Chapter 28 The Eye of the Mountain
Chapter 28 The Eye of the Mountain
The summit air bit at Arin’s skin as he stepped onto the upper courtyard of Eryndor Peak. The sun hung low, stained orange by drifting ash. Cultivators gathered across the terrace, murmuring as a faint tremor rolled through the mountain beneath them softer than before, but constant.
Everyone sensed it.
Something ancient was shifting.
Lysandra stood at the courtyard’s center, cloak snapping in the wind, commanders gathering around her like sparks around a flame. When she caught sight of Arin, she gestured him forward without hesitation.
“You came quickly,” she said.
“I felt… something,” he answered.
“Good. Because we don’t have much time.”
The cultivators parted as she led him to the far edge of the terrace, where the stone railing dropped away into cloud and open sky. From here, the entire world sprawled beneath them mountain ranges layered like folded steel, forests flickering with faint magical life, rivers carving silver paths into the horizon.
Then Arin saw it.
A swirl of dark clouds coiled far below them, rotating directly above the mountain’s base. Lightning cracked through its center not white, not gold, but a deep molten red. The air vibrated with its energy.
Arin’s breath caught. “That wasn’t there this morning.”
“No,” Lysandra said, her tone grave. “Because it wasn’t supposed to exist.”
“What is it?”
“A Riftstorm. The kind that forms when leyline pressure is disrupted by a dragon echo strong enough to crack reality.”
Arin stared. “You’re saying the mountain itself is reacting to what spoke to me in the Archive?”
“I’m saying,” she replied softly, “that something remembers you more clearly than you remember yourself.”
He swallowed.
The Riftstorm pulsed again and his flame pulsed with it.
Lysandra noticed. “Good. Now you understand the urgency.”
They turned away from the edge as Darius one of the senior cultivators approached with a grim expression.
“Commander. Scouts positioned along the eastern ridge are reporting fractures in the lower wards. If the pressure continues”
“The whole leyline could rupture,” Lysandra finished.
Darius nodded. “We need a stabilizer.”
Lysandra’s gaze shifted to Arin.
He stiffened. “Me?”
“You heard the echo,” Lysandra said. “It recognized you. That makes you the only one who can approach whatever is forming inside that storm.”
Arin forced air into his lungs. “And if I get closer? What happens?”
“We find out whether it’s calling you to test you…” Lysandra said quietly.
“Or to consume you.”
A cold shiver crawled across his spine.
“Don’t look so grim,” Darius added, though his voice trembled. “You’re not going alone. A squad will accompany you to the lower ridge.”
Arin didn’t feel reassured.
But he nodded.
He had to.
The Descent
The path leading down the mountain was narrower than Arin remembered carved between jagged rocks and frozen streams. As he and the escort squad descended, wind tore through the canyon, carrying faint whispers that made their torches flicker.
Arin recognized those whispers.
The same cadence that brushed his ear in the Archive.
Find you… found… flame-child…
He clenched his fists.
The squad’s lead cultivator Saela, a sharp-eyed woman with braids bound in silver rings glanced back at him.
“You hear it too?” she asked.
“You don’t?”
“No.”
He didn’t know if that made things better or worse.
As they neared the lower ridge, the air turned hot uncomfortably hot, like standing too close to an oven. A distant roar echoed through the valley, deep and rolling, almost like…
Breathing.
Saela raised a hand. “We’re close. Brace yourselves.”
The Riftstorm loomed ahead, swirling violently above the base of the mountain. The clouds churned crimson near their center, twisting into a spiraling column that reached toward the earth.
Lightning cracked again red and gold and the ground beneath them trembled in response.
Arin’s flame surged.
Hard.
He staggered.
Saela grabbed his arm. “Arin!”
The world tilted. Heat flooded his veins, a firestorm igniting behind his eyes. His vision blurred, then sharpened until every color around him burned too brightly.
A voice thundered inside his skull.
Awakened spark… why do you run from me?
Arin gasped. “Get… get back!”
Saela pulled the squad behind a stone outcrop. She reached for her weapon, but Arin shook his head.
“Don’t,” he rasped. “It’s calling me, not you.”
Another crack of lightning. The Riftstorm expanded doubling in size as a shockwave tore through the valley.
Saela cursed. “It’s destabilizing the entire ridge!”
A web of cracks snaked across the ground beneath them.
Arin could barely hear her.
The voice cried out again deeper now, impossibly loud.
Come, flame-child… come to the place where your fire was first named…
Arin’s knees buckled.
Memory no, not memory, something older surged through him in blinding flashes:
Burning sky.
Golden wings.
A roar that shook the bones of mountains.
Then
A pair of colossal eyes blazing in the darkness.
Eyes that knew him.
Eyes that waited.
He collapsed to his hands, breath torn from his lungs. The fire inside him raged, tearing at its boundaries like an imprisoned beast.
“Arin!” Saela lunged for him.
But the moment her fingers brushed his shoulder
His flame erupted outward.
A shockwave of gold burst from him, knocking her and the entire squad backward. The mountain roared in answer, the storm above twisting into a spiraling inferno.
Arin screamed, but the voice inside him drowned everything out.
Yes… yes… I remember you. And now you will remember me.
The Dragon’s Vision
The world dissolved.
The valley disappeared.
Arin found himself suspended in a void of burning gold, flames rising like curtains around him. Shapes moved through the fire dragon silhouettes, wings stretching wide, scales shimmering like sunlit metal.
One shape descended.
Massive. Terrifying. Beautiful.
A dragon its body forged of flame and living gold lowered its head toward him. Its breath was molten wind; its eyes, twin suns staring directly into his soul.
Arin couldn’t move.
The dragon spoke, and the void shook.
You bear a spark I once carried. A piece of a soul long severed. You are mine, child of ember. You are the ember I lost.
Arin’s pulse hammered.
“I’m not yours,” he whispered.
The dragon leaned closer.
Then why does your fire call to me by name?
Arin froze.
“My… fire…?”
The dragon laughed a sound like mountains splitting.
Ask your flame. It remembers what you do not.
Arin’s fire surged violently in his chest.
He saw a flicker of something
A boy standing beside a colossal egg.
A touch of golden light.
An explosion of warmth.
A dragon’s roar soft, protective.
And then
Darkness.
An abrupt severing.
Arin stumbled back as the vision ripped itself apart, the golden void collapsing inward like a dying star.
The dragon’s voice chased him as everything shattered
Return to me, little ember. We are not finished.
Back on the Ridge
Arin hit the ground hard.
Cold stone. Real wind. Real sky.
Saela knelt beside him, shaking his shoulders. “Arin! Arin, breathe!”
He gasped as if breaking the surface of deep water. His vision steadied just enough to see the Riftstorm shrinking collapsing inward as though something had withdrawn from it.
“What happened to the storm?” he croaked.
Saela stared at him, pale. “It stopped when you screamed.”
Arin wiped sweat or was it blood? from his face. “I… saw something.”
“Something?”
“A dragon.”
Silence fell.
The squad exchanged looks fearful, uncertain.
Arin pushed himself upright, the world still spinning. “I think… I think it wants me to come to it.”
Saela swallowed. “And what do you want?”
Arin looked up at the sky.
At the fading storm.
At the trembling mountain.
Then at his own hands still faintly glowing gold.
“I think,” he said quietly, “I want answers.”
“And that means finding it.”
But someone was already waiting for them.
When the squad turned to climb back toward the Pea.
Lysandra was there.
Standing at the ridge’s edge.
Face pale.
Eyes locked on Arin like she had seen a ghost.
“Arin,” she whispered. “What did you awaken?”
Arin opened his mouth
But the fire inside him answered first.
A small, deliberate pulse.
Not wild.
Not chaotic.
Recognizing her.
Her eyes widened.
And in that moment, Lysandra understood.
And whatever she understood
Terrified her.