The surrounding light shifted and moved unnaturally—not the glow of sunset at all. A low roar filled his ears. Turning, he said, “Sweet Asha…”
From eastern gate to far western wall, the city burned. Towers of flame and smoke swirled into the starless void from every quarter. Even as he watched, the roof of the Library collapsed in a fountain of sparks and cinders. On the pinnacle of the Temple dome, the circle of Truth, of the Cycles and of Asha, stood bare against the curtain of fire.
Daen watched in shock for several minutes, as buildings crumbled and the inferno grew higher. Dragons still circled above, but the combat had ended. Cinvat was lost.
Daen swallowed his grief. Two thousand years of conquest and refinement and culture now survived only in these three books, and in his memory. He had a mission, and a destination in mind. He fished his record book out of his tunic and flipped through its pages to find the map he had drawn this morning, with an X to mark his best guess at the location of the courtyard and the statue, where he had met an enigmatic little girl.
The map wasn’t there.
He flipped back through the book the other direction. But it wasn’t to be found. There were two pages stuck together toward the back. Surely…
When he peeled them apart, they were blank other than the stain that bound them, and he remembered spilling ink as he sat in a doorway just a few hours ago. But he knew he’d seen the statue, walked upon the pavers, and spoken with a curious wilding child.
A deep, mournful gong sounded from the Dome of the Temple at that moment, reverberating through the valley and off the surrounding peaks. Daen’s eyes snapped up in time to see the dome list, the walls beneath it disintegrate. It thundered down into a maelstrom of flames, giving out one last enormous peal as it cracked. The Circle of Asha disappeared in a plume of fire and smoke that shot into the sky. Screams of despair sounded from the city.
All of it hauntingly familiar. Too familiar: his dream of death this very morning.
As the beat of giant wings filled the air around him, a dreadful thought struck Daen, and he swiped the pages of his record forward and backward in vain hope. The map was not there. Nor were there missing pages where it might have been. He had never made any such accounting in his record.
The only chronicle he found with today’s date stunned him:
Waeges’ Day, 207th y. 4th Age: Sun bright and warm. Stumbled upon a huge cache of cinderblack. Mer will be pleased.
He read it twice, pulse throbbing in his ears.
But he remembered wandering through fog to a stone courtyard, where he spoke to a mysterious little girl. He’d asked to meet her mother. “I don’t think she will see you,” she had replied.
As black dragons settled down around him with weapons bolted to their limbs, bearing armored warriors on their backs, he realized the bitter, horrifying truth. He knew it as certainly as he knew his name. A rare gift of Truth, from Asha, perhaps.
And when the High Dragon, the Dahak, sculled to a landing before him, all doubt was erased. Bigger than any dragon he’d ever seen, so black as to reflect no light at all, its wings like a chasm across the heavens revealing the farthest, lightless void, it stepped toward him. Where its giant talons trod, the grass curled and blackened.
The monster from his dream, but also the black dragon from the sculpture.
KEEPER OF MEMORY, it said, in his mind, its lips not moving at all, SEE HOW MEMORY DIES. Then it bent its head down, plucked the three books off the paving where he had laid them, and swallowed them whole.
Daen cried out in hopeless agony, knowing that his failure was absolute, the story of Cinvat lost forever. Knowing he had relived the final day of his life over and over again, unaware, condemned by his remorse to a nightmarish limbo he would inhabit for eternity…
Until, after a millennium, a child wandered into the path of his mournful spirit, a child who could see him and speak with him, who interrupted his endless torment with a glimmer of Truth, in a courtyard so distant in time from his failure that a statue had been erected and its story all but forgotten while he repeated…repeated.
Would he even remember this revelation if…when he woke again? If he could find the girl again, could he somehow give her the history that was about to die with him—that had died with him—or was he doomed to echo this tragedy, unknowing, until the end of creation? It was the slimmest hope of redemption, perhaps not a hope at all.
But he realized something else, and with it came a strange serenity. The statue depicted two High Dragons in battle, one white, one black. The white one wins, the girl had said to him.
Even as the jaws of the Dahak opened and descended toward him, he knew that this was all a phantasm, a memory of events long past.