Silence Falls (Sequel to Promise the Sky)

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Drystan

 

 

 

It's raining again today. Although I guess we shouldn't use the word 'again', because it implies that it ever stops raining. It is still raining, it has been raining since the day I arrived. It has been raining for three years.

Actually, it has been raining since the birth of the world, but I'm not that old; even if three years in this hellhole does feel like an eternity.

"Still, Drys me boy," I murmur to myself, picking a careful route through the bones, "better than being dead. Better than the stomach of the Wyrm." I shrug noncommittally, a small smile flickering across my lips. "In theory."

Looking up, I catch the irony of my words, and laugh. I'm standing in a giant ribcage, the great bones arching up around my head like some nightmarish prison. For a second I just shake my head, blinking away the crystalline patter of the rain. From this perspective the sky seems to curve out around me. It's nice to remember, every now and again, that there's an entire world out there... not that I can see anything other than grey cloud.

Patting the bones almost fondly, I ignore the way they suck weakly at my skin, step over the beast's jumbled spine and out into free space once more.

The Dawnlight mountains. I can't even remember how I got here, this place reserved for the dead; it has been a long and unfortunate journey, that's for sure. And the only thing I'm really certain of is that it all leads back to the Wyrm.

I kick at a stone, shaking the moisture from my damp hair, and sidle through the gap from a missing fang, into the brief darkness of yet another giant skull, before walking out along the knobs of an old spine. It's the same route I have taken every day: direct from A to B, and it's such a well worn path that my footsteps have begun to carve themselves into the ancient bone.

My hair's getting in my eyes again. It's too long, and ever damp. I can barely remember a time when it was dry, when I was dry, when it would sparkle, red and gold, in the sunlight.

I can barely remember sunlight.

They call it the Dawnlight because that's as far as it ever gets. The sun rises in the early morning, with its thin, tentative light, and for the rest of the day there is nothing more. Nothing. Nothing but rain and grey and dead dragon bones. Nothing lives in the Dawnlight. Bare rock and bodies. It's dark and wet and empty. It's fog and sickness and death.

And then, for the past three years, it has been Drystan Beddoe, the world's unluckiest cretin. It has been Drystan Beddoe and it has been the Wyrm.

I wonder if she will be there again today, just outside the boundary. But then, of course, I know she will be. She's always there; waiting until she wastes away. Waiting until she wins.

I've got no other option but to face her though. If I want to eat, I have to leave the Dawnlight, I have to find the places where life returns to the world.

Trailing my fingers over yellowing bone, a Drake so ancient that the rain has slowly begun to warp the shape of his remains, melting them down together into a single formless boulder, I allow my feet to bring me to a reluctant stop. And there it is, the edge, an invisible barrier between her and I, between myself and the freedom she guards.