Father! Fallion thought, his heart feeling as if it would break.
“What is that creature?” Jaz shouted.
Fallion looked to King Urstone, whose face was pale with fear, and then to the Wizard Sisel, who merely shook his head in bafflement.
“It is a graak,” Daylan Hammer shouted from atop the battlements. “But only of a kind that has been spoken of in legend.”
Fallion stood, heart hammering, in mounting fear.
Did I create that terror when I merged the worlds? he wondered. He had no answer.
There were too many of the Knights Eternal. The darkness was falling.
Suddenly, the wyrmling princess gave a great cry and leapt from the tower wall. She landed only feet from Fallion, and the ground trembled beneath her weight.
The huge beast, this graak of legend, landed in the field, two hundred yards away, and the lonely figure just clung to its neck. The graak reared up, its ugly neck stretching thirty feet in the air, and for a moment Fallion feared that it would lunge, take them in its teeth and kill them all.
Then it lay down as the wyrmling princess sprinted through the dry grass toward it.
“Areth?” the king cried out. “Areth?”
The lone figure raised up, peered in their direction, and let out a mournful cry, almost a sob.
He was a wreck of a man. His black hair had not been cut in years, and it fanned out from his head in disarray. His long beard reached nearly to his belly.
But even from a distance, Fallion recognized his father’s blazing blue eyes.
Prince Urstone let go of the beast’s neck, went sliding down its leathery hide, dropping twenty feet to the ground.
He got up on unsteady legs, as if he were not used to walking. He began staggering over the grass, calling out, sobbing.
He’s a broken thing, Fallion thought, a wretch.
Fallion heard Talon sniff, looked over, saw tears of pity in her eyes.
Fallion, so focused on his father, almost did not see the wyrmling princess run and leap onto the monster’s neck, quickly scrambling for purchase. The behemoth let out a strangled cry, then thundered up into the air.
For an instant, Fallion’s father was there under blackest shadows, the wind beating down upon him, and then the star reappeared.
At the edge of the glade, three Knights Eternal flew, wings flapping softly.
Fallion saw his father stumble, and King Urstone let out a shout, went rushing across the field, calling “Areth! Areth. Ya gish, ha!”
Fallion found himself running, too, legs pumping in an effort to keep up.
“Father!” he shouted. “Father, I’m here!” Fallion so wanted to see his father again, that for a moment he imagined that this “shadow father” might recognize him.
Then his father rose from the ground, and came stumbling toward them on unsteady legs.
King Urstone drew to a halt, took a step backward and shouted in his own tongue.
That’s when Fallion saw it. There was something wrong with his father’s eyes. Fallion had fancied that he’d seen blazing blue eyes a moment ago.
But now all that he saw were pits, empty pits.
They’ve blinded him, Fallion realized. They couldn’t just set my father free. They had to blind him first.
And as the derelict came staggering forward, Fallion’s dismay only grew. In the failing light, he realized that his father’s skin looked papery and ragged. His hair was falling out in bunches. His face was shrunken and skeletal.
“Father?” Fallion cried out in horror.
“Fallion, get back!” the Wizard Sisel shouted a heartfelt warning. “There is no life in that accursed thing!”
King Urstone had fallen back, and now he drew his ax in his right hand and grabbed Fallion with his left, holding Fallion back.
The wretch drew closer, and with each step, the rotting horror of his features became clearer. Soon he was forty feet away, then twenty.
The shape of his face is wrong, Fallion decided. That’s not my father at all.
Fallion felt bewildered, uncertain.
No, his features aren’t becoming clearer. He is rotting before our eyes.
The thing came toward Fallion, staggering and bumbling, and fell. Almost, Fallion reached out to grab him, but he heeded Sisel’s warning.
The derelict suddenly flicked his wrist, and a knife dropped from his sleeve, into his hand. Viciously, he took a swipe at Fallion.
Fallion raised his sword and slashed the creature’s wrist, disarming it as the derelict fell to the ground and collapsed, its flesh turning to dust, leaving only a half-clothed skeleton with ragged patches of hair to lie at Fallion’s feet.
Fallion stood there, his sword in hand, and peered down in dismay. He looked up at the Knights Eternal, but they were already winging away, over the dark swamps.
One of them threw back his head, and dimly Fallion realized, He’s laughing. They’re laughing at us!
There was no one to strike, no one to take vengeance upon.
The meadow was left empty and unbloodied. The wyrmlings had not violated the truce. Nor had they kept their word. They had their princess, and Fallion had…a corpse.
Sisel came up at their back, stood peering down in dismay. The others followed, the entire small group converging as one. King Urstone swore and raged at the sky.
“Was that my father?” Fallion asked, still uncertain.
“No,” the Wizard Sisel said, “just some unfortunate soul who died long ago in prison. The Knights Eternal must have put some kind of glamour upon the corpse.”
“But,” Rhianna asked, “the dead walked?”
“Oh yes,” Sisel intoned, “in the courts of Rugassa, the dead do more than walk.”
“I…was a fool to hope,” Fallion said, blinking back tears of rage and embarrassment.
“A fool, to hope?” Sisel said, “never! They want you to believe that, because the moment you do, they have won. But remember-it is never foolish to hope, even when your hope has been misplaced.”
High King Urstone knelt, his hands resting on the pommel of his ax, and just wept softly for a long moment. There was no one to comfort the king, no one who dared, until at last Alun came and put his hand upon the king’s shoulder.
The king looked up at him, gratitude in his eyes.
“The wyrmlings lied,” Jaz said bitterly.
“It is in their nature to lie,” Sisel said. “The wyrms in their souls find it hard to abide the truth. Daylan knew that they might try to deceive us. It was always a risk.”
“A risk?” Daylan Hammer called out. “Yes, there was a chance that the wyrmlings would seek to cheat us. But if we had let things go as they were, the destruction of our souls was not a risk-it was a certainty. You know of what I am speaking, Sisel. You smelled the moral rot as well as I did.”
Daylan Hammer came down from the tower now, and went striding up behind the group, peering down at the corpse.
“I smelled the moral rot,” Sisel said. “It was like an infected tooth, that threatens the life of the whole body. Still, I suspect that we could have waited a little longer before pulling it.”
“And I think that we have waited far too long,” Daylan said. “The moral rot runs all through Luciare now.” He sighed, studied the body. “I’m sorry Fallion, Jaz. I had hoped for a happier end than this.”
“What will you do now?” Jaz asked. “Will you go to Rugassa and free my father?”
“We don’t have the troops,” the Wizard Sisel said. “We could throw ten thousand men against the castle walls there and still not be sure to breach their defenses.”
“There must be something you can do-” Jaz said, “perhaps a better trade?”
But we’ve already offered a fair trade, Fallion thought. I know, he considered sarcastically, we could offer
