The Assassin King

2

The same sunlight sparkling on the sea thirty score miles away was illuminating the frosty dew that lingered in the air of the forest, bathing the wood in hoary radiance. Shafts of dusty gold illuminated the bare trunks and limbs of the white trees, making them gleam even more starkly against the neighboring evergreens, patchy with frozen snow. No winterbird broke the morning stillness with song, no rustling in the branches or undergrowth signaled the presence of any of the forest residents that traditionally braved the cold months or felt the beginnings of Second Thaw that had been evident for a full turn of the moon. This place, always alive with wild music, emitted no sound, not the fluttering of needled boughs, nor the cracking of icy burdens in the diffuse sun. Even the wind itself, a customary singer that rattled the empty branches and whispered through the laden great beasts, who believed that they were without souls, who acknowledged that the Afterlife held no place for them, longed, as each sentient creature longed, for some vestige of immortality. To End was to consciously give up any chance of that forever. More terribly, it left a hole in the shield of power by which the race of dragons protected the Earth. With the loss of each member of the ancient race came the loss of the control, of the stewardship, by which they kept the forces of chaotic destruction that were imprisoned within the very earth from destroying it. Finally the harsh voice of Sinjaf, the vaporous dragon steward of the great poison swamps and everglades of the eastern island chains, crackled through the silent glen. “Llauron was not wyrm, but wyrmkin,” he said curtly, his fear transmitting like a headache to the assemblage. “He was born a man, with dragon’s blood in his veins, true, but not really one of us. His loss, while tragic, hardly affects the shield—.”

“Llauron served to guard the Great White Tree of earth, just as the Daughters guard the three other remaining trees,” interjected Talasynos, a Daughter herself and protector of Eucos, the tree of living air. “From the time he was a child he has tended it, loved it as we Daughters love the World Trees. When my sister Elynsynos gave up her corporeal form to escape her pain, he, as her grandson, took on her stewardship. Had he not, the tree would have been destroyed, as so much of the Wyrmlands were destroyed, in the wars of men. His transformation to dragonkind was complete; he gave up his humanity to join our service. Do not fool yourself, Sinjaf; this loss is as great as it would have been should Elynsynos herself have Ended.” The last of her words echoed hollowly through the glen. Finally, Mikanic gave voice to what they all were thinking. “Where is Elynsynos?” The great wyrms focused their eyes, then their other, deeper senses, on the question, seeking her vibrations in this place over which she had held dominion since birth. They scanned the horizon, sought her within the running sap of the trees, beneath the surface of the ground, tasted the air around her for a trace of her ethereal form, listened for any whisper of her on the wind. Not a single echo of her could be felt. The horror of the Ending surged within the assemblage into even greater fear. “Surely she cannot be dead,” came the insistent voice of Chao, a sparkling creature from the bright lands of the rising sun; frail and nervous, he was the most evanescent of the kin. “We would have felt it as we did the death of Marisynos, who guarded Sagia, when the Island of Serendair was consumed in cataclysm.”

“Perhaps we did feel it,” said Sidus darkly. “The reverberations from Llauron’s Ending were vast enough to draw all of us here; mayhap Elynsynos’s death was masked within them. Clearly her dominion is broken; these lands of hers are without protection, vulnerable. Can you not feel the loss of her magic?”

“There are so many holes in the shield already,” murmured Valecynos. “We have lost so many of our kind—look at us. Only a few hundred remain of what was once the greatest of the Firstborn races; how can we guard the Earth with but a few of us? Without a Guardian for the last of the World Trees?”

“We can but concentrate on what is below,” said Witheragh, “and leave the rest to the races of man.”

“The races of man are the root of the woe!” exclaimed Dyansynos. “You may coexist happily with the Nain, Witheragh, but most of us live in conflict with the other races, maintain an uneasy truce, or avoid them altogether by keeping to the depths, hiding in the bowels of the Earth. It is their folly that invites the Unspoken in; it is their bodies to which the demons crave to cling, being without form themselves. It is through man that the F’dor propagate, through man they accomplish their destructive will.”

“Men must fend for themselves now,” said Mikanic. “There is naught we can do for them. While Elynsynos was here, she held these lands completely under her dominion, more so than any of the rest of us has managed since the beginning of the world. Her folly, her association with a man of a Firstborn race, led to the downfall of that, to the war that followed. It is foolhardy for us to try to save any of them now. We must do the best we can in holding a fragile world together, to guard against the evil ones in the Vault of the Underworld, and those that walk the upworld. Whatever befalls the races of man is of no consequence. And to that end, we should bless our brother and be gone from this place, back to our own lands, lest we leave them vulnerable.”

Amid silent assent, the dragons turned once more toward the stone corpse of one of their own kind. “What was he doing, when he Ended?” Chao asked nervously. “Why is he crouched, yet his head is erect, his eyes open?” The dark evergreens rustled loudly as the wind blew Through the greenwood again. “He must have been sheltering something,” said Talasynos. “Whatever it was, he must have considered it worth the loss of not only his life, but his legacy, and all of his lore.”

“We can return at least some of that to him in blessing,” said Valecynos. She closed her incandescent eyes and began to chant without sound, without words, joined a moment later by the others. Llauron’s stone shell was suddenly engulfed in flames, clear, pure elemental fire with no trace of ash or cinder, the kind that burned brightly deep within the heart of the Earth. The streaks of ash that had once marred him now purged by the flames, the chant changed, summoning cold rain from the clear morning sky. Once the body was cleansed, the wyrms altered their chant again, summoning the wind, which dried the droplets of rain as a mother dries the tears of a child. Finally, when the body had been blessed by those three elements, the very earth below it opened gently to receive Llauron, forming a grave deep within the forest he had loved in life. When all the elements of the natural world had anointed the place where he had Ended, the dragons fell silent. They remained in the greenwood, standing vigil, until the night came and ether, in the form of starlight, came to rest on the grave. The oldest of the five elements, ether was considered the magic that tied their race to the rest of the universe. “May it bring you peace, and whatever immortality you can attain, Llauron,” intoned Valecynos. And may whatever you sacrificed yourself for have been worth the price you paid, she thought. As the wind picked up again, the immense serpentine bodies loosed their ties to the corporeal flesh of earth. Translucent, gleaming ethereally, they caught the wind as gossamer does, or burrowed back within the ground and returned to their lands. Trembling with fear.