CHAPTER 19: "Morbid Epiphany"

ARI

The library was tall, walls entirely comprised of books from floor to ceiling. It was so tall that every few meters was an iron landing with ladders leading up to the next, and so on for five more landings. At the center of the ceiling was a rotunda with gryphons and clouds painted onto it, revolving around a sun with feminine facial features.

Ari was intimidated, Prince Richard, enamored.

A white man with white hair in white robes eyed them from his perch on one of the many landings. He had not met the two yet, but had a smile, and gave off the impression that that was how he greeted most people.

"Hello," he called. "Welcome."

"Greetings, sir," Richard called to him. "I am Prince Richard, of Nightingshire. This is my friend, Jason, Sir Oliver Boumgarden's new squire."

The old man's squinty eyes widened a little more. "Sir Oliver has returned?" he asked. "Where is the young lad?"

Young? Ari laughed to herself, assuming that maybe "young" was relative. She answered the old man, "He will join us soon. What may we call you?"

"Hopefully, me name," the elder laughed. "Kellan Glynn, King of Shepherds, Master of Coin, Master of Books and whatever else they might like t'add to me name to make it unbearably long."

"We were hoping to find tomes regarding dragons," Prince Richard told him.

"Dragons?" Kellan laughed. "Oy, many a tale about the beasts, odd as it might be t'ask about it. We will have to ascend a few levels though. Come."

Ari and Richard looked to each other. Richard held his hand out to say, "After you."

Ari approached the metal ladder and hoisted herself, trying to catch up with Kellan who moved swiftly for a man of his age. He had gotten himself up to the fourth level, and stopped ascending, scanning the walls. As Ari and Richard had finally both caught up to him, Kellan was pulling a few volumes from the shelf. The one he had in his hands was leather-bound but pages were falling out.

"This one, The Ballad of Gravyon Brooke," Kellan laughed. "There was a mention of dragon bones."

Kellan chucked the book at Prince Richard before he was ready to catch it. The book landed harshly on the floor of the landing. A few pages had flown out and fell like feathers to the marble floor below. Prince Richard bent down and picked up the tome.

"Ah, Yousuf Arslanian," Kellan said. "Better poet than any Cambrian." He looked at Ari, then to Prince Richard, devilish, and said, "a romantic."

Ari tried to pretend like it did not matter, but she looked to Richard to see his reaction. He gave her the warmest smile possible, and in that moment, it was clear. He knows, she realized. She was less interested or concerned that Kellan also obviously saw through her disguise as "Jason." When she tuned back into reality, Kellan was tossing another book her way.

She fumbled it in her hands, but wrangled the heavy tome.

Kellan addressed her with, "That one, O' Sorrow, Thou Dost Love Me, is quite the bore. Sad scribbles and agonizing melodrama. But there is one brief passage about dragon mages."

"I..." Ari started, but Kellan was already climbing the ladder to the next level of the landing. "... thank you."

SIR OLIVER

It was good to see Kellan. The old man had not aged a day since Sir Oliver last saw him. Oliver guessed that he already aged enough for one lifetime. Kellan was one of the few acceptable members of the Table, because like Sir Oliver, he did not care to sit with those "knights" either. Kellan, over the years, helped Oliver develop not only his lack of faith in the Order but his sense of purpose as well.

When Kellan was discussing astrology with the Prince, Sir Oliver pulled Ari aside.

"Fatime wrote that the boy will live," he told Ari. "He will have to walk with crutches for some time, though."

She seemed to have a sense of relief, but nothing close to absolution.

"The boy will live," Sir Oliver reiterated, a hand on her shoulder. "You will have to do much worse when you are an anointed knight."

This must have made her feel worse, for Ari simply walked away to the large wooden table in the center of the room where Kellan and the Prince were still conversing. Kellan had his long, bony finger pointing to something on the page.

"Read this here, boyo," Kellan commanded. "And if t'at doesn't convince ya that star Elementals are real, then Osha spare ya."

"Don't let that old bat fill your head with fables," Sir Oliver joked.

"Fables be only truths awaiting proof," Kellan replied. "Back to dragons, though, boyo."

Prince Richard nodded and closed the astrology book. Kellan had gathered a stack of maybe ten or twelve books with dragon-related content and set them sloppily on the table. The Prince nabbed a book off the top and opened it where Kellan had set the bookmark.

"This work details dragon mages," Richard said, scanning the parchment inside. "It says that... many dragons are tamed and commanded by mages, but not all. Be our dragon a free spirit?"

Sir Oliver answered, "That beast answers to no man. What purpose would it serve to set a village of Nightingshire ablaze?"

///

The night dragged on, so long that the sky began to cry again. Drops of rain tapped the window as Ari read what she could off of a page. "'Beasts with hearts made of...' Made of...?"

"Made of sulfur," the Prince read.

"Sulfur?" Ari asked.

"A lesson for another day," Prince Richard told her.

Sir Oliver was reading a tome of his own, translated from some Fifth Hellion dialect to be titled Dark Monsters, Dark Men, Dark Waters, according to Kellan's notes inside the work.

"This claims that the beasts typically guard a horde of treasure," Sir Oliver told everyone. "If Kellan's translation notes can be believed."

"Been e'erwhere, boyo," Kellan said, reading another work himself, squinting hard. "My notes might as well be scripture."

"In that case," Sir Oliver began, "dragons are coerced into guarding caves by mages. But this book claims that mages have not been seen for centuries. However... Richard, how old is the other work?"

Prince Richard turned to some of the last few pages in the book. "It looks like it was written before the invention of the Lamarian calendar. It does mention a long era of drought though."

"If it is before the time of Lamarius, then it does tell us something, that Doller's is older," Sir Oliver claimed.

"Meaning...?" Kellan asked.

"It means that there most likely were mages, but there aren't anymore," Sir Oliver asserted.

///

"This script here talks about treasures again," Kellan told the group, holding a round glass circle up to his left eye to enhance his vision. "This one was writ by a one... Xhiang Nghiem... a traveller of all the world and beyond, a man from edge of the world himself who's gone farther than I'd ever dare ta'. He writes the accounts of many a man who claim to have seen a dragon. Oft, he says, men report that the beasts guard a cave of treasure, but rarely leave their nest. He says one man used to visit a dragon's cave from childhood to his elder years. The dragon slept, but never stirred. A few other passages in here align with that testimony, that a man be more likely to find a dragon snorin' than snarlin'."

///

All the talk of snoring put Kellan to sleep, and he practiced his best dragon snore from his chair, head in his right hand.

"Might there be a privy nearby?" the Prince asked. He, too, was weary, eyes glossing.

"Out the door, to the left, and down the steps," Sir Oliver told him. "Have a Dove lead the way should any be awaiting you."

The Prince nodded, rubbing his face, trying to wake up. As he was leaving the room, Sir Oliver looked to Ari, who was anything but tired, hunched over a book like a vulture over a rabbit. She glanced up swiftly towards the door, around the room. A look of morbid epiphany spread across her face.

"My squire?" Sir Oliver asked.

Ari put a hand through her hair and sighed. "Nearly all of these dragons live with treasure."

"Yes."

"Our dragon... no treasure."

"Yes. And?"

"But a chalice. I had a chalice, a cup made from gold."

Sir Oliver started to put together what she was saying and felt like he should have realized this months ago. "One of Lord Gerard's knights left his corpse there. No..."

"They mostly sleep," Ari continued. "They never attack. Not if they are left alone. So then, how did this dragon lose its treasure? You understand?"

Sir Oliver thought back on his arrival in Nightingshire. The villages were dirty, dilapidated. The people were poor, so poor that Fatime and the Sisters felt they had to rob the nobles in order to feed them. Yet, Lord Gerard had the coin for...

"The Harvest Festival," he said out loud. He put a hand through his thinning hair, sighing. "He has the dragon's gold."

Ari looked to the door again, to see if Prince Richard was returning yet. He was not. Kellan was snoring too loud to be paying attention either. So she spoke freely with her knight, saying, "The dragon. The Lord... he did this."