From Embers

by Pogue, Aaron

  The chieftain only raised his chin. Before Wotan could shout again, Erik spoke up again from the other side of the table. “I mean no disrespect, Highness, but perhaps Gunther is right. Perhaps we are swinging at spiders. Spring is always a time of trouble. I have felt it as much as any of us, but it is a long run to believe.... Well, to claim what you claim. Ten thousand dragons awakened at once? A world awash in fire? I've heard the stories, too—my father survived the second swarm as a boy—but here? And now? Ten thousand wyrms at once? I find that hard hewing indeed. Has any of us seen a dragon at all?” He waited for an answer and nodded at the silence. "Not even one."

  The prince pressed both hands flat on the ancient table. He pushed himself to his feet. He drew himself up, he caught his breath. His heart hammered as though he were about to go to war, and in a way he was. He fixed his gaze on Gunther first and then on Erik. He opened his mouth.

  But before he spoke, the Wolfhound let out a great yelp and leaped to its feet. It threw a shoulder against the door to knock it open, then lurched out into the gathering gloom without. A disheveled figure was just then trudging the last few steps to the threshold, and the Wolfhound guided her forward to stumble wearily into the hall. Already on his feet, Wotan was the first to meet the haggard intruder. With a gentle hand he brushed back a mass of tangled hair to reveal the face of his wife, covered with scrapes and bruises from her half-day trek. She opened her arms to lay Michael on the floor at her feet; the boy shook himself a bit and squirmed into a more comfortable position on the wooden planks, but he never woke.

  Suddenly oblivious to the presence of the other Councilors, Wotan drew his wife against him in a protective embrace. “Elsa, dear." His voice caught. He coughed, and turned her face up to his. He shook his head. "What has brought you here?”

  "Michael," she said, and he could hear a touch of madness in her voice. "Our home. Wotan." A shadow passed before his eyes, and Elsa seemed to sense it, too. Her grip on his arms closed like pincers, and her eyes flashed unearthly terror. "Oh, Wotan."

  He leaned his forehead down to touch hers. "Elsa, you are safe. Michael is well. Come back to me, Elsa." Dimly he recalled the Council. He sensed them standing, now, gathered at a distance—anxious to express their concern, unwilling to intrude on the scene. A part of him was grateful for this distraction. It had united them, in its way. It had distracted them from Gunther's defiance and swept Erik's challenge to the side. A part of the prince was grateful, but the greater part felt grief at his wife's fear. He stroked her hair and touched her cheek and whispered in her ear.

  "Come back to me, my Elsa. I am here."

  "Oh, Wotan," she moaned against his palm. A shadow passed over the room again, and Wotan frowned. He brushed the tears from his wife's cheek with a calloused thumb and trembled at the mindless panic in her eyes. She licked cracked lips, and a childish little sob escaped her. "My Wotan." Her voice cracked. "You were right."

  Behind her words a piercing shriek tore the air. It was the sound of a hunting falcon magnified a thousand times. It pressed hard against his eyelids and twisted in his guts. Elsa gave a scream of her own, almost in answer, and then she fell limp in his arms. Her courage and strength had burned like a candle, and there was nothing left.

  The prince heard the sounds of nervous confusion among the chieftains, but he ignored them. He gently, carefully laid his wife upon the ground next to his sleeping boy. Then he rose and turned to the Council. They were assembled in half a circle, five paces away; silent, anxious, and afraid. Wotan met their eyes, one-by-one, and he gathered them in. He bent the fingers of one hand, beckoning, and they came to stand behind him as he turned back to the door. That same terrible cry came again, but the chieftains stood together now.

  Nothing came through the door. Instead, an explosion tore away two-thirds of the wall, leaving a jagged, gaping hole in the Hall of Meeting. "You were right," she had said. He felt molten steel in the pit of his belly, and winter-cold iron behind his heart. Wotan drew the axe hanging from a loop on his belt, and he heard the Councilors behind him reaching for weapons that had long been useless. They were a warrior people. All these servile centuries of man could not take that from them. Perhaps they could not carry a message to the king, but they could make a warning here and now.

  Wotan felt the thunder of his heart. He felt the fire in his veins. He screamed his fierce defiance and more than a dozen voices shouted right behind him. And then they were moving, leaping through the rent wall, and Wotan sensed Gunther at his side, Erik at the other, both ready and willing to fight by their prince. Their heads turned this way and that as they scanned the woods for any sign of the unknown threat.

  But Wotan knew better. "You were right," she had said. He raised his axe and pointed to the sky, and fourteen warriors' faces turned up. And there above them was a dragon out of legend. Shades of black and violet to match the midnight sky. A tail as long as the Council Hall, a head at least as tall. Its wings could hide the sunlight, and its teeth could chew through stone. It dove at them now, claws outstretched and flames roiling in its gaping maw. And in the distance, dancing over the trees, a dozen living shadows flew to join it. A dozen distant, piercing screams echoed the elder legend's cry.

  "You were right," she had said. The dragonswarm was come.

  Then the monster was upon them.

  THE END

  Afterword from the Author

  My family moved around a lot as I was growing up. Not as much as a military family, maybe, but every five or six years we'd pull up roots and cross a state line. I never really took it that well. I was born in Dodge City, Kansas, but while I was still a baby we moved down to Dallas, Texas. Just before I started elementary school, we moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma. Then I transitioned over to middle school by moving north to Wichita, Kansas.

  I settled down in Wichita. That was two decades ago, but half the friends I have today I met in Wichita. That's also where I started dating the girl who's now my wife. I became a writer and dreamed up most of the fantasy stories I'll be writing for the next two decades. And then in the spring of 1998, a couple months before I graduated high school, my dad accepted a job in Little Rock, Arkansas.

  His new employers wanted him right away, but after a little negotiation he convinced them to wait until the end of the school year to make it easier on the kids. Not a lot easier, mind you. I walked across the stage at my graduation on a Friday night, shook the principal's hand and accepted my diploma, then slipped out the side door and into the waiting moving truck.

  That move was probably the hardest for me. I had a lot more connections to sever and a lot more plans to interrupt than I had in the past. And, worse, I had another move looming up just a couple months later. I knew I'd be heading to Oklahoma City for college, so it seemed such a waste to move to Arkansas for three short months.

  If all that angst sounds a little melodramatic...well, there are two things to consider. 1) I was eighteen. If teenagers aren't melodramatic, they aren't conscious. 2) I was wrestling with some pretty serious but undiagnosed social anxiety. I've talked about that a little bit on my blog. It's nothing crippling, but just bad enough that I hated having to meet new people. And a move always meant meeting new people.

  We'd barely been in Little Rock a week before my parents hosted a big dinner party to get to know some of the families from Dad's work. After enough whining and complaining, I convinced Mom to let me spend the evening hiding in my room. They told everyone I was sick. I was, in a sense.

  But that's how I found myself trapped upstairs, feeling miserable and wrestling with a world in turmoil, and quietly worrying that it was all going to be just as bad all over again when I went off to college in August. I was also bored and stuck there for at least two or three hours before the last of the guests left. I didn't have a TV or computer in my room, but I didn't really need one. I grabbed my scribblebook and started writing a story.

  I wanted excitement and conflict and drama right off the bat, and by some flash of
inspiration, I decided I wanted to show a happy home life torn asunder (go figure). I wanted to show a stable, pleasant world turned upside down and torn apart. And that, quite honestly, is where the dragonswarm came from: a melodramatic teenager hiding from a dinner party.

  That night, sprawled on my bed, I wrote the prologue. I ruined a perfectly pleasant spring day for dear Ms. Elsa, I established the premise of the dragonswarm, and then I rolled right into chapter one and really got down to business. Now it was a teenage boy's life getting upset as he was called away to study at a school that wouldn't be nice to him. The words flowed like water. It all came so easily. It still took months to write, but once I considered it done, I started sharing it with friends and family.

  When autumn rolled around I went off to school and had a pretty good time, all things considered. After a couple years of training I did a handful of extensive rewrites on the story and stripped out some of the melodrama and most of the autobiography. I also cut the prologue, because it had absolutely nothing to do with the actual story.

  Eventually I split that initial book into two volumes (which became Taming Fire and The Dragonswarm). Then much later (about a week before publishing each of those), I completely rewrote the whole thing from the ground up. And all that hard work was certainly worth it! I published Taming Fire and it built a massive audience in a matter of months. When I released The Dragonswarm it jumped straight to the top of the fantasy bestseller list. But there's very little in the published works that remains from the story I wrote in that scribblebook way back when.

  That was more than a decade ago. And the funny thing is, I can't count how many times over the years one of those friends or family members approached me to ask, "Hey...what was that story you wrote with the baby riding on a dragon in someone's living room? I loved that one!"

  That story was the prologue. That was "From Embers." With so many people so excited about the books, I thought maybe they'd like to see where it all started. So there you go. I hope you enjoyed it.

  Sincerely,

  Aaron Pogue

  (December 21, 2011)

  The waking of the dragons continues with Aaron Pogue's The Dragonswarm, available from Consortium Books. Start that adventure with the first book in the series,

  Taming Fire

  Daven Carrickson grew up as a beggar in the filthy alleys beneath the shadows of the palace. He's the son of a known thief, disgraced and despised. His only real talent is his ability with a sword, and his only real chance at finding honor or a home is a desperate dream of joining the King's Guard.

  Then Daven receives a new future when Master Claighan invites him to study magic at the Academy. The wizard offers to make him into a new kind of soldier: a swordsman equally skilled with forged blades and mystic forces. It only helps that Daven has no home, no family, and nothing left to lose.

  But when conspiring forces destroy the wizard's plans, Daven finds himself wanted for treason and murder. Hunted by a great black beast of a dragon, caught between the King's Guard and a rebel force led by a rogue wizard, Daven's only hope of surviving is to become more than he's ever dreamed possible.

  Taming Fire is the first book in the Dragonprince Trilogy. Approximately 110,000 words.

  About the Author

  Aaron Pogue is a husband and a father of two who lives in Oklahoma City, OK. He started writing at the age of ten, and lays claim to more than a dozen finished novels, as well as a handful of short stories, scripts, and videogame storylines. His first novels were high fantasy set in the rich world of the FirstKing, including the bestselling fantasy novel Taming Fire, but he's explored mainstream thrillers, urban fantasy, and several kinds of science fiction. Gods Tomorrow represents the introduction to a long-running science fiction cop drama series focused on the Ghost Targets task force.

  Aaron is also a Technical Writer with the Federal Aviation Administration. He has a degree in Writing and has been working as a Technical Writer since 2002. He's been a writing professor at the university level, and is currently pursuing a Master of Professional Writing degree at the University of Oklahoma. He also runs a writing advice blog at UnstressedSyllables.com, and is a founding artist at ConsortiumOKC.com.

  About the Publisher

  Consortium Books is an innovative publisher with a unique mindset. All proceeds from Consortium Books sales are donated to an organization dedicated to injecting money into artists' pockets and art into the culture.

  To learn more about the unshackled, free-thinking publishing world that is Consortium Books, please take a step through the looking glass:

  http://www.consortiumokc.com/books/