“They’re perfectly safe. Both Thurvishar and Kihrin are glyphed for pressure and air. Those won’t run out. There are no predators interested in humans in these waters. Also, I’m expecting one of the Eight Immortals to check on what happened to their precious control crystal any second now.”
Qown gasped. “In that case, we have to leave. Right now!”
Relos Var smiled. “In a moment.” The wizard walked over to the throne and bent over, clearing away the muck and mud to reveal a small chunk of hematite. He chuckled as he picked it up. “Don’t want to forget this. Morios would be upset if it fell into the wrong hands.”
“That’s Morios’s Cornerstone? Warmonger really was down here the whole time?”
“Of course. One of you might have forced Senera to use the Name of All Things to confirm its location. And I’m sure Kihrin did use Urthaenriel to confirm the presence of a Cornerstone in the vicinity. The only way to satisfy both means of checking was to leave the Cornerstone here. Now why don’t we be on our way. We have a lot to do and not much time to do it.”
Qown picked up Urthaenriel as Relos Var opened a gate.
The water rushed in over the two unconscious men.
Qown and Var stepped through.
* * *
By the time Tyentso finished, Janel perched on top of the very highest pinnacle of the temple, had a voice that could be heard for miles, and glowed.
She was also—at least temporarily—extremely difficult to cut.
“Morios! Answer me this. How does one become a dragon? Did you have to make some sort of demon pact?”
The dragon turned toward her, snarling. “What?”
“Janel, what are you doing?” Khored said.
She ignored her god.
“It cannot be so easy to become a dragon,” Janel continued, “or they would litter the valleys. Is there a guild? A special password?”
With each word, Janel threw fire at Morios, spells she knew would never ever damage him.
Come on, she thought. Ignore your brother for just a little while longer. Swing at the gnat. Bite at that snake’s wriggling tail.
Morios breathed at her, but the swirling energy cloud Tyentso had placed around her deflected most of the blades. The few that penetrated beyond that point bounced against her own protections.
“Is that the best you have?” Janel taunted.
“Janel—” But Khored stopped. Perhaps he’d sensed she had a plan. Perhaps he just couldn’t imagine she’d be this stupid otherwise.
Then a look of horror crossed the god’s face. Khored vanished.1
Why…?
Morios flew right at her, opened his maw, and swallowed the top of the spire, her along with it.
Janel screamed as the dragon’s dark, suffocating throat constricted around her, an act that would have crushed her without Tyentso’s protections.
And she should have known; he had razors on the inside too.
She unsheathed a dagger and plunged it into one side, jamming the blade between two razor ridges to gain her a handhold. Morios might have even felt the act, the way one feels it when a rice grain lodges in one’s throat the wrong way, because he continued trying to swallow. Janel held on for dear life.
If she was wrong, she was about to find out what the Afterlife was like as a permanent citizen.
She took a deep breath and concentrated. Not on attacking Morios. Not on the dragon at all. She shoved all thoughts of Morios from her mind because she now dwelt in a playground where intentions mattered, where concepts mattered, where purposeful violence and accidental violence were not equivalent. Not so different in some ways from the Afterlife’s metaphors, where the realm of the spiritual and mental triumphed over the physical.
Instead of thinking about Morios, or her odds, Janel did something she’d always done by instinct and always done well.
Janel created fire.
In tremendous quantity.
* * *
The survivors were gathered at Lake Jorat’s shoreline, too numb to do much more than see to the injured and watch as one of the wonders of the world disintegrated.
Only a small few understood the philosophical underpinnings of the battle going on above the city. Destruction on this scale fed Khored’s power.
And yet, Khored seemed incapable of defeating the dragon who had destroyed his city, Atrine, quite possibly beyond all rebuilding.
But even as some watched in horror and others observed with massive academic interest, the spectators noticed the dragon pull back from the fighting, looking surprised.
He shook his head, as if trying to clear it. Then Morios began clawing at his neck, tearing giant rents in the metal there. He keened to shake the stones as he dug deeper.
The giant tears in Morios’s neck turned red. The color rapidly brightened to yellow and then to bright white. Metal melted, sizzling down to the lake water.
Abruptly, Morios’s neck and head separated from his body. Both pieces fell, the huge body landing across Atrine, and the head dropping past the city, over the falls. It tumbled all the way down the immense, failing dam’s enormous height.
Only a few noticed the small red dot, person-sized, that also fell into the water.
Those few were enough.
62: END GAMES
Atrine, Jorat Dominion, Quuros Empire. Three days since Tyentso told a high lord to “stand there and look pretty”
Janel woke, gratified to be alive, fearful of what news the Living World would bring. The Afterlife had been strangely deserted, with no sign of the demon hordes she expected to find snapping at the heels of such62 a massive event as the destruction of Atrine. The souls of the dead had freely wandered, however. There had been so many.
She staggered to her feet, ignored the concerned looks of military physickers. Outside, smoke turned the normally teal sky a sooty green; she’d only been unconscious for a few hours.
Ninavis waited for her outside the tent.
The woman seemed uninjured, a few smudges marking points on her forehead and jaw. Ninavis gestured toward a Joratese azhock as soon as she saw Janel, and they both started walking in that direction.
“Casualties?” Janel asked.
“We lost a few,” Ninavis admitted. “Dango took some shrapnel in his leg, but he’ll be fine. Although you wouldn’t know that with the way his husband’s fussing over him.”
“Oh, I can’t blame Baramon for that. I’d fuss too. What about—”
“Arasgon’s fine.” Ninavis held open the azhock flap for Janel. “He’s over at the refugee camp, helping herd.”
Janel nodded, relieved, and then couldn’t help but smile as she entered the azhock and saw the Markreev Malkoessian’s pennants. The smile faded quickly. There was only one reason that the Markreev would have set himself up so close to the high general’s bivouac: because the duke was in no position to do so.
“I’ll assume this means you weren’t able to save Duke Xun.”
“He must have died in the first few minutes of the attack. We always knew that was a possibility. Plan B, on the other hand, went smooth as silk.” The Marakori woman tapped the satchel at her hip.
“Good. That’s not all of them, I hope?”
“Oh no. Call it a representative sample.”