Troy Denning - The Titan of Twilight

“Yes, Majesty?”

“Do you… still have… Simon’s healing…”

The queen did not have to finish her question. Avner took one hand away from her belly and reached into his cloak. He withdrew the small purple flask and offered it to her.

Brianna shook her head. “Not yet.” She pulled her dagger from her satchel and turned the hilt toward Avner. “Baby might… need it.”

The young scout stared at the weapon, uncomprehending.

“You can see… the baby,” Brianna said. “It’s the only… way.”

Avner was too terrified to reply. He could only shake his head and stare at the knife’s gleaming blade.

“Take it!” Brianna thrust the weapon toward him, then collapsed onto her back. “Cut my child free… I command it!”

Since dawn has my eagle battled the cold boreal wind, that I might witness the debacle below. Through his eyes have I watched the Sons of Masud fall like trees to the axes of men, and through his nostrils have I smelled their acrid blood heavy in the air. I have heard dying fire giants call my name, adjuring me to guide their spirits safely to Surtr’s fiery palace, and I have seen their warm corpses sinking into the ice. I have tasted the sour sapor of defeat, and it has filled my throat with the burning bile of despair.

My plan, of course, was not perfect-I am no god-but it was sound. The fire giants were too slow to implement it; too slow, and too faint of heart.

Cowards? Perhaps. They faltered. They faltered, and so the firbolgs will carry the day.

I am watching them now, the firbolgs clambering toward Brianna’s dank hiding place. In grim silence they climb, thirty warriors no larger than bears, weary of gait and pale with their barbarous intent. Their compassion makes softlings of them all; worse, it makes them liars. What honest warrior would shirk at murder to save his people? Not I; I killed, and willingly.

My eagle beats its wings, rising high above their heads and flying straight on toward the tunnel where Brianna hides. By the flickering torchlight inside, I see the queen’s guards pinning her to the floor, one with a knife poised above her womb. Foolish woman. If she had come to me, I would have removed the infant with my magic. Now, she must trust the child’s life to an unwieldy dagger and a trembling boy.

My pet reaches the tunnel mouth and wheels along the mountainside. He dives deep into the canyon, down half the length of the slope, and swoops low over the first firbolg. Talons as sharp as needles rake his quarry’s face. The warrior screams and falls, his hands reaching for an empty eye socket. My eagle banks away, a volley of shouts chasing him over the dusky gorge.

This small reprieve is all I have to offer the unborn emperor. It is little enough, I know, but Annam’s children have fallen farther than I thought. In Ostoria’s absence, the giants have grown as weak and stupid as all the races of Toril.

“… and we know who did that, Charles.”

“… now you must leave, my darling…”

“Don’t be afraid. One foot after the other…”

Be silent, I pray you!

I know what the gods demand of me, yet I would tarry here a while longer. Even I cannot reach the mine ahead of the firbolgs, and I am loathe to leave the Vale before I must. For a mortal to relinquish himself is no great sacrifice; his life is a fleeting and uncertain thing, and it will end soon enough.

I surrender eternity itself.

From the queen’s hiding place erupts a shriek as piercing and shrill as a wyvern song. The voice, of course, is Brianna’s, and in her scream there is more hope than anguish. The eagle raises his head toward the mine, his predator’s mouth watering at the sound of her distress, but I command him to fold his wings and dive. The emperor is coming, and I must find a better way to guard the child than scratching at firbolgs’ eyes.

The scream caught Tavis as a rope catches a hanged man, at the end of a long, lonely fall. The high scout found himself dangling in cold, bleak darkness, numb and queasy and thick-headed, with no idea of how long he had been plummeting through the icy murk. The flesh on one side of his body felt soft and pulpy where the fire giant’s boot had caught him, and a huge goose egg had risen where his skull had slammed into a boulder, but these injuries did not actually hurt. He was merely aware of them, as he was aware of the black, frozen emptiness into which he had sunk, and the anguished cry that had rent its desolate tranquility.

Tavis would have heard that scream anywhere. Had he been at home in Castle Hartwick, he would have heard it ringing inside the keep’s thick granite walls; had he been fighting frost giants in the bleak northern plains, he would have heard it rolling across the white wastes of the Endless Ice Sea; and even in this lonely dark place, the cry had cleaved the frozen gloom like the almighty axe of Annam the All Father. Brianna was hurt.

The first defender opened his eyes, and his mind turned inside out. The blackness through which he had been falling was suddenly inside his head, and Brianna’s voice yielded to the wailing wind. A crooked chasm of purple twilight took shape before the high scout’s eyes. He came to realize that he was lying head-down on a steep slope, staring up into the dusk sky. Save for the icy throbbing deep in his battered bones, his body had gone numb from cold, and the gorge felt as empty and deserted as the dark place from which he had come.

Tavis dug his boot heels into the frozen hillside and slowly pushed his feet around, so that he would no longer be lying upside-down. The effort sent swells of frigid agony slushing through his body, and he began to form an idea of his injuries. His right flank hurt from his hip to his armpit. Each breath filled him with anguish, a sure sign that some of his ribs had snapped beneath the giant’s kick. One shoulder seemed strangely weak, as though the blow had momentarily popped it out of joint. His head hurt most of all. A swirling brown fog had seeped up from some rank place to fill it with caustic fetor and raw, aching pain.

The high scout was injured, and badly. With each breath, the sharp point of a broken rib might be slashing his vital organs to shreds-the possibility seemed more likely every time he inhaled. He had certainly suffered a skull concussion, perhaps even a fracture. It would be some time before his thoughts came rapidly and clearly; more importantly, his reflexes would be slow, his judgment suspect. There was also the danger that his pummeled brain would let him slip away in a blissful sleep.

Groaning, Tavis propped himself up. A short distance away stood a black spire eagle, no doubt here to feast on the battle carrion. The high scout brandished an aching arm, but the bird merely hissed and continued to watch.

Fifty paces below Tavis, a belt of purple-shadowed ice ran alongside Wyrm River: the road. The surface was strewn with dark boulders and frozen, contorted bodies, both human and giant. Other than the high scout himself, there were no wounded. Unlike firbolgs, neither humans nor fire giants could tolerate bitter cold; their wounded were doomed to quick, frigid deaths.

Farther up the canyon, the courtiers’ sleighs lay shoved and shattered to the side of the road, many with the twisted carcasses of draft horses still in the harnesses. Down the canyon, Tavis could barely make out a mangled heap of debris that had once been the royal sleigh. Nearby lay a few dark blotches, the corpses of men and horses that had died in the queen’s defense. Beyond the sleigh, the landslide’s jumbled slope was distant and dark. In the purple shadows near the crest lay the huge silhouettes of several fire giants. Save for a single pennon flag snapping in the wind, nothing moved, and no one cried for help.