tried to lift his head again, and failed.
“Welcome to the Mournland,” he said.
Gaven rested for only a moment-long enough for the sting to fade from his dragonmark, though the wound on his chest still burned. He struggled to sit up, every muscle in his body protesting, then slowly got his feet under him and stood up.
He looked at the sun as it disappeared below the horizon, scanned the sky again for any sign of Vaskar, then turned to look for Nymm, the largest moon. It was just rising out of a gray haze to the east, orange and round.
“The Eye of Siberys will lift the Sky Caves of Thieren Kor from the land of desolation under the dark of the great moon,” he said to himself. “The great moon’s full now. I’ve got two weeks.”
He put his hands on his knees and let his head hang.
“Two weeks to reach the Sky Caves. If I can stay alive that long.”
He found his sword where it had fallen on the ground, heaved it onto his shoulder, and started walking.
CHAPTER 25
Vaskar perched on an eruption of stone, overlooking a plain of jumbled rock and sand. He had been watching the great moon’s ascent through the sky, and his patience was rewarded as it neared its apex. A hint of shadow appeared at the edge of its disk. He clutched the Eye of Siberys tighter in his great claw and rumbled deep in his throat.
“The eclipse is beginning,” he murmured, “the dark of the great moon.” He stretched his neck and his wings to the sky and roared. “The time is at hand!”
He watched, waiting for the perfect moment, as Nymm slowly disappeared in the world’s shadow.
When its light was completely quenched, he raised the Eye of Siberys high, holding it gingerly between his two front claws. “Do your work,” he whispered. He gazed into the golden crystal, and he saw.
He saw the desolation of the Mournland and the life-leaching energies that still permeated the land. He saw the twelve moons arrayed in the sky above him, Nymm shrouded in its eclipse, and he perceived the forces aligned to make this moment possible. He saw the Sky Caves slumbering beneath the ground, and he called to them. He felt them begin to stir, responding to his call.
For a moment, he saw himself-small and insignificant among the events of the moment. But he did not like to see himself, and he certainly didn’t like feeling small.
“The Storm Dragon has emerged!” he cried. “I will walk in the paths of the first of sixteen!”
He closed his eyes, and the earth began to shake. The ground trembled so violently that Vaskar took to the sky, pounding his wings in the still air to rise above the tumult. The plain below him looked like a troubled sea, sand erupting in geysers and boulders rolling wildly in every direction. He flew in widening circles, watching the earth churn in an area the size of a large island.
Soon there was direction in the movement below him-a general tendency toward the outside of an enormous circle. The ground swelled, sand sliding and boulders rolling downhill from the center of the bulge. Vaskar flew to the edge of the swell, not wanting to be directly above whatever emerged.
As he continued his flight, the sand at the crest of the swell fell away, revealing a jagged dome of reddish stone. Slowly it rose higher and higher above the surrounding earth, and Vaskar caught sight of a cave entrance in the face of the rock, sand pouring out of it as it lifted into the air.
“The Sky Caves of Thieren Kor!” he roared.
The more rock emerged from the earth, the faster it rose, and in another moment it had broken free entirely. The rumbling thunder of the earth below came to an abrupt stop. In the sudden silence, an enormous island floated a hundred feet up in the air, rounded at the top, a jagged point at the bottom like an inverted mountain. Sand and rubble poured from dozens of holes, spilling down the sides and trickling into a great crater in the ground below it.
Vaskar tightened the circle of his flight, surveying the Sky Caves from every side, trying to decide where to enter. The cave mouths seemed to form patterns, characters of the Draconic script, but every time he tried to read them he thought they shifted, aligning themselves in different patterns. Finally, impatient, he chose a cave near the top and landed on its lower lip, scrabbling at the edge until he could get all four claws on solid ground.
“The Storm Dragon walks in the paths of the first of sixteen,” he said. “I am here. Reveal your secrets to me!”
He advanced into the winding tunnel.
Gaven felt the earth rumbling and hefted his sword, expecting an attack-something springing from the ground, perhaps, or some enormous monster that shook the earth with its steps. The rumbling grew until it threatened to knock him off his feet, and in that moment he glimpsed the eclipsed moon above his head.
“No,” he breathed.
Exhausted as he was, he ran. The wind cradled him and sped him on. The sky darkened as clouds rolled in- the first real clouds he’d seen since entering the Mournland-and covered the Ring of Siberys, the stars, the eclipsed moon. His steps and the wind around him kicked up a storm of sand and ash in his wake.
He occasionally glimpsed creatures moving in the night around him, from scavenging vermin the size of dogs to an enormous war construct he spotted in the distance, lumbering across the landscape. One spiny crab-spider thing snapped at him with fangs and pincers as he ran, but he didn’t slow at all, and it quickly grew tired of the chase. Nothing else came close enough to threaten him.
Rain began to fall. It cooled him as he ran and soothed the burning wound across his chest. He saw it form craters in the sandy ground and drain away.
The land around him was flat and featureless. The map he’d found in Paluur Draal and committed to memory was his only guide, and he had no better way to navigate than trying to keep his path straight in the direction he’d first chosen. The bank of gray mist hung off to his right, sometimes nearer than others, but otherwise he could see nothing to indicate where he was, where he’d been, or where he was headed. He slipped in and out of an illusion that only the ground moved at all, that he hung in the air, running in place. He lost all sense of time and distance-he could have been running for hours, days, weeks.
But then a darkness appeared before him in the distance. At first it looked like a dark cloud, a heart of a storm in the midst of an overcast sky. As he drew closer, though, it began to take shape. The first feeble daylight illuminated the clouds overhead, casting it in silhouette. It was huge, like a mountain hanging upside-down in the air above the blasted landscape. It floated over an enormous crater, the remains of the cyst from which it had burst forth.
A part of Gaven’s mind that was not quite his knew all about the Sky Caves of Thieren Kor. In a different life he had learned all he could about them, poring over fragments of the Prophecy collected in great draconic libraries. He had waited a dragon’s long lifetime for the opportunity to explore them and plumb their secrets, and when that lifetime had ended, he-that other he, the dragon of the nightshard-had made sure that what he had learned would someday be remembered.
So Gaven remembered, and the knowledge flooded back to him. The Sky Caves were ancient-they had floated above the untouched wilderness of Khorvaire when dragons first ventured forth from Argonnessen to challenge the fiends that ruled the world. Thieren Kor was a placename in the language used by the fiends, meaning “mountain of secrets.” Countless battles had raged beneath that floating mountain, in the skies around it, and within its twisting tunnels-dragons and demons tearing at each other, spilling oceans of blood to gain control of its secrets. When the dragons emerged victorious from the eons-long war, the first dragon to explore the Sky Caves in their entirety became a god, the first of sixteen.
Now Vaskar hoped to follow where that ancient dragon had led. And Gaven felt, for the first time, a surge of envy-he wanted that knowledge, and that power, for himself.
He roared, giving vent to the frustration that had simmered in him since he felt the earth rumble and saw the darkened moon that had propelled him across the Mournland. The brooding clouds thundered in answer to his roar, and lightning danced around the floating mountain. And the wind that had blown at his back swirled in a whirlwind
