Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (60 page)

The vault of the Serpent Sea glowed with
their fiery breath and the reflected light of the damson cliffs.
Mychael felt the heated wind of their wing beats gusting against
him. He felt their fire at his back, and in the next moment felt it
light the fire within him, a spark at first that raced along the
tinder of his scars and made him burn.

Bright, purifying heat filled him. Flames of
dragonfire coursed beneath his skin in a sudden, exhilarating rush.
His hand grew stronger on his sword grip, oddly, fiercely stronger.
The dragons flew closer, screeching at him, grazing him with their
scaled wing tips, and in their way, he knew they were urging him on
to the end before them. When next they roared, he answered, opening
his mouth and letting loose the same terrible cry. The power of it
surged through him, and he roared again, lifting his voice into the
rain. Wind whipped around him, tearing at his clothes and setting
his hair on end, the blazing red and molten gold strands snapping
and crackling like fire.

I have drunk the dragon’s blood!
The
voice came to him from out of the past, a priestess’s voice from
his mother’s line.

I have drunk the dragon’s blood and eaten
of his flesh, and my blood shall be as one with the Red Dragon’s,
steeped to a potent brew in my womb until in time the fierce
creature of my conjuring will be brought forth to battle
.

He was the fierce creature the priestess had
conjured. His blood was the dragon’s blood, and the battle he faced
was his to win.

He looked to the swirling dark matter and
again to his hand wrapped around the sword hilt. The blade he held
would ever be the Magia Blade, because of his hand.

He turned the sword into the light of the
cliffs and felt the dragons descend on the beach behind him. They
drew closer, wreathing him with fire and smoke, and the last of his
fear left him. They drew closer yet, and purpose took the place of
his doubts. If Dharkkum would devour, let it devour him and choke
on his dragon heart, for he was the beast who would bring Dharkkum
to its doom.

In the end, he was the beast who would devour
it.

Stretching, feeling tight within his skin, he
felt his muscles harden with iron strength, felt the heat and rage
of the dragon’s screaming cries fill him near to bursting. When
next he roared, flames shot forth from his mouth and the hand
gripping his sword grew claws to match any serpent beast’s. Between
the maelstrom of dragons’ screeching and the fire of flames from
within and without, Mychael felt himself transform, felt the blood
coursing through his veins with a power and strength he had not
foreseen in his dreams. Victory or death, his path was clear. If
this world would last out the day, it was into the heart of
Dharkkum he must go, to destroy the black mystery at its core.

With the fierceness of the creature he had
become, he strode through the sand, and with every step, his body
shifted its shape, skin hardening in sections and becoming scales,
the armor he would need. His teeth pushed further out of his mouth,
becoming long and sharp, his muscles bulged, straining the cloth of
his tunic until it ripped apart. He was no dragon, but the
half-man, half-beast of their making. Terrifying, it was, and so
necessary. He paid the price with every odd and frightening change
and knew there had never been a choice for him. This was his
purpose.

Screaming their rage, their wings beating
against the air, the dragons rose from behind him into the heights
of the cavern. They flew along the edges of Dharkkum, their jaws
tearing at the dark stuff and shredding it between the glistening
white curves of their fangs. As they flew and tore, the black
terror began to churn, the inky, fluid darkness cycling in an ever
tightening funnel to protect itself—and from within its depths, a
pulsing power reached out for him, taunting him to taste the death
of Dharkkum.

Come, war-dreamer. Come, bloodspell beast.
Closer. Come to the All Destroyer. Come to The End From Beyond, and
let the darkness feed on you as the darkness fed on Stept
Agah
.

He heard the call, and in the silence of his
heart, he answered—before his death, Dharkkum would taste his
steel.

With the darkness twisting into an ever
tighter skein, drawing all its threads in upon itself, the soldiers
on the Wall and the trails, skraelpacks and Liosalfar alike,
battled anew.

Run
, he wanted to tell them, for the
true fight had yet to begin. There would be smoke and darkness
aplenty soon, and none would survive it, if he failed. Least of all
the light-bearer at his side, for she, too, was for the dark throat
of their enemy, their course set for the blackest heart of it.

Come, war-dreamer. Find your river of
blood
.

Mychael roared and dragged one leg out of the
rising tide only to plant it again and sink up to his thigh in the
water. Closer, ever closer, he fought his way forward, his heaving
chest mottled with serpentine scales, his clawed hand raising his
sword high.

“
Ddreigiau!
” he roared.
“
Ddreigiau!
” he called to them again. “
Gorchmynnaf ichi
ddyfod!
” Dragons! I bid you come!

And come they did, swooping down from the
cavern’s heights. Ddrei Goch landed in the tide and sent a wave
washing over the top of him, near drowning him with seawater. Smoke
flowed out of the creature’s nostrils, wreathing Mychael in its
sulfurous scent. Fell creatures, indeed, to smell like the gates of
hell, but ’twas the dragon’s next fiery breath he felt sear him to
his core. The water at his feet vaporized with the terrifying
blast, the sand turned to glass, and he... and he... was consumed
inside the towering flames, wrenched with terrifying swiftness from
one place to the next. His heart still beat, but from within a
mighty incarnadine breast covered in serpentine scales. His eyes
still saw, but from a great and soaring height.

He’d found his dragon, and the fell beast was
him.

A strangled cry escaped him, and he knew it
was his last human sound. Dire portents had brought him to this,
wretched dreams and priestess trickery.
Too much
, he
screamed inside, fighting against the agony of transformation —but
naught could hold it at bay. More than a dragonlord, more than a
half-beast, he was the dragon. This was his fate, the true course
of his blood. Ddrei Goch roared, twisting in his own fire, sharing
the same searing pain, and Mychael felt every clenching of massive
muscle and moving of giant bone. He felt the heat and the rage and
the lust for the fight, until there was naught left of Mychael ab
Arawn, until there was but one bloodspell beast to rule the
day.

His sword fell to the glassy shore, unheeded
as he beat his great, leathery wings. With powerful, dread grace,
he rose into the air, and Llynya came into view, racing forward to
retrieve the fallen sword. Behind her, Ddrei Glas swooped low over
the beach. Using elfin speed and a few light steps, the Aetheling
made it onto the Green Dragon’s back, and with her dreamstone blade
to light the way, she lifted the Magia Blade high and cried out,
“
Khardeen!
”

And thus she drove the dragons forth to fight
Dharkkum.

~ ~ ~

From her perch on the trail to the
pryf
nest, Naas watched the dragons and the Starlight rider
disappear into the churning tunnel of darkness. The roots of the
land trembled with the force of that first clash, and in the
ensuing eruption of smoke and blackest night, she caught a bare
glimpse of the dragons wheeling about for another attack—and so it
went.

Drenched by the rain and huddled against the
rock wall at her back, Naas took up a priestess chant. Arianrod
Agah had promised her a fierce creature, and Naas had never seen
one fiercer than that which Mychael ab Arawn and Ddrei Goch had
become—beastly, huge, feral, but not fell. The Druid boy was no
skraeling, and he and the Red Dragon were both of the cauldron
born. Truly, there was power here, a shape-shifter conjured from
millennia past, brought forth by dragons in the present, a calling
to the blood set by a Prydion mage’s spell.

Auch
. She’d lived to see more than
she’d dreaded, more than she’d hoped, dragons and their
shape-shifting lord battling the ancient enemy for the fate of the
world.

The seas grew wild, rising high with the tide
and the storm of war and sweeping clean the beaches. When the smoke
grew thick and the night-black threads snaked through the cavern,
even the doughtiest of the Liosalfar retreated to the nest and
cowered in fear. But when the dragons pushed the darkness back and
the wind blew them a freshening breeze, all took heart and fought
again. Skraelpacks that escaped beyond the Wall were hunted down
and killed in the deep dark. Those that fled aboveground to
Merioneth were mired in the spreading rot and died in Riverwood.
The Liosalfar were relentless in their pursuit, and the skraelings
were leaderless. Yet all would be for naught if Dharkkum overcame
the rider and the dragons.

Naas never left her place, and her hope never
waned. She’d seen the past a thousand times in the flames, and all
the stories had led to the one playing out in the cavern. But with
the coming of Corvus Gei, she’d seen the future—solid and whole and
clearer than any vision she’d ever conjured in her fires. Aye, and
he did her heart good when all the world was darkness and the
screaming cries of dragons filled the air. She might have feared
all would soon be lost, except for him, the traveler, his mere
existence proof that Dharkkum would not prevail, not in this
time.

Tightening her cloak around her, she closed
her eyes and shivered against the storm—and she waited for
victory.

~ ~ ~

Darkest terrors of the night, a deep scent
path filled with the smell of blood and rotted offal and all things
too terrible and pestilent to name
—it pained Llynya to breathe.
Her body ached with exhaustion, her muscles and limbs were
stretched near to their breaking point where she held to her place
on Ddrei Glas’s back. In all the world, there was naught but
darkness cut only by the beast’s fiery breath and the faint flicker
of her dreamstone blade. Of Mychael and the Red Dragon, she’d seen
nothing, not for an eternity—for there was no time in Dharkkum,
neither past nor future, only an endless, instant present that
simply
was
.

She fought. Nothing more. Nothing less. She
fought with the strength of her heart and the mighty beast she
rode.

Darkness and the rushing wind of beating
wings
—a deadly race to the end of time. Pure instinct ruled the
Red Dragon, to devour, to destroy, to feed on the darkness that
dared to breach what he’d been born to protect. The battle raged in
all-consuming night rent by his fiery breath, flames of shifting
shades of color coalescing into a blinding white light to
obliterate the smoking, blanketing void feared as Dharkkum.

When the wretched force of destruction
retreated, he followed with scorching speed, racing in pursuit
through the labyrinth of fjords and tunnels in the deeper caverns,
following the shores of Mor Sarff.

“
Fight with me!
” he roared, his voice
harsh and guttural, far from human. Yet he knew the one he called
would understand. She rode the Green Dragon at his side. A faint
bluish light flickered in her hand, the only guide he had, besides
the inky, fluid center of the darkness that pulled him ever onward
to fight or die.

Time slipped away in the dark war, and when
the dragons disappeared into the lost lands beyond Mor Sarff,
following Dharkkum, Naas could do naught but wait and chant. The
storm of battle still raged about her in the cavern and beyond, but
even through the maelstrom of sound and fury, she heard the
cracking of rock and the screams of the beasts, and once, she heard
a fair, trembling voice faint on the wind...
Heln heln
criy-darr... ba!

‘Twas a chant for the doom of Dharkkum, and
she prayed it meant Llynya yet lived.

At the end of the fifth day, the last traces
of the empty void of night cleared once more and no new smoke arose
to take its place. ’Twas only then that Naas roused herself and
shuffled to the edge of the trail to look north, towards the far
reaches of Mor Sarff. Two more days she waited for the dragons and
the rider, but the dragons ne’er did return.

Trig it was who found Mychael and Llynya
lying on the sands of a cove hidden deep in the secret passages of
Mor Sarff. Long gashes rent their tunics, as if they’d fought with
demons. Firemarks singed their skin, clothes, and hair, but the
Druid boy was whole as a man. They were sorely wounded, aye, and
pale beneath the layers of soot and grime covering them, but they
were alive.

T
he winter became a
time of healing for the land and for the
tylwyth teg
. As the
deep dark rid itself of the smell of Dharkkum, Liosalfar troops
explored farther and farther, searching for Ailfinn and Rhuddlan.
But though they scoured the tunnels and caverns from the Rift to
the Wall, no sign of the mage or her companions was ever found.
Ailfinn was lost to them, along with the
Elhion Bhaas Le
.
The King of the Light-elves was dead...
long live the
king!

The
prifarym
no longer churned in
wildness, and Mychael and Llynya spent the long months setting the
nest aright. He left her once in mid-November, traveling north to a
monastery in Gwynedd to have a mass said for Owain. The stalwart
Welshman had befriended him in a time of need and was sorely
missed. Mychael would not have Owain’s soul troubled by the
enchantment surrounding his death. After the winter solstice, he
and Llynya descended into the dragon nest below Lanbarrdein to
prepare it for the mating that would take place on Beltaine in the
spring. One year hence, Ddrei Glas would return from the dragons’
far northern lair to spawn and die, and a year later, Ddrei Goch
would come for the hatching and join her in death. There would be
new dragons to raise then, two culled from the
pryf
larvae.
And so the cycle of the dragons would once more be united with the
rhythms of Merioneth.