Chapter 214: Pain

The tokens ended.

Encrid felt it happen. He did not need the windows to tell him, but they came anyway.

[ Temporary Realm Limit Breakthrough Token – Expired ]

[ Temporary Proficiency Token – Expired ]

It did not fade.

It fell.

The Star went out of him the way water goes out of a broken jar. All at once. The whole world, which had been listening to him for fifty-five seconds, stopped listening. The river at the bottom of the gorge went back to being a river. The stone of the Span went back to being stone. The air went back to being air.

And Encrid went back to being Encrid.

An insignificant one star swordsman with a sore back and a bandaged arm, standing alone at the end of a bridge with a sword that was suddenly very heavy in his hands.

His knees bent.

He did not fall. He made himself not fall. He locked his legs and stood there, swaying, and the frost on the stone around his feet began to melt.

The borrowed memories went with the Star. He felt them go. The faces, the courtyards, the old man’s patient voice saying Again. They slipped away like a dream slipping away on waking, and he tried to hold on to them, and he could not.

Only one thing stayed.

A shape. Very faint. At the very bottom of him.

A man on a mountainside, cutting something that was not there.

He held on to that.

? ? ?

Something was walking toward the bridge.

The horde had made a lane for it, wide and clear, from the hills to the edge of the chasm. Every Roamer on either side of the lane lay with its head pressed to the ground. Tens of thousands of them. Not one of them moved.

Down the middle of the lane, something small was walking.

Encrid looked at it.

At first, he did not understand what he was seeing.

It was small.

That was the first thing. After everything that had come out of the Great Green, after the Talljacks and the Gorehorns and the Ironbacks and the Elder, the thing walking down the lane was small. It was perhaps the size of a young horse. Its body was slender and low. Its scales were very dark, almost black, with a faint dull sheen like oiled iron.

It had wings. They were folded against its sides. They were too short for its body, half-grown, the wings of something that had not finished growing into them.

Its head was narrow and wedge-shaped, with two small horns just beginning to curve back from behind its eyes.

It looked young.

It looked like a child.

And Encrid’s whole body went cold.

It was not the cold of the Azure Star. It was not the cold of fear. It was something underneath fear. Something older. The cold a small animal feels in the instant before the hawk’s shadow touches it.

Something was wrong.

Something was fundamentally, completely wrong.

He could not see it. The creature walking down the lane did not look dangerous. It did not look like anything that could have frightened him.

But he could feel it.

He had felt this pressure before. In the Council chamber. On the eighth mile. On the road. At the barrier, when the Grand Magus’s hands had shaken on his walking stick. He had felt it coming from somewhere far back in the horde, vast and awake and proud.

It was not far back anymore.

It was here.

It stopped at the edge of the chasm.

It raised its head and looked at him.

Its eyes were gold. A dull, ancient gold, like coins lying at the bottom of a well for a thousand years. They were the oldest eyes Encrid had ever seen. They did not belong in that small young face.

But there was something wrong with them.

Across the gold, like a film over the surface of still water, lay a faint crimson sheen. It moved. It crept across the eyes and pulled back and crept across again, the way a tide moves on a beach. The pupils inside them were pinned, narrow and fixed, and they did not move with the creature’s head.

They were looking at him.

But Encrid was not sure if it was the creature itself which was looking.

He opened Appraisal. He did not decide to. His eyes fixed on it, and the window opened, the way it always did.

[ Name: ??????????? ]

[ Classification: ???????? ]

[ ERROR ]

[ ERR?R ]

[ Cond?tion: W?unded. Comp?lled. ]

[ Sou?ce: ??? (Out of ra?ge) ]

[ Th?s targ?t ca?not be ?ppr??sed. ]

[ ????????????]

The window flickered. Broke apart. Re-formed. Broke apart again.

Then it closed itself.

Encrid had seen Appraisal fail before. On Gus. On Arthur. On the Grand Magus. A clean black bar every time with a polite message..

It had never broken like this.

But through the breaks, he had seen enough.

Compelled.

The same word he had seen on every Roamer in the horde. The same word he had seen on the Elder. He had assumed, for days, that the source of it was the thing he could feel pressing down on the Wall. The thing that felt vast and awake and proud.

He had assumed it was this.

He had been wrong.

The creature in front of him was a Dragon!

The appraisal hadn’t shown him but he was sure it was a Dragon.

And the Dragon was Compelled too and the source was still out of range.

Encrid thought of the bloodlust that had crushed the Council to their knees.

He thought about the Grand mage guessing the Dragon as the perpetrator of the horde.

They had all been wrong.

It had never been pride.

It had been pain.

The crimson sheen spread across the Dragon’s eyes again, thicker this time.

For one moment, the gold beneath it cleared. Encrid saw it happen. The pupils widened. The creature’s head jerked to one side, sharply, as if it were trying to shake something off. Its claws scraped at the stone.

Then the crimson closed over the gold like a lid.

The Dragon screamed.

It was not a roar. It was a thin, high, terrible sound. The sound of something young being hurt. Its whole body went rigid. Its bent wing strained against its side. Its claws tore at the road.

And slowly, against everything in its body, its jaws were forced open.

Deep in its throat, a light began to grow.

? ? ?