He landed in the yard, inside the outer gate atop the hill. The stone was scorched, bits of rock and rubble strewn across the cobbles. The details had not been so clear from above, but now he saw that many balconies and terraces had been blasted apart by dragonfire, the walls torn at by their talons, the stonework and masonry pitted and scarred. Though the keep had not fallen, fire had ripped through its guts all the same. It would take years to fully restore.
He stepped forward, searching for movement, calling out as he went. “Hello? Is anyone there?” His voice echoed out across the yard, leaving behind an eerie silence. “Amara? Lil? Sir Connor? Jovyn? Anyone?”
He stepped up the stair, and into the entrance hall, passing the black and broken door. Inside was silence, soot, and smoke, the floor coated in ash. The tapestries on the walls were burned, only their iron holdings left. The wood tables were nothing but charred heaps, with bits of leg poking out here and there, as sticks in the remnants of a fire. Statues had been scorched, and sometimes misshapen. Almost everything was black.
“Amara? Lillia? Jovyn?” Elyon coughed out the names, covering his mouth as he stirred ash with his feet. His voice rang up the stairs and down them, through the corridors and halls. “Mrs Windsworth? Master Artibus? Helena? Is anyone there?”
He moved through the keep, calling out any name he remembered. The maids and cooks, the washerwomen and scullery staff, the guardsmen who manned the gate and groundsmen who tended the gardens. No replies came back. He reached his old bedchamber, found it badly damaged as well, though not like the rooms below. Old trinkets he valued were still intact; books, maps, toys he’d played with as a child, kept inside a trunk by his bed. A wooden knight that Vesryn had once carved for him. A pendant his mother had given him, only months before she died. A brooch he favoured, in the sigil of House Daecar, given by his father when he’d first won his spurs. He paused a moment to look at them, remembering simpler times, but only a moment and nothing more. It felt indulgent to lament how easy life had once been, when so many thousands, countless thousands, lay dead throughout the city.
His search continued, his voice ringing out. The upper floors were empty, hauntingly so, so he went down into the cellars and staff quarters, the storerooms built into the hill. If there were survivors, this is where they would have gone. He called out once again for the head housekeeper - “Mrs Windsworth, are you here?” - and for the head of the serving staff - “Helena, can you hear me?” - bellowing the names of a dozen others as he rushed from room to room. He saw no sign, heard no reply. In places the ceiling felt unstable, the walls groaning and threatening to fall. Thick dust filled the air, and darkness that was hard to see through.
“Amara? Lillia? Are you here? Someone answer!”
He got no answer. No one was here.
No one alive, at least.
He found them in one of the storerooms, in the deepest part of the castle. Over a dozen men and women, trapped when the keep was attacked. Elyon could only imagine their panic as they heard the horns ringing out from the south of the city, as they saw the shadows in the skies. They came down here thinking they’d be safe, he thought. They thought the threat would pass, that the dragons would be driven away. Instead the flames had filled the halls above and ripped through every room, cutting off their escape, drowning them all in burning smoke, suffocating them to death.
Elyon could not bear to remain there any longer. The death, the darkness, the stink, the smoke. A part of him wanted to take them away, carry them one by one up through the castle to be buried and laid to rest. But he knew he couldn’t spare the time. How many thousands would suffer the same fate? Rotting where they had fallen, with no one to dig them a grave or build them a pyre, no loved ones left to speak the last rites and send them on their way with grace?
He closed a fist. Some believed that funeral rites, in whatever form they took, were the key to entry into the Eternal Halls. That those who were not officially laid to rest were doomed to wander the world as spectres, caught between the planes of the living and the dead. If so, half the city, half the kingdom, half the north would suffer the same fate. This will become a world of ghosts, Elyon Daecar thought. A world haunted by a horde of lost and lonely souls.
He returned to the main yard, shaking dust and ash off his cloak, breathing deep of the clear morning air. The sun had risen to touch the stone, bathing the carcass of the keep in a terrible new light. At the gates he found several more dead bodies, those of guardsmen, so gruesomely charred he could not tell who they once were. Their blades were scorched black, regular steel, un-misting, counting out Sir Connor and Sir Penrose and his auntie’s other Bladeborn knights.
She wasn’t here, he knew. Nor Lillia. It was small solace, faint as a candle in a storm, but something. They might have been in the palace, after all, or visiting another of the keeps, or strolling the tree-lined streets around Maple Way when the Dread and his minions descended.
Or in Ilivar, Elyon thought. His sister had been there, with their grandfather, kept in his care for the last few months. Vesryn had told him that Amara had gone to Ilivar to fetch her back, but Elyon had cause to doubt whether that had truly happened. Lord Bryon Amadar was not a man to be cowed and commanded, not in his own city, and certainly not by a woman. He is immovable, my grandfather. Not even Father is able to bend him.
With a stirring of the wind, Elyon rose, once more, to survey the city. In the spreading dawn light he saw pockets of people, clearing rubble or gathering provisions or tending to the many wounded. A field hospital of sorts appeared to have been established at the foot of the palace, down the southern steps, and he could see people coming and going from the harbour, wagons wending through the wreckage of the city, bringing food from the ships, perhaps, or even stocking them for the survivors to flee.
He flew right down to land where the people were thickest, drawing yelps and shrieks from several women, and causing some children to scream out in alarm. “Fear not, it’s only me,” he called to them. “Elyon Daecar. I’m here to help.”
There were more than he’d realised. Some hundreds, soot-stained and fearful, moving up and down the nearest lanes, milling about the rubble. It was a sight he was used to from King’s Point. The haunted eyes. The dirty faces. The quiet mournful shambling of the horde, as they picked through the corpse of their city. He saw a man who looked like he was in charge, and marched over to join him. It was only when he got close that he realised he was looking into the old seamed eyes of Artibus, the Daecar family physician and noted scholar. “Master Artibus…” he said, hailing him.
The old man turned, eyes widening. “Elyon? Elyon, is that you?” A smile leapt to his lips. “It’s so good to see you, my boy. Come here, come here…”
He opened his arms, and Elyon stepped right into them. Artibus clung to him fiercely. He was a small man, slim and scholarly, with a bald head and long white beard, a man who had raised him, in part, helping to guide and tutor him all his life. To see him alive and well was a blessing on this bleak day.
“I feared you might have died, Artibus,” Elyon said. He turned his eyes up the hill, to where the shadow of Keep Daecar loomed, wreathed in swirls of smoke. “Mrs Windsworth, Helena, all of them, they’re gone.”
The old man dipped his chin. There were soot stains and flakes of ash peppering his beard. “I feared as much. I had wanted to climb the hill myself, and check to be sure, but…there has been much to do here. I’ve barely stopped to take a breath, with all these wounded to attend.”
The moaning about them was a wretched thing, men, women and children all bleating and weeping in pain and sorrow. Elyon did not doubt that such places as this will have sprung up all across the city, in whatever open squares and yards they could find unburdened by heaps of rubble. Nurses moved about, applying poultices and salves. Others were stitching wounds, or dressing them, using white cotton bandages and lengths of linen torn in strips from sheets and bedding.
Elyon looked around, wondering for a moment if his auntie or sister might be here somewhere. “Master Artibus, I didn’t find Amara in the keep, or Lillia. Tell me, are they still absent from the city?”
“As far as I know,” the old physician confirmed. “In Ilivar, I would hope.”
And me. Elyon breathed out, a temporary relief. Unless the Windy City is in ruin as well. “I plan to fly there now,” he said. “There are signs of destruction, east beyond the gate. Do you know if Drulgar flew that way?”
Mention of the monster made the old man flinch. A woman nearby overheard, and began babbling at once, “Dread…Dread…the Dread…the DREAD!” until a nurse came by to comfort her. Others shuddered and muttered the name. A crowd were beginning to gather around them.
Artibus shook his head. His eyes were strained, voice choked. “The people are afraid, Elyon. They fear he will return.” He looked skyward, shrinking.
Elyon stepped closer. “East, Artibus. Did the dragon fly east?” Show no fear. Stand tall for them. The eyes were on him. “I need to know where he went.”
The old man swallowed. “Yes…that I have heard. The soldiers at the gate there…they said…”
“He went east,” a stronger voice declared. From the crowd emerged a sturdy swordsman in silver plate and blackened mail, a cloak of silver, green and blue upon his back, stitched with an elk with bladed antlers.
“You’re a Kanabar man,” Elyon said to him.
“Aye. Sir Miles Hewitt. Captain of the Household Guard at Keep Kanabar.” He had thick brown hair, streaked in grey, a broad jaw and wide neck atop a bull’s shoulders. A pair of small eyes, deep and close-set, looked west through the city smog. “Was at the keep when it happened, saw it all from there. Got lucky. Dragons didn’t come out that way…not many of them, anyhow. But Drulgar? Aye? He left to the east, saw that with mine own two eyes.”
Artibus nodded. “The gate guards there have reported the same. Sir Miles has been helping to restore order here, Elyon.”
“Good to have you, Sir Miles.”
“Many have said that the Dread was bearing wounds,” Artibus went on. “I did not see myself, but there have been those who claim that they saw cleaves upon his neck and face, many bolts driven into his scales…”
Elyon nodded. “I saw those cleaves to his face and neck myself. And from up close. He had them when he arrived at King’s Point.”
“King’s Point?” repeated Sir Miles, brows knitting. “The Dread was there?”
The crowd thickened. Many were listening.
Elyon nodded. “The city is in ruin, I fear to say. But many have survived, many stout soldiers and committed commanders. My father is among them. Amron Daecar yet lives.” He spoke loudly enough for the people to hear. Then he leaned in and lowered his voice. “Do you have any idea how many have died here, Artibus? Is there anyone trying to perform a count, or…” No, he realised. It was much too early for that, and the task here was ten times as difficult as it was at King’s Point. “Who is in charge out there?” Elyon went on. “In the Lowers. Sir Bomfrey? Sir Hank? Sir Winslow? Did any of them survive?”
