There comes a point in the life of every overly powerful person where the world stops providing.
It happens to all of them eventually and it happens quietly.
One year there is a list, and on the list are the things that can kill you, and you work down it the way a man works down a ledger.
And then one year you look at the list and there is nothing left on it, and you find that you are forty or four hundred years old and that you have become the most dangerous thing in every room you will ever walk into for the rest of your life.
Most of them take it well. They found sects, or they teach, or they go and sit on a mountain and become a legend that people three kingdoms away argue about the existence of.
A few of them do not take it well at all, and those few tend to go looking for lines on a different kind of list. A far more dangerous one.
---
There were six in the party and they had been walking north across the White Silence for thirty-one days.
There was no road. There had never been a road.
The White Silence began several hundred miles above the northern reach of the Mist Forest and ran from the western sea to the eastern one, and no kingdom on Nern claimed a single yard of it, because there was nothing there to claim.
Only ice, old snow packed hard enough to feel like rock underfoot, and a wind that carried seemingly never ending blizzards across thousands of miles of flat white ground without meeting anything at all.
Nothing lived there. That was the first thing everybody said about it.
This, however, was not entirely true, as things did in fact live there. Many… terrifying things, most forgotten. They were just simply comfortable in the cold solitude.
---
Oruma was cooking, because Oruma was always cooking.
She was beast-kin, of the northern lineages, and she stood a head and a half over the tallest of them with a short dense coat the color of tree bark and blunt black claws she filed down every second evening out of consideration for other people's tents.
She had a wide flat face and small warm eyes and she was, by a comfortable margin, the least frightening-looking person in the party and the ninth-strongest living being anybody present could name.
She had a pot over a fire that Sarrenhal had made out of nothing, and she was arguing about salt.
"You put in too much," said Dagvar.
"I put in the correct amount."
"You put in enough for six people."
"There are six people."
"There are four people, an elf who eats like a sparrow, and Pell, who I have never once seen swallow anything."
Dagvar Stonewake sat back on his pack with his arms folded across a chest like a beer barrel. He was of Magh Daruhm, and he had a beard down to his belt with eleven rings braided into it, and he had been a very long way from any mountain for a very long time. "So it's four. And you salt for six. And that's why everything always tastes like the sea."
"I like the sea."
"You've never seen the sea."
"I've seen a drawing," said Oruma, with enormous dignity, "and it looked delicious."
Pell, who was sitting on the rim of the pot with her boots off and her feet in the steam, said: "I swallow things."
"You do not."
"I ate a whole grape once."
"When?"
"Years ago," said Pell. "It took a while."
Pell was four inches tall from heel to crown and had wings like two panes of smoked glass, and she was the strongest person in that circle by a distance that nobody discussed, because she was sensitive about it and because the one time somebody had raised it she had gone quiet for two days.
She was also perpetually cold, which was why she sat on the pot.
---
The fire was Sarrenhal's and it burned nothing.
It sat in the middle of the camp on a flat disc of ice that it had not melted, and it gave out heat in a sphere about thirty feet across, and inside that sphere the wind did not come. Not less. Not weakly. It simply did not come, and you could stand at the edge of it and put your hand through and feel the White Silence take your fingers off at the wrist in about four minutes, and then take your hand back and be warm.
Sarrenhal had made it on the first night by sitting down, thinking about it for a moment, and then continuing a conversation.
He was elvish, but not of Vradia.
He was from a forest called Immeth that had stood on the eastern side of the Thousand Rivers for a very long time and no longer stood anywhere at all, and there were, at last count, somewhere between nine and fourteen people alive who had been born in it.
He never talked about that. He talked about almost everything else, constantly, and at length.
"—which is why the Malkoobans are correct about roofs and wrong about doors," he was saying. "A door is an admission that a wall was a mistake. Whereas a roof—"
"Sarrenhal."
"—a roof is defiance of the sky, and I respect it—"
"Sarrenhal, the wind's coming round."
"Is it." He did not look up. He moved one finger about an inch, the way a man adjusts a picture frame in passing, and two hundred yards of storm that had been rolling down on the camp from the northwest went somewhere else. "As I was saying. A roof."
Nobody remarked on it. Ysolt just smiled and passed him a cup.
---
They were hunting a dragon.
What was known of dragons would not even fill a page. And what was unknown would fill a library.
There were only four accounts in the historical records that scholars regarded as credible. The records spanned roughly two thousand years, and every single one of the accounts was secondhand.
There was an ancient fossil in a salt bog in southern Ashina that had been there for as long as civilization had been able to document it.
The Ashinan crown had built a wall around it and charged admission to see what consisted of a single piece of rib.
The rib was ninety feet long.
Scholars disagreed violently about the rib.
Some held it was not a rib. Some held it was not a dragon.
One respected school held that it was a fraud, on the grounds that nothing that large could draw breath nor be able to consume enough to sustain itself.
What was not known was essentially everything else.
Nobody knew what they ate, where they denned, how many there were, how long they lived, or whether they were beasts at all in the same sense that a thorn-elk is a beast.
Nobody had a reliable account of one being killed. Nobody had a reliable account of one doing anything, for that matter.
The four credible records all described the same thing, which was a very large shape, at a distance, going somewhere else.
And there was the trade.
Because a thing that rare is worth a great deal of money. A single confirmed dragon scale had sold at auction in Ashina for more than the annual revenue of two dukedoms.
What was sold as dragon bone — and what may or may not have been any such thing — turned up in extremely rare occurrences deep underground.
Mined from the depths of Ashina and ground into a fine powder, it was the active ingredient in eleven of the fourteen most expensive medicines in the world, and eleven of the fourteen were almost certainly fakes, and the three that were not had cured things that nothing else has ever cured before or since.
Dagvar had done the arithmetic on the way north and had done it out loud, twice.
"A tooth," he said, to nobody. "One tooth. Just one, and I retire to a hall with a door on it, I'll put my name in big letters on the front, and make sure to build it somewhere nice and warm so I never look at snow again as long as I live."
"You'd be bored inside a year," said Oruma.
"I would be rich inside a year and bored inside eleven." He smiled at the prospect of it. "I'll take that trade."
---
The tracking had been going badly and then extremely well.
Badly for nineteen days, because nobody actually knew how to track a dragon and the party had been reduced to following secondhand reports of a shadow over a fishing camp four seasons ago.
Then Ysolt had found the line.
She had walked in a slow grid for eleven hours in weather that would have killed a mammoth, reading the ice. And what she had found was a depression.
A long shallow trough in the hardpacked snow, about ninety feet across at its widest, running north-northeast.
They had all assumed it was a geological feature. Ysolt had walked it for a day and a half and found another one, parallel, eleven hundred feet east.
Then a third.
"They're not features," she had said. "They're spaced."
And they had followed the spacing for nine days, and the spacing had got fresher, and here they now were.
---
Ysolt of the Ninefold Coast was human, and thin, and forty-six, and she had been Ninth Circle for nine years and had stopped trying to close the tenth about four years ago without announcing it to anybody.
"I want to say a thing and I want everyone to let me finish it."
The campfire popped.
"Ten years ago at Anneth Ford we fought a wyvern," she said. "And I have been thinking about it for about a month now and I would like to say out loud that I do not think we won that fight."
Kaveh laughed.
He did not do it cruelly. That was the thing about Kaveh. He was not a cruel man, he was a delighted one, and he had been delighted since he was nineteen years old and had never had a very good reason to stop.
He was human, and enormous, and he had closed his tenth circle fourteen months ago at the age of fifty-one, which made him one of eleven people alive that anybody could name with certainty.
"Ysolt. We killed it."
"We did."
"Then we won."
"We killed it in eleven hours," said Ysolt, "and I was under the ice for four of them, and Dagvar's arm has never worked properly since, and it took Oruma three days to be able to speak. That is not what winning looks like. That is what surviving looks like."
"That is what a hard fight looks like," said Kaveh cheerfully. "And it was ten years ago. Ysolt, look at me. Look what I am now. I was only ninth at Anneth Ford."
"I know."
"I have closed a circle since then. So has Sarrenhal. Pell was not even with us." He spread his hands. "That is not the same six people. It is not the same anything. If that wyvern came over that ridge right now I would put it down before Oruma finished the soup and she would be annoyed about the interruption."
"She would," Oruma agreed.
"And a wyvern is a — " Kaveh made a vague gesture. "It's an animal, Ysolt. A big nasty animal with a bad temper. Which is all a dragon is. It's the same thing just further along."
Kaveh leaned back and smiled as if satisfied with his conclusion. "Yes. Just a bigger wyvern is all it is."
And there it was.
Oruma, sitting with the pot between her knees, heard it and did not say anything.
She had been listening to both of them for an hour with the particular discomfort of a person who can see that two friends are each about half right.
Ysolt was right that Anneth Ford had nearly killed them and that Kaveh had mostly forgotten that, because Kaveh forgot bad days the way other people forget dreams.
And Kaveh was right that they were not those people anymore.
Oruma had felt her own ninth circle close two winters ago and she could remember, precisely, the morning she woke up and understood that the world had got smaller overnight.
Both true. She could hold both of them at once without discomfort, and she suspected this was the reason nobody in the party had ever once tried to make her pick a side in anything.
So she said the thing she actually thought, which was:
"I think it'll be fine and I think Ysolt should keep saying it anyway."
Ysolt looked over.
"Say it every day," said Oruma. "Say it when we get there. I'd rather hear it eleven more times than not hear it once."
"Thank you."
"Also there is too much salt in this," Oruma admitted.
She looked away so nobody could see her face. "Dagvar was right and I will never say so again."
---
They found it on the thirty-fourth day, in the afternoon, and at first they thought it was terrain.
It lay across the northern horizon as a long low black ridge, running east to west for further than any of them could see in either direction, with a dusting of old snow along its upper edge.
It looked exactly like a ridge. It had the color of a ridge and the profile of a ridge and Sarrenhal, who had spent six hundred years looking at landscape, said "we'll go round the east end" and meant it.
They walked toward it for a full day and it did not get closer.
That was the first thing that was wrong, and Ysolt was the one who noticed, because Ysolt noticed things.
"Stop," she said.
"What?"
"Stop walking. Everybody stop." She stood still with her hand up and her head tilted, and did an enormously simple thing that nobody else had thought to do: she picked a point on the ridge, and she sighted it against her own thumb at arm's length, and she walked four hundred paces, and she sighted it again.
The thumb had not moved.
"Sarrenhal," she said. "How far away is that."
"Six miles."
"Take a proper reading."
He took a proper reading. It took him about a minute, and he was not a man who took a minute over anything.
"That is not six miles," he said.
"How far?"
"I make it," said Sarrenhal, in a voice Oruma had never heard him use, "somewhere between fifty-one and fifty-four."
Nobody said anything.
Everybody, at once, did the same piece of arithmetic, and everybody arrived at the same answer, and the answer was that a thing which looks that size at fifty miles is not a thing anyone in that party had a word for.
"It's a ridge," said Dagvar. "Sarrenhal, it's a ridge, you've got the reading wrong."
"I have not got the reading wrong."
"Take it again."
"Dagvar."
"Take it again."
Sarrenhal took it again.
---
They reached it at dusk on the thirty-seventh day and by then nobody was talking at all.
The last six miles were uphill, because the snow banked against it, and the banking alone was four hundred feet high and ran out of sight in both directions like a coastline.
What they came up onto was not a ridge.
It was a flank.
Close up, they could make out the pattern of scales, and each were the size of barn doors and lay over one another in ranks going up out of view into the low cloud.
They were a dark green so deep that it only became green at all in the last twenty feet, and each one had a crust of ice on its lower edge, and between them, in the joins, there was moss growing. Actual moss. There was a lichen up there that Sarrenhal did not recognize, and Sarrenhal had named eleven hundred plants.
They noticed the whole surface was moving steadily.
Not quickly. It rose, over about forty seconds, and then it fell, over about fifty, and the movement lifted the snowbank they were standing on by a foot and a half and set it back down.
Oruma put her hand flat against it.
It was warm.
"Right," said Kaveh.
His voice came out wrong and he cleared it and tried again.
"Right. That's — right. That's it. That's the animal." He was breathing hard and grinning in a way that had gone strange at the edges. "That's the animal. That's what we came for."
"Kaveh," said Ysolt.
"No, look. Look. It's asleep." He pointed up with a shaking hand. "It's asleep and it doesn't know we're here, and we will never get another chance like this in our lives, not one of us, not ever. All six. Everything we have, one strike, into the same place. Right here, right now."
"Kaveh."
"Ysolt, say it. Go on. Say the thing." He was laughing. "Say it and then help me, because I have been chasing this for nineteen years and now it is so close I can touch it."
Ysolt looked at the flank going up into the cloud.
"I don't think we should do this," she said.
"Noted."
"I don't think we should do this," she said again, and drew.
---
Six of the strongest living beings on the continent of Aqira hit the same ten square feet of that animal at the same moment.
Kaveh went in first because Kaveh always went in first, and what he did to it would have opened a mountain.
Dagvar went second and drove something through the join between two scales that was designed for exactly that purpose and that he had spent two years and a great deal of money having made.
Sarrenhal did not move at all. His eyes glowed and dozens of giant boulders of ice the size of a house tore themselves from the ground, and started spinning as they sharpened to a point, and shot forward.
Oruma got her shoulder under the edge of a scale and lifted, and she was strong enough to lift it, and she did.
Pell put a hole in it.
Ysolt went in last, as she always did, cleaning up the angles the other five had left.
All six landed.
Every single one of them landed, and they were good solid hits that would've immediately destroyed almost anything they've fought prior.
The dragon, however, didn't seem to notice.
There was no roar. Nothing turned. Nothing rose up.
In the eleven seconds that followed, the only thing that happened was that the vast slow rise-and-fall of the flank in front of them paused very briefly at the top of a breath, the way a sleeping man's breathing catches when a fly lands on him, and then continued.
"It's not—" said Dagvar. "Ysolt, it's not—"
Then it woke up.
The first thing it did was stand.
Two thousand feet of snowbank went down the newly-opened slope in about four seconds.
Sarrenhal stopped the section of the avalanche where he was standing. He was still holding the cup Ysolt had given him at the fire two nights before as the snow came and went around him in two smooth streams like water round a stone. His hands glowed as he heated his drink and took a slow sip while he stood there admiring the beast before him.
Kaveh rode it down about a thousand feet, laughing, and came out of the bottom of it upright and walking.
Oruma went under and dug herself back out while slapping the hard snow off of herself.
Pell simply rose fifty feet and hung there.
Ysolt had been clear before the first crack finished travelling.
They came back together on the newly bared ice with the wind screaming and half a mountain of loose snow still sliding past them on both sides, and for about four seconds all six of them were fine.
Then the head came around.
It came out of the cloud slowly, from a very great height, and it kept coming.
The jaw alone came down past them and kept going, and behind the jaw came a length of skull that took several heartbeats to finish arriving.
The cloud tore open around it the way fog tears around a ship. There were ridges along it that seemed like mountain peaks until they moved.
There was ice in the seams of it, and old snow, and in one place near the back of the jaw there was what was almost certainly once a tree.
And then it stopped, and lowered, and looked at them.
The eye was the size of a lake.
It came to rest perhaps four hundred yards from where the six of them stood, and it took them in. The entire sum of everything six of some of the most powerful people alive on that continent had made of themselves in over hundreds of years combined.
They had expected rage. They had expected, at minimum, interest.
What they got was the expression of a creature who has looked down and found a bug that has bitten it, and is deciding whether it is worth the trouble of getting up.
Dagvar made a small sound.
"Run," said Ysolt.
Nobody ran. There was nowhere to run and every one of them knew it, and in any case Kaveh was already moving.
He went straight at it.
There was nothing else in him to do. He had spent his whole life always fighting stronger foe. It sent a level of thrill through his soul that nothing else in life had ever matched.
These last months and years of his life had driven him mad searching for that same thrill and what he did in the last four seconds of his life was the most thrilling thing he ever did.
He put everything he had into a single ascending strike and he threw it at that eye.
It was magnificent. It was the work of a Tenth Circle mage that knew this attack would be his last, and it crossed four hundred yards in less than a heartbeat and it struck true.
The eye closed.
It closed the way an eye closes when something small comes at it, and then it opened again.
Kaveh's entire life's work had done nothing whatsoever except put a shallow white scratch across a scale on the lid.
"Oh," said Kaveh.
And then the animal breathed in. A long minute the air being sucked from the area into the massive nostrils.
There was no fire.
There was no ice. No element of any kind.
It let out an ear-shattering roar that shook the ground so hard it caused the ice to crack everywhere, and shot out a thick beam of pure mana the width of a nobles estate.
Every living thing leaks mana. That is the first lesson any child gets the year their core closes.
The world is full of it, thin and everywhere, and that a core draws it in slowly and endlessly for as long as its owner lives. It is why cultivation works. It is why a man gets stronger sitting still.
And every child gets the second lesson in the same breath, which is that there is such a thing as too much.
Beast meat carries mana, concentrated, and a man who eats too much of it in one sitting will spend a day in agony while his core and his pathways strain to filter what he has put into them. A man who eats a great deal too much will not recover.
The core is not a cup that can be set down. It is a mouth that cannot close, and it will keep drinking whatever it is put in front of, and it does not have the sense to stop.
The breath of that animal was mana at a density nothing on Nern was built to hold.
It went into them through the one door none of them could shut.
---
Pell died first, and worst, because Pell was the strongest.
She had the largest and deepest core of anyone in the White Silence and it did what a core does, which is take in what is around it, and there was no version of Pell that could have chosen otherwise. She had perhaps a second and a half. Her wings caught the light strangely for a moment and then she popped in a flash of light was gone.
Sarrenhal went next.
Six hundred years of careful, patient, extraordinary work, and he understood exactly what was happening to him — he was almost certainly the only one who did — and he had time to turn toward Ysolt and get one hand up in a gesture that might have been an apology or a warding or simply a reflex, and the ancient elf that coined eleven hundred plants went out of the world.
Kavehs loud delighted laugh, that they could hear even over the dragons roar, ceased as Dagvar and Kaveh went together.
Ysolt of the Ninefold Coast, who had been Ninth Circle for nine years and had quietly stopped trying for the tenth, lasted about four seconds longer then burst into particles of mana.
Oruma was furthest down the slope and she was the last.
She was on her back on bare ice with her core tearing itself apart inside her and no air in her at all. She turned her head, and looked up.
She saw the underside of a jaw, at a very great height, with cloud moving across it. She saw a line of that deep green running back and back and back until it stopped being a shape and disappeared into the clouds.
And she saw the eye.
It was already lifting away. It had gone back up into the cloud and it was turning north again, toward the horizon, toward whatever was over there, and went past her without a second thought.
It had never really been looking at them at all.
Then Oruma was gone too, and the wind came across the slope, carrying with it more snow that covered ice and nothing else.
---
The animal walked north for some hours.
It stopped once, because there was a place where the ice gave onto an old sea and the water there was warmer.
It stood in that for a while. The blood from the wound in its side had already stopped and healed.
Around midnight it lay down again, several hundred miles from where it had started, and did not get up for a considerable time.
Nothing about the day had been unusual for it.
---
The trough it left where it had been lying filled with snow over the following two seasons, and by the spring after that there was nothing there to find at all.
Nobody came. Nobody had known where they were going in any detail, because they had not wanted company and had not wanted the competition, and six people who do not report to anybody do not get reported missing.
In Ashina, a broker who had been promised first refusal on a tooth kept the appointment slot open in his ledger for two years out of superstition, and then ruled a line through it.
And in a hall in the far south a very old man who had taught Kaveh to hold a sword forty years earlier waited for a letter that had always come every winter, and did not come that winter, and did not come the next one either, and eventually stopped setting a place at the table on the solstice without ever once saying out loud why he had stopped.
That was the whole of it.
There is no record anywhere on Nern that any of this happened.