around his feet, lifting him into the air. Higher and higher it carried him, until he stepped forward and alighted in one of the many mouths of the Sky Caves of Thieren Kor.
“Vaskar!” he shouted, sending echoes dancing through the twisting network of caverns. He tensed, gripping his sword in both hands, expecting an attack at any instant. All that emerged from the darkness before him was his own voice in a hundred fragments.
Gaven limned his blade with a pale blue glow, lighting the cave ahead, showing him three tunnels converging on the same mouth-one leading up and to the left, one up and to the right, and one more or less straight ahead. The tunnels were like the boring of some enormous worm-round, smooth, and wide. Stretching his arms wide, he could not touch the walls on either side, and the walls curved together far above his head. He started along the right-hand passage, following it as it wound in an upward spiral. At each branch, he bore right, ensuring that he could find his way back to where he started if the need arose.
After the fourth branch, he found himself teetering at the edge of another cave mouth, his momentum almost carrying him over the brink. He threw himself backward, sending his sword clattering to the floor and sliding toward the cave mouth. He stopped it with his foot then scooted forward to grab it. He got back on his feet and turned around, continuing to follow the right wall.
The next cave opening didn’t catch him by surprise, but it did make him stop and think. He’d been blindly following the right wall, as if it would lead him to some destination. But what was his destination? He didn’t recall any mention of a specific location within the Sky Caves that might be important-a vault of knowledge or library of some sort. Finding Vaskar seemed like a hopeless endeavor, especially if the dragon were trying to avoid him-he could never hear or see the dragon before Vaskar noticed his approach. So what was he trying to do?
He moved back into the passage he’d just left. The walls were striated in broad patterns of dark and light stone, which he had noted only casually before. As he examined it more carefully, he realized that there was a definite shape to it. He couldn’t see it all at once, but as he moved farther in to the tunnel, the parts formed a whole in his mind, a Draconic character representing either a hard th sound or the sixth of some sequence. He continued slowly along, reading more characters-short “a” or a moon, a “sh” sound or a beast, or horns. Thash, meaning storm-or the horns of the sixth moon, the crescent phase of Eyre.
He stopped, retracing the tunnel he’d been following in his mind. He turned and followed it again, his eyes closed, trying to visualize the path he was walking. It, too, took shape in his mind-another Draconic character, a long e sound or the number nine. Was that part of another sequence, or an attachment to the word and phrase he’d already pieced together? The number nine could be part of a calendrical expression connected to Eyre’s crescent phase. Or thashe would turn “storm” into an adjective-he had a feeling there might be a “dragon” attached to that somewhere. Or this character could be connected to other symbols formed by the other passages of the Sky Caves.
His mind reeled, and he put a hand out to rest on the solidity of the cavern wall. He had suddenly gained a new depth of respect for the Prophecy. He had learned endless passages of it in Draconic lifetimes ago, and he’d translated them so often in his mind that they spilled out of his mouth in his own language quite naturally. But he began to appreciate what a poor vehicle language was to convey the meaning of it all, how feeble these words and phrases seemed in comparison to the layers of meaning he was experiencing.
Trailing his hand along the cavern wall, he turned and walked farther into the tunnels. He no longer cared about finding his way back. He opened his mind and explored the Prophecy.
CHAPTER 26
When Gaven was a young man, a casual hobby of collecting snippets of the Draconic Prophecy had given him the merest glimpse into its intricacies and complexities. It had made him think that perhaps there was more to life than working and sleeping, eating and getting drunk, getting married and having children-some greater purpose beyond the mundane activities of life, something unfolding behind the scenes. Many people he knew who shared his interest in the Prophecy found that it gave their lives a sense of immediacy, of urgency-life lived against the context of impending catastrophe. Some of the best-known fragments of the Prophecy did seem to concern the most earth- shattering events-the death of empires and the decline of races, natural disasters on an enormous scale, battlefields where thousands upon thousands fell. And he had understood it then as most people did: as sort of a script for the unfolding events of history, preordained and unalterable, revealed through the gods of the Sovereign Host or perhaps binding even them to its dictates.
Discovering the nightshard, the Heart of Khyber, had given him a better sense of the scope of the Prophecy and of the age of the world. He had learned pieces of the Prophecy that had been fulfilled before humans or elves ever walked the earth, and phrases that could not be fulfilled for another thousand thousand years. His earlier sense of immediacy had largely washed away in a dragon’s perspective on the Prophecy: the world would not end that year, or the next, or during Gaven’s lifetime, but individual events on a smaller scale still carried enormous weight. The appearance of the Storm Dragon seemed to be a central point in the Prophecy from this perspective-possibly the most important event that any human, elf, or dragon alive would ever experience.
Walking the Sky Caves of Thieren Kor showed Gaven the Prophecy in its proper context. In some sense, Senya had been right. If the Prophecy had anything to do with destiny-the destiny of individuals or of the world-it was destiny as Senya had described it. The Prophecy was not a foreordained sequence of events but an infinity of possibilities. Most people used their limited understanding of the Prophecy to justify their action or their inaction, but Gaven came to understand it as a context for action. The Prophecy was reason to act, to watch for opportunities and seize them when they came.
But after days spent tracing the winding tunnels of the Sky Caves, a greater wisdom seemed to dance at the edges of his understanding, like the layers upon layers of meaning in the words of the Prophecy. Exactly like that-to one way of understanding, the words of the Prophecy weren’t even Draconic anymore, they were their own language. The Prophecy seemed, in his mind, like the language of creation, the words that called the world into being and spoke it through its course, the tongue in which all things were named. Then, somehow, it was no longer about fulfilling what had been predicted, but about continuing the course of creation that had been established in the beginning, acting in such a way as to become a creator in one’s own right. A co-creator alongside all the beings, mortal and divine, who had heard and understood and spoken that mystic language in the past, and all who would do so in ages yet to come.
With that greater wisdom came power, enormous power-the power of the Storm Dragon, whether he chose to accept that title or not. What he decided to do with that power, though, was up to him.
Gaven closed his eyes and walked a stretch of tunnel for the sixth time, trying to get a sense of its convoluted path, the meaning it tried to convey to him. He stopped. Something had changed. He felt the hair on the back of his neck standing up, his skin tingling, and his mouth had gone suddenly dry. The dragon approached.
He stood still, waiting for it. I am the lightning, he thought.
Then lightning engulfed him, flowing through his body and out through his limbs. It sank away into the tunnel floor and sputtered harmlessly out his hands.
He opened his eyes and turned to face Vaskar. The dragon filled the tunnel, wings pressed against his body, legs pulled in close. He crawled forward, more snake than dragon, his emerald eyes fixed on Gaven.
“You shouldn’t have come here, Gaven,” the dragon said. “The secrets of the Sky Caves belong to me, the Storm Dragon. I don’t need you anymore. The Prophecy is laid bare to me now.”
Gaven hefted his sword. If that were true, if Vaskar had learned as much from the Sky Caves as he had, the dragon would be a deadly foe.
“Did you hope to thwart me?” Vaskar said. “Would you prevent me from unlocking the secrets of this place? You pathetic creature.”
“You arrived before I did. You’ve been here for days. What have you learned?”
Vaskar roared. “Insolent hatchling. I shall tear you open and feast on your bones!”
Gaven remembered seeing those gaping jaws closing on a wyvern’s neck. Suddenly the dragon seemed like nothing more than a ravening beast. Vaskar had learned nothing. “Will you usurp the Devourer?” Gaven said. “Does the world need two gods who eat without thinking?”
