The dragon’s roar cut through the wails of the Soul Reaver’s hosts. Gaven drove his sword down through the double head of a waist-high monstrosity and glanced up at the Crystal Spire. Vaskar had come to face the Soul Reaver, hoping to bring about the fulfillment of the Prophecy. The sounds of the battle fell away, even the howls of the monsters around him, leaving a strange stillness, and the words of the Prophecy rang in his mind:
The Bronze Serpent faces the Soul Reaver and fails.
But the Storm Dragon seizes the shard of heaven from the fallen pretender.
Had Vaskar accounted for those words? Did he even know about them? Gaven had spoken them to Haldren, but not in Vaskar’s presence. Would Haldren have repeated them to the dragon, when they upset him so much?
It didn’t matter, he realized. Vaskar was doomed to fail, which meant that the Soul Reaver’s hordes would continue to pour forth from Khyber’s darkness. Every soldier in the Starcrag Plain would fall beneath them. The monsters would pour into Aundair and Thrane—they might raze Thaliost, or Daskaran across the river. They might reach Stormhome. The idea of Haldren conquering Khorvaire was terrible to contemplate, but the thought of the Soul Reaver spreading his tentacles across the north was much, much worse.
Vaskar was doomed to fail, and that meant the Storm Dragon would have to do what the Prophecy demanded of him: seize the shard of heaven and drive it through the Soul Reaver’s heart.
No one could do that but him.
The aberrations crowded closer. Growling, Gaven impaled one of the larger, shambling monsters, left his sword hanging in the wound, and swung his hands together to create a clap of thunder that drove the smaller creatures back. Then he grabbed the sword from the teetering bug-thing and leaped aft, toward the helm.
“Clear the deck!” he shouted. He seized the wheel and willed the elemental out of its quiescence.
“Can she fly?” Rienne called back. “That was a rough landing.”
“I’ll make her fly.” The wind howled, and the airship lurched, then she slowly lifted off the ground.
The elemental resisted Gaven’s control at first, protesting as though the damage to the hull had wounded or weakened it. Fly, damn you.
Rienne and Darraun fought hard to carry out Gaven’s command. Rienne nearly stopped using her sword, instead relying on a constantly shifting stance to overbalance the creatures that came charging toward her and throw them overboard. Maelstrom came to bear only in the one instance where a tentacle wrapped around her leg as its owner hurtled overboard, threatening to drag Rienne off the ship as well. A swift, sure blow from Maelstrom freed her from its grasp and sent the creature plummeting to its doom. Darraun swung his mace, magically enhanced to slay the aberrations of Khyber, beating them back under a constant hail of blows until they had nowhere to go but off the ship.
The Eye of the Storm teetered higher, rising above the din of the battle and the gibbering hordes below. Gaven let the winds carry her in a wide circle around the Crystal Spire as the ship swirled faster and faster around the bridge of light. That circular path provided Gaven with a clear view of the continuing battle between the Soul Reaver and Vaskar—be he Storm Dragon or doomed Bronze Serpent—as it raged in the midst of the great column of light.
It would be more accurate to say that Vaskar raged, Gaven thought. The battle was not too different from watching Rienne fight a drunken Eldeen wild man. The Soul Reaver remained calm, moving very little in response to Vaskar’s charges, his circling flights and desperate lunges. Each time Vaskar closed in, an invisible force pushed him aside, preventing him from making contact. Gaven couldn’t see the Soul Reaver make any counterattack, but it was clear that Vaskar grew more tired with each passing moment. His frustration also built with every failed lunge. He roared and spat lightning at the Soul Reaver, but though the lightning at least touched the creature, it didn’t seem to cause it any pain or distress. To his surprise, Gaven felt a twinge of pity for the dragon—he was so misguided, and ultimately so ineffectual, just as he tried to seize tremendous power.
Vaskar pulled back and floated motionless on the building gale for a moment. Carried by the wind, the airship swirled closer to him, and for a moment Gaven thought the dragon would attack the Eye of the Storm to vent his frustration. Then Gaven saw a flash of gold: from somewhere on his body, Vaskar had produced the Eye of Siberys. He fumbled with the dragonshard in claws too large to serve as hands, and Gaven saw that Vaskar had clumsily bound the shard to a straight, polished staff, making a spear to slay the Soul Reaver. He was desperate, Gaven realized, and was pulling out his weapon of last resort. The dragon didn’t expect it to work—and he was right. Vaskar was already defeated.
Gaven jerked the wheel hard to port and took the Eye of the Storm out of the cyclone.
“What are you doing?” Rienne said.
“I need to get off this ship,” Gaven said, “and I’m not going to make Darraun try to fly her in that storm.”
“No,” Rienne said, “I mean, what are you doing?”
The airship had cleared the worst of the storm and flew smoothly again, despite the staved-in timbers of her hull. “Darraun, can you take her from here?” Gaven said.
“I can try,” Darraun answered. His hands clenched the wheel, and Gaven released it. The ship bucked slightly, then leveled. Darraun nodded, but didn’t try to speak again.
“Gaven,” Rienne said, “what are you doing?”
Gaven pulled off his scabbard and untied the ash staff he’d bound to it. Touching the staff sparked a torrent of memories—stumbling, half crazed through the Mournland, climbing the storm-blasted tree to pull off the branch, a dream: a yellow crystal pulsing with veins of golden light, carved to a point and bound to a blackened branch, plunging into a body that was shadow given twisting form.
“It was my hand on the spear,” he said, more to himself than her. “It seems I will play the part of the Storm Dragon after all.” He stood with the staff in his hands and slung his sword and scabbard back over his shoulder.
Rienne lay a hand on his back. “Play the part,” she said, “but write it as you go. You are player and playwright.”
He looked into her eyes and cupped her cheek in his hand, running a thumb along the curve of her lips.
“I don’t know how I could ever have doubted your love,” he said. “I never will again.”
“Come back to me.”
“I will.” He kissed her, savoring the taste of her breath, and then jumped over the bulwarks.
A fresh gust of wind caught him up and carried him away from the airship, back to the storm that whirled around the Crystal Spire. Lightning flared and roared around him, and the rain became hail, as though the storm had been holding its full fury back until that moment. Gaven willed himself forward, toward the Soul Reaver, and the wings of the storm carried him there.
Vaskar roared when he saw Gaven approaching. “Do you still think to steal my prize?” he howled over the wind. “Get away, interloper!”
Vaskar’s outrage had a very different effect than he had intended. The Soul Reaver followed Vaskar’s gaze, turning its monstrous head toward Gaven as he approached. Then, as if the battle to that point had consisted purely of the Soul Reaver playing with Vaskar, the tentacled thing dismissed him. Barely sparing the dragon another glance, it blasted him with waves of energy that made the air shimmer, and the echoes of it made Gaven’s head throb with sudden pain. Unconscious or dead, Vaskar fell.
As the Soul Reaver turned its full attention to Gaven, lightning streaked into the Crystal Spire and coursed through the Soul Reaver’s withered flesh, though it left the creature unharmed. Wind buffeted it from every side, and the robes it wore flapped furiously around it. In return, Gaven felt his mind engulfed in a similar storm. Thoughts and feelings welled up in no sensible order, like a nightmare galloping through his mind at a breakneck pace. Slights and shames from his childhood sprang to his thoughts alongside the fresh grief of his father’s death, while the memories he’d acquired from the Heart of Khyber added their own share of fear and frustration. For a moment Gaven could not even distinguish the torrent of memories from his sensation of the present: the Soul Reaver and the storm seemed like distant thoughts amid the deluge.
Among the torrent, though, Gaven found words that connected the ancient dragon’s memories to his own past, walking the Sky Caves of Thieren Kor, and the present moment, tying them all together—
The greatest of the daelkyr’s brood,
the Soul Reaver feasts on the minds and flesh of a thousand lives before his prison breaks.
The Bronze Serpent calls him forth, but the Storm Dragon is his doom.
The words focused his mind like a bolt of lightning. I wield the power of the Storm Dragon, he thought. If I don’t kill the Soul Reaver, who will?
He whipped the storm into a greater fury. Hail battered the Soul Reaver, rain like searing fire burned its flesh, and lightning crackled in a ball around it. Then the Soul Reaver, too, fell from the sky, sliding down the shaft of unearthly light. Gaven watched it descend and disappear again below the earth, and he wished he could believe it dead.
The Storm Dragon descends into the endless dark beneath the bridge of light, he thought, where the Soul Reaver waits. There among the bones of Khyber the Storm Dragon drives the spear formed from Siberys’s Eye into the Soul Reaver’s heart.
Siberys’s Eye—where was it? With a start, he searched the ground below. Vaskar lay crumpled on the rocky plain near the base of the Crystal Spire, one wing outstretched at a strange angle, his neck curved around beneath the bulk of his body, his head hidden from view. The Soul Reaver’s hordes had dispersed from there already, moved outward to tear into the armies gathered at either end of the plain. Gaven willed himself downward, and the wind set him on solid ground once again. Drenched with rain, chilled to the bone, he scrambled over and around the rocks to the place where Vaskar’s body lay.
The dragon looked pathetic, broken like a child’s toy dashed to the ground, and Gaven again felt the welling of pity. “The Bronze Serpent faces the Soul Reaver and fails,” he said. “But the Storm Dragon seizes the shard of heaven from the fallen pretender. Where is it, Vaskar?”
Gaven circled the fallen dragon’s body, scanning the ground for any gleam of yellow. The ground around Vaskar’s body revealed no clues, so Gaven used the ash staff to prod under the dragon’s claws. He lifted a claw, and almost jumped in surprise as the Eye of Siberys flashed gold beneath the dragon’s massive hand. He scooped up the dragonshard and yanked it free from Vaskar’s staff.
He was back in the Aerenal jungle, cradling the warm Eye of Siberys close to his chest, gazing into its vibrant core where veins of gold danced like Siberys at the dawn of creation. It was so easy to lose himself in that writhing dance, to forget his surroundings, to forget himself. Even the sound of thunderous footsteps could barely stir him from his reverie, but he made himself turn and look at Darraun.
Except that he wasn’t in Aerenal, and the footsteps had been hoofbeats. Gaven tried to shake his head clear, without much success, and sized up the rider charging him from the north. A knight of some sort, he supposed, clad in heavy armor—no, a warforged. Cart.
Gaven stowed the Eye of Siberys in a pocket and held his ash-black staff as though it were his greatsword. “What are you doing here?” he called to the advancing warforged.
“I’m not here to fight you, Gaven,” Cart said. His tone reminded Gaven of the first time he’d encountered the warforged: Cart bending down to him in his cell and trying to coax him out as if he were a frightened child. “I thought you might want some help.”
“Help? Why would you help me?”
Cart dismounted and walked closer to Gaven. “Because we are alike, you and I.”
“Alike? How so?”
“Each of us was made for a single purpose, Gaven. It’s foolish to deny that purpose. I was made for war, and I will continue to war until I finally meet a foe who can defeat me. And I’ll die knowing that I lived according to my purpose. What more can anyone hope to do?”
“And for what purpose was I made, Cart?”
“You were made to be here at this moment, to fight that monstrosity down there and do what Vaskar could not. To be a god.”
“Of all people, shouldn’t gods be free to choose their destinies?”
“What greater destiny could you ask for?” Cart sounded as though he couldn’t possibly imagine a satisfactory answer to his question.
Gaven looked up into the storm, feeling the rain striking his skin. The wind lashed his hair against his face. He was the storm: he felt himself raging in the whirling clouds and booming thunder. But he was also a rain-drenched man, feet planted firmly on the ground. “You’re wrong about me, Cart,” he said. He pulled the Eye of Siberys out of his pocket and started binding it to the ash staff.
“Am I? Then why are you readying your weapon?”
“Oh, I’ll play the Storm Dragon’s part, for now. You’re right—someone has to stop the Soul Reaver, and no one here is going to do it but me.” The branch he had pulled from the ash tree seemed made to fit the Eye of Siberys. He jabbed the ground a few times to make sure the dragonshard was securely affixed.
Satisfied, he pulled his adamantine box out of another pouch and sprang it open. The nightshard inside seemed to spring to life at the proximity of the Eye of Siberys. “The Time of the Dragon Above draws to a close,” he said, not really addressing Cart. “The Time of the Dragon Below approaches. The Eye of Siberys and the Heart of Khyber are united, just as the Crystal Spire links the Dragon Above and the Dragon Below.”
“I agree with Darraun,” Cart said. “The Prophecy makes my head spin.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” Gaven lifted the nightshard and tossed it gently away from him. It seemed to float along that path for a moment, then it circled back, drawing a ring of lightning behind it. Like the whirlwind that had borne him aloft, it swirled around him, tracing its path in crackling light.
“Are you coming with me?” he asked the warforged.
Cart nodded.
“Let’s go, then.” Gaven strode over to the base of the Crystal Spire, to a ledge overlooking the chasm that rent the plain. He tried to peer down into it, but the light blinded him. “The Soul Reaver awaits.” Without a backward glance, he stepped off the ledge and fell.