THE DARKEST ROAD by Guy Gavriel Kay

This was it. This crystalline, shimmering Dragon of the Lake was the power of Calor Diman. It was the heart of the Dwarves, their soul and their secret, which she and Loren had now been allowed to see. A fact, she was grimly aware, that made their deaths doubly certain if Kaen should prevail in what was coming.

She forced her mind from that thought. All around her everyone else, including Loren, had knelt. She did not. Not clearly understanding the impulse that kept her on her feet—pride, but more than that—she met the shining eyes of the Crystal Dragon as they fell upon her, and she met them with respect but as an equal.

It was hard, though. The Dragon was unimaginably beautiful. Creature of mountain meadow and the icy depths of mountain waters, it glittered, almost translucent in the starlight, rising from the agitated waves high above the kneeling figures of the two Dwarves on the banks of Calor Diman.

Then it spread its wings, and Kimberly cried aloud in wonder and awe, for the wings of the Dragon dazzled and shone with a myriad of colors like gems in infinite variety, a play of light in the meadow bowl of night. She almost did sink to her knees then, but again something kept her on her feet, watching, her heart aching.

The Dragon did not fly. It held itself suspended, half within the water, half rising from it. Then it opened its mouth, and flame burst forth, flame without smoke, like the torches on the walls within the mountain; blue-white flame, through which the stars could still be seen.

The fire died. The Dragon’s wings were still. A silence, cold and absolute, like the silence that might have lain at the very beginning of time, wrapped the meadow. Kim saw one of the Dragon’s claws slowly emerge, glittering, from the water. There was something clutched in its grasp. Something the Crystal Dragon suddenly tossed, with what seemed to her to be contemptuous disdain, on the grass by the Lake.

She saw what it was.

“No,” she breathed, the sound torn from her like flesh from a wound. Discarded on the grass, glinting, lay a miniature crafting of a crystal dragon.

“Wait!” Loren whispered sharply, rising to his feet. He touched her hand. “Look.”

Even as she watched, she saw the Dragon of Calor Diman raise a second claw, holding a second object. And this was a cauldron, of shining, scintillant beauty, and this object too the Dragon threw away, to lie sparkling on the blue-green grass.

She didn’t understand. She looked at Loren. There was a curious light in his eyes.

He said, “Look again, Kim. Look closely.”

She turned back. Saw Matt and Kaen kneeling by the Lake. Saw the Dragon shining above them. Saw stars, subsiding waves, dark mountain crags. Saw a crystal cauldron tumbled on the grass and a small crafted dragon lying beside it.

Saw that the dragon discarded there was not the one Matt had just offered to the Lake.

And in that moment, as hope blazed in her like the Dragon’s blue-white fire, Kim saw something else come up from Calor Diman. A tiny creature exploded from the water, furiously beating wings holding it aloft. A creature that now shone more brilliantly than it ever had before, with eyes that dazzled in the night, no longer dark and lifeless.

It was the heart’s crafting Matt had offered, given life by the Lake. Which had accepted his gift.

There was a flurry of motion. Kaen scrambled forward on his knees. He reclaimed his cauldron. Rose to his feet, holding it outstretched beseechingly. “No!” he pleaded. “Wait!”

He had time for nothing more. Time ended for him. In that high place of beauty which was so much more than that, power suddenly made manifest its presence for a moment only, but a moment was enough. The Dragon of the Lake, the guardian of the Dwarves, opened its mouth, and flame roared forth a second time.

Not up into the mountain air, not for warning or display. The Dragonfire struck Kaen of Banir Lok where he stood, arms extended, offering his rejected gift again, and it incinerated him, consumed him utterly. For one horrifying instant Kim saw his body writhing within the translucent flame, and then he was gone. There was nothing left at all, not even the cauldron he had made. The blue-white fire died, and when it did Matt Sören was kneeling alone, in the stunned silence of aftermath, by the shore of the Lake.