67: THE DESTRUCTION OF YNISTHANA
(Kihrin’s story)
We didn’t do anything immediately. In fact, implementing my plan took another two years. That may seem like a long time, but despite Khaemezra’s worry that I would leave the island too soon, I did see the wisdom of finishing my training. I had a lot of magic to learn from Tyentso, more sword work from Doc, and then I had to learn how to play the saymisso* from one of the local Thriss musicians.
I needed a string instrument, you see, that was more portable than a lap harp.
Once I was running through Doc’s lessons without any “resets,” and once Tyentso had grudgingly agreed that I had learned as much as I was probably going to learn from her given my own natural inclinations, only then did I go to Khaemezra for permission.
To my surprise, she agreed, announcing the whole thing “inevitable.”
So that just left the fun part.
We picked a bright sunny morning just after a Maevanos, when it would seem normal that most of the residents of Ynisthana were out of sight, presumably sleeping off the drinking and bedding of the night before. No drakes hunted in the jungle and no fishermen were out casting their nets, but those details were easy to overlook if you happened to be a giant, self-absorbed, narcissistic dragon.
I dressed myself in a pair of black kef and sandals, hair pulled back and tied with a length of white cloth I’d salvaged from an initiate robe. My gaesh was secured in a pocket. I wore the Stone of Shackles around my neck, shining like a piece of long-dead sky.
I wanted there to be no question that I was wearing the damn thing.
I left behind weapons. They would be useless anyway. The star tears of my gaesh made easy and effective talismans, sharpening my tenyé with protections from magic and fire—the latter a special spell Tyentso and I had worked out together. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t truly ward off the Old Man’s fury—I wasn’t that powerful—but I hoped the spells would buy me a few precious seconds just in case I found myself in the wrong position. The only objects I carried were my saymisso and bow, tucked under an arm.
I walked down to the beach, which was empty of all life. I couldn’t see the Old Man, but his island was there off the coast, along with his “rock garden” of trapped singers. I counted thirty-six of them, and felt my throat constrict.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered as I sat cross-legged on the beach and rested the spike of the saymisso in the sand. “I’m so sorry.”
I drew the bow across the strings.
I heard a roar. Seconds later, that monstrous shape flew in from a nearby island and spread his wings to blot out the sky. Sitting there and playing that instrument instead of fleeing was one of the hardest things I have ever done. Every instinct pushed me to run screaming. I played a lullaby, keeping the bow strings stiff with my hand while I pulled a long plaintive note and let it echo in the air. Hot winds scoured passed me, but I ignored that.
The dragon landed on his island and growled with a sound like an earthquake. He was still magnificent, terrifying, and profoundly wrong—a perversion of the natural order on a scale that was in its own way transcendent.
“Have you decided to die? To give yourself to me? To surrender?”
“No,” I told the dragon. “Not this time. I am curious about something. What was your price for betraying your mother? Was it jealousy? Your mother was chosen to be one of the Eight and you weren’t. Did you think you could manage things better than she did, or was your betrayal a misguided attempt to make her proud of her little boy?”
The Old Man spread his wings and hissed, “You are a fool.”
“I’ve been told. It’s probably even true. But a while back I snuck out while you weren’t looking and stopped by Kharas Gulgoth. Maybe you remember the place. Big city, kind of run-down, lots of magic, and a giant demon god sleeping in the center. Sound familiar?”
“So, you do remember.” He had that lethal menace in his voice, worse than his periods of insanity.
“No,” I admitted, “but I can read a book if I stare at it long enough. There were these drawings all over the place telling the same story again and again and again. It took me a little while, but I realized that the squiggly lines at the end weren’t rays of energy or a depiction of chaos—they were dragons.* Eight men and women who thought they could become gods became monsters instead.” I pointed a finger. “You were one of them, Sharanakal. You were human.”
“We only wanted to balance the inequity of power, knowing it was only a matter of time before the Eight Guardians became corrupted. Those idiots had chosen warriors, soldiers, healers—the carrion crows of the battlefield. People who blindly followed orders, people they could control, to give unto them power unrivaled.” The dragon stood, far too large for the island on which he perched. He rose upon his haunches and roared to the heavens, the thunder in his voice trembling the ocean and the rocks and bringing every bit of animal noise on the island to a complete halt. The dragon’s black serpentine head whipped back to stare at me with volcanic eyes.
“Sounds like you had good intentions. Sounds like it wasn’t really your fault.”
“No. It was your fault. YOU!” His head snapped forward, lunging toward me. “You. You were a naïve trusting FOOL. How could you believe his lies?”
I had expected this response, anticipating it. That didn’t mean it was an easy thing to endure. “It was Relos Var’s fault,” I corrected, taking a deep breath to keep myself from running as that head dove for me.
He stopped very close—close enough that he had broken Khaemezra’s commands and trespassed onto the island proper, close enough that I felt my fire protections kick in to keep me from being scorched. I couldn’t look him in both eyes, but had to stare in one only, where I watched as the heart of a thousand fires raged.
“We, who were pure, thought our purity would bring resistance to evil. But this is foolishness, for the soldier understands that purity is impossible, that evil cannot be destroyed, only tempered and channeled. The soldier knows he is a tool, and will not suffer to be wielded by his enemies. We, in our arrogance, thought we were above such usage. Hubris!”
“Relos Var created the ritual,” I said. “Relos Var was the one who convinced you that they’d made a mistake when they chose eight other people to fight the demons instead of you. It should have been you from the start, right? You thought you’d become a god, but Relos Var turned you into a monster. You blame me, but he lied to me too. He used us both. You and I are alike. We’re both victims.”
That eye widened. “We’re not alike. You are far worse than my own cursed existence. You are Vol Karoth’s Cornerstone,* the shell left behind from that rivening, a great unending hunger that can never be filled, that will devour and devour as a star that collapses under its own weight eats without ever being sated. You are the only piece of his soul left, and when he wakes, he will reclaim you. Let me save you. In my garden, you will be spared that fate.”
I shuddered. I didn’t dare take too long to contemplate what he was saying. I might start screaming. “That’s kind of you, but I’m going to have to refuse your generous offer. But don’t think I’m not appreciative. In fact, I wrote a song for you. Would you like to hear me play it?”
The Old Man folded back his wings and regarded me for a long, slow, silent moment. I actually worried he might say no or fly away.
“Yes.”
I exhaled with relief. “That’s what I hoped you’d say.”
I bent my head down and drew the bow over the strings. The song itself was a wordless overtone, low and droning, and the musical accompaniment wove its way around it in high arches and long, flowing sustained notes. It didn’t take very long before the Old Man ordered his garden to begin singing accompaniment.
It was beautiful. I can’t deny it was beautiful.
I lengthened the notes, let them build. What I didn’t think the Old Man could tell was that it wasn’t purely musical talent. I wasn’t just playing music.
I was casting a spell.
It had taken months of work to figure out how. Tyentso didn’t think a spell like this had ever existed before. We had practiced by using the temple gate to sneak off the island, never for more than an hour at a time, while I practiced against every kind of rock I could find—until I had found a type of onyx that was the perfect match.
The garden statues sang so melodically I think they could tell what was about to happen and welcomed it. Underneath the intertwined notes, a deeper resonance began to vibrate. Sand danced in circles away from me. Ocean waves lost their rhythm and collapsed. I built up the sound, note by note, and the dragon’s aura of cacophony wasn’t enough to stop the relentless vibration, a pattern that I built and stacked higher with every note—
The harmony cut off sharply as the garden statues cracked and crumbled to chunks of rock no bigger than my fist.
Thirty-six trapped men and women died in an instant, free at last to return to the Afterlife. I felt guilt—even at that moment I felt guilt. It was impossible to truly know for sure if it was the fate they would have wanted. If they would have chosen death and later rebirth over an endless immortal prison trapped in stone.
All I knew for certain was that it’s what I would have wanted. I wondered if Elana Milligreest, who had freed me from my prison inside Vol Karoth in another lifetime, had questioned if she was doing the right thing too.
I wished I could meet her just once, to tell her that she had.
In that same moment, the Old Man became a statue himself, temporarily frozen by his own outrage.
I was already running.
The roar that rose on the air behind me made the ground shake so hard I was thrown off my feet. A great rumbling echoed, and over my head, the mountain at the center of Ynisthana erupted in a giant cloud of smoke, ash, and lava bombs.
“How dare you!” the Old Man screamed. “The mountain will bury you in lava, the molten rocks will be your tomb. You will spend eternity screaming in despair and pain. You will never know peace.”
Now that’s a standing ovation, I thought as I picked myself up and kept running.
I was halfway up the slope when a large crack opened in the ground in front of me. Lava fountained into the air, a wall of fire threatening to burn me to ash.
“Kihrin!” Teraeth tackled me and pushed me to the ground as one of the lava bombs came uncomfortably close to finalizing our plans in an unexpected way. The threat was real; the Stone of Shackles felt like fire at my throat, as it prepared to keep me alive at any cost. There was no one, after all, who was directly responsible for my impending demise.
That’s not what the Old Man saw, however.
“NO!” the Old Man screamed.
What the dragon saw was Teraeth tackling me to avoid the lava bomb. Because of that tackle, the Old Man saw me trip and fall, stumbling toward the just-opened crack. I tried to grab the edge, but screamed as my hand met volcanic rock hot enough to sear flesh from bone. I fell. Likely I’d have impacted on the surface of the lava and burned to death, but the eruption was still in progress. My screams were cut short as my body was churned under in the lava fountain.
Teraeth, for his part, staggered—exactly as you might expect for someone who had just been possessed by the soul of the man he had accidentally killed. He put his hand to his chest, but found only that black arrowhead necklace, and no sign of the Stone of Shackles. Teraeth stared horrified at his hands, looked at his body, disbelief evident on his expression.
“I am not that dramatic,” I protested.
“Shhh,” Teraeth told me. “And yes, you are.”
We needed to keep low. The air was growing hard to breathe, and gods help us if a mudslide or ash flow decided to make its way down the mountain.
We watched as the illusionary Teraeth turned to run just as an equally illusionary river of burning cinders came streaming down the mountain. He was engulfed in but an instant, and this time, without air to breathe or the Stone of Shackles to keep him alive, the result seemed sadly all too predictable. Kihrin, now Teraeth, would burn to cinder, choke on ash, and die quickly and painfully.
“Damn you, fool.” The dragon’s voice was so loud I could still hear it over the eruption. “Come back here and let me save you.”
“That’s our cue,” I said, grabbing Teraeth’s hand. “Come on.”
The dragon started ripping into the mountainside not far from us, no doubt trying to recover and save a nonexistent illusion of Teraeth. Since the mountain really was erupting, it wasn’t long before he was tearing huge gouges of molten rock out with his claws, scattering them all around. Tears of lava ran down his face, making it seem like the Old Man was crying.
Perhaps he was.
We were forced to dodge to the side as a giant slab of basalt landed right where we had been hiding. The rock elongated and distorted, flowing to the sides of us. I looked around.
Tyentso stood farther up the beach, gesturing. “Come on then. What are you waiting for? The whole mountain is about to come down around our ears.”
“Too late,” Teraeth said while staring toward the center.
I followed his gaze and inhaled sharply. A real ash flow surged down from the volcano, looking graceful as a slow-moving cloud if one didn’t know better.
“Run!” Tyentso screamed, which seemed like solid advice: the gate that was to be our escape route lay in the center of the old Temple of Ynis, now rededicated to Thaena.
That meant we were going to have to run toward the death cloud if we wanted to escape.
“We can’t,” Teraeth said. “We’ll never make it in time.”
I knew what he was talking about. I’d paid attention all those times the Old Man had created similar clouds. There was zero chance we would run faster than that air would move. I wasn’t worried about Doc. Khaemezra was with him, and she was more than capable of protecting them both.
Us? I wasn’t so sure about us. Even if the burning cloud didn’t kill us, the mountain was spitting out molten rocks that slammed into the ground. Just one hit would be enough.
Tyentso started running anyway, and she had a determined gleam in her eye that told me she was going to try something insane. Probably, she meant to try holding back that cloud through force of will alone, and much as I thought of her skill as a magus, I didn’t think she was that powerful.
I’m not sure Relos Var was that powerful.
“Stop Ty!” I yelled at Teraeth, although I was running too. “I need her help!”
Teraeth didn’t run faster than me, but he could use one of his illusions to catch her attention.
“Scamp, we need to go!” she shouted.
“We can’t outrun it,” I said, “but maybe we can redirect it.” I pulled out the saymisso and ran the bow over the strings. “The mountain’s mostly basalt, right?” I looked at Teraeth for confirmation, but he just shrugged. Evidently, he hadn’t paid attention.
“Basalt and obsidian,” Tyentso volunteered. “The cloud itself will be pumice.”
“I don’t need to match the composition perfectly, just enough to cause a landslide.” I frantically thought back over my knowledge of Ynisthana geography. The best place to divert the flow would be at the caves, which had the advantage of having already been hollowed out (assuming they weren’t filling up with fresh magma). The trick was keeping all of us alive for long enough to make sure I could cast the spell.
As if to emphasize that point, the Stone of Shackles went hot around my neck. I looked up in time see a giant glowing orb of rock batted to the side by Tyentso.
“What can I do?” Teraeth asked, looking as nervous and uncertain as I’d ever seen him, but then his illusions were useless against the foe we fought, and he likewise faced nothing he could poison or stab.
“Guide us,” I said. “I’ll be playing. Ty will be keeping us both alive. Neither of us will be watching our step. We need to be just close enough to see the caves and not an inch closer.”
That cloud seemed like it was just seconds from swallowing all of us, but I knew it wasn’t a short trek up that mountain, and the scale of the damn thing made judging distance difficult.
I muttered a prayer out loud to Taja, because I needed all the luck she could give me.
Three times on the way, Teraeth either pulled us to the side or Tyentso used her magic to save us from lava fountains or fast, lethal projectiles. I didn’t have a target yet. This wasn’t what I’d spent years practicing, but the theory seemed sound. If I could collapse the cliff edge away from the temple, the cloud would follow that easier path, and we would reach safety.
If I miscalculated, I would either damn us to an earlier death or bury the temple in burning ash, making escape impossible.
Finally, Teraeth pulled us to a halt. Ahead of us was the mountain and the giant cliff face that housed both the caves used as shelter by the Black Brotherhood and, farther to the side, the large temple built into the mountain. The volcanic avalanche would reach that temple, and just after would reach us, in a matter of seconds.
The spell I cast at that moment was considerably less subtle than the first. I had no time to waste on a stealthy ritual that would go unnoticed until it was too late. While I played I hoped Doc was still using Chainbreaker to cloud the Old Man’s mind, because if the dragon felt me cast this same spell a second time from somewhere else on the island, the whole con would be for nothing. He’d know I was still alive.
I bowed the strings violently, seeking the necessary disharmony and vibration so they could be amplified. All I was doing, you understand, was encouraging rock to do what it wants to do anyway. Rock wants to crumble. Stone wants to turn back into sand. You might think the ground would fight this, but you’d be wrong.
Everything falls.
“Damn,” Teraeth said next to me, while Tyentso said nothing as she concentrated on keeping dangerous gases out of our breathing air and boiling rocks away from our skin.
The sound of the volcanic eruption was so loud we couldn’t hear the avalanche, but a giant section of the cliff face detached, sheared away, and collapsed to the ground, rolling downward into the jungle. The glowing cloud acted like a river that had just found a new course made available; it jogged to the right, following the new bed as it wreaked its path of destruction.
We ran for the temple.