Pillars of Dragonfire (14 page)

Finally, as the last
few dragons flew above, they shifted back into dragons and flew again. Heading
away from their pain, away from guilt, from fear. Flying to a promised
homeland. To a dream of a house, a garden, and more moments of joy.

 
 
TIL

For the first time in a
month, the sun emerged from behind the clouds, shining down upon the ruins of Requiem,
but it brought no warmth, no joy, no beauty to this land.

Til and her brother
walked across the scorched earth, their few belongings slung across their
backs—fur pelts, an iron pot, some rope, an old canteen, and two scrawny
rabbits on a rope. Their tattered cloaks billowed in the wind, and ash filled
their hair and smeared their faces.

Around them, the
landscape was in no better shape. In the old tales and songs, Requiem was a
land of beauty—her forests pristine, her plains blooming with flowers, her
skies full of birds and dragons and golden light. All that was gone. The fabled
birches were burnt, shattered, fallen, and soot covered the hills and valleys.
Only a few scattered ruins rose in the distance—the stubs of columns, the
shells of walls, crumbling towers. Even the sky had lost its beauty; red smoke
coiled there like clouds, and ash rained.

And every mile, they
found them.

The dead.

"Don't look,
Bim," Til whispered as they walked by the gallows on the hill. "Just
look ahead. Just look and imagine the coast over the horizon."

Yet she knew that he
looked. He always looked, sneaking glances. The cages hung from the wooden
posts, rusty, creaking as they swung in the wind. The skeletons languished
within, jaws still open in screams. Most of the skeletons were bare. One still
had some thawing flesh, and the crows bustled, tugging skin off the bones.
Wooden signs were nailed onto the gibbets, written in the tongue of Requiem:
"Weredragons."

"You did tell me
that we'd find others," Bim said.

Til frowned and looked
at him. He kicked a stone, not looking at her.

"Don't joke about
that." She kicked the stone into a rut before he could kick it again.
"All right?"

Still he didn't look at
her. He only shrugged. "Someday we'll join them. Just two more skeletons
in two more cages."

Til stopped walking.
She grabbed Bim's shoulders, spun him toward her, and glared at him. The boy
was only eleven years old, shorter than her but not weaker. Perhaps in some
ways stronger, for his hope was lost.

Hope drives us
onward,
Til thought,
but it hurts. Hope hurts so much. The hopeless feel
less pain.

"We will not end
like that." Til grabbed his chin and raised his head, forcing him to stare
at her. "Do you understand? We will not. Father did not die so we could
too. He died to let us escape, to continue this quest. To find a safe place. To
find other survivors."

Bim stared at her, his
eyes sunken into his gaunt face. His hair was red like hers, but it now seemed
white with ash and snow. No emotion showed on that face. No life filled those
eyes. No fear, no hope, no anger—blank eyes.

I'm looking at the
dead,
Til thought.
He's dead already.

"All right,
Til," he said. "All right. We'll go south. We'll find others."

But he doesn't
believe,
Til knew.
I promised to take him south, to give him a better
life, but he doesn't believe there's a reason to live.

Still holding his
shoulders, Til looked around her at the devastation of Requiem. The burnt
forests. The ruins of old towns. The smoke and skeletons in cages. Countless
more skeletons lay strewn across the valleys and hills, some buried, more
beginning to show themselves as the snow melted. Spring was near, but would any
flowers still bloom here, or would only death sprout from the earth?

She looked back at Bim.

What could this do to a
child—to always run, hide, never sleep for more than an hour, face death with
every breath? When Til had been his age, a full decade ago, she had lived among
other Vir Requis, a thousand souls. Their life had been hard, but they had
tunnels to hide in, they had warmth, they had company and dreams and songs.
What kind of life could Bim still have, and would the scars inside him ever
heal, even should they find safety from death, an end to constant running and
fighting?

Til
sighed. "You're right, Bim. You're right. Sooner or later, we all end up
as bones. We all die. Perhaps we'll die tomorrow. Perhaps we'll die in sixty
years, and those years go by quickly. Death is final. Death is unforgiving.
Death—whether now or in a few dozen more winters—is certain. But so long as
we draw breath, as our hearts beat, as our legs can walk and our wings beat, we
will fight. We will believe."

"Believe
what?" Bim said, voice softer now, cracking.

"That we can still
build a new world. That we can find joy. That life is beautiful." She
embraced him. "It's hard to see here in this ruin, but there is so much
that's beautiful and good in this world. So much that our ancestors fought for
and won, so much that we can still find. Do not let your eyes see only
ugliness. Let them weave new landscapes of what can be."

Yet as they walked
onward through the desolation, Til wondered. Was the southern coast but a
dream, a fool's hope, and would she find only ruin there too? If that was so,
Til vowed that she would move on. She would travel to the east or west, or
gather enough food and fly across the sea, or make her way north to the arctic
and the cities of ice they said rose there.

We move onward,
until we find a home—a hope of peace or a rusted cage.

She sang softly, the
old songs of Requiem, and told her brother stories of the old heroes and
heroines. The ash kept raining, the skeletons swayed in their cages, and the
ruins spread out before them into the south.

 
 
ISHTAFEL

The boy cowered under the
bed, panting, trembling, praying so hard to the Eight Gods to save him.

"I never rebelled
against you," he whispered again and again. "I was born here—here in
Saraph, never in your garden. Please, gods, please, don't let her find me,
don't let her hurt me."

Yet of course she found
him. She always found him. There were hundreds of rooms in the ziggurat,
hundreds of beds to hide under, but she always found him. He heard her shriek
in the hall, the cry of a dragon. He heard her footfalls patter through the
palace. Seeking him. Sniffing him out. A wolf hunting her prey. The door swung
violently on its hinges, slammed into the wall, and tore free from the
doorframe. It crashed onto the floor with a shower of splinters, and the boy
started. He scurried deeper under the bed, pressing himself against the wall.

Please, gods,
please, gods, please, let her go away, please help me. Please. I'm sorry.

Yet the gods had
banished his mother, and they would not save him from her.

"Ishtafel, you
little piece of filth!" Queen Kalafi screamed. "You miserable little
worm, you wretched scum!"

She knelt and reached
under the bed, a rabid beast, her fingernails like claws, her golden eyes
shining like two suns, her teeth bared. The boy wailed and tried to dodge those
hands. He tried to escape from under the bed, to race to safety. But his mother
had always been able to grab him, and she grabbed him now. She tugged him out
from under the bed, lifted him into the air, and shoved him down onto the
mattress.

"I'm sorry!"
he cried. "I didn't mean to eat the cake. I'm sorry. I can bake another.
I—"

She slapped him.
"Shut your maggot hole. I'm sick of your lies. I should toss you into the
bronze bull and hear you sing. But I want to hurt you myself. You who ruined my
body, who ruined my life, who ruined this family, a weak, pathetic link in a
great dynasty. Shameful, shameful! You should never have been born." She
shook him wildly, and his head whipped from side to side. "You should
never have lived."

She beat him then. She
beat him as he screamed, until he could barely breathe, until he felt like
every bone in his body was breaking. And even then, as a boy, he knew that a
madness lurked inside Queen Kalafi. He knew that she was raging against
herself, her life, her banishment, not against him. But he was small. He was
weak. He was hers—her precious heir, hers to torment, to blame for all the
pain of this exile, of this hot land so far from the locked gates of Edinnu.

And so she beat him.
She beat him until he slumped onto the floor, blood dripping from his nostrils
and mouth.

"Next time you
disobey me, I'm going to send you into Requiem, and I'm going to let the
dragons rip out your guts and feed them to you. You won't like that nearly as
much as the cake you stole. You will not shame me again."

Kalafi, Queen of
Saraph, stepped out of the room, leaving her son bleeding on the floor.

For a long time he lay,
struggling to breathe, to wait until the bleeding stopped. But long after the
pain faded, his mind stormed, and he trembled, the fear refusing to leave him.

I should escape
,
he thought.
Escape this palace. Escape this city. Fly across the wilderness.

He had wings—the
feathered wings of a seraph. He could fly away. He could cross the deserts and
sea, find a safe place where Mother could not reach him, and—

No.

The boy shuddered.

There was danger out
there. Across the sea, they waited—the weredragons. Bloodthirsty men and women
from a land called Requiem. People who could turn into dragons, their wings so
much larger than his, their claws and teeth even sharper than Mother's.

They would rip him
open, Ishtafel knew. They would tear out his entrails and feed them to him. His
mother had told him this, and his mother never lied. Whatever punishment she vowed,
she carried out.

"I have to
stay," the boy whispered to himself, tasting his blood. "I have to
stay here. Mother will protect me from the dragons. I have to be
good
."

He limped toward the
window, and he stared north. There, across the city, across deserts and seas,
it lay—the land of dragons. The creatures who would hurt him, from whom only his
mother could protect him.

"But I will
grow," the boy whispered. "I will grow stronger every day, until I
can kill them all. Kill everyone who hurts me. Kill the dragons . . . and kill
you, Mother."

His eyes snapped open.

He breathed out
shakily.

Just a dream. Just a
memory.

Once more Ishtafel was
an adult, a great king, five hundred years old. His mother was dead—he had
killed her himself. The boy was dead too. A man, a king, a god now lay
under the sky.

Ishtafel rose from his
blankets, his new metal skin creaking. He stretched out his dry wings, looked
around him, and beheld a field of bones and blood.

The city of Keleshan,
once home to a great garrison of seraphim, lay in ruins before him. The dragons
had come here. The dragons had left death. The walls of the city had fallen, and
the great egg-shaped fortress on its crest had hatched. The city's inhabitants
were gone—the seraphim dead or fled, the slaves escaped.

But new denizens had
come here.

The harpies swarmed
across the city. Ishtafel stood on the mountainside, watching them. They
bustled across the fields like vultures, gnawing on the corpses of seraphim,
ripping off skin, dragging ribcages through the dirt, guzzling down innards.
Thousands of other harpies scuttled across the walls, roofs, and streets of the
city, seeking both the living and dead, ripping into the flesh. Blood stained
the harpies' withered faces, and bits of flesh clung to their talons.

Ishtafel spread his
burnt wings, the feathers lost to the dragonfire. On the mountaintop, where the
stone egg had hatched, the harpies had built their own mountain of corpses. The
dead seraphim rotted in the sun, limbs slung together, and the harpies bustled
above, digging into the meal. As Ishtafel approached, they hissed, snapped their teeth, and squealed with bloodlust and hunger. The beasts
were larger than him, larger even than most dragons, their talons like lances.
Yet they knew him as their lord. Shrieking, they retreated, their bloated
heads—the heads of crones, covered in warts—bowing.

He flew to the top of
the rotting pile. The harpies returned, surrounding him, feeding. And Ishtafel
fed with them, tearing into his meal, letting the meat fill him, the ichor
stain him. Because it was not his blood. Because it was not his pain. He was
strong now, and none would ever hurt him again.

You hurt me, Mother,
and now you lie dead and rotting.
He licked the ichor off his lips.
You
burned me, dragons, and so you too will soon rot. Your mountain will rise into
the sky, and we will feed upon it.

He tore off flesh,
swallowed, and grinned. He beat his wings and soared, and his host rose with
him, a foul army that covered the sky. A new day rose and their hunt continued.
They would not rest until their next meal was the flesh of weredragons.

 
 
MELIORA

Dawn rose, and she saw it in
the north, gold and blue, a sight so beautiful her eyes dampened.

The edge of Terra,
Meliora thought.
The edge of this cruel southern continent.

Thousands of years ago,
her mother's family had fallen from Edinnu, the blessed realm in the firmaments.
The Eight Gods had cast out the seraphim, the immortals who had rebelled
against their makers, banishing them to exile in Terra—a massive continent beneath
the sky, a desolate land of rock and sand and heat. In the unforgiving land,
they had forged a new kingdom, had raised a nation called Saraph, and they had
spread across the world, crushing all other nations.

Terra, this southern continent, had always seemed like Saraph's true
earthly home. The place where the seraphim had cowered, nursed their wounds,
built, grown strong. It had always seemed to Meliora that lands across the sea,
while now part of her family's domain, were somehow not truly parts of Saraph but
mere colonies—foreign, conquered lands.