The Dragons

by Doug Niles

  He was about to dive toward the exit cave when Auricus pulled him up with a word. “Sire, can we not prepare for this battle with spells?”

  “Yes!” he agreed, chagrined at his own impetuous speed. “But not for battle but for escape.” Aurican spiraled tightly, thinking. “Those of you who have learned the haste spell, cast it upon yourselves.”

  He knew this would allow most of the golds and silvers to fly with great speed. The patriarch cast his own spells of haste on Dazzall and Krayn, giving the two largest brass wyrmlings the advantage of magical swiftness.

  “I will cast mine upon Tharn,” little Agon said, startling the copper with the abrupt enchantment, then turning to face Aurican’s scowl. “Should we not see that two of each color, a male and female, have the best chance to escape?”

  “And my spell goes to Horim!” Arjen agreed, enchanting the copper female before she knew what was happening.

  “A good thought, my brave wyrmling,” Aurican agreed, powerfully moved by the crippled silver’s sacrifice. Brunt and Dwyll, the largest male and female bronzes, were also enchanted with the spell of speed. “Now fly to the Valley of Paladine and beyond!”

  In moments, Aurican burst out of the entry tunnel in a golden explosion of speed. The sun blazed in a cloudless sky, and the shimmering brightness of daylight seemed an incongruous contrast to the darkness in his heart, the grief and shame that would be the legacy of their flight.

  And there was Deathfyre, poised above the entry, already sweeping into a reckless dive. Two crimson females flew close at his sides. Other flecks of color appeared in the sky, widely scattered over the High Kharolis, and Aurican immediately understood the reason: Only the trio of reds had been able to teleport with accuracy, since the other serpents had formed their destination based only on Deathfyre’s descriptions. Still, a pair of blues plunged swiftly toward the valley, and more spots of color appeared in the near distance.

  Aurican’s mouth gaped wide and fire spewed forth. The three reds flew through the flames, breathing infernos of their own. Golden claws reached out, tearing a crimson wing, and one of the females shrilled a cry of pain and fury. Aurican felt talons rending his own flank and knew that Deathfyre had whirled around to attack from behind. The mighty gold flipped and twisted, slashing down at the other female but unable to reach the tenacious foe clinging to his back.

  “Get the rest!” cried Deathfyre, in a shrill tone of command, and Aurican knew that his nestlings had flown into view. “Kill them all!”

  “Fly, my wyrmlings, for the Platinum Father. Escape and live to gain vengeance!” Aurican roared.

  Then there was a shape of black wings, like a monstrous, snake-limbed bat, poised before him, and a blast of acid seared the golden scales of Aurican’s chest. He groaned, an involuntary explosion of pain, and then felt his body pummeled by another smashing blow. Dazed, he wheeled in the sky, vaguely surprised by the sudden silence that seemed to have descended. He felt no pain, merely a gentle serenity. Only when the scent of ozone stung his nostrils did he realize he had been struck by the lightning of a mighty blue.

  Frost and fire blossomed around him, and the serpent writhed in renewed efforts to escape, to fight. His fiery breath seared a black, but more lightning hissed into his flanks, ripping away his wings, gouging deep into his ancient flesh. A cloud of noxious gas swirled as a green dragon dived past, and Aurican’s desperate thrash tore at an emerald-colored wing, shredding the membrane and sending the wyrm spiraling into a doomed descent. Once more he breathed, the great fireball engulfing several blues and a screaming white.

  But then more power, another barrage of deadly dragonbreath came together with lightning and fire and cold. For a moment, Aurican’s struggling body was lost in a cloud of murky sky.

  And then that murk closed in, darkening his vision, finally seeping through the pain to draw a final curtain across his life.

  Chapter 25

  A Valley of Corpses

  2693 PC

  Deathfyre turned into a reckless dive, shocked at the speed with which several of the young wyrmlings were fleeing the deep valley. He had expected the creatures to fight to the death and had not anticipated the desperate flight that drove them toward the high ridges. Clearly the cowardly serpents intended to escape.

  Now the powerful red twisted in the air, seeing that many of the metal dragons had in fact remained to do battle. Other wyrms swept above, and he saw a blue dragon shriek and writhe in the clutch of several silvers and a brass. A red pulled through the melee, rearing its head to blast a desperately maneuvering bronze from the sky. Recovering his own equilibrium, stabilizing himself on his powerful wings, Deathfyre curved through the air, still looking for victims.

  The memory of Crematia’s death was a fire within him, a driving force for vengeance. Her loss was not a cause for grief—there was a clear advantage that came to Deathfyre, heir to the Dark Queen’s empire—but it was a wrong that called for revenge.

  Deathfyre wheeled to pursue the fleeing dragons, but he saw several silver shapes slashing toward him, and his instincts compelled him to protect himself. Though all of them were small, they flew with deadly purpose.

  Twisting like a corkscrew in the air, Deathfyre whipped his neck toward the enemy attackers. Jaws gaping, he belched a cloud of roaring flame, a billowing fireball of death that wrapped two of the silver shapes in its killing embrace.

  Pushing down with hard strokes of his wings, Deathfyre fought for altitude, trying to avoid the scorched bodies that would tumble out of the dissipating ball of fire—but there were no bodies! The remaining silver serpent curled around, and the red barely pulled his wing out of the way of a vicious blast of frost. He saw that this young silver was a cripple, that its rear legs were weak and shriveled, but that did nothing to tame the deadliness of its breath weapon. Deathfyre tumbled backward, out of control, with a burning pain of ice freezing his tail.

  At the same time, he knew how the crippled silver had eluded him. It had been the simple spell of the mirror image, an enchantment Deathfyre himself had known since his first hundred winters. Yet when it was used against him, the simple trick had fooled him completely. There had been only one silver dragon, not three, and his lethal fire had been wasted against a pair of magical impostors!

  Infuriated, he swept after the silver as that gleaming serpent flew close to the ground, carving a wide arc back toward the battle raging in the skies. Some of the wyrmlings had escaped, aided by magical speed, but most of the brood had remained to fight. This silver newt was small, little more than half of Deathfyre’s awesome length, but he proved to be a surprisingly fast flier. The withering of his body clearly did not extend to his wings. Straining to the limit, Deathfyre found that he could close the distance only gradually. Finally he breathed, spewing a hellish cloud of fire that surrounded the impudent silver for a searing, fatal instant. The red dragon was already wheeling away as the wrinkled, charred carcass tumbled from the sky.

  Clouds of dragons whirled through the sky overhead. A young bronze tumbled, horribly slashed, while blues and blacks caught a pair of coppers in a deadly crossfire of acid and lightning. Fire and smoke drifted through the air, and flashes of flame and clouds of green and noxious gas added a surreal beauty to the scene.

  And still more chromatic dragons winged toward the fight, with vengeful challenges ringing through the air before them. Several greens dived from the heights, sweeping toward the smoldering patch of sky, and a wedge of whites, laboring hard to gain altitude, winged speedily closer, their pale, serpentine forms standing out clearly against the mountainous landscape to the north.

  Another metal dragon, this one a golden female, plunged downward, writhing and shrieking in pain. As the pathetic creature tumbled past, Deathfyre saw that her entire face had been burned away by a blast of black dragon acid. Another gold, this one a larger male, roared in and torched one of the blacks with a breath of fireball, but then the gilded wyrm was forced to flee for his life as the other blacks
whirled about in furious pursuit.

  Then suddenly the skies were empty of Paladine’s dragons. A few of the metal serpents had buzzed over the high ridges, scattering away from the mountain valley. They fled in full panic, knowing their clan had been decimated, and for now the chromatic dragons let them go.

  Looking down, Deathfyre saw dragons of every color lying in the ghastly stillness of death. The battle had littered the valley floor with corpses, great shapes scattered like bright scars on the ground itself. Here a blue wing twitched, or there a copper tail lashed back and forth, but for the most part the serpents on the valley floor were utterly and irrevocably slain. Even from this height, the awful wounds inflicted by breath and fang and claw were clearly visible, leaving great rends in the scaly bodies.

  And central to this killing ground was the mighty golden serpent, Aurican. It pleased Deathfyre to know that not only had the mighty patriarch perished, but also that fewer than a dozen of the metal dragons had escaped the carnage. The few that had fled were no threat for now. They would be hunted down and killed at his leisure.

  His mother’s teachings, the words of Takhisis herself, came to Deathfyre in a clear flash: Find your strongest enemy and kill him.…

  Now, with the dragons of Paladine defeated, he knew where that enemy lay. The power of magic still screened Silvanost, and it was time to reduce that stronghold.

  There would be time for the metal wyrmlings later.

  Chapter 26

  Exiled

  2693 PC

  The surviving nestmates gathered in a dark, marble-walled gorge in the tangle of the Kharolis foothills. There were but ten of them, young dragons of metal who had departed the grotto in desperate, magically enhanced haste, with memories of violence and death licking at their heels.

  Callak and Auricus were the last to land, after insuring that the evil dragons made no pursuit. The pair had circled for a long time over the Kharolis Mountains while the others tucked their wings and dived to the shelter of the secluded gorge. They all understood that there would be no returning to their ancient lair. Once on the ground, the remaining dragons of the Platinum Father could only huddle miserably together for warmth and comfort.

  “Aurican is dead,” Auric whispered, his voice numb with disbelief. “He died so that we could live.”

  “He was so wise, so mighty,” wailed Blythe, the golden female who now coiled dejectedly beside Auricus. “How will we survive without him?”

  “And so many of our nestmates …” Dazzall said numbly. “I saw Flash perish after he tore the wings from a blue.”

  “And Agon,” Daria said, her voice catching. “He led that mighty red away from me … from all of us.”

  “Ten dragons of metal … we are all that remain.” It was Callak who called for the attention of the others. He nodded his silver head sadly, reflecting on the brothers and sisters they all had lost.

  “Are we safe here?” asked Daria, the only other silver to remain alive.

  “We cannot know for sure,” replied Auricus, in tones so deep that he sounded startlingly like his sire. “It may be that Deathfyre or another has tracked our flight, knowing we came here to hide and lick our wounds.”

  “At least they felt the sting of our claws, the bite of our fangs!” asserted Tharn with a menacing growl. “I saw Arjen kill two blues … before he perished.”

  He sighed, lowering his sharp, angular head to the ground in acknowledgment of the truth they all understood: In a few short minutes over the Valley of Paladine, the good dragons had been dealt a devastating defeat. It had been a tragedy of unprecedented and far-reaching proportions, culling most of their number, slaying their patriarch, reducing these nestlings to a band of pathetic survivors.

  True, they had killed some of the Dark Queen’s wyrms, perhaps as many as they themselves had lost. But that, in the balance, still left scores of chromatic dragons, many of them fully mature, arrayed against these five pairs of young serpents.

  The dragons of Paladine finally slept, abandoning themselves to torpor. A sunrise and sunset passed, but the nestmates didn’t stir. Instead, they rested, allowing their wounds to heal … but even the passage of time couldn’t quell the rising of despair.

  Daria awakened them all with a braying cry of alarm. The silver female regarded her nine nestmates seriously.

  “I have had a dream,” she said, her tone low, awestricken. She looked at Callak, then at the others, shaking her head in wonder. “I saw a great Spear of Paladine. Someday there will come to us a weapon that will allow us to battle the dragons of evil.”

  “Where do we find this weapon?” growled Callak.

  “It will find us, but not for many hundreds of winters. Until then, we must leave this place.” Daria looked at each of the wyrmlings, and the finality of her tone was enough to quell most objections.

  “Leave the High Kharolis?” Auricus was the one who voiced the disbelief felt by all of the young dragons.

  “New people will claim the grotto—not our enemies, but not our neighbors, either. They will mine these mountains and build great cities on the lake. And we must be gone.”

  Callak thought for a moment about debating this point, but in the end, he deferred to his kin-dragon, knowing that the grotto held nothing for them now. And he understood instinctively that the power of her dream was not a trifling thing.

  “We must separate, as Aurican said,” the silver male declared. “But we cannot forget each other. Remember, in our differences are we strong.”

  “I will keep the fires of vengeance burning,” growled Tharn. “That we, or our children, shall know the price our nestmates have paid … and shall one day exact an accounting.”

  “And I shall record the history of our grotto, and our leaving, so that none of our wyrmlings may ever forget.” Auricus made the statement, and they all knew that it was a solemn oath.

  “The humans must learn what has happened,” Dazzall announced. “And I shall tell them to insure that they remember us.”

  “Be strong, my nestmates,” Brunt declared, his thick, wedged head dipped into a bow. “For in strength, we will survive.”

  “But for now, we must fly,” concluded Callak.

  The mountain range was abandoned under the clear skies and bright full moon of the spring equinox. As Callak took to the air, with Daria by his side, he saw that the landscape of the High Kharolis was still a blanket of uniform white, sparkling glaciers and pristine snowfields reflecting the dazzling brightness of the midnight sky. Even the lake where his mother was buried had vanished beneath the layer of whiteness.

  The wyrms of metal flew for a long time under the full moons, circling the high ridges in their matched pairs. Fate had seen that the ten who survived could still plant the seeds of future generations, for their numbers included five males and five females, a single pair of each precious metal color.

  Finally they winged upward and away, soaring over the ridges of mountains that encircled their sacred realm. To an observer, it might have seemed that each pair of dragons chose a different point of the compass for its destination. Yet there was no such calculated plan to the dispersal. The divergent courses were merely the result of the good dragons seeking refuge in far quarters of Ansalon, places where the vengeance of the evil wyrms could never reach them.

  Many years remained to pass before these young serpents would breed, produce eggs, and eventually restore the numbers of their kind. They would need to make new lairs, to hide themselves in such wilderness as remained in the world, seeking to live that their descendants might someday have a chance to be born.

  Yet in their survival, they knew hope, and in their memories were the tales that would fashion their history and their destiny.

  And perhaps, in the unknown future, that destiny might lead them to revenge.

  Chapter 27

  Wild Magic

  2688 PC

  Three robed figures gathered in the highest chamber of the Tower of Stars, Silvanost’s loftiest promontor
y. Aside from the colors of their robes, which were black, white, and red, respectively, the trio of figures might have been stamped from a single mold. Each was hunched low, grimly taut in posture, with the cowl of his robe pulled forward to hide face and features.

  Although the clear skies allowed the light of a million stars to illuminate the room, the three remained fixed upon the floor, almost as if they were unwilling to regard the heavenly brightness. A pattern of arcane symbols was barely visible on the tiled surface, glowing slowly brighter until a pattern of illumination passed like a web though the room.

  “Do we dare?” asked Parys Dayl, he of the white robe. “We have no way of knowing what effect the spell of wild magic will have, beyond that of capturing the wyrms of the Dark Queen.”

  “What else matters? If the chromatic dragons are allowed to come on unchecked, everything is lost,” declared red-robed Fayal Padran.

  “Yes.” Kayn Wytsnal’s voice was a hiss. “And since the dragons of metal have failed, there is no other hope. Our power may wrack the world, but if the serpents of the Dark Queen are defeated, we shall be well rewarded.”

  Another figure came into view. His golden hair, gone slightly white with age, glowed softly in the starlight that filtered through the tall, crystal windows. The three wizards looked at him expectantly and with obvious respect.

  “How fares your council?” asked Silvanos. Though the elven patriarch’s voice was as dry as parchment, the three listeners knew this was not because of age, but rather due to the profound nature of the proposal now being considered.

  “Bah!” Kayn’s voice cracked like a brittle twig, snapping from beneath the black cowl of his robe. “They know what must be done, and yet they are afraid to do it.”

  “And you are not afraid?” asked Silvanos, gently raising an eyebrow.