MEMORY OF DRAGONS
BY
MICHAEL G. MUNZ
Red Muse Press
Seattle, WA 2020
COPYRIGHT © 2020 MICHAEL G. MUNZ
Kindle Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Inquiries about permissions should be directed to Red Muse Press, 1037 NE 65th St #232, Seattle, WA 98115, or to [email protected].
Written by Michael G. Munz
Cover Design by Franzi Haase
www.coverdungeon.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.
Print ISBN: 978-0-9977622-9-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020907739
Dedicated to the Isle of Britain, its people, and its lore.
ONE
Rhianon shivered in the windowsill of a cramped hotel room and kept vigil over the rain-soaked street below. Her mind and muscles ached from the stress, the magic, and the lack of sleep that had filled her existence after she had escaped Maeron. It had been three days since he had found her last hiding spot, three days since she had discovered he could track her anywhere.
Unerringly.
All because of something she knew.
A shout in the hallway jerked her attention from the window before she recognized it as harmless laughter. Other guests were leaving a nearby room. Perhaps they were getting an early start on touring the English city of Bath, or trying for breakfast downstairs. Envying their carefree demeanor, she returned her gaze to the pre-dawn shadows outside.
She endangered the other guests by staying here, Rhianon knew. She would need to move on. Though she had only arrived in Bath the previous night, Maeron would find her again. He had betrayed and killed those he’d called friends to gain control over what she protected; he would hardly shirk from destroying any strangers who got in the way, and now she had scant means to protect them. After the choices she had made last night, she could no longer wield magic to counter his.
Not in this world, anyway.
Rhianon traced the edges of the onyx pendant hanging from her neck, not daring to lift her gaze from the street. With Tragen and the others dead, the pendant was her last hope, and that was being generous. It was a reckless gamble, more likely to get her killed than to keep her safe.
Yet no other course of action remained. She had created the pendant last night, shivering in a seaside cave where the salty wind howled as loudly as her desperation. The theory behind its creation was sound; its magic would do what she had designed, certainly.
Would that be enough to stop Maeron? Even if she managed to use the pendant successfully, she might never know for certain that it had worked. It would destroy nearly everything she was. Did that count as suicide? Did she have any other choice?
Rhianon pushed the questions out of her mind. She was committed. She had created the pendant, and would unleash its power soon enough. The only question that mattered now was when to do so.
She was wishing for Tragen’s guidance, for the hundredth time, when she saw the hound. Easily three feet high and fifty pounds heavier than her own slight frame, it appeared in the shadow of an oak tree and loped across the street to the hotel doors beneath her window. The scrape of claws on wood, followed by cries of alarm, answered the question before she could ask it: This was no ordinary hound. It had entered the hotel and she knew it came for her.
Rhianon sprang from the window, taking barely a moment to tuck the pendant into her shirt before snatching up her backpack on her way to the door. The clock read a quarter to six: twenty minutes before the first train of the morning. It was a two-minute run to the station. Now that Maeron — or at least his hound — had caught up with her, she would flee on the first train she could. She had only to get there.
The hotel’s rear exit lay near her room. She might reach it before the hound found her.
Rhianon rushed out the door, dashed to the top of the stairs, and froze. The hound stood on the red carpeted landing midway up the staircase, its teeth bared, ears down, and forelegs spread, ready to spring in whichever direction she tried to run. She had seen similar breeds in her own world — it was a wolfhound, originally bred for dragging down wolves and holding them in place for its master’s blade. The whites of its eyes, tinged with blood, confirmed her suspicions: Maeron had caught the animal and infused its brain with his own memories to guide it. The traumatic violation had overloaded the beast’s physiology with thoughts it wasn’t equipped to handle, and the hound could not survive.
With no time to pity the creature, Rhianon leapt back into her room. The hound surged after her and collided with the wooden door before she could shut it. Its claws scrabbled for purchase. Its weight pushed against hers amid a storm of barking. Rhianon spun and drove her shoulders against the door, feet planted, legs straining as her blistered feet scraped the inside of her shoes. The door bucked between them. She feared it would burst from its hinges until, finally, the hound lost ground, and Rhianon slammed the door shut.
The animal redoubled its efforts to smash into the door just as she locked the deadbolt and stumbled backward. Wood strained and splintered as the hound used its own body as a battering ram.
Certain it would burst through at any moment, Rhianon dashed to the window and scanned the street for any sign of Maeron. He would have come for her himself if he could, and likely only sent the wolfhound ahead of him to stop her while he hurried to catch up.
Please, let him be farther behind than just a few blocks!
Rhianon seized the window frame and heaved it open, stabbing splinters into her palms. She ignored them and clambered onto the narrow overhang outside. Her hesitation about the twelve-foot drop evaporated when the hound burst through the door behind her. Not daring to look back, Rhianon clutched the pendant through her shirt.
She leapt.
Her shoes collided with the pavement, jolting her legs and back despite her attempt to roll with the impact. Momentum threw her against a parked car.
A man wearing a tan flat cap shouted his surprise and rushed over to her, but Rhianon didn’t hear what he said. Still reeling, she staggered to her feet as the hound appeared in the open window above. It sprang onto the overhang in a single motion, bloodied but no less agile from its battle with the door. Bloodshot eyes darted from her to the ground as it judged the leap.
Rhianon didn’t wait. The flat-capped man carried an umbrella — long, sturdy, and closed — with a pointed metal tip. With a cry of “Sorry!” she wrenched it from his hands and fled across the street into the headlights of a passing truck. It screeched to a halt as she dashed out of its way and reached the other side of the street, where a waist-high stone railing served as a barrier to a wide, verdant park fifteen feet below.
Rhianon didn’t need to look back to know the hound had jumped down in pursuit. Ignoring the shouts and snarls behind her, she dropped the umbrella over the railing and then swung herself over it, keeping a firm grip on the metal bar to scramble down as far as her feet could find purchase. There was half a heartbeat to see the hound tearing across the street after her before she let go and dropped to the grass.
She fell farther than she expected. Her right ankle landed first, punching into the rain-soaked earth and twisting. Pain flared and she cried out even before her hips and back hit the ground. Something hard in her backpack jutted against her spine. The wolfhound bounded onto the stone ra
iling above and stared down at her with possessed eyes. No normal animal would make the jump, but Maeron’s memories drove it. She could not escape.
The umbrella lay out of reach to her right. Rhianon scrambled across the slick grass, ignoring the pain in her ankle, and seized the polished wooden handle just as the hound sprang. Clutching the closed umbrella with both hands, she rolled to her back, planted its handle against the ground, and screamed.
It was all she could do not to shut her eyes as the hound plunged toward her, jaws gaping. She met its gaze, and it was as if Maeron’s gray eyes stared back at her. Therein lay the same cruel serenity as when he had murdered Tragen. Rage erupted within her, returning the life to her muscles. She tightened her grip on the umbrella and angled it straight for the beast. The metal tip pierced its shoulder with a horrible splinter of bone, drove through to its heart, and wrenched the hound’s snarl into a howl that abruptly ceased.
Even impaled on the umbrella, the beast’s impact knocked out her breath. She strained against the weight, struggling first to get out from under it and then, failing that, simply to breathe at all. Maeron himself might be close behind. Though the creature was dead, it would serve its purpose if she let it trap her beneath it. Maeron would steal what he wanted from her mind and then kill her. Tragen’s sacrifice — to say nothing of their entire expedition to this world — would be for worse than nothing.
The wolfhound’s blood soaked into her clothes, its lifeless muzzle pressed to her neck. She struggled desperately to gain some sort of purchase. At last, she managed to roll to one side and take advantage of the mangled umbrella’s leverage to find room to draw breath.
Rhianon lay there, waiting for her lungs to recover. The sky was beginning to shift out of twilight with a faint orange glow from the east. The wet, frigid grass soaked through her clothing in sharp contrast to the wolfhound’s hot blood. It tingled, just slightly, with what she surmised was the fading energy of Maeron’s magic.
She still did not know how he managed to work the magic outside of their home world of Rhyll. It was a feat she herself had only achieved using the Draig Crystal’s aura, and she had kept that from him. She had theories, of course — she had always been better with magical theory than practice — but no time to test them.
“I say!” The shout came from the railing above, where the flat-capped man looked down at her. “Are you alright?”
“Yes!” Rhianon managed. Aside from her ankle and what felt like a gash on one side of her forehead where the hound’s claws had struck, she was, at least, unharmed. Nevertheless, as she hauled herself out from under the poor brainwashed animal, she doubted that she appeared anything but terrified as she looked around for Maeron’s approach. “Don’t come down!”
“You can’t be serious!”
She shook her head, longing to say otherwise and invite the help she craved. Yet even if it didn’t come with questions she couldn’t answer, any aid she might find here would ultimately be powerless against Maeron. She would not bring anyone in to die needlessly.
“I’m coming down! Stay there!” The man waved a phone. “I’ve called for help!”
He dashed out of sight along the bridge as Rhianon cursed. At least the nearest stairs down to her were a good fifty paces away.
She fled into the foggy park. Blood-slicked shoes slipped on the grass. Her injured ankle howled in a protest she forced herself to ignore. Not until she had gained the shelter of a stand of trees did she realize that the park’s gates were likely closed at this hour. This world’s custom of controlling access to natural areas puzzled her, but she took it as a blessing at the moment. Perhaps the man would give up trying to follow her — although he could scale a gate easily enough.
Then again, so could she. Yet soaked as she was in the hound’s blood, boarding a train without attracting attention would be difficult at best. With a cautious glance for either Maeron or her would-be rescuer, she tossed her backpack onto a dry patch of earth and stripped off her shirt and pants. From the pack she yanked one of her few available luxuries: a spare set of clothes. Rhianon dressed as quickly as she could in the black slacks and gray and red sweatshirt. Their colors were reminiscent of the far more familiar but lost outfit she had worn to this world. After wrapping and stuffing her bloodied garments into the pack, she limped hurriedly across the park to a gate at the opposite end.
Atop a flight of stone steps leading up from grass level, the five-foot gate was more boundary marker than barrier. Rhianon scaled it in a few moments and then fled down the sidewalk in the direction of the train station. The park stretched out to her left, and she spotted the helpful man searching in the dawn mists. She forced herself to a less conspicuous pace and hugged the far edge of the sidewalk to keep hidden.
A hundred paces ahead of her lay an intersection leading back toward her hotel. The blue lights of the town’s law-keepers — police, she remembered — flashed outside the building, summoned by the man’s phone call. Their headquarters stood farther down, on the way to the train station. Rhianon slipped the sweatshirt’s hood up around her and hoped they’d not scrutinize every passerby. There were few people on the streets this early; it wouldn’t be hard to stop everyone. But at least that would help her spot Maeron, if he was near.
She quickened her pace and, unable to deny the impulse, turned down an alley to put distance between herself and the police. There were plenty of places to hide in the narrow passages amid the tan, sandstone buildings that comprised the city’s predominant style. Her imagination placed Maeron in every one of them. He couldn’t possibly know she would come this way, but he could track her. He could anticipate.
Rhianon wove her way through stone alleys and closed storefronts, keeping her footfalls as silent as possible on the cobblestones and concrete, and then circled back past a bank to the main street. Too late she realized that she had misjudged the distance. The police station stood just up ahead. There was, thankfully, little activity. She was making her inconspicuous way down the opposite sidewalk when Maeron whispered her name.
Rhianon.
She jumped with a shout and spun around to find no one there but a young woman on her way to work whose startled eyes matched Rhianon’s own. The woman’s surprise turned to concern as Rhianon sized her up for any trace of a threat, backing away slowly.
His voice came again, more clearly from within her mind than from anywhere nearby: Rhianon!
Rhianon turned from the startled woman and quickened her pace toward the train station, belatedly hoping she had cleaned enough of the blood from her face and hair to avoid notice and wishing she knew how far Maeron could project his thoughts. She refused to answer him.
Come now, Rhianon. Silence serves only rudeness. Are your concerns so petty? You know I will catch up to you. I know where you are this very moment. I can sense the pace of your heart, your feet, your mind. Tragen knew when to accept the inevitable. Did he not teach you to recognize it yourself?
Her pace faltered, but she renewed it. Passersby grew more numerous as she neared the train station. Maeron might be among them, but no trains had arrived yet. If he was close enough to intercept her, would he have sent the wolfhound at all?
Going to take a train, Rhianon? Amazing contraptions, are they not?
She changed course down an alley, almost without thinking, moving faster. “Think so?” she growled. Though the pain of her ankle was slowly subsiding, fatigue still tugged at her with every step.
I truly do not understand why you run. You eluded me once; I commend you. Yet whatever magic you worked to block my own obviously failed to last. Will you try it again? Each time you work within the crystal’s aura, you weaken the bindings that lock the spirit inside. Would you let it loose among these people?
So he didn’t know she’d left the crystal behind. Or was he trying to goad her into confirming it? Her toes struck a curb as she crossed another street. Every step took her farther from the station now, farther from her planned escape. There could be no u
sing the pendant until she was aboard the train.
“Your magic still works without the crystal, Maeron,” she said, glancing left and right down a perpendicular alley. “What makes you think mine can’t?”
Because I know you, Rhianon. I know what it takes to use magic in this world without the crystal, and I know you lack the mettle for it. It is a method based in death, do you know that? Do you know how to harness the energies of the dying? Store it for your own uses? Kill to harvest it? Return the crystal to me, and I will teach you. I would even leave this world to you, to shape it as you see fit. Continue running, and, well. Death upon death shall fuel my search. No one wants that, do they?
“Then don’t do it.”
She stopped and pressed her back to a stone wall, unwilling to go farther, afraid to go back.
You say that as if I have a choice.
“You do have a choice! How many will die if you return the crystal to Rhyll?”
Rhianon, so naïve. So trusting of what they told you. Do you sincerely think the crystal’s presence would doom Rhyll? That its presence here is not far more harmful?
“Yes!”
Tragen said as much before he perished. I still wonder, did he believe it, or did he merely shepherd the Sentinels’ lies?
Maeron’s words stabbed her heart. Tragen and the others did not give their lives to protect a lie! “The lies are yours!”
If you wish to forfeit further lives on that delusion, that is your choice. But not one I would commend.
“It’s not a delusion!” She couldn’t accept that! She wouldn’t consider it! Rhianon forced the idea out of her mind.
Maeron gave no reply.
Rhianon froze, and then searched about in case his silence heralded an ambush. Birds flew between the tan buildings that framed the narrow street. The wind blew a scrap of paper along the wall. Nothing else moved.
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