Inside Mount Luciare, the humans huddled, awaiting the final onslaught. The hand of doom seemed to cover them like a roof. The thunder drums had gone silent. Everything was hushed.
Rhianna and the others came upon the Wizard Sisel down in the lowest depths of the tunnels. His head was wrapped in a bloody bandage. Thumb-lights lit the way, burning like the brightest stars, and the floors were strewn with herbs and seeds, so that the tunnel smelled like a garden. A roof had collapsed, and beyond a knot of warriors, rocks barred the way. The scent of stone and soil only helped to heighten the illusion that this was somehow a garden.
“What is happening?” Daylan Hammer called out.
“The enemy has withdrawn,” the wizard said in exasperation. “I do not know why. They are waiting…for something. My heart tells me that this bodes ill.”
“A Death Lord leads the wyrmling horde,” Daylan said. “He cannot risk the touch of sunlight, yet dawn is not half an hour away. He must enter the city before then.”
“I thought at first that the collapse of the tunnel had slowed them,” Sisel wondered aloud. “But that cannot be it.”
Suddenly, it seemed that his eyes caught the light of one of the thumb-lanterns, and they went wide.
“The wyrmlings will come, they must come. But when they do, we must hold them off until dawn. Unless… Quickly-gather the people. Get them to the eastern end of the city!”
The soldiers all stood for a moment, unsure what to do. Sisel was no warrior lord, with the right to command. No one seemed to be in command.
“Quickly,” Daylan shouted, for he seemed to divine the wizard’s plan, “do as he says!”
Areth Sul Urstone had never been inside a wyrmling temple, where those who hoped to receive wyrms committed foul deeds in order to prepare themselves for immortality. He had never wanted to be in one. He had only heard of the bloody rites performed there in whispered legend.
Areth was too weak from hunger and pain to stand. But he heard the red-robed priests shout in triumph. They stood with their backs to him, on a dais near the front of the temple. They suddenly backed away from an altar. One of the priests gripped a sacrificial knife.
Upon the altar, the wyrmling boy that had given Areth his endowment jerked, his legs pumping uselessly, as if in a dream he ran one final race with death.
Then the boy stopped, his muscles eased, and he lay still, blood dribbling from the open wound at his throat. His eyes stared uselessly toward the heavens.
With that, a bond was broken. Most of the ache and fatigue that Areth had felt eased away, dissipating slowly, as if it had all been an evil dream.
“Well done,” the emperor whispered. A wyrmling priest stuck his thumb into the blood at the boy’s throat, then pressed the bloody thumb between the child’s eyes, anointing him.
He stepped down from the dais, crossed the stone floor, and pressed his bloody thumb between Areth’s eyes, anointing him with the child’s blood.
Around Areth, on the stone benches beneath the altar, a crowd of wyrmling supplicants made a low moaning noise, a groan of ecstasy.
Areth closed his eyes and waited for the wyrm to take him. He thought that it would be a violent act, that he’d know when it came. He thought that he would feel a sense of entrapment, like a creature being forced into a cage.
Instead he felt a rush of euphoria.
The child’s endowment had been stripped from him, and Areth Sul Urstone, who had endured greater tortures than any man had ever known, was suddenly free of pain.
Over the past fourteen years his body had become so accustomed to torture that the sudden absence was like a balm, sweet and soothing beyond measure.
But it was more than just physical pain that he found himself freed from. There was something more, something that only the presence of a great wyrm could explain. He suddenly felt released of all responsibility, of all guilt.
All of his life, his well-exercised sense of morality had guided his every deed.
Suddenly it was stripped away, and he perceived that he had been living his life in shackles. For the first time he was truly free-free to take whatever he wanted; free to kill or steal or maim.
Areth leaned his head back and laughed at the folly of the world.
“It is done,” the emperor cried, and wyrmling priest’s eyes went wide. It seemed that he could not drop to his knees and prostrate himself fast enough. “The Lady Despair walks among us in the flesh-” the emperor shouted, “let all obey her will.”
In the temple, the crowd let loose with cries of rapture. As one the wyrmlings fell down upon their faces, so that Areth was ringed by a throng of worshipers.
Areth felt surprised at first, but recognized the truth. Yes, Lady Despair was with him, the Queen of the Loci who had lived from the beginning.
In his mind’s eye, he imagined her just-discarded form, a world worm that now lay dead, floating in a pool of molten lava, a deserted husk.
Yaleen moved Areth’s hand, stared at it as if it were some foreign object. How long has it been since I have worn a human form? she wondered.
“You shall call me by a new name,” the Lady announced to her followers. “My name is Yaleen, as it was in the beginning; and you shall call me by a new title: I am your Lord Despair.”
Yaleen closed his eyes, and images flashed in his mind, the view of the world as seen from the eyes of a thousand evil creatures and men. A great war was brewing. Wyrmling troops had begun to destroy the newly discovered human settlements, harvesting the small ones, but now the small ones were arming themselves with bows of steel, mounting knights in armor with great lances. They would fight tooth and nail for their lives.
In the underworld, Yaleen’s great servants, the reavers stood ready to enforce his will.
Upon the One True World, the last remnants of the Bright Ones fled from his Darkling Glories.
But most imposing upon his vision was the City of Luciare. Yaleen’s Death Lord now held the city in his grip. Its troops had been slaughtered, and its doors were broken. Vulgnash had carried Fallion down from the mount and was flying rapidly to the courts of Rugassa.
The Death Lord waited now only for Yaleen’s final command.
Areth Sul Urstone had given his soul to save this city. Now, some small corner of his mind that still functioned peered at the miserable wreckage. He could not remember why he had paid such a price.
Yaleen sent her thoughts out, like a dark and grasping hand, and probed for the mind of her servant.
Leagues away at the ruins of Mount Luciare, the Death Lord now felt a familiar touch to his mind, and whispered, “Master, reveal thy will. What shall I do with this city?”
There was a moment of hesitation. Areth Sul Urstone felt almost as if Yaleen waited to consult him, to let him make the choice.
I gave my soul for my people, Areth reminded her.
Yet what did they give you in return? she asked. They left you in prison to die in torment. They never mounted an expedition to rescue you, never offered a coin to buy your freedom. You gave your all for them. And they offered you nothing in return. For many years now, they have laughed and loved in your absence. They have thrown their feasts and spawned their children. They have forgotten you.
The words felt like truth. How many times had Areth lain in his cell, wondering if anyone worried for him, or even remembered his name?
Areth felt empty inside, numb and lifeless. He no longer hoped for rescue. He needed none. Now he felt hurt. He only wanted to strike back at these petty creatures who had left him to his fate.
The choice was made.
“Go into the city, and make of it a tomb,” Yaleen whispered to the Death Lord.
The Death Lord shouted a command, and with a roar his troops raced through the ruptured gates.
Yaleen opened his eyes and gazed down now upon the wyrmlings in the temple, all lying prostrate before him. For countless millennia, Yaleen had longed for this moment-when the great wyrm could claim the soul of an Earth King.
