Marsheila Rockwell - Skein of Shadows

There was a commotion at the back of the church.

Something was coming through the doors.

“What are you waiting for? Let’s go!”

“Gotta calibrate-”

“No time!” Sabira shouted. The drow in the back were beginning to scream as the something reared up and tossed two halves of a mangled body into the air. Sabira caught a glimpse of black scales and multiple legs. It was one of the lizardlike spiders she thought she’d imagined back in the tunnels. And it had brought friends.

A lot of them.

And they were heading straight for her and Greddark.

“… the right one… sensitive trigger…,” the dwarf continued, fiddling with some settings on the wand. Sabira grabbed his broken arm and he winced.

“Just pick!” she yelled, then jabbed at the wand herself as the lead reptile cleared the crowd of screaming drow and launched itself at them.

There was a flash of colorless light and Sabira felt that strange stretching sensation again. And then they were floating in a mass of roiling orange and purple clouds as green lightning crackled around them.

“What the…?” she began, looking around in stunned amazement. As she watched, the clouds hardened into crystal and they were standing on a vast pearlescent plain. It began to rain blood.

“Kythri, the Churning Chaos. You didn’t let me finish the calibrations, so it sent us to the closest plane. Kythri is coterminous right now, but that could change at any moment. Sort of the nature of chaos.”

“Now what?” she asked as the plain dissolved beneath them and they fell into a sea of gritty golden ooze, which evaporated and hardened again below them into black rock scored with innumerable fissures. Fire shot up from the cracks, showering them with stinging sparks.

He thumbed a switch on the wand.

“Now we go home.”

Mol, Rhaan 2, 998 YK

Trent’s Well, Xen’drik.

They landed in the desert outside of Trent’s Well, not far from the Shimmying Shifter. At Sabira’s look, the dwarf shrugged.

“I needed a focus.”

“And it just happened to be the only place where you can get a decent drink. Why am I not surprised?” She shook her head. “Come on. Let’s go find Brannan, get you patched up, and get out of here.”

They made their way slowly back up the steep path and into the cavern that housed the rest of the settlement. As they entered, Sabira shivered. After Korran’s Maw, the caverns below Frostmantle, and now Tarath Marad, she didn’t think she ever wanted to be out of sight of the sun again.

There was no line outside the mayor’s house and she pushed the door open, not bothering to knock. She was beyond niceties at this point.

She walked through the foyer and into the sitting room. Brannan sat in a high-backed seat, sipping from a glass and talking to someone in a chair across from him. He stopped mid-sentence when he saw her, nearly dropping his drink.

“Sabira!” he exclaimed, standing quickly. The man in the other chair followed suit. As he rose and turned, she could finally see who it was.

Elix.

The dark-haired Marshal rushed across the room and gathered her into a tight embrace. For a too-brief moment, the horrors of the past weeks drained away like ice in the new spring sun. Then he sighed and stepped back from her, searching her face.

“Tilde?” he asked.

She could only shake her head sorrowfully.

“What happened?”

She related the story of Tilde’s last moments as succinctly as possible, leaving out the awful things she and the sorceress had said to each other at the end. As she talked about the aftermath of the explosion and the attack of the spider-lizards, Greddark interrupted her.

“Those weren’t spiders. They were dragonspawn. Gloomwebs, if I’m not mistaken.”

Sabira looked at him.

“ Dragonspawn?” She thought back to the sand dragon that had attacked them outside of Zawabi’s Refuge. Of all the wagons in the caravan, it had just missed theirs.

A dragon-and then dragonspawn-attacking out of nowhere, bent on stopping a mission triggered by the Draconic Prophecy. Sabira couldn’t deny the truth of it any longer. The Prophecy was real. And she was a part of it, however unwilling.

Had been. Hopefully it was over, now that Tilde was dead.

Greddark gave her a rueful smile.

“So which Conqueror piece did you want to be? I’m thinking paladin.”

“Queen,” Elix said decisively, touching her cheek. She reached up to press his palm even closer, drawing strength from the simple gesture.

Greddark chuckled, then moaned, grabbing his arm.

Brannan bustled over to him.

“There are healing potions in the back. Let me get them.”

Greddark arched a brow at her and she gave a barely perceptible nod. She wasn’t sure what role the Wayfinder was really playing in all this, but she didn’t trust him. If he was leaving her sight, she wanted someone else’s eyes on him.

“I’ll come too,” the dwarf said. Brannan shrugged and led him out of the room.

After they had left, Elix removed his hand, went over to a small, flask-laden table, and poured her a drink. As he brought the glass over to her, she detected the distinctive tang of ironspice.

“Frostmantle Fire,” he replied to her unspoken question. “I brought it with me.”

Which reminded her.

“What are you doing here? Did Breven get impatient waiting on his prize?”

Elix shook his head.

“You first. You said Tilde’s death stopped the Prophecies-plural. What did you mean?”

She took a quick sip before answering, feeling the warmth of the potent liquor flowing through her, bolstering her. It was a poor substitute for Elix’s embrace, but it would do for now.

“There were three different bits of Prophecy in play, not just the one Breven told us about,” she said, then recited them all for his benefit. “Greddark figured out that the first one had been mistranslated-it wasn’t referring to all three moons being dark, just Rhaan. When that moon was dark and an unmarked member of House Kundarak-the dreaming Warder-arrived with the ‘Daughter of Stone and Sentinel’ on the day of Onatar’s Rest, then the eight locks could be opened.”

“You and Greddark? And Onatar’s Rest-that’s today, right?”

She nodded.

“So were the locks opened, then?” he asked, looking confused. She didn’t blame him. She wasn’t completely sure she had it all right herself. Even if she had to believe the Prophecy was real, the interpretations were still all too suspect. “And if so, what was behind them?”

“I don’t think so,” she replied. “I think Tilde was the Heart in the second Prophecy. She was certainly intending to bathe this world in tyranny, anyway, and by the looks of it, she’d already done a pretty good job of it down there. And that ties into the third Prophecy, too, the one about her people being doomed from her birth-I think that means her transformation into… whatever she was-and the world being ‘her killing field.’ But I kept her from ‘breaking free’-to the surface, I guess. Which she would have done if she’d been able to sacrifice me to the Spinner, like she’d planned. And since she didn’t break free-or sacrifice me, thankfully-then the locks stay closed and the She stays put.”

She paused.

“I think.”

A sudden widening of Elix’s hazel eyes was all the warning she had.

She spun, the blade in Brannan’s hand skimming along her battered armor instead of plunging through it and into her back. His eyes blazed red.

“But you did free her, you smug little fool-when you killed her. And now all that remains to secure my Queen’s release and regain Her favor is your death!”

He lunged at her again and she sidestepped, pulling her urgrosh from its harness as she did. He recovered and came at her again. She swung at him, going for his skull. He moved at the last second, and the axe-blade of her urgrosh caught his Khyber shard-studded ear, sheering it cleanly from his head and taking off most of the left side of his face with it, exposing glistening muscle and bone.