James Wyatt - Dragon forge

“You did fail,” he said. “You taught me detachment, taught me not to love. But you didn’t teach me not to care. You made me hate you, and you never punished me for hating you. Hatred is just as strong as love, Kelas, and my hatred for you is my greatest strength. Because I hate you, I care-and because I care, I learned to love.”

Kelas laughed-a low chuckle that grew into a great, booming laughter that echoed in the canyon. “Then you have learned to fail,” he said, his face suddenly grim.

Then the bear-beast leaped at Aunn again, knocking him to the ground. With its massive paws pinning him down, its fiery eyes met his gaze. As it spoke, droplets of spittle fell on his face and seared his skin. “I am everything you’ve ever cared about. Except for Kelas, it’s all been a sham. My evil is the only thing that’s ever been real in your life, changeling.”

Despair sank into Aunn’s chest like the weight of the fiend’s paws, and he waited for its teeth to close around his neck. Instead, it brought its mouth close to Aunn’s and drew a deep breath.

Aunn’s lungs screamed their protest as the demon sucked every last scrap of air out of them and still continued its inhalation. His vision swam, and darkness closed in at the edges. The paws lifted off his chest and Aunn felt his body rise off the ground with the force of the monster’s breath. He closed his eyes.

He was a husk, left with nothing inside him but his despair. Kelas had been manipulating and controlling him his entire life, and Kelas was an incarnation of evil. Everything else had been a lie-Dania, Vor, and Farren. The ideals of the paladin that had seemed so virtuous, they were nothing but a quick path to a noble death. And now his own death, hardly so noble, was upon him. Kalok Shash would not burn brighter, he felt sure. If it existed at all, it would soon be extinguished.

In the midst of the blackness, Dania lay atop him as she had in his fevered dream. She moved against him, smiled at him, and asked, “Why do you resist me?”

“I can’t anymore,” he said. “Take me.”

A blast of white fire shattered the darkness, and air poured into Aunn’s lungs. Hope seeped back into his heart as well, and as his eyes regained their normal vision he saw the bear-thing scrabbling at the ground, trying to get its feet under it again. When it did, it vanished from sight, and a moment later Aunn felt its absence.

But there was still a presence with him, a presence that had taken root in his soul and flowered at last into that burst of fire. It was Dania’s smile and Vor’s courage, Rienne’s care and Gaven’s fierce power. It was a flame burning against all the world’s darkness, a purifying fire.

Who are you?

He knew, with every last spark of his soul he knew. He smiled and answered, “I am Aunn.”

Then he climbed up and over the rubble that had blocked his path.

The Demon Wastes lay behind him and the Shadowcrags rose up ahead. Aunn turned for a last look back. The Labyrinth had not changed since his first view of it-an endless maze of winding canyons, scorched as if by the acidic touch of corruption, all spread out beneath a blood red sky. But it felt different. He had approached it with dread, afraid of losing his soul. But he looked back on it with a strange mixture of grief and… something else, something that was hard to name. He lost Vor there. He led Sevren and Zandar to their deaths. He helped kill Durrnak and the orcs under his command, and finally left all of Maruk Dar to the hands of the Carrion Tribes. That grief and remorse might have overwhelmed him, except that he had gained something as well. Vor had warned him to abandon hope, but instead he had gained a shred of hope.

A thin plume of smoke to the right caught his eye, and he wondered whether it was a sign of Maruk Dar’s fate. As he watched, more plumes arose, and more, until they were joined into a great billowing cloud of black smoke rising up and spreading out to cast a deeper pall over the whole Labyrinth.

Maruk Dar is burning, Aunn thought. I should have been there to die in its defense.

He fell to his knees and watched the smoke and occasional flashes of fire rising above the canyon walls. He thought of Farren, probably one of the first to die as he tried to shield the city from the onrushing hordes. He thought of Dakar and the woman with him, and the other Carrion Tribe “converts” among the Ghaash’kala. They, too, were probably early victims, sought out for special punishment by those they had deserted. Or perhaps they turned on the Ghaash’kala, hoping to redeem themselves and rejoin the winning side in the conflict. And what of young Ghaarat, who had just sworn his vow to defend the Labyrinth? How long would a boy last in battle against the Carrion Tribes, even a boy of the Ghaash’kala?

Farren had allowed him to escape the sack of Maruk Dar. Farren had ensured that he would be alive at that moment, able to look back on the billowing smoke that told of the city’s destruction. Farren had broken his vow and allowed Aunn to escape the Labyrinth, and for one purpose: to warn the people of the east, of the Eldeen Reaches and perhaps Aundair and Breland. The Carrion Tribes were on the march, their sights set on the cities of the east, and it fell on him to try to stop them.

Aunn felt the weight of that burden as he lurched to his feet. He gave one last look toward Maruk Dar and said, “Kalok Shash burns brighter.” Then he turned his back on the city and set off to find his way back into the Shadowcrags.

Gaven was barely aware of guards putting new chains on his wrists and removing the ones that had bound his hands together. Winches rattled on either side, and the chains pulled his arms up and out, then harder until his shoulders burned with pain. The pain jolted him from his stupor.

Kelas stood before him. “Storm Dragon,” he said, snarling with contempt. He reached up and ran a fingertip across the dragonmark at Gaven’s neck. “Will the storm still obey you after this? I wonder.”

He turned away, reaching into his coat, and produced a dragonshard larger than his fist, at least the size of the Eye of Siberys. Its substance was light red, and a swirl of blood coiled in its heart-an Eberron shard. Kelas set the stone into a fine gold setting, and adjusted an array of fine metal arms around it, cradling it aloft and apart from the rest of the forge’s workings.

“The Dragon Forge is a refinery, of sorts,” Kelas said, satisfaction in his voice. “It’s made to separate gold from dross.”

“To purify the touch of Siberys’s hand,” Malathar whispered behind him, “by removing it from the tainted flesh on which it is written.”

Gaven gazed at the dragonshard with growing horror. Eberron shards were often used to contain magic-wizards recorded spells in them or attuned them to specific spells to make wands or even the relatively mundane everbright lanterns. Could it contain his dragonmark?

Kelas placed his hands on a golden orb below the dragon-shard and gasped as silver flame leaped out from the orb to engulf his hands. He trembled with what might have been torment or ecstasy, his eyes rolled back in his head, and the dragonshard flared with crimson light.

The light washed over Gaven, searing into his dragonmark, and then the pain struck him.

The worst of it was over. The chains binding his wrists held Gaven as he hung, limp and drained. His skin still burned where his dragonmark had been, blood oozing from the raw skin it had left behind. The manacles bit into his wrists, and he lacked the strength to find his feet and take the weight off his arms. He could barely lift his head to look around.

Kelas cackled with delight as he lifted the enormous dragon-shard from its golden setting and gazed into its depths.