The Titan of Twilight

13

Brianna cringed as Avner pushed against the loose stone. The young scout sat on the smoke shelf just above the fireplace damper, using his feet to shove the heavy block out of its niche in the chimney wall. He had already scraped the mortar from the joints, but the block moved slowly, grinding against the stones around it and filling the murky chamber with a loud, harsh grating.

“Quietly!” Brianna urged.

“We don’t have time to be quiet,” Avner retorted. “Whatever Lanaxis is doing, I’ll wager it has to do with twilight. He’ll be on his way again as soon as dark falls, and us with him if we’re still here.”

It was late afternoon, the day of the battle between the giant-kin and the storm giants. Brianna had crawled down the chimney into the tower’s first-floor chamber, where all manner of weapons had been knocked from their racks and scattered across the floor during the rough journey northward. The room’s only outlet, aside from the chimney flue, was a doorway that had once opened into the internal passages of Wynn Keep’s thick walls. Now, the portal was covered by a twinkling curtain of purple gloom, as were the sally port, the arrow loops on the second floor, and all of the tower’s other exits. Lanaxis had used his magic to draw the dark screens over the openings shortly before twilight, when he had suddenly stopped and set the tower down. Brianna and Avner had no way to look outside and so did not know where their captor was presently. But a minute earlier they had felt the floor shuddering, presumably as the titan walked away.

The grating in the fireplace ceased, and the stone fell free with a muffled clack. A brief rustle sounded in the flue as Avner rearranged himself, then a puff of icy wind rolled out of the fireplace. The young scout stuck his head down beneath the lintel.

“Now’s the time, Brianna.” As Avner spoke, little black clouds billowed from his soot-packed beard. “I’d say we still have twenty minutes before dark.”

Brianna passed Avner a waterskin filled with her milk and a rope they had found in the room’s debris. Then she pressed her lips to Kaedlaw’s brow and held them there for a long time.

At last, Avner said, “Majesty, I’m not fond of this plan of yours, but if it’s going to work, we’d better be on our way.”

Brianna nodded, then looked into Kaedlaw’s round face. “Good luck, my son. I love you-both of you.” With tears in her eyes, she passed the child to Avner, then touched the young scout’s soot-covered face. “And arrow’s speed to you, my defender. Watch over my child.”

“With my life,” Avner assured her. “I’ll see you at Wind Keep.”

“Don’t wait. That’s not my purpose.”

“I know,” the young scout replied. “But you’ll fool him. Hiatea will help you.”

Avner withdrew onto the smoke shelf, pulling Kaedlaw out of the queen’s sight.

Brianna tried to stop crying for a moment, then gave up and went to the side of the fireplace. She removed a rock from the mouth of a tin ewer and thrust her hand inside, grabbing a terrified rat Avner had caught for her. The rodent tried to bite her and squirm free as she pulled it from the pitcher, but the queen had it by the back of the neck. It was helpless in her grasp. She removed Hiatea’s amulet from her neck and took a tress of Kaedlaw’s coarse hair from her pocket, then pressed them both to the creature’s chest.

“Valorous Hiatea, take mercy on your humble servant,” Brianna beseeched. “Grant this lowly creature the aspect of my beloved son, that mad Lanaxis may have a prince worthy of his mad plans.”

The tip of the silver spear glowed red and the flames began to dance, singeing the fur from the helpless rat’s chest. The creature let out a shrill squeal and writhed wildly, but Brianna’s grasp remained secure. She uttered the mystic syllables of her spell. The rodent grew calm, tranquilized by the goddess’s magic. A flickering yellow fire spread over the beast’s body, burning away the fur and revealing skin as pink and tender as a baby’s.

The rat began to grow, its narrow face broadening into the round, double-chinned visage of her son. The muzzle receded to form Kaedlaw’s flat, rather swinish nose, the long fangs shrank into a mouthful of snaggled incisors, and the lips grew puffy and as red as blood. As the rodent’s size increased, its body softened and thickened. Its claws retracted to become toenails and fingernails, its gaunt limbs changed into an infant’s chubby arms and legs, and almost before she knew it, the struggling creature in her arms appeared to be her son. Only the eyes gave away the truth; the black pupils were almost as large as the irises, and so full of fear that the queen felt sorry for the confused beast.

Brianna swaddled her decoy in a pair of woolen cloaks, wrapping him tightly so that he could not squirm, then crawled into the fireplace. The breeze hissing down the flue smelled of spruce and pine, and its frigid bite felt good against her skin. The queen pushed her shoulders through the damper throat, and a pale, wintry light shone through a square hole in the back of the chimney. She laid the rat-child on the smoke shelf and hoisted herself up, then retrieved him and sat down, pushing her feet through the opening. A mountain stream outside gurgled softly under its ice, and trees rustled in the wind, but she heard no sound to suggest that the titan waited nearby. Clutching her burden to her chest, she squirmed through the passage and dropped into the cold snow.

Brianna found herself next to a moonlit ribbon of ice that snaked its way through a broad, round-bottomed canyon. A blanket of gangly conifers covered the valley bed, but the forest grew steadily thinner as it crept up the steep walls of the dale. A short distance downstream, the frozen creek abruptly became an icefall and dropped away into nothingness, with only sky and the distant Baronies of Wind beyond. The queen saw no sign of the rope Avner had taken, which was good. It meant he had already reached the bottom of the waterfall and retrieved his rappelling line. By now, he would be well on his way toward the canyon mouth and the shelter of Wind Keep.

Brianna turned to inspect her own route. The flat expanse of a snow-covered tarn lay fifty paces upstream. Beyond the frozen lake, the dale’s craggy headwall rose a thousand feet to the narrow saddle of Cuthbert Pass, where the slender silhouette of Gap Tower was barely visibly in the afternoon light. At its crown flickered the orange speck of a signal fire, a sure sign that the garrison had observed Lanaxis’s approach. The queen saw no sign of the titan himself.

Brianna clutched the rat-child close to her breast and started up the canyon.

On the last sun-tipped peak I stand, the savage winds whistling across the ashen sky, cold twilight flooding the purple valleys below. In the distant west, a golden crescent sinks behind endless ranks of sawtooth mountains, shooting effulgent rays across the heavens to stab, like daggers, far, far into my wounds.

There was a time when warmth and light caused me no pain, and well do I remember it. Thinking of those days does me no good now, yet I will stay longer-in memory of what once was, and to honor what will come again.

She will run; of course she will. I could lodge the tower in the granite heart of this mountain, and still Brianna would run. The queen is, after all, a daughter of Hartkiller’s line, and it will take time to tame her. She must learn for herself the futility of defiance; only then can she embrace the glory of what she has spawned.

I have grown old today, immeasurably ancient and more feeble than I would admit. Perhaps my strength will return with the darkness, or perhaps the ebbing light will leave me even weaker. I do not know; how could I? This is the first sunset I have seen in three thousand years. Perhaps nothing will happen, perhaps I will shrivel into a withered husk, vulnerable to even a mortal’s † it will be safer to find the answer alone.

So I wait, if not enjoying the feel of the sun on my face, then at least savoring the memory of a forgotten joy. I watch the yellow beams as they trickle between the teeth of the distant mountains. One-by-one, the golden rays sink away. Twilight rises higher in the valleys, and the last bead of golden sunlight settles below the jagged horizon. A familiar dullness laps at my feet, like the frigid waters of a sea too salty to freeze, and the pain fades from my crippled heel. A blush of evening gloom creeps over my legs, rich and deep as the last moment of dusk, and beneath this cold murk my shriveled skin grows supple and young again. As the purple tide rises higher, it laves the aches from my bones; the arrow floats from my shoulder, the iron quarrel sinks from my eye, and the strength flows back into my body. I am well again. I am Lanaxis the Chosen One, the Titan of Twilight.

A cold, tingling energy seeps into my body. I step forward into the purple gloom, with aught but a thousand feet of frigid void below, and stretch my hands to my sides. I plummet a hundred feet through the darkness, and shadowy layers of feathers sprout along my arms. I fall another hundred feet, and an umbral tail fans at the base of my spine. My legs become a pair of sticklike silhouettes, my toes the talons of a great raptor. Two hundred feet more, and my lips stretch into a hooked beak. The winds swell beneath me. My umbral wings beat the air, and I rise into the night. I feel as light as a cloud.

At last, the shadowroc is free! I climb higher and soar as I have only dreamed of soaring. The mountains below become dark ruffles of stone streaked by the creamy, writhing snakes of moonlit glaciers. Baronies and fiefs pass like clouds beneath my breast, and the stars above twinkle and wink at me, beckoning. If I had time, I could fly to them, but already the sun has sunk too far below the horizon. Purple twilight is fast yielding to night, and with its dying light shall go my umbral wings.

I wheel and dive. All the northlands spread beneath me, from the sparkling sands of the desert Anauroch to the Coldwood’s black tangle. I sail over valley after valley, crossing aretes and ridges and whole lines of mountains, until I spy a fleck of orange light flickering in the saddle of Cuthbert Pass: the signal blaze at Gap Tower. I swing toward the flame, wondering what fires they will light this time, and soar up the canyon.

In the forest below, dark shapes glide along the edges of the snowy leas and slip quick from the shadow of one tree to the next. They are hulking, disfigured masses, but they move with a slow, silent grace that belies their brutal temper. The fomorians have arrived sooner than I thought, but it hardly matters. Already I see the queen’s tower listing atop the frozen waterfall.

My eyes, as keen as those of any raptor, spy the queen. She stands halfway up the headwall, her ribs heaving, my nephew bundled in her arms. Brianna watches me soar up the valley, then turns and races along the trail to a nearby cliff. She raises the child above her head, as though she expects me to believe she would actually hurl him to his death.

Now will I tame her. I swing my talons forward and voice my woeful screech. So loud and so shrill is the cry that it blasts the snow from the mountainsides and shakes the canyon with rumbling avalanches.

Avner was wondering if the last of the fomorians had passed when the shadowroc’s screech broke over the canyon. Even inside his hiding place, a boulder heap near the bottom of an avalanche chute, the cry was the loudest, sharpest noise he had ever heard. It made his ears ache and his head throb, and so he did not immediately hear the rumbling. The stones around him began to tremble; wisps of powdery dust fell past his nose. Then came the roaring: a low, muffled, basal murmur at the base of his skull. No one who had experienced that soft growl would ever forget it.

With Kaedlaw fastened tight to his chest, Avner leapt from his hiding place and rushed toward the gully wall. He had dug enough victims from avalanches to know that any risk-even being caught by fomorians-was better than being trapped beneath hundreds of tons of snow.

Avner reached the craggy wall in three steps. The cliff was shaking and clattering with the force of the approaching cataclysm. He refused to look toward it; to do so would waste a precious second and petrify him with fear. He grabbed a spear of rock and pulled himself up. Kaedlaw’s head banged against the stone, but if the child complained, the scout could not hear it. The avalanche was closer and larger now; the mountain was groaning beneath its fury. The rumble sounded like thunder.

Avner grasped the edge of a massive granite flake. Something cracked in the base of the slab, and it tilted toward the gully. He pulled harder and scrambled up the sheet in two steps. It began to tip faster. The scout stood on top, clutching a rocky spine that ran along the rim of the gulch.

The avalanche arrived with a mighty boom, spraying billowing white clouds high into the air. A wall of loose snow slammed into Avner’s side. He swung his legs up, hooking a foot over the gulch rim, then hoisted himself onto a windswept ledge of dry granite. He rolled onto his side, panting and quivering with fear as he stared into the raging white river that had nearly carried him away.

Avner never saw the fomorian who speared him. A sharp blow struck his side, then a huge blade slipped between his ribs. His entire torso erupted with cold fire. Blood filled his mouth, and a deep voice yelled, “I got one, me!”

Avner hooked an arm around the shank of the spear and jerked it toward the gulch, at the same time kicking backward with a heel. His foot slammed into a huge ankle, and he felt the body at the other end of the shaft toppling forward.

“Hey-arrgh!”

The fomorian tripped over Avner’s legs and fell into the thundering avalanche, jerking the spear from the scout’s body.

A gout of warm blood shot from Avner’s mouth, then a strange, gurgling rasp filled his throat. His limbs began to ache terribly, but he was too shocked to realize he was banging them against the ground until the avalanche passed and he heard them clattering against the stones.

Avner forced himself to hold still. Kaedlaw felt warm against his breast, but the cold fire inside his chest was seeping through the rest of his body, down through his bowels into his legs, up through his shoulders into his arms. Blood kept filling his mouth, and he had no more healing potions. He had used the last of those-it couldn’t have been only the day before yesterday-in the Silver Gorge. He was going to die.

Damn his luck! He had thought he would do better for the queen’s son; at least make it to Wind Keep.

Avner still heard a bellowing voice. The sound was coming from lower down the slope: another enemy. The young scout braced his hands on the mountainside and pushed himself into a seated position. He could see the fomorian now, a pear-shaped shadow down at timberline.

Avner coughed up a mouthful of bright blood, then summoned the courage to look at his wound. It was as big around as his fist, and deeper than he wanted to know. With every breath, a froth of brilliant red blood came bubbling out of the hole. There would be no sewing this wound shut.

Avner pulled his dagger and cut Kaedlaw free, then laid the baby on the lee side of a boulder. The young scout choked on a mouthful of blood, reminded himself to spit, and unbuckled his sword belt.

“There, Awn see him!” yelled a fomorian. “Maybe kid, too!”

Awn was so close that Avner could hear the stones clattering beneath the hunter’s feet.

“Give me strength, Hiatea,” Avner gasped. “For Kaedlaw.”

Without removing his sword from its scabbard, the scout used it to push himself to his feet. Awn was less than twenty paces down the mountainside, his eyes fixed on the ground beneath his feet as he clambered up the ridge. A dozen more misshapened silhouettes were a fair distance below at timberline, and beyond them the forest was swimming with shadows.

Avner glanced at Kaedlaw. “Too many,” he gasped. “Just too many.”

Leaving Kaedlaw behind, Avner hobbled down the hill to the largest boulder he could find. He shoved the tip of his sword scabbard beneath the uphill side, turning it edge-on so the blade would not snap as he pried at the rock. He let the whole of his weight fall on the pommel. The ridge was steep enough that the stone did not need much encouragement. It tipped forward and went bounding down the slope.

The boulder did not strike Awn, nor did it unleash a landslide, as was Avner’s desperate plan. It simply bounced fifty paces down the mountainside, sending a crashing boom across the canyon each time it hit, and sailed into the avalanche gully.

Awn stopped and looked up. “Stop, you!” he said. “Awn hurt you good, him!”

Avner hacked up a mouthful of bright, frothy blood, then staggered over to the next boulder. The fire had left his body, and now he felt only cold. There was such a rushing in his ears that he could barely hear Kaedlaw’s growling, and his vision was fast narrowing into a black tunnel. He slipped the tip of his sword under the rock and collapsed over the end.

The stone rolled away. It hopped once, then bounced toward Awn. The malformed warrior cried out, not yelling but whimpering, and the last thing Avner saw were the fomorian’s arms rising to catch the bounding boulder.

The shadowroc’s monstrous talons sank a dozen feet into the mountainside. Again, the gloomy wings beat the air, blowing Brianna and her rat-child against the slope. The enormous bird backed away. His shadowy claws tore huge masses of stone from the trail, leaving the queen trapped between two gaping chasms. He circled off to release his burden, and untold tons of rock and earth plummeted through the frozen surface of the tarn below.

Brianna gathered herself up and raised the decoy over her head, determined not to allow the shadowroc’s deafening screech to stun or disorient her again. She ran to the chasm and waited until the immense bird turned back toward her, then raised the rat-child over her head.

That was when the first bellowing giant-kin voices began to reverberate up the canyon. Brianna faltered, worried for Avner and Kaedlaw, and the shadowroc dipped a wing to turn toward the sound. The queen let out a loud, mournful wail to draw the bird’s attention, then hurled her burden into the chasm.

The rat-child shrieked in terror, then thumped off the rocks below and fell silent. The shadowroc folded his wings and dived, giving voice to a watery screech that did no more than send a shiver down Brianna’s spine. She sank to her knees and buried her face in her hands, wailing in what she hoped would be a convincing imitation of grief.

More bellowing echoed up the canyon, followed by the boom of tumbling boulders. Brianna resisted the temptation to look down the valley. The crashing was caused by giant-kin trying to dig their fellows from the avalanches unleashed by the shadowroc’s screech. It had to be.

After his dive, the shadowroc did not pluck Brianna from the trail, did not screech at the loss of his nephew. He remained silent, and the clatter of falling rocks continued to reverberate up the canyon. Finally, the queen opened her hands.

The shadowroc was not in the chasm. In his place stood Lanaxis, once again fully cloaked in robes of purple gloom and holding a blood-soaked mass of pulp and rags in one hand. His damson eyes were turned down the canyon, and Brianna saw no sign of either despair or anger on the profile of his murky face.

The titan tossed aside the rat-child’s pulverized body, then turned to Brianna. “Enough of this nonsense,” he rumbled. “Your son has need of us.”

Lanaxis plucked Brianna from the trail, then descended the slope. It took him less than a dozen strides to pass the tarn and reach the top of the waterfall. Not far down the canyon, dozens of twisted silhouettes were clambering up a ridge, and Brianna heard her son’s voice growling in the wind. There were no other sounds: no more clattering boulders or bellowing echoes, no clanging steel, no hint that Avner was anywhere near.

“They have killed your servant.”

Brianna let a groan slip past her lips and felt warm tears streaming down her face.

Lanaxis made no move to descend the waterfall. “What do you wish me to do?”

“What?” Brianna gasped. “Can’t you save my son?”

The titan nodded. “There is still time. The fomorians have not reached him yet. But I cannot save your son from you. A child needs his mother, or so I have heard.”

“Save Kaedlaw!” Brianna ordered. “Kill the fomorians!”

“Then there will be no more of your willfulness?” Lanaxis pronounced. “You accept his destiny?”

Brianna had no idea where her son was, but the fomorians were already well above timberline. Assuming Avner had been trying to circle around them, she doubted the young scout would have climbed much higher than that.

“I want Kaedlaw to live,” the queen replied.

“So do I-but it will take both of us to accomplish that,” Lanaxis insisted. “There can be no more escape attempts.”

Brianna looked toward the distant figures of the climbing fomorians, then swallowed once. “There’s no other safe place to go. I am done with escaping.”

“Then let it be so.”

Lanaxis’s words kindled a cold tingle deep within Brianna’s core. The sensation seeped up through her stomach and into her heart, and she knew that she was as bound to her word as any firbolg was to his.

Lanaxis muttered a few syllables in the ancient language of his magic, then took a long deep breath and spewed it down the canyon. A howling cloud of purple murk shot from his mouth and billowed over the fomorians, sweeping their disfigured silhouettes off the ridge and hurling them into the ravine beyond. The titan jumped down from the waterfall as easily as a man would leap off a meadow fence. He walked calmly down the valley, his steps booming off the walls, the bedrock cracking beneath his immense weight. He waded through the debris of an avalanche fan and climbed the ridge, sending the warped shadows of a dozen fomorians scuttling back into the thin forest.

Lanaxis set Brianna near Avner’s fallen body. “Gather up your son. I will see to our enemies.”

The queen had no trouble finding her growling son. He lay on the lee side of a boulder, swaddled in blood-soaked wool. Brianna unwrapped the child and found him cold and hungry, but otherwise uninjured. She bundled him up and turned down the slope.

Lanaxis was standing at timberline, glaring into the trees. As Brianna climbed down to Avner, the titan plucked a spruce out of the ground, then tossed it over the forest. Embers of violet fire danced among the boughs; then the tree burst into amethyst flame and shattered into a thousand blazing splinters. Wherever the slivers fell, geysers of purple fire shot high into the sky. All that lay beneath their light erupted into damson flame.

Holding Kaedlaw beneath her arm, Brianna knelt beside Avner’s body. The young scout lay facedown in a pool of frothy blood, with his sheathed sword beneath his body. The tip lay over a hollow where a boulder had once rested.

“No one could have done better, Avner-not even Tavis.” Brianna’s voice broke as she said the words. The queen touched the young scout’s neck, checking for a pulse that was not there. “I wish I could repay your courage, but even Hiatea’s magic cannot bring the dead back to life.”

Avner’s spirit lingered with his body long after the titan took the queen and left, until long after his flesh had frozen as solid as the stones it lay upon. He did not stay because duty demanded it-he had never been much for such folly and certainly did not feel bound by it now. Nor did he stay because unfinished business tied him to the world-he had died valiantly, and an honorable death always cuts such fetters.

He stayed for vengeance. The fomorians had started to scream almost as soon as Lanaxis set the forest alight, and the agony in their voices had been music to Avner’s dead ears. They had continued to wail all through the night, some of them until long after the last tree had burned. Even now, the dead scout-he had lived more of his life as a thief, really, but he had died as a scout, and he wanted to be remembered that way-even now, with the gray dawn light revealing the charred and barren landscape of the canyon, he could still hear a few of them moaning. Avner would always remember Lanaxis kindly for this favor, at least.

But the dead scout knew that he must soon forsake even this final pleasure. Already, he could feel the pale sunlight scorching his gossamer spirit, burning away the last airy threads by which he clung to his lifeless body. The time was fast approaching when he would have to let go and begin that terrifying journey every spirit makes alone. Avner saw no reason to wait. He loosened his hold, and his ethereal substance started to sink.

Then he heard a familiar voice coming up the ridge. Avner grabbed hold of his body-with what, he was not exactly sure-and held tight.

“Up here!” The voice belonged to Tavis Burdun, the firbolg who had changed him from a thief to a scout. “They came this way!”

“I’m coming Tav-” The speaker suddenly fell silent. Avner recognized this voice as his friend Basil’s. “Stronmaus save me! What is that there?”

“Avner.”

A pair of large, hot hands-they felt as fiery as forge irons-slipped between the young scout and his body, then lifted the remains off the ground. Avner struggled to stay, but there was nothing for him to hold to and he began to sink.

“Now will you listen to me?” Though Basil was screaming, his voice was fading fast. “Now will you use Sky Cleaver?”

Avner did not hear the answer, for he had already settled into the emptiness between the stones.