The old man nodded with satisfaction. “And so, how can one survive in a world in which there are so many variables to these goals that many strive for?”
His student smiled, took a quick breath, and answered the question she knew had been coming. “The only thing that you can do is try to maintain a balance. Do not actively seek out these goals, but know that each of these goals can aid each other. If you can conquer those that oppose you, you will gain power over those who have heard of your deeds. If you do so in an honorable manner, or in a manner in which the greater good is benefited, many will see the valor of your deed, and come to respect, and even love, you for your power. Also, being able to obtain the love and respect of the people will lower the number of those willing to oppose you. Eventually, when you are around, places will be exceedingly peaceful, and if your enemies do decide to attack you, they will be seen as the aggressors, and many will not blame your presence for bringing the attack. On the contrary, since you were there, you were able to stop the enemy in time. There will always be those that doubt your motives, or even doubt you, but you must remember the mob rule. The mob is the rule. If the majority is with you, the rest will follow. You must strike hard when needed, and be fair when needed. Hoard your money to increase your standing, but distribute that which you don't need, to those that truly need it. In other words, always remember to strive for greatness, but never forget that those around and below you, are truly the ones that make achieving that goal possible.”
He had tested her on all of this before, but the fact that she remembered all of which he had taught her after so many years made him all the more proud of his pupil. “Very good, not quite as long of a speech as I would have gave, but you summed everything up rather nicely.”
“Do you think that he will remember the lessons that I taught him?” She asked that distant look once again dominating her features.
“Tyrdralyn, listen to me.” Seeing her eyebrow quirk at him he corrected himself. “Forgive me, old names die hard for me, would you prefer Tyrdra, or your newest name Shaylyn?”
“As far as the world is concerned Tyrdra has finally died. Shaylyn is the name I use now, and will use until the day I die.” At the end of this comment both of them visibly cringed, for when they were dragons, death was a far off concept, unless you died from violence, or now, the Dracairian tainted blood. Unfortunately the humanoid races had become increasingly hostile, and they had to change to be able to insure the survival of their blood, and that of the world.
“Shaylyn, you were given the most important time in the boy's life to insure that he would turn out as well as can be expected. From all that you have told me, Victor is an exceptional boy, and though he may forget the specifics of his childhood lessons, his identity as a person will be developed around those very lessons. I am led to believe that it is quite likely that he will have a trying time ahead of him, and we can only hope that the lessons he has learned from you will shine through in the end. It does no good to fret about it though. We are not allowed to influence events over the next dozen years if we wish to catch them off their guard. The best we can do is prepare for the time to come, and hope that he is there in the end to fight with us. Already there are new players that were not foreseen by the ancients, and there is no telling how they will affect the outcome. It is all terribly frustrating, and yet it is also quite interesting to watch how the boy influences those around him.” The old man looked at his apprentice and smiled tiredly. “I would not have believed how much he could influence people, had I not seen his effect on you.”
Shaylyn looked at her long time friend, and teacher. “What do you mean?”
“Before you left those of us that remained thirty years ago, you were all business. You had everything planned out and organized exactly. There wasn't anything that could get in between you and our goals. Then, you raise Victor, and now you can think of nothing else than to be by his side. I would think that it could possibly just be a maternal urge to protect the boy, but I believe it is something different.” He watched her stiffen at this comment, and he knew that he had hit a nerve, so he continued on. “I think that you don't feel the need to protect him. I think that you want to fight beside him, so that he can protect you.”
“Protect me from what?”
“From everything. From nothing. The boy brings out the inner fire that is inside those around him, and intensifies it to his purpose. He has recognized your strength and the benefit of your presence, but he has also recognized something that many others would miss. Even though you are a powerful mystic, and there are many who quake at your mere presence, you are still just a woman now, as I am now just a man now. No matter how strong anyone becomes, or how powerful the forces at their command, it all comes down to the fact that we are mere mortals now. No matter what, we may never be able to do anything to change that fact, we have chosen our path. Everything lives, and everything dies. He has willed you to need to be with him, and your mind has no objections. You feel safer around him even though his life is rife with danger. He has turned your basic need, and your morals into a driving force for his goals.”
“Randoleon” She said using the name he had taken on when he had taken his new form. He had waited until every other dragon that was going to undergo the change had done so, or died trying, before he made the change himself, as was his right. “You cannot truly believe that! Victor would never twist someone's will!” Shaylyn was near to a rage, and were it anyone besides the man in front of her, they would have been on their feet and back as far as the room allowed, had they any sense.
So pervasive was the aura of power radiating off of the Half-Elven woman sitting at the table that even Randoleon had to hold himself in his chair to contain his own broiling power that reflexively raised up in his defense. A few moments passed before he raised his hands in a calming gesture. “My dear, I never meant to suggest that the boy was conscious of his effect on people, but nonetheless from what I have seen, it is what he does. This may be the true power that the ancients saw in this boy's life, but we may never know for sure. The text is hard to translate, and even we, the oldest race currently surviving on the planet cannot translate the language that the texts are written in, with any true accuracy. We may be completely wrong in our translations. I believe that we have translated enough correctly to achieve a limited understanding of what is to happen, but we can never be completely sure if we are correct.” He pointed to the tome that was lying open on the table. “See here, from the way this translates, it says, His power will be an influence on the lives of many. Are we to take that to mean that his deeds, and special abilities are going to influence the lives of many, or that he actually has a power to influence the events, and actions in the lives of many?”
Visibly calming Shaylyn became even more thoughtful. “There are so many statements in here that could be taken many ways though. I had never truly considered the meaning of that sentence, but I had thought of many others. Now that you point that one out though, it brings a few more phrases to mind that would be changed by the meaning of this one sentence.” She began flipping pages, and became thoroughly engrossed in the tome, and Randoleon smiled to himself.
That's the mind I know and have grown to respect. I only wish that this new line of thought could keep you distracted long enough for this ordeal to be over. Maybe you will find something in there that the few of us that have made those tombs a life work, have not been able to. Randoleon moved away from the table and went to go observe the events that were transpiring far away. He hated being so far removed from the world, but he knew it was best for now, he hoped it was best for now.
Chapter 9
A Different Direction
Year 3043 AGD
Month: Preparation
Night of the Third Third Day
Continent of Terroval
Twenty five miles north of Safeharbor
Shawnrik's Camp(or Ashur's if you asked him)
Watching the moonlight filter through
the branches of the copse of trees the two veteran warriors thoughts turned towards the future. Occasionally they would turn their attention towards the mound on the opposite side of the fire and watch it rise and recede as the young man within slept contently. It was this young man that occupied most of their thoughts this night, as he would for the nights to come for quite some time.
Ashur saw in Shawnrik, a younger more innocent version of himself, and he swore he would teach the boy everything he knew so that the boy's life would be easier to survive than his own had been. He kept telling himself these lies, but he knew deep inside that this boy would see things that Ashur wouldn't even want to comprehend. That realization in particular was why he was more relieved than surprised when Dunnagan had decided to teach the boy as well.
Ashur looked at the old Dwarf across from him with a look of respect that can only be seen on the face of men who have gone to hell and back together. Dunnagan was loud, he was a habitual complainer, and he could fight like a whirlwind while singing a dirge without missing a note, in short, he was a quintessential Dwarf. The old Dwarf hailed from the Deepvein Clan in the Shattered hills to the Northeast. Dunnagan was amongst the smallest members of his clan, yet average size, or even large, when compared to a Dwarf from any of the other continents.
The Mountain Dwarves on the continent of Terroval, especially the Deepvein Clan and the Skyshatter Clan, were said to literally have the blood of the mountains flowing through their veins. Most of these Dwarves were by no means short, and anyone who has ever seen a dwarf that is six feet tall knows that they are at least twice as thick as any human blacksmith. There's an old Stroml'dier saying that a man might fair better standing under a rock slide than facing a group of charging Mountain Dwarves.
Few could have predicted what would happen when the blood of the dragon was mixed with that of the Dwarves. Those female Dwarves that got pregnant by the Newcomers rarely survived giving birth. The children they had grew quickly however, and produced children of their own at a pace that had never before been seen in Dwarven society. Not only were the children quicker to mature, but having twins or even triplets was not an uncommon occurrence. Many of the females of the next generation died as well, and it wasn't long before they discovered the cause was the children themselves. Some reaction in the old Dwarven blood would create a poison with effects similar to mercury poisoning, and the mothers would waste away quickly if there were no clerics around to disperse the poison.
So it was that those first few generations had more children than the Dwarven people had seen in twenty generations combined. The oldest among them mumbled about curses, or demon spawn until they began to notice how much stronger and faster, both physically and mentally, these children were. They tried to teach the children the same way as they had taught their young for tens of thousands of years, but the children were learning so quickly that it was no longer feasible. Soon they began to know things before they had been taught, as if remembering from a previous life. This phenomenon had spread, to a lesser degree, throughout the other races that the Dragons had decided to live among. It didn't take long for the men to greatly outnumber the women, so there were long periods where there would be no births, until the next generation matured, and then there would be a lot of births all at once. This trend continued for five generations(Which ended up at half as long as they used to be, so one hundred years between generations instead of two hundred), at which point most of the female's physiology had changed enough to survive their pregnancies. The only women left at this point over a hundred were the ones that had never married, or were unable to have children, and the female Newcomers who assumed Dwarven form that didn't have any issues giving birth.
Seven hundred and fifty years after the Newcomers had come to live among them their population was surging like no Dwarven civilization had in history. Dwarves were the longest living humanoid race on the planet, and the life cycle of a dwarf had often been compared to that of a volcano. They both come into the world making as much of a commotion as they could. Both cooled down gradually over time, before suddenly erupting to the surprise of everything around, and then just when you thought they were getting ready to quiet down for good they became more dangerous than ever before burning out spectacularly.
It was not long after the Dwarven population hit numbers that no one ever expected that the warning came about the coming danger. Many of the older Dwarves chose to fight or ignore the warning when the Newcomers told them they should hide below ground. What came to pass was hard for everyone, but especially so for the Dwarven people. Five thousand of their oldest and mightiest left three times that number in the caves below what was then South Harbor in order to face the coming storm, beside those that had come to their aid a thousand years prior.
Few know any of the actual details about what happened to those that stayed above ground, but the time below ground thinking about it changed many irrevocably. A yearning came upon some of them, a longing that had never before been known to the Dwarven people, a need to see the open sky. The few remaining elders conferred and led their people into the newly formed Shattered Hills once the city of Safeharbor was secure. They had hoped that being among the mountains, among their own people would suppress the urges that some of the younger generations were feeling. For some it seemed to work, they once again began to hear the call of the earth, and moved deep within the mountains as Dwarves had done since time immemorial.
For every Dwarf that went back to live inside the mountains however there were three who could no longer stand the confining embrace of the earth. Of those that stayed above ground there were many who found themselves stretching their hands to the skies above them. For the first time ever Dwarven children began to imitate birds, running through the hills, arms outstretched, feeling the wind whip through their hair. This play brought the children a familiar contentment, yet also a deep sadness when they once again realized that they were bound to the earth.
One Dwarf, who noticed not only these feeling, but also the increased activity on the border to the east decided that the best way to deal with both problems would be to put the younger generations to work. From these thoughts came the Wardens, a border patrol well trained in hit and run tactics. In the beginning this force was made up completely by Dwarves, but over the course of the organization's life, many other races had been accepted into the fold. It began with orphans who had no other place to go, and before they knew it they had people knocking on their doors asking to join. Seeing a kinship with many of these people who just wanted to feel like they had done something useful with their life, few were turned away. Soon, they became an official military branch of the Protectorate, only answerable to the office of the High Commander.
It was from within the ranks that Dunnagan had been produced. His mother and father had both been Wardens, and he himself had been on the path to be inducted into their brotherhood. What happened instead was something few could have foreseen. His training platoon had been coming through the area when their forward scouts noticed increased movement from a particularly nasty tribe of Orcs called the Crimson Flight. They arrived at the settlement the Flight was heading towards with barely enough time to place a few minor defenses before the attack began. For half a day they repelled nearly two hundred Orcs, five times their own numbers, from the settlements walls. Nearly half of his platoon was wounded, oversized arrow shafts sticking out of many, and they had only taken perhaps fifty of their enemy out of action. There appeared to be two dead, and another had bled so much that Dunnagan didn't know how she was still conscious. Things didn't look good for them, and the Crimson Flight knew it. Even though they had lost many in their attacks, they could feel victory at hand and this drove many of them into a bloodlust that their leaders were not willing to attempt to restrain. It was as the Orcs were preparing for their final push that the path of Dunnagan's life would change forever, as he began a prayer for the souls of those with him, and the people they were trying to protect.
&nb
sp; The reports of what happened next are now legend amongst the Wardens. One human, who is long dead now, described a bright light that began to emanate from Dunnagan, and the air seemed to crackle with energy as the light grew brighter. He said that the light began to radiate off of him as he finished his prayer and hefted his axe. The whole world went white in a blinding flash, and when the man's sight was restored he saw Dunnagan racing across the battlefield yelling that the Orcs would only come closer over his dead body. His first thought had been that it was a brave, yet futile gesture, but it would be an honorable death. The man had said he could hear some of the orcs laughing, right before the ground erupted below their feet.
There were a few on the field that knew what was happening however, and even they could not believe their eyes, mainly because only moments before several of them had been near death, and one of them had been dead. It is said that if a person has a strong enough bond with their deity, they have the ability to bring the dead back to life. The spirit must still yearn for life, but there was nothing that those dead Dwarves wanted more than to heft their axes and get back into the battle, so the effort wasn't as draining as it could have been. Everyone who was in sight of the walls looked around in amazement, as where there had been gashes, cuts, and bruises only moments before there was now unmarked skin. All eyes were drawn to the battlefield as the first pillar of flame appeared outside the walls. The pillar of cleansing fire erupted within the ranks of the Orcs that were the most lost in their bloodlust, the next two pillars replaced any remaining bloodlust with fear. Those that were unaffected by the pillars of flame either ran for the hills, or died at the axe of a Dwarf deep within the thrall of a God's power. It was all over in moments, Dunnagan looked around the battlefield, the Orcs that remained were on their knees crying and looking at him as if he were Ragnos given form. For a second he was confused as to how exactly he had gotten so far from the wall. He turned to see his platoon and many of the townspeople on the wall looking in his direction, when the last few minutes flashed through his head with crystal clarity. A silent prayer of thanks was all that he managed before the world went black.
Victor Deus (Heritage of the Blood Book 1) Page 18
