Dragons- Worlds Afire

by R. A. Salvatore

The airship was the largest she had ever seen, the pride of House Lyrandar, a glorious yacht held aloft by twin rings of elemental power. The kraken was on the seal of House Lyrandar, and the ship was designed so that a mighty kraken appeared to be clutching the rear of the boat, four darkwood tentacles stretching out to grip the two massive rings of elemental energy surrounding the vessel.

  At least, that was the design.

  Zaehr loved airships, and she watched the skies when business brought her and Tolar to the vicinity of Lyrandar Tower. She had been watching when a skycoach rammed into the ship and exploded, leaving a gaping hole in the side of Pride and shattering two of the four supports. The ring of elemental fire collapsed, and a moment later there was a second explosion, greater than the first. Fire flooded the sky, accompanied by a roar that shook the towers and a wave of force that threw Zaehr’s companions to the stones. While flame engulfed the ship, the stabilizing ring of elemental air was still holding her aloft—at least for now. But even as Zaehr reached down to help Tolar to his feet, she could see that the ring was losing its integrity. Zaehr knew what would happen next. The ring would collapse, and the burning ship would plummet to the depths of Sharn, smashing against bridges and towers until she finally reached the distant streets. It was inevitable.

  The cloudbelt buckled, and the blazing vessel tilted crazily in the sky, charred corpses skidding off the deck and into the air. It was just what Zaehr had seen in her mind.

  Except for the dragon.

  The ring of air flickered, died, and the ship fell. A new force ripped through the stern, scattering shards of burning wood across the sky. This was no explosion. It was a dragon, a massive creature covered with mirror-bright silver scales—and it was growing. With every second the dragon increased in size and the ship splintered around it.

  There was no time to waste.

  Zaehr reached deep inside, calling on the natural power within her. Zaehr was a shifter, a blend of human and animal. Many said that the shifters were the thin-blooded children of werewolves, but Tolar swore there was rat and hound in her ancestry. Her senses were sharper than those of any human, and she was swift and strong. When she called upon her animal spirit, her speed became super-human, matching any horse.

  She snatched Tolar and lifted him off his feet. The old man was over six feet in height, but he was bone-thin, and the shifter had no trouble carrying him. She charged forward, plowing into people on the bridge as she moved. She heard curses and cries. and a few angry feet and fists lashed at her. People were frightened and confused, and Zaehr knew humans often found her to be an intimidating sight. Her eyes were gleaming red, her skin snow-white, her hair a ghostly silver-white mane, and when she was drawing on her inner spirit as she was now, her mouth was a distended snout filled with razor-sharp teeth. The people were dazed from the explosion, and now this fearsome shifter was ramming into them. But there was no time to explain.

  “Get off the bridge!” she snarled. She slammed into a small child, sending him reeling back toward Stonebridge Tower.

  A massive chunk of burning wood crashed into the space where she had been standing. This was followed by a flash of silver—a dragon’s tail?—and a thunderous impact that shattered the bridge. Chunks of stone joined the cascade of wood, fire, and flesh tumbling to the streets far below. There was a moment of silence. Zaehr had just saved these peoples lives, but terror and confusion outweighed any sense of gratitude.

  “Put me down.” Tolar’s voice was cool and calm. Zaehr had never seen the old man lose his composure. She set him down, and he walked over to the jagged edge of the bridge and stared down at the path of destruction, thoughtfully running a finger across his red-and-white beard.

  Zaehr stepped up beside him. She released her hold on the animal spirit and felt her teeth and jaws retract to their natural shape. Looking down, she could see flames where fragments of the burning hull had lodged along bridges and tower walls. She could see a greater light below, where the ship had finally struck ground.

  “Get down there,” Tolar said. He’d produced a silver disk from one of his belt pouches, and he pressed it into her hand without looking at her. “The flames will soon consume what the impact left behind. Study the point of collision and any bodies you can find—especially the dragon.”

  “Right.” Zaehr looked at the disk, bright metal embossed with the image of a single feather. A wind token, designed to protect people who fell from towers or bridges by slowing the descent at the last minute. “And you?”

  “There are other matters I must attend to,” Tolar said. The breeze snapped at his long burgundy overcoat. He looked up at the sky, studying the shattered moorings on Lyrandar tower.

  “Right,” Zaehr said. “To work, then. And thanks for, you know, saving my life.”

  Tolar ignored the sarcasm. “Go.”

  Zaehr sighed. She’d done this before, but it wasn’t something you soon grew used to. Taking a deep breath, she wrapped her fingers tightly around the wind token and dived off the edge of the broken bridge. How did I get into this? she thought.

  It was a rhetorical question. Tolar had found her in the sewers of Sharn. Most likely she’d been born to one of the bands of shifters that lurked in the undercity, surviving by scavenging the midden heaps and sifting through the garbage of the world above. Tolar believed that her family had abandoned her because of the strange color of her skin and eyes, most likely leaving her to die—but she’d proven to be a survivor. Tolar had been an old man even then, facing a young and feral shifter who could only speak a few words. Tolar Velderan was an inquisitive. He made his livelihood through investigation. He’d never said what task had brought him to the depths that day, but he’d chosen to solve her mystery. He’d calmed her and convinced her to follow him to the surface. In the months and years that followed, he taught her to speak, to read, to follow the pulse of information as it flowed through the streets. She’d saved him a dozen times. But he’d given her life. Without him, Zaehr would still be hunting rats in the dark. He was the only father she’d ever had.

  The streets of Sharn rushed up to meet her. She could feel the heat rising from the burning yacht. The magic of the medallion took hold, slowing her descent, and she twisted in the air, adjusting her weight so that she’d drift to the side instead of landing in the wreckage. A crowd had gathered around the shattered ship, and she wondered how many had been crushed beneath her.

  The destruction of a Lyrandar airship was a remarkable event. But the dragon? That was something else entirely. A dragon was a thing of legend. It was said that the world itself was formed from a battle between three celestial dragons. The first age of Eberron was a time of terror when fiends and demons ruled the world—until the dragons had risen up and imprisoned these dark spirits in the depths of the underworld. Since then there were stories of the occasional dragon sighting. A drunken explorer once told Zaehr that he’d encountered a dragon with scales the color of midnight in an ancient ruin in the jungles of Q’barra, but he’d also claimed to have found a diamond the size of his head and then dropped it from his airship. Zaehr had always thought that both tales were simply in his imagination.

  What lay before her was no adventurer’s tale. The silver dragon was tangled in the wreckage of the ship, its head still hidden inside the shattered vessel. It was crumpled and twisted, but Zaehr guessed that it was over eighty feet long from the tip of its muscular tail to the hidden jaws. Its hind legs had been shattered by the impact, and Zaehr noticed that even its blood looked like liquid silver, leaking out from between the armored scales and hissing against the flames. She touched down on the cobblestones next to the dragon’s left hind foot. Even its toes were larger than she was.

  It’s just another victim, Zaehr thought, and it’s time to get to work.

  A dozen different blades were tucked along the black leather harness Zaehr wore, and she selected one—a thin stiletto she liked to use as a probe. Stepping up to the dragon’s foot she fought to shut out the screams and
yammering of the surrounding crowd, focusing her attention on the sight of the corpse, and more importantly, on the smell—the world of scent that humans couldn’t begin to understand. Fire, blood, wood, heat, and dozens of shattered lives—all of these stories stretched out before her, painted in the language of scent. Strongest of all was the smell of fresh rain—a smell that soon she realized was the odor of the dragon’s blood.

  Silver rain battled burning wood as Zaehr grew closer to the ship. The vessel was still burning, but Zaehr had no fear of fire. Tolar had told her to trace the corpses, and it was possible there were survivors. Besides, she wanted to see the creature’s head. Ignoring the crowd, Zaehr leaped onto the side of the stricken dragon and climbed along its chest, pulling herself to an opening in the hull of the shattered ship.

  She’d wanted to see the dragon’s head. But the legends, her expectations… nothing had prepared her for what she found inside.

  The smell of blood and smoke filled Zaehr’s nostrils—the coppery tang of human blood blended with the thick rain-scent of the silver dragon. The floor was at a sharp angle, but Zaehr was a talented climber. Her fingernails and toenails were thicker and stronger than those of a human, coming to a natural point, and they helped her maintain a grip on the wooden surface. Absently, she brushed the back of her hand against the steel studs embedded in her black leather jerkin, activating the enchantment held within the armor—a spell that helped to hide her from prying eyes and to disperse any sounds she might make. Zaehr didn’t know what she might find in the ship, but she was a hunter by nature—and she’d decide whether or not to reveal herself.

  She was standing in a small stateroom. The eastern wall had been shattered by the expanding dragon, but she caught the scent of human blood within the rubble and saw a finger protruding from under a plank. Carefully sifting through the wood, she found the body of a young male half-elf wearing the bloodstained livery of House Lyrandar—a servant from the look of him, lacking the rough hands of a sailor or the clothing of a House noble. The fire hadn’t killed him. From the looks of the corpse, the explosion hadn’t reached him. But the damage was terrible. Both his lungs had collapsed, and he had at least a dozen broken bones. Blood was still flowing from his mouth.

  As powerful as the explosion had been, much of its force had blasted away from the ship; it might have knocked this boy off his feet, but it hadn’t killed him. The dragon had done that. Its body had expanded, smashing through walls and finally through the hull itself, crushing everything in its way in an inexorable tide of armored flesh. Glancing around and tasting the air, Zaehr identified another dozen corpses buried in the rubble. A few carried the scent of burned flesh, no doubt drawn from deeper in the ship and closer to the explosions. The others had been caught in the path of the dragon and crushed like ants beneath a child’s foot.

  As Tolar had commanded, Zaehr paused to take a quick trace item from each of the corpses she could reach—a scrap of cloth, a lock of hair. She carried a few strips of fresh linen in her pouch; she dabbed one on the silver blood of the dragon and rubbed another against a thick scale.

  She pressed forward, working her way deeper into the ruined ship. She could hear voices shouting outside the vessel—officers of the Sharn Watch, a Lyrandar salvage team, healers from House Jorasco. The watch was working to push the public back while the House forces extinguished the fires and brought their own teams into the ship. There wouldn’t be much work for the Jorasco healers. Between the impact of the crash, the two explosions, and the crushing bulk of the dragon itself, Zaehr had yet to find anyone who could possibly be revived. During her childhood in the depths and her time with Tolar, Zaehr had seen many horrible things, but finding three young girls crushed against a doorframe… what sort of person would set such horror in motion?

  She found the center of the first blast—a large dining hall. The walls were covered with ash, and a number of the blackened corpses had been blown apart before being crushed by the dragon. Zaehr found the remnants of a giant owl, most likely a merchant from Dura or a windchasing champion; she plucked a few feathers from one scorched wing. After searching for trace objects on the other corpses, she scoured the room for remnants of the airship that had struck it, then turned her attention to the dragon. Only the muscular neck remained, rammed through the wall leading to the bow of the ship. Zaehr pulled herself along the serpentine neck, squeezing through the smashed gap.

  She had a strong stomach. She had spent her first years in filth and had just examined a score of corpses, but what she saw next brought bile to her throat, and it took all her will to keep from retching.

  Soon enough the ship was crawling with Lyrandar salvagers, and Zaehr made her way back to the square. She planned to disappear into the shadows, but a skycoach was waiting for her, the steersman carrying a parchment with Tolar’s crest. Normally Zaehr loved riding in the air, but after the fall of the Pride, she felt a momentary trepidation at stepping aboard the flying boat. But it wasn’t in her nature to argue with Tolar. Once she was aboard, the skycoach rose into the air, winding through the massive towers of Sharn and finally bringing Zaehr to the luxurious residential district of Oak Towers. The buildings on this level of Sharn were inspired by elven architecture, with rounded, curving walls and intricate engraving. Most were built from densewood—a form of lumber with the strength and durability of stone.

  Tolar was waiting in a small park filled with bloodvines and gray oaks, and Zaehr quickly relayed the highlights of her investigation. Tolar led her down a road cobbled with disks of densewood as they spoke.

  “Precisely what I expected,” Tolar said when Zaehr told him the story.

  “You expected the head to be missing?” Climbing along the neck, Zaehr had actually dug one hand into the charred flesh of the beast’s stump.

  “Missing or at least severely damaged,” Tolar said. He was favoring his left leg and placing much of his weight on a gnarled cane. Apparently the morning’s excitement had taken its toll, but Zaehr had other concerns.

  “Explain,” she said. Finding the seared stump of the neck had sent a chill through her. The dragon’s head must have been ten feet long. How could something like that simply vanish? She’d half-expected to find some sort of terrible head-eating beast lurking in the wreckage, but she’d seen nothing of the sort.

  “When the dragon burst through the hull of the ship, there was no sign of motion in its limbs that could not be explained by the wind and fall. Such an experience would be extremely uncomfortable for the creature in any case. The logical explanation was that the dragon had been concealed on the ship in the form of a smaller creature and that this magical effect was broken upon its death… as is typical of such transformations.”

  “But—” Zaehr knew it was a mistake the moment she opened her mouth. Tolar hated interruptions, and she could sense his frustration in a half-dozen ways—the tightlipped scowl, the lines on his forehead, the sour smell no human would have noticed. She bit her lip even as Tolar silenced her with a sharp wave of his hand.

  “I had an excellent view of the creature during those first moments, and there were no signs of mortal injury that I could see—minor burns and scrapes most likely caused by bursting through the hull of the ship. Therefore, the killing blow had to have struck an area of the body that was hidden from view.” He paused, glancing back at her for the first time in the conversation. “Now, I believe you had a question?”

  “Yes, but… the, head was gone. How does something so large just vanish?”

  “You’re not thinking on the proper scale,” Tolar replied. She could sense his slight disappointment and felt a touch of shame. “When the attack came, the dragon was in the form of another creature—most likely, a human, elf, or half-elf. The injury came while she was in this shape.”

  Zaehr opened her mouth to speak but bit back the question. One interruption was bad enough.

  “I suspect that she was standing close to the breach in the hull during first explosion,” Tolar said.
“I already mentioned the minor burns. However, her head—barely the size of yours, I imagine—must have been exposed to the full force of the blast. You said the stump of the neck was charred.”

  Zaehr nodded.

  “So the head was blown apart. Most likely pieces remain, but they would have been scattered during the expansion of the rest of the body—I suspect a few curious children will go home with dragon’s teeth tonight.”

  “You said she.”

  “Yes?” Tolar said. “You didn’t notice?”

  Zaehr blinked. “Well, I…” She shook her head. “It was a dragon! A myth! How am I supposed to tell the difference between girls and boys?”

  “Dragons are living creatures, Zaehr. And that means that they eat, sleep—and breed.”

  Zaehr held up her hands “Until today, I thought dragons were just something cartographers put on maps to justify the regions they were too lazy to explore. I’ve never considered the idea of where little dragons come from. And you’re not the least bit surprised to find a dragon in Sharn?”

  “Of course not. Sharn is the largest city in Khorvaire—possibly the largest in the modern age. It’s a center for trade, diplomacy, and all manner of intrigue. If a dragon is going to move among humanity, do you suppose it would live on a farm? Clearly the creature was here to monitor events in Sharn.”

  “But why?”

  Tolar rubbed his short beard, fingering the streaks of red. “The Library of Korranberg has an excellent draconic studies department. The latest research indicates that while dragons are mortal, they can live for thousands of years. Now look at the last five thousand years of history. Humanity has gone from a state of savagery to dominating two continents. Your race didn’t even exist back then. The younger races must move very quickly from the perspective of a dragon. It’s hardly surprising that they should wish to study events from within… or, I suppose, to control them.”