The cloud obscuring the settlement slowly dispersed. People wandered out of the mists, pale as phantoms, powdered from head to foot in dust. There was no sign of the storm now. It has dissipated as quickly as it had rolled in. Above them was a brilliant blue sky, but there, on the edge of the horizon, was a smudge, a smear of darker colour as though dusk had come early.
“Dunsany, do you still carry your telescope?” Silus said.
“Yes, why?”
“Hand it to me, please.”
Silus trained the telescope on the horizon.
It wasn’t dusk that he saw there, however, but the upper edge of a great azure disk.
Bestion knew exactly what it was. “Allfather! Allfather, you have returned to us. Lord, I knew that you would hear my call.”
And indeed it was the Allfather. Rising above the desert plain, casting its shadow across the whole settlement, was the god they all knew intimately.
“It has come,” Illiun wailed. “Our end has arrived. The entity is here.”
Silus realised that this was the threat Illiun had been talking about all along; this was the entity that had made exiles of his people.
Kerberos.
CHAPTER TEN
Calabash dropped to its haunches and Emuel rolled from the creature’s back, tumbling to the ground, rudely awakened as he came up hard against a boulder.
“Can you not give me more warning next time?” the eunuch said, brushing the dust from his clothes.
But Calabash didn’t respond. Instead, it sat stock still, staring at the horizon.
It was then that Emuel realised just how quiet it was. He couldn’t hear the usual hisses and groans of the following herd. He turned to see that the other dragons were mimicking their leader: sitting back on their haunches, wings folded against their flanks, silently watching the horizon as though waiting for something.
Dragons.
There was no other word for them. Emuel had been able to deny the evidence before him when the creatures had been no bigger than ponies, but they had grown at an alarming rate over the last few days, until he finally had to admit that he was indeed surrounded by the creatures of legend.
In all the stories of dragons he had encountered, they were always either on the verge of extinction or the last of their kind, ensconced in some mountain eyrie, occasionally venturing forth to terrify the populace of a village and devour their livestock. Emuel knew that some magical catastrophe had done for Twilight’s dragons, but he had no real idea as to the nature of the apocalypse. Was this world, he wondered, the true home of the dragons? Had they never been native to Twilight in the first place? Emuel reflected what a privilege it was to be amongst such creatures.
Calabash shifted and gave a soft bark, and Emuel looked up to see a deep azure band edging over the mountains. Several days earlier they had left the last of the desert behind; the terrain they now found themselves in was no less forbidding or lifeless, yet something was now breathing life into the ragged peaks, washing them in a colour that reminded Emuel of dusk on Twilight. There was a tingling sensation in his arms, as the tattoos there started moving. The flowers inked amongst the elven runics slowly opened, lines of script in a language Emuel didn’t recognise snaking out from amongst the black petals. Where they wrote their story onto his flesh, it burned.
Calabash sang. It began with a deep, repetitive rhythm, like a heartbeat. At first it was just Calabash’s voice, but as the mountains took on the colour of the huge disk rising over them, the rest of the dragons added their own voices to the song. Some took the base rhythm and kept it going — the thuds and clicks resonating deep within their throats — while others wove delicate melodies into the music, the harmonies seeming to rise not just from the dragons, but the very earth itself.
As one, with a sound like a great whipcrack, the dragons snapped their wings open. They were swaying to the song now, their eyes alight with the twilight glow. Their feet began to move, lightly at first — the soft padding of their claws on the ground barely audible — but soon they weren’t just swaying, they were dancing, pounding out the rhythm of the music into the dusty earth.
Emuel wept, as he hadn’t since the death of his parents. Hot tears rolled down his cheeks and his chest hitched. He could barely breathe, but he didn’t care, because it felt so wonderful; the song had released something in him.
He cried for the way he had been used. He cried for the loss of his manhood, and all that had been denied him with that one vile act. He cried with joy that he, not much more than a boy from Drakengrat, had been gifted with such sights as were revealed to him now. He cried for a faith that had been shattered, and which he had rebuilt himself, painfully and slowly, on his own terms. He cried for the loss of his friends, and the thought that he would never see them again. He cried for the destruction of the Llothriall and the realisation that he would no more guide that majestic vessel through the storm.
But most of all he cried because, looming large over the arid mountains, looking down on him, was the face of his god.
As Kerberos cleared the range, Emuel went to stand beside Calabash. The ground shook under the force of the dragons’ dance and he stumbled, but Calabash nudged him back on his feet with the tip of its snout, without losing its rhythm. Emuel laughed and began to move in time with Calabash, delighting in the music rolling from the creature as it led the song.
The ancient texts, the stories, the songs, the plays — not one of them had ever talked about this; this act of sheer creativity, of beauty, of pure, unmediated joy. In the legends, dragons were killers, jealous recluses guarding hoards of treasure that they couldn’t possibly ever spend. Like most things he had been taught, Emuel was coming to realise the legends were wrong.
“What are you?” he cried.
Calabash’s voice changed, the clicks and deep thumps coming from its chest now giving way to something more breathy, less frantic. Each new element added to the song’s power. Emuel found himself swaying in time with the dragon, matching its movements exactly, like a snake caught by the gaze of a charmer. Calabash’s wings slowly flapped, fanning Emuel with a cool breeze that dusted the last of the desert from him. When the dragon brought its head low, Emuel leaned forward to look deep into its eyes, and it was then that Calabash let the song tell the dragons’ story.
Deep within the heart of Kerberos, beyond the storms that give voice to its wrath, lies a place of absolute silence, quieter than death, yet it is here that creation begins.
They are tiny at first, no bigger than a thought, because that is what they are; a god’s will. But soon they flicker into true being, a heartbeat clothed in flesh. They hang in the darkness, tiny pulsing lights strung like stars throughout the deity’s firmament. Even now they are calling to one another, the song growing in strength as cells divide and consciousness awakes.
Though these creatures are part of the deity itself, Kerberos marvels at the life within it, at the complexity of thought that develops as the creatures sing themselves into being.
When they are fully formed, the god begins to gather certain minerals from its atmosphere, weaving these around each dragon foetus, until they are encased in rock impervious to all but the mightiest of forces.
It is time to let its children go. Beneath Kerberos’s gaze a whole new world turns, one that has not yet heard the song of its creation. And so, the god sends its children out into the void. Hundreds upon hundreds of eggs hurtle out into space, the vast azure sphere of Kerberos quickly spiralling away from them, only for the larger planet below to gather them into its embrace. With a quick succession of terrific bangs, they hit the upper atmosphere, but it is not this that awakens the dragons, but the heat of the flames that engulfs each egg as it falls, incubating them, completing the life begun by Kerberos.
They seed the earth, the impacts cracking the shells, allowing the dragons to break out and crawl forth. They
