The words hung in the air for a moment before he heard them, and then some heat rose into his cheeks. He didn't look away, though.
Yerin gave him a lopsided smile, and this one sunk into his memory: her smile, the thin scars standing out against her skin, her black hair mussed from training so it didn’t look straight anymore.
“That has a sweet sound to it, now you've said it,” she said at last. The instant passed, and she turned to open the door onto the screaming wind. “Heavens never came down to show me anything, and that's the truth.”
***
Eithan stopped in his tracks even as the front windows filled with crags of black stone: Shiryu Mountain, the peak where the last of the dragons had gone to die. He'd intended to leave the children to their little moment—they would need to trust each other even more than they trusted him, and trust was always built on small, personal moments—but a phrase caught his ear, carried to him on threads of power.
The heavens opened up and showed me...
He tended to smile by default, but now his grin stretched his lips to the breaking point. He'd wondered. From the first glimpse of that little glass ball in Lindon's pocket, the one with the steady blue flame, he'd wondered. Some of the boy's comments, some of his actions, had made him more and more certain.
And now...now he knew.
The heavens opened up...
Very interesting indeed.
Chapter 8
With Cassias actively working at the control panel and Eithan standing proudly in front of the windows, Lindon and Yerin looked down over the city of Serpent's Grave.
“This,” Eithan announced, “is the birthplace of the Blackflame Empire. The imperial capital has moved over time, and moved again, but here is where it all began: where the last of the dragons who once ruled this land were finally brought down.”
“Dragons?” Yerin asked, unsettled.
“That's where the empire got its name. After the dragons were destroyed, a certain family found a source of their power, ruling for centuries like dragons themselves. That source lies beneath us, although of course it's been all but tapped out over the generations.”
Lindon had been raised to believe dragons were myths—or if they did exist, only in the heavens. But Suriel had shown him a dragon beneath the sea.
And besides, something had left all those bones.
The black mountain beneath them rose from a desert like the crest of a dark, frozen wave. A vast spine, yellowed with age, twisted and curled around the rock, with a serpentine skull resting at the mountain's foot.
It was the most complete skeleton in Serpent's Grave, but far from the only one. A claw here, a pile of sharpened fangs there. And Sky's Mercy had yet to begin its descent—if he could see them from here, what would they look like on the ground?
“Serpent's Grave,” Lindon said aloud, and Eithan pointed to him.
“Well named, isn't it? I have to applaud the empire’s straightforward naming sense.”
The floor fell out from Lindon’s feet.
He caught himself on the edge of a table, which was bolted to the floor, and sank into one of the chairs. He'd discovered over the course of the journey that it was best to take a descent sitting down.
Yerin joined him, and Cassias was braced against the control panel with eyes locked on his landing, but Eithan stood with his hands in the pockets of his red-and-gold outer robe. His head was almost pressed against the glass, which reflected his smile.
As they fell lower, Lindon started to make out details among the bones. Dark spots in the bones resolved into holes—windows and doors, through which people streamed. The streets wound around the biggest bones but cut through others, which had been hollowed out or stacked together to make buildings.
Lindon leaned forward in his seat. Over the years, these people had carved a city into a dragon's graveyard. A long, straight bone, sticking out of the earth, was covered in windows and ringed with stairs. A fractured skull had a huge gong mounted in the eye socket. Four claws reached out of the ground with man-sized lanterns dangling from their tips.
The city had even crawled up the mountain, so that the black stone bristled with towers. More bones rose like a thorny crown from the mountain’s peak, with palaces nestled between its spikes.
Lindon was overwhelmed at the sight of it all. Sacred Valley had what they called towns and cities, but this city dwarfed his imagination. Even leaving aside the size, he had never heard so much as a legend about a city of dragon’s bone.
This was the world Suriel had opened for him. His myths didn’t even come close.
Sky's Mercy was circling one location: a rib cage, with the gaps between each rib closed by pale stone and mortar. A pair of banners—blue and black and white—flew from the highest peaks, proudly displaying the Arelius crest. Cassias descended until they were almost on top of the bones, then drifted to the end closest to the mountain.
Massive greenhouses stretched in rows behind the buildings, their glass roofs letting in sunlight and allowing Lindon to see the fields of crops growing inside. Scripts shone along the outside walls, and rain fell from one of the ceilings.
The sacred artists here had advanced beyond the need to live off the land. They had bottled up their farmland and taken it with them.
One plot with enough space to hold another enclosed farm had been left empty, little more than a wide square of reddish dirt. Cassias steered them until they floated over that square, and slowly edged down the last few feet.
Eithan turned from the window and walked to the door, hair streaming behind him. “I don't know about you,” he said, “but I'm ready to get to work.”
Cassias left the controls, running a hand through his yellow curls. He had worn his best today, and he smoothed every crease in his shirt as though worried about leaving the slightest imperfection.
Lindon was wearing a sacred artist’s robe in the Arelius colors, but it was weathered from the trip. He wondered if he should have asked for something more presentable, but Yerin was wearing the same tattered black she always did, and she didn’t seem concerned.
Eithan threw open the door, revealing a hundred people arranged in ten rows of ten, all clad in blue with the black crescent on their backs. Lindon had a very good view of their backs, as they had all prostrated themselves on the ground with their heads pressed against the reddish dirt.
“The Arelius family greets the Patriarch,” they shouted, in a unified voice that shook the ground.
Yerin winced and knuckled her ear. “Wouldn’t have turned down a warning.”
“Patriarch?” Lindon repeated. Eithan heard him and turned.
“Oh, yes, I’m the head of the family. I expected you to have guessed that by now.”
Cassias stepped in front of Eithan, his steel bracer Goldsign gleaming in the sun. “Number one, step forward and report.”