It was only day one.

10

He woke to the sound of thunder, rumbling through distant skies.

Rain crashed hard against the ceiling of the barn, a black deluge falling, hammering at the roof. He sat up from the pile of hay he’d taken for a bed, stretching a crick in his neck. A dull throb had settled in his right arm, and his right leg had gone dead. His bladder was full to bursting. He stood, stepped unsteadily to the nearest wall, opened the small hatch in his armour that permitted a good pissing, and relieved himself, sighing deep.

Lighting flashed outside, drawing white lines between the plank walls. It lasted a split second, then darkness resumed. Thunder bellowed like a dying god.

Elyon stepped over to the wide barn door, unhooked the lock, pulled it open and looked out. A rough sea raged beyond the coastal cliffs, all white tips and waves, lashed by torrential rain. That was south. In the east, the horizon was brightening.

Another dawn, he thought. Another day.

He yawned, picking hay from his hair, feeling more rested than he would have supposed. Not fresh, exactly, but less heavy in the head than he had been yesterday when he’d found this little coastal farm and decided to call it a night. The farm was abandoned, its occupants most likely having fled to Redhelm to the northeast of here, the closest major city. Elyon did not yet know what had come of the Helm, or Rustbridge further east. His mission last night had been to track the trail left by Drulgar. The Pentar strongholds would have to wait.

He stepped over to his cloak, left on a rusted hook on the wall, and fixed it about his shoulders. His helm he re-attached to his belt, slipping the oiled leather strap through one of the eye slits. He had not removed any other element of his armour to sleep, hence the dead leg and throb in the arm, owing to restricted movement. Elyon did not much like sleeping in full plate, but without the luxury of company and another to keep watch, he had no choice. It was a necessity he simply put up with.

He stepped back to the door, peering out across the sea. “Where are you?” he whispered, surveying the turbulent skies. His hunt had led him here, to the southern coast of Vandar, where the trail had been lost. That meant Drulgar the Dread had most likely returned to Agarath, to rest and heal from his wounds.

Some might call that good news, but Elyon wasn’t so sure. The titan’s maddened quest for vengeance, against Varin and his city, had taken its toll. Dozens of his dragons had been killed and Drulgar himself was wounded, perhaps enough to make him vulnerable. Another attack on a major city might just have been enough to finish him. It’s why he did not fly to Ilivar. It’s why he fled across the sea.

Elyon closed a fist. Would the destruction of another major city or two, the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people, and thousands of soldiers, be worth it to see the Calamity come crashing from the skies? It said a lot that Elyon could not find an answer to that. Because if he heals, and recovers, and grows stronger. If he returns…

He turned, stepping back from the door, brushing away the last loose strands of hay from his armour. He took a moment to nourish himself on the provisions he had brought with him - quickly dwindling - and then spent a few minutes stretching his neck, back, shoulders, legs. He had come to see that stretching was important after a long day of flying, and with many more miles to cover, he did not want to seize up in the skies and risk an unpleasant fall.

All the while the rains were weakening, the skies brightening, the stormclouds moving on to the southwest in a loud and lumbering procession. A swift sunrise rose up in the east, and it seemed that in no time at all a beautiful spring day was dawning. Capricious gods, Elyon thought bitterly. They like to change everything on a whim.

He stepped outside, the rain no more than a fine mist now, the air thick with spring scents and salt from the sea. The coastal grasses twinkled all about him, the rising sun reflecting off the plains. A few gulls were cawing overhead, complaining as they liked to do. He looked up at them. “Best move. I’ll be coming your way in a moment.”

He drew out the Windblade, gave it a quick wipe down with an oilcloth he kept tucked into his pocket, so that it had a nice bright shine, and summoned the winds. A vortex of air gathered and spun about its length, from tip to cross-guard, quickening, widening. Before long it was embracing him from head to heel, the rain-soaked grasses capering wildly, the door to the barn rattling on its hinges. When next he looked skyward, he saw that the gulls were flapping away.

“My thanks,” Elyon said, as he thrust from the earth in flight.

The lands fell away beneath him, spreading, his view widening. The sensation was still a wonder to him, a glory that only he could know, an intoxicating thrill. He smiled. If only others could experience it too, a part of him lamented. But another part had no such misgivings. Mine, that part thought. The skies are mine, and mine alone.

He pushed the thought aside, a persistent nuisance in his mind, like a rat, gnawing. His father had spoken of his nightly mantra, of the pathways he was building in his head. Pathways from temptation, he called them. “There will come a time when we must give our blades up, son,” he had said. “You may think now that it will be easy, but it will not. Speak nightly the words, ‘I will give it up’. Repeat them a hundred times. Visualise handing the Windblade over. Visualise letting it go. Imagine a world beyond the power it bestows upon you, without flight. Do this every evening, every chance you can, and when the time comes, you will not fail.”

His father had been adamant, staring at him with those steely eyes. Does he not trust me? Elyon wondered. Does he see in me some weakness?

If he did, he saw the same weakness in himself. Amron Daecar knew what it was to give up a Blade of Vandar, and in the time since then, their power was only growing stronger. He will need to give up the power to heal, Elyon thought. He will accept life as a cripple, lame-legged and beset by pain. If the king could do that, Elyon could give up flight. I have lived my entire life without it. It is a means to an end, to help win this war, a temporary power…that is all.

He put it from his mind, turning from it, trying not to dwell on a life earthbound…a life where travel could only be done by saddle and sole…where he would never again see the world from up here, its grand scale and scope, never feel the wind rushing through his hair, feel the power of a god, the God King Vandar, thrumming in his grasp.

I am a guardian only. A temporary champion. A servant…just a servant.

I’ll give it up when I must.

He drew a deep breath, several heartbeats passing, refocussing on his task.

Drulgar, he thought. Check the coast. Make sure he’s gone. It had taken hours for Elyon to follow the trail here, and though it appeared to end at the coast, he had to be certain of that. It was possible the dragon may have flown out to sea, and returned further along the shore. Unlikely, but possible. Elyon Daecar wasn’t going to take any chances.

He kept to the coast, then, gliding no more than a few hundred metres from the ground. The drops of Drulgar’s blood - if they could be called drops at all, given how large they were - were easy enough to spot. They glistened like smooth black boulders, often leaving scorched craters where they had landed, setting fire to bushes and trees as they splashed down upon the earth. Even his blood can kill, Elyon thought.

There were other signs of his passing too. Flattened trees, blackened fields, buildings torn down in his wake, lakes and rivers that had boiled over as he flew by, killing all the fish. Elyon had seen them floating on the surface, the water that gave them life terraforming to some sudden simmering hell. Birds had died as well, he’d seen, their nests combusting in the trees. Others that had been flying near the dragon had perished of heat exposure and fallen to the ground, their wings and feathers singed.

It all added to the trail he had followed, making it clear where Drulgar had gone.

And it wasn’t here, he thought, studying the lands along the coast. He saw no lava-blood, no dead birds and floating fish, no tracts of lands scorched by the titan’s passage. He felt comfortable enough to confirm his theory that Drulgar had returned to his own lands. And given where he was, and the dragon’s direction of travel, he felt he knew where. He has returned to his Nest.

He would need to report that to his father, as well as everything else he had seen. “See what you can learn, and return. I want you back here as soon as possible,” the king had told him. No doubt he had hoped his son would return sooner, but Elyon still had much to do. East, was his next quarry.

He swung his Windblade in that direction, and made at once for Rustbridge.

It wasn’t so far. No more than a hundred and twenty or thirty miles, as the crow flies. As with Ilivar the day before, he flew higher, eyes cast forward, powered by godsteel, looking for smoke plumes and signs of damage, wondering if the city was intact. Slowly, surely, it came into view. And Elyon could breathe again.

Thank Vandar, he thought.

Rustbridge still stood.

The city sat astride the Rustriver, a surging watercourse so named for the reddish tint of its water. On the river’s western side the city proper stood, home to a bustling trade economy; to the east were grand fortifications, towers and battlements and siege weapons. Get through that, and an enemy army still needed to cross the river itself. No easy thing. The only bridge was narrow, fiercely defended, with drawbridges on both the eastern and western shores that could prove problematic for an enemy with designs to pass.

To the south, the Rustriver barrelled along angrily all the way to the sea, eighty miles away. There were no bridges, and only the occasional ferry crossing at places where the waters calmed. North it was little better. The river itself was served by several wide tributaries that came flowing down from the southern Hammersong Mountains. These tributaries themselves formed from branching webs of rivers and rills, hundreds of them that made up the great Riverlands of East Vandar. An enemy army could try to cross there if they wished, but that would require a long march north from the coast, with no hope of being resupplied, and worse, the attentions of the Riverlanders, who from humble fisherman to highborn lord were fiercely protective of their lands. The late Lord Wallis Kanabar had always been proud of that, Elyon remembered. “No enemy army’s ever marched through the Riverlands and lived to tell the bloody tale,” he had been known to say.

That left Rustbridge. The door to the west.

And it was barred shut, Elyon Daecar saw.

The banners were in full force, fluttering and flapping in the wind. They hung off poles on the battlements, and high on the towers, and outside the many tents and pavilions mounted in the great ward within the walls. On the eastern side, the fortress side, the double walls were cast in a great half moon, curving out from the river, thick with surging, triangular bastions that made the half-moon fortress look more like a star. From the air, Elyon had a unique vantage of the fortress’s unique construction. Magnificent, he thought.

Three double gates gave access to the fort; one at the river to the north, one to the south, and one at the centre between them, where the walls extended furthest from the waters, facing east across the plains. All the gates were portcullises, heavy with godsteel bars and chains, impossible for anyone but Bladeborn to lift. Between the two walls sunk a deep moat, spiked and flooded. Drawbridges linked the portcullises.

Inside the inner wall, the great ward was vast and open, a sprawling space designed to house armies come to defend the west. Those armies had come, Elyon saw.

He smiled, hope stirring.

He could see the banners of House Amadar at the heart of the great ward, see his uncle’s pavilion in its hues of pink and pale blue, the tents of his captains and commanders ringed about it. Lord Rammas was nearby, the canvas walls of his command pavilion in a sludgy grey and brown, colours common among the Lords of the Marshes. There were others, too, tents and shelters showing greyish blue and white, Oloran colours, and those of House Kanabar; silver, green, deep river-blue, with the great blade-antlered elk of their house showing on many flags. And House Payne, of Rasalan, under the command of Lady Marian. The house of the Stormwalls, grey and black and brown. And among all that were a hundred other sigils, lord and knightly, vassals of the greathouses, spreading far and wide.

My army, Elyon Daecar thought. He had been with them at Dragon’s Bane, and had fought with them when the fortress was sieged. Retreated with them to Oakpike. And found them again many days later, after he’d gone off on other errands, marching down the Mudway to defend Mudport from attack.

Folly, that had been. Mudport was already destroyed by Vargo Ven and that only left the army open to attack. Nights of raids had followed, dragons swooping from the skies, and hundreds more men had been taken in the dark by the bog lizards and marsh serpents and ghoulish swamp-dwellers.

But they made it, Elyon thought. There had been thirty thousand men left after the Battle of the Bane, thirty thousand who reassembled at Oakpike, thirty thousand who marched the Mudway. Some five thousand had been lost on the road, but no more. A strong host, Elyon reflected.

And one of several, he saw.

The Pentar banners were here too, whipping proud in silver and red, steel and blood, tens of thousands strong. They grouped to the south of the great ward, alongside a huddle of enormous stables, and would be garrisoned at the city across the river as well. The bridge that spanned the city and the fort was busy with wagons and carts and men, supplies being brought over; food and fodder, arms and armour. Preparing for war, Elyon knew.