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Though facing Venethrax would almost certainly result in her death, she was first and foremost a survivor. Her very essence was an affirmation of blighted life and fertility, manifested in the creation of rapidly evolving spawn. Avoiding Venethrax would be failing Everblight, however, and that was inconceivable. She went to her fate gladly. She had dedicated her life to serving Everblight, and if her death could serve him as well, it was coin she was more than willing to pay.
Everblight chafed at the constraints of his divided consciousness even as he recognized its necessity. It was what would protect him against his siblings, even now that they were aware of his movements. None of them would ever have delayed physically reforming himself. None could ever have imagined dividing the athanc, sharing a single identity among many lesser creatures. His was the only cunning that could conceive of this path, which was his only defense against the other dragons until he grew powerful enough to defeat them.
In his grasp now was the means to do just that: the disembodied athanc, found by Cryx through some unknown means and carried south by them in a hastily constructed wagon designed to keep its nature contained. Everblight hungered for it. Before Pyromalfic, he had never consumed another of his own kind, but now he knew the power of it. He burned for it. Now he understood better than he ever had before the hunger that Toruk must feel to become whole. Yet for Toruk each athanc was a small piece of what he had once possessed, while for Everblight consuming the essence of another dragon had magnified his own power far beyond what it had ever been. How much stronger would he be after consuming a third, or a fourth? The athanc promised power enough to defeat any of his siblings—and eventually to destroy Toruk himself.
Any athanc was a treasure beyond price, but this was perhaps the greatest of all. This was the heartstone of one of the strongest of the dragons who had opposed Toruk during the earliest clashes in which his progeny had turned on their father. A dragon thought dead and devoured by Toruk thousands of years ago, before the ascendancy of man. How the athanc had survived, how it had remained hidden for so long, Everblight couldn’t guess, but powerful magic had certainly been involved. Now that it was exposed, Toruk must not claim it. It had to be Everblight’s. He could feel its nearness, taste its power on the air. He could imagine that power running through his being. The lure of such a thing was far more than simple ambition—he required it for his very survival. He must find a way to turn the tables on the other dragons who, even now, were circling ever closer.
He was aware of their scrutiny, though he did not know where they were. He had seen Charsaug through the eyes of his warlocks, and the feeling of pride that had welled inside him when Lylyth drove that dragon away was slowly being replaced with seeping dread. Blighterghast and the other dragons were aware of him in a way they had not been in centuries. Even now their agents were out in force, hunting for him. He knew even the blackclads whose armies now harassed his flanks must be in league with them. It was only a matter of time before the other dragons discovered his secret and grew to understand his divided existence. He had hoped to have longer to build his forces before this day came, but that was not to be. He had to be ready, now. Added to the encroaching presence of the other dragons was a new threat—or, rather, a reminder of the oldest threat, the first threat. The Dragonfather. Everblight knew what few other beings on Caen did, that the entire purpose of Cryx’s empire was to build a power base strong enough for Toruk to find and slay his offspring. He also knew the name of the chief architect of that mission, the lich lord Toruk had put in charge of studying, tracking, and confronting the other dragons: Venethrax. One of the only once-mortal creatures on Caen to have battled a dragon and lived. If Venethrax were to learn enough about Everblight, the lich lord was one of the only beings that could pose a true threat to his existence. The danger was not just to his warlocks and his armies but to his very essence. Venethrax knew far more about most dragons than they knew about themselves, and he had the full might of Toruk’s army at his back.
Venethrax marched at the head of an army of black iron and the reanimated dead. This army had split from the main Cryx column and doubled back to intercept Everblight’s forces and turn them aside. The lich lord intended to prevent Everblight from gaining the prize that was even now racing farther from his clutches and toward Toruk, his greatest enemy.
The perspective of his warlocks was necessarily limited. They saw only themselves, separate individuals, each commanding his or her own forces and spawn. Though they could sense each other’s minds through the athanc shards that bound them together and they could feel the longing of the shards to reunite, they remained distinct.
BefOre pyrOmaLfiC, he had
Never CONsumed aNOther
Of his OWN kiNd, But NOW he
kNeW the pOWer Of it .
To Everblight, they were simply a part of him, a series of eyes through which he could view the world. Each set brought a different perspective, but it was always him gazing out. They were no longer individuals at all but one entity made up of many parts. He had assembled his warlocks carefully. Each had been chosen for the vantage that his or her eyes offered. Each had a role to serve, but they were all one vast army, united by his will.
Now, however, the army was becoming ragged. Rhyas and Saeryn had been at the vanguard, but they had been delayed and depleted by the ambush of Circle forces. Lylyth and Bethayne still ranged ahead, nearest the athanc, but they were also beset by blackclads. Kallus brought up the rear, while Thagrosh and Vayl remained in the north, awaiting Everblight’s call. Venethrax planned to create a blockade, a dam that would stop the river of soldiers and spawn entirely. Everblight refused to let that happen.
He rankled at sending one of his warlocks against Venethrax. He knew he could not commit enough troops to stop the lich lord without compromising his true objective. Absylonia would serve only as a diversion, there to stall Venethrax. If she could sufficiently distract him, the others could get past and eventually reach their prize. He was more than willing to sacrifice a warlock to gain the athanc. What gave him pause was to sacrifice her to Venethrax, of all creatures.
One of the hazards of his current arrangement was that he could feel his warlocks’ emotions and sense their thoughts. Through them, he had tasted what it was like to be mortal, to suffer the fears and frailties of such a short life. Through them, he had felt mortal hopes and mortal despairs, and he had tasted mortal fear. The feeling that settled in his mind when he thought of Venethrax carving the athanc shard from Absylonia’s body was disturbingly close to that sensation. It was not a feeling Everblight relished.
Skeletal trees stood draped in shrouds of hanging moss, jutting accusatory fingers skyward from pools of brackish water. The Wythmoor was choked by expanses of weeds
and tall grass, the ground soggy underfoot. Above, the sky was a ceiling of low, dense clouds. Fog lay in heavy streamers that cut off mundane sight and distorted sound. Each skirmish became a closed room, the heat of the helljacks burning off the fog just enough to illuminate the immediate area. The muffled sounds of other battles echoed through the fog: the clash of metal, the screeching of dragonspawn, the cries of the living and the dead. Every sound seemed eerie and far away, like voices heard in a dream.
Absylonia let her eyes sink away behind ridges of forming bone and opened her sight to blighted vision. With that, she pierced through fog and clouds to see the winged shapes that wheeled in the sky above her: an angelius locked in a battle with two of the winged bonejacks called Scavengers. As she watched, one of the constructs fell like a dead crow to splash in the muck at her feet. Within moments, the angelius drove its spiked tail into the side of the other, piercing the joint where tattered wing met metal shoulder and slicing the light ’jack in two. One piece plummeted to the watery ground, while the other spun away through the air, streaking the fog with black smoke.
Absylonia called the angelius to her with a thought and turned her blighted sight toward the battlefield around her. Everywhere, blighted ogrun and spawn clashed with the necromantic nightmares of Cryx, some of them much nearer than the sound of their combat would imply. Only Proteus was directly at her side, the remaining raeks and nephilim farther afield. As she watched, Proteus lashed out with his barbed tendrils and pulled a soulhunter off its feet, dragging it into reach of his maw and talons before tearing it apart. She felt his frustration on tasting the undead flesh, but he continued to consume it; with so few living creatures among Venethrax’s forces, there was little to feed him.
As she cast about looking for prey, she noticed strange plumes of blackened smoke that even her blighted vision couldn’t penetrate. Two massive engines of black metal and necrotite fire came barreling at her from out of the smoke. One was a Desecrator, a spiderlike horror with a buzz saw arm that advanced through the swamp on four spiny legs. The other was the sleek, tusked form of a Reaper. Between them came Venethrax himself.
Absylonia assumed he had once been a man, centuries ago, but he now bore none of the hallmarks. He was a hulking creature of black armor and green flame, nearly as large as the helljacks accompanying him. Soul cages clanked at his waist, and plumes of black smoke poured from stacks on his back. Of his former humanity only his skull remained, and from that, green balefire eyes glared with a monstrous intensity that went far beyond human.