Alakyer
| Type | Mountain |
|---|---|
| Notable sites | The mountain's mouth, the core, the summit ledge |
| Notable inhabitants | Dragons, Nelazgians |
| Status | Its dragons hunted and cleansed by Obellius Kalaar |
| First appearance | Sacred 2: Flames of the Awakened |
Alakyer is the highest peak in Eslura. Its core is where the dragons come from and the only place hot enough for them to break out of their shells, which the troll Vendalis explains to Barnaby Britto when she asks him to carry an egg there.[1] Barnaby, who had seen the maps, knew that Alakyer and its core lay on the road he was already taking.[1]
The mountain
Alakyer stands in a mountain range that rises out of the Meadow of Aezaros and runs down to the sea. Piercio told Barnaby that the only way to reach Morgaedion from the meadow is up and over, and Alpin Loomin worked out afterwards that going around would have meant a long trek back.[1][2]
The climb begins where the grass of the meadow turns to stone. The lower path is gentle and winding, lined with wildflowers and tall pines, and a florahorse may be seen moving off the beaten track between the trunks. Higher up the dirt gives way to a rugged, uneven scatter of rock, and higher still the snow begins.[1]
Crossing during high moon season is what Vendalis calls a fool's errand. Storms blow up over the peaks with little warning and swallow everything in a swirling haze of white, deep enough to bury a gopher to the shoulders and blinding enough that a climber cannot tell which way is up. Vendalis knitted the party coats, a scarf and hat for a toad, and a pair of spiked boots before she let them go on.[1][3]
There are no signposts above the treeline, only landmarks passed from one traveller to another: a naked pine shaped like a Y, a frozen stream whose bridge is riddled with gopher sized holes, and finally the dragon sign.[3]
Eslura's highest peak is a byword for coldness. Aero Ellisvat told Reagan Hideaway that Tabitha Glowdish's heart is as cold as it.[4]
Vendalis's house
A single storey house stands high on the mountainside. Its main room holds a table, a kitchen and a great fire in an alcove at the back, with a closed door behind it to the troll's sleeping quarters. Vendalis lives there alone with a gully, her walls hung with portraits she paints herself, dried plants and utensils hanging from the wooden ceiling and knick-knacks and worn books over every surface. She goes by the keeper of the cliffs, and by that purple troll up there in the mountain, and answers to either.[1]
The mountain's mouth
The entrance to the core is a cave mouth on the mountainside, nearly hidden by snowdrifts and blending into the landscape. A chipped and worn painted wooden sign, the dragon sign, sticks up out of the ground in front of it. Inside, icicles hang jagged from the roof, snow blows across the floor in small twisters, and crows pick at the remains of an animal long since dead. It is as cold inside the mouth as outside it. Three paths run on from it deeper into the rock, and nothing distinguishes one from another.[3] Barnaby found the right one by watching Vendalis's egg: it shook harder at each entrance in turn, and nearly jumped out of its cart at the last.[3]
The core
The correct path runs down through rising heat until it opens onto a rocky ledge several storeys above the floor of an enormous cavern. Barnaby guessed the space to be about the size of the whole city of Ovallia. At the base a large magma pool gurgles and bursts with the occasional gas geyser, and a tunnel opens at ground level.[3]
Dragons return to the core, and eggs hatch by being tipped into the lava, which melts the shell and frees the dragon inside.[3][5]
The summit ledge
Outside the core, at the summit, a ledge overlooks a stretch of water and Cape Heladria, with the prison island of Morgaedion far on the other side. The drop is sheer. Barnaby, who had never thought himself afraid of heights, found the top of the floating city of Galecrest minuscule beside it and the craggy climb down no better than a staircase to an open grave.[2]
Inhabitants
Nobody governs Alakyer. Vendalis is the only settled resident the books name, and she found the egg she asked Barnaby to carry while scavenging for food in a lull in the storm; its mother had died on her way back inside the mountain and two of the clutch had already been lost.[1]
By the time Barnaby reached the core, Obellius Kalaar had made it a working site. Two Nelazgians in obsidian armour held three grown dragons in cages there and had orders to capture any dragon that made its way back to the core and bring it to him for cleansing. Piercio supposed that this was why the mother dragon had left the core with her eggs in the first place.[3][5]
Notable events
- A blizzard drove Barnaby Britto, Alpin Loomin, Piercio and Mauz to Vendalis's door. She fed them, and Barnaby agreed to haul her surviving dragon egg to the core in a spiked wooden wagon she had been building before her leg went bad.[1][3]
- From the ledge above the core the party watched Obellius empty three caged dragons of something, bottle it, and raise them again with black eyes. The act is covered at Dragon Cleansing.[5]
- Piercio was thrown at the goons as a distraction while Barnaby tipped the egg into the lava. The dragon that came out of it, later named Egras, swept both Nelazgians off their feet and flung their armour across the core.[5]
- Egras carried Barnaby, Alpin, Piercio and Mauz off the summit ledge and down to the beach at Morgaedion.[2]
Behind the scenes
Alakyer is not lettered on the map of Eslura, and the pronunciation guide in Sacred: Eslura's Calling does not list it. The guide in Sacred 2: Flames of the Awakened adds it at the end of the places, given as Al-uh-cure.[6][7]