When Dragons Die- The Complete Trilogy Box Set

by K. Scott Lewis

  Ghost sauntered up to the seelie man. He stared deeply into his face and placed his wide forehead on Tiberan’s, then snorted once and sat beside him.

  Tiberan rested a hand on the tiger’s head. “It is good to see you again,” he said aloud.

  It’s been too long, Ghost sent his thoughts to the man. I tried to watch over her, but your mate has chosen another.

  I know, Tiberan returned the thought. Kaldor. Pain tugged at his heart, much more fresh than the memories that the dream evoked. That Aradma’s mate was worthy of her love—Kaldor, the Gold Dragon’s avatar—didn’t make the wound in Tiberan’s heart ache any less.

  You mourn her loss, Ghost said. She waited for you for all this time, until he came only months ago.

  Tiberan drew a deep breath. Only months? Then: That is the past. She is the past. I wish now to think only of the future. I will not dwell on her. She and Kaldor will live a long, happy life, and I will not stand in their way.

  The wolven woman stood behind the tiger. “Tiberan,” she said in a velvety voice. “By the gods, it’s you!”

  Who is this? Tiberan mentally asked Ghost.

  She was a cub when you saw her last.

  “I’m sorry,” Tiberan said aloud. “Some time has passed…”

  She shifted into the form of a slender human woman. A grass-stained white cotton gown emerged from the receding fur as she changed, hanging from an almost boyish form. Tiny breasts made impressions in the gown’s top. Her wide eyes remained piercingly blue, and her dark hair was cut somewhat short. The skin on her forearms and hands was warped by burn scars.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Ghost says I should know you, but I don’t recognize you.”

  “Tibs!” She jumped up and down in excitement and then threw her arms around his neck. “It’s me! Keira. Where have you been? You’ve been gone this whole time! Now I see why Ghost was acting strange. I think he wanted me to follow him.”

  “Oh!” he exclaimed. She had been but a child when last he saw her. So much time had passed, but for Tiberan, only an instant. What else had changed? “Keira! I didn’t recognize you.”

  “I’ve grown up,” she said. “I’m not a child anymore.”

  “Why are you here?” Tiberan asked. “I felt Ghost’s presence coming for me, but why you?”

  She frowned, withdrawing with a hurt look.

  “What I mean,” Tiberan clarified, “is why did you follow him? Won’t your family be worried?”

  “A lot has happened since you’ve been gone,” she said sourly. “I don’t have a family. But what happened to you? We thought you were dead. Aradma said the Archmage had killed you.”

  He shook his head. “No. Were it that simple.”

  “Oh,” she said. She looked at him with sorrow in her eyes. “You should have come back sooner.”

  Why did you bring her? Tiberan silently asked the great cat.

  Her pack abandoned her. She’s alone. You watched over her as a cub. She should not be without a pack.

  “Your family?” Tiberan prompted her aloud. “Are they… what happened to them?”

  A dark look overshadowed her eyes. “They are dead to me. My parents became vampires to save their town. They surrendered to the Covenant. Arlen continues to serve them.”

  “They cast you out?”

  She shook her head. “I ran away. I left with Attaris.”

  “Attaris?”

  “A friend.”

  “Do you not have a home with him?”

  She clenched her fists and brought them down to strike her hips, straightening her arms in fury. “Gods’ blood!” she snapped. “I’d been sleeping in the woods and didn’t want to be a bother on everyone else. They had their own things to worry about. When Ghost told me he was leaving Windbowl, I knew it was important. I came with him. I had no reason to stay.”

  “He told you?”

  “Well, no,” she said. “He can’t talk. He’s a tiger. But he gave me a look.”

  Tiberan shot a glance at Ghost. Better to have left her…

  Ghost seemed unperturbed.

  “Aradma…” Tiberan said. “She was pregnant. Is her daughter okay?”

  Keira regarded him and then nodded. Tiberan could tell her mood from her scent, and she seemed satisfied that the topic had shifted. “Yes,” she said. “Fernwalker was Ghost’s friend too.”

  She rubbed my tummy, Ghost added.

  “Fernwalker,” Tiberan tasted the name. “She’s okay?”

  “Yes,” Keira said. “She lives in Windbowl with her mother. Duke Montevin welcomed all seelie to settle in his lands. They live there in peace.” She grinned. “Everyone will be excited to see you. I can’t wait to see the looks on their faces!”

  Tiberan shook his head. “I’m leaving all this behind. I’m going into the wilds to be alone.”

  “You’re not coming to Windbowl?” she asked, eyebrows raised. She frowned. “I thought you would want to fight for her.”

  He shook his head. “She is happy. I will not intrude.” When last he saw Aradma, she had been fighting the vampire queen alongside Kaldor and two other women. Tiberan had told his two companions, Eszhira and Kristafrost, to keep his return to the world secret. He was confident that Aradma and Kaldor would bring a final resolution to the contagion’s evil.

  “She doesn’t know you’re alive,” Keira blurted in sudden realization. Then: “I’m coming with you.”

  He frowned. “I’m not sure where I’m going,” he said, “but I’m going into the wilds. I need to be alone for a while.”

  She huffed. “Then we can be alone together. Try to stop me. Besides, you wouldn’t be alone with Ghost anyway.”

  She has a point, Ghost thought. And life’s been difficult for her. She could stand to get away as well.

  I know, Tiberan replied. She’s headstrong. He remembered the little girl who had hoped to grow up and become a wolven like her older brother.

  Amusement tugged at the corners of his eyes. “If that is your wish,” he said. “I won’t stop you.”

  “Well, then,” she said, obviously having expected to argue more. “Good.”

  He gave the faintest of smiles and nodded, then started walking. She and Ghost followed him on a northwest course, away from the Tranquil Woods and towards the flatlands between Hearthholm and Windbowl.

  They hardly spoke in the weeks it took to traverse the Maeleegh Grasslands. After passing between the southern edge of the Windmane Mountains and the northern reaches of the Hallkrift Mountains, they crossed over the road that connected Hearthholm to Windbowl, none of them caring to turn left or right to join its path.

  Tiberan remained lost in his own thoughts as Keira walked beside him. Ghost ranged ahead, scouting and hunting as he went. When Ghost brought down an elk, Tiberan noticed that Keira always shifted into wolven form to eat the raw flesh. It must have tasted different to her lupine tongue than it did as a human. Tiberan had no such compunctions, remembering his days in the Vemnai jungles.

  He knew he wasn’t being a congenial traveling companion, lost as he was in his own solitude. He appreciated that she didn’t feel the need to chatter all the time, that she also enjoyed the quiet peace of the wilderness.

  He was glad to see she had grown up healthy and safe. He remembered her as the little girl—recently, in his mind—who had proudly declared she was “nine-and-three-quarters years old.” He and Aradma had taken her to hear Rajamin’s sermons about the return of the Old Gods. This almost nineteen-year-old woman beside him was a stranger, but he came to appreciate her silent companionship. Now that he was away from the vampire city of Artalon, the immediate shock of being thrown forward in time receded, but he dwelt more on the raw pain of what he had lost.

  Aradma.

  His heart ached.

  Stop thinking of her, he told himself. Don’t be this weak. You’ve made your choice, now live with it.

  * * *

  “What happened to you?” Keira finally asked, days later. The fact he
had yet to answer this question echoed in her mind every day, but so far she had refrained from bringing it up since they’d first crossed paths. She was afraid that he might have simply abandoned his friends, but after several days she needed an answer. “She waited so long for you. How did you survive?”

  Tiberan stopped and turned to her. Pain and loss flashed across his face. He stood silent for several moments before answering.

  “Valkrage didn’t kill me,” he finally said. “He was mad. He sent me forward in time.”

  She stared at him. “You mean…” she trailed off. How awful!

  “Yes,” he confirmed. “For me, it was only weeks ago. One moment I was at Aradma’s side, fighting the mad Archmage. The next I was in an empty throne room nine years later, and Artalon was dead to everything but vampires.”

  And she was with someone else.

  “Oh, Tibs, I’m so sorry,” she said.

  He turned away so she couldn’t meet his eyes. “She is happy now,” he whispered.

  Keira had adored him when she had been a child, both him and Aradma. They were symbols of hope, who had come in and freed their city from the crime guilds’ control and had brought the Reverend Rajamin with them. Keira loved the Old Religion, which was much more joyful and free than her childhood’s monotheistic worship of Karanos had been. Until Valkrage went mad, life had seemed promising.

  Aradma was not the only one to mourn Tiberan’s passing. Keira had grieved for him as well. They all had. He had been “Uncle Tibs”, and had reunited her family by finding her lost brother with the help of Kristafrost and Eszhira.

  Now he stood before her, this beautiful, vulnerable man, not dead, but wondrously alive. He seemed stronger than the world, but utterly broken. He kept the pain hidden silently inside, and she worried that he might break from it. He needs me, she realized in that moment. He won’t survive this alone.

  “But you aren’t happy,” she said softly. “I see you when you sleep. You toss and thrash and sometimes speak. Your dreams are troubled.”

  “That is different,” he insisted. “Old memories from a dead world. It is nothing.”

  It isn’t nothing, she thought. What else troubles your spirit, Uncle Tibs?

  But looking at him now, with woman’s eyes, he seemed less the awe-inspiring elder she had remembered, and more a fellow lost and wandering soul.

  He needs me, she thought once more.

  He started walking again, and she followed beside him.

  * * *

  It was July, and they were only a day or so from Icecap Forest. The sun shone high overhead, alone in a pure blue sky. Tiberan felt its gentle warmth and breathed in the pleasantly cool air. A soft wind rolled around them, bending waves through the grass tops of the field they passed through. He loved the shifting shades of green from deep to bright as the blades of grass swayed in unison.

  “I can’t believe it’s the middle of the summer,” he remarked. He had made lightfall in the jungles of Vemnai, where even in winter it was warmer than it was here.

  Keira regarded him for a moment. “We’re pretty far north,” she said. “East of the White Sea, it gets colder than Windbowl during the winter.”

  He shrugged. He had never been to either of those places.

  She suddenly grabbed his wrist and stopped, sniffing the air, and then abruptly shifted into wolven form, her clothing absorbed by her black lupine fur. She continued to sniff, and the thick wolf mane on her neck stood on edge. “Something’s very wrong,” she growled. “I can’t smell it, but I feel it in my bones.”

  Tiberan smelled the wind, searching for what had put her on edge. The wind’s scent was clear, carrying only the aroma of the open fields. He reached out with his Dragon-gifted senses, becoming aware of the animal life around him. He felt her at his side and Ghost up ahead. Mice played in the grasses, and prairie dogs dug under the—

  He suddenly tensed.

  Under the plains.

  He felt hundreds of humanoid forms beneath the surface. Reptilian forms. They were all moving ahead of the three of them, focused on a purpose.

  He felt Ghost’s mind touch his. There are darklings ahead, the tiger sent. They have stopped to rest. Four of them, and horses too.

  “They’re beneath us,” Tiberan told Keira. “Hundreds of them.” He crouched low in the grass. They were moving up ahead towards where he felt Ghost’s presence.

  Come back, quickly! he mentally sent to the great cat. Something moves beneath the earth.

  The things traveled quickly underneath, whatever they were. Tiberan stayed low and followed them swiftly on bent knees. Keira dropped to all fours and matched his pace with ease. Ghost returned, falling in beside them, and the three companions advanced towards the party of darklings, following Tiberan’s sense of those who moved below.

  They crested the top of a gentle rolling hill, and there across a shallow valley on the opposite rising slope, Tiberan saw the darklings, four men with their telltale horns. They appeared to be trappers, with strings of prairie dogs hanging from their horses’ saddles. They sat in a circle, lazily enjoying the sun’s warmth and eating lunch. They did not look as if they were far from home.

  In the slope below them, a sinkhole opened, just far enough that the darklings themselves didn’t fall into it. They stood in alarm, grabbing their rifles.

  The hole widened, and a writhing mass of muscular, humanoid reptiles erupted from the earth, crawling over each other. They were man-sized creatures, with thick crocodilian tails, long lizard-like fingers, and heads with wide square-shaped chins and jutting teeth. They swarmed over the horses, pulling them down into the earth even as they tore meat from the animals’ bones with their teeth.

  At first they didn’t seem to notice the darklings, but one of the hunters was foolish enough to shoot into the reptilian mass. His three companions ran, and he soon followed, realizing his mistake.

  It was too late. One of the larger creatures lifted its head and saw them. Twenty of them broke off from the cluster and overtook the hunters. The darklings’ rifles reported several shots, but they were too panicked. None hit their targets.

  And then the darkling men were dragged screaming into the morass as the knot of reptilian creatures descended back into the ground, leaving only the silent sinkhole and its blood-stained rim as evidence that anything had disturbed the tranquil countryside.

  Tiberan, Keira, and Ghost cautiously approached the rim of the opening. Whatever tunnel it had connected to had caved in, and they looked upon a deep impression of freshly churned dirt. If he had not witnessed the sight, he would have had a hard time believing that what had caused the blood in the grass had come up from the hole itself.

  Tiberan’s senses told him that the humanoids had moved on to the north. Their presence grew fainter as they fell away into the depths. There was no opportunity to pursue even if he had wanted to, but that would have been foolish in any case.

  “What were those?” Keira asked. In her wolven form, her voice took on a deep velvety texture, but it still sounded distinctly feminine.

  “I don’t know for sure,” Tiberan replied softly. His Dragon memories hinted at what they might be. “I believe they were troglodytes.”

  Keira cocked her head, wolf ears pricking upright. “I didn’t think they were any more than children’s stories.”

  He shook his head. “They haven’t been under open sky since the First Age. They were the servants of the Black Dragon.”

  “This can’t be good,” Keira muttered.

  Tiberan could not ignore this. Despite his wishes to fade away into the wilds, if the forces of the Black Dragon were moving, that was worse than any vampire contagion.

  “Indeed not,” he agreed. “Come, let us continue towards the forest. I suspect the darklings’ homes are nearby. If so, then whatever town they come from should be warned.”

  2 - A Divine Contract

  The goddess Athra left the mortals at the stone cabin to their fate. The wizard Kaldor lay dyi
ng, and the troll apostate Oriand killed the ratling priest who had stabbed him. The ratling had been the head of her Church of Light, but no matter. There would be plenty more. Athra felt so energized from her growing worship. The world was alive with faith again, faith in all the gods! A priestess arrived, the troll Suleima, but she turned away from the goddess to help the wizard. No matter. That troll belonged to the goddess Rin anyway.

  Athra flexed her fists, examining the interplay of gears and pistons. This body she possessed, which Valkrage had mockingly called Athra’s Jewel, was perhaps the most incredible feat of engineering Ahmbren had ever known. It rivaled the splendor of Artalon itself, not for size but for sheer complexity. She was the Goddess of Civilization, and even she was impressed at what the gnomes had managed to pull off with the natural materials of the world. The gnomes… if only they had ambition beyond mere discovery, they could have been her favored people. As it was, humans gave her the most joy. The gnomes lived by the questions: What can I learn? What can I make? The humans took it one step further: What can I do with what I make? What will this allow me to achieve?

  Mastery. That was civilization’s power. Rational mastery over the natural world. She supposed that was why her and Rin’s followers often came into conflict the further away they got from the unifying Church that balanced their ideologies together. Poor Rajamin. She had been rather fond of him. Humans may have been the predominant race among her worshippers, but she didn’t favor them individually over anyone else who exemplified her values… and won worshippers for her. Rajamin had been her favorite devotee in recent memory.

  She laughed. Her constructed body laughed. Her laughter rang with a smooth feminine note, almost too smooth to be natural. It had a faint echo. She felt alive. Life in the Kairantheum had been more diffuse, her consciousness less focused and more dependent upon receiving clarity from her worshippers. Now she existed without being dependent upon them. She had a physical body that did not require focus to maintain its manifestation, whose independent existence provided a solid anchor for her being. Even more wondrous, she could feel the body as part of her. The magic of her being brought life to its cold metal, and sensations that had never been designed into the body’s architecture ran through her zorium skin and the armor-resin fibers that encased the inner gear work.