Thrall - Christie Golden [57]
The dead were here. She saw countless bones of kodos and other creatures, bleached white with age. The skeletons dotted the landscapes as trees did in other places. What living creatures she did see seemed to feast on death—hyenas, vultures. Alexstrasza watched dully as a vulture wheeled over her. She wondered if it had ever tasted dragon before.
It would, soon. This place suited her. She would not leave it.
Slowly, the dragoness once known as the Life-Binder ascended a jutting peak to look down upon the wasteland. She would not eat, nor drink, nor sleep. She would sit atop the peak and wait for death to claim her, and then her suffering would, at last, be over.
Thrall almost missed her.
Even atop the back of one of the great bronze dragons, he could not see everything. He was looking for a red dragon, presumably easy to spot in this empty place. He was not looking for a slender elven female, huddled alone atop a stone peak.
“I will set you down a short distance away,” Tick said. One of the dragons who had guarded the Caverns of Time, she had volunteered to bear Thrall wherever he needed to go—starting with this forsaken place. “I think my presence here will not be welcome.”
She spoke this not in hostility but in deep regret. Thrall imagined that all the dragonflights mourned for what had happened to the Life-Binder. If they had any sense, Thrall thought, every sentient being would mourn it.
“I think that best,” Thrall said. As they came closer, he could see the small form better. He could not see her face, but her body was huddled tight, legs clasped to chest, red head bent over them. Every line of her screamed pain and devastation.
The bronze dragon landed some distance away, crouching so that Thrall could dismount.
“Come here when you are ready to depart,” she told Thrall.
“My hope is that Alexstrasza and I will be departing together,” Thrall reminded her.
Tick looked at him somberly. “Come here when you are ready to depart,” she repeated, and leaped skyward.
Thrall sighed, and glanced up at the peak, and began to climb.
“I hear you, orc,” she said before he had gotten halfway to where she sat alone. Her voice was beautiful but shattered, like a precious glass sculpture smashed by a careless hand: still glittering, still lovely, but in pieces.
“It was not my intention to sneak up on you,” Thrall replied.
She said nothing further. He finished the climb and sat down beside her on the hard stone. She did not even favor him with a glance, much less a word.
After a while, he said, “I know who you are, Life-Binder. I—”
She whirled on him then, her tanned, exquisite face furious, her teeth bared in a snarl. “You will not call me that! Ever! I bind no life, not anymore.”
Her outburst startled but did not surprise him. He nodded. “As you wish. I am Thrall, once the warchief of the Horde, now a member of the Earthen Ring.”
“I know who you are.”
Thrall was slightly taken aback, but continued. “And whatever name I call you by, it is you I have been sent to find.”
“By whom?” she said, her voice and face becoming dull again as she turned away to regard the empty, ugly landscape.
“By Ysera, in part, and by Nozdormu.”
The barest flicker of interest crossed her features, like something half glimpsed in deep water. “He has returned?”
“I sought and found him, as I sought and found you,” Thrall said. “There is much he has learned—much that he believes you need to hear.”
She didn’t reply. Hot air lifted her dark red locks and toyed with them. Thrall wasn’t certain how to proceed. He had been prepared for grief and anger, but this dull, deathly despair—
He told her what had happened until this point,