Guild Wars_ Edge of Destiny - J. Robert King [122]
Eir’s green eyes opened wide. “I killed him?”
“Put him back!”
Eir stood for a long while, holding the asura genius. Then slowly, reverently, she lowered his body back into the ruined golem.
“Now, get out of here!” Zojja snapped. “I have to cremate him.”
Numbly, Eir turned and wandered away through the shattered sanctum.
Zojja waited until the norn was gone. Then, with tears streaming down her face, she said, “Good-bye, Master.” She lowered her hands into the shattered cockpit of Big Snaff and called forth cremating fire.
“Pointless,” Rytlock muttered as he stared out at the battlefield.
Before him, the sands had fused to green glass, entrapping a thousand stone creatures. To his right lay Glint, destroyed in combat against her master. To his left lay her ruined sanctuary—once a haven in the Crystal Desert and now a ragged memorial.
“Pointless.”
Especially because they had been so close. Just a few moments more and the lance would have pierced the dragon’s heart, and Kralkatorrik would have died, and Snaff would have lived.
A few moments that Logan could have given them.
“Logan!” Rytlock roared, ripping Sohothin from its sheath and ramming it into the ground. “It’s your fault!”
The shout rang false. It wasn’t Logan’s fault. It was Rytlock’s, for trusting a human. For letting a human’s softness make him . . . weak.
“I’m a fool,” Rytlock said.
“You’re a hero,” said Caithe, stepping up to him. “We can’t wallow in grief.”
“Wallow!” Rytlock growled. “Two of our companions are dead.”
“And more will be if we don’t join together,” she insisted. Her strange white face, so small and intense, stared at his own. “We have to regroup, come up with a new plan.”
“There’s no more group. There’s no more plan.”
“But we haven’t finished—”
“I have.” Rytlock crouched to pull his flaming sword from the ground, slung it in its sheath, and strode away.
“What does that mean?” she shouted after him.
Rytlock continued to walk.
“Rytlock, what does that mean?”
He made no reply.
Caithe strode through the ruined sanctum of Glint, heading toward the fallen golem.
Zojja was within. She had removed one of Big Snaff’s epaulets and was using it as an urn to gather her master’s ashes.
Caithe spoke softly. “Rytlock is leaving.”
“Just like Logan.”
“We have to stop him, or go with him.”
Zojja smiled sadly. “I don’t have to do anything.”
“Don’t be irrational,” Caithe said.
Zojja’s eyes clouded with anger. “Who are you to tell me anything? You’re not my master. My master is dead.”
Caithe said sincerely, “This could be the death of the whole world.”
“My world is dead.”
Eir stood stunned on the battlefield.
Logan was gone. Snaff was dead. Glint was dead. And Kralkatorrik lived.
She staggered toward the broken hulk that had once been Glint. Her wings had been sheared off on impact, and her body was bashed, her neck broken. . . . But her head lay on the sands as if she only slept. Those ferocious horns, those wide and wise eyes, that noble muzzle all mantled in whiskers—
“Forgive me,” Eir said. “I was sure we could keep him safe. With Logan, we could have. But now . . .” Eir looked away across the desert. “The plan went wrong. My plan.”
Glint lay unmoving.
Eir leaned against the jowl of the beast and whispered into her torn ear, “Forgive me.”
Only silence answered.
Caithe approached and said, “Rytlock is leaving and Zojja won’t move.”
Eir clung to the dead dragon.
“Kralkatorrik will be back. We have to regroup.”
“Who?” Eir asked, infinitely weary. “You, me, and Garm?”
Caithe tried a different approach. “We can’t stay here. There’s nothing to eat or drink.”
Eir didn’t answer.
“So, we have to go somewhere, and we might as well go the same way that Rytlock is going.” Caithe took a deep breath. “We have to take Zojja with us, but she won’t go.”
“Neither will I.”
“Come along, Zojja,” Caithe said. “We have to go.”
The asura looked up from the gutted shell of Big Snaff. Her eyes were empty.
“We have to catch up to Rytlock,” Caithe went on.
“There’s only one thing I have to do: take his ashes back to Rata Sum.”
Caithe