Veil of the Dragon (Prophecy of the Evarun) (4 page)

The Remnants fell to Baerythe as Al-Aaron passed.

The songs of the Cherubim faded. 

Al-Aaron lowered the blackened length of Baerythe’s gossamer blade beside him. Blue flame still trickled across its edge. Behind Al-Aaron, the husks of the Remnants collapsed and buckled upon the shadows that bound them. The souls they’d held billowed past, the glow of blue flame dancing upon them.

***

Chaelus awoke to his head pounding, his vision blurred. He lay upon the ground. Al-Aaron stood nearby, surrounded by the fallen bodies of armored men. Darkened legion helms, skirted in mail, concealed their faces above blackened lorica. Short stabbing blades, widened at their tips like teeth and blackened like their armor, lay on the ground beside them.

Before Al-Aaron, a single rider leveled a stave bearing the standard of the Taurate, the circle Imperious inscribed with the X of the Prostrate Cross. His black mount reared beneath him.

The azure flame from Al-Aaron’s blade illuminated the silver child’s face beneath his cowl. Magus’ whisper - the Dragon’s whisper - caustic and sweet, drifted from it. 

“Why do you still stand?”

Chaelus struggled to his knees. The ground beneath him and the enemy before him wavered. Impotent rage coursed through him.

Al-Aaron stood calm, holding his wounded arm close. He raised his sword upright with the other. The thin white cloth that bound the steel had blackened. 

“Because I remembered what protects me.”

Magus turned his stare towards Chaelus as a smile surely passed across his unseen lips. He urged his mount forward. His voice grew coarse as it drew in.

“Death suits you well, Master.”

Al-Aaron stepped between them. “You can’t have him.”

Magus and beast sprang back, blocked by something unseen. He screamed with the sounds of the damned as he pulled the beast up short.
“Your kind is dead and your ashes have been scattered. I know this!”

“Then it’s from the ashes we’ve returned. I hold no fear of you.”

Magus screamed again as the beast reared once more beneath him. Al-Aaron remained steadfast, his sword aglow with soft blue radiance. Barely, he whispered, “Go back.” 

Magus pulled away as if stricken by the flame, crashing his steed back into the wood until the darkness and mist there consumed them.

Chaelus could only stare into the wood where Magus, where the Dragon, had fled. The weight of its shadow was only surpassed by that of his shame. He hadn’t even raised his blade against it, against the thing that had taken everything from him.

Al-Aaron lowered his own, its supernatural fire extinguished. He staggered over the corpses, his breathing weak. His eyes dimmed. He held out his hand toward Chaelus. 

“We have to hurry,” Al-Aaron said. “The Prophecy of the Evarun has begun.”

Chapter Four

Effigy

Chaelus watched the pallid gossamer stretch taut beneath Al-Aaron’s trembling fingers. It pressed against the oiled surface of the steel, overlapping as he guided it up the length of the blade. The steel cast blue in the morning light,
like
the mystical aura and flame it
had
held the night before. 

Sunlight filtered through the forlorn branches above, branches made bare by the autumn’s tide. Only odd leaves, stragglers remained. The great oak twisted and bent itself behind him, its roots stretching out as it reached high above the small hollow in which they rested.

Al-Aaron leaned over the sword, weary, lost in his task. He steadied the blade with his wounded arm. He still wouldn’t speak of it
. O
nly at Chaelus’ insistence had
he even
let
him
tend to its dressing. The bleeding had stopped, but from what
he
had glimpsed of it, and from what he had seen of the adversary they’d faced, it was no normal wound. Whatever poison it carried drew Al-Aaron further away with each moment
that
pass
ed
. 

The blackened cloth of wound and blade lay discarded
at Al-Aaron’s
feet.

Chaelus knelt beside him. His own fever wore at him, but he said nothing of it. Not while Al-Aaron suffered. But there was something he would say, one question that he had to ask, that his pride feared to say.

“How did I fall while you remained against them?”

Al-Aaron looked up at him. “It was the Dragon’s Call. The poison of the Dragon’s blood awoke within you. There was nothing you could do.” 

Chaelus struggled against Al-Aaron’s reply and everything it meant. How could he destroy the Dragon when it could strike him down with a whisper? 

“Then how do I to defeat it?”

“By lighting a fire.” Al-Aaron gave a weary smile. “I’ll need it to purify.”

Chaelus played along. “The smoke will reveal us.”

“The Dragon has already found us. It was waiting within you, within both of us. I’d forgotten. Hopefully we can reach the safety of Sanseveria before it returns. The Dragon is eternal. So too must be the power you wield against it. Sword or spear or bow cannot harm it. You can’t hope to defeat the Dragon alone.”

The discarded gossamer appeared already burnt. Its substance was brittle and frail. 

“What’s become of it?” Chaelus asked, pointing to the cloth.

Al-Aaron returned to the sword and continued its binding. He didn’t pause in his reply. “It’s been spoiled by the Dragon’s taint.”

Chaelus bristled at the memory of his failure. The dark shadows of men brought down by the hand of a child, while he had watched and done nothing to stop them, letting Magus, the Dragon, escape him. It sickened him and it left behind something else he had yet to ask. “How did you defeat them?”

Al-Aaron looked up at him, holding his gaze. “I didn’t. They didn’t fall by my power. I’m but a channel. The sword is only a symbol.”

“No symbol wounded you after you left me. Forget that you’re only a child. I’m familiar enough with your oath. It was a man’s blade that pierced you.” 

Al-Aaron pressed the gossamer’s end beneath the hilt of the sword. He stared into the depth of the steel. “They weren’t men.”

“No beast is cloaked in the arms of the Theocracy. They weren’t ghosts.”

“Not beasts, not ghosts. Remnants, made from the husks of those the Dragon has spent.”

“You say they’re dead?”

“No, not dead. They’re the servants of the Dragon and the dead serve no purpose to it. Only the living may be possessed by its shadow. They’re what remains. It’s within the cenotaphs that they’re made.”

Chaelus’ throat thickened.  His vision wavered. The same shadow from the cenotaph pulsed beneath the surface of everything before him, like a face behind a veil. Everywhere, save for the soft glow emanating from Al-Aaron, and even from himself, until at last both light and shadow faded away.

Al-Aaron, unmoved, laid the sword upon the fur beside him. He wrapped the blade within it, binding it finally again in sinew as he spoke. “They’re not dead. Nor are they men anymore. The Dragon’s shadow has consumed them, their souls lost until only the vessel of their wasted flesh remains. Until now I only knew them in stories and legend. They haven’t walked among us since before the Expulsion. They were the wizards’ minions; the dancing horde. That they’ve returned to us, and so disguised, is grave news indeed.” 

“What of Magus?”

Al-Aaron paused, setting the bound blade beside him. “Magus is the mask of the Dragon itself. Not flesh corrupted, but the Dragon made into near flesh. It’s as close as the Dragon may come to our image, which was made in the Rua’s own. Even your father succumbed to its lies. You stood no chance against it. Not then. Not now.”

Chaelus staggered to his feet and began to gather the scattered dead wood around them, buried beneath the fallen leaves, and in short time he had the timbers piled together. The fire started after only a few strikes of his flint. Leaning over the small pyre, he shifted the wood as the flame grew, consuming the kindling at its center. 

Al-Aaron turned his gaze into the burgeoning flame. “The Dragon is eternal. All that is now has already been so before. Ever since the Expulsion a century ago, the Dragon has waited as its seed silently spread across the Pale. The failing of the Servian Lords opened the door for its return. The Line they guarded was already broken. The Dragon had already been set free.”

Chaelus withdrew his stoke from the fire. The failing of the Servian Lords, he thought, and the failing of his father. “It was with the Schism of your Order that the Servian Lords failed.”

“No. The Schism was only the consequence of it. The failure of the Servian Lords came long before. It began the day their promise was broken, the promise they made to watch for the Dragon’s return in themselves.”

Al-Aaron’s voice trailed away. He stared at his wounded arm. “The wall we call the Line, like the gossamer bound swords we bear, is a symbol, meant to be honored, but not the end in itself. The Line they truly failed to protect was one within their hearts. People will say that the fall of the Servian Lords happened quickly and without warning. But they were dead long before breath ceased to come from their lips. Each of them, chosen by the Giver to defeat the Dragon a hundred years before, was eventually seduced by the Dragon itself, just like the Gorondian Wizards were before them.

“Only your father, Malius, was spared their fate. He was spared by the death you gave him, for only the living may answer the Dragon’s call. The other eleven have now answered to the Dragon they came to serve. Now the Dragon hunts for the one who can take your father’s place, the one it has marked. The same mark you bear above your brow.”

Chaelus stood and leaned against one of the great roots that stretched around them. He pressed his face into his hands and passed them over the runes upon his brow. He felt the pulse of the darkness he had just seen beneath everything. “I feel I’ve walked into a dream.”

“It’s the dream of the life you once held that you must walk away from. It’s from the Dragon that I took you and it’s the Dragon that comes for you now. With you, it hopes to make its own dark prophecy complete, when the twelve who’ve fallen rise in fealty to it.”

Chaelus lowered his reeling head. The light of the fire, faint in the sunlight, danced upon the bare face of the rocks around it. “Then by what you say I’m already damned, just like my father.”

“This is what the Dragon wants you to believe.”

Chaelus watched the light fade from the stones as the small fire ebbed behind him. Just like everything he had known or loved had already done. “And what do you believe?”

“That there’s hope, that you have a choice. But there are other losses you carry. There are wounds you have yet to speak of. Promises of your own, perhaps, that were broken.”

Chaelus turned away. He felt
again
the cold touch of the old woman’s hand. He remembered the
sweet
scent of jasmine that had lured him to her. 

“Her name was Faerowyn,”
he
said.

“She was someone you loved.”

Chaelus’ voice fell distant as he saw her with his mind’s eye again. “Her beauty was a fire to me.”

“You were with the Lossons, exile
d by
your father.” 

“So it
was
for her as well, but her family rose to high station within the Theocracy. Her father was a member of the Theocratic Council itself. Only the High Priests of the Taurate held reign over him. If, that is, even they truly did.”

“All men fall
,
”
Al-
Aaron whispered.

“Her family was surrounded by the luxuries their circumstance afforded,” Chaelus said. “Promises were made for her that her family could
n’t
ignore; everything she wanted, everything that the prince of a Roan Lord could never offer her.”

“Then Malius summoned you back.”

“Yes. There was once a time
when
I’d hoped his world would
never
become mine.”

Al-Aaron stared into the flames as he reached for the pile of spent gossamer beside him, clutching it unceremoniously within his fingers. He held it above the flames as one end of the darkened cloth fell from his grasp, hanging wind-tossed above the fire that reached up to meet it. The cloth withered above the heat, giving off an acrid stench that filled the air. As the parched threads erupted into flame, he let the gossamer fall. He closed his eyes, his lids shrouded gray above them.

“Tell me of the death of your father,” he said.

Chaelus sank again against the tree root. The weight of shame and memory pressed him there. His breath grew thin. “There’s no greater guilt I bear. Yet still it
’s
worsened, because I
can’t
remember how it came to pass.”

“Then tell me what you can
.
”

“I had returned from exile in answer to his summons,” Chaelus said. “The host of Roan Lords had gathered to him. They’d just beaten back the Khaalish horde. On the field of war I found my brother Baelus, of less years than you are now,
lying
wounded in the snow.