Chapter 38 Thirty eight
The climb up the old chimney vent was a journey through darkness and tight, crushing stone. The air was thin, tasting of ancient soot and the metallic tang of the deep forges below. Theron led, his Fae grace making the treacherous handholds seem like stairs. Kaelen followed, a contained inferno radiating heat at my back. I came next, the Drake's Coin a hard, warm weight against my chest, my focus on the bond, using it as a lifeline and a guide. Baelen and Lyraxis, in their more compact humanoid forms, brought up the rear.
Elara’s information had been precise. The vent was a forgotten relic, wide enough for a dragon in human form, but only just. The new ward, focused on the main passes, hummed around this stone throat but did not seal it—a fatal oversight we now exploited.
We emerged not into the main forge halls, but into a high, abandoned gallery thick with dust and shadows. Below us, the heart of the Sky-Smith forges roared.
The sight stole my breath, and not from the climb.
Gorath’s faction had not been idle. The great forges, which usually glowed with the clean, controlled fire of enchanted industry, now burned with a frantic, angry orange. Dozens of dragon-shifters worked with a militarized efficiency. They weren’t crafting wards or art. They were hammering out blades of blackened star-iron on massive anvils. Others were assembling siege components—the skeletal frames of ballistae large enough to harpoon a dragon in flight.
But it was the center of the main floor that froze the blood in my veins. There, surrounded by his inner circle, stood Gorath. And before him, glowing with a sickly, captured violet light, was a weapon unlike any I’d seen. It was a cannon-like apparatus, forged from the same dark metal, but its barrel was ringed with pulsating runes that hurt the eyes. At its base, powering it, was a cage of shimmering energy. And inside the cage, writhing in silent agony, was a minor earth elemental—a captive spirit of the mountain, being drained to fuel the weapon.
He wasn't just preparing for a fight. He was building a weapon of magical atrocity.
Kaelen’s hand clamped on my arm, his fury vibrating through the bond. That is an abomination.
The plan, I thought back, forcing cold logic through the haze of rage. You deal with Gorath. I deal with that.
We split with silent nods. Theron, Baelen, and Lyraxis melted away to sabotage the secondary forges and armories, to cause chaos. Kaelen stepped to the edge of the gallery, and without a sound, let himself drop.
He landed in the center of the main floor with a shockwave of heat and authority that silenced every hammer. All eyes turned to the King who had walked into their den.
“Gorath,” Kaelen’s voice was calm, a terrifying contrast to the inferno in his eyes. “You have one chance. Stand down. Dismantle that… thing. And face the judgment of your King.”
Gorath turned slowly. There was no surprise on his face, only a grim, savage satisfaction. “Judgment? You, who have judged our very nature to be inconvenient? You are not my King here. This is sovereign ground.” He gestured to the enslaved elemental. “You prize alliance with dirt and leaf? This is the only alliance a true dragon needs: mastery.”
While they faced off, I moved. I scrambled down a network of service ledges and gantries, keeping to the shadows, my gaze locked on the pulsing, imprisoned elemental. The pain emanating from it was a psychic shriek I felt in my teeth.
I reached a gantry directly above the weapon. Below, Kaelen and Gorath began to circle, their argument escalating into a physical threat. I had seconds.
I focused on the coin, then through the bond, into the deep, resonant pulse of the Keystone far below. I wasn't trying to summon power. I was trying to listen. To find the unique, tortured frequency of the captured mountain spirit.
I found it—a discordant, screaming note in the earth's quiet song.
I didn't have Borin’s power to command the stone. But I had the Keystone’s connection to Aethelgard’s soul. And this spirit was part of that soul.
I poured my will down that connection, not with force, but with a single, clear command of recognition, of kinship.
You are not alone. You are of the mountain. And the mountain remembers you.
The effect was instantaneous. The caged elemental stopped writhing. Its form solidified, its glow shifting from captured violet to a deep, angry amber—the colour of the mountain’s heart.
Then, it turned its consciousness not outward, but inward.
The cannon-like apparatus, intricately forged and magically calibrated, was fused to the stone of the floor. The elemental was of that stone.
With a sound of shearing crystal and buckling metal, the weapon imploded. Not from an external blast, but from the floor itself surging upward in a spike of solid rock, piercing its core. The violet runes exploded in a shower of harmless sparks. The cage shattered.
Freed, the elemental didn't attack. It simply sank back into the floor, its job done, returning to the deep quiet.
The destruction of his super-weapon snapped Gorath’s attention from Kaelen. His eyes found me on the gantry, my hand still outstretched.
“YOU!” he roared, a sound of pure, incandescent betrayal. He abandoned Kaelen and launched himself into the air towards me.
I had no time to run. His claws, extended and sharp enough to shred stone, filled my vision.
A blur of emerald and copper shot across the space. Lyraxis and Baelen, having completed their sabotage, intercepted him. The three dragons collided in mid-air with a crash of scale and a burst of fire, crashing down onto a secondary forge in a tangle of snapping jaws and tearing claws.
The forges erupted into total chaos. Loyalist dragons clashed with traditionalists. The sounds of combat—roars, the shriek of metal, the sizzle of spell-fire—filled the vast chamber.
Kaelen, seeing me safe for the moment, turned his fury on the remaining rebels, clearing a path through the melee with controlled bursts of white-hot flame.
But my eyes were on the grappling dragons. Lyraxis was pinned, Gorath’s jaws closing over her wing-joint. Baelen was trying to tear him off, but Gorath’s obsidian hide was impossibly tough.
I did the only thing I could think of. I focused on the bond, on the image of Kaelen’s fire, and I pushed. Not to summon it to me, but to project the memory of its heat, its blinding power, directly into Gorath’s mind.
It wasn't an attack. It was a psychic flashbang.
Gorath flinched, his bite faltering for a split second. It was all Baelen needed. He hauled the obsidian dragon off Lyraxis and slammed him into the side of a superheated smelter.
Gorath howled, his scales sizzling. He shook off Baelen, his eyes, wild with pain and fury, locking on Kaelen, who was now striding through the fading battle towards him.
This was it. The final confrontation. King versus rebel. Fire against stone.
The forges held their breath.