Instead, Flayze had decided he’d had enough of fighting, at least, enough of the kind of violence required for the execution of the emperor’s grandiose plans. The rogue red dragon had veered south, crossing the Newsea, finally coming to rest in this rugged region of Kharolis. The cave where he had recently secluded himself had been a fortuitous discovery on his earlier campaign. Subsequently it had provided a refuge wherein he could wait out the war in safety and comfort.
Now clean of the sticky mud, Flayzeranyx took to the air, flying high through the night and wondering about the fate of the world during the interval of his long nap. For a long time he glided through the skies, skirting the massif of Thorbardin—he knew that even the most deadly attack of Ariakas’s legions was not likely to have reduced that dwarven stronghold—and seeking familiar spoors on the night breeze. He smelled proof of humans and elves in the forests and plains below and caught the acrid stink of a hill dwarf village well to the north.
Finally he detected the reptilian scent that he had been seeking. He soared low, silently gliding through the skies, drawing closer to the source of the odor that brought so many familiar and tangible memories. Acrid smoke tickled his nostrils, and he suspected the creatures he sought were gathered around a dying fire. A glance at the stars showed him that it was nearly dawn, and then he crested a low ridge and saw a dozen or more human-sized figures wrapped in cloaks and lying motionless around the embers of a large blaze.
Settling to the ground in a rush of wings, the dragon lowered his head and glowered balefully at a lone sentry, one who dozed, half standing against a nearby tree.
“Y-Your lordship!” stammered the draconian, dropping its sword as it scrambled to come to attention. “Get up, useless scuts!” it barked at the sleeping company. “Greet his crimson lordship!”
Alerted by the shout and the wind of the dragon’s landing, more of the reptilian dragonmen rose from their sleep, muttering and cowering, regarding the monstrous serpent with slitted, fearful eyes.
Flayze was pleased to see that the draconians reacted to his august presence with instinctive obedience and fear. The red dragon huffed a deep breath, a thudding sound like a distant boom of thunder, and the creatures cast themselves facedown onto the ground.
“Tell me, little snakes,” he hissed, slowly articulating each word. “What news of the war?”
The draconian guard, apparently used to the slower time sense of great wyrms, raised his head to ask a question. “You refer to the Draconian War, Mighty Lord? The campaigns of the Highlord Ariakas?”
“I do.”
“Sad to say, Excellent Fire Breather, the dragons of Paladine and their cruel lances inflicted tragic defeat. The highlord is dead, his armies disbanded.”
“I see.” Flayze was not terribly displeased by the news. “And what of these lands? Who rules?”
“Much of this land is wild, O Mighty Wyrm. That is why we are able to survive here. The Plains of Dergoth, to the north, are a barren desert. But we have seen a brass dragon there, near the mountain of the great skull.”
“Aye, Skullcap.” Flayzeranyx remembered flying over the place. He had been curious during that earlier exploration, had even thought to land and investigate, but his rider had ordered him on, no doubt driven toward some other pointless matter of the war.
“He is a bold one, that brass,” declared one of the other draconians in a sibilant accusation. “He killed Dwarf skinner, just last month.”
“Aye, a killer,” murmured several others. They looked at Flayze hopefully, and he understood why: They wanted him to kill the brass.
“Perhaps Dwarfskinner may be avenged,” Flayze allowed. “But tell me more. How many winters have passed since the coming of the metal dragons?”
“Four, Excellent Flaming One,” replied the sentry who had done most of the talking. “The latest just recently melted into water.”
“Good,” Flayze declared, with a nod of satisfaction. That meant that enough time had passed for certain concerns, such as his disobedience to the commands of Ariakas, to become irrelevant. At the same time, however, there were likely to remain aftereffects from the war, factors of chaos and violence that would make the red dragon’s existence a little easier.
“Would his lordship care for a taste of jerky?” asked one of the draconians, with obvious reluctance.
Flayze snorted contemptuously, looking at the scrawny dragonmen as he remembered his sumptuous repast in the marsh. “No,” he replied curtly. “I take wing again—and I shall look for scales of brass.”
Chapter 15
Two Skulls
356 AC
Third Kirinor, Yurthgreen
Recalling the location of Skullcap, Flayze flew toward the great mountain with unerring accuracy. Fire pulsed in his belly, and his mind was inflamed with eager thoughts of battle. A brass dragon! None of the metallics was more hot-tempered, nor more irritating to the presence of a beautiful chromatic such as Flayzeranyx. The thought of a vicious battle, of the killing that would follow, drove him near to a frenzy as his broad wings soared northward through the dawn.
A brownish-gray fog lay low across the Plain of Dergoth, and the fire-breathing dragon had to forcibly resist the notion that he flew through a realm of ether, a place lacking substance and boundary. Occasionally the vapors would part to reveal a glimpse of the cracked and broken ground below, and this was enough to reassure Flayze about his bearings. So he swept onward, slicing the vaporous cloud with his sharp wings and smooth body.
He could have risen above the blanket of mist, but it suited him to remain within the concealment of the fog. He remembered that the plain below him was featureless and flat, offering no upthrusting obstacles that would suddenly burst from the fog to endanger him. And if there was in fact a brass dragon at Skullcap, Flayze felt no obligation to give the serpent a great deal of warning about his approach.
Other reds might have handled the situation differently, Flayzeranyx knew. Perhaps they would have concealed their flight beneath a spell of invisibility, or even altered their beautiful, perfect shapes with a polymorph spell, flying in the feathered guise of an eagle or condor. The red snorted, scorning such arcane deceits. Like all of his clan dragons, Flayze had an arsenal of magic at his command, but as he had throughout his life, he now disdained the casting of spells. He preferred instead the integrity of hot fire, the trustworthy strength of powerful sinew and sharp, rending claw and fang.
By the time the sun started to burn away the fog, the red dragon was only a few miles from the skull-shaped mountain that gradually materialized in the middle distance. He approached the mountain from the front, flying at an altitude that was even with the great pock-marks in the cliff that so resembled the eye sockets of an actual skull. The rounded dome formed a smooth summit of whitish-gray stone, and the whole edifice was still and ominous.
Drawing closer, he saw no sign of any inhabitant, not in the yawning maw of the entrance cavern at ground level—the skull’s “mouth”—or in the large apertures that gaped above the craggy cliffs of the preternatural cheekbones. Any one of the three entrances was large enough to have concealed a good-sized dragon, so Flayze didn’t allow his caution to recede. Instead, he banked, gliding through a leisurely circle around the edifice. On the back side, downwind from Skullcap, he caught a hint of sulfurous, steaming heat, the distinctive spoor of the brass confirming the draconians’ reports.
Flayze dived past the face of the ghastly mountain, bellowing a challenge, turning to spit a gout of fire that raked all three of the entrances scarring the rocky face. Then he veered to the side, circling sharply, looping to come to rest on the smooth, rounded summit.
His blast had no sooner dissipated along the craggy rock than did the front of Skullcap exploded in a hiss of blistering air, a gout of heat that seared outward, emerging from the skull’s left eye to linger in the space before the mountain. Flayzeranyx prepared to leap, expecting the serpent to burst out of that same hole.
But the bras
s took him by surprise. It lunged from the right eye socket, curving sharply down and away. The red leaped after it, breathing fire, only to see the brass tail flicker out of sight around the side of the mountain.
Reacting by sudden instinct, Flayze flew upward, tilting to the side, flying in a wild, rolling cartwheel over the rounded crest of Skullcap. Immediately he saw brass jaws gaping before him, realized that the metallic had tried the same tactic—but the red was faster. Flayze’s lethal fireball exploded around his enemy, searing the scales back from its face, boiling the glaring eyeballs in their sockets.
The two dragons met in a crash of talon and fang, but the brass was blinded and too sorely hurt to make an effective attack. Flayze seized his enemy’s supple neck in his foreclaws, then struck with a single, crushing bite. The serpents, coiling together almost like lovers, collapsed to the dusty ground, shivering and lashing about for a moment, then settling into utter stillness.
Slowly a single head—a head cloaked in scales of bright crimson—rose from the corpse of his foe. Flayze twisted, uncoiling from the tangled body, shaking the sulfurous stench away. One final sniff confirmed that the brass was utterly dead.
Finally the red dragon turned toward the mountain. Already he entertained thoughts of making this his lair. Indeed, with the forbidding aspect of the skull visage, it seemed a perfect place for a red dragon. He padded through the entrance, ducking low to pass beneath the stalactites jutting down like great fangs.
A short distance into the cave he drew up short, puzzled by an object on the smooth floor. Squinting, Flayze discerned that it was a skull—a human skull. Surprised, the dragon picked it up, balancing it between two massive foreclaws. He felt a pulse of magic in the bony object, and at the same time knew a strong sensation that he should leave this place.
He scuttled out of the cavern with alacrity, looking over his shoulder at the mountain with a newly critical eye. In fact, he now perceived, this place had many faults as a lair. Most notably, it was stuck here in the middle of a desert. His comings and goings would be observed, on a clear day, by any creature within dozens of miles.
No, Flayze decided, taking wing again, he would find another lair. There was certain to be a better place around here; perhaps he would even return to the cave where he had hibernated.
At the same time, he pinched the piece of bone between his powerful claws. For some reason that he didn’t clearly understand, he was utterly determined to keep the skull.
Chapter 16
A Window Through Time
374 AC
Fourth Bracha, Paleswelt
Flayze lounged easily in the steaming depths of his cavern. Water spilled from a narrow chute high in the cave wall, pouring in a cheery rivulet down the steep slope, then splashing into a pool of crystalline water. The overflow of that pool sloshed down a sloping slab, then gushed into the depths of the lower caverns. There it spattered onto rocks that were deceptively dark, but the sudden burst of hissing vapor provided quick proof that those stones were very hot indeed.
In fact, Flayze knew that, should he break one of those lower rocks in half, he would find that the center was a fiery red core of viscous lava. He knew because, more than once, he had done it. He relished the fiery depths of his lair, delighted in the fact that living, flowing rock slowly oozed into the lower reaches.
The perch where the mighty dragon coiled was, in fact, a sort of island surrounded by a gulf of black space. In the depths of that space, lava oozed and occasional spumes of fire burst from cracks in the rock, wafting upward to flicker soothingly through the lair.
He had discovered this cavern a decade or so ago, after abandoning the cave where he had gone to avoid the end of the Draconian War. That place, in truth, had proved to be too close to the dwarves of Thorbardin. This cave was larger and lay much farther to the south and west, overlooking the Plains of Dust from the terminus of the Kharolis Range. The climate outside tended to be a little frosty, by red dragon standards, but Flayze relished the natural heat of these deep caverns. He was content to remain here during the deepest months of winter, when the frigid expanse of Icewall Glacier seemed likely to extend all the way across Ice Mountain Bay and grind against the very base of this massif.
But now it was spring again, and Flayzeranyx was restless, ready to fly, to plunder and kill. As befitted an ancient and lordly wyrm, first he would do some planning.
His huge yellow eyes, the black slits of the pupils spread wide in the darkness, swept across the glorious extent of the fiery cave. Beyond the lava bubbling around his perch, he could see grotesque shapes, smooth and flowing formations frozen into the shapes that outlined the manner the molten rock had cooled into natural stone. Smoke wafted through the air, and several deep niches were illuminated with more or less permanent flares of glowing rock or wisping, flaring fires.
From one of those niches, black eye sockets stared back, and the dragon uttered a grim chuckle. There were many treasures scattered about the niches and corners of the cave: piles of steel and golden coins, weapons of dwarf-crafted steel, gems and jewels of spectacular value and sparkling beauty. Nearly every other item had an intrinsic value or purity of beauty that was far more tangible than the piece of dry bone. And though he valued many things, he treasured nothing so much as the skull he had claimed from Skullcap following his battle with the brass dragon.
The dragon didn’t know what it was about the bony artifact that made it so compelling to him; he merely understood that it gave him a sense of power and well-being to look upon the object. Now he rose, spreading his wings to add a bit of lift to his gliding leap across the searing rock of the moat. He came to rest before the skull and squatted, staring into those black eyes.
He felt it again, a sensation that had become increasingly common when he regarded the thing. It was a feeling that the skull was trying to talk to him, to communicate something that was terribly important.
“What is it, my skull? Show me … speak to me!” he urged, his words a whisper hissed on a breath of soft flame.
As always, there was no reply. Gingerly, carefully, Flayze reached out and picked up the skull. He looked at it from every angle, flicking his forked tongue into the mouth, through the empty sockets of the eyes. He felt as though there was a mystery here, a locked treasure that he should know how to reach, to understand.
Yet though he had possessed the skull for nearly twenty years, he had never been able to learn how to release the secrets held within. Naturally he had tried many times. Perhaps sorcery would have helped to decipher the puzzle, but as always Flayze disdained magic, scorning the arcane arts as the tools of weaklings.
On an inexplicable impulse, he lifted the skull and placed it atop his own head, the eyeless face turned toward the front.
And for the first time he felt the power of the artifact take hold.
Abruptly he could not see the cave, couldn’t smell the smoldering rock or the acrid taint of sulfur on the air. Instead, he was looking at a different place.
This was a small fortified manor house on a rocky knoll. The terrain was suggestive of the Kharolis borderlands, though Flayze did not recognize the specific location. As he observed, mystified and intrigued, the dragon’s perspective whirled inward, slicing through the manor’s walls as if they didn’t exist. He found himself in a room filled with a dozen or more rough-looking men. These were warriors, bandits most likely, to judge from the motley clothing, the ill-kept nature of hair and beards. Though they were inside, apparently at a place of safety, each of the men was armed.
And one of them stood out from the rest, a man who was well groomed, young, and handsome. He regarded the others with a tolerant gaze, and Flayze sensed that, despite his apparent youthfulness, this was the leader.
Something about the young man compelled the dragon’s attention more firmly, and Flayze sensed the hot pulse of blood and magic, a cadence that was pounding beneath the stiff leather armor of the human’s shirt. Finally the dragon’s perspective fell furth
er, through that material, and he beheld the bloodstone. The gem seemed huge, and he could sense its power—and its link to the skull that still rested upon the dragon’s head.
These ruffians were an interesting lot, Flayze decided. Someday before too long he would seek them out, perhaps to kill them or take the bloodstone. Yet he felt a reluctance as he considered those options, a sense that the skull did not want him to attack—at least, not in a way that could endanger the precious stone. On the other hand, the wyrm might try to find a way the men could be useful to him.
Abruptly his attention shifted, pulled back from the bloodstone, out of the manor house and across the valleys of Kharolis. Soon he had the sensation of diving downward, sweeping along the banks of a shallow river until he hovered over a small village, a place of humans.
His attention was riveted upon a large house in the center of that village. There was danger to him there, in that house, a menace that the red dragon could not identify. Yet he knew that it was the skull that was showing him this danger, and the skull that was compelling him to act. Vaguely he perceived that the danger there was to the skull, not to the dragon, but even that threat was an affront to his draconic pride.
With a growl, Flayze lifted his head, dislodging the skull and breaking the spell that had bound him. He caught the treasure in his claws, setting it back upon the natural dais he had found for it. He was restless, uneasy, mystified by what he had seen. The men in the manor, he suspected, had a role to play in his future. Someday he would find them and bend them to his will.
But before then, there was the matter of the village. All sorts of alarming notions had stampeded through the dragon’s mind when he beheld the place. Flayzeranyx didn’t understand the nature of the danger, but he recognized a threat when he saw one. And with that recognition came the drive for action.
The village would have to be destroyed.
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