Elizabeth Heydon - Elegy for a Lost Star

Achmed the Snake , she had called him, eradicating the name by which he had been called for centuries, the Brother, freeing him from the bonds that had enslaved him through it. Firbolg, Dhracian. Firstborn. Assassin . Those appellations had been true before they had entered the earth, but then she added something more.

Unerring tracker. The Pathfinder .

With that nomenclature had come those powers.

From the moment the namesong had left her lips he had never been lost again. Concentrating on a path he had never seen, his mind’s eye suddenly took on a new perspective, a dimension high above him. An inner sense he had not had before guided him now, showing him the way he wanted to go to anything he sought. That sense had led the three companions along the Axis Mundi, through the countless tunnels, roots, holes, and passageways in the flesh of the world, to this new land, this continent on the other side of the world, and of time. It had served him well since.

The woman who gave it to him now lay before him, her life spilling onto the floor with each breath.

Achmed dipped his finger into the pool of blood on the cave floor.

He closed his eyes and sought the path, hearing her words in his mind again.

Unerring tracker. The Pathfinder .

The blood on his fingertip hummed in the sensitive nerve endings of the digit.

An image of tunnels, now veins and arterial pathways rather than root passageways, filled his mind.

One of them ran with a river of dark blood turning brighter as it fled her heart.

Slowly Achmed expelled his breath, then loosed the path lore he had gained from Rhapsody’s namesong in the center of the Earth. His mind cleared; the dragon, the wyrmkin, the midwife, and the lair faded into mist at the edge of his consciousness and vanished, leaving nothing but the tunnels in his mind, passageways inside the woman who had become the other side of his coin.

A sickening nausea came over him, a chill recalled from other sickbeds. He beat the sensation back and concentrated.

His mind’s eye followed the trickling blood up through dark hallways, internal caverns that made him cringe. He tracked its path as he would the scent of an animal or the heartbeat of human prey; having been born with the gift to track those born in his birthplace by their heartbeats, he was used to hearing them, to feeling them in his own skin, to lock his own life’s rhythm on to theirs.

But nothing he had ever done had prepared him to visually see inside another living person. Especially not one for whom he felt the damnable emotion of love, denied, confused, and forbidden as it was.

The trip along the internal path moved with a lightning speed; in a heart’s beat he was seeing the inside of Rhapsody’s womb, where blood welled from a tear in the wall. He concentrated, willing the wound to close, the blood to cease, and to his amazement, he saw the spongy tissue swell for a moment, then slip back into itself, stanched and red. Then the wound disappeared. The veins in his own skin pulsed, as they did when he was tracking a victim and had successfully locked on to that victim’s heartbeat.

Achmed shuddered. He closed his eyes, preparing to unbind his mind from the path, but hesitated for a second, long enough to see what floated near the former wound.

Wrapped in a translucent membrane, torn down the middle, was an almost human form, a form with eyes closed as if in slumber, the shape of a head with facial features obscured by the broken caul. The membrane was gleaming in the dark, as if it had once been a sack filled with light, striated with streaks of every imaginable color.

The child within it lay motionless, the only movement a weak flickering beneath its breastbone.

With his mind’s eye Achmed stared at Rhapsody’s child, captivated by the sheer beauty of what he was witnessing. Rather than the despised spawn of wyrmkin, the very thought of which gave him to nausea, the infant was tiny, perfect, wrapped in light and color and darkness all at once. Even through the sticky caul golden wisps of hair were visible, and a warmth emanated from it that was compelling to behold, the same warmth that had radiated from its mother before she had come to this dank cave some months ago.

The path now found, his vision faded to darkness again. As it did, Achmed was struck with two thoughts in the same instant.

The child was not the freak he feared it would be. It favored its mother, but had a light about it of its own, and rather than emitting the ancient avarice and twisted lore of a wyrm, it seemed human, tiny, and vulnerable.

And it was dying.

Achmed pulled his hand from the pool of blood as the vision disappeared, leaving him cold and shaking.

“The bleeding is stanched,” he said, his face gray with sweat. “But you have to get the child out now.”

Far away, within the depths of his kingdom, unbeknownst to the Bolg king, another Sleeping Child’s heart was beating more faintly as well.

As chance would have it, the guard of the Blasted Heath, to the immediate west of Kraldurge, was changing just as the beast bored up through the dry riverbed that had served as a barrier against human attack for centuries. A consequence of this timing was that twice as many soldiers were on hand to witness the arrival, and twice as many bolts from crossbows were loosed at her a moment after she did, thudding through the air with a dull war tom that served to gain the notice of many who otherwise would have been caught unawares.

It also meant that twice as many died in the single moment that followed.

At first it began with a rumble of earth; the rocks of the crags of the Teeth loosened and began to rain down into the crevasses of the east and onto the steppes to the west with the force of a violent hailstorm. The Eye clans, holding their customary watch over those crags, scrambled down from the summits, trying to find purchase in the rocky terrain shifting beneath their feet, but many were caught in the beginnings of avalanches, and tumbled with those rocks a thousand feet or more into the canyon below.

The Claw clans were guarding the inner and outer passes of the Cauldron, also not far from Kraldurge. Their training had led them to be ever watchful from all directions—the four compass points and the air above—as an attack might come from anywhere. And while they had been schooled to believe that the earth itself might be a point of entry, in reality it was difficult to imagine that the very ground upon which one walked could be monitored as a hazard. So when that ground sundered suddenly, splitting open like the maw of a great stone beast and erupting fire, the Claw soldiers could do little more than roll and run, shielding their heads from the broken earth that rained back down upon them, burying them alive.

The Guts, who by heritage had claimed the lands beyond the canyon to guard, could only stand by, exposed, and watch as a great shadowy beast rose out of the ground, light glittering madly off the copper scales of its hide from the innumerable fires that ignited in bare trees and wintergrass along the Blasted Heath. It was to this group of soldiers that the dragon turned her attention first.

All of the building anger, all of the unspent rage, fostered over the months of travel, listening endlessly to her name cursed aloud in unmistakable loathing; all the betrayal, the loss of these lands that she knew were once hers, all of the confusion and terror at being unable to clearly recall the Past, and, above everything, all of the blame she held for the woman whose face haunted her every waking and dreaming moment, was given vent in the scourge of her first attack. The beast vomited the fire that had been stewing in her belly, inhaled and breathed it again, at every living being she could see or sense in her old lands, tingling with joy as her dragon sense felt them roast alive.