Silence Falls (Sequel to Promise the Sky)

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Kiara

The mask shatters as it lands, a hundred crystalline pieces bouncing across the floor. I watch them as they roll, twinkling over perfect marble flooring. The rattle echoes meekly through these empty rooms, a brief tinkling repeated on into silence.

Drake reaches over my shoulder, interest etched firmly into his features, but I put a hand on his nose, guiding him gently back to the conversation.

“Does it give you pleasure, Jester?” A fist slams down onto the wooden tabletop before us. It produces a dull, angry thud, one which, curiously, does not echo at all. “Whenever you and that cursed rat of a dragon step back into this city, you bring nothing but misery.”

Ella hisses a frustrated warning. She’ll never brush treetops as Drake does, she’s only as large as a horse and she’ll get no larger, but she’s a different species to these dragons of the plains. For a creature of the mountains, she’s beautiful.

I think she’s beautiful regardless of her size.

There are approximately fifteen of us, dragons included, around one massive wooden table. The rest of the room is nothing but bare marble, as everything else appears to be in this regal complex, the abode of emperors since magic was first born. The man who slammed his fist, the man who thew the mask for they are one and the same, is the emperor himself. Or, from what I can gather, he was the emperor.

But now is the time for martial law and the Mirror switches its sides, master of the below reaching for his turn in the light. It is time for brittle diamond to shatter and be replaced by a mask of different material, a mask that has been brought forth and placed deferentially on the table before us, waiting hungrily to discover by whom it shall be donned. It is a thick ugly thing made of tanned leather and iron. Old but supple, it has been moulded by generations of faces, stained with the dark speckled splash of a thousand wars.

The only problem is that no one has risen to take it yet.

“Null wore that once,” someone says, gesturing to where the demised mask’s wartime counterpart huddles ominously.

“Null is gone,” Geraint growls.

I turn my gaze back up to the man who was the emperor behind the mask that sparkled. He is not as I expected, nothing more than a man; young enough to lead an entire nation, old enough to be wise. His features are contorted in passion but this does not disguise how haggard he looks, does not cover the rough layer of stubble across his chin.

From what I can gather, these elaborate pieces of facial artwork actually serve more than a decorative purpose. They add fluidity to a nation that needs it, whose very backbone is anchored in magic, the most unpredictable element in the universe. They allow any man to rule with the gravitas of the hundred that came before him. They allow conversations like this one to happen, where a man whose expertise lies in the seamless running of a city at peace can be replaced by a man with the brutality required to command a nation at war and no one but us need know.