James Wyatt - Storm dragon

Vaskar roared when he saw Gaven approaching. “Do you still think to steal my prize?” he howled over the wind. “Get away, interloper!”

Vaskar’s outrage had a very different effect than he had intended. The Soul Reaver followed Vaskar’s gaze, turning its monstrous head toward Gaven as he approached. Then, as if the battle to that point had consisted purely of the Soul Reaver playing with Vaskar, the tentacled thing dismissed him. Barely sparing the dragon another glance, it blasted him with waves of energy that made the air shimmer, and the echoes of it made Gaven’s head throb with sudden pain. Unconscious or dead, Vaskar fell.

As the Soul Reaver turned its full attention to Gaven, lightning streaked into the Crystal Spire and coursed through the Soul Reaver’s withered flesh, though it left the creature unharmed. Wind buffeted it from every side, and the robes it wore flapped furiously around it. In return, Gaven felt his mind engulfed in a similar storm. Thoughts and feelings welled up in no sensible order, like a nightmare galloping through his mind at a breakneck pace. Slights and shames from his childhood sprang to his thoughts alongside the fresh grief of his father’s death, while the memories he’d acquired from the Heart of Khyber added their own share of fear and frustration. For a moment Gaven could not even distinguish the torrent of memories from his sensation of the present: the Soul Reaver and the storm seemed like distant thoughts amid the deluge.

Among the torrent, though, Gaven found words that connected the ancient dragon’s memories to his own past, walking the Sky Caves of Thieren Kor, and the present moment, tying them all together- The greatest of the daelkyr’s brood, the Soul Reaver feasts on the minds and flesh of a thousand lives before his prison breaks. The Bronze Serpent calls him forth, but the Storm Dragon is his doom.

The words focused his mind like a bolt of lightning. I wield the power of the Storm Dragon, he thought. If I don’t kill the Soul Reaver, who will?

He whipped the storm into a greater fury. Hail battered the Soul Reaver, rain like searing fire burned its flesh, and lightning crackled in a ball around it. Then the Soul Reaver, too, fell from the sky, sliding down the shaft of unearthly light. Gaven watched it descend and disappear again below the earth, and he wished he could believe it dead.

The Storm Dragon descends into the endless dark beneath the bridge of light, he thought, where the Soul Reaver waits. There among the bones of Khyber the Storm Dragon drives the spear formed from Siberys’s Eye into the Soul Reaver’s heart.

Siberys’s Eye-where was it? With a start, he searched the ground below. Vaskar lay crumpled on the rocky plain near the base of the Crystal Spire, one wing outstretched at a strange angle, his neck curved around beneath the bulk of his body, his head hidden from view. The Soul Reaver’s hordes had dispersed from there already, moved outward to tear into the armies gathered at either end of the plain. Gaven willed himself downward, and the wind set him on solid ground once again. Drenched with rain, chilled to the bone, he scrambled over and around the rocks to the place where Vaskar’s body lay.

The dragon looked pathetic, broken like a child’s toy dashed to the ground, and Gaven again felt the welling of pity. “The Bronze Serpent faces the Soul Reaver and fails,” he said. “But the Storm Dragon seizes the shard of heaven from the fallen pretender. Where is it, Vaskar?”

Gaven circled the fallen dragon’s body, scanning the ground for any gleam of yellow. The ground around Vaskar’s body revealed no clues, so Gaven used the ash staff to prod under the dragon’s claws. He lifted a claw, and almost jumped in surprise as the Eye of Siberys flashed gold beneath the dragon’s massive hand. He scooped up the dragonshard and yanked it free from Vaskar’s staff.

He was back in the Aerenal jungle, cradling the warm Eye of Siberys close to his chest, gazing into its vibrant core where veins of gold danced like Siberys at the dawn of creation. It was so easy to lose himself in that writhing dance, to forget his surroundings, to forget himself. Even the sound of thunderous footsteps could barely stir him from his reverie, but he made himself turn and look at Darraun.

Except that he wasn’t in Aerenal, and the footsteps had been hoofbeats. Gaven tried to shake his head clear, without much success, and sized up the rider charging him from the north. A knight of some sort, he supposed, clad in heavy armor-no, a warforged. Cart.

Gaven stowed the Eye of Siberys in a pocket and held his ash-black staff as though it were his greatsword. “What are you doing here?” he called to the advancing warforged.

“I’m not here to fight you, Gaven,” Cart said. His tone reminded Gaven of the first time he’d encountered the warforged: Cart bending down to him in his cell and trying to coax him out as if he were a frightened child. “I thought you might want some help.”

“Help? Why would you help me?”

Cart dismounted and walked closer to Gaven. “Because we are alike, you and I.”

“Alike? How so?”

“Each of us was made for a single purpose, Gaven. It’s foolish to deny that purpose. I was made for war, and I will continue to war until I finally meet a foe who can defeat me. And I’ll die knowing that I lived according to my purpose. What more can anyone hope to do?”

“And for what purpose was I made, Cart?”

“You were made to be here at this moment, to fight that monstrosity down there and do what Vaskar could not. To be a god.”

“Of all people, shouldn’t gods be free to choose their destinies?”

“What greater destiny could you ask for?” Cart sounded as though he couldn’t possibly imagine a satisfactory answer to his question.

Gaven looked up into the storm, feeling the rain striking his skin. The wind lashed his hair against his face. He was the storm: he felt himself raging in the whirling clouds and booming thunder. But he was also a rain-drenched man, feet planted firmly on the ground. “You’re wrong about me, Cart,” he said. He pulled the Eye of Siberys out of his pocket and started binding it to the ash staff.

“Am I? Then why are you readying your weapon?”

“Oh, I’ll play the Storm Dragon’s part, for now. You’re right-someone has to stop the Soul Reaver, and no one here is going to do it but me.” The branch he had pulled from the ash tree seemed made to fit the Eye of Siberys. He jabbed the ground a few times to make sure the dragonshard was securely affixed.

Satisfied, he pulled his adamantine box out of another pouch and sprang it open. The nightshard inside seemed to spring to life at the proximity of the Eye of Siberys. “The Time of the Dragon Above draws to a close,” he said, not really addressing Cart. “The Time of the Dragon Below approaches. The Eye of Siberys and the Heart of Khyber are united, just as the Crystal Spire links the Dragon Above and the Dragon Below.”

“I agree with Darraun,” Cart said. “The Prophecy makes my head spin.”

“You don’t know the half of it.” Gaven lifted the nightshard and tossed it gently away from him. It seemed to float along that path for a moment, then it circled back, drawing a ring of lightning behind it. Like the whirlwind that had borne him aloft, it swirled around him, tracing its path in crackling light.

“Are you coming with me?” he asked the warforged.

Cart nodded.

“Let’s go, then.” Gaven strode over to the base of the Crystal Spire, to a ledge overlooking the chasm that rent the plain. He tried to peer down into it, but the light blinded him. “The Soul Reaver awaits.” Without a backward glance, he stepped off the ledge and fell.