Veil of the Dragon (Prophecy of the Evarun) (23 page)

The Servian Lord standing next to Ras Dumas turned towards Michalas. Its red flame burned as cold as fallen snow.

The mask upon its face bore the head of a dragon, the mark of Ras Dalamas, first in line of the Servian Lords after Ras Malius. The glow from the cenotaphs diminished against it.  Its breath buffeted the black smoke around it
. “We are the Fallen. We have risen once more.”

The raking of steel broke against him as Ras Dalamas drew his sword. The blade widened at its tip like a fang. Black smoke whispered against it as he lifted it high above his head.

“No!” Al-Thinneas cried out. He stepped before Michalas.

Ras Dalamas stopped and lowered his sword, pointing it towards Al-Thinneas.
“You are a fool. The blade of your Order has broken. The fire that wields it is useless against us.”

“It is your circle that has broken,” Al-Thinneas said. “The promise the Dragon made to you can never be met until you are twelve once more, and twelve you shall never be.”

The Dragon’s fire within Ras Dalamas flared. The glow of it trembled like a kettle about to turn. Ras Dalamas’ voice descended to a chastened whisper.
“A promise made by the blood of the Fallen can never be broken. Already we can taste the sweet ardor of its sacrifice. When it is made at last, our circle will be complete, and so too will our return.”

The cold red flame within Ras Dalamas expanded until the smoke around it was consumed. A burgeoning echo of silence descended, pulsing through the air like a heartbeat.

Al-Mariam’s grip and cry seized Michalas, pulling him away.

Al-Thinneas held his Gossamer Blade upright before him. The blue glow which dressed it rained over him like a veil.

The blade of Ras Dalamas rose again. 

It sliced invisible through the air. Only the crumpling sound of Al-Thinneas’ body as it fell sounded against its muted call, his head having already struck the stones beneath his feet.

Chapter Twenty Two

Malius

“No. No. No. No!”

Chaelus staggered back, stumbling. Sundengal slipped from his grasp.

Malius, his father, rose from where he had fallen, drawing the crimson wrappings of Magus away. His long gray hair smeared the blood from the cut alongside his mouth where the edge of Sundengal had found him. 

“You’re dead,” Chaelus said. 

“Your new wisdom becomes you, my son,” Malius said. He smiled. The blood cast his face in a cruel parody of the man he had once been. “Did you believe you would only kill me once?” 

“It was you?” Chaelus choked on the pain and tears of his sudden realization. “When the Dragon whispered its poison into my ear, it was from your lips?”

Malius smiled. “I did it to protect you, my son. I did it to protect you in a way I could never do while I lived. I did it to prepare you for the choice you’re faced with now, because the way that stands before you, my son, it is a dark way.”

“Yet here you are, standing within its shadow.”

“Your friends, these Servian Knights, the ones even I once claimed as my own, the truth that you seek isn’t theirs. They will turn away from you just as they turned away from me. Already, in your absence, they conspire and plot their ways against you.”

“No,” Chaelus said. “I’ve already seen the truth. The spirit of the Giver has shown me. I’ve stood in the flesh of his footsteps. I’ve waited alone with you in the darkness of Magedos. I felt it when you put your sword through his side.”

“Then at least I am no longer alone in that,” Malius said.

“It’s you, father, who turned away,” Chaelus said.

Malius stared at Sundengal where it lay upon the broken ground. The light of the burgeoning storm branded it with ire. Sands blew like the passage of time across the length of the blade. 

“Too long have I suffered for the curse of a moment,” he said.

Sundengal’s veil of blowing sand was not unlike the gossamer which bound the swords of the Servian Knights. Beneath it, the ghosts of blood and snow still remained, and they yielded nothing else before them. 

“I can’t remember your death,” Chaelus whispered.

“Yet still it was. But I hold no blame for you, my son.”

Malius turned and spread out his hands upon the cracked and pitted stones of the Line. His eyes held a covetous and distant stare as they looked out across the illusion of the Pale. 

“You are my redemption,” he said.

Chaelus stepped back. The Giver’s own words, spoken similarly once to Malius, haunted him.

“I knew it when I first saw you, held within your mother’s arms.” Malius’ voice softened. “She was of Forgotten Blood, exiled from her own kind. Just as you were born of my blood, you are born of her flesh, and so too, the lost power of the Evarun flows deep within your veins.”

“And so you marked me.”

Malius continued to stare out across the shrouded leagues. The tower, and his brother Baelus who held it, had nearly fallen. It was only a matter of time until it did. 

“So that you would rule this new kingdom with me,” Malius said. “So that you would help me to create it anew.”

“What of Baelus?” Chaelus asked. “What would you have of your other son?”

Malius wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth.

“I don’t need him anymore.”

“Have you whispered the same to him of me?” Chaelus asked. “His blood’s no different than my own. Or do you merely use us as you did our mother?”

Malius struck him in the face with his fist like a hundred stone. 

“Your wisdom no longer suits you,” he said. “You seek too much with it.”

Chaelus looked in surprise through the arrows of pain that struck him. Not all of them were real, not all of them were bound within his flesh. Some of them were bound within his memory. He stared past them, past the blowing sands to the blood and the snow and the memory unfolding before him, at once unbidden and reclaimed. 

He fell to his knees.

His father staggered back through the descending snow, holding up his mailed fist as if it were a malaise itself. His mouth opening and closing to silent speech. He stopped and looked down to where Baelus lay alone in the blood-turned snow.

The boy looked up at his father and swallowed, shaking from cold and fear, his hands clutching at the bloodied wound in his side; the broken shaft of the Khaalish arrow that he had removed still in the snow where he had dropped it.

The arrow should have remained, to keep the wound sealed, but Baelus was too young to have known that, and his father was too consumed to care. The wound was not mortal – yet – and the cold slowed his bleeding and his suffering from it. Yet Baelus was too young to know any of this, either. He turned to Chaelus, his deep eyes fearful and pleading.

Chaelus stood as Malius drew Sundengal from its scabbard. 

He could do nothing for the fear which swept through him. “No, Father.” 

Malius turned from Baelus, his face somber. He raised his blade and strode towards Chaelus.

Chaelus stumbled back. His hand fumbled with the hilt of his own sword, its blade as heavy as his heart as he held it within his grasp. His fear diminished to despair. He held his blade weak, its length trembling before him. “You don’t have to do this, Father!”

Warm sunlight, reflected blue by the snow, consumed them like fire as Malius seized Chaelus’ blade within his mailed fist. His eyes had changed; they were softer, pleading. “Yes, I do.”

The face of his father leaned close to Chaelus, his breath warm against Chaelus’ neck.  A weak smile, awash with shame and yearning, spread across Malius’ face. “The Dragon, it feeds off the living. The dead serve no purpose to it.”

Chaelus trembled. 

His father’s eyes showed bright. They looked into him as they had before his mother died, when they had looked out upon the future of a new day, burning bright over the Kessel plain. His father’s smile faded. He gripped Chaelus firm by the shoulder. His breath fell to a whisper. “I was wrong.”

Chaelus’ blade lurched as his father’s fell upon it. Blood spotted the corner of his father’s mouth. Tears gleamed in his eyes. “And I’m sorry.”

Chaelus surrendered the blade. He grabbed at his father, holding him up. He pressed his face into the fading warmth of Malius’ neck as the weight of his father’s body pulled him down. “No!”

Chaelus jolted as the different chill of sand returned. It filled the edges of his mouth. His eyes stung where his blood had matted there. He rose, more lifted than stood, and looked into the empty hulls of the eyes of the thing he had just thought was his father. 

“Now I know,” Chaelus said.

The aberration of his father studied him. Hesitation held it fast.
“What could you know?”
 

“I know that I didn’t murder my father, and I know now that you, Dragon, aren’t him.”

The Dragon’s fist clenched and unclenched, uncertain of its failure. 

“Don’t let my disappointment in you become complete,”
it said.

“You’re not my father. You’re the Dragon, Gorond, and you feed off the suffering of the living. My father’s already passed to the dead, and those those that have their rest, cannot serve you.”

The broken husk of Malius which the Dragon bore stared back at him. The Dragon’s shadow poured out from the hollow of its eyes like oil. The sand and stone around them trembled. 

“No,”
the Dragon whispered. Its voice shook the broken ground beneath him.
“But your death does.”

***

For the first time ever, Michalas felt fear. Not the tears of a child that he knew had already begun to fall, but
real
fear. Or at least
,
that’s what he thought it was. It was the opposite of what he felt when the Angels came.

The feeling crawled and curled around the pit of his stomach, not unlike the black tendrils he had seen infesting the bodies of those
whom
the Dragon had imprisoned within the cenotaphs. Perhaps this was
n’t any
different.
M
ore than anything else,
he wanted it to
go away.

Blood pooled beneath Al-Thinneas’ body. Only the stalwart beacon of Al-Hoanar’s gossamer blade remained. Around them, like a wall between them and the Fallen Ones, the thin line of the Khaalish swayed as their cries descended back into the whispered rhythm of their chant.

From just behind Michalas, where she clutched her arms around him, the agonized pleas of his sister cried out to him. She could do nothing more. Before him, Ras Dumas, the Servian Lord that the Angels had brought him to save, stared at him in silence.

Steel scraped against steel. As if they were one, Ras Dumas
and
the other nine Servian
L
ords drew their blades from their scabbards and closed their circle around
Michalas
.

Ye
t none of these things were what scared him.

Beyond them all was the glow of the Angel. Not near to him but far beyond his reach, and of the distance between them, no passage could have been greater. No cold could be more numbing than the chill th
is
distance held within its grasp. It was like
infinite
night. The Angel stared at him. She did not smile. She did not stretch out her hand to gently hold his face. There was no voice or comfort at all c
o
m
ing
from her.

Tendrils of fear spun their way through
Michalas
. What had he done
wrong
? What had he done
that
she would
not to come to him? Had he not already done everything she had asked of him? The doubt of it all tangled and wrought its way inside him, taking away his very breath. To see her and not be near her felt like damnation.

The fearful and fateful prayer of the Khaalish warriors drifted over him. It was fearful, all of it. It was all their fears bound together,
ye
t each fear made somehow less real
for
its
utterance. The strength of their bearers, the Khaalish, grew through the sharing of their own weakness.