The forest at their right was unlike any other Gaven had seen, shrouded in shadow but alive with color, hung with moss, and steeped in the silence of ages. A hush lingered in the trees, muting the sound of the grass rustling with their footsteps, brooding like a physical presence constantly at their side. Here and there a dragonet perched on a branch at the forest’s edge and watched them pass, slowly fanning its wings as its tiny black eyes followed their movement. As colorful as any bird in the jungles of Q’barra or Aerenal, the dragonets seemed like something between a squirrel and a monkey-small foreclaws gripping branches or some morsel of food, needle-toothed mouths preening their scales, the serpentine undulation of their bodies as they scurried and glided among the leaves.
As Gaven and Rienne walked, they sometimes played the games that had occupied them on many treks in the past, jousting with words or exchanging riddles-but they knew each other’s riddles, and Gaven was prone to slip into brooding over some riddle of the Prophecy. They walked often in silence, hushed by the stillness of the forest, absorbed in the strange landscape, stumbling occasionally over a tangle in the grass or a root striking past the forest border to invade the plain.
When they made camp under the eaves of the forest, Rienne sang, and the silence fell away.
Clinging to his scraps of sanity in Dreadhold’s mighty walls, Gaven had often tried to remember the sound of her voice, but it had eluded him. Her voice was like the perfect steel of her sword, clear and sharp and resonant like ringing crystal, and it cut to his heart. Her tunes were at once peaceful and deeply melancholic, making his chest ache with their beauty. Sometimes she sang old epics or hymns or laments, but often her songs had no words.
When he closed his eyes, he could see the shape of the melodies, tracing bold arcs or curling on themselves. They reminded him of the words of the Prophecy traced on the walls of the Sky Caves of Thieren Kor, the words of creation hidden in the earth itself, but these were characters he couldn’t read, secrets of the universe he couldn’t decipher. They hinted at the eternity beyond the tumult of history and Prophecy, in much the same way that the anthems and marches of Khorvaire’s nations and armies shouted their fleeting, furious existence in the thick of that storm.
Rienne walked and laughed and sang with him like an old friend, but when the embers of their fire died down and they spread their bedrolls on the ground, she did not lie in his arms. So he lay watching the stars and listening to her breathe as she drifted into sleep, and grief weighed on him until he thought he would drown in it.
A few days in, the forest bent their course back toward the beach, and the bay reached for the trees, cutting another cove into the line of the shore. The sound of the tide as Gaven drew nearer to the water put him on edge-the urgency of the waves made his trek without a destination feel like a waste of precious time. For the better part of a day they wore at his mind until he was nearly ready to abandon his quest and teleport back to Khorvaire where he felt he could at least do something-he didn’t know what, but any activity had to be better than what might turn out to be a walk through an unchanging eternity.
Then they rounded the last hand of the forest, grasping at the beach, and the landscape of Argonnessen came to an abrupt end. The forest fell back from the intrusion of a vast blanket of cultivated fields. Dragon heads carved from great boulders formed a rough ring around the fields as far as their eyes could see, tiny compared with the monuments of Totem Beach but similar in style-except that these all depicted what might have been the same creature, with the pronounced crest of a silver-scaled dragon. Far in the distance, beyond the fields, the bright afternoon light shone along the southern horizon in the shimmering line of a river, and lit the western walls of a city.
Rienne sank to her knees in her amazement. “The Serens?” she said.
“Jordhan seemed to think that they see Argonnessen as sacred ground and won’t venture inland any farther than Totem Beach.”
“Jordhan could be wrong,” Rienne said.
“Besides, the Serens are barbarians. They’re sea raiders. Their settlements on the islands are scattered villages, nothing like a walled city.”
“Maybe the Serens and these people are two branches of the same family. Maybe one branch settled inland, developed agriculture, and built cities, while the other settled the islands and kept to their raiding. Like the Lhazaar Principalities compared to the Five Nations.”
The mention of the Lhazaar islands sent a shudder down Gaven’s spine-the prison-fortress of Dreadhold towered over one of those islands. Many nights he had lain in his cot, straining to hear the faint whisper of the waves crashing against the rocks far below his tower cell, struggling to stay awake.
“But even the Lhazaarites have Regalport, Port Verge, and Tantamar,” Rienne continued, oblivious to his discomfort. “They’re not much, but they’re more than the Serens seem to have.”
Battles raged in the memory of the land, the clash of armies, the blood of soldiers soaking into the soil. The earth had whispered to Gaven of Argonnessen’s native people, and proof of them was spread before his eyes. His earlier shudder lingered in his spine as a chill tingle-an excitement and wonder and dread he couldn’t quite pin down.
“The only way to figure out who lives there,” he said, “is to go there.”
Hugging the edge of the forest, Gaven and Rienne made their way around the fields. Most of the crops growing there were familiar-wheat and barley, grapes and olives. Whoever lived in this city, Gaven surmised, baked bread and drank beer and wine. A few plants he couldn’t identify. Moving farther along, they came upon fields of livestock-hulking beasts the size of cattle, but definitely not cattle. Their horns were curved and sharp, their hides covered with brown-black scales, and their shoulders were ringed with a frill of spines. Still farther, they found some fields that were freshly plowed. And there they saw a long line of people stretched across the far side of one field, stooping or crawling along the ground, planting.
It struck Gaven as absurd, somehow, the mundaneness of it. They were in a distant continent, one that no other native of Khorvaire had ever seen, as far as he knew, and his first sight of the people of this land was a row of farm laborers, planting the next season’s crops. All their talk of Prophecy and eternity, of exploring new lands and walking into unknown danger, and then they stumbled upon a farm. He laughed.
“What are they?” Rienne breathed. The absurdity had escaped her, clearly-she was intent on the distant figures, shielding her eyes from the setting sun.
“What are they?” Gaven echoed. “They’re farmers, laborers. Where’s the mystery in that?”
“No, I mean what race are they? They’re not human.”
The smile dropped from Gaven’s face, and he squinted at the laborers he’d dismissed. Rienne was right-at first they looked human, tall and as broad as you’d expect from people who made their living by heavy labor. They were too far away to make out more detail than that. The discrepancy was in their heads, when from time to time he’d see them in profile. Rather than the gentle contours of a human face, they had long, rounded snouts.
“Gnolls?” he said. Those barbarians, plentiful in the monster nation of Droaam, had heads resembling dogs or hyenas.
“I don’t think so. I’ve never heard of a gnoll city before.”
“They could be slaves of whoever built the city.”
“It’s not the right shape.”
Rienne was right. Gnolls had flat, sloping foreheads, a sharp brow ridge, and a pointed muzzle. These had a single curve from crown to snout, unbroken by a brow. With the addition of a horned frill, they would look just like Vaskar.
“Lizardfolk?” Rienne wondered. Reptilian races were fairly common in the jungles of Q’barra, south of the Lhazaar islands on Khorvaire’s east coast.