Text Key
"Audible speech."
'Directed thought, telepathic speech.'
Chapter 1 - Into Something Rich And Strange
The wind carried a scent that would change the world.
The average, reasonable person would cackle at that line, the comical overwroughtness of it. But to one with even the mildest attunement to fate, it was a very real thing. It was a scent that defied description - neither sweet nor sour, favorable or foul, the best you could call it was 'fresh' in the way that was the opposite of 'musty' or 'stale' or 'familiar' -, and in its unlikeness to everything else, it bore a warning.
There's to be a sea change, it whispered to a core of the self from time immemorial, before words and writing and reason had set the world into a 'fixed' order. There is a new uncertainty in the world, and it may see everything you know upended and destroyed.
Many would ignore it - dismiss it as a turning of the seasons or just 'a bad feeling'.
Some would remember it, putting it to the side to muse over at another time when their hands and thoughts would be free to do so.
A few others, less obliged to the daily drudgery of common life and even less inclined to favor the forces of 'change', would try to find the source of the scent - and snuff it out.
Some of them were already on the move.
"Y'think anyone's noticed us?" I asked Selby as I evaluated our surroundings. My one warning about this from our 'Patron' was that it was throwing us into Alagaesia, the setting of the Inheritance Trilogy. I'd been a fan, once, and then it'd fallen off my radar almost completely after I'd finished the fourth book. A nice memory, but not one I routinely went back to, considering I'd started reading as a ten year old.
'This place does appear pretty solidly abandoned,' he said, turning over a fallen log with a huge claw. 'Otherwise, I think my new form might have garnered some sort of comment by now.'
Selby did make for a very pretty dragon, I had to admit. The antennae that spun off of their brow was a perfect parallel to xer natural form, even without the benefit of being a personal editorialization - it was one of the features that had made the designs on the covers of the books memorable back in the day, along with the heavily lipped, almost catlike mouths, curling feathery scales that ran over most of the body - and some of the wings, I noted with delight -, and odd tufts of fur that had no actual place in the textual descriptions.
The interplay of different shades of green - pale jade jumping to uranium glass and down into fern and forest, with just the lightest touches of cerulean blue on the edges, particularly her antennae and eyes - across all of that was particularly gorgeous to look at.
Why be a generic dragon when you could be an interesting and visually distinct one, after all?
I'd remained a regular human - the local me had been a stupid talented sorcerer for a teenager, of all things, but nothing so fabulous as a Rider. Not that I needed to be - me and Selby had our own connection and I had no use for a slow metamorphosis into a 'perfect' elfy being or a special shiny 'Chosen One' mark when my best friend was dragon enough on his own.
But, I figured as I picked my way through the rubble of Doru Araeba, I wouldn't have said no to one of the series' cool technicolor swords. Or just… something to give me an idea of where to go next.
Vroengard wasn't a dead land, despite its tendency towards mountains and rockiness - no, the torture centipede-worm-things and the man-eating snails and the fucked up (but fundamentally harmless) owls were more than enough evidence of that, even if you didn't count the flora that had overtaken the ruins of Doru Araeba. But it was one that had been twisted, both by the extermination of its Riders and by the radiation left behind.
Seriously, the island was radioactive as hell - aggressively so, despite the fact that the event that had made it so was a hundred years in the rearview. Some of it was even still glowing.
But I guess that's what you got when you mixed a magical nuclear bomb - by spontaneously annihilating every single particle bond within one's own body - with a dying curse; raw, malicious staying power cleaved straight from the darkest depths of the heart that resisted the idea of fading naturally because the emotions that went into that big of a 'Fuck You' didn't fade easily.
So, I was pushing things along a bit unnaturally in the other direction, using powers gleaned from a post-apocalyptic wasteland to scrub the invisible poison from the air and the dirt around us.
The me of this world had communed with spirits and the like for a bit of magical edge. If nothing else, they would appreciate this sort of gesture - wait, wait. Sword!
"I was a bit more worried about Galbatorix having… I don't know. Some kind of alarm spell on the place," I said as I tried to pull the sword I'd spotted from where it'd been embedded into a tree - damn, this fucker was in deep, might have even been lodged in there by the OG nuclear elf himself, given that the grip had been entirely burnt black. "Given that he's a paranoid fuck who has nothing but time to spare putting wards on every fucking thing he's mildly interested in, like fucking coins-"
Finally it popped out, dropping me on my ass where, instead of rising again, I took the time to appreciate exactly what I'd found; no mundane piece of steel, but a Rider's blade bearing the unmistakable milky-green cast of opaline uranium glass, the green intensifying the closer you went to the 'core'.
"Hey, it matches you!" I announced to Selby, holding my prize - special sword! - aloft. "Mostly."
The greens of this sword were more sickly, more unnatural, compared to Selby's healthier nature tones. If it was a deliberate choice at its crafting or the side-effect of what it'd gone through here, I couldn't say.
He snorted, amusement prickling over our connection. 'Does it have a name?'
I looked at the etching on the blade, taking advantage of my local self's knowledge of the Ancient Language and its associated glyphs. "'Born from need-fire and loving pyre, my name is Balmung, reforged of Nothung.' Damn, someone went full mythic," I said, half admiring the sheer brass of naming a Rider's sword after a famous dragon-slaying blade. "And they even made me pull the damn thing out of a tree, too."
I mean, really. The Volsung Saga might not have been a thing here, but that was right up with, if not beyond, Oromis carrying around Beowulf's Naegling.
"Well, at least I don't have to worry about you breaking again, if you've already been reforged," I informed the sword before I dipped my head to the tree from which I'd pulled it. "If this blade be released to my hand by Fjolnir, the concealer, manifold and multiplier of wisdom and fortune, may I give my thanks and praise to the quality of the weapon you have gifted me; may its use be favorable to your discerning eye."
The wind shifted and the tree bent toward me with a groaning creak, almost as if returning the gesture.
'And if it was just luck?'
I gave my partner a half-serious Look. "Then I thank the fates for deciding it is my day to be lucky, because you know damn well what my luck is normally like."
'Superstitious human,' Selby said affectionately.
"Hey. Never hurts to be polite," I said, right as I turned and threw Balmung through the cloaked figure who'd been halfway through a pounce, sending it flying backwards and nailing it to a wall. "Right up until whoever or whatever you're dealing with ain't."
The Ra'zac probably died surprised at being pinned like a common insect taxidermy. It was hard to tell through the inhuman, beaked face, but the fact that its Aura had spiked into a distinct 'exclamation point' in the picosecond before its demise… was a pretty good clue.
After all, they were supposed to be 'invisible' to the common mindreading of this realm, the greatest stealth specialists on the globe, the specialized human hunter.
The second, I figured as I tracked the sound and Aura of an absolutely rancid being running towards two similarly wretched, but much larger, presences, was probably the smarter of the two. It would pick the time and place of its second attempt much more carefully than the first, now that I'd thoroughly disproven that assumption.
Humanity's perfect predator had suddenly realized a new rung of the food chain had been created - and that it wasn't anywhere near it. If the Ra'zac and the Lethrblaka had any concept for sleep or dreams, I hoped that knowledge would leak into whatever passed for nightmares - it would be a bit before our next encounter, if they had any sense, but it wouldn't do for them to forget about me.
For now, however, I'd be making sure that my first victim would be staying dead - by dismembering the body at every exoskeletal joint. Selby, for his part, would be contributing the fire part of obliterating all that was and remained of the ugly bastard. After I picked through its gear.
It always paid to be thorough, after all. Skill, effort, and attention to detail were the best counters for chronic bad luck.
"I should thank you," I told the Ra'zac as I removed its head, cloudy purple hemolymph muddying the stone beneath us. "I probably wouldn't have opted for joining the Varden without you providing some proper motivation. They have such annoying internal politics, you know."
It didn't respond, but I wasn't offended.
Most dead things didn't.
The scent of change had come to the world, and it was perhaps the humblest of its inhabitants that understood best how to handle it.
To fight the sea was folly, any sailor worth his salt could tell you. Better to ride the waves as they came and run with the current, rather than kill yourself for nothing by challenging the irresistible power of the tide.