“What is your point, then?”
“I salute you, Gaven Storm Dragon-with nothing but respect. I hold no hatred for you. I am proud to have known you.”
“And Dodge returned your salute, did he? Faced death like a dutiful soldier?”
Cart stared down, impassive as always.
“Well forget that.” Gaven spat at Cart’s feet. “The war’s over, Cart. You’re as much a criminal as I am, and a more cold-blooded killer. I used to respect you, but I don’t any more.”
Cart’s unblinking eyes fixed him for a long moment, then he turned away without another word.
A crash of thunder brought two guards running to knock Gaven out again.
He stood on a floor like glass, traced with coiling lines of light. He walked along the twisting path they formed, and they rose up behind him as he walked, a tangled spiderweb hanging in the air. Recognition slowly dawned on him. The lines were his dragonmark, the Siberys Mark of Storm. Suddenly the path was not a line of light anymore, but a round tunnel carved through rock. He trailed his fingertips along the rough walls as he walked, and the winding tunnel spoke to him of the Prophecy and his place in it.
The dream-words made no sense to his sleeping mind, but they made him sad. He was lying in a swinging cot, and Rienne’s fingertip was tracing the path on his skin, and he kissed her forehead. Her eyes, full of tears, looked into his, then she was wrenched away from him into the darkness.
He slowly surfaced toward consciousness, dimly aware that he had not said good-bye to Rienne and he might not have a chance to. Then a kick to his stomach jolted him fully awake.
It was the Thuranni, Phaine, standing over him, wearing a malicious grin. “Wake up, Gaven,” he said in his whispery voice. “It’s time to play your part.”
His head still muddled from his dreams, Gaven allowed himself to be lifted to his feet. They led him on a winding path to reach the rim of the canyon. Phaine followed behind until they reached a spot directly above the Dragon Forge. The dragon-king was there, head high as it looked down on the completed forge. Kelas, looking somber and suspicious, watched Gaven approach. Haldren watched him too, but Cart did not look his way. There was a woman at Cart’s side, whispering to him and pointing down at the forge, but Cart seemed oblivious. A few others Gaven didn’t recognize filled out the knot of people.
“It begins,” the dragon-king said, and a burst of fire rose up around the forge below. In the distance, a horrible rumbling howl arose, starting with a single voice and growing into a ghastly chorus before fading away again. The guards led Gaven to the cliff edge and he saw the forge complete and ready for him.
He was back in his dream-the vision he’d had months ago, as he and Senya rode the lightning rail out of Zil’argo. In stark contrast to his first view of the canyon, the earth around it was desolate, and the canyon had taken on the appearance of a gash torn into the earth. At the heart of this gaping wound was a cloud of smoke and steam billowing up from the canyon floor, from the trenches dug into it, from the base of the Dragon Forge.
The dragon-king’s neck swung around and its burning eyes took in the people gathered at his feet, lingering longest on Kelas. “You suspect the significance of this moment,” he said, “but you know only a glimpse of it. To you, the completion of the Dragon Forge is the climax of your plans and schemes, or this stage of them. It paves the way for the next, greater stage.”
Gaven wondered how many of the assembly understood the dragon-king’s words. Kelas, certainly. How would he react to the revelation that his mighty schemes were a tiny part of Malathar’s much larger plans?
The dragon-king raised his head higher, so he was looking down at Kelas. “It plays much the same role in the history of the world,” he said, “though you see it not. We stand at an axis point, the very center of history around which all the rest revolves. An age of the world has ended, a new one is about to begin, and we are in the Time Between.”
The center of history-Gaven had described it to Rienne as a point that history revolves around. He’d been right, then. To Malathar’s mind, the Time Between was the pivotal moment in history, with the Time of the Dragon Above merely its prelude, and the Time of the Dragon Below its aftershock. The Time Between begins with blood and ends in blood. Blood is its harbinger, and blood flows in its passing.
“At the birth of time,” the dragon-king continued, “the three dragons were united, but they broke apart. In the Time Between they are united again. At the end of the ages, they will be united a third time. What you have accomplished here speeds the world on its course to completion.”
Kelas shifted impatiently, and Malathar dropped his head to stare right into his face. Kelas stumbled backward. “Do my words bore you, meat?”
“Of course not,” Kelas said. “Only look at the sky.”
The dragon-king swung his neck to look upward, to see the clouds gathering there in answer to Gaven’s distress. “No matter,” he said. “The storm will not answer him much longer.”
The dragon-king raised his skeletal wings and took to the air, their tattered flesh lifting him without a breath of wind. He swooped at Gaven and snatched him up in one great claw, tearing him from the grasp of the guards who held his chains. Gaven watched below as he fell with the dragon-king into the canyon. The ground and the metal wings of the Dragon Forge rushed up at him as it had in his dream among billowing clouds of hot smoke.
Malathar swept into the wide gap between the crystal prison and the walls of the Dragon Forge and set Gaven down inside. Waves of heat assaulted him, rising from the furnaces below. The iron dragon’s wings formed a dome that arched high above Gaven’s head, leaving the dragon-king just enough room to rear up to his full height. The bizarre apparatus Gaven had glimpsed during the forge’s construction towered over him like a massive pillar, silver tracing forming twisting symbols across its surface. Tubes and rods, gemstones and glass clustered around its lower portions like barnacles encrusting a stately galleon. Its bottom disappeared into the smoke and fire below.
Metal grates formed the floor around the apparatus, covering a trench dug like a moat protecting it. On scaffolding below, a few people moved around, wielding strange tools to adjust a pipeline here or a cylinder there. Jets of flame burst in erratic rhythm from spouts shaped like dragon heads beneath them, the crimson light of the fire turning them into sinister shadows, like devils tending the flames of Fernia. A dragon snaked into his view, crouching low to the scaffold, wings folded so they didn’t brush the grating above. It looked up and met his gaze, then hissed angrily, loosing plumes of smoke from its nostrils. A wave of vertigo washed over him as he stared down into the raging furnace.
A heavy hand on his shoulder steadied him, and he grabbed at it. The metal of Cart’s hand was warm against his skin. He tore his gaze from the fire and turned to look at the warforged, but the sight of the crystal prison behind Cart stopped him. The dark figure inside was clearer than Gaven had ever seen it, pressing its hands against the inside surface, an impression of a snarling feline face above them. A silver serpent writhed around it, clearly trying to pull it back, to hold it fast. Palpable waves of fury emanated from the blue stone, and silver fire sparked from the slender filigree connecting the torc to the receptacles on either side.
“Gaven,” Cart said beside him.
“Two spirits share one prison beneath the wastes, secrets kept and revelation granted.” Gaven spoke as if in a dream. “They bind and are bound, but their unbound whispers rise to the Dragon Between, calling to those who would hear.”
“Gaven, you were right.”
Flame burst up from the furnace below, great spouts of it erupting around him, searing his skin. He heard the clank of metal as Cart’s adamantine axe cut through the chains that bound his legs.