Chapter 1046 — Waking from a Great Dream
Blade of Dawn · Page 4 of 4
Yet that conclusion was still not enough to deduce the true situation in Tarrond.
Gao Qi frowned, speculating about what had happened in the far north, when at that very moment a special Magic Net terminal beside Hedy's desk suddenly sounded an alarm.
Every gaze in the room snapped to the machine that was emitting sound and flashing light.
This was the special direct line of the Empire's Grand Consuls—it only sounded when a special major event occurred at some border, or when the other two Grand Consuls made an emergency contact with the Imperial Capital.
"Connect it," Gao Cen said to Hedy as he walked toward the desk.
Hedy quickly connected the communication terminal, and amid the flickering and rising of a holographic projection, the figure of Victoria Wilde appeared before Gao Yang and Hedy.
"Your Majesty, and Grand Consul Hedy," said the Ice and Snow Duchess, her expression unusually grave, speaking hurriedly the moment the connection was established, "the Eternal Storm has vanished."
For a moment Hetty did not even react: "...What did you say?"
"The Eternal Storm has vanished," Victoria repeated with great patience. "That is—the colossal storm over the northern seas. The final visual observation this morning has confirmed it: the wall of cloud the storm had formed is now utterly gone, and the monitoring station near Northport further confirms that the magical currents in both the ocean and the atmosphere are shifting."
At this she fixed her gaze on Gao Yang, her tone graver than ever before: "Your Majesty, beyond the borders we know, something else may well be unfolding in this world."
Yet Gao Yang did not answer Victoria at once. He merely lifted his head as if by instinct, his eyes snapping to the large map hung upon the nearby wall—to its northern reaches.
…
When the great sun of the polar day once again swept past the lowest point of the horizon and slowly climbed to a third of the way up the sky, a sea wind blew across the lands of Agondor, carrying the tang of salt and the scent of smoke and dust away into the distance.
Metzen Pernia woke from deep slumber with the sense that she had dreamed a very long, very strange, very bizarre, and very terrible dream.
In that dream she had been armed into a bloodless, tearless engine of war for the Uiqa, opposing with an iron will an enemy far harder to overcome than any natural calamity; in that dream, the god she had once both revered and feared had become a ruinous catastrophe, sweeping across the land and devouring all things; in that dream she had watched magnificent Agondor split and crumble, the soaring walls and towers of the Council's palaces toppling from the mountain's peak to lie in ruins together with the ancient, crowded districts of lower Tarondel below, and the dragon nest she had tended with such care for tens of thousands of years had collapsed along with the mountain itself, everything within it burning fiercely in the flames...
She drifted and sank through that dream, yet could not wake, nor think freely, as though her spirit had been frozen in a block of murky amber—able only to watch it all flow past before her eyes with cold indifference, her mind as dead as a corpse, stirring not a ripple.
But suddenly she heard the howling of the wind, and felt the chill sweeping across the land.
Amid the ruins of Agondor, the scarred blue dragon opened her eyes.
"...What the...?!?!"
The dream was real.jpg.
(End of this chapter)