If it's not too much of a spoiler, could someone in the know explain the meaning of the title "The Beating of the Aquiline Heart?" It's bothered me since I've seen it, and I can't decipher it. Aquiline means "like an eagle" or "like an eagle's beak." I can't find any other definition, and I can't conceptualize how a heart could be eaglelike (physically or metaphorically).
Any ideas? Pretty please?
Well, this involves spoilers.... but here's part of the WotBS intro:
In primordial times, an ancient spirit of elemental fire known as the Flamebringer Dragon battled the spirit of air, the Stormchaser Eagle. The dragon tore out the eagle’s heart and drank her blood, gaining immense power and ensuring the strength of his draconic progeny. But the spirits of sea and stone sensed the dragon’s growing might, and the dragon knew that if he consumed the heart and slew the eagle fully, the other two spirits would unite to destroy him. So the dragon hid the still beating heart in a place to which he could never return, preferring to live rather than risk death by seeking more power.
Buried beyond the sight of any creature, the heart’s blood pulsed into the roots of the world, nourishing it and fostering life above and below the surface. Ages marked the world, and as civilization rose, rumors of this font of life spread throughout the lands that would become Ragesia and its neighbors. Spellcasters could sense its power, and the power-hungry and the desperate sought it out, but only the scantest clues hinted at its location, or at the dangers that awaited those who found it.
The Aquiline Heart passed into legend, becoming a symbol of the unattainable.
Then two people found it. Where many had tried before, a young sorceror named Leska and her lover, the fey Etinifi, discovered the path to the heart in a desert of white stones called the Opaline Wastes. A lifeless land, where time flows like an erratic wind, the wastes long attracted seekers, but ancient shamans and warriors had devoted themselves to hiding the heart. The shamans erected colossal arcane totems to conceal the heart’s resting place, and to ensure that only those who truly needed the heart to avoid death could find it, while their warriors slew unworthy trespassers.
Leska and Etinifi, however, had been sentenced to death by the aging Ragesian emperor Drakus Coaltongue, who had offered them reprieve if they found him the secret of immortality. Of course others had found the trail to the heart too, but only Leska had the strength to defeat the dangers on the path and claim the prize. She drank the heart’s blood, achieved immortality, and in a fit of patriotism she would later regret, brought back a vial of the heart’s blood for Coaltongue.
