? ? ?
They looked out upon mountains bathed in the light of the three moons. At first Clay thought they were in the Coppersoles, but soon saw differences in the landscape. These mountains were not so tall, their dark flanks largely free of snow or frost. This was a place he had never seen.
“I don’t have your skills,” Kriz said. She stood near by, close to the edge of the promontory on which they stood, spreading her arms to encompass the view. “Still a little fuzzy around the edges.”
Clay scanned the mountains once more, seeing a subtle shift to the peaks and valleys, as if it swayed in some mighty wind, though the air was completely still. “It’s not so bad,” he said. “Should’ve seen my first mindscape.” He raised his gaze to the sky, eyes taking in the sight of the moons. Nelphia and Morphia were slightly overlapped with Serphia drifting off to the right. “Got the moons right, anyways,” he said.
“I remember them very well. This”—she nodded at the mountains—“this I never saw. Nor has anyone else for twelve thousand years.”
Clay frowned at her, watching a grim anticipation settle over her face as she also raised her gaze to the heavens. “If you never saw it, how’d you make it?” he asked.
“There are . . . were paintings, sketches. This is my best guess. I needed something suitably impressive to help you understand.”
“Understand what?”
She gave a small jerk of her head, Clay seeing a small glimmer of light swelling in her eyes. He followed her gaze to find a new light in the sky, a bright orange ball trailing fire across the faces of the moons. “My father called it the Catalyst Event,” Kriz said as the fiery ball grew ever larger. “One moment that forever altered the destiny of this planet.”
The fire-ball made a silent descent towards the mountains, streaking down to slam into the peaks a few miles away. The entire range shimmered as a huge blast wave spread out from the impact, ancient stone transformed to powder in the blink of an eye as the sky turned black with displaced dust. For a second the mindscape disappeared, swallowed by the dark, and when it returned Clay found himself standing in a crimson desert.
Something Skaggerhill once said came back to him as he gazed about at the rust-coloured dunes stretching away on either side: Educated fella I knew in Carvenport said it must’ve been a mountain range once . . . thousands a years ago some great catastrophe turned it into a desert.
“You know this place?” Kriz asked, stirring pink dust as she came to his side.
“Been here once,” he replied. “We call it the Red Sands.”
“My people called it the Iron Wastes, though those of a more spiritual outlook termed it the Cradle of Divine Rebirth. All that remains of a range of peaks that stretched across the centre of this continent, brought low by something beyond human understanding, at least at the time.”
She pointed at something on the crest of a near by dune, a tall figure swaddled in thick clothing, face covered against the dust. The figure strode across the sand towards them, giving no indication of registering their presence. It stopped a few feet away, crouching low to scrape at the iron flakes with a rag-covered hand. The covering on the figure’s face came loose as he crouched lower to peer at what he had uncovered. Clay half expected to find himself looking upon a Spoiled, but instead saw the face of a man. Dark-skinned and weathered with long-healed scars marring his skin, but undoubtedly a man.
“We believe there were at least half a million people living on this continent at the time of the Event,” Kriz said as they watched the scarred man dig in the sands. “Within the space of a century the population had fallen to barely ten thousand. The planet suffered a hundred-year-long winter, so much debris had been cast into the atmosphere it obscured the sun. Whole species were wiped out, the larger animals went first, followed by the predators that preyed upon them. It’s no exaggeration to say that all life on this continent stood on the brink of complete extinction. The Event came within a whisker of destroying us, so ironic then that it also brought the key to our prosperity.”
Clay watched the scarred man scrape away another handful of flakes to reveal the glassy, multi-faceted surface of a crystal. “How these people came to know enough to make use of them is lost,” Kriz said, as the crouched figure pressed his hand to the crystal. “We do know they thought them to be gifts from the gods, a few ancient texts call them the Divine Seeds. And so, the people of this continent began to recover, their entire culture forever transformed. But”—she turned away from the crouching man, nodding at something scrabbling in the dust a short way off—“they were not the only thing to change.”
It was small, smaller even than the Green that had bitten him, no more than a foot long from nose to tail. Its skin was mostly hidden by a thick pall of crimson dust, but as the beast shifted Clay saw the light catch on gleaming black scales. The drake gave a small, almost kittenish squawk then convulsed, jumping in alarm as a small but intense gout of flame erupted from its mouth.
“This is just supposition,” Kriz said as the tiny Black coughed out some more flames, its wings flaring in excitement. “We never really discovered how exactly it happened, but somehow a small, reptilian species survived the Event and it . . . changed them. The ability to spit venom became the ability to breathe fire and they grew in size with each generation. Some theorised that crystals disintegrated during the Event and the fragments fused with the drakes. The power they held seeped into their being.”
“And their blood,” Clay said, squinting at the drake in wonder. “Guess it didn’t take long before folks found out what it could do.”
“Actually, no.” Kriz turned away from the drake, closing her eyes in concentration. “That took a very long time.”
The Red Sands disappeared, fragmenting into a million shards that in turn shattered into sparkling motes of dust. They swirled about him like fire-flies, the glow they cast slowly increasing as they came together to form a new scene. When it was done he thought at first she had taken him to another mountain range, so tall were the structures that slid by below.