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“Don’t,” A’ka ordered while she wove red threads into Keon’s chest, “if Alana is screaming, she’s breathing air. More bodies will just strain Auryn’s focus.”
“Did the Gate fail?” Dekka asked.
“No.”
“Then where did shego?” Akoni demanded of me.
“To Homeworld!”
“Are you sure of that?”
“You saying I sent her to Helheim?” I snapped. “I know what I’m doing, andI’m the one doing it!”
Akoni gave me a look of such burning doubt and horror that I had to turn around and not face him. My consorts still didn’t trust that the Queen wasn’t (in some form or fashion) pulling my strings. If Akoni wanted to think I’d opened up a portal into Helheim or some other nightmare world just to punt his mother through, he could go on thinking that. That sort of hamhanded stupidity could hurtle through the cosmos without me.
Eventually, Keon and Hekon stopped coughing, and Alana, Sorren, and Auryn came up the tunnel. Whatever Alana had seen had sucked a couple of years off her life and hairs off her head.
“I’mfine,” she was telling Sorren while he fretted.
She didn’tseemfine. She was still doing that silentI’m not crying, you’re cryingsemi-sob.
Dekka, composed and cool, asked Alana, “Where did you end up? Was it Homeworld?”
“I think so. It was another world. Different stars, so heavy but…” She visibly swallowed, while her tears intensified again. Sorren purred and held her close.
“So the Gate works,” Dekka said.
Alana lifted her head off Sorren’s shoulder. “It was just like Helena said. It opens up… it’s Homeworld…it opens up onto…”
Volcano? Lava pit? Cryovolcano? Magnetic pit? Mass grave?
Her voice became a soft, torn piece of silk. “It’s all destroyed. Homeworld. It’s destroyed.”
Between boutsof despair and near-hysteria, Alana revealed that the Gate opened up onto what looked like it had been an open-air temple complex, with broken columns and cracked rocks. She’d had the presence of mind to turn around and saw that the Gate was in a broken housing of stone, but the leystone itself was obviously intact, and didn’t appear to be in its original location. There had been evidence that the Gate had been rebuilt in the temple complex, and attempts to repair the outer housing.
But the problem was Homeworld itself: it was a wasteland. Vacant. Empty. She hadn’t seen a single living thing. The air had been breathable, but dusty, and everything had been swept with a dark rusty dust. The sky had been low, dark clouds and lightning, there had been no vegetation, and the mountains in the distance had been dark stone. She admitted it had been dark (because of the clouds, and Homeworld’s star wasn’t as bright as Earth’s), and hadn’t been able to get a good look in the distance in the twilight, but that there had definitely not beenanythingresembling civilization or life.
In the stunned silence, I picked up the banner of State the Obvious. “Homeworld lost the war.”
Saying it sent a shudder through all our magic.
It wasn’t like no one had contemplated the possibility that Homeworld had lost the war, or that the war would be ongoing. There’d been contingencies if Homeworld didn’t answer or refused to come. There’d been acknowledgement of the risk that contacting Homeworld might lure predators to Earth.
Except that’s the thing. You can think those things. You can contemplate them. You can list them under possible outcomes. But you’re never actuallyreallyprepared for the moment ofthey’re all dead, it’s all gone.
There’s a difference between Homeworld not answering at all, andknowingyou’re all that’s left. In one version, there’s a hundred different reasons why they might not answer. While being forgotten or ditched was no one’s idea of a good time, it wasn’t the same asMom got into a car accident on the way to pick you up, and no one is ever coming, ever.The Earth dragons had always thought of themselves as castaways, waiting patiently for a magnetar to traverse so they could call for rescue.
Genocide and razing a planet seemed senseless. What had provokedthatlevel of horror?
If all the dragons had been like Immoalen and his crew, that would have made sense. But the Homeworld dragons weren’t the scourge of the cosmos stealing kidneys and leaving your body on a park bench.
Akoni said, “I want to go through.”
Hekon tilted his head, sending his bells tinkling softly. “Your mother was a machine dragon before you. I’d trust her understanding of what she saw.”
Akoni glared at the Wyrm. “I trust it too, but I want to see Homeworld.”
I didn’t dare saysame. My consorts might think it was the Queen talking. Not that you could have dragged the Queen back to Homeworld for all the coffee in Seattle.
