by Martha Woods
The Dragon’s Legacy
(Prequel To The Dragon Prince Series)
Martha Woods
Contents
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1. Alza
2. Melina
3. Alza
4. Melina
5. Alza
Epilogue
FREEBIE
© 2019 Romance Books 4 U
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Alza
It was a golden summer evening. The soft light permeating the shimmering treetops, their leaves rustling rhythmically in the warm, gentle breeze. The scent of earth, of nature, rose softly up from the ground, a beautiful, indescribable thing.
I felt myself welling with emotion, in a way that I secretly hoped no one would see.
I was overwhelmed. Not only by the beauty of the scene, but the fact of sharing it with the small, innocent life at my side. Ynder, my child, paced along beside me, still a boy, but already displaying subtle signs of the man I knew he would one day become. A man, I hoped, would take after his father's own image, but who would inherit only the best of him. Leaving behind his weaknesses, his doubts, and his uncertainties. Uncertainties, I realized, I had never felt before. Doubts and weaknesses I had never known before when I was young, but which had arisen late in my life. Only when the little one beside me had come into existence. He and his two brothers, Fri and Nol.
The three of them were my treasures. Far greater was my love for them than for this entire kingdom that would one day be theirs to inherit, as deep and as permeating as it had always been.
If you had asked me, when I was the age that Ynder was now, reaching for low branches as he walked and snapping them casually off along the way, I told you that no pride I experienced could eclipse that which I felt for this land, and what it represented. The pride of the Protectors. One of the last vestiges of dragonkind in all the world, fortified against the human race, and their antagonism toward us.
Once, I would have done anything to protect it, and that was still true today.
But the bravado of youth had since been tempered, altered from the state it had once taken. I wasn't so bold as I once might have been. My fury at the thought of these woods being taken, stolen away from me, was diluted by the love I had for my boys. For the world they had become, eclipsing the one I had known before them, and taking its place.
Them, and their poor departed mother, god rest her soul.
Andra, the love of my life. Along with the blessings she bestowed upon me before her untimely passing.
There wasn't a day that I didn't mourn for her, and yet I was as thankful, with each new morning, for the time I'd been granted to spend with her. I was endlessly grateful, for the blessings she had given me in her time. For our three boys.
I missed her like a limb, like some sacred part of me I might never recover.
But I had never stopped being strong for her, for our children, or for our kingdom.
Sometimes, on nights like tonight, when the dying light was just right, and the breezes blew just so, I would see traces of her in them. In their gestures. Their mannerisms. Ynder's jet black hair and gleaming golden eyes.
We used to walk out here together, she and I. And though I had never confided this to the boys whenever we would spend this time together, it was meaningful to me beyond words to be able to relive those carefree hours with them. To still have some small part of her with me, even if, these days, such stolen hours were anything but carefree...
I sighed, and placed my hand on Ynder's shoulder, patting him affectionately, then tussling his hair. He gave me a kind of look, the sort that a boy his age tended to give his affectionate father. A look of mild annoyance, of longsuffering with my antics, yet clearly unable to suppress a smile all the same.
“Don't,” he said, brushing my hand away after a few seconds, and then straightening out his mussed black hair, as though there were anyone out here he might need to impress.
I smiled at this. Thinking of how very like me he was at this age. We shared an ego, a sense of importance, and I wondered if he knew– but how could he know?– that his arrival in my life had been the very thing to strip me of that ego. That once this joy in my life existed, it became paramount for me, to do everything I could to ensure the very best possible life for him. And this pursuit, I quickly learned, left very little room for my ego to abound.
“This will all be yours someday,” I said, thinking I must have said it a thousand times before now, though he didn't seem annoyed by the fact.
“Some day,” he said, a little uncertainly. “But...”
He trailed off, seeming to be lost in thought, troubled by something. I waited patiently, then placed my hand gently on his shoulder. “What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“No, it's okay. Tell me what's on your mind,” I insisted.
He stared off into the distance for a moment, as though he, himself, was still trying to decipher what was on his mind. Then he looked up at me, his eyes only occasionally meeting mine directly, flitting frequently off to one side as he spoke.
“It's just... When it is mine... That means it won't be yours anymore. Which– which means that you won't be here, either...”
He looked away altogether after he'd finished saying this, kicking at a clump of undergrowth. I frowned, realizing that I hadn't been thinking.
Of my three sons, Ynder had taken the loss of their mother the hardest, and these days the specter of death never seemed to stray too far from his mind. Not to mention, the recent political climate, the tensions between our people and the faction known as the Dark Ones, made the future seem, at times, highly uncertain. I wouldn't have dared to admit this, but sometimes I wondered myself how honest I was being, when I told my son that this land would one day be his.
It was something I told myself I believed. That it would be true as long as I believed it, and that the day I began losing that conviction, would also be the day it all started slipping away from me.
A luxury that I simply could not afford...
I sighed, smiled, and shook my head, trying to reassure him.
“No, son. You don't need to worry about that. I'm going to be here for a long, long time. I'll be here to take care of you and your brothers until you're all grown up, until I've made sure you're strong and able to look after yourselves. Then, guess what? You'll be able to take care of me when I'm old! Doesn't that sound fun?”
To my relief, this broke a smile across Ynder's face, and he shook his head.
“No!” he laughed, as though he couldn't believe that I might seriously consider that fun for him.
“Well, okay... You can be king and I'll have Nol take care of me. Give me baths, wipe my wrinkly old butt for me... He'll love that, don't you think?”
“Yeah, I bet!” said Ynder, the tension a
ll but diffused now. Nol, though the youngest of my boys, was easily the most rebellious, and least inclined to do what was asked of him. The thought of him being willing to spend his adult life looking after his old decrepit father was inherently funny to both of us, and soon we both found that we couldn't stop laughing.
I tried to think of something else I might say. One last bit of reassurance to give my eldest boy. But the moment seemed too perfect now, the dying light making our faces barely visible, but the white of our eyes and teeth seeming to cast a spectral glow in the encroaching darkness.
“Come here, son,” I decided to say instead, and pulled my boy into my arms, holding him close. I was surprised he allowed me, for at least a few seconds. I wanted to tell him I loved him, but I felt like I'd already gotten too saccharine on him, and anything more syrupy at that point would be sure to give him diabetes.
Sure enough, he pulled himself away from me as I was still enjoying the beating his little heart up against my belly, and I decided that I'd better not press my luck with him any further than I'd done.
“It's getting dark,” I observed.
“No shit,” he mouthed, and I couldn't help but laugh.
“Language!” I said, still smiling.
“Sorry,” he said, whipping a fallen branch casually up against a tree trunk, splitting it in two.
“What do you say we head back in? Get something to eat?”
“Yeah, I'm starving,” he said, and we started out toward home.
We hadn't gone far before I smelled what I thought was smoke, and I could see what appeared to be emerald flames far off in the distance.
“Shit...” I muttered under my breath, and Ynder looked up at me, like, Why do you get to say it and I don't?
All of the sudden I heard the sound of footsteps racing toward me, and a voice calling out frantically across the night:
“Sir! Sir! Alza! King Alza, sir! Thank god you're here!”
A figure emerged through the blackness, running wildly toward me, his wide eyes shining in the moonlight. It was Esir, one of my closest assistants and confidantes, out of breath by the time he drew near.
“Esir! Are you alright? Jesus, what happened?!”
“It's the Dark Ones... They're starting to get crazy! They were holding a meeting, and some of the men and I broke them up, tried to chase them down, but... Oh, you've just got to see!”
He started off in the direction from which he'd come, clearly expecting me to follow his lead, though I hesitated a moment before finding the motivation to do so.
I looked down at Ynder, so small and so helpless at my side. The grounding force in my life, those eyes the only thing I saw whenever I was about to consider doing something rash or foolish.
“Dad?” he said, confused, like he couldn't understand why I hadn't already followed after my companion.
I thought for a moment, reasoned that Esir wouldn't be asking me to follow him with Ynder by my side, if there was any immediate danger still to be feared. And so I drew my boy close to me, gripping his shoulder more firmly than before, so as to impress upon him the seriousness of obeying.
“Stay by my side,” I told him, and Ynder nodded, as though it was something he didn't even need to be told– in that regard, anyway, I was grateful it was my eldest by my side, rather than, say, Nol the rebel.
The two of us hurried along, Ynder keeping pace with me even as my footsteps bounded across the undergrowth.
Soon the two of us emerged onto a clearing, Esir standing in the center of it.
“See?! God, it's a horrible!”
I did see, and it was horrible.
Instinctively I shoved Ynder behind me, as much for protection, as for the desire to keep him seeing what I was seeing. There was no real use to this, however, as he just as easily poked his head around to the other side of me, and managed to see anyway.
“God damn it,” I muttered under my breath, staring at the ugliness of it all, trying not to let it overwhelm me.
A number of signs lay abandoned across the clearing, some posted on the trees, some set ablaze by both gold and emerald flame.
They read:
“Man is Menace”
“Humanity is Inhuman”
“Wreckers Get Wrecked”
“Bow to the Dark Ones”
“Ryl is Our Only King”
“Mankind Shall Burn”
“Die, Wreckers!”
“Masters of Mankind”
“No More Hiding”
Etc., etc., etc.
They appeared to be written in blood...
I looked around at the burning woods, the signs of struggle between my men and the dragon supremacists, our multicolored flames slowly consuming the very world over which they fought.
Then, at the center of it all, what appeared to be a body. Lifted high up in the air, strung from the trees, its form crackling with bright green flames.
“Is that...?” I asked in horror, dreading the answer.
“No,” said Esir, sounding as relieved as I was by his answer. “We thought it was, at first. An actual human. But no. No, it's just an effigy. For now, it's just an effigy. But you know it's on their minds. You know, as soon as Ryl feels confident enough in his support, it'll be the next step...”
“God damn it,” I sighed, thinking I had never hated anyone in my life with a fraction of what I felt toward Ryl, leader of the Dark Ones. “And... And the signs. Whose blood are they written in, or do you know?”
“We have no idea,” said Esir, shaking his head. “Might just be animal blood. Or it might be... Not animal blood... We plan to scour the woods once we get the fire put out, see if there are any bodies. Some of the men are still trying to chase after the Dark Ones who were meeting here, and the rest have gone back to the kingdom to fetch water, to try and get this put out before it spreads.”
“Good, that's good,” I said, trying to think a million steps ahead, but struggling to process the awfulness of it all, and the sense of an impending doom, whose progress I was consistently failing to slow down. “Ryl,” I said, finally returning my focus to the man at the center of all this. “Was he here? Did you see him? Did you catch him?”
I already supsected the answer to this latter question.
“We aren't sure,” said Esir. “Things got crazy fast once our men showed up to ruin the party. I didn't see him, and I don't know that anyone else did. We think they've been gathering more and more frequently these days, and it wouldn't be unusual for Ryl not to attend except during the most important meetings. He knows he's a wanted man, and that his movement depends on his ability to remain both seen and unseen, wherever and whenever he wants to be.”
I snarled, hands curling into fists.
I had been grappling for months with the problem of what to do about Ryl and his growing waves of support. There seemed to be no good option. The traitors' heads could not be turned from the hateful ideology of anti-human sentiment that Ryl had sown among them, which was now spreading among their ranks like some infectious disease. And it certainly didn't appear to be a situation which could be solved by violence, either– enough of my men were buying the garbage he was selling them that the Kingdom might fall apart if I tried to war against the Dark Ones, generally. It would be nothing short of civil war for me to even think about trying it.
No... It was Ryl himself. Ryl, that bastard, was at the root of all this. And somehow, some way, I needed to find him. I needed to track him down and put a stop to all of this, before I allowed it to go any further.
“Dad?” I heard a small voice suddenly calling to me. I'd been trembling with anger, and I looked down, taken aback, suddenly remembering that Ynder now stood beside me, looking terrified for all his tough guy bravado.
“Could you get him out of here, back to the castle? Make sure he's safe,” I ordered Esir.
“Yes, sir. The other boys have already been taken care of, shut in their rooms. Nol was thrilled about that, I'm sure you can imagine...”
> “Go with Esir,” I told Ynder.
“Dad?” he said again, seeming genuinely terrified.
“It'll be alright,” I told him. “Just go with Esir, he'll keep you safe. I'll be back soon. It'll be alright. I need to stay here and have a look around. Make sure we aren't missing anything.”
Ynder looked wholly skeptical, but he'd never been one to argue with me. He nodded, piped out a quiet little, “Be careful,” and was ushered off by Esir's side.
I watched them go, staring after until they were both obscured by the haze of darkness. Then I turned back to the scene at hand, struggling to figure out what the hell I was going to do about this mess.
I stared for a long time up at the human mannequin suspended from the treetops.
My eyes watered from the flame and the smoke, and, though I tried not to admit it to myself, from the emotion of the scene.
How could this hatred exist in the world?
How could I have allowed this animosity to flourish within the boundaries of my own kingdom?
And what if, I couldn't help but ask myself– what if, on some, perverse level, the Dark Ones were right?
I shuddered at the thought, but the question had to be asked.
I harbored no hatred toward the human race, and I would denounce to my dying breath the use of violence against them.
But, the simple fact could not be denied, had they not spent decades, centuries, practicing violence against us? Had their brutal ways not driven our people to the precipice of extinction, sent us all into hiding, into an existence where we could never be our true selves?
And as a king, had I failed my people in devising some solution to this oppression?
What solution was there, I wondered? It was true, our race was inherently more powerful than theirs– just as, say, a bear, or a lion, or a great white shark, could easily tear a human being to shreds. One on one, there was simply no comparison between a dragon and a man.
