Page 215 of Of Empires and Dust

“I have no control over it.” The admission grated at Calen. What good were these visions if he could not call on them when he needed them? This place was enormous, and it rose for five storeys, and even if they searched every shadowed corner and shard of split stone, there was no guarantee they would find any trace of what they were looking for.

A realisation dawned on him. What if whatever Alvira had hidden was already gone? What if Eluna had come here centuries ago and brought the pendant back to Vindakur?

He pushed those thoughts down. They would do him no good. “There are nine of us,” he said, rising and looking around at the knights. “If we break into groups, we can cover ground quicker. I may yet see something as we search, but there is no sense in us standing here arguing.”

Kallinvar stared into Calen’s eyes for a long moment, then nodded. “Agreed. Though there are more than nine of us.”

A light flickered behind the Grandmaster, and the portal Haem had called the Rift appeared, its green light sharp againstthe pale stone of the platform. One by one, Sister-Captain Arlena and her five knights stepped through the Rift.

“What are we looking for?” Kallinvar asked once the Rift had closed.

Calen read through Alvira’s letter in his head, thinking. “Alvira said that Kollna cast the runes. So wherever this hiding place is, there will be Jotnar runes nearby.” He fingered the pendant that hung around his neck. The key. He held it up. “And anything that looks similar in shape and size to this pendant. A slot, or a symbol, or anything at all.”

“That’s a start,” Haem agreed, Ildris nodding at his side.

Once broken into groups, Calen and the knights set about searching the vault-turned-tomb. Only he could cast a baldír, but the knights’ green Soulblades acted as lanterns well enough and allowed him to spot their movements across the walkways.

Calen, Haem, and Lyrin crossed to the open corridor on the left side of the cavern and ascended a stairwell to the second storey. To Calen’s left, doors and openings were set into the stone all along the wall and off into the shadow-obscured distance. On the right, a parapet rose as high as Calen’s navel. Arched openings ran along the ceiling and connected to the low wall, providing a clear view of the open chamber.

Calen placed a hand on the parapet and stared out into the darkness, the glow of the knights’ Soulblades moving across the walkways and along the opposite corridors. The world flickered again as he stared, the sound of footfalls and conversation echoing all around him, the lanternlight warm against the stone, the walkways alive once more.

Then it was gone, and the vault returned to being pale, and cold, and silent, and dead.

“Best to work away from one end to the other,” Haem said, eyeing Calen curiously. “We could be a while.”

Calen nodded, then pulled his hand from the parapet, allowing his gaze to linger on the open chamber just a moment longer.

The closest door was nothing but splinters and twisted steel, the stone shattered where the hinges had been torn away. Calen drew a long breath and prepared himself for what he feared he would find inside.

The light of his baldír crept across the stone floor, the shadows seeming reluctant to retreat at its touch. Bones and steel were the first things he saw, black bloodstains marring the white stone. Calen loosened his threads of Spirit within the baldír, allowing more light to shine through. They stood in an antechamber as wide as The Gilded Dragon but only half as long. Five braziers of black iron lined both the left and the right walls, evenly spaced. Ornate golden boxes sat between each brazier, the symbol of the Dracårdare worked into their sides, each stuffed to the brim with coal.

Lyrin ran his gauntlet-clad finger over the iron of a brazier, brushing the dust away. He looked from his finger to the skeleton draped over another brazier a few feet away, a prong of iron sticking through its ribs, its skull and arms black as night from the flames.

Calen looked to the second door at the opposite end of the room. That, too, had been smashed from its hinges, gouges clawed into the stone.

Bloodmarked. Calen had faced the creatures enough now to know their work.

Haem must have seen the look on his face, must have known what Calen had expected to find inside, for his brother shook his head. “I’ll go.”

“I need to see it.” Calen’s voice was just short of a whisper, and he felt Valerys in the back of his mind, the dragon’s heart beating quickly as he soared over the city.

Calen moved past Haem and stepped through the doorway. In the shadowed depths of the room, beneath dust and stone, fragments of broken dragon eggs shone in the white baldírlight.

A wave of sorrow washed over him from Valerys, and memories of Vindakur, of the broken eggs in Eluna’s office, flashed between them. Seeing through Kollna’s eyes, he had known what he would find in this place. But knowing and seeing were two entirely different things.

Calen moved further into the room, the ache in his heart growing deeper with each new shattered shell that met his gaze. The eggs in Vindakur had been but a grain of sand.

The room stretched onwards for almost fifty feet before the baldírlight revealed a wall at the end, and the ceiling rose twice as high, ladders connecting to the top sections.

There must have been thousands of shards of broken dragon eggs, the pale light reflecting a sea of colours as it hit the scales. So much beauty in such a horrific thing. So much colour in such a dark, lonely place.

More bones lay amongst the shattered eggs and the rubble. A pair of legs was half-buried on Calen’s right, a severed spine jutting from between crumpled stone. To Calen’s left, a skeleton sat headless against the collapsed shelves, the remnants of two eggs still clutched in its arms.

“Gods…” Lyrin’s hushed voice echoed softly, drifting over Calen’s shoulder. “This has all just been sitting here for four hundred years…”

Calen knelt, letting out an exhausted grunt as his knee hit the stone. He touched the gleaming sapphire scales of the egg clutched against the skeleton’s right breast.

The baldírlight dimmed to black and the world blurred around Calen before the sounds of pure chaos crashed against his ears.

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