The Dragonswarm Read Online Free Page B

out the broken road that used to lead to Cara, and the hills so rich with iron that the soil here burned red.
    And so we passed an afternoon moving farther and farther from civilization. The farms grew further apart as we went, and smaller and smaller. The river Teel still trickled in and out along the rocky earth, but no crops would grow far from its shore. Farms dotted its shallow banks, but everywhere else was red cracked earth.
    As we went the horizon grew closer. Ugly, jagged mountains tore at the sky, and even the foothills were hard and sheer. The whole of the continent funneled down to a single point this far south, and the mountains that blocked the coast wedged in on either side of us until our whole vista could not have been more than a dozen miles from left to right.
    She finally drew rein at a bit of desert much like all the rest, and as I climbed down I couldn't see why we'd stopped this time. There were trees here—a full pace taller than most of the shrubs we'd passed by—and a bit of a stream, but not much to recommend the place. I took the opportunity to stretch my legs, then finally turned to Isabelle to ask, but she only met my eyes with the spark of excitement in hers.
    She motioned me to silence and led her horse over to one of the thorny little trees. I followed her example, scanning the ground around me for some indication that we'd arrived, but there was no path and no structure in sight. Still, we tied the horses up, and then she turned without a word and started across the cracked earth.
    As we walked, a jagged shape on the horizon slowly separated itself in my vision from the black mountain range beyond. It seemed to drift into the foreground, all harsh angles and shadows in the red light of afternoon. Even in the heart of winter, heat hung in the air without a breeze to stir it, and the only sound was the crunching of dirt beneath our boots.
    And then we topped a small rise, gained a new perspective, and the pieces fell into place. In an instant I recognized the shape of ruins within the jumble—ancient walls of stone that must have stretched for a mile in each direction, and a great crumbled mountain back behind them must have been a tower once. I stared in awe, trying to reconstruct the tower in my imagination. Trying to see how tall it must have been, to leave so much rubble two thousand years later.
    Beside me, Isabelle breathed, "It's beautiful."
    I looked over at her. "Beautiful? You mean that?"
    She met my eyes and frowned. "How could I not? They say this fortress protected fragile humanity from the mindless monsters that once swarmed through the pass beyond. They say one man stood against the darkness and fought it to a standstill until others could come take up the cause."
    I stared at her until she began to blush. Then I shrugged. "They also say he learned the depths of suffering and pain here. That he came to this place to escape humanity. That he passed through hatred and found the love that eventually united all the lands of man."
    She smiled at me. "Of course. But if he hadn't waged his war here, there would have been nothing left to love beyond." She took a slow step toward the ruins, then turned and held out a hand for me. "Come fight the monsters for me, Daven. I want to see it more closely."
    As we went closer, we discovered it would be more difficult than either of us had expected. The walls were crumbled but still more than three paces high in most places, and their old shape made even the rubble a sheer climb.
    We found at last where the northern gate had once been, its span long since fallen into a pile we could scale, and beyond that we found the courtyard.
    Within, the shape of the ruins became clearer. The walls had made a triangle, its point stabbing toward the southern pass, and at its center had stood the tower. We pressed through thorny scrub and picked our way carefully across treacherous stone, climbing down the far side of the gateway's rubble and into a lower