Page 13 of Heart of Chaos (Chaosborn #1)

Chapter thirteen

Eisa

I woke what felt like hours later, my neck and shoulders stiff and my head still tucked beneath Arik’s chin.

The fire had burned low, and the blue glimmers of light that danced across the cavern ceiling were darker and more subdued than they had been before, as if the Rift were finally slumbering peacefully after a fitful night.

“Feeling better?” Arik murmured.

I wanted to say no and remain quiet and peaceful, engulfed by the heat and scent of him, unbothered by the world that was splitting apart around us.

But Arik shifted, bracing my shoulders with his hands and holding me away as if to inspect me.

I mourned the loss of his heat as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. “A bit. We should get back. Won’t your reirhold be worried?”

“They will.” Arik stood, seemingly satisfied that I wasn’t going to collapse on him again. “But I want you to see something first.”

He drank deeply from the copper pot, which he must have moved off the fire at some point, before handing it to me. The water was cold, but I drank it down as Arik smothered the fire. The cold instantly doubled, and I wrapped the moldy fur more tightly around myself.

“Ready?” Arik stood and held out his hand to me.

“Where are we going?” I asked, ignoring his hand and pushing myself to my feet. The ground was rocky and uneven and my legs were unsteady enough that Arik had to catch me by the elbow before I fell back down.

“I’m going to insist you swallow your pride and take my hand,” he murmured, as if afraid speaking too loudly would awaken the slumbering Rift. “The path is steep and rocky, and you have all the grace of a newborn foal with four left hooves.”

“No more than three,” I grumbled, allowing him to steady me and interlace my gloved fingers in his bare ones.

The edge of a smile tugged at his lips, but it was gone again as he moved toward the back of the cavern.

In the darkness just barely illuminated by the glowing blue of the rock, there was an opening and a set of steep, rocky steps.

“You said this place was an outpost?” I whispered, letting Arik precede me and guide me down after him.

“A long time ago,” he confirmed. “Most have been abandoned for at least a century as our numbers dwindled. Not enough drage to safely maintain them and ward off attacks by the odemarksdyr.”

“And what exactly is stopping them from attacking us right now?”

“Nothing. Which is why we’re going to be very careful and not entice them to come investigating.”

I bit my lip, all my focus on not toppling down the stairs as if the noise alone would be enough to alert the odemarksdyr to our presence. “How many are there?”

“Thousands,” Arik replied, his grip tightening on my elbow. “Almost there.”

The blue light of the cavern was strengthening as we descended, as if the Rift were growing closer. My stomach churned as Chaos swam through my veins and began a steady beat in my head once more.

“Give me a minute,” I hissed, leaning against the wall of the stairwell for support.

Arik stopped, waiting until I nodded that I was ready to go on.

“This outpost used to lie directly on the Rift,” Arik explained as we continued down the steep stairs.

“Used to?”

“The records of what exactly happened have been lost,” he continued. “Or at least, I haven’t been able to find them in twenty years of digging through the archives or the Book.”

“The Book of Chaos?”

Arik nodded gravely as we reached the bottom of the stairs. He nodded toward the wall in the chamber that opened before us, guiding me down the final step. “This is what I wanted to show you.”

The wall was stone like the rest of the cavern, which I now realized was like Ironholm—carved into the very rock of the land. But unlike Ironholm, this rock must be free of iron, for the Rift clearly had been here.

A jagged seam, glowing faintly blue, marred the entire expanse of stone wall. It was as if the hole torn by the Rift had been sealed somehow, a thin scar of rock the only evidence that there had once been a mighty crack in the stone.

The blue behind the healed fissure pulsed once, as if in welcome.

“The Rift used to run all the way to the sea,”

Arik explained, letting go of my hand to press his own to the sealed stone. “There are maps in the archives that show it extending all the way to the Iron Sea, several miles south of Ironholm.” He turned to give me a serious, calculating look. “Now, it looks like this.”

I frowned. “Something sealed it?”

Arik nodded. “This outpost was built over a thousand years ago. After this portion of the Rift was somehow sealed.” He turned, taking my hand in his again. “The last time there was a blue dragon at Ironholm.”

Chaos pulsed sharply in my skull, and I blinked rapidly to clear my vision as I felt blood drip from my nose. “You think a blue can somehow close the Rift?”

“Baldur does,” he replied, reaching down to stem the blood with the fur I still had wrapped around me. “But he won’t tell me how. He guided me here when we were first bonded. Explained that his mate might be able to continue the work if I could find someone able to bind her soul to this world.”

“That means Ragnar’s mate could as well,” I reasoned, pushing the fur away and wiping the rest of the blood on my leather glove.

Arik let out a wry laugh. “His mate is a white. Powerful, but not nearly as powerful as a blue dragon. You can bond either, but the fact that Einar is not adamantly pushing you to bond with Baldur’s mate—that he doesn’t see why we need her—is evidence enough that he cares more about power than protecting Stalheim.”

“And that’s what you want,” I hedged. “To protect Stalheim?”

Arik didn’t look at me as he replied, “It is.”

“Does Einar know? About Baldur’s theory?”

Arik’s pupils slitted momentarily, as if Baldur were offended by this turn of phrase. They were round a moment later, and Arik’s mouth curved into a line of disgust. “He does. He has dismissed it. Said it would be in the Book, if it were true.”

I frowned, not sure how much weight I should be giving this Book that the drage seemed to revere as if it were holy scripture. As far as I knew, Baldur’s theory was just that—a theory. The idea that a single dragon could close a tear in the world that had existed for millennia—that thousands of dragons before had been unable to close, seemed far-fetched at best.

“Eisa,” Arik said, turning to face me and lifting his hands to my face. Despite the fact that he was only half dressed and wore no gloves, his hands were warm as they tilted my chin and forced me to meet his silver eyes. His thumbs drifted over my cheekbones once, as if he couldn’t help the movement. “ This is why I want you to choose Baldur. To choose me. Not because of the power or claiming you or anything else you think I want. Because I want to fix this. To close the Rift and end the odemarksdyr for good. But I can’t do it without your help.”

Arik took my hand in his and placed it against the sealed stone.

The room went dark, the pounding of the Chaos and Arik’s thundering heart drowned out by screaming—cries so sharp I thought they must be coming from me.

In my mind, I saw Ironholm, then Stalheim, and then a shadow consuming everything in its wake.

The screaming was the voices of the millions who were swept away by the darkness—the innocent children who cried out for their mothers.

And then a voice swept over the world, angry and ancient and cruel: You will not stop me.

My hand fell away from the stone as I blinked back into myself. Sigrid’s tiny gem, tucked away beneath my shirt, flared with heat, then cooled as if momentarily awakened.

Arik was still looking at me, waiting for an answer as if no time had passed. Had he not seen the vision too?

“Eisa?”

“I…”

The cavern shook with a boom that nearly deafened me, and I fell to my knees as I covered my head.

“Fuck,” Arik swore, grabbing my hand and running for the stairs.

“What is that?” I gasped as he pushed me up the stairs before him, hands at my rear to steady me and urge me faster.

“Nothing good.” He ran past me when we reached the top of the stairs, past our little smoldering fire and around a corner I hadn’t noticed. Of course there must be an entrance to the cavern he had entered as Baldur, and I didn’t hesitate to follow, the dim blue of the stone walls just enough light to make my way over the ice and stones.

A winding tunnel led to a massive, cavernous space where Arik had already transformed into Baldur, his blazing white fire searing the surface of what looked to be huge, moving boulders of ice.

Not boulders. Monsters.

I knew too little about odemarksdyr to name these creatures, but the earth shook wherever they stepped, huge blocks of irregularly shaped ice serving as hands and arms as the creatures swung at Baldur. He was larger than the creatures, which were perhaps the height of three men, but he was also outnumbered.

I shrank back against the wall of the cavern. It was impossible to tell where one creature began and another ended, but I guessed there were perhaps three or four of them.

No. Five.

One had come in from the side and was creeping around the back of the white dragon, who seemed to be slowly melting the creatures. The fifth creature held a sword of gleaming ice, its eyes black pits looked at both nothing and everything, and I willed Baldur to turn and see him as he raised the weapon above what must be his head.

Baldur!

My scream was silent, but somehow the dragon heard me, turning at the last moment to blast the sword of ice from the monster’s hand with fire so hot it scalded the stone ceiling. The creature screamed, its hand melting and its weapon clattering to the floor. The other diminished ice creatures swiped at Baldur’s flank, tearing a gash down his side.

The dragon roared, swinging his massive head to incinerate the beast with a final explosion of flame as his blood splattered the floor. I felt the searing heat of it from the other side of the room, and I trembled at its power. The sheer ferocity of Baldur in his element was a terrifying sight. I wasn’t really sure what I had expected, but somehow, it hadn’t been this.

The fifth creature lunged for the dragon, sinking icy teeth into his neck. Baldur screamed again and turned his flame on the last of the odemarksdyr. He thundered down upon it with fire and brimstone, pinning it to the cavern floor with a massive foreclaw until the monster was nothing more than a puddle of water on the ground.

The ice sword lay at its center pulsing with something that felt truly malevolent.

Baldur sat back, blood dripping from his side and neck as he swung his massive head toward me, pinning me with a silvery glare.

Are you well?

I nodded, too stunned to move as the voice that both was and wasn’t Arik’s filled my head. A silver arc of awareness snapped into place, stretching between my mind and the dragon’s like a bridge of moonlight before fading into nothingness.

Baldur grumbled as if arguing with someone before his form shuddered, scales and claws shrinking back into human flesh and limbs. It was the first time I had seen Baldur transform without turning away, and it was both the most unnatural and oddly mundane thing to watch. The way the dragon became a man just sort of fit, despite the inner part of me that recoiled at the strangeness of it.

“Eisa,” Arik rasped, clapping a hand to his bleeding neck as he strode toward me. He was completely bare again, but I kept my eyes on his face and the wound that was gushing blood. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine,” I replied truthfully. “But you’re not.”

He stopped a foot away from me, his eyes dark and…was he angry with me?

“How the fuck did you do that?”

“Do what?” I took a step back and found myself pressed against the cavern wall. “What in the hells were those things?”

“Jotnar,” he replied. “Frost giants. Answer the damn question.”

“What question?”

He was somehow more frightening like this than he had been as a twenty-foot, fire-breathing dragon, and he caged me against the cavern wall with his free arm, the other still stemming the flow of blood from his neck.

“How the fuck,” he repeated, eyes burning silver in the blue glow of the stone, “did you speak to my dragon?”