fashioned from the same dark teal fabric. The clothing looked somewhat the worse for wear and stretched tightly enough across him to leave the impression that he had either accidentally shrunk his clothes by washing them at the wrong temperature, or had borrowed the clothes of a slightly younger, smaller man.
Still, none of his skin was exposed to the often-toxic air of the volcano.
He stopped for a moment to gaze at the impressive view before him.
It was a view thankfully bereft of rotting dragon corpses, because of the efforts of the gold dragon Peralon, who’d arrived one morning a few weeks after the First Dragon’s awakening and left again a short time later with a very satisfied air about him.
Nothing was ever found of Neveranimas’s body after that, but as one of the few people to have ever witnessed Peralon disintegrating his foes, Gwydinion couldn’t say he was surprised.
He whistled cheerfully as he picked his way across the steaming ground, avoiding any pockets of bubbling lava. What he was doing was a little risky.
Wildly ill-advised, as his mother would say, but when he’d asked his sister about the best time to visit, she’d told him she had a hunch the volcano would be quiet today.
She’d somehow developed a certain knack for predicting these sorts of things.
That said, Gwydinion thought she might have had a different attitude if she’d known why he was there.
Gwydinion pulled a piece of chena from his pocket, raised it to his mouth to take a bite, and then remembered he was still wearing a mask. He sighed and promised to save that for later. Instead, he walked around for a bit more, then squatted down next to an area where the rocks had stacked against each other as they were thrown about.
He pulled several rocks off the stack, until he’d uncovered a perfectly smooth sphere of rainbow feldspar.
“Aren’t you a big piece of chena?” Gwydinion said happily as he picked up the Rampant Stone and tucked it into his knapsack.
He thought it was only fair that he should have the stone. It was an evening of the scales, a small righting of wrongs after what the violet dragon had stolen from him. Neveranimas had once been told she couldn’t hoard magic, but in the end, Gwydinion thought she’d managed it, to the detriment of all. She died with a wealth of magical spells, inventions, and discoveries tucked away in a vault that, in all likelihood, might not be opened again for years, assuming his sister and certain dragon friends of hers felt up to that challenge. No one would ever know what she might have shared with the world. No one would know what secrets she had discovered.
Except for this.
Gwydinion would have to be ever-so-careful—there wasn’t a guild in Seven Crests that wouldn’t commit murder to keep some of these techniques from coming to light—but he intended to make certain that Neveranimas ultimately failed in keeping her secrets.
Most especially the magical ones.
In his heart, he knew it was the only way there would ever be real peace between humans and dragons. Dragons would always be what dragons are—beautiful and strong and all but gods.
But humanity? With magic, who knew what humanity might be capable of achieving?
He meant to find out.