Chapter 27

  What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

  I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

  Under my head till morning; but the rain

  Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

  Upon the glass and listen for reply,

  And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

  For unremembered lads that not again

  Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

  Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,

  Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

  Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

  I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

  I only know that summer sang in me

  A little while, that in me sings no more.

  - Edna St. Vincent Millay

  She didn’t dream of skies anymore. The wind on her mountain did not sigh with her breathing as she slept. Her arda had begun to regrow—but what use, without a Song? Like a tool in the hands of a paralytic. Her dreams were no better than waking; there was no escape from the terror of the Burning Books, even in slumber. She oft awoke trembling in sweat and tears, pressing palms against eyes to shield them from the hideous brightness.

  And so it was on this frosty morning. She awoke hungry and shivering in her bedroll, and there she stayed until the tattered tarp of her makeshift tent blazed gritty and blue above her with the morning sun, scattered with swaying branch-shadows. She had once loved sunrises, but these days she made sure to sleep through them.

  She arose when her compulsion to act, deeply ingrained even now, overrode her lethargy. She struck her meager camp, loaded the bedroll, tent, supplies into the backpack she had designed to fit around her wings. She wrapped a cloak against the cold, took up her scythe which she used as a walking staff, and continued on, ever on and up, into the eastern heights, into the morning glare of the sun.

  The mountains of the east stabbed at the clouds, steep and sharp, their lower slopes green with fern and bamboo that gave way as they rose to pale grasses and lichenous stone, and then to barren boulder-strewn formations carved by the wind, and finally to the icy peaks that gleamed with the clouds in the rich morning sun. Up and up these mountains rose, higher and higher, into the thin, icy darkness of the Twilight Peaks, where a daimon could hardly breathe and stars sparkled even at noon. None traveled there, for that was the realm of the dragons. The Dragonmount towered like a golden cloud-wreathed gateway to the Twilight Peaks. There was no other approach, for the realm of the dragons did not correspond to a spatially consistent location on the planet of Infernus. It was, simply, eastward. Into the sunrise.

  And there she went—eastward, to the Dragonmount. A bold endeavor, and one for which most daimon would die. A path existed to that mountain, though faded and ill-used, especially in these times. To tread that path was to submit oneself to judgment by the dragons, to come under their scrutiny. She had seen several watching her from the clouds, from the icy peaks. Each had allowed her to pass. Each time, their passivity surprised her. She, with no Song, no better than a voidbound, allowed to approach the Dragonmount? Perhaps she was not worth the trouble of killing. She did not particularly care either way. As she had recently told Zayana, Anthea was not interested in killing herself, but she was not interested in remaining alive either. It was all the same to her. The books waited, in this life or the next. There was no escape. Not for any of them.

  Through dry and bitter winds she traveled, crawling like an insignificant speck of an insect across the unlikely landscape of the eastern mountains. Across frayed rope bridges swinging in the gusts, past monolithic sign stones, their text faded to oblivion. Beneath arches carved by ancient hands to resemble frolicking dragons, through overgrown bamboo thickets she cut down with her scythe, across treacherous glaciers that had crept atop the path. She never left the path.

  Far above her, ignored, a single white eagle circled. It watched without eyes, passing from cloud to cloud like a spy drone in hiding. The dragons ignored it, knowing it to be hardly real.

  The Dragonmount came into view around a sudden corner. As broad and tall as any three of the other mountains, it consumed her field of vision, and Anthea’s eagle eyes picked out its every detail. The late afternoon sun, low in the west, filtered its golden rays through burning clouds to illuminate the western face of the Dragonmount in a rich light. Curling wisps of mist glittered in that glorious radiance; waterfalls sparkled. Above and beyond, the Twilight Peaks towered, dark and mysterious with dusk; auroras danced among their starry summits.

  Anthea felt more sorely than ever the loss of her capacity to be stunned by beauty. Would this sight have taken her breath away months ago? Would she have been immobilized, stunned with awe at the glory of the vista before her, which few daimon in all of history had been allowed to see? Perhaps. She did not know.

  She continued down the faded path. True sunset bathed the Dragonmount in rose and coral when she came to the foot of that mountain. She refused to look at the sunset. No marker or wall delineated the separation of the Dragonmount from all else; none was necessary. The light did it. All the rest of the world lay wreathed in dull shadow when weighed against the heavenly glory of the home of the dragons. Nor was there a gate across the path—not so much as a rickety wooden door. Two mossy stones of great size, decoratively carved, stood on either side of the path. Any being which set foot beyond those stones uninvited, save perhaps one of the gods themselves, incurred death.

  An array of dragons waited for her, a breathing, glittering rainbow of coiled majesty. Jeweled claws scratched at the verdant hillside; luminous whiskers spread adrift in the warm breeze; profound eyes like burnished shields gazed wide and unblinking.

  Eight of them waited, and two more slithered down from the skies to join as Anthea came to a halt before the stone pillars at the base of the Dragonmount. In the center of these dragons squatted one greater than the rest. This was Golden Dawn, the elder dragon of the assembly. Anthea had heard all the legends. Golden Dawn was the oldest living dragon, and one of the oldest living things alive, perhaps surpassed only by Ma’Turin. He had slain monsters, had fought alongside gods and heroes, had personally elevated the unsurpassable Mylo Starlight, and had even destroyed an apocalyptic void wraith in the cold depths of the outer wilds. His scales shone like lustrous gold even when the light of sunset faded beyond the distant hills.

  Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

  Anthea knelt. She bowed low and remained there with her forehead pressed against cool gravel.

  Why have you come? It was Golden Dawn who spoke. His voice was the source of his name; experiencing his mental speech would have elicited the same emotional reaction as the sight of dawn breaking after a long, dark night, had Anthea been able to feel such things.

  “I wish to ask of you concerning the future.”

  Golden Dawn did not respond for a long time. The dragons stirred; she heard their movement, the sighing of their breath. They were conversing with each other. She waited patiently.

  I know the future, said Golden Dawn at last. As I know the past. There is little difference. Your fate lies in both.

  She waited, wondered whether to ask a direct question.

  One without song is not permitted to set foot on the Dragonmount, said Golden Dawn. As is one without a name.

  “A…a name?” She fought back tears, struggling to keep her voice steady.

  We had prepared a name for you. It is yours no longer. You have no part with us, dead one. Take your books and depart. We will not speak again until I go to slay the False Flesh.

  Trembling, Anthea rose. She kept her eyes down, refusing to look at the dragons and their beautiful mountain. She turned away from it and faced the mountains whence she had come, now shrouded in shadows and darkness, their icy peaks shimmering with the colors of sweeps and shining like beacons with the reflected light of Solesta.

  She took one step, and then another. And again. And again. She repeated the process, unthinking, guided by dull instinct back down the path. Step after step. Afraid to think. Afraid of what might happen to her now that the dragons themselves had rejected her. If anyone could have freed her from the the Burning Books, it was the glorious golden being that had just turned her away.

  Numb, cold, she walked until she could walk no more. The eastern sky was lightening behind her when she stumbled and fell to her knees on the grassy trail. She hugged herself and wept for the sense of loss, for what she had become, for her Song. She curled in on herself and pressed her head to the earth.

  A light grew behind her. It came with a blaze of heat and a gust of hot wind. The books.

  “No,” she whispered, shaking her head, shivering. “Go away. Go away. Please…”

  “Fear not, child,” the books replied. Only, they had never spoken before. And if they could speak, she could not imagine their voice would be so compassionate. She heard pity there, and surely pity was the most alien of all emotions to those books, could they feel at all.

  Anthea risked a swift glance behind her, a peek at the source of the light. It was fire indeed, but not the books. It was a bird, a fierce winged creature twice as tall as she, its vibrant rainbow plumage licked with yellow and orange flames. A phoenix. And beside it, her angel. The cloud-white eagle seemed comically small beside the phoenix.

  Anthea hastily wiped her tears and stood to face the phoenix. Her scythe still lay at her feet; she considered picking it up, just in case. But even in these uncertain times, some things were still worth certainty. A phoenix could be trusted. And if it could not, if it would slay her, well…did she even care?

  “Anthea,” said the phoenix. Its voice, piercing and melodic, quavered with heat as though spoken through a furnace. “I have come to you at the behest of a vesta.”

  “What…what is your name?”

  “You may call me Truth Teller, for that is what I am to you.” Its body illuminated the mountainside like a bonfire; the flickering light made dancing shadows all around them. A comforting warmth rolled off of the creature.

  Anthea nodded. “Then call me A Waste of Time, for that is what I am to you.”

  The phoenix, Truth Teller, rustled its plumage. Heat flared for an instant; grasses singed in a circle around it. “Self-pity does not become you, Anthea.”

  She shrugged, tired. “What else do I have?”

  The phoenix cocked its head at her, bird-like and curious. “Friends, perhaps?”

  “I have lost that capacity.”

  “Your friends have not.”

  Anthea dropped her gaze and sighed. Fiora, Zayana, Rasmus, even Emmius…they had never stopped caring about her. “What about Acarnus?” she whispered. She hadn’t been asking the phoenix, but it responded regardless.

  “What about him? Tell me.”

  Anthea shrugged hopelessly. “The pain of missing him…I would give anything to be rid of it. Anything but never having known him at all.”

  Truth Teller watched for a long, warm moment. Then he said, “Cloudstone.”

  “What?”

  “That is the name that the dragons had intended to give you. But you did not hear it from me.” The phoenix winked one of its fiery eyes at her.

  Anthea Cloudstone. She liked it. She loved it. It would never be hers. “Friends, love, names. Did you come only to torment me with things beyond my reach?”

  The phoenix cleared its throat in a way that reminded Anthea of Derxis about to give a silly speech, or Acarnus about to go off on some explanatory tangent. “I am a phoenix,” said Truth Teller. It spread its wings and blazed with fire in demonstration, illuminating the area and torching a few small bushes nearby. “A phoenix dies and is reborn. Death and rebirth. Hope and despair. Over and over again. A cycle, as all things are a cycle.”

  Truth Teller had been reciting a prepared speech. Now it became serious. Its eyes narrowed; its head lowered. It pointed at Anthea with a jab of its beak. “You, Anthea, are an eagle. But you will be like a phoenix. You will die and die again. You will be lost and then found. Hope will follow despair, as surely as life follows death.

  “You will be a phoenix as this world is a phoenix. As every story is a phoenix, and every song. No thing now happening is for the last time, nor for the first. All of existence is fractal circles, tessellated to infinity. Stories within stories, and songs within songs. Life within death, and death in life. Around and around.” He laughed, entranced by his own words. Very much like Derxis.

  The sunrise grew stronger behind Truth Teller, making Anthea nervous. She didn’t understand much of what Truth Teller was saying, truth or not, but if he was trying to make her feel better, it wasn’t working. “What…what about the books?” she asked. “The Burning Books?”

  Truth Teller nodded. “They will close. And they will open once more from the beginning. They are books, after all!” He looked at her with eyes like glimmering coals. “It is fine that you do not understand now. Only know this: that I am hope, and you are hope, and this is not The End. I cannot say that all will be well at The End, for that is a matter of perspective. But I can say that The End is not here yet. You have a long way yet to go, Anthea Cloudstone. And that is the Truth.”

  With a mighty flap of his wings and a rush of hot air, Truth Teller lifted up above the mountain. He disappeared with great speed into a dark grey cloudbank, which glowed with inner light before fading back to darkness. Anthea watched the phoenix go, then turned her attention to the angel. It was hopping about on the smoldering fires, stomping them out.

  She didn’t know what to think. Even if everything the phoenix said was true…what of it? What use? If Acarnus were here, and speaking to her, she would have asked him. But he was not interested in her anymore. He spent time with Akkama now. Anthea did not understand any of that. Had she simply been a fool from the start, knowing so little of herself and others?

  “One thing I know,” she told the angel. “We have little time left.” Solesta, not currently visible in the sky, had just passed the point at which it came closest to Infernus. The Grim King was coming.

  “And there is another thing,” she said, this time to herself. “The dragons are going to kill Emmius.” No one had ever learned what the markings on Emmius’s skin meant. But the dragons hated them apparently enough to kill him now, at the end of the world.

  She thought for some time as she watched the sunrise without fear for the first time in many weeks. “No,” she said at last. “They are going to try.”