Guild Wars_ Edge of Destiny - J. Robert King [117]
It was not hard to find.
The dragon’s eye was seeking him.
Its mind was in every facet.
As Big Zojja stood in the eastern colonnade, inside the cockpit, Little Zojja wondered if she or any of her friends would survive this day. They had fought dragon champions, yes, but never dragons, let alone Elder Dragons. And nobody in the history of history had ever tried to take hold of an Elder Dragon’s mind.
But Snaff would succeed—wouldn’t he?—if only so that he could brag about it afterward: “Did I ever tell you about the time I single-handedly wrestled Kralkatorrik to the ground? Or I should say, single-mindedly?” How annoying would that be?
Yet Zojja hoped against hope that Snaff would live to tell that tale—and that she would live to hear it.
The fact was, Snaff really was a real genius. No one could build golems the way he could. No one understood mind auras the way he did. He could think circles around anyone. That was what was so annoying and inspiring about him.
If anyone could take hold of an Elder Dragon’s mind and drive it to the ground, Snaff could.
But not if those giant devourers reached him.
Ahead, a line of massive, two-tailed scorpions scuttled through the eastern gate and swarmed among fallen hunks of ceiling.
They’d never come close to her master.
Big Zojja’s left hand splayed, and fire roared from her fingertips and engulfed a group of devourers, sizzling their joints until they couldn’t move. It baked their innards until they burst like popcorn.
Pure genius. Snaff had stocked the water reservoirs with oil.
Big Zojja’s right hand crashed into another batch of devourers. The rock drills cracked through stony carapace and ground the meat within.
Big Zojja cleared the hall, baking half of the monsters and grinding through the other half. In mere moments, she had cleansed the whole colonnade and stood, shiny and spectacular, in the sanctum’s eastern entrance.
Let the dragon minions come. None would get past her.
Snaff stared at his reflection in the compound eye of the beast—stared so long that he passed through the reflection and found himself on the other side . . .
Within the dragon’s mind.
It was like standing in the eye of a cyclone. All around, a great storm raged, tearing down the heavens and churning up the sands and whirling all in primordial chaos. Tortured coils of cloud mixed with dissolving seas of silt. The winds scoured away rock and rill, tree and blade, flesh and bone—and tossed them all in a crystalline tempest.
All things were fuel to that storm.
Everything was a feast to Kralkatorrik.
How does one fight a hurricane?
Snaff suddenly knew. The insight came from an offhand conversation he had had with Master Klab, the icebox genius. He was speaking about temperature differentials—how the air in the icebox was cold and dense, and the air in Rata Sum was hot and light, how opening the door of an icebox created a vortex of frost, where the dense, cold air sought to spiral into the light, warm air “like water swirling down a drain!” Klab had proclaimed this idea in his grating way, and Snaff had curled his nose and said that he had “gotten it.”
But only now did he understand.
The center of every vortex is a great emptiness—a hollow longing. The storm tries to fill the emptiness, but the more it hungers, the deeper the emptiness becomes.
And Kralkatorrik’s hunger was insatiable.
To draw the dragon, Snaff had to become the eye of the storm—to be what Kralkatorrik was not.
Where the dragon was fury, Snaff had to become bliss.
Where the dragon was rage, Snaff had to be delight.
Where the dragon was ancient and bloodthirsty and voracious, Snaff had to be new and altruistic and quite content, thank you very much.
Snaff thought of mathematics, the infinite beauty of numbers.
The dragon’s mind whirled tighter around the intruder.
Snaff thought of the smile on Zojja’s face when she invented a new ankle joint for her Big.
Around Snaff, the fury of the storm redoubled. The eye squeezed around this still center.
Snaff remembered