Dust of Dreams

eyes. Y’ can’t freck on an’ on thinkin’ th’world won’t push back. It’ll push awright. Till the shore breaks an’ breaks it will an’ when it does, we ever do drown. I saw dust, Pully, but it wasn’t no puffy earth. T’was specks a bone an’ skin an’ dreams an’ motes a surprise, hah! We’s so freckered, sister, it’s all we can do is laughter an prance into the sea.’
    ‘Goo’ anough fra me,’ Pully grumbled. ‘I got so many aches I might be the def’nition a ache irrself.’
    The two Shake witches—the last left alive, as they were soon to learn—set out for the village.
     
    Take a scintillating, flaring arm of the sun’s fire, give it form, a life of its own, and upon the faint cooling of the apparition, a man such as Rud Elalle might emerge, blinking with innocence, unaware that all he touched could well explode into destructive flames—had he been of such mind. And to teach, to guide him into adulthood, the singular aversion remained:
no matter what you do, do not awaken him to his anger.
    Sometimes, Udinaas had come to realize, potential was a force best avoided, for the potential he sensed in his son was not a thing for celebration.
    No doubt every father felt that flash of blinding, burning truth—the moment when he sensed his son’s imminent domination, be it physical or something less overtly violent in its promise. Or perhaps such a thing was in fact rare, conjured from the specific. After all, not every father’s son could veer into the shape of a dragon. Not every father’s son held the dawn’s golden immanence in his eyes.
    Rud Elalle’s gentle innocence was a soft cloak hiding a monstrous nature, and that was an unavoidable fact, the burning script of his son’s blood. Silchas Ruin had spoken to that, with knowing, with the pained truth in his face. The ripening harvest of the Eleint, a fecund brutality that sought only to appease itself—that saw the world (any world, every world) as a feeding ground, and the promise of satisfaction waited in the bloated glut of power.
    Rare the blood-fouled who managed to overcome that innate megalomania.
‘Ah, Udinaas,’
Silchas Ruin had said.
‘My brother, perhaps, Anomander. Osserc? Maybe, maybe not. There was a Bonecaster, once . . . and a Soletaken Jaghut. A handful of others—when the Eleint blood within them was thinner—and that is why I have hope for Rud Elalle, Udinaas. He is third-generation—did he not clash with his mother’s will?’
    Well, it was said that he had.
    Udinaas rubbed his face. He glanced again at the tusk-framed hut, wondering if he should march inside, put an end to that parley right now. Silchas Ruin, after all, had not included himself among those who had mastered their Draconeanblood. A sliver of honesty from the White Crow, plucked from that wound of humility, no doubt. It was all that was holding Udinaas back.
    Crouched beside him, shrouded by gusts of smoke from the hearth, Onrack released a long sigh that whistled from his nostrils—break a nose enough times and every breath was tortured music. At least it was so with this warrior. ‘He will take him, I think.’
    Udinaas nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
    ‘I am . . . confused, my friend. That you would permit this . . . meeting. That you would excuse yourself and so provide no counter to the Tiste Andii’s invitation. That hut, Udinaas, may be a place filled with lies. What is to stop the White Crow from offering your son the sweet sip of terrible power?’
    There was genuine worry in Onrack’s tone, deserving more than bludgeoning silence. Udinaas rubbed again at his face, unable to determine which was the more insensate: his features or his hands; and wondering why an answer seemed to important to him. ‘I have walked in the realm of Starvald Demelain, Onrack. Among the bones of countless dead dragons. At the gate itself, the corpses were heaped like glitter flies along a window sill.’
    ‘If it is indeed in the nature of the Eleint to lust for self-destruction,’ ventured Onrack, ‘would it not be better to guide Rud away from such a flaw?’
    ‘I doubt that would work,’ Udinaas said. ‘Can you turn nature aside, Onrack? Every season the salmon return from the seas and heave their dying bodies upstream, to find where they were born. Ancient tenag leave the herds to die amid the bones of kin. Bhederin migrate into the heart of the plains every summer, and return to forest fringes every