as it waned. Thana Lilvia, the vast wind fury that came sweeping down off the Sea of Ice and over the Calderon Valley, was making a show of force today, gathering her herds as usual near her husband. Flashes of lightning in wildly varying colors lashed constantly through the clouds, and even from miles away, Tavi could see the gliding, looping, sinister forms of windmanes, windmanes by the score, prowling the mountain's slopes.
A low thread of fear ran down Tavi's throat, and he swallowed it as manfully as he could. He had seen windmanes kill, and it had been terrifying. But for a stroke of good luck, they would have torn him to shreds as they had that luckless deer.
He ground his teeth. He didn't need to be rehashing his life's closest calls. He needed to be focused on the enemy behind him, a being more dangerous than a cohort of windmanes. He checked over his shoulder. The vord Queen had closed his lead to a scant two hundred yards or so.
Tavi plunged into the thunderclouds gathered at Garados's summit and let out a quick bark of mocking laughter.
A pulse of anger strong enough to destroy worlds flashed through the mist, and Tavi winced at the intensity of it. That wrath belonged to the vord Queen, and was being directed entirely at him. He banked left and reduced his speed, aware that the mountain was near but not sure of its precise location.
He almost found it with the end of his nose. The grey mist occluded the frosty grey stone of the mountaintop near perfectly, and Tavi had to shift course frantically to keep from smashing against it. He avoided disaster, steadied himself, and settled down to light gently upon a slope near the mountain's peak, crouching. The vord Queen's windstream roared on by. She had apparently lost track of him in the mist.
Tavi waited for a moment, but nothing happened. He stomped on the rocky ground beneath him a few times. Then he jumped up and down, feeling exceptionally foolish.
If that didn't provoke the enormous fury, he wasn't sure what would.
Without warning, the vord Queen's voice called through the mist, disassociated from any particular direction. "Where are you, Father?"
Tavi blurred the obvious direction of his own voice with a windcrafting over his mouth. "Why do you keep calling me that?"
"Because your blood gave me birth. Yours and that of my mother."
"So that was you," Tavi said. "You were the thing Doroga dropped that big rock on."
The Queen's voice buzzed with steely undertones. "Yes."
"Grampa Doroga," Tavi mused. "I am not your father. It means more than blood."
"You are close," the Queen said, her words clipped and sharp. "For all practical purposes, it is a fact."
The stone beneath Tavi's feet quivered. He focused some of his attention downward. Though Garados was deadly dangerous, it was not swift. He should be able to leap clear if he was paying attention.
"Not quite," Tavi said. "If I were your father, you'd be the heir to the Realm."
"I am already the heir of this Realm, and after that, this world," came her answer, from the mist. "All that is left is for you" - her voice suddenly changed, coming from immediately behind him - "is to die."
He spun and barely got his sword up in time. Steel rang on steel, and again sparks bellowed forth in a thundercloud of their own, illuminating the mist around them with flashes of red, blue, and green light.
Her speed was incredible. Even without furycrafting, the vord Queen moved with blinding swiftness. Tavi had drawn upon all the windcraft he could to expand his perceptions, and it was barely enough to allow him to defend himself. Similarly, her strength was unbelievable, easily greater than a large Cane's, and Tavi found himself forced to draw strength from the earth simply in order to meet her attacks with enough power to stop them.
In retrospect, he thought, it probably wasn't one of his most insightful tactical decisions.
Within seconds of Tavi's drawing upon the earth for strength, the mountain was wrenched with a spectacular thundercrack of sound, so loud that it knocked both Tavi and the vord from their feet. In front of Tavi's widening eyes, the peak of the mountain abruptly split, a sudden crack running from the summit down to Tavi and beyond him. Within a heartbeat, the crack had widened, with rock and stone grinding and screaming. Tavi rolled rapidly to one side, an instant before the crack - well on