“You deflected most of the fragments, but a few stronger ones broke through your shields. Only a few pierced you; it was the force of the explosion, which I fought to contain, that left you unconscious.”
“The fragments. The sphere. One of the pieces struck me in the arm?”
He knew it was the Crystal Dragon who spoke to him, but still the voice sounded so different from anything he had heard before. What new change had the explosion wrought upon the Dragon King’s personality? “It did not strike your arm. It pierced it, warlock. The wound goes completely through your upper arm. I did what I could, but it will not heal for me. It may never heal, you understand, not completely.”
Never heal. Much the way King Melicard’s face and arm had never healed after the burst of magic that had maimed him. Cabe was aware that his own wound did not even approach the severity of Melicard’s, but he could not help but be more upset by it.
“There are also small scars on your neck. You were very fortunate, warlock. Your skills are impressive.”
Skills? More like pure luck! Cabe pulled his robe askew so that he could study the wound. A jagged, green scar surrounded by red, swollen skin marked the fragment’s passage. With great trepidation, he touched it. The soft touch was still enough to make him grunt in intense pain. Bracing himself, the wounded mage touched the back of the same arm. Again, the pain struck him.
Never heal?
He was still staring at the wound when the Crystal Dragon spoke again. “We are both fortunate, Cabe Bedlam. When the sphere was shattered, the doorway to Nimth was closed, not opened. That was how the device was designed, but there was no true way of testing it except by an occurrence much like this explosion.”
Cabe looked up. His vision had cleared enough so that he could now clearly see the Crystal Dragon. The drake lord looked unmarred, but that did not mean he had not been wounded. More important now was his state of mind. He seemed sane enough . . .
“What happened?”
“I underestimated the wolf raider leader. I underestimated so much. He has wrested control of the mist from me. Before long, he will understand something of how to utilize it. Things go from bad to worse.” The glittering leviathan closed his eyes.
The warlock’s gaze darted back and forth between the massive dragon and the face that stared at him from all directions, but his attention remained on the subject at hand. “What will you do now?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I must do nothing!” The Dragon King’s long, narrowed eyes opened again . . . and was this the first time that Cabe had noticed how crystalline they appeared? They were almost like the insane orbs of Plool. “I dare not! I will not lose myself!”
Cabe’s gaze again drifted to the multiplied countenance covering the walls. This time, however, he studied them closer. Not lose myself, the leviathan had just said. Did that mean what Cabe thought it did?
“Who are you?”
The Crystal Dragon settled back. He seemed almost to welcome the strange question. The huge head turned and indicated the faces. “Once . . . I was him.”
Him. The faces in the visions. The eyes of Plool. The obsession with the foulness of Nimth. It all began to make sense to the warlock.
“You’re a Vraad.” He found he was really not that astonished by the revelation. So much had pointed to it. Yet, if the knowledge that the Crystal Dragon had once worn a human form was not shocking, then the fact that he still lived was. How long had it been since the coming of the Dragon Kings?
“How did it happen? When?”
The dragon’s laugh was harsh and humorless. “By the banner, I no longer even know, warlock! Centuries, yes. Millennia, yes. How many it has been I have forgotten! I have watched generations come and go, live and die! I have seen the rise of the Dragon Kings and I have watched their pitiful decline! The others passed on, but I lived! Ha! Lived? I am fortunate that I have not gone insane!”
The last word echoed throughout the chamber. Cabe stood, careful to avoid stress to his arm. He had to hear. “Tell me.”
“Tell you?” The Crystal Dragon contemplated that. His expression was weary. “Tell you of Logan of the Tezerenee? The dutiful son, one of many sons, to Lord Barakas Tezerenee, he was. Not like Gerrod or Rendel or Lochivan, he was. Logan obeyed blindly as was proper. When the Vraad fled Nimth, he was there to aid his father. When Barakas claimed this land under the dragon banner, Logan was there to enforce that claim.”
Cabe Bedlam listened transfixed as the history of the first Dragon Kings began to unfold before him. The wound was all but forgotten as the time-worn leviathan spoke of the fatal error that had led to his present existence.
“It was the bodies, the bodies his father and Master Zeree and his brothers Gerrod and Rendel had created, created from the stuff of dragons! They were people-shaped, but they were dragons in heart. The spirits, the ka, of the Tezerenee crossed the path of worlds to this one and claimed those bodies. Claimed their own eventual destruction.”
The sorcery-shaped bodies had worked well for the Tezerenee. Most of the other Vraad had crossed over physically, but that door had not been open at the time of the Tezerenees’ crossing. So the folk of the dragon banner truly became dragon men, which served to increase their power and presence among the other refugees.
It was not until a few years later that people, not merely the Tezerenee, began to notice some changes. Their skill in sorcery faded, but even that was not so insurmountable a situation to the Tezerenee, who had always espoused the physical even while they made use of the magical. For a time, it served to make the Vraad more reliant upon the clan. Not enough to accept the rule of Lord Barakas, however. When he sought to take his rightful place, there was resistance. Strong resistance. It was that in the end that forced Lord Barakas to seek a new kingdom overseas.
“They claimed that land.” The Dragon King did not seem to consider how the Tezerenee had made the long crossing from one continent to the other without ships and sorcery important enough to discuss. Recalling what little he had gleaned from Darkhorse over the years, the warlock wondered if this was where the eternal had fallen prey to the Vraad. It might explain the shadow steed’s bitterness and, yes, fear where things relating to Nimth and the Vraad were concerned.
Lord Barakas had evidently expected to fight the Seekers, but the avians’ civilization had collapsed in some war and only a few bands were strong enough to give them trouble. Flushed with success, they conquered the mountain stronghold of the bird folk and took its ancient secrets for their own.
Kivan Grath. Cabe recognized the place from the Dragon King’s description. Kivan Grath, the mountain whose caverns would become the citadel of the Dragon Emperor. Odd how he recalls so much but not how much time has passed. Then again, he may want to recall his humanity, but not how long it has been since he lost it.
As he spoke, the Crystal Dragon seemed to shrink a little. More and more he became a man seeing a horror ahead than a great leviathan who ruled and was feared. With great unease, the warlock noted how the multitude of faces copied the drake lord’s emotions. It was like being surrounded by a thousand tormented ghosts.
“It may be that the land was fearful of them and although it could not destroy the Tezerenee, it made them into its own. Or perhaps the bodies themselves, formed from that which was dragon, at last sought to revert to what they had been meant to be. In the end, all that matters was the changing. First one, then another. No one understood then. No one saw it was happening to all, not merely a few.”
He shuddered, blinked, then looked directly at his human guest with something approaching desperate envy. “I remember the pain that day. I remember screaming as my arms and legs stretched and bent at angles no human appendages had been meant to bend. Do you know what it feels like to sense burgeoning wings squirming beneath the flesh of your back and then having them burst fully formed through your skin? To feel and see your skull reshape itself and then realize that your eyes, too, a
re shifting, changing? To scream and scream again as the transformation tears through armor and sends you crashing to all fours . . .
“. . . and then to know oblivion.”
Cabe, thinking of his own fear of even the minutest shifting of form, swallowed.
The reptilian monarch looked down at the floor. “I recall vague images, the thoughts of a beast struggling to think. How long, I do not know. I only recall that one day I began to think as a man, but I was not myself. I was a creature. I was . . . a dragon. This land was supposed to be my kingdom. Years it would be before I remembered that it had been chosen for me by my father, that all of us had, despite becoming beasts, claimed our particular kingdoms.” His laugh had more than a tinge of bitterness. “I have never known whether he gave me this peninsula because he knew what wonders were here or simply because I was one of the least important of his many sons.”
It was child’s play to seize these caverns. The Quel civilization had been in worse condition than that of the Seekers, disorganized and much too busy trying to devise a method to save their kind to note the danger until it was too late. The self-proclaimed Dragon King explored his new domain and in doing so found a place that the Quel had obviously shunned. There were no signs of recent activity. Nothing but a dark passage before him, a dark passage leading to the mouth of an even darker cavern. His arrogance and curiosity got the better of him. The passage was wide enough to allow him through and so with no reason to retreat, the dragon entered.
“There was no flash of memory, no flood of recollections. I entered the chamber and stalked to the center, fascinated by the glitter. I was not yet what you see before you, although my form had already adapted to my kingdom. Turning about, I studied this place from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall. When I was finished, it came to me that this would make a most proper citadel for such a magnificent leviathan as myself. This chamber, I decided, would be my sanctum.
“And then it was the truth overwhelmed me. Then I recalled who it was I had been.”
Cabe waited, but the Crystal Dragon lowered his head to his breast, as if that distant moment was still too terrible to speak of even now. The warlock suspected he knew what had happened. The images surrounding a startled dragon, images of what he had been. Memories rising from the buried portion of his mind. It would be like awakening from a long, deep slumber, but a slumber whose peace had been shattered at last by a nightmare of untold horror. Only this was a horror that would turn out to be all too real.
“I can only say, warlock,” the Dragon King began again, lifting his head just enough to eye his guest. “I can only say that it was as terrifying as the transformation, which was my last recollection. Now I saw what had become of me. I roared in anger and madness and it would not be exaggerating to say that on that day I put the fear of the Crystal Dragon into all that lived in Legar.” He scratched at the floor with his talons. “Not that I cared. My own fear was all that mattered. I tried to destroy this place, but you can see how well I did. Although it resembles other cavern chambers in this underground world, I think it lives, in a manner of speaking, lives and plots and does what it can to give it purpose. If the Dragonrealm is not a living thing, then it may be that this chamber is what guides the course of our land. Perhapssss it even viessss with the Dragonrealm for powerrrr.”
Cabe tensed, noting the change in the Crystal Dragon’s voice. The human quality in it had given way to the more reptilian sibilance that he was accustomed to from the other Dragon Kings.
Looking more and more exhausted, the drake lord slumped back. The hissing became more pronounced with each breath. “I wasss a man who wasss a beassst, but I knew who I wasss now and so I believed there wasss hope for my humanity. The others mussst have become like me. I decided to summon the other dragons, the onesss I was certain were of the Tezerenee, and bring them into the chamber one at a time. Surely, with all of usss once more knowing who we were, we could work to transform oursssselves back to what we had been.”
It was not to be. He who had once been the Vraad called Logan summoned drake after drake into the chamber, only to find that none of them recalled even the vaguest of memories. One after another disappointment. When the last had been dismissed, he again attempted to tear the place asunder and was again defeated by the power that held the chamber together. He and he alone was evidently the recipient of the crystalline chamber’s great sorcery. He had been chosen; that was the only answer that he could surmise. It would be useless to summon his brothers even assuming he could find them. They would be no different than the poor fools who were now his clan.
Humanity briefly crept back into the Dragon King’s voice. It was as if there were a constant struggle going on between the two sides of his mind. “And so through the millennia, I have remained alone, my mind a man’s and my form a monster’s. The chamber gives much: the ability to view the land all over, power that reaches beyond the borders of my domain, and, most devilish of all, life eternal.” He allowed Cabe time to think of the ramifications of that gift, then resumed, “But it does not give me the power to become the man I once was. Nothing has. If I try to transform, I risk losing control over my very thoughts. All that is left to me is my mind. After so long, that is little consolation, but I will not give it up. I have watched the others give way to generation after generation of heirs, each more of a monster than the lassst. I have watched the rise of humanity, who thinks that it, in turn, inherits from beasts and not from its own ancestors. I have watched . . . and watched . . . and watched.”
A lengthy silence followed. It was a silence that the warlock knew meant the tale was at an end, or at least as much of it as the drake was willing to tell him. There were many questions that Cabe wanted to ask, including whether Shade was one of the Tezerenee and how the Crystal Dragon had kept his immortality secret from his counterparts, even barring his hermitic existence. Perhaps someday he would be told the answers to his questions, but not this day. What he had learned was stunning enough. The Dragonrealm was ever a cornucopia of surprises.
The silence continued without foreseeable end. At last able to stand it no longer, Cabe dared speak. “Your Majesty?”
There was no response from the massive form.
“Your Majesty?” The warlock paused, then shouted, “Logan Tezerenee!”
The Crystal Dragon’s head shot skyward. Blazing, reptilian eyes fixed on the small, defiant figure standing before him. The monarch of Legar hissed. “You have my attention. Make it worth the danger.”
Cabe Bedlam had had enough, however. He took a step closer and retorted, “I don’t fear the danger. If you were anything of a threat, you would be acting against the true problem, the wolf raiders. Instead, you remain here, dwelling on a past that is lost. If you care so little about your existence, then you should have ended it long ago.”
“Beware of how you ssspeak, human!”
“Listen to yourself! Is that a man speaking?”
The glittering behemoth rose to his full height. Even then, the warlock would not back down. He dared not.
“You are purposely trying to annoy me! Why?”
Pointing at the walls, Cabe responded. “You’ve seen what’s out there. You unleashed the fog. Now, instead of bringing down the Aramites, it may become a weapon they can use. You have to do something.”
“The fog will eventually dissipate! It must! It cannot hold itself together, not even if he commands it. The raiders will wipe themselves out trying to conquer this land and that will settle the situation.” He hesitated. “Now leave me . . .” The Dragon King started to turn away. “I must rest.”
Cabe could not recall ever becoming so infuriated with a Dragon King before. The very notion surprised him even now, but he knew that he was nonetheless fast approaching the point where he would lose his temper . . . and then probably his life. There were too many people relying on him, however, for the incensed sorcerer to give up.
“You’ve been hidden away here too long, content with observing thro
ugh this device rather than seeing the world through your own eyes! You’ve become afraid of the outside, afraid of becoming part of the Dragonrealm!”
“You understand nothing!” roared the Crystal Dragon. “You understand nothing! I cannot leave this chamber! If I do so I lose everything! I will become as the others did, as I once was! I will be a creature, a monster, in form and in mind! I will lose myself! And this time it will be forever, I feel it!” The enraged dragon tried to calm himself down. “The sssame it isss if I exert my power too often, asss I nearly did when Ice sssought to end all things with his foul spell! I have rested much since then, but it is still not near enough!
“It almost happened once, when I decided to seek out some of the others and see if they, too, with the aid of this chamber could recall their past. As I started to leave, though, my head began to swim and my thoughts grew beastlike. I only barely made it back here. It was three days before my mind was calm enough to think my bitter experience through. I came to realize that only here was I myself. Only here could I survive intact.”
Intact? Cabe found that debatable. His shoulders slumped in resignation. There would be no alliance with the lord of Legar. Now, Cabe was truly alone unless somehow he could find Darkhorse.
“Then there’s no need for me to remain here,” the warlock stated. He readied himself for the worst. “Am I free to depart or have you told me this fantastic story with the intention of keeping me here?”
The Crystal Dragon no longer seemed even interested in him. He curled up in what was obviously a prelude to slumber. It dismayed Cabe to see what the Dragon King had become. “You were free to go the moment you woke. You are free to go now.”
What are you waiting for? the sorcerer demanded of himself. To his surprise, he tried once more to convince the Dragon King to see his way. “If you would only consider-”
Glittering, inhuman eyes that had been nearly closed widened. A hiss escaped. “I ssssaid leave!”
Legends of the Dragonrealm, Vol. III Page 27
