annihilation of the Reaches. The barbarian horde would burn the Towering Wood to the ground, the warlord said, until not a single tree remained standing.
Mission accomplished, Aric thought bitterly.
And rather than watch Zandar and Sevren endure any more torture, he slipped through the bloodthirsty mob and lost himself in the Labyrinth.
CHAPTER 22
Gaven felt the nearness of the shrine before Lissa pointed it out to him, as though the words of the Prophecy contained inside were calling to him. The building was not particularly remarkable, except for the two dragons, painstakingly sculpted in wood, that flanked the stairway leading to the open archway-one painted red, the other gold. White plaster smoothed the stone walls, and gold leaf decorated the edges of the peaked roof. But to Gaven’s eyes, it seemed as if the Prophecy had written the building into existence.
An elaborate mosaic adorned the ground just outside the shrine, depicting the three primordial dragons- shriveled Khyber coiled at the heart, enfolded by the sinuous body of Eberron. Siberys formed a snaky ring around the others. The Dragon Above, the Dragon Between, and the Dragon Below.
Lissa gestured for Gaven and Rienne to enter ahead of her. Gaven held his breath as he stepped across the threshold, hardly daring to hope that he might find what he sought inside. Colorful murals of dragons and dragonborn decorated the inside walls-dragonborn prostrate before dragon-kings, dragons unleashing their devastating breath upon armies and cities, dragonborn soldiers and courtiers and heroes. A stone tablet rested on a carved wooden pedestal at the far end of the room.
And that was all. Gaven let out his breath in a sigh of disappointment. He had expected something more like a library, or at least walls covered in writing rather than space wasted on murals. But this-a single stone tablet. How many of these shrines would he have to visit in order to find what he sought?
“Welcome to the shrine of the Prophecy in Rav Magar,” Lissa said. “May you find here the insight you seek.”
Gaven turned to her. “Where do we sleep?”
“On the floor, of course. In front of the tablet. Dream well.” She bowed, then she was gone.
Gaven stared out the archway at the mural on the ground outside. “I don’t believe it,” he said, glad to slip back into the comfortable Common tongue.
“Not what you expected?” Rienne was examining the murals.
“Might as well at least see what the tablet says.”
“There’s writing on the walls as well. Maybe just captions, but you should check.” Rienne sighed. “Here, take off your pack. I’ll get our bedrolls ready while you read.”
Gaven slid the pack off his shoulders and kneeled in front of the tablet. “Three shadows… stifle?… extinguish? Stupid verbs. They put out the light of three stars, and their blood-is that the blood of the stars or the shadows? Probably either one. Their blood scours or cleans or refines the drakatha-the dragonborn, maybe, or the spawn of a dragon, maybe the brood of Khyber.” He sighed. “I don’t think this is what we’re looking for.”
He turned to Rienne and saw her smoothing her bedroll next to his-the shrine wasn’t large enough to allow any space between them. His heart ached.
No wonder she feels like a supportive wife, he thought. She doesn’t speak the language, and she’s not invested in our purpose here. She’s only here because of me.
She looked up, and her eyes were full of sympathy. “I’m sorry, love. You’ll find it, I’m sure.”
He glanced around at the words woven into the murals. They seemed like captions to the illustrations, though they were couched in the language of the Prophecy. He figured the murals might have illustrated a particular interpretation of the Prophecy, but there was nothing that struck him as relevant to the Time Between. He’d examine them in the morning.
As he lay awake long into the night, Rienne’s head on his chest, his heart still ached. He had the nagging feeling Rienne had only accepted him back into her arms to comfort him, to fulfill her role by supporting him.
Rienne’s hair became a mass of snakes, then a knot of tentacles reaching for him. She was the Soul Reaver then, an abomination, a tentacled head crowning a slender body, great claws on shriveled arms grabbing at him, blank white eyes staring into his and whispers of malice flooding his brain. Gaven rolled on top of it, pinning it to the ground. His hand clenched the spear whose point was the Eye of Siberys, embedded in the Soul Reaver’s chest. His mouth full of slime and bile, the creature’s tentacles raking across his face, he thrust the spear down into the Heart of Khyber.
Through his own hand.
The blood from his hand became a spear of lurid red light, jabbing up from the depths of the earth to pierce the sky. Scarlet filled his vision, and he floated in blood.
Three drops of blood mark the passing of the Time Between.
A ring of silver, a serpent coiled into a circle, shone brightly in the field of red. The red turned to sapphire blue, and the silver ring burst into blinding argent flame. A sword slid through the ring, and then it became a stream of blood, mingled silver and black, flowing out through the ring of fire. Searing flames burst to life around Gaven.
The Time Between begins in blood and ends in blood. Blood is its harbinger, and blood flows in its passing.
Pain like he had never imagined woke him from his sleep.
Rienne stood in darkness. A hard floor, smooth as glass, was cool against her bare feet. The only thing she could see was Maelstrom, suspended in the air before her, the blade pointing up and shining a faint beam of light upward into the darkness. She reached out and grabbed the hilt, savoring the touch of the leather wrapping its hilt. With ground beneath her feet and Maelstrom in her hand, she was solid, rooted.
Maelstrom jerked her arm upward and then lifted her off the ground. She floated in a void. Maelstrom was all-all she could see, all she could feel.
Dragons fly before the Blasphemer’s legions, scouring the earth of his righteous foes.
Carnage rises in the wake of his passing, purging all life from those who oppose him.
Vultures wheel where dragons flew, picking the bones of the numberless dead.
Rienne recognized those last words-Gaven had recited them on the airship as they approached the Starcrag Plain.
But the Blasphemer’s end lies in the void, in the maelstrom that pulls him down to darkness.
Rienne’s feet found solid ground again, and the world burst into light-into the tumult of a battlefield. Dragons flew overhead, their flames and lightning blasting the armies on the ground. A banner fluttered in the wind, bone white, marked with a twisted rune. Maelstrom was alive in her hand-did she control it, or it her? Together they cut through soldier after soldier in a languid dance of annihilation.
She cut a swath through the soldiers until they fell away before her. Then a demon stood before her, his sword burning with blood red fire.
Darkness again, the brief awareness of Gaven’s arms around her, and then she fell back to sleep.
Lissa waited in the antechamber until her feet ached from the hard stone floor and her eyes drooped from sheer exhaustion. After days of hasty travel, she wanted nothing more than to collapse into her bed and sleep for the better part of a day. But duty demanded this one last thing of her.
The door swung open and two soldiers clad in armor made of blackened bone escorted her into the chamber of the dragon-king. She entered silently, but as she approached, the great dragon’s skeletal head turned and rose up on its bony neck. Lissa fell to her knees and dropped her face to the floor.
“Why do you come before me?” The dragon-king’s words were a whisper, spoken without breath or voice.
One did not mince words with a dragon-king, though of course one used the more formal diction of the dragons. “My lord and king, I have found what you have long sought.”
“What is that?”
“The touch of Siberys’s hand.”
