Old Dark (The Last Dragon Lord Book 1)

by Michael La Ronn

  They had used that poison to kill a dragon lord.

  But this place was too unlike those mountains.

  Everything he’d seen so far was unlike anything he’d ever experienced in his life. His heart hadn’t stopped racing since the moment he’d opened his eyes.

  “Release me!” he yelled. “Or I will kill every one of you!”

  Silence.

  “Release me!” he yelled again. “Release me! I am the Dragon Lord!”

  Still nothing, only his voice echoing back at him, bouncing off walls that were far, far away. Hearing his voice inflicted back on him, he shrank against a cold wall and panted. Grief overcame him, and he fought back the urge to let his guard down.

  He was the dragon lord. He had to remain strong.

  Dragon lords weren’t captured.

  Dragon lords weren’t weakened.

  Dragon lords always showed strength.

  They radiated confidence and forced respect.

  What did he have to do to get what he deserved?

  He thought of his mother’s voice. If you can’t command respect, you must create it, and that must involve the breaking of bones and the spilling of blood. For we are Darks, and nothing we’ve worked for was ever given to us, not even as Lords.

  What would his mother have thought about him now? She would have been ashamed. His mind cycled back to his last images of her. Her mouth was stitched shut and she had to carve messages into the dirt with her long tail in order to communicate.

  He heard her voice in his head.

  We are the Darks.

  We are the Lords of the World.

  The sun does not set until we will it.

  Her words made him hungry.

  For meat.

  For blood.

  His gums ached as he thought about food. He wondered if he’d even be able to eat with his missing teeth. His gums were like raw scales torn open after a battle; the pain was always there, and worse when you were idle because you couldn’t take your mind off it.

  He scratched the floor gently with his claws, but unlike dirt, this floor did not give. Unlike stone, it did not scratch.

  It shone. And it was cold.

  He sniffed.

  A scent. Elven. Human. Two people on the far side of the darkness. They walked quietly, whispering to each other. Dark couldn’t make out the words, but he knew the familiar sound of whispers.

  The area grew brighter and darkness disappeared in an instant as lights in the ceiling flickered on.

  Suddenly he saw where he was. A giant room that seemed to stretch endlessly outward. The roof was made of iron beams, hundreds of them. Dark wondered how many blacksmiths had been required to forge that many beams.

  The shapes he had seen glinting in the distance ... he still didn’t recognize them. There were long metal rails that circled up and down, iron arms hanging lifelessly over the rails. Stacks and stacks and stacks of white paper piled up twenty feet high. Dark had never seen paper shine like that, not even in a spell book. It must have been magicked. He was sure of it.

  He sniffed again. The footsteps grew closer and he saw two people walking toward him.

  He sensed their fear and growled.

  They stopped just outside the metal cage.

  It was the man from the tomb. Dark still didn’t understand the clothing, the layers, and the man’s floral smell that was more suited to a woman. He was thoroughly elven, and for that alone Dark despised him.

  The woman next to him had also been in the tomb. She was a human. How she had cowered in his presence!

  But now she stood upright, fearless, unflinching. He had never seen that kind of boldness in a human before, and he took a mental note of it.

  Dark wanted to swipe them, but he knew his claws wouldn’t reach. So he decided to conserve his energy.

  “It ... you ... eat,” the elven man said.

  He thought he heard the word ‘eat,’ but he couldn’t be sure. He kept quiet.

  “You … larking … beast!”

  The man banged the bars with a metal rod.

  Dark ignored him.

  “Listen to me!”

  Dark’s ears perked up.

  The man with jewel-green eyes looked into Dark’s eyes. Though he was tiny compared to Dark’s giant frame, they understood each other for a moment.

  “I am listening,” Dark said.

  “It’s about … larking … we … other.”

  Dark sighed and turned his head.

  The man banged on the walls again.

  “Listen to me!”

  But Dark kept his head down.

  He smelled meat. A lot of it.

  Several workers in what looked like white robes entered with giant buckets of raw meat. From the smell, it was beef. Tenderloin and rib.

  The workers started to dump the buckets, but the man stopped them and said something sternly.

  Ahh. So the elf is the one in charge.

  The elven man took a hulking piece of beef and threw it into Dark’s cell.

  Dark lowered his head and smelled the meat.

  No poison. Of this he was sure.

  “Eat,” the man said.

  “No,” Dark said. “I’ll not eat a thing until you tell me who you are and where I am.”

  The man laughed, doubled over and slapped his knees. Then he pointed at Dark angrily.

  “Eat!”

  “No!”

  The man pulled out a white card from his pocket. It was the same as the cards that were piled up around the room. He held it in front of his face, and a pink wheel of light appeared around his head.

  Magic.

  This man wielded magic like it belonged to him.

  Dark smashed his claws against the cage and roared.

  A blast of energy hit him and pulsed through his body.

  The man had cast a spell. Dark couldn’t move.

  He fought as hard as he could, but he couldn’t move his legs. He tried to speak, but his tongue was frozen. All he could do was shake in place.

  The workers opened the cage and entered. They dumped the buckets of meat across the floor.

  Another group of men entered the room with a metal cast. They climbed onto his body and fastened the cast to his mouth, screwing it together with magical screws that shone like iridescent rainbows.

  The men all exited the cage and locked it just as the spell wore off.

  Dark seized control of his body and threw himself against the metal, filling the room with a deafening clang. He tried to roar, but the metal cast on his face prevented him from opening his mouth more than a few inches.

  Meanwhile, the meat lay at his feet, and he began to salivate.

  “If you ... larking eat ... then larking starve!” the man cried.

  The man and the woman turned and walked away, followed by the workers.

  Then the room went pitch black again, blacker than before.

  All Dark could do was stare at the meat.

  You elves never lost your sense of irony, he thought.

  XXIV

  Lucan reviewed a dossier on his tablet in the back of his limousine. He and Celesse were in a motorcade that drove through the city streets so fast the buildings outside passed by in a blur.

  A green serpentine dragon with a white, bustling mane stared back at him. The image was animated, and the dragon’s red eyes glowed as his mane wavered in an imaginary wind. He had a crooked smile and severe wrinkles around his eyes, as if they were crumpled shut.

  Dragons. They all had a determined air about them.

  Normally he respected that about them, but today, he hated it.

  He was still pissed from the encounter with Old Dark. The dragon wouldn’t eat, and there didn’t seem to be anything he could do to convince him otherwise.

  Lucan had to shut down an entire manufacturing facility in order to hold him. He’d had to magick the hell out of it to make sure the old dragon wouldn’t escape, and he was losing money every minute.

  How was
he going to explain that his state-of-the-art production facility was down? After he just broke ground on it last year?

  He hadn’t had much time to think. He had been standing in the factory trying to come up with a plan as he gaped at the muzzled dragon. So he was relieved in a way when Celesse tugged him out of the room to begin his long list of appointments for the day.

  “You sure this is a good idea?” Lucan asked, studying the picture of Moss. “I thought Moss and Old Dark were enemies, for obvious reasons.”

  “We’re not changing our strategy,” Celesse said. She had changed into a sleek white dress—his favorite. “We don’t want the media to start investigating us. And no, Old Dark and Moss weren’t enemies.”

  “Then what do you call someone who tried to kill you?”

  “He betrayed Old Dark. You really need to read up on your history.”

  “Sorry, history doesn’t do much for me, considering my ancestors committed mass suicide. So forgive my short memory.”

  Celesse sighed. “Read the dossier, Lucan. Mess up your history in front of Moss, and we’ll lose his support.”

  Lucan remembered that Moss had gone through Abstraction. He was now the Guardian of History.

  Dragons already took their history seriously. Moss must have been even worse.

  Lucan swiped through the profile, past a photo of Moss’s home, now the city’s natural history museum. He memorized some dates, names, and events, then peeked up at Celesse. She was on her phone, answering an email.

  He snapped his fingers to get her attention.

  “Doesn’t he have offspring? Two girls, right?”

  “I’m not an animal. Don’t snap your fingers at me.”

  “You weren’t paying attention.”

  “I’m not here to wait on your every desire.”

  “The question, babe, the question...”

  Celesse pursed her lips. “Yes, Moss has two daughters in Abstraction. One is the Guardian of Music and the other is the Guardian of Books.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Lucan said. He remembered the two serpentine twin dragons; they looked just like Moss, but he had only seen holographic representations of them. They acted as patron saints for musicians and writers across town, often choosing what arts would be the most popular in society. They used their magic to support artists, and they had even created a muse wall in the Half Eight, if he remembered correctly, a wall that you could touch and get inspiration for just about anything. Since the dragons were Crafters, they could craft magic into whatever they wanted now that they were in Abstraction.

  Useless magic.

  Befitting for the daughters of the Guardian of History.

  Lucan had heard some of their music and read a few of their books. He personally thought they had terrible taste, and they were more stuck-up than a pole in mud, but that was just him.

  He hated dragons who flaunted money and influence. Didn’t seem like it was what they were meant to do.

  Come on, Lucan, give ‘em that charming grin. Don’t think about it. You’ve got this.

  “Moss is one of the most powerful ancients in history,” Celesse said. “Need more talking points?”

  Lucan sprayed cologne on his wrists and rubbed them together. “No.”

  The motorcade slowed to a stop. Siren lights washed against the rear window from a police car behind him.

  He sighed as the doors opened and photoflashes blinded him for a moment. A crowd of people cheered at him behind barricades. Two beefy bodyguards took his hand and helped him out of the limo. Paparazzi photographed his every move, and the air went ablaze with shuttering.

  He walked through a narrow path in the crowd carved out by the barricades. On one side, his supporters waved signs:

  SCREW THE GOVERNOR

  IT’S TIME FOR ACTION, NOT RHETORIC

  PROTECT THE AQUIFER!

  On the other side, protestors screamed at him.

  He waved at his supporters and ignored everyone else.

  Ahead was the Magic Hope Museum of Historical Events, a tremendous granite building squeezed between apartments.

  The building was shaped like a dragon tooth, curved and orange. A spiraling row of windows started at the first floor and dotted up all five floors of the structure. From its size and shape, it was obvious that a dragon lived here.

  Lucan and the guards walked up a long set of stairs to an automatic revolving door. Above it, a brass insignia of a dragon head glowed—the mark of a building inhabited by a dragon in Abstraction.

  “You may enter,” the insignia said. It resembled Moss. It rumbled to life and sneered at them. “Mr. Grimoire, leave your bodyguards at the door.”

  “I prefer not to,” Lucan said.

  The automatic revolving door stopped moving.

  Lucan waited for the dragon to respond, but it did not.

  “Fine,” he said. He tapped the bodyguards and they stood at parade rest.

  The automatic door started again and Lucan walked inside. The doors ushered him into a huge lobby.

  The first thing he noticed was the chill. Then the video screens.

  The walls were filled with glowing screens. Some played the news; others, documentaries about the birth of Magic Hope City; and others, realistic, evolving maps of the western continent over the last thousand years, blooming slowly in time-lapse view.

  Lucan’s shoes clacked on the shiny floors, and he heard his footsteps echo all the way up to the second floor, where a life-size replica of Moss hung from silver chains. The serpentine dragon was at least forty-five feet long, the size of a school bus.

  The area had a museum smell—sterile, cold.

  Lucan stood on a parquet floor shaped like a pentagram.

  “Moss, you know I’m here.”

  Silence.

  “I’m on a tight schedule,” Lucan said. “No offense, but let’s get this conversation going, shall we?”

  The floor rumbled.

  Typical dragon theatrics. Lucan didn’t let it faze him.

  The wall in front of him, covered in moss and bark, shifted and glowed, and two fiery red serpentine dragons exploded from it. They flew past him, crisscrossing each other as they streamed higher and higher into the air until they were specks in the atrium above. Then they descended slowly, laughing like pixies as they circled Lucan.

  Red eyes. White manes. Young, high-pitched voices that made Lucan want to punch something. They were barely five hundred years old from the look of their slender, youthful bodies.

  Moss’s daughters.

  “Mr. Grimoire, why are you all business?” the dragon sisters asked at the same time. “Our father doesn’t make his decisions lightly.”

  Meah and Mynthia hovered in front of him, intertwined together. They were twins. Meah had a rune shaped like a clef burned into her chest; Mynthia, a boxy rune that looked like a book.

  “I’m running for governor,” Lucan said. “If your father changed his mind, tell him I’ll send him an invoice for wasting my time.”

  “There’s no need to leave,” the sisters said in unison. Then they said nothing, staring at him.

  Stupid dragons. They always did crap like this, trying to test you to see how you reacted. These girls were no doubt testing him for their father. He resented it, but realized he had to go along with it if he was going to get what he wanted.

  “Then what do you want?” Lucan asked.

  “The way to father’s heart is through us,” Mynthia said. “We aren’t clear on your views on the arts, Mr. Grimoire.”

  So that’s what this was about.

  “Last year, you expanded your product line,” Meah said, “and missed yet another opportunity to invest in the arts.”

  “There are grimoires for science and technology,” Mynthia said, “Yet none for the humanities. Explain yourself.”

  “You want music grimoires, I’ll give them to you.”

  “It is not for us,” the sisters said, swirling around the room. “It is for the world, Mr.
Grimoire. The world does not yet understand the gift we are to it. You have an exciting opportunity to showcase what a treasure we are.”

  Treasure? Trash was a more accurate definition.

  “You got it. Anything else?”

  “Magic Hope University,” the sisters said. “We despise what the governor said last week. Professor Charmwell is doing fantastic work. To take money away from the humanities would diminish our influence in the city...”

  Good God! They just wouldn’t stop! Their singsongy voices were beginning to annoy him and he wasn’t sure how much longer he could capitulate.

  “You and I have mutual enemies in the governor. I don’t believe in taking money away from any place that needs it. Does that satisfy you?”

  “Indeed, Mr. Grimoire...”

  The sisters twirled around him. “We will give you our support, as long as you do not forget what we discussed here today.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Father! We are impressed!”

  The twin sisters roared and flew back through the wall. They soared outside, over the city streets, singing as the crowd photographed them.

  “Clap for us, children, for we have new art to show you...”

  The ground rumbled again, threatening Lucan’s balance.

  The wall of ivy and bark bulged. Lucan squinted at the wall and noticed the pattern of scales.

  The entire wall rolled into a ball and Lucan realized his eyes had fooled him; there had never been a wall.

  Moss rose into the air like a cobra, his head two stories higher than Lucan. The dragon looked exactly like his photo, except for his two rows of sharp teeth that gnashed in his mouth.

  “Welcome, Mr. Grimoire.”

  “Moss.”

  “Don’t mind my daughters,” he said.

  “I didn’t.”

  “When you get to be an old dragon like me, you stop making personal demands. All your thoughts focus on your offspring. This, humans, dragons, and elves have in common. Do you have children, Mr. Grimoire?”