"Elizabeth Haydon - Rhapsody 5 - Elegy for a Lost Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haydon Elizabeth)

see it. By night it mixed with the hot haze coming off the ground and,
caught by the wind, wafted aloft, blending with the low-hanging clouds.
Finally came the eruption.
Waves of shock rolled through the earth as if it were the sea, waves that
intensified, growing stronger. The earth began to move, to rise in some
places, shifting in its underground strata.
Then, with a terrifying lunge, it ripped apart.
The rumbling beneath the surface suddenly took on movement. It
started outside of Ylorc but traveled quickly. It was heading north.
Unerringly, determinedly north, toward the icy land of the Hintervold.
All along the eastern rim of the mountains, then westward across the
plains, a movement within the ground could be felt, a shifting so violent
that it sent aftershocks through the countryside, uprooting trees and
splitting crevasses into the sides of rolling hills, causing children miles
away to wake in the night, shaking with fear.
Their mothers held them close, soothing them. "It's nothing, little one,"
they said, or uttered some similar words in whatever language they were
accustomed to speaking. "The ground trembles from time to time, but it
will settle and go quiet again. See? It is gone already. There is nothing to
fear."
And then it was gone.
The children nestled their heads against their mother's shoulders, their
eyes bright in the darkness, knowing on some level that the shivering they
had felt was more than the ripples of movement in the crust of the world.
Someone listening closely enough might sense, beyond the trembling
passage, a deeper answer from below the ground.
Much deeper below.
As if the earth itself was listening.
Deep within her tomb of charred earth, the dragon had felt the aftershocks
of the explosion of the mountain peak.
Her awareness, dormant for years, hummed with slight static, just
enough to tickle the edges of her unconscious mind, which had hibernated
since her internment in the grave of melted stone and fire ash in the ancient
Moot.
At first the sensation nauseated her and she fought it off numbly,
struggling to sink back into the peaceful oblivion of deathlike sleep. Then,
when oblivion refused to return, she began to grow fearful, disoriented in
a body she didn't remember.
After a few moments the fear turned to dread, then deepened into
terror.
As the whispers of alarm rippled over her skin it unsettled the ground
around her grave, causing slight waves of shock to reverberate through
the earth around and above her. She distantly sensed the presence of the
coterie of Firbolg guards from Ylorc, the mountainous realm that
bordered the grave, who had come to investigate the tremors, but was too
disoriented to know what they were.
And then they were gone, leaving her mind even more confused.
The dragon roiled in her sepulcher of scorched earth, shifting from side
to side, infinitesimally. She did not have enough control of her conscious
thought to move more than she could inhale, and her breath, long stilled