by Jean Rabe
“She’s killing him,” Feril cried. “By all the gods, she’s killing him!”
A determined Ragh picked up the scroll again, seeing that the words were faint but still legible. He hurried to the lakeshore, wading in, dead fish swirling all around him, reaching and searching for something. “There!” Cradling the scroll under his right arm, he pulled out a scale the size of a small shield. “Hope this is one of Sable’s,” he said to Feril, who had rushed to join him. “Don’t have time to be sure.”
Then he was out of the water and rushing to the base of the skull totem where he scooped up a few trinkets Feril hadn’t destroyed. He spread them on the scale and said a quick prayer to any god that would listen. Then, reading from the scroll, remembering everything Obelia had whispered to him before, he held the scale.
Feril knelt at his side. “Do you know what you are doing, Ragh? If he becomes human now, she’ll kill him instantly. Is that what you…”
Ragh shook his head, reading faster. Feril took Obelia’s part, adding her voice to his and directing all of her inner magic into the shield-shaped scale.
All around them the swamp roiled and shook. Sable and Dhamon plunged into the canopy then rose again. The ground shuddered. The creatures of Sable’s territory—the natural and the perversely transformed— wailed their panic.
“Now,” Ragh said, whispering urgently.
Together, he and Feril, with an effort that depleted all their remaining strength, smashed at the scale, breaking it. They looked skyward.
Dhamon slammed into Sable, giving her a jolt that sent her tumbling end over end toward the lake. She opened her wings in the last instant and hovered. Dhamon, bleeding from dozens of wounds, struck her again, diving forcefully into her from above, with all his weight slamming her down under the water.
The water exploded, steam blasted forth, and the air filled with sulfur. All the remaining creatures of the lake popped, floating and bloated, to the surface. The grass that rimmed the bank receded and turned brown, and the trees lining the shore died.
Ragh and Feril backed away from the lake as a great bubble formed, then erupted, with Dhamon and Sable soaring skyward one last time. Blood and scales dripped from the two dragons. The sky turned the color of dark blood.
It may have been hours or minutes that the two dragons fought on. Sable was the larger, but now seemingly the weaker. Her movements had become slow and jerky, and she had to exert herself merely to stay aloft.
Once, it appeared to Ragh and Feril, she tried to slip away, but Dhamon clamped his jaws on her throat and slashed at her underbelly. His tail twisted around hers to grip her tightly as his wings beat furiously to keep both of them in the air. His wings looked like battered sails, shredded in places. Still, he fought on.
Blood and scales rained down. The world was filled with horrible noise and the poisoned breath and hideous screams of dragons. Sable hissed and spat, twisting and contorting, trying every means of staving off Dhamon.
Feril clutched Ragh’s hand. “They are killing each other.”
“Pray,” Ragh answered. “We can only watch and pray.”
Lunitari and Nuitari were starting to rise above the canopy.
Sable screamed deafeningly, lashing out one last desperate time. Then she and Dhamon, clutching each other violently, plummeted into the lake. They fell into the shallows, with the overlord’s body cushioning Dhamon’s fall.
Ragh and Feril stumbled toward the two dragons as they twitched slowly, almost automatically unraveling from each other. The Overlord bore hundreds of slash marks that glistened with blood in the moonlight. The draconian and the Kagonesti waded out into the water to meet the one crawling wearily onto the bank.
“Dead,” Dhamon pronounced, his eyes dazed. “Sable will corrupt nothing again.” Blood dripped from his teeth and jaws. His lower lip hung loose and a great gash across the side of his head spilled thick blood into the water.
Feril climbed onto his snout and peered with concern into his massive eyes. “Dhamon, you are magnificent. A dragon like no other. Ragh and I know how to work the spell now! With scales from Sable we can make you human!”
He shook his head, nearly unseating her.
“No!” she wailed, her trembling fingers moving over the small scales around his eyes.
Ragh saw in the same instant that his friend was mortally wounded. His black blood continued to spill into the lake, his breathing growing shallower.
“I can heal you!” Feril searched for the spark inside. Quickly the warmth rushed from her chest and down her arms, into her fingers. “Be strong. Be well….”
Dhamon looked long and hard at her. She briefly caught an image in his huge eyes. It was a face she well remembered from long ago—all angular and handsome with wheat-blond hair and sparkling eyes. Then the great dragon eyes closed as a last wisp of gray lacy breath escaped from his nostrils.
“By all the gods, no!” Feril cried in anguish and anger. “No! By Habbakuk’s grace, no!”
Ragh tugged her down and held her, his own tears streaming down his face and onto her shoulder.
25
They left Sable’s corpse to rot in the shallows of the lake. By dawn, the giant alligators that had survived the dragons’ battle had returned to feast on the slain overlord.
“Dhamon knew it would take his life, going against Sable,” Ragh said ruefully. “There was nothing you or I could have done to save him once it had begun. He didn’t fear dying that way. Better than living, cursed as a dragon.”
Feril was pale and weak from weeping. Her chest ached as she knelt on the marshy loam and spoke to the land, coaxing it into creating a deep depression and swallowing up the dragon that had been Dhamon Grimwulf. His grave was far from the Overlord’s carcass, yet still in sight of the foul water. Not Dhamon’s favorite place, but it would have to do.
Another Lake of Death for Krynn, Feril told herself.
The sun would touch the grave in the morning, but the trees that rose above it would shade it and keep it cool during the hottest days. Fitting, Ragh thought, that most of the time Dhamon’s grave would lie in shadow.
“If I hadn’t been Sable’s puppet…” Feril began.
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” Ragh interrupted her. “Sable would have found another way to slay Dhamon. It was fate. He understood that. Nobody can blame you. I was little help to him in the end, too.”
Ragh helped tamp down the ground, then stood back as Feril urged the vines to rise up and shroud the massive grave. The sivak bowed his head for several minutes, then went off alone into the trees. When he returned some time later, Feril was sitting on the grave, fingers deep in the earth, her lips still moving.
He waited for her to finish whatever spell or prayer she was invoking. His own throat was dry, his chest tight with anguish. He’d never had a true friend before, so the loss was profound for him. Even breathing seemed an effort.
When she looked up and their eyes met, he held up what he’d found. It was a small chokeberry bush, the kind Dhamon had always favored, and now, with Feril’s help, he planted it at the head of his friend’s grave. Feril used her magic to strengthen its roots.
“I loved him,” the elf said simply, feeling surprised at her own words. “I don’t know if I ever told him that.”
“You didn’t have to. He knew,” the sivak answered, equally surprised that the elf was confiding in him, “and he loved you with all of his being. You were the one thing he left the swamp for; you were always in his mind.”
“He’ll always be here,” she said, pointing at her heart and then her head.
The sivak nodded. “A good man, my friend Dhamon.”
They stayed at the grave until the sun set and the two moons rose over the lake. They spoke little, only a few sad words. They left when the night birds took flight and the great horned owls went off in search of prey.
“Where are you headed?” Feril asked tentatively. “Do you want to come along with me?”
“
What, looking for those Qualinesti elves who left the forest?”
She nodded. “Looking for an old elf woman named Elalage. I need to tell her about her brother Obelia. He, too, was a friend of Dhamon’s, to the end.” She stared up at Ragh, her eyes still misty. “Who knows? We might stick together. I’m sure you’ve got some stories to tell that’ll pass the time, and I’ve got some to tell you about Dhamon in the old days, too.”
Dhamon Grimwulf, cursed to live as a shadow dragon, yearns for his lost humanity. His quest for its recovery takes him from the depths of the dragon overlord Sable's swamp to the shores of ruined, flooded Qualinost. Along the way, he is reunited with Feril, a Kagonesti druid he once loved fiercely. The search becomes perilous for all involved, and the goal, if attainable, hinges on what lies at the very bottom of the massive, mysterious Lake of Death.
