Page 244 of Of Empires and Dust

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.

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