The next week was an unending, miserable trudge for Riyun. Surviving the strike of a giant dragon hurtling through the air as fast as a train…
Luck. Pure luck.
Even so, he’d been left with joints and ribs that ached. The cooling weather and threatening rain only amplified those aches. Although the others griped about the persistent stench of ash, his sinuses were clogged with a fetid infection. At times, he thought he might drown in his own brown, clumpy snot. Late at night was the worst, at least until he woke in the morning. What he spat up then could probably crawl away on its own, it seemed so massive.
But he was alive. More importantly, his team was alive.
They took turns supporting him on the journey, which was a welcome change from the sameness of the plains. Now they faced a slow, uphill climb Tarlayn said would end when they reached the Plateau of Berogil. Garelan rested atop that high point. And they would find the Haelok River they had encountered in the Tongalon Green once again, now running along the base of that plateau on its way south to the sea.
Most of the way, Riyun had hoped that, along with the terrain, they would see at least a diminishment in the damage wrought by the dragons. That didn’t happen. And to make it worse, dark clouds had rolled in from the north over the last three days. He was sure they had dumped rain on those burned-out areas, probably washing away topsoil and the blasted remnants of the grasses and trees that had once covered the land. It would be years recovering, if it ever did.
He was leaning against Hirvok when the storm finally went from threat to reality. The first drops were cold and heavy.
That was apparently too much for the younger man. “Sure. Why not? Things haven’t been bad enough.”
Riyun chuckled. “What’s a little rain after all you went through?”
“After all I—” The sergeant shook his head. “I suppose she told you what happened.”
“‘She’ being Javika or Symbra?”
That worsened the other man’s mood. “Either, I guess.”
“I don’t need someone to tell me the details when I can see the end result: You saved the unit. After three of those dragons attacked? That had to be one for the books.”
“Really?” The sergeant scowled. “So no one told you what happened?”
“Well…” Riyun didn’t know what to make of the sergeant’s reaction. “Naru said that Javika did her usual crazy thing. Charging a monster the size of that dragon?”
“Yeah, and leaving me with a bigger one.”
“She was saving a teammate’s life.”
“Sure. And cutting my firepower by twenty percent. Naru was as good as dead, and going after her was a bad call.”
“Saving a life is never a bad call.”
“Oh, yeah? What about when it puts everyone else’s life at risk? What if it puts the mission at risk?”
“Did it? Javika knows what she’s doing. Maybe she was thinking you could survive without her.”
Hirvok snorted. “I knew you’d stick up for her.”
The rain picked up, and a shiver ran down Riyun’s back. It wasn’t just the cold drops that quickly soaked his hair; something had gone on after the dragon had knocked him into the pit, and it wasn’t what he’d inferred. “What happened, Hirvok?”
“Seriously?”
“Please. No one’s told me anything.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Other than that we killed two of the dragons and that Tarlayn’s magic fooled the big one—Niyalki, right?”
“Whatever.” The younger man shifted his grip. “All right. I’ll tell you. Your unit disobeyed orders.”
“If Javika saved Naru, it’s water under the bridge. You have to learn—”
“It wasn’t just saving Naru’s life. It was saving yours.” The sergeant’s voice cracked, and he looked away. “You were supposed to be dead.”
Riyun stumbled. He had been dead, at least he had accepted that he was dead. “When that thing hit me, I thought it snapped my spine.”
“I thought it tore you apart. The way you just went limp…” His jaw muscles bulged.
“So you thought I was dead. There’s nothing wrong with that call.”
“Might want to talk to your unit about that. They wanted to retrieve your body. They ignored my orders to leave you.”
“Well…” Riyun remembered the pain he’d felt seeing Tawod disappear into the abyss. Even if it was bottomless, leaving the young man’s corpse had felt like the wrong move.
“What’s the point of burying the dead in a place like this? Huh? What’s the point?”
“It… It gives closure, I guess.”
“You think that’s all it is? Because it looked to me like they couldn’t let you go.”
Riyun chewed his cheek. Loyalty was a wonderful thing, but taken too far, it could compromise the unit and ruin a mission. “I’ll talk to them. Maybe they weren’t thinking clearly. You’d just fought something most of us could never have imagined. It’s easy for even a disciplined person to lose it in a situation like that.”
The younger man trudged on, eyes angrily raised to the fat, purple clouds overhead. “Before I joined the Gryphon Brigade, I heard about you.”
“I’ve made a lot of enemies, and I don’t always make the right call.”
“Nah. I mean, I heard about this guy. People served with him. People fought against him. Almost everyone said the same thing—this Riyun Molliro guy, he’s what every officer should be. Maybe your tactics aren’t always the soundest, but every single one of them said that you were honorable and treated people with respect. They admired you.”
“It won’t necessarily further your career, but it lets you go to sleep at night. We’re all one under these stars or any other. That’s something my father told me when I was young.”
“And you believe it?”
The heat in Hirvok’s voice made Riyun wince. To someone who didn’t grow up in the same environment, the words probably sounded silly. “I know it’s not what most officers believe.”
“But you do.”
“Some things can’t be shaken off. I think it would diminish me to see people the way I’m supposed to see them. I’m sorry if that makes me a problem as a commander.”
Hirvok stopped to shake dark mud from his boots. “I figure you know by now where I really come from.”
“It doesn’t change what I think of you. You still show great potential as a leader.”
“Most people from the Outer Sphere won’t follow an Onath, especially a Silver.”
“They don’t have to know. But if you show them who you’re capable of being, they’ll follow.”
“Right.” The sarcasm in that single word was thick.
Toward the front of the column, Quil threw a hand up and waved his arm wildly.
Someone had discovered something.
Riyun tried to pick up the pace as best he could. “Maybe Javika found the top of the plateau.”
Hirvok grunted. “Told you that’s what she saw through the haze this morning. Wish she’d found the road.”
“Good. I’m tired of walking. If we can find a place here to rest—”
“You really think I could replace you?”
“You’re reliable, Hirvok. You stay steady in the roughest times. You know tactics.”
“But I don’t have their respect. Not like you.”
“You can gain it. Show them respect, and they’ll return it. Don’t hold it against everyone else that you came from the Inner Sphere. These people want to believe in you. Let them.”
Quil jogged back toward them. “Javika—!” He pointed to the west, where a steady curtain of rain fell from the clouds. “She found Garelan!”
An emerald glow lit up the sky. Tarlayn was calling them.
They hustled up to the wizard and gathered around. She stood tall beside the hovering drone. Alush had grown even more silent since the fight at the quarry. But Tarlayn still deferred to the prophet. Now, however, she seemed in her element. Her thinning hair was plastered to her face. The clothes that were normally hidden by her cloak were similarly soaked and clinging. There wasn’t much meat on her bones, and her hip was lopsided, jutting out on the left side.
Some injuries apparently couldn’t be healed.
Javika hurried down the slope toward them, splashing through rushing water.
“Your scout says that the outer walls have fallen.” There was a welcome hardness to the wizard’s eyes. She had found strength and resolve since facing the giant dragon Niyalki. “Even if Meriscoya has managed to destroy the city, there is still a chance we can find what we seek within.”
Hirvok squinted from beneath a cupped hand. “Mind telling us what that is, exactly? Meriscoya’s tower doesn’t seem—”
“That’s a few days west. We can travel there next.”
“Then what’s in this city? If the place is a wreck, why bother?”
“The Lyceum. It holds knowledge and power that might guide us to what could destroy Meriscoya.”
Riyun nodded toward the drone. “What about your prophet?”
Tarlayn’s eyes followed his. “Our path is set.”
“But what does he think?”
A sapphire glow fringed the machine, then faded. “The Lyceum indeed poses a threat to even someone so powerful as Meriscoya.”
Riyun caught a smirk on his sergeant’s face, but the look was quickly gone, replaced by a more somber façade. The young man still had a chance, if he could simply learn. With time and training, Riyun could only hope the two of them might find common ground and produce the replacement the team would inevitably need. “Tarlayn, is there any chance we can rest here? In the ruins?”
The old woman frowned. “If the walls have fallen, nothing is likely to remain inside.”
“Even one of the stone cellars would give us a chance to dry off and stay out of the elements for a little bit.” As if on cue, his sinuses began to drain, and he stepped back to cough until he had something to spit up. It helped his ears unclog, at least.
“We will only know what remains by passing through the remnant of the walls.”
Javika bowed her head. She must have seen enough to know there was no shelter for them within the ruined walls. But they still needed to go inside, to seek out this Lyceum.
After about half an hour, Riyun understood the Biwali warrior’s mood.
Their ascent steepened, and water pooled in spots but rushed down in other areas. Thick walls sat atop an area maybe two hundred feet above the point where the incline became more severe. Cracks and wide gaps revealed collapsed structures beyond the walls. Stone had come free of the fortifications and settled some ways below, leaving behind a meandering, low wall of rock transformed by intense heat into smooth and lopsided shapes. It was like the temple ruins, but on a terrifying scale.
He pushed free of Hirvok and drifted over to Tarlayn, who looked up with puffy, bloodshot eyes. She swallowed. “I had prepared myself for this decimation…”
Riyun hobbled along at her side. “You can’t. Preparing for something like this… You can’t.”
She squared her shoulders. “I will take you to the Lyceum.”
“I’m sure the city held more than that. What was your favorite place to visit here?”
“The gardens.” A smile trembled on her lips. “They could grow flowers there year-round. One courtyard was dedicated to nothing but the white roses this place was named for.”
“I thought that was a person?”
“It was. But she took her name from the roses as well.”
“What made the city so important?”
The wizard bowed her head once again, but this time it was in concentration. She walked in silence, not even looking up as they passed the melted rock that had fallen from walls. They were almost to one of the widest gaps in the defensive structure when she finally nodded her head. “The mixture of arts and knowledge. The largest library on the continent, a university that taught poetry and sculpture, as well as studying the stars and philosophy. An embracing of peace and benevolence. For generations, rulers indulged in philanthropy and diplomacy even in hard times.”
“They sound as if they were very noble.”
“They strove to be more. It was the way of the queen.”
“People will follow the path of a leader, for good or bad.”
Picking a way through the clumps of rubble littering what had once no doubt been glorious streets of flagstone, Riyun couldn’t ignore what had been lost in the devastation. It wasn’t just a grand city, but good people.
Now, ash traced cracks in the ruined stone. Little more than foundations remained in most places, but there were also the occasional blackened columns or partial walls. At one point, Tarlayn stopped at the base of stairs that climbed thirty feet up before ending in…nothing. When he followed her up the steps, he marveled at the slick, black pit that must have once been the main structure. The sides leading down to the bottom maybe a hundred feet below sloped gently, creating the impression of an upside-down dome.
The power necessary for something like that left him shaking. “One of the big ones had to do this, right?”
Tarlayn pointed with her staff, and a soft emerald glow lit the floor, revealing black glass. “Only two beings would be capable of this—Niyalki and Meriscoya.”
“Could he have been here? Was this personal for him?”
“Everything is personal for Meriscoya now. He is full of bitterness and fury. He blames everyone for the lies that he believed, even though we believed those lies as well.”
“I’m sorry about…everything. To have all that you knew torn away—”
“It’s terrible, but it doesn’t justify this. Could Meriscoya have lashed out and done this himself? I suppose. But it’s my belief that he’s too busy for such actions.”
“Busy doing what? What can be more important than destroying a place like this?”
“You heard Alush. Meriscoya has sought out greater power. Other power.”
“What does that mean? The Chaos Abyss? What other—?”
Quil whistled. He waved them over from maybe a quarter-mile away. The drone hovered beside him, sparkling a bright blue in the gloom.
Riyun hobbled down the steps. “Looks like they’ve found something interesting.”
The wizard matched his pace, jaw set hard. But partway to the pseudo and drone, her nose crinkled. Riyun smelled it a few seconds later, too: not fire-blasted flesh—rotting flesh.
And something more.
As they neared Quil, Javika approached from the west, a cloth covering her mouth and nose.
The pseudo looked uncomfortable. “You will want to see this, Lieutenant.”
There was unmistakable impatience in the assassin’s body language. Riyun had seen that enough to know she was upset about whatever she’d found. “Take us there.”
The drone actually took the lead, casting the ruins in its pale blue glow. “Never before seen, never to be seen again.”
Riyun was already missing the relative quiet they’d enjoyed after exiting the abyss. Alush had been transformed by what it had seen shortly after rising from those depths, but some of the fear—if a prophet-drone could know fear—had apparently started to fade.
Javika was waiting for them just beyond a wide intersection. She wrapped an arm around Riyun’s waist to help him along. “They did not leave here unscathed.”
“They? The dragons?”
But she didn’t have to answer. The smell that had hit even his sinuses since finding the black crater became almost overwhelming. She turned them down a side street that had been partially blocked by rubble piled particularly high, and the source of the odor became obvious: a dragon body.
This one was more than fifty feet long, closer in size to the one that had crashed into the quarry than to Niyalki, but it was still huge.
“Oh.” Riyun’s legs felt weak.
The thing had dug a trench with its impact, tearing up deep, dark soil littered with the charred remains of dense vegetation. There was among all the destroyed structures in the area a look of what might have been grace and serenity. Far off to his left, a huge shape—like a giant, ornate planter—had tumbled from somewhere up high to crack in half.
A garden. Tarlayn’s garden. Shattered and burned.
He turned his attention to the corpse. The top of the wedge-shaped head was gone—from snout to eyes. One of the wings was similarly disfigured.
Riyun pushed free from Javika and shot a glance at the prophet. “I thought you said they couldn’t be killed?”
Alush hummed as it breezed past. “Death as you understand it is not the end for such creatures. What you see here is but the shell of one of these beings. A very old one. Whatever caused this, was only possible due to the destruction of its power.”
“Yeah? One of my people tore a hole in the gut of one of these things, and another cut that hole wider. You want to tell me how that destroyed its power?”
The prophet hovered near the ruined head of the dragon. “It is a puzzle yet to be solved. Most likely, only the shell died.”
A puzzle. It sounded to Riyun more like refusing to accept what was right in front of them.
He circled the blasted monster, noting several wounds beyond just the head and wing. There were fist-sized holes on its flanks. Up close, he caught a whiff of whatever it was that went beyond the stench of rot: the smell that came just before the dragon-fire.
He squatted beside the right rear leg and poked at a wound that might run beneath the corpse.
Javika’s familiar stride caught his attention. She stared at the wound. “They have a vulnerability.”
Riyun rapped the scaled beast with the back of his glove. “A soft underbelly.”
“Soft to our weapons. Not to theirs.” She kicked the corpse. “Six more of them, four of them small. Two not much smaller than this.”
Seven dead dragons. Did that mean there were others with weapons like his?
As if sensing his question, Tarlayn scraped closer. “There were wizards here. They must have come to try to defend the Lyceum.”
That sounded convenient to Riyun. “Why would they come here? Why not fight the dragons earlier?”
“There was always the hope the dragons would break free of Meriscoya’s influence.”
“And everyone’s onboard now with the idea that they won’t, is that it?”
The older woman closed her eyes. “Inevitability. It is the acceptance of what we see before us. Even avatars can learn, assuming that is in our destiny.”
Riyun leaned against the corpse to stand. The rest of the team huddled around the high mound of debris at the entry to the gardens.
Naru shook her head. She seemed on the verge of tears.
Guilt? Shame? Did she somehow blame herself for what happened, for the bitterness in Tarlayn’s voice? He would have to talk to the young hacker. This had nothing to do with her.
But she would have to contend with those emotions alone for now.
There was no making sense of the city’s layout when it was in such a ruined state, so Riyun set aside any pretense of knowledge. “You said you would take us to the Lyceum. Now seems like a good time.”
The wizard’s lips pinched into a tight circle. “This way.”
She spun on a heel and stormed away.
Javika harrumphed. “Spry when she wishes to be.” She offered a hand, which Riyun wrapped around his waist.
He wasn’t sure what to expect in this Lyceum, but he hoped they might finally find some answers.