However, there was no sign of Tira’s star near the peaks of the mountains. Maybe the hour was later than Grace thought. She craned her neck, raising her gaze higher into the sky.
It felt as if an invisible anesthesia mask had been pressed to her face, filling her lungs with cold, paralyzing her. The wind snatched her shawl from her shoulders, and it fluttered away like a wraith in the gloom. In the center of the sky was a dark hole where no stars shone. The hole was larger than Eldh’s large moon, its edges jagged like the warrior in her dream.
Only that was impossible. A circle of stars couldn’t simply vanish. Something was simply covering them up–a cloud perhaps. She blinked; and then she did see something in the dark rift: a fiery spark. Was it Tira’s star?
No. The spark grew brighter, closer, descending toward Grace. A new wind struck her face, hot and acrid, knocking her back a step. Vast, membranous wings unfurled like shadows, and the one spark resolved into two: a pair of blazing eyes. Even as Grace realized what it was, the dragon swooped down, alighting atop the battlement, its talons digging into solid stone as the keep groaned beneath its weight.
Grace knew she had to flee. She should run down the stairs and sound an alarm. Only then the dragon moved its sinuous neck, turning its wedge‑shaped head toward her, and she could not move. So close was the thing that she could feel its dusty breath on her face as it spoke, and in that moment she realized she had met this creature once before.
“The end of all things draws nigh, Grace Beckett,” the dragon Sfithrisir hissed. “And you and Travis Wilder must stop it.”
11.
The dragon folded its wings against its sleek body; the stones of the keep shuddered under its weight. Four years ago, when they first encountered Sfithrisir in a high valley in the Fal Erenn, Grace had thought the dragon looked like an enormous, sooty swan. Now it seemed more like a vulture to her. Its featherless hide absorbed the starlight, and its eyes glowed like coals. The small, saurian head wove slowly at the end of a ropelike neck, and a constant hiss of steam escaped the bony hook of its beak.
Fear and smoke choked her. For some reason the reek made her think of the smell of burning books. Grace fought for breath and to keep her wits. She had to have both if she was going to survive.
“Answer . . . answer me this, and an answer you shall have,” she said in a trembling voice, speaking the ancient greeting she had learned from Falken, and the proper way to address a dragon. “One secret for one secret in trade. Why have you–?”
“Mist and misery!” the dragon snorted, the words emanating from deep in its gullet. “There is no time for foolish rituals concocted by mortals whose bones have long ago turned to dust. I did not come here to barter with you for secrets, Blademender. The age for such petty games is over. Did you not hear what I spoke? The end of all things comes. Have you not seen the rift in the sky? Surely it has grown large enough that even your mortal eyes can see it now. And it will keep growing. Now it conceals the stars, but soon it will swallow them, and worlds as well. It will not cease until it has consumed everything there is to consume, until all that remains is nothing.”
Grace gritted her teeth and did her best to look the dragon in the eyes, though matching the weaving of its head made her queasy. Sfithrisir wasn’t lying about the rift; dragons could only speak truth–though that truth was always twisted to their own ends.
“I don’t understand, Sfithrisir,” she said, sticking to the truth as closely as she could, but formulating it carefully, like a dragon herself. “I thought the destruction of the world was what your kind craved.” The dragons had existed long before the Worldsmith created Eldh, dwelling in the gray mists before time.
“The end of the world, yes! How I loathe this wretched creation.” His talons raked the stones, cracking them. “It is a prison, binding us and everything in it. Blast the Worldsmith for making it.”
Despite her fear, Grace managed a grim laugh. “Travis Wilder is the Worldsmith now.”
“Do you think I do not know that, mortal?” The dragon ruffled its wings. “I am Sfithrisir, He Who Is Seen And Not Seen. In all of time, no one’s hoard of secrets has been greater than mine. I know what Travis Wilder has done. Runebreaker he was. He destroyed the world just as I knew he would. Only then he betrayed us by making it anew. That I had not foreseen, and if I could, I would burn him to ashes for it.”
Grace held a hand to her forehead. “If you’re so mad at Travis for forging the world again, shouldn’t you be happy about the rift in the sky?”
“You know nothing, mortal. Do you think this material thing you see before you is all that I am?”
The dragon sidled closer and the air about it rippled, distorting everything around it like images seen through crystal. It felt as if Grace’s own body was stretching and contracting in impossible dimensions. The sensation was not painful, but wrenching and deeply wrong.
“You believe order gives power and purpose,” the dragon said. “But you are mistaken. Order only limits, confines. In the chaos before this world existed, there was such freedom as you cannot possibly imagine. There were no limitations, no arbitrary rules to be obeyed. I would destroy this world, yes. I would return to the mayhem of before.”
“Then why fight against the rift?”
Sfithrisir’s wings spread out like smoky sails. “Because the rift discerns not between a world of stone and air and water and fire, or a world of formless mists! At the rift’s borders, all of being ends–order and chaos alike. It is the annihilation of all existence, not only for this world, but for all those worlds that draw near to it.”
A shard of understanding pierced Grace, freezing her heart and shattering her soul. She could comprehend destruction. A rock could be crushed to dust, a piece of wood burned to ash, a living organism sent back to the soil that gave it life. But in each case something–dust, ash, soil–remained. Travis had destroyed the world Eldh when he broke the First Rune, but even before he forged the world anew somethinghad existed. He had told her about it: the gray, swirling mists of possibility.
But the rift was not like that. Inside it was neither light nor dark. It was a place without potential, without possibility. It was a vacuum, a field in which nothing existed, or could ever exist. In that moment, in the presence of Sfithrisir, Grace truly understood what the rift was. It was Pandora’s box emptied of everything it had contained.
It was the end of hope.
Grace clutched her stomach. She was going to be ill. No human mind should try to comprehend what hers just had. But already the crystalline moment of understanding was passing, her mortal faculties too feeble to hold on to it.
“It’s . . . it’s like the demon below Tarras, isn’t it?” she gasped. “The sorcerers had bound one of the morndari, and it wanted to consume everything in the city. It almost did.”
“Wrong again, mortal. The spirits, the beings which the sorcerers call Those Who Thirst, come from a place which is like this world reflected in a mirror. It is the opposite of this creation in all ways, a place not of being, but of unbeing. Yet all the same, it is something; it exists. The rift will eradicate the morndarijust like everything else.”