The Dragon Emperor of Another World: Awakening of a Legend

CHAPTER 6: Perilous Harvest

For the better part of a month, the road was the whole of their lives. They crossed half of Astrael on Eileen's three marks—fast when they could be, patient when they had to be, careful always with what they carried—and her voice rode along with them like a third traveler: I need them whole.

---

The first mark lay north, at a place the old maps called the Crater of Fallen Stars and the handful of traders who still worked its rim called only Norvahn.

Broken rock ringed it like the fingers of a closing fist. The ground inside shimmered with leftover power, cracked in long rays out from the center where something had come down out of the sky a very long time ago, and everywhere in the rubble lay the shards: cold, blue-black, humming. Ethan could feel them in his back teeth from the rim.

They weren't alone with them. A nest of sandstalker wyrms had claimed the crater—long, low things that swam through loose scree the way eels move through water, their scales soaking up the starlight glow of the metal until they shone with it. The biggest of them lay coiled on the biggest shard of all, in the middle of the crater, a two-headed brute with veins of pale fire threading its hide.

"Nesting," Celestia murmured. She was crouched beside him behind a cluster of scorched boulders, wings folded tight. "They won't leave the mound of their own accord. We'll have to make them."

He squinted through the heat haze. "I only need the big one. Can you pull the alpha off it?"

"I'll take the sky. You take the ground." She smiled without much humor. "Don't die."

Then she was gone upward—and grew, as she went, into something much closer to her true shape than he had seen before: a long stroke of silver and shadow across the pale sky, wings that could have roofed a house. The wyrms screamed and reared out of the scree, jaws unhinging, every head turning up.

Ethan ran.

Not ran, exactly. The Godslayer gear let him do a thing he'd done ten thousand times with a keypress and never once with a body—a short, wrenching blink through space from one boulder to the next. Voidstep, the game had called it. The game had not mentioned that it felt like being yanked through a keyhole by the navel. After the first his vision swam. After the second his mouth filled with the taste of pennies. He did it a third time anyway and landed in a crouch behind the last rock before the mound, and wiped his nose on his wrist, and his wrist came away red.

Above, the alpha had gone for Celestia with both heads. She rolled in the air and answered with a cone of black fire across its neck-frills, and it shrieked and chased her, higher, further, away from the mound—exactly as she had meant it to. A smaller wyrm burst out of the scree in front of Ethan with its mouth open. He swung before he'd thought about swinging, and a tight crescent of violet light left the blade and took its head off at the neck.

Then the mound was clear.

The great shard lay on top of it, big as a shield and humming like a hive. He did not simply grab it; he could hear Eileen. He unshipped the canister, worked the shard loose with the flat of the sword instead of his hand, and let it slide in against the lining. It thrummed once, fretful, and went quiet as the runes closed over it.

Then he saw what it had been lying on.

Eggs. A dozen of them, maybe more, bedded down in the warm grit in a hollow the shard had shaded. They were pale and leathery and faintly lit from inside by the same cold glow as the metal, and one of them moved while he watched—a slow push, from inside, against the shell.

His head went, without asking him, to the obvious place. Break the spawner and the mobs don't chase you. The alpha would be back in seconds. If the eggs were gone it would have no reason to follow, it would stay and—

He had the sword halfway up.

Leave them.

Celestia's voice. Not in his ears—inside his head, arriving from somewhere very high up, as close as his own thoughts. She had never done that before.

He stood with the blade raised over the nest.

Ethan. Quieter. Leave them.

He lowered it. He took the canister and nothing else, and shouted up into the sky, "Got it!"

She heard him over the shrieking. She tipped into a hard roll and fell like a stone and struck the alpha in mid-lunge with her tail—a crack like a mast breaking—and it went into the crater wall and did not come straight back out. She didn't wait to see if it would. She came down, caught Ethan by the harness across his back, and hauled them both up and out over the rim before the rest of the nest could regroup.

He twisted around as they climbed. Behind them the alpha had dragged itself back to the mound. Its screaming had changed. It wasn't hunting them. It was circling the hollow, around and around, pushing its heads down among the eggs.

Celestia did not look back. She flew fast and low and without a word until the crater was a pale dish on the horizon behind them, and when they made camp that night she sat with her food in her lap and did not eat it, and he didn't ask her why.

---

The second mark lay east and high: the Skyreach ruins, where the lilies were said to bloom on altars that no one had tended in centuries.

The climb was punishing. For two days the path went up switchbacks cut into the mountain by hands long dead.

On the first morning of it he said, without looking at her, "You talked inside my head. At the crater."

"Yes."

"Since when can you do that?"

She thought about it for three switchbacks. "Since the temple," she said. And then, to settle it: "It's easier than shouting."

The air got thinner with every turn, until Ethan was stopping every twenty steps with his hand flat against the rock, breathing and breathing and not getting enough.

It frightened him more than it should have. He knew that even as it happened. It was only altitude, only thin air, and something in him that had nothing to do with altitude had come wide awake and was counting—in, and in, and is it coming—with his palm pressed so hard against the stone that his fingers went white.

Celestia's hand settled flat between his shoulder blades. She didn't say anything. She waited, with her hand there, until his breathing slowed.

"It's the height," she said then. "That's all it is. Only the height."

He nodded. She didn't take her hand away until he started walking again.

The old temples at the top were haunted. Not by the dead—by magic that had been left behind with no one to spend it, and had curdled. Mana ghosts, Eileen had called them: pale shapes with hollow faces that drifted through the halls wailing, and wherever they went the air smeared, so that a corridor became two corridors, and then three, and sound came from where things weren't.

"Don't fight what you see," Celestia said, somewhere to his left or possibly his right. "Fight what's real."

He pulled Eileen's clarity charm from his belt and crushed it in his fist. Cold certainty went through his head like a draught through a house—the doubled corridors snapped back into one, every edge hard and bright. A ghost peeled itself out of the wall beside him, its jaw falling open and open. He didn't go looking for a spell he didn't have. He pulled one of the light-charged daggers, already blazing in his grip, and put it into the thing's chest. It came apart into drifting motes and a sound like a sigh let out of a bottle.

Celestia burned a way through the deeper dark with black fire, driving the pale things back ahead of her, and at the heart of the temple, under a dome whose top had long since fallen in, they found it.

One lily. It grew out of a crack in a moon-white altar, its single petal the color of ink with light behind it, and it seemed to be drinking the light that came down through the broken roof.

The moon was rising full. Ethan watched it clear the jagged edge of the dome. Pick them at midnight, with the moon on them. A thin cloud slid over it; he waited, not breathing much, until the cloud was gone and the light came down pure and white and the flower seemed to open its whole self to it. Then he eased the petal free with two fingers—no pinching, no hurry—and laid it in the pressure case, and closed the lid, and heard the soft sigh of the seal.

"Two," said Celestia.

They were already moving when the temple began to groan and drop its ceiling behind them. They didn't look back at that, either.

---

They had saved the worst for last on purpose.

Storm clouds boiled forever over the canyons of Arask. Lightning forked between black peaks that had never known a calm hour, so often that the thunder never finished; one roll ran straight into the next. And at the heart of it, on a spur of rock above the canyon floor, crouched the Thunder Drake—vast and silver-whiskered, its every scale drinking the storm and giving it back as a low, constant hum that made Ethan's fillings ache.

He pulled on Eileen's insulated gloves and checked the straps twice. "One whisker. In and out. We do not fight this thing. We'd lose."

Celestia's eyes had gone electric with the light of the sky. "Then we make it hold still long enough to be robbed."

The plan was to pin it, not kill it. Celestia went first: a dive out of the rain with her wings blazing, black fire splashing across the drake's head to spoil its aim and foul its footing on the wet stone. While it turned on her, roaring, Ethan hauled the grounding chain out of his pack—weighted, rune-etched, meant to drink a charge and bleed it into the rock—and threw.

It looped the drake's foreleg and bit. Where the links touched its hide, the drake's own lightning sputtered and ran down the chain into the ground in a hissing blue sheet.

It screamed and fought, but the chain held it to the stone—for a heartbeat, and another, and another—

"Now—carefully!"

Celestia came in along the drake's muzzle and, with the very tip of one claw—not a slash, a surgeon's cut—severed a single silver whisker at the root. She flung it clear of the storm the instant it came free, and Ethan caught it out of the air and fed it into the silver tube before its charge could bleed away. The cap screwed home with a hiss of trapped lightning.

"Got it—break off—"

The chain went.

He saw it go. The drake reared up against it and a link glowed white and then yellow and then was not there, and all the lightning the chain had been bleeding off came back into the beast at once. It turned its head. It looked at him.

He got the storm-dome open. Wire ribs sprang out over his head and locked. The first bolt struck them and broke across them in a spray of fire. The dome held. His whole arm went numb to the shoulder. He had time to think it held—

The second bolt came through.

The ribs went white. He saw it coming through them, a fork of light with his name on it—and then something dark swept across between it and him. A wing. Her wing.

The noise was beyond noise. There was a smell of burning, not his. Then claws had him by the harness and the ground dropped away. They were flying—badly, lopsided, dipping toward the canyon wall and pulling away from it and dipping again—down the length of Arask through the rain with the drake's roar behind them, until she couldn't hold the air any longer and they came down hard on a shingle bank a mile below and rolled.

He got up first.

She was on her knees on the shingle with her left wing half-spread, shaking. There was a hole in the membrane he could have put his head through, and the edges of it were black and curled and smoking in the rain. The leather straps of her cuirass had burned through on that side, and the whole thing hung off her at an angle, and underneath, along her ribs, the scales had gone a dull, cooked grey.

He reached for the wing.

"Don't." She turned her shoulder away. "Not yet."

He stood there in the rain with his hands out, useless. After a while she let him look. After a longer while she let him touch.

In his left fist he was still holding the storm-dome. It was no longer a rod, or a dome, or anything with a name. The lightning had fused its ribs into one knot of iron the size of a fist, still warm through the glove.

She could not fly for nine days. They walked out of Arask. She carried the silver tube herself, inside her shirt against her skin, and would not give it to him even when she stumbled.

---

When they came back into Dasi at last, footsore and singed and filthy, Eileen was waiting in the red glow of the forge, exactly where they had left her.

She took the canister from them, and the pressure case, and the silver tube—which Celestia had to take out of her shirt, and did without comment. She cracked each seal in turn and looked inside. She set each one down on the bench beside the one before it, in a row. For a while she didn't say anything at all.

"You actually got everything," she said. "All three. Whole." She looked up, and for once there was no smirk anywhere on her face. "That's… absurd."

"You didn't think we would?" Ethan was swaying on his feet, and trying for a grin.

"I thought you'd die," said Eileen. Her voice did not change at all. "I'm glad to have been wrong."

He held out the lump of iron that had been her storm-dome. She took it and turned it over once in her hand, and set it down beside the other three things without a word.

Then she looked at Celestia. At the way she was standing, and the burned-through straps, and the wing held half open and a little away from her body.

"Take that off," she said.

Celestia's chin came up.

"The leather. Not the wing." Eileen was already turning away toward the back of the forge, pushing her sleeves up past the elbow. "Rest. Eat something. Don't touch anything that hums. The next three days are mine."

And for three days and three nights, the forge did not stop.