Page 245 of Of Empires and Dust

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 fistsand 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.

Chapter 56

Monsters, Men, and Broken Things

19thDay of the Blood Moon

Northeast of Berona – Winter, Year 3081 After Doom

With Trusil’shooves squelching in the mud, Rist leaned back, closed his eyes, and let the cool rain splatter against his face, his hands resting on the soaked hair of the horse’s neck.

The First and Fourth armies had left Berona four days ago, marching hard from sunrise to sunset, and in that time the rain had been unrelenting. And still, Taya Tambrel had forced a pace of almost twenty-five miles each day. Even mounted, Rist was exhausted, his muscles aching and his thighs chafing from the rain and constant friction. He didn’t dare try to imagine the state the infantry were in.

After the attack on Berona and the High Tower, both armies had been replenished to their full complements of five thousand four hundred – along with Taya Tambrel’s Blackwatch. The armies were also bolstered by some ten thousand auxiliaries –volunteers drawn from those within the city and the refugees who had flooded into Berona and the burgeoning town that had formed outside Berona’s walls. Many had lost friends or family in the attack, and a marching army also meant food. When the call for volunteers had gone out, the response had been overwhelming. The people wanted vengeance; they wanted blood. The limit had not been the number of souls willing to join and fight, but the capacity to feed and armour them. And now, together, they marched for the rebel stronghold in the Firnin Mountains. From what Magnus had said, the Seventh and Eighteenth armies were marching from Elkenrim, along with ten thousand more from Merchant’s Reach. Over forty thousand souls.

According to Garramon, the empire had known of the stronghold for quite some time but had held off on launching a strike due to the emergence of the Uraks and the elves from Lynalion. They were an irritation that could be ignored.

The attack had changed that.

Rist opened his eyes to the strange hue of pink from the light sparkling in the heavy rain, falling diamonds forged from blood.

Looking up at the crimson moon dragged his thoughts to the gemstone around his neck and the Essence that filled it. The Essence collected from a man Rist had killed with his bare hands. The Essence that called to him even at that very moment.

He barely remembered doing it. Just anger, rage, and thensnap. It had almost seemed as though he were floating above himself, watching his body break the man’s neck. But he did remember the whispers in the back of his mind, his own voice, his own thoughts, urging him to take the man’s life. To break his neck for even daring to harm Neera. And he had done just that. He had let his rage control him.

“Your arse sore?”

Rist lurched forwards as Magnus clapped him across the back, almost falling from his own saddle in the process.

The big man rode on a beautiful buckskin gelding that rivalled the Varsundi Blackthorns for size – and almost looked like one with the amount of mud darkening its coat. “Whoa now, ya big bastard. Steady as she goes. I don’t like you, and you don’t like me. We have an understanding. But if you throw me off, you better believe it’s horse for supper.”

The horse snorted and shook its head but carried on walking.

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