When he was finished, he laid his roasting stick carefully in the skiff beside his pole and the makeshift spear with which he had slain the lizard. The restless ravens settled in the trees, watching and waiting. The dragon was watching too, endless patience in her inhuman eyes. Ushahin touched his chest, feeling the scar's ridges through the fabric of his shirt, remembering the pain and the ecstasy of his branding. The scar throbbed beneath his touch, exerting a westward tug on his flesh. He thought of Lord Satoris, left with only one of his Three at his side, and the urge grew stronger.
Raising his head, he watched the ravens fluff and sidle, catching the tenor of their feathered thoughts. A winding wall encircling a vale, dark towers rearing under an overcast sky, yellow beech leaves and messy nests.
Home, home, home!
Calanthrag's voice hissed softly. "Do you ssstruggle againsst your dessstiny, Sson of No One?"
"No." He shook his head. "What you have told me, I will hold close to my heart, Mother, and ponder for many years. But it is Lord Satoris who gave meaning to my existence. I am his servant. I cannot be otherwise."
"He is the Sssower. Ssso it mussst be. Ssso it is."
There was a tinge of sulfur and sorrow in the dragon's exhalation. Turning away, Ushahin knelt in the skiff and worked at the knot in the rope he had tied around the palodus tree. His crooked fingers were unwontedly nimble. Oh, there was power in this place! It sang in his veins, heating his blood and rendering irrelevant the myriad aches that were his body's legacy. There was a part of him that was reluctant to leave. He sighed, bowing his head and winding the rope, laying it coiled in the prow. Straightening, he grasped the pole and stood, meeting the dragon's gaze. "Do you know how my story will end, Mother?"
"No." Calanthrag did not blink. "Only the Great Ssstory, little ssson."
Whether or not it was true, Ushahin could not say, for he had learned truth and lies were but two sides to the same fabric for dragonkind, inextricably interwoven. He thought of the things the dragon had shown him in the long night he had passed in the Delta; of the Chain of Being looped and looped and looped again, gathering him in its coils. A mighty consciousness, fragmenting, sighed and consigned itself to its fate. A world was born and died, and dying was born anew. Across the vastness of the stars, in the hidden bones of the earth. Nothing was born but that died; nothing died but was born. Fragmented. Striving, all in ignorance, at cross-purposes and folly. Waiting, all unknowing, for magic to pass from the world, for the deep fires to be extinguished, until there was only the hunger, the memory and wanting.
Such were the things the Eldest knew; the Eldest remembered.
Only then; only then would the cycle have come full circle, and true sentience reemerge, ready to be reborn.
Ushahin's hands tightened on the pole. "Will it truly come to pass, Mother?"
The dragon's jaws parted in a laugh, a true laugh, punctuated with jets of smoke. "Yesss," Calanthrag the Elder said. "Oh, yesss. Sssome day. Without usss, it shall not passs. Yet may it come later than sssooner for ssuch as I and you."
"So." Ushahin nodded. "I will play such a role as I may."
Plumes of smoke rolled and roiled, dark and oily, coiling around the branches of the palodus tree and obscuring its spatulate leaves. Ushahin coughed and the ravens of Darkhaven rose in a ruckus into the cleaner air above, chattering with annoyance.
When the smoke cleared, the dragon regarded him. "Go, little Ellyl-Man," she said. "It is time. Go, and remember." She moved one foreleg, then another; legs like columns, churning the mire. The vast hummock shuddered, moving. Murky water surged as Calanthrag's plated breast emerged from the swamp, mossy and dripping. Along the dragon's sides, vaned pinions stirred, revealing their sharp angles, hinting at their folded spans. The thick, snaking column of her neck arched, spines jutting erect as her head reared into the sky to brush the uppermost branches of the tall palodus tree. Gilt-green eyes glowed from on high and the massive jaws parted, revealing rows of jagged teeth, darkened with the Delta's corrosion. A forked tongue, red as heart's blood, flickered between them. "Remember the plasse of the Sssower's birth," Calanthrag hissed. Behind those terrible jaws, the opening of the dragon's iron-grey gullet glowed like the glory-hole of a kiln. "Remember I am here!"
The skiff rocked under the dragon's shadow. Ushahin Dreamspinner rode it out, legs braced, holding tight to his pole and craning his neck, caught between awe and terror. "I will not forget, Mother!" he shouted. "I will not!"
"Go!" the Eldest roared in a gout of fire.
Ushahin crouched, jamming the pole into the submerged roots of the palodus and shoving hard, launching his skiff into the waterways. A blue-white ball of flame passed low over his head, singeing his pale hair. Above, the ravens gathered in a flock launched themselves like an arrow in a southern trajectory, heading for the outskirts of the Delta.