6: BRIAR AND BONE

(Kihrin’s story)

The fighting turned out to be both closer and farther away than I’d originally thought. Several deep crevasses and valleys separated us from the battleground, distorting the sound into something distant and muted. Those same crevasses and valleys made reaching the battle surprisingly difficult.

We’d almost caught up to Janel when a large form rose up from the next canyon over, then slammed back down on whomever it fought.

The creature was animate, but I hesitated to call it alive. Rather, it looked like an enormous serpentine skeleton, held together by a web of connective tissue, dried tendon, and dead flesh that shifted and merged with each movement. The monster existed in a constant, never-ending state of simultaneous decomposition and regeneration. The only color I’d seen had been the glowing blue dots of its eyes and the green vines tied around its massive wings and long neck.

Oh, also it was several hundred feet tall and so large it could probably smash most enemies by stepping on them. And its shape was depressingly recognizable.

“That was a dragon, wasn’t it?” I asked.

Janel started running. Toward it, naturally.

“Shit,” Teraeth cursed.

“That’s Rol’amar!” Thurvishar shouted as we all started running after Janel.

I remembered the name. Relos Var had referred to Rol’amar with unusual loathing, but it didn’t mean Rol’amar would want to be our friend. Dragons, as a rule, were no one’s friends.¹

At the canyon trailhead’s crest, the path dropped down. The crusted Blight floor transformed into hot springs and scalding, bubbling pools filled with liquid that probably wasn’t water and definitely wasn’t safe. The canyon continued, following an arrow-straight hard stone floor whose shape scratched at my mind with nagging familiarity.

I mainly paid attention to the dragon. The creature’s pure awe-inspiring size emerged as we drew closer. He wasn’t as large as Morios, the metal dragon who had devastated Atrine, but he was easily Sharanakal’s equal. Fighting a creature like that seemed impossible, but I knew it had been done before.

At least it had been done before with other dragons.

A morgage band fought the beast. They weren’t doing a great job, since bodies littered the ground all over the canyon’s base, but I admired their stubborn determination. As a morgage woman in the back of the canyon raised her arm, something green glinted in her hand. She shouted; leafy vines shot up from the canyon floor and looped around the dragon’s bones. The vines drew fast and grew from places lifeless just moments before. Some vines broke—okay, most vines broke—but enough stayed in place to slow the dragon. The morgage warriors seemed to be buying enough time for their people to retreat.

Janel threw her javelin, a perfect arc flying through the air. The weapon hit directly in the center of a glowing blue eye. Then it flew right through the dragon’s open eye socket, slammed against the far wall, and did no damage to the dragon at all.

But Janel did catch the dragon’s attention.

“That’s Rol’amar,” Thurvishar repeated as he came to a panting stop next to Teraeth and me. Thurvishar was shockingly well muscled for someone who spent his life sitting in libraries reading books, but he wasn’t used to sustained exertion.² “You can’t kill Rol’amar. Nothing can kill him. Rol’amar isn’t alive.”

“There has to be a way,” Teraeth said. “All dragons are vulnerable to something.”

“Oh, so is Rol’amar,” Thurvishar replied. “Magic.”

I only half paid attention. After Janel’s failed attempt to spear the dragon through the eye, she’d kept moving forward. She was running toward a dead morgage woman lying on the ground.

No, Janel was running toward the baby lying next to the corpse. A baby still alive. With an undead dragon about to bring his whole foot down on the mother’s corpse, the baby, and Janel.

“Damn it.” I ran down into the canyon after her.

“Kihrin!” Teraeth screamed after me, but I didn’t pay any attention to him either.

Janel slid between the dragon’s toe claws, tumbled, and stood, scooping up the baby as she ran. The dragon lunged, but a dozen vines tied his head. He couldn’t reach down far enough to bite her.

I dove to the side to keep from being crushed. When I tumbled back up again, I used the dragon’s foot to steady myself, bracing my hand against the bone.

I wondered if all magic would backfire. What the morgage woman was doing looked like magic. And dragons were magic—or really, chaotic magical distortions.³ Still, I suspected Janel had ignored Teraeth’s instructions not to use magic to make herself supernaturally strong. No chaos storm had shown up yet. Maybe only certain kinds of magic were the problem?

And what sort of magic would mess with a dragon who was already dead?

I set my hand back on the dragon’s foot and concentrated on healing. Instead of the normal feeling of warmth, a black miasma spread out from my handprint. Bone turned to ash, flaked off, began to float away.

The dragon reacted immediately, letting out a deafening roar.

I blinked. That hadn’t been healing. That had been the opposite of healing. Which I figured meant my hunch had been right.

The dragon raised its foot and started to slam it back down again. On me.

I ran.

The morgage hadn’t been idle while I was distracting Rol’amar. The woman in the back had continued to summon up plants and vines, so I ran in her direction. A thorny briar welled up from the ground behind me, an impenetrable hedge as high as the valley wall. Even the dragon had to pause. I slid into the dirt next to the morgage. A warrior pulled me to my feet, saying something thick and guttural in an unknown language. Argas may have blessed those of us who didn’t know how with the ability to speak the vané language,⁴ but nobody had contemplated the possibility we’d end up facing morgage in the Blight.

Thurvishar and Teraeth, being a little less suicidal than Janel or myself, had skipped attacking the dragon and had instead made their way over to the main morgage line. They were attempting to help the injured.

“I hurt it,” I gasped as I joined them. “I think healing acts the opposite against it.”

A roar and a staccato of wet snapping sounds met my proclamation. I turned back to see the dragon breaking free from the vines.

A vine whipped backward, flicking against a morgage as fatally as a spear wound. Others immediately rushed to his aid.

The whole battle might have gone differently if we could have used magic—if the morgage could have used magic. Other than however the lead morgage sorceress was creating that extraordinary plant growth, my own attempt at “healing,” and maybe Janel’s strength, other attempts hadn’t worked out so well. Another morgage woman tried to cast something, only to fall down to the ground choking, her yellow-green skin turning an ugly purple.

Clearly, casting magic was still a problem. Except when it wasn’t.⁵

The canyon floor, with its unusually straight angles, caught my attention again.

It seemed familiar. But why? I’d never been in the Blight before, except for that brief trip I’d taken to Kharas Gulgoth when I was sixteen.

I couldn’t shake the feeling I knew this place.

“Wait,” I said.

No one paid any attention.

“Let’s just be thankful the damn dragon doesn’t breathe fire or choking gas or something,” Teraeth said.

Thurvishar gave him a pained look.

“It doesn’t do that, does it?” Teraeth said.

Thurvishar pointed to the ground near the dragon’s skeletal feet. Dead morgage warriors were beginning to stand back up again.

“Oh,” Teraeth said. “I should have known.”

“There’s a tunnel at the end of the canyon.” I knew it was true. Somehow.

No one heard me.

“Everyone ready!” Teraeth had a knife in each hand as the dragon began to tear through the final bits of bramble and thorn. He looked grim.

I sighed. Then I shouted, “We need to retreat! End of the canyon. Right now. Go!” I started backing up in case anyone misunderstood me.

Janel turned to me. “Is it defensible?”

“Very.” I stopped to pick up a wounded morgage woman. Fortunately, she was unconscious, so she wouldn’t stick a knife in my ribs. I hoped. “But we need to reach it first.”

Janel nodded, then turned to the morgage and screamed out something low and guttural. She spoke morgage.

Where had Janel learned to speak morgage?

I answered myself immediately. She’d learned morgage the same way I knew we’d find a tunnel at the end of the canyon. Janel Theranon didn’t know how to speak morgage, but in Janel’s past life as Elana Kandor, she must have picked up the basics.

The lead morgage woman responded, calling out to her people. She must have thought whatever Janel had yelled out a fine idea, because she wasted little time making it happen.

I couldn’t help being impressed by the morgage. What I had originally taken for chaos and disorganization proved to be anything but. The Quuros imperial army would have envied their formation skills. The men covered for the women. The women picked up children, packs, supplies. As one, the morgage retreated down the canyon. A morgage man came up to me, and although I didn’t understand him, he clearly wanted to take the woman from me. I let him. He had a lot of poisonous arm spikes.

The morgage leader—who also seemed oddly familiar—raised her hand higher. The green flare I’d seen glinting from her hand originated from a large green gem she held. Plant growth exploded from the canyon walls, forming a second thorny hedge filling up the crevices between the dragon and us.

As Thurvishar moved backward, he said, “Healing the dragon hurt it, you said? And it didn’t cause any backlash?”

“I’m fine, and no chaos storm,” I said. “But I’m not sure it’s the dragon’s vulnerability. I think the Blight itself is what’s twisting everything. You tried to teleport us away, so instead it teleported a bunch of something else to us. I tried to heal, so maybe instead I destroyed.”

“That is an interesting hypothesis. I wish we had more time for research. I’m not sure how wise it would be to try healing magic from this range, anyway.”

“Wouldn’t kill him, anyway, would it? Not permanently. We don’t have its Cornerstone. Wait, we don’t, do we? Please tell me it’s the green gem that woman’s holding.” I didn’t think Relos Var had been lying when he said the only way to kill a dragon was to destroy both it and its matching Cornerstone at the same time. My “brother” saves the lies for when it really matters.

Of course, since Relos Var had stolen Urthaenriel from me, I didn’t have a way to destroy a Cornerstone, but one problem at a time.

“No,” Thurvishar said, “it’s not. Rol’amar’s Cornerstone is the Stone of Shackles.”⁶

“Oh, isn’t that nice? Rol’amar and I know all the same artifacts.”

The dragon roared as he seemed to finally realize we weren’t just repositioning ourselves but engineering an escape.

As we approached the spot I remembered, I ran to the front. I ignored what would happen if my memory proved faulty or if, more likely, a thousand years of wear and natural disasters had sealed the entrance.

I started examining the walls. The chiseled stone sides didn’t seem familiar, but the angles—the way the walls framed sky, that turn there, the slope over here …

It had to be here. It had to be.

Then I saw it. Smooth gray stone, partially covered by scrabble and rockslides. “Thurvishar!” I shouted back. “Thurvishar, I need you!”

Several morgage who’d followed close behind me started shouting. I didn’t have to speak their language to suspect they were demanding I materialize whatever miracle Janel had promised. I did my best to ignore them, which wasn’t the easiest thing to do when the average morgage male stood two feet taller and twice as wide. And seriously, let’s not forget those poisoned arm spikes.

Thurvishar ran over to me. “What is it?”

I pointed to the cliff. “I need you to clear this rock away.”

Thurvishar looked at me like I was surely the stupidest person ever born. “I can’t use magic, remember?”

“You can. Put your hand on the rock, flush up against it. Then try it.”

Thurvishar’s expression was skeptical, but he placed his hand against the rock face and closed his eyes. He must have found concentrating difficult, what with the shouting morgage and the roaring dragon and the real probability we only had only seconds to live.⁷

The rock face exploded in fine ash and debris.

The morgage nearby shouted in surprise, then covered their faces and started coughing. Thurvishar and I were fine, thanks to our air sigils.

“What the hell are you doing—?” Teraeth’s voice cut off as he ran forward.

The falling rock revealed a panel set into the smooth gray stone. I slammed my hand against the square, which depressed with a soft click.

A grinding noise sounded from inside the wall. The gray stone slid down into the ground, revealing an opening easily large enough to pass a burly morgage male, but far too small for a dragon. Beyond, stairs led into darkness.

“One miracle, as requested.” I ran down the steps.