Page 22 of Among the Burning Flowers
Marosa could not rip her gaze from the mountain. There were occasional rockfalls in Cárscaro, where a boulder would suddenly drop, but this was different.
‘It’s all right,’ Priessa said. ‘The palace is safe.’
‘But what of the stonecutters, the water tower?’
Now the sound changed to an ominous crack. As Marosa watched, transfixed by fear, a sheet of stone crumbled away from the mountain. Ruzio gasped as it shattered and crasheddown the steep incline, chased by smaller fragments, grey dust billowing around. The debris rushed into the eastern outskirts of Cárscaro, overwhelming the houses there.
It took some time for the dark haze to clear. When it did, Marosa could only stare in disbelief. Where the colossal sheet had fallen, there was now a yawning break in the mountainside.
A cave had been revealed.
‘Fruma,’ Yscabel said in the barest whisper. ‘He seeks vengeance upon the children of Isalarico.’
Marosa looked at her, lips parting in question. Yscabel clapped a hand over her mouth.
‘Donmata,’ she said, ‘I beg your forgiveness. It’s only kitchen gossip. I didn’t mean—’
What Yscabel did or did not mean, Marosa never established, for then a mighty clamour filled the night.
A sinister light stemmed from the cleft, rivalling the river of fire. Marosa gripped the balustrade, her knuckles turning pale, as the opening abounded with movement, violent in its intensity.
A thundercloud seemed to emerge from the cave. Marosa could not understand what she was seeing, even as it spilled forth in a rush, solid and molten at once, and swept towards the Palace of Salvation. A twisting mass of shadow, which moved like nothing she had ever laid eyes on. Before it could reach them, Priessa and Ruzio pulled her away from the window.
‘No, no.’ She tried to fight them off. ‘I have to—’
‘Donmata, we must get out of sight,’ Ruzio insisted. ‘Yscabel, away from the windows!’
Marosa was not especially strong, but she did have the element of surprise. No one expected nobles to makesudden movements. With one sharp wrench, she broke free of Priessa and Ruzio, who was already distracted by her care for Yscabel. Before they could stop her, she burst from her apartments and rushed along the corridors, chased by her protesting guards.
She ran until she reached the balcony. Just as she shoved through its doors, the cloud passed over the lava, and she could see it, all of it. The bat wings and serpentine tails, ripped from a bestiary.
Wyverns.
The word tolled in her mind, paralysing her. She did not want to accept the evidence of her own eyes. For the first time in five hundred years, a flock of wyverns was soaring over Cárscaro.
It splintered at the edge of the cliff, leaving the Cárscari screaming in its wake. With piercing calls, the wyverns dived over the precipice, following the lava falls towards the Great Yscali Plain.
And then, by the distant light of dawn, Marosa beheld a sight that sent a knife into her soul.
Since she was sixteen, she had dreamed of death. None of her nightmares touched what she saw now. As she watched, red lights flared across the Great Yscali Plain, as far as the eye could see. At first, they were isolated bonfires, small and glimmering. One by one, those fires grew.
They have their flames.
The realisation stole the feeling from her skin. The Saint’s Comet had quenched their fire when it put them to sleep.
Like some terrible murmuration of starlings, the wyverns spread out across the Great Yscali Plain, sowing that unnatural red fire, the light of the Dreadmount itself. For ashort time, there was utter stillness, the Cárscari stunned into silence, as they watched the flowers burn. All Marosa could hear was her own heart, and the uneven breaths of the people behind her.
Then half of the flock returned; the screams began again. The wyverns swooped upon the Great Aviary, which stood on a bluff above Vatana House, and brought it crashing to the ground. Marosa was too high to see her people; she only heard them crying out in terror.
More fire sprang in the corner of her eye. A small wyvern flew along the Tundana, its wings skimming the lava, before it blew a jet of flame, burning the archers that guarded the Gate of Niunda. More of the beasts fell upon the unattended catapults and bolt throwers on the cliff, weapons made for a second Grief of Ages. Marosa watched them crumble to embers.
‘They know what to destroy,’ Priessa said hoarsely. ‘They remember.’
Marosa Vetalda was used to nightmares, but now she felt as though she had been pulled into a folk tale. All the heroes of the Grief were in her body in that moment. She stayed at her post, like a soldier at war, and watched a hundred wyverns landing on the rooftops.
During the Grief of Ages, the Cárscari had descended to the old mines to wait out the destruction. Now, in this softer time, most of those mines were sealed for their safety. A bitter twist of fate.
‘Please,’ Ermendo said. ‘Come inside, Donmata.’
