Dragons- Worlds Afire

by R. A. Salvatore

  Zaehr lay just beneath the dragon’s head, and the flames passed over her. This was no natural fire, and the heat was dizzying. Where the flames touched stone the walls melted, liquefying and flowing away from the terrible heat. When the light faded, the gates of the Stormwind Keep were gone, melted by the dragon’s breath.

  The demon was still alive, kneeling amid the cooling stone. The flames had burned away patches of fur and skin, revealing blackened muscle and steaming blood, but he rose to his feet, bearing his fangs in a fierce snarl.

  The dragon flowed over Zaehr in a blur of scarlet scales. It smashed into Haladan, hurling the fiend into the empty streets of Oak Towers. The dragon followed, seeming to double in size as it emerged from the blasted entrance and spread its wings.

  Whatever Haladan’s motives, he had courage. He hurled himself at his foe, lashing out with his dark fists. It was an act of desperation—and futility. Even as Haladan charged, the dragon lashed out with its powerful tail. The blow sent the fiend reeling. The dragon gestured with one claw, and Haladan froze in place. Zaehr could see a rippling field of energy surrounding the fiend, a nearly invisible fist, and as she watched in stunned silence she could hear ribs cracking one by one.

  “You… you cannot… defeat us,” Haladan said, burning blood leaking from his mouth. “You are still… only mortal. I… cannot die.”

  “Perhaps,” the dragon rumbled. “We have held you at bay for a hundred thousand years. The humans, the elves, the shifters… they live and prosper, in spite of your games.“ The dragon clenched its claw, and the fiend hissed in agony. “What are you? You are nothing. A worthless memory of a time long gone. A lord of dust and nothing more. You can kill us, but there will be others waiting to put an end to you. And someday, the younger races will be ready to face you on their own.”

  “You—” Haladan began, but the dragon was done with conversation. It reached out, and its long black claws sank into the chest of the fiend. The demon’s eyes grew wide, and the burning stripes along his fur flared into brilliant light. But the dragon showed no signs of pain, and an instant later Haladan shuddered and was still. The flames along his fur slowly faded.

  “Tolar!” Zaehr rolled to her feet, her burned lips drawn back across her fangs. Her companion was nowhere to be seen.

  The dragon flung the corpse to the side, a casual gesture that sent the broken body skidding across the cobblestones. It turned to Zaehr, and as it fixed her with its luminous gaze she was gripped by pure, unreasoning terror—the raw panic a mighty predator instills in its prey.

  “Tolar had no place in such a battle,” the dragon said. Its voice was thunder and steam, a rumbling hiss that Zaehr felt in her bones. Its crimson scales glittered in the torchlight, as if it was painted in fresh blood. This ruddy armor was punctuated by black ivory—two dark horns stretching back of its massive head, and ebon talons longer than any of Zaehr’s blades. Even its teeth were dark, as if burned black by the flames that licked around its jaws. But the true fire was in its eyes. The blazing orange orbs consumed her thoughts, reducing her to a frightened child. It took all her strength of will to tear her gaze away, to wrap one hand around the hilt of a curved dagger.

  How had it come to this?

  “This ends now!”

  The rumbling voice tore Zaehr back into the present. The knife slid into her hand. Her wounds burned as she fell into a defensive crouch, ready to leap. The dragon towered above her, rearing back on its hind legs, jaws thrown wide. Time slowed to a crawl, and Zaehr could see the light rising in the gullet of the beast.

  Fire, she thought. It had begun with fire.

  Zaehr woke with a start. The image was still etched in her brain. A second torrent of fire bursting from the lips of the dragon, engulfing the body of the fiend and burning it to ash. The great beast turning to face her, and—

  “Feeling better?”

  “No.” Zaehr sat up and turned to face the speaker. “I don’t know why you won’t get me another healing potion.” Her wounds itched, and it was all she could do to keep from tearing them open.

  “Do you know what Jorasco charges for such salves?” Tolar said, setting a cup of steaming tal by the side of the bed. “If I paid for mystical healing every time you hurt yourself, we’d be on the streets within a week.”

  “I thought dragons slept on mountains of gold.”

  Tolar’s face froze. “The dream again?”

  “Yes.” She watched him carefully. He hid it well, but she could sense his discomfort every time she brought it up.

  The truth was far less exciting than the dream. Her injuries had been worse than she’d thought, and she passed out before reaching the gates of Stormwind Keep. Inside, Tolar had managed to lure Haladan before Lord Dantian and tricked him into confessing before his master. Haladan had used magic to escape, but for the moment Dantian was satisfied. Haladan had been the one seeding his master’s thoughts with suspicions of House Tharashk. Now it seemed clear that it was Haladan and his cult that were responsible for the disaster. The danger to Lyrandar shipping might not be over—but at least Lyrandar had a better idea of who was responsible. As for the dead dragon, it remained a mystery. Dantian maintained that it must have been working with his treacherous chief servant, and at the moment, there was no reason to believe otherwise.

  But somehow, it still felt… wrong. Tolar had taught her to follow patterns, to make sense of the jumble of facts. This seemed too simple, too convenient. After Tolar had left, she found herself lying in bed and thinking about her dream. The images were faint, already fading away, but she could piece together a trail from the faintest hints of scent, and memories were no different. She thought about an old man with a red beard and coat, a friend who didn’t want her to follow him. She pulled together fragments of sound and thought, reconstructing the words the dragon might have said when it turned toward her….

  “You should not have come here.” The luminous eyes were fixed on her, but she could see that there was no anger in their gaze. This creature might be the world’s deadliest predator… but she was not its prey.

  She lowered her knives. “Tolar?” she said.

  “At times.”

  “Why? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “There are only a few of us out in the world, sentinels watching for creatures like Haladan. It will be difficult to repair the damage he has done. My brethren will do what they can to normalize relations between Lyrandar and Tharashk—and to prevent the fiends from destroying more ships. But our role in this cannot be known.”

  “What am I supposed to believe now? Is King Boranel a dragon? Or just one of his advisors?”

  “Power is not what we seek, child. There are ancient nations of my kind, hidden in the land of Argonnessen. If conquest was our goal, your people would never have spread across the land.” He let his breath out in a long hiss. “You will stand on your own, one day. But the Lord of the First Flame and the other ancient fiends will always be out there, always seeking vengeance for their defeat. They do not seek power either—just chaos and destruction. Even we are not safe from their evil, as Adaixaliantha’s murder shows. So we must work from the shadows. Strike with surprise. Secrecy is our shield and our greatest weapon.”

  “So what does that mean for me?” Zaehr said.

  A long hiss. “By the laws of our kind, you should be killed. You have seen my true face, and I have told you more than you should know.”

  “You could have told me that part first.”

  “You should not have followed me. But I have no wish to kill you, child. You… you have been a faithful friend, and I have enjoyed our time together. I am not without talents of my own. I can twist a few minutes of memory—difficult magic to work, but within my power. It is what I must do to resolve this matter with Lord Dantian.” Fire flashed in the orange eyes. “And if you wish to live, it is what I must do with you.”

  Zaehr considered. “What do I need to do?”

  “It will be best if I render you uncons
cious, I think. You will wake on the steps of the keep, with the new memories in place. You should never know what truly happened.”

  Zaehr raised an eyebrow. “Is this the first time you’ve done this to me?”

  “Do you truly wish to know the answer?”

  “I suppose not.” Zaehr took a deep breath. “If you’re going to make all of this go away, I’ve got one more question.”

  “Anything.”

  “You say you’re here to protect us. But are there… bad dragons out there? Dragons with other ideas about what we need?”

  The dragon stared down at her, smoke trailing from his nostrils.

  And that was where the dream ended.

  About

  the Author

  Keith Baker discovered Dungeons & dragons® in elementary school, and this was the beginning of a lifelong interest in games of all sorts. In 2002 he quit his day job to become a full-time freelance writer. Much to his surprise, in 2003 his world Eberron™ was selected as the finalist in the Wizards of the Coast Fantasy Setting Search. Keith currently lives in Boulder, Colorado with his lovely wife Ellen and a very bossy cow.

  The City of Towers was his first novel. The Shattered Land is the sequel.

  the Artist

  Michael Komarck was born in Louisiana and promptly relocated to Michigan where he has lived ever since. As the years passed, he transitioned from crayons to pencils to acrylics to oils, and in 1989 he found himself at a community college where his suspicions that he was better off self-taught in art were proven correct almost immediately. His stint there was brief in the extreme.

  After several years as a projectionist at the local Cineplex, Komarck co-founded a small publishing company. However, with the exception of illustrating several children’s books, the majority of his time was spent designing business cards, ads, and eventually web related materials. It was during this period that he was introduced to Photoshop and ultimately replaced his oils with digital paint. Eventually he left to pursue a career as a full time illustrator. He spent a couple years building a portfolio while designing business/self-help book covers to pay the bills (to this day he still happily design several such covers a year).

  Unnatural Predator

  Scott McGough

  Vaan felt his master drawing near long before there were visible signs. He had spent his entire life serving the dragon… but it wasn’t familiarity that guided the blue pixie’s eyes skyward. Duty and fear bound Vaan to his master as deeply as any magic, and he felt the great beast’s approach as a mouse feels the shadow of a hawk.

  The sky throbbed as the dragon swooped down from the pre-dawn clouds. It was gigantic—over one hundred feet long—and as lean and sinuous as a serpent. Its head was as broad and sharp as an axe-blade, and its long alabaster horns jutted forward beyond the end of its tapering snout. His master was awesome—a beautiful sight even after decades of servitude, and Vaan cursed himself for being swayed by it.

  And yet, what a majestic monster to be enslaved by. Its scales were an exquisite fused glass, blue-white in color and harder than steel. A small dot of light glowed in each scale’s center like a candle through a translucent ceramic jug. The dragon had wide, sweeping, batlike wings veined with subtle shades of cyan and yellow. As the great serpent flew, the colors on its wings shimmered and merged. Last night’s lingering moon glistened across the brute’s streamlined body, enveloping it in a cloud of silver sparks.

  Two streams of thick smoke trailed from its nostrils, braiding together as the dragon rolled. The titan’s jagged wings carried it over the wooded countryside below, soaring east toward the rain-swollen river.

  Vaan’s rush of admiration soured as he watched the dragon descend. As surely as he knew his master was approaching, Vaan also knew where the beast was going.

  “It’s happening again,” the pixie whispered, surprising himself by speaking aloud. If the others heard him they gave no sign. Considering the scene that now played out before them, it was understandable how they could overlook the muttered ramblings of a small winged man hovering overhead.

  Far below them all, dozens of human figures scurried across the sturdy wooden bridge that spanned the river. Four straight days of driving rain had gorged the river to the point of catastrophe, though the levees remained intact. The local farmers and villagers, wisely unwilling to risk the flood that would greet them if the levees failed, marched across the bridge and continued up the heavily wooded hills to the west. The bridge had taken three generations of hard work to complete, along with a significant chunk of the hardwood forest nearby. For decades it provided the farmers and village merchants with access to the western lands across the river. Now it provided a way for them to reach higher ground and safety.

  Consumed with escaping the rising water with their families and valuables intact, the locals failed to see the even greater danger descend from above. The dragon undulated its body as it flew, swimming through thick streams of cold air and high wind, its eyes fixed on the people below.

  Vaan’s tongue was a block of stone in his mouth—he could say nothing, do nothing. Nothing except stand, wait, and watch like the loyal servant he was bound to be.

  The dragon’s brilliant eyes crackled, and tiny jags of blue and yellow energy danced across its face. Its gaze locked on the heavy wooden bridge and the refugees lurching across it. The beast opened its jaws and arched its back, spreading its wings to slow its descent and steady its aim. Its spiked tail curled under its feet, and the dragon hovered in place, its huge wings churning the water below.

  The beast drew its long neck back, and a dull boom sounded from within its chest. Its lower neck swelled like a frog’s to grotesque, almost comical proportions, then the bulge surged up the dragon’s throat to its mouth and erupted in a halo of white light.

  The dragon lunged like a striking adder and coughed out a glowing sphere of white-hot energy. The sphere coalesced into a solid ball of electric fire and hurtled down toward the western end of the bridge. Dropping like a comet, the crackling missile plowed through the bridges wet wood pilings and into the heavy clay below.

  Vaan’s lips parted, but only a faint wheeze emerged. Another moment passed as the farmers stood frozen, glancing nervously at each other. Then the western end of the bridge exploded.

  People, water, and debris were cast hundreds of yards in every direction. Before the first victims landed, the dragon coughed out another blast and the east end of the bridge vanished in a cloud of splinters, foam, and jagged light. Those refugees who weren’t killed outright or hurled from the bridge were trapped in the middle of the river on an unstable island of cracked, groaning wood.

  Instead of pressing its attack, the brute rose higher, circled back, and cut a great, looping arc across the sky. It rolled and spun as it soared, insouciant and careless, as if it had forgotten its unfinished work below.

  But the beast soon veered back toward the villagers and the bridge. It swooped so close to the river’s surface its tail carved tiny wakes in the water. The dragon stretched the rest of its body out long and straight as it homed in on the final section of intact bridge. While dozens of tiny figures remained atop the crumbling structure, very few were moving—many of those still conscious fell to their knees and covered their heads.

  The wind whistled against the dragon’s scales, rasping over their razor edges with a stinging, sharp sound. The beast bore down on the bridge, its eyes glowing yellow and blue and its face fixed in a feral grin.

  The dragon’s head dipped and broke the surface of the river. Ignoring the sheer force of the river’s flow, the dragon slipped under water a mere hundred yards from its target. Vaan shuddered at the beasts casual display of grace and power—the winged devil had disappeared into the raging water as smoothly as a child easing into a bathtub from its mother’s arms.

  For an endless moment there was no sign of the beast. Lightning continued to slice through the clouds overhead, the river continued to rush and froth, and the remnants of the shat
tered bridge continued to teeter and burn, but the creature’s attack had once more stopped as suddenly and capriciously as it had started. No one was lulled by the trick a second time, but Vaan knew why the beast had played it twice: it delighted in their realization that even though they knew what was about to happen, there was nothing they could do to stop it.

  Finally, a horned, scaly head burst up from below the center of the bridge, scattering planks and farmers like drops of water from a shaking dog. The dragon craned its supple neck through and over the remnants of the bridge and turned its terrible eyes on the dazed survivors. Contemptuously, the great beast hissed, shrugged, and drew its muscular neck partially back under the ruined structure.

  Then, with a brutal surge of power, it forced most of its body through the head-sized hole it had made. Timbers shattered and boulders flew as the last of the bridges foundations splintered, then slowly collapsed into the water. The debris quickly broke apart and was carried away by the water, and the farmers’ screams finally gurgled to a sickening halt as the last of the bridges pilings disappeared into the deluge.

  The dragon slithered onto solid ground and rose up on its thick hind legs. At its full height the beast undulated again, ripples of muscle cascading along the length of its body under its glistening ceramic armor. Its magnificent scales stood on end, quivering in the moonlight as tiny arcs of galvanic energy sparked between them.

  The great beast spread its wings wide and with two powerful beats rose into the air. Two more long, languid beats took the dragon back to the edge of the clouds. It huffed and snorted as it rose ever higher, and smoke trailed from its nostrils. Vaan grimly marked the evidence of the dragon’s visit to the farmland below: three score dead, two wisps of thick smoke, and the shattered remains of an entire community.