Chapter 80. Climb
A few hours had passed since Sael's conversation with the High Priestess.
He'd told the Darranshi captain he would be back. The orcish uprising, the consequences of it, whatever the Darranshi leadership knew or didn't know about Corruption or the Path of Souls—all of that needed answering, and he intended to answer it. But not yet. He'd made a promise to a little girl, and breaking promises to children who'd just watched their mothers die wasn't something he was prepared to add to his day.
The captain hadn't asked what the promise was. He'd saluted, mounted his pegasus, and gone.
Antor was smaller than Sael had expected. A cluster of wooden buildings around a central square, a well, a stable, and a trading post that doubled as the only structure with a second floor. The kind of place that existed because two roads happened to cross in the same spot and someone had decided that was reason enough to build.
The bodies had been laid out along the eastern edge of the square. Eleven, on sheets of canvas that the settlement's residents had provided without being asked. The caravan guards were still in their mismatched armor; nobody had thought to remove it, and nobody wanted to be the first. Lira's mother lay at the end of the row. Dress still clean from where Sael's magic had mended it. Hands still folded the way he'd arranged them.
She looked out of place among the others. Too composed. Too... neat.
Two soldiers from Darransh had ridden ahead on pegasi to let the people of Antor know what was coming while Sael's cloud was still in the air, and by the time the corpses and survivors arrived, the settlement had already cleared space and set water to boil. A woman with rolled sleeves was distributing blankets as people moved around the dead quietly.
Sael stood at the edge of the square, near the well, and watched.
Oz was there, too. He stood beside Sael. Motionless as usual.
And the girl, Lira, was in her father's arms.
The man had come running the moment the cloud descended. He'd pushed through the crowd, past the soldiers and the merchants climbing down, scanning faces desperately and found Lira first.
She'd been standing beside her mother's body, holding the edge of the canvas, and when she saw him she made a sound that wasn't quite a word and ran.
He caught her, dropped to his knees in the dirt and caught her, and she buried her face in his chest and cried.
That had been twenty minutes ago.
They were still there, at the same spot. His hand on the back of her head. His face in her hair. His eyes shut. Whatever was happening behind them, he was keeping it there.
"Weak and stupid," Oz said.
Sael glanced at him.
"This." Oz didn't gesture, but he didn't need to. "They know they are dead. They knew before we arrived. They will still be dead when the kneeling is over and the crying is done and the ground has been packed over them. Nothing that is happening in that square is changing anything." A beat. "It is weak. And stupid."
Not quite cruel. That was the thing about Oz that still caught Sael off guard sometimes, even after all this time. He didn't say it to wound. He said it the way someone might say water runs downhill. A fact too obvious to dress up.
"What would you have them do?" Sael asked.
"Stand up. Bury what needs burying. Take stock of what is left and what is needed and move." Oz's jaw shifted faintly. "There is always somewhere higher. Always something to be done that the grief is delaying. A settlement to rebuild. Defenses to shore up. The girl needs to eat. The man needs to provide. Every moment spent on the ground like that is a moment they are choosing to be less than what they could be."
"And among dragons?"
"Among dragons, you burn what fell and you climb. That is the way of it. You do not kneel or hold what is already gone. You look at where you are, and you look at where you are not yet, and you close the distance. That is what strength is. The act of always becoming more."
Sael reached into the inner pocket of his coat and pulled out his pipe. He packed it slowly, because the alternative was sighing, and sighing at Oz, he supposed, would not really accomplish anything.
He lit it, drew once, then let the smoke drift.
"Can I ask you something?"
"You will regardless."
"Where are you going, Oz?"
There was silence for a moment.
"I mean it." Sael continued. "Every dragon I've known has said some version of what you just said: burn what fell, don't stop, close the distance. And I've always wanted to ask, genuinely, as someone who has been aware of your kind for a very long time and admired more about you than I've ever said out loud—" He tapped the pipe against his thumb. "Where does it go? What's at the top?"
"There is no top. That is the point."
"Is it?"
"Yes."
Oz didn't answer.
Sael watched the smoke curl and thin. "My mother used to tell me about dragons from her childhood." He was quiet for a moment. "She told me they were vast, and wise, and that they cared about things. That they'd land in the fields outside her village and the children would gather and the elders would come and there'd be something like—" He searched for the word. "Counsel, or... partnership. She said the high elves rode with them. Shoulder to shoulder in the sky, fighting for things that mattered to both." The pipe had gone half to ash. "She used to say you could hear them speaking to each other across the valley in the evenings, and it sounded like thunder learning how to be gentle."
"Your mother," Oz said, "was describing the age that nearly ended us."
"She was describing dragons who knew what they were for."
"She was describing dragons who knelt and tangled themselves in the small lives of small creatures and called it wisdom. Then when the first descent of Corruption came, those dragons—your mother's gentle, wise, benevolent dragons—were slaughtered. Because they had stopped climbing."
Sael said nothing.
"That is what gentleness purchased them," Oz said. "The ones who survived were the ones who burned what fell and climbed. The rest are stories mothers tell children."
"Maybe," Sael said. He tapped the pipe against his thumb one more time. "But the ones who survived, the 'climbers'." He looked at Oz. "What did they build?"
This time, it was Oz who said nothing.
"My mother's dragons had valleys with villages and children gathering in fields. They had the high elves beside them. They had something to lose, and that's why they lost it, I'll grant you that. But they had it." He drew on the pipe. "What do the climbers have, Oz? What have you built, in all your climbing? What's beside you?"
"I am alive."
"You are." Sael nodded. "Is it not time to stop for a while, then? Look at what's around you?"
"You want me to become something from your mother's stories."
"I want you to see what he's doing." Sael gestured with the pipe toward the father. "Not as stupidity, but just as what it is."
"I see a man on the ground."
"You see a man who's going to get up."
Oz was still for a long time.
"Your mother's dragons got up too," he said. "And then they died."
"Everyone dies, Oz."
"Not if you climb high enough."
Sael looked at him as he drew on the pipe, then let it out slowly.
"Yes they do," he said quietly. "Even then."
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They stood in a silence that wasn't agreement and wasn't argument. The sun kept dropping while shadows stretched and the pipe's smoke drifted and disappeared.
After a while, the man stood. He lifted Lira with him, settling her against his hip as she clung to his neck, then he turned and walked toward Sael who tapped the pipe out against the stone edge of the well, put it away and waited.