Purpose, Aunn thought. That’s what this is.
He didn’t think the Messenger within the prison had taken residence in his body the way the Silver Flame had filled Dania. He felt too… too present, perfectly aware of everything that happened around him. Even lying on the floor of the Dragon Forge, no detail had escaped him-he knew exactly where his bones were broken, where each of Gaven’s footsteps fell as he foolishly ran toward him, where Cart circled carefully around the dragon-king. No, he was still in control of his mind, where Dania had relinquished control.
But there was purpose now in everything he did, a cascade of objectives and intentions that all built toward the greater goal of destroying the Dragon Forge and ensuring that the Keeper of Secrets remained imprisoned. Protecting Gaven so he could reach the dragonshard, Gaven summoning this storm, Malathar’s annihilation-these were steps toward his greater purpose.
The wind whipped around him, snatching at his breath and stinging his eyes. Cart and Ashara had taken cover in the shadow of a boulder, Cart’s armored body shielding Ashara from the driving gravel and biting sand. Gaven stood on a column of whirling air, halfway to the arched roof of the Dragon Forge, arms raised skyward, lost in the storm’s fury.
A knife of lightning struck the iron structure, arced to Gaven’s outstretched arms, and flowed through his feet to the ground. Gaven threw his head back and held the lightning in place. His every muscle strained, as if the lightning were chains that bound him to the walls, and Aunn saw him begin to pull the walls down.
It was time. Before Gaven leveled the forge, Aunn had to deal with the lattice of magic and gold that fed it. He stood up and slid his healing wands back into the sheath at his belt. Then he turned and walked, unhampered by the wind, to the hilt of the sword plunged into the crystal.
He recognized the hilt-Kelas had shown him the blade. The Ramethene Sword, which Janik had discovered in Xen’drik and Maija had stolen from him when the fiendish spirit possessed her. She had given it to an agent of the Order of the Emerald Claw, who had then sold the blade to Kelas. The blade, of course, went through the ring of Dania’s torc as it entered the stone. The Torc of Sacrifice, Kelas had called it, when Aunn-Haunderk-had given it to him. An embodiment of the serpent’s binding power. The torc formed the gleaming center of an intricate lacing of silver threads, which then joined to two cylindrical reservoirs. Inside those reservoirs, Aunn thought, must be pure, distilled magic.
No, he reminded himself-or the Messenger’s velvet whisper reminded him. There was nothing pure about the magic fueling the forge. Every mote of its power was polluted by the fiend’s incalculable evil. That Dania’s sacrifice was connected to this abomination made him sick. Slowly, he stretched his fingertips to touch the silver ring of her torc.
He jumped as twin crashes of thunder boomed behind him, followed by the sound of wrenching metal. Then a monstrous roar made him wheel around in sudden terror.
Gaven had managed to wrench the roof over the forge open, and steam billowed up where rain fell into the open furnaces. The roar had come from a red dragon, small compared to Malathar, that had emerged from the furnace and was trying in vain to redirect its fiery breath at Gaven. Its wings grabbed at the air, flapping wildly, but the wind buffeted the dragon and would not let it fly. A second dragon leaped up from the furnace and well into the air, unfurling its wings as it reached the apex of its mighty leap, catching the wind and soaring away, jerking in the turbulent storm but unharmed. Then a third followed the second, just as the first dragon crashed down onto the jagged wreckage of the metal roof and lay still. A blast of lightning pinned the third dragon for an instant, but it flew on, quickly disappearing behind the lip of the canyon to the west.
Aunn drew a steadying breath and felt calm flow through him again, soft and warm. The wind raged at his back, but his mind was still and silent. Once again he stretched his fingers to touch the ring of the torc. He closed his eyes and let the web of silver threads trace themselves on his mind.
He was in the Labyrinth again, utterly lost and bereft of hope. A fiend stood close at his back, her arms wrapped seductively around his chest. “Why do you fight me?” she whispered, her breath hot in his ear. “Don’t you want me beside you?” She ran her hands over his body, seeking some response, but receiving none.
Her gentle breath became a roar of fury in his ear. “You dare threaten me?” The fiend’s face was now the horned bear of the Demon Wastes, fearsome in its rage. The hands on his chest were massive claws, and they tore into his chest. He threw his head back and screamed.
A voice called to him within the Labyrinth, “Over here, Aunn.” The pain faded and he turned his head to see Ashara, her hands pressed to the blue crystal. Cart stood behind them, trying to shield them both from the storm. Aunn looked around, but saw no fiend. He looked down, and to his surprise saw no blood on his chest.
A shadow moved within the crystal as he stepped beside Ashara, keeping his fingers on the silver tracings. The fingers of one hand met hers, and suddenly he saw the latticework in its entirety, spread like a map before him. Ashara had been working to unravel the threads at one end, and he knew at once he should do the same at the other, near the opposite reservoir. The torc and the blade-those would come last.
Aunn stepped out from Cart’s protection and the wind blasted in his face, hot and dry like the air of the Labyrinth, then frigid like the wind in Frostburn Cut. The bear-thing loomed before him out of the driving snow, then reared on its hind legs to tear at him.
“No,” he said, and the fiend fell back before him. Still holding the entire network of silver threads in his mind, he found the place opposite where Ashara stood and he mirrored her work, thread by thread, with painstaking precision. The calm-the promised presence of the Messenger, he believed-settled into his mind and kept the fiend at bay.
Aunn and Ashara worked more quickly together. Their minds and hands were joined in the lattice, so each could follow every movement of the other. They worked like expert weavers, hands darting over the loom, barely conscious of the work. The earth rumbled and the sky roared behind them as Gaven’s storm continued in its fury, but they worked on, moving from the outer edge in until they stood side by side before the Torc of Sacrifice and the Ramethene Sword.
A crack of thunder so loud it might have split the world Ashara sliding the sword out of the crystal The torc of sacrifice falling into his outstretched hands In a single instant the Dragon Forge was unmade and the Keeper of Secrets imprisoned once more.
Silence.
Aunn looked around wildly, trying to take it all in, everything his eyes could tell him. He floated in an ocean of silent, still air. No breeze brushed his face, no sound reached his ears. Dust and sand settled slowly onto the ground in the wake of the storm, while clouds parted and drifted off and faded into a perfect blue sky. Cart shifted beside him, turned to look at him, and his metal jaw opened, but Aunn could hear no voice. Ashara was curled on the ground, leaning against the column of blue-gray stone that had once been clear crystal, and Cart bent to tend to her.
Aunn wandered to the wreckage of the Dragon Forge, the gravel silent beneath his feet. The metal roof lay bent and sundered, a horse-sized dragon impaled on one jagged edge. The eldritch machine itself was a pile of rubble, half-collapsed into the trenches and furnaces beneath it. Clouds of steam still billowed up from the furnaces, and broken pipes here and there shot silent jets uselessly into the air.