Vaskar perched on an eruption of stone, overlooking a plain of jumbled rock and sand. He had been watching the great moon’s ascent through the sky, and his patience was rewarded as it neared its apex. A hint of shadow appeared at the edge of its disk. He clutched the Eye of Siberys tighter in his great claw and rumbled deep in his throat.
“The eclipse is beginning,” he murmured, “the dark of the great moon.” He stretched his neck and his wings to the sky and roared. “The time is at hand!”
He watched, waiting for the perfect moment, as Nymm slowly disappeared in the world’s shadow.
When its light was completely quenched, he raised the Eye of Siberys high, holding it gingerly between his two front claws. “Do your work,” he whispered. He gazed into the golden crystal, and he saw.
He saw the desolation of the Mournland and the life-leaching energies that still permeated the land. He saw the twelve moons arrayed in the sky above him, Nymm shrouded in its eclipse, and he perceived the forces aligned to make this moment possible. He saw the Sky Caves slumbering beneath the ground, and he called to them. He felt them begin to stir, responding to his call.
For a moment, he saw himself—small and insignificant among the events of the moment. But he did not like to see himself, and he certainly didn’t like feeling small.
“The Storm Dragon has emerged!” he cried. “I will walk in the paths of the first of sixteen!”
He closed his eyes, and the earth began to shake. The ground trembled so violently that Vaskar took to the sky, pounding his wings in the still air to rise above the tumult. The plain below him looked like a troubled sea, sand erupting in geysers and boulders rolling wildly in every direction. He flew in widening circles, watching the earth churn in an area the size of a large island.
Soon there was direction in the movement below him—a general tendency toward the outside of an enormous circle. The ground swelled, sand sliding and boulders rolling downhill from the center of the bulge. Vaskar flew to the edge of the swell, not wanting to be directly above whatever emerged.
As he continued his flight, the sand at the crest of the swell fell away, revealing a jagged dome of reddish stone. Slowly it rose higher and higher above the surrounding earth, and Vaskar caught sight of a cave entrance in the face of the rock, sand pouring out of it as it lifted into the air.
“The Sky Caves of Thieren Kor!” he roared.
The more rock emerged from the earth, the faster it rose, and in another moment it had broken free entirely. The rumbling thunder of the earth below came to an abrupt stop. In the sudden silence, an enormous island floated a hundred feet up in the air, rounded at the top, a jagged point at the bottom like an inverted mountain. Sand and rubble poured from dozens of holes, spilling down the sides and trickling into a great crater in the ground below it.
Vaskar tightened the circle of his flight, surveying the Sky Caves from every side, trying to decide where to enter. The cave mouths seemed to form patterns, characters of the Draconic script, but every time he tried to read them he thought they shifted, aligning themselves in different patterns. Finally, impatient, he chose a cave near the top and landed on its lower lip, scrabbling at the edge until he could get all four claws on solid ground.
“The Storm Dragon walks in the paths of the first of sixteen,” he said. “I am here. Reveal your secrets to me!”
He advanced into the winding tunnel.
* * * * *
Gaven felt the earth rumbling and hefted his sword, expecting an attack—something springing from the ground, perhaps, or some enormous monster that shook the earth with its steps. The rumbling grew until it threatened to knock him off his feet, and in that moment he glimpsed the eclipsed moon above his head.
“No,” he breathed.
Exhausted as he was, he ran. The wind cradled him and sped him on. The sky darkened as clouds rolled in—the first real clouds he’d seen since entering the Mournland—and covered the Ring of Siberys, the stars, the eclipsed moon. His steps and the wind around him kicked up a storm of sand and ash in his wake.
He occasionally glimpsed creatures moving in the night around him, from scavenging vermin the size of dogs to an enormous war construct he spotted in the distance, lumbering across the landscape. One spiny crab-spider thing snapped at him with fangs and pincers as he ran, but he didn’t slow at all, and it quickly grew tired of the chase. Nothing else came close enough to threaten him.
Rain began to fall. It cooled him as he ran and soothed the burning wound across his chest. He saw it form craters in the sandy ground and drain away.
The land around him was flat and featureless. The map he’d found in Paluur Draal and committed to memory was his only guide, and he had no better way to navigate than trying to keep his path straight in the direction he’d first chosen. The bank of gray mist hung off to his right, sometimes nearer than others, but otherwise he could see nothing to indicate where he was, where he’d been, or where he was headed. He slipped in and out of an illusion that only the ground moved at all, that he hung in the air, running in place. He lost all sense of time and distance—he could have been running for hours, days, weeks.
But then a darkness appeared before him in the distance. At first it looked like a dark cloud, a heart of a storm in the midst of an overcast sky. As he drew closer, though, it began to take shape. The first feeble daylight illuminated the clouds overhead, casting it in silhouette. It was huge, like a mountain hanging upside-down in the air above the blasted landscape. It floated over an enormous crater, the remains of the cyst from which it had burst forth.
A part of Gaven’s mind that was not quite his knew all about the Sky Caves of Thieren Kor. In a different life he had learned all he could about them, poring over fragments of the Prophecy collected in great draconic libraries. He had waited a dragon’s long lifetime for the opportunity to explore them and plumb their secrets, and when that lifetime had ended, he—that other he, the dragon of the nightshard—had made sure that what he had learned would someday be remembered.
So Gaven remembered, and the knowledge flooded back to him. The Sky Caves were ancient—they had floated above the untouched wilderness of Khorvaire when dragons first ventured forth from Argonnessen to challenge the fiends that ruled the world. Thieren Kor was a placename in the language used by the fiends, meaning “mountain of secrets.” Countless battles had raged beneath that floating mountain, in the skies around it, and within its twisting tunnels—dragons and demons tearing at each other, spilling oceans of blood to gain control of its secrets. When the dragons emerged victorious from the eons-long war, the first dragon to explore the Sky Caves in their entirety became a god, the first of sixteen.
Now Vaskar hoped to follow where that ancient dragon had led. And Gaven felt, for the first time, a surge of envy—he wanted that knowledge, and that power, for himself.
He roared, giving vent to the frustration that had simmered in him since he felt the earth rumble and saw the darkened moon that had propelled him across the Mournland. The brooding clouds thundered in answer to his roar, and lightning danced around the floating mountain. And the wind that had blown at his back swirled in a whirlwind around his feet, lifting him into the air. Higher and higher it carried him, until he stepped forward and alighted in one of the many mouths of the Sky Caves of Thieren Kor.
“Vaskar!” he shouted, sending echoes dancing through the twisting network of caverns. He tensed, gripping his sword in both hands, expecting an attack at any instant. All that emerged from the darkness before him was his own voice in a hundred fragments.
Gaven limned his blade with a pale blue glow, lighting the cave ahead, showing him three tunnels converging on the same mouth—one leading up and to the left, one up and to the right, and one more or less straight ahead. The tunnels were like the boring of some enormous worm—round, smooth, and wide. Stretching his arms wide, he could not touch the walls on either side, and the walls curved together far above his head. He started along the right-hand passage, following it as it wound in an upward spiral. At each branch, he bore right, ensuring that he could find his way back to where he started if the need arose.
After the fourth branch, he found himself teetering at the edge of another cave mouth, his momentum almost carrying him over the brink. He threw himself backward, sending his sword clattering to the floor and sliding toward the cave mouth. He stopped it with his foot then scooted forward to grab it. He got back on his feet and turned around, continuing to follow the right wall.
The next cave opening didn’t catch him by surprise, but it did make him stop and think. He’d been blindly following the right wall, as if it would lead him to some destination. But what was his destination? He didn’t recall any mention of a specific location within the Sky Caves that might be important—a vault of knowledge or library of some sort. Finding Vaskar seemed like a hopeless endeavor, especially if the dragon were trying to avoid him—he could never hear or see the dragon before Vaskar noticed his approach. So what was he trying to do?
He moved back into the passage he’d just left. The walls were striated in broad patterns of dark and light stone, which he had noted only casually before. As he examined it more carefully, he realized that there was a definite shape to it. He couldn’t see it all at once, but as he moved farther in to the tunnel, the parts formed a whole in his mind, a Draconic character representing either a hard th sound or the sixth of some sequence. He continued slowly along, reading more characters—short “a” or a moon, a “sh” sound or a beast, or horns. Thash, meaning storm—or the horns of the sixth moon, the crescent phase of Eyre.
He stopped, retracing the tunnel he’d been following in his mind. He turned and followed it again, his eyes closed, trying to visualize the path he was walking. It, too, took shape in his mind—another Draconic character, a long e sound or the number nine. Was that part of another sequence, or an attachment to the word and phrase he’d already pieced together? The number nine could be part of a calendrical expression connected to Eyre’s crescent phase. Or thashe would turn “storm” into an adjective—he had a feeling there might be a “dragon” attached to that somewhere. Or this character could be connected to other symbols formed by the other passages of the Sky Caves.
His mind reeled, and he put a hand out to rest on the solidity of the cavern wall. He had suddenly gained a new depth of respect for the Prophecy. He had learned endless passages of it in Draconic lifetimes ago, and he’d translated them so often in his mind that they spilled out of his mouth in his own language quite naturally. But he began to appreciate what a poor vehicle language was to convey the meaning of it all, how feeble these words and phrases seemed in comparison to the layers of meaning he was experiencing.
Trailing his hand along the cavern wall, he turned and walked farther into the tunnels. He no longer cared about finding his way back. He opened his mind and explored the Prophecy.