With immense difficulty he kept his vision fixed away from the avalanche of images swirling before him and held the fragment up in the clear blue light before his eyes. The image he had seen once before, at the time nothing more than a hazy smudge, refined instantly into a crisp clarity that was painful in its sharpness. Despite being utterly clear, the picture still made almost no sense to Faedryth, whose eyes throbbed, threatening to burst. It was as if he was standing himself in the place where the image had been captured, a familiar dark hall that could have been within his own mountain. Faedryth sensed, by the thinness and striations of the stone, that it was within a peak. At the end of the tunnel an arm’s length away was an opening, past which there appeared to be a laboratory of some sort, within a large clear sphere suspended in the open darkness of the upworld sky. The colored illuminations he had seen and mistaken for the Bolg king’s Lightforge were in fact gleaming lights inside the dome, set in uniform lines into panels that encircled the transparent room. Beneath the panels was a table of sorts, with a doorway in the horizontal surface from behind which light as bright as the flame-well leaked.
Beyond the clear walls of the sphere he could see the world down below, burning at the horizon, as fire crept over the edges, spreading among the continents he recognized from maps of the Earth.
As bewildering and horrifying as these images were, they paled in comparison to what stood between him and the glass sphere.
Hovering in the air before him was a being, a man of sorts, with the characteristics of several different races and all the aspects of youth except for his eyes, blue eyes, deep as the sea, scored with vertical pupils. Those eyes held the wisdom of the ages, and pain that matched it. His skin was translucent, motile, altering with each current of air that passed by or through it. The man glowed with the same light as the crystal throne, especially his hair, curls of brilliant gold that seemed almost afire. And despite his knowing eyes, and the calmness of his expression, his clenched jaw betrayed a quiver of nervousness. He stared at Faedryth, as if looking at him for the last time. His mouth moved, and words formed; Faedryth did not hear them in his ears, but rather internally, as if they were resonating in his own throat. Will I die?
Faedryth felt his burning eyes sting with tears be had no connection to, felt his throat and chest tighten in sorrow he did not understand. He heard his own voice then, speaking as if detached from him; he heard himself cough, then form words that rang with awkward comfort.
Can one experience death if one is not really alive? You, like the rest of the world, have nothing to lose.
The translucent being in front of him nodded, then turned away. Faedryth was suddenly gripped with a sense of sadness and loss that shredded his soul; in his mind he felt himself reach for the lad, only to watch the image fade into darkness. Then, as if underscoring that he was reliving someone else’s memory, he was surrounded with another notion, the impression of the Bolg king he had picked up from the first sight of the parchment scraps, and was left with one last thought, which he heard in the voice of the translucent young man.
Forgive me. In my place, I think you would have done the same. Given the choice, I think you would have wanted it that way, too.
He did not know why, but Faedryth was certain that the strange youth was speaking to the Assassin King.
Overwhelmed and without even the slightest clue of the meaning in what he was perceiving, Faedryth’s mind threatened to snap. And worse, deep beneath him, channeling up through the living rock of the crystal throne, he felt a different vibration, atonal and physical and slight, almost imperceptible.
As if the very earth was shrugging, dormant parts of it stirring to life. Terror consumed him as the speeding vision returned, because this time it was as if he was seeing in darkness into his own lands, his point of sight very far away but growing rapidly closer. Looking for him with the same clarity he just experienced. In that moment, the Nain king understood what he had done.
He was seeing as a dragon sees because the sight he had called upon, had tapped with the elemental power of color, was dragon sight.
The inner sight of a blind wyrm long asleep in the very bowels of the Earth. The eldest Sleeping Child, said to comprise a good deal of the Earth’s mass. Witheragh, the dragon that had whispered the secret to him, had warned him of a prophecy that one day the Sleeping Child would wake.
And would be famished with hunger after its long sleep that commenced at the beginning of the world. And he, Faedryth, was nudging it from its slumber, directing its vision into his own kingdom. A hollow scream tore from Faedryth’s throat, a war cry that had gone up from his lungs many times in his life. With the last of his strength he pitched himself from the crystal throne, feeling it strip years from his life as he broke through the column of elemental blue light, tumbling roughly to the floor, bruising himself against the crystal stalagmites. His falling body dislodged the pieces of colored glass, breaking the circle and extinguishing the blue light; leaving only the pulsating dance of the radiance from the flame-well spattering off the ceiling high above. As Garson pushed the lever with all his might, shutting the vent once more, and the yeoman lowered the crossbow sight, Gyllian hurried to her father. Faedryth was facedown on the stone floor; she turned him over gently and winced, seeing the new whiteness in his beard, the new wrinkles in his brow that had not been there a few moments before. It was as it always was, and yet the strong-willed princess never could become entirely accustomed to the sight of her father, so clear of eye and mind, staring wildly, blankly above him into the dancing fire shadows, panicked by the return of darkness when the vent was closed again.
“What did you see?” she asked gently, stroking his hair and sliding her age-crinkled hand into his. Faedryth continued to stare, agitated, his eyes glazed, breathing shallowly on the floor of his throne room. Finally, when his eyes finally met Gyllian’s, they contained a desperation she had never seen before, not in the horrors of battle, or the nearness of defeat, not on the banks of the swollen river of fire that he had caused to return from its sleep, swallowing mining towns and miners with it. He clutched her hand, trying to form words, but only managing to resemble a fish gasping for the breath of water.
“The Assassin King,” he whispered when he finally could generate sound. “We have to stop him.”
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