When Dragons Die- The Complete Trilogy Box Set

by K. Scott Lewis

  “We will,” he promised and pinched silent the flame.

  He looked at Keira for a long moment. “We’re alone in this.”

  “It’s going to be an interesting winter,” she replied.

  16 - Abandon All Hope

  Athaym had stopped torturing Aradma ten days prior. She was too close to term. She lay in bed in his chamber with him sitting by her side. He held her hand gently as if all were well between them, as if they were old friends, perhaps lovers, and that he had never caused her pain. In the world above, it was Highwinter, just before the turning to a new year. Aradma knew today would be the day her daughter would be born.

  She hated the man beside her, despised him with all her being. If she could keep her baby locked safely away inside her womb until she managed to escape him, she would. But the child would come, and there was no way to stop it.

  Oh, Fernwalker, she thought. Where was she now? What was she doing for Highwinter? Oh, Kaldor. Are you with my daughter?

  Odoune…

  Then a smaller, fleeting thought… Tiberan. Why did you have to die?

  There was something else underneath her consciousness that was starting to bubble. Athaym’s torture had caused it, drawing it forth. The black elf was right, though it wasn’t the same kind of clarity of pain that Marta had brought. It was something else, a certain kind of agony she already knew somewhere in the depths of her self. It was as if he was trying to summon a memory buried deep within through an acutely familiar agony.

  Aradma thought she had already unlocked all the Dragon’s memories, but now she wasn’t so sure. She now felt guilt with Sidhna near, more than just sorrow for Sidhna’s fate. Guilt and shame so intense it made her want to lock herself away in isolation. And beneath that, the memory of something else. The cause, the why, of the shame.

  Athaym regarded her thoughtfully for a moment. “We both want to end the rule of gods,” he told her gently, “but I have a means to do it. Join me, and we will end their tyranny. Let us fulfill the Black Dragon’s purpose.”

  “What?” she asked. “What was it that Klrain wanted so badly that he would destroy the world?”

  “To starve the gods of hope,” Athaym replied. “Without hope, without faith, the Kairantheum will wither. The gods will die. They will have nothing to feed them. In time, I will reunite the troglodyte tribes—who have no hopes, nor dreams—and we will exterminate those races that feed the gods.”

  Aradma shrank back in horror. This was why the Three had raised the Champion to kill him.

  Athaym grinned. “As long as you have hope, you will resist me,” he said, almost soothingly. “You will give yourself freely to me when you finally abandon hope. No matter, I have time, and my plans do not rest on you.” He touched her belly. “Your daughter will bring the troglodytes together into one tribe.”

  Aradma shuddered. “How?”

  “It is not important for now. Now you need only know that there is no hope.”

  “There is,” she challenged. “There is another way. Artalon—”

  “Yes, yes,” he answered. “Artalon can control the Kairantheum. But how do you unlock it, do you know?”

  She shook her head. “We’ll find a way.”

  “Well, why don’t I just tell you,” he offered. “The gnomes who built it realized what kind of power they had made and how it might be abused. They put a lock on it to ensure that it would never be used while the world was at war with itself. A lock whose keys are the four elemental seals. There is only one thing that can reveal the Stag Throne.”

  Aradma stared at him, keeping her lips pressed together.

  He laughed. “The Four Archdragons acting in concert! Think about it. By the time Artalon was made, you had already abandoned me! The gnomes made sure that Artalon couldn’t be used unless the Four of us came together with common purpose, with peace between us. Until then, it would remain locked away.”

  Aradma felt a little bit of hope slip away from her.

  “It can never be unlocked now,” he said. “You and I are the last of the seals. I know you bear Graelyn’s seal, as I carry Klrain’s. But Valkrage is dead.” Then he looked at her with a slow, cruel gaze. Time seemed to crawl. “And so is Kaldor.”

  Her heart lurched. “You lie,” she said through tears, but she didn’t believe her own words. She knew he spoke the truth. That was why Kaldor had not found her. He was dead. Tears dropped to her cheeks, and more hope drained from her spirit.

  “Your friends gave up on you months ago,” he said. “Without Kaldor, they had no hope of finding you. Even now they fumble around in Artalon. The armies of the world tear each other apart to seize its power. And its power will forever be closed to them. Only two seals live in the world now. Artalon is a dead end.”

  At that moment she sat up as a birthing pain clutched her bowels.

  “Ah,” he said. “It is time.”

  Two troglodytes entered the room when the birthing commenced. They knelt to either side of her. One of them peeled back the snake-scale living armor from her waist, freeing her legs so she could push her daughter out.

  Athaym stood silently in front of her, staring in wait for the child’s head to emerge. There was no tenderness on the part of the troglodytes, no words of encouragement. She wondered where the women of these people were.

  She cried out in a different kind of pain. Compared to the torture she had been enduring, this was nothing, almost welcome in comparison. These throbbing aches of clenched tightness meant life.

  The tower made its sighing breath, and the troglodytes placed their hands under her back. They helped her sit as she pushed, almost as if they were taking sudden direction from the tower itself.

  Finally, after many hours, the child’s head emerged.

  Athaym reached down and took the tiny head in his hands. He waited for Aradma’s final push and then lifted the baby to the air.

  “You are her mother,” he stated. “Name her.”

  She reached her arms out to her baby, but he did not give her over. He held the girl just close enough that Aradma could see wisps of cyan hair and bright teal eyes. The child’s skin was the warm pink of the rising dawn.

  “Naiadne,” Aradma whispered, squeezing tears from her eyes. They weren’t going to give her baby to her. “Her name is Naiadne.”

  Athaym nodded. “So she shall be called.” He cradled the child in his hands and focused his gaze upon her. Naiadne cried and screamed the rage of an indignant infant. “She is like the Champion,” he remarked softly.

  Through their demonic bond, Aradma could feel his actions. He forced his mind into her daughter’s soul and covered up the link to Light that had passed to her from Kaldor, the same way he had cut Aradma off from Life. Then he ripped open a link to the Dark and planted its seed within Naiadne’s spirit.

  The child’s screaming stopped, and she grew silent.

  “Why?” Aradma started to ask, but he cut her off.

  “She is well,” Athaym stated. “She is sleeping.”

  He handed the child to the troglodyte attendants and cut the umbilical cord. The reptilian men took Naiadne away.

  “Sleep,” Athaym commanded Aradma.

  Unable to fight his will through their dark bond, her eyes closed, and she drifted away into fitful dreams of the Green Dragon’s torture at the Black Dragon’s hands in the Otherworld for over a thousand years…

  …Aradma awoke, screaming again. Athaym stood over her, sending waves of agony into her body through their bond. He neither grinned nor showed any other sign of pleasure in the torture. He simply looked determined.

  Kaldor, how could you abandon me? First Tiberan, and now you too…

  She twisted and turned, falling off the bed, and then her mind floated away…

  A memory.

  Yes, a memory.

  That’s all this pain was. She had experienced this before. The Fae King had watched over her. The real Fae King. The remnant of him in her mind was nothing more than a twisted memor
y of him, incomplete and warped. It was cold and greedy for life. The real Fae King had been so much more than that. He had been noble and pure. He had watched over Graelyn’s dreamwalker as she sacrificed herself to the Black Dragon’s attentions. As she distracted him for a thousand years so he would not awaken.

  She had given Valkrage enough time to transform the Champion into a god… in order to make up for withdrawing from Sidhna’s mind rather than dominate the young woman. All because she had failed to awaken as an avatar and surrender her power to Aaron.

  And so she had atoned. Through her suffering she made things right. Valkrage would not have had enough time to manipulate the human race to retune the Kairantheum’s focus on Aaron away from all the other gods. Klrain would have awakened and devoured the peoples of faith.

  But they were more than peoples of faith. They were peoples of hopes and dreams. They were peoples of vision and imagination.

  Graelyn’s dreamwalker had existed so long as a separate entity from her greater self she had begun to think of herself as an individual…

  …Aradma floated forward through the haze of memory…

  …Aaron, fully awakened as a god, hurled divine fire down upon the sleeping Black Dragon. They had hoped he would die in his sleep. Instead, Klrain awakened. Klrain’s dreamwalker tried to return to his greater self, but he was held there by the magic of the Fae King…

  …but now that Klrain had awakened, there was no reason for Graelyn’s dreamwalker to stay imprisoned with him. She returned to her higher self.

  …Aradma floated as a shining star over the vast, unending sea of Graelyn’s light. For a brief moment she—no, not Aradma. Graelyn’s dreamwalker—wondered if she wanted to dissolve and surrender her individuality back into that light. That thought was fleeting, and she reentered the mind of the Green Dragon.

  Graelyn awoke in Dragonholm. Klrain already flew in the sky, locked in battle with a shining god. Aaron. The God-King. The Shadowlord. The Champion. Karanos.

  The silent bodies of Eldrikura and Archurion lay in their mindless comas beside her and would never awaken. Graelyn spread her vast wings, roared, and then flew to join the battle…

  …Klrain died. Aaron channeled all that he could, throwing the Black Dragon back into the center of Dragonholm from whence he had emerged. The final god-fire laid waste to the mountain and burned the flesh off of both of them and the sleeping bodies of Eldrikura and Archurion. The fire spread over Dragonholm, destroying all life within it.

  But Klrain’s dreamwalker had never been released by the Fae King. He still seethed in the Otherworld, clawing to free himself.

  He died and imploded, and the link between him and his greater self split like a taut steel cable stretched too far. It ripped through the central core of the Otherworld’s essence.

  Graelyn saw the shards of the Otherworld fall towards Ahmbren. She only had moments.

  The fullness of the Dragon’s spirit released her body to fall between the mountains, and her spirit flew free, expanding to fill the space between the two worlds…

  …she was torn apart…

  …but there was one piece of her, one piece that had become its own entity unto itself…

  …the dreamwalker… who had existed independently for millions of years…

  …that piece glowed brightly and pulled in faerie light around it, forming a new body. In its birthing, it buried and forgot itself, hiding from the shame of its failure with Sidhna…

  …and it fell to Ahmbren, a soft light falling from the sky amid snowflakes and shimmering moonlight, touching the snowy ground and becoming a gentle pool of water…

  …and Aradma awoke for the first time on the slopes of Windbowl.

  Aradma opened her eyes in the top chamber of Taer Koorla. She looked into Athaym’s face, but she did not see Athaym. She saw Klrain. She saw the dreamwalker of the Black Dragon who had tortured her for a thousand years.

  He was right. She was Graelyn.

  I and my mother are one.

  The greatest lie she had clung to finally fell away. She accepted the guilt, the shame that she had given into fear, both with Graelyn and even in her life as Aradma when she withdrew to protect Fernwalker from the world at the expense of the world.

  She was no mere Dragon shard that had collected a few motes of Fae remnants to itself. She was the dreamwalker, who had touched the visions of mortalkind for a million years, who had initiated the first troll druid, who had watched with her siblings for signs of the Black Dragon’s return, and who had planned to incarnate and surrender her power to save the world. She was the dreamwalker who had possessed the unborn fetus of a sidhe girl who would be named Sidhna. She was the dreamwalker who allowed Sidhna to push her away, for fear of sharing Kaldor and Valkrage’s mortal fate.

  I am who Sidhna should have become.

  But she was more than that. She too had the Fae court in her mind. She was a new being, a seelie. She had loved and given birth and shared mortal struggles and uncertainties. She fought for those she loved, and her bond to Fernwalker felt closer than Graelyn’s had ever been with her hatchlings. It was mortality she had feared in her previous life, but now it was mortal limitations and struggles that made her spirit stronger than she had ever been before. The struggle through limitation allowed her to appreciate and know living, not just life. The Green Dragon had overseen and guided life, but Aradma had participated in its flow. Instead of just the forest, she now knew the trees. She had a depth of understanding that the Archdragon could never have had at the height of her power.

  She was Aradma.

  She stood. Her body screamed at her for the betrayal of standing. It ached from the birthing and throbbed from the torture. But it obeyed her will.

  She stared into Athaym’s eyes. She would never let this man see another tear on her face.

  “I know who I am,” she said in a calm voice, “but that was another life. I was Graelyn, but I am Aradma. I am so much more than I was, and that you can’t see it will prove your undoing in the end.

  “You were Klrain, but now you are Athaym, and you are so much less than you were. You think we have lost because the seals are no longer here for us to unlock Artalon, but even at your height, you never triumphed. Now you are at your least. Even though your old enemies Archurion and Eldrikura are no longer here to challenge you, you will still lose.”

  Hope returned to her spirit.

  “Good,” he said, ignoring her words. “I need all of your self to hear me. You will pledge yourself to me, and when you do I will release the block on your soul. You are the Seal of Life, and through you, Life will serve at my side. We will destroy the gods and remake this world in our image. Dragons will rule again, as we once did.”

  “The people of this world—the people of imagination and vision—are strong. You will break yourself upon them, and I will laugh when you do.”

  He suddenly stepped forward and seized her arms, grasping underneath her elbows. She started in surprise and reflexively clasped his forearms in her hands.

  “Abandon your hope,” he commanded. As he spoke, she felt the presence of the Black Dragon radiate from him, and the rest of the world grew dark. She could only see him. “There is only the Dark, and I am at its center. You cannot escape this truth.”

  It seemed as if the Void itself emanated from him, and she trembled. Her knees gave way, and she sank to the ground, unable to look away from his face as she slid down his legs to her knees. Darkness shot through her and in her, with a cold that burned even as it froze. This was unlike the agony from before, intended to evoke a memory. This was unlike the torture in the Otherworld when she had been his equal. Now she was cut off from Life, and the Dark of the Void dominated her mind. She saw the space between the stars, and the maddening expanse of unlit eternity.

  “From Darkness everything emerges,” Athaym said, but it was not Athaym’s voice. It was deeper, older. “And unto Darkness, everything returns.”

  The gold flecks in his red eyes g
littered intensely. “I need you,” he whispered. “We are the last of the seals! With your power of Life, we can preserve the worlds in the Void!”

  She tried to answer, but she could not move against the cold of his Dark. Her frozen lips trembled, and she managed to breathe a single word. “No…”

  His lips clenched together. “I have brought you forth Graelyn, but these lesser creatures pollute you. Once I return you to the purity of yourself, you will see.”

  His fingers dug hard into her arms. She doubled over with the agony as the cold dark burned through her. This time, however, she held her eyes dry, even as her body contorted in its shivering against the ice that violated the core of her bones.

  One by one, she felt the presence of the Fae court diminish as the darkness overtook and consumed the faerie shards in her mind.

  The world fell away from her awareness, but her mind held to one thing. He is not worthy of my tears.

  From the side of the room, Sidhna watched unnoticed. It was Sidhna who shed the tear. The vampire wiped a single spot of blood away from her cheek, but even as Aradma writhed, the elf noticed that fading drop of red as darkness consumed her. The light in Sidhna’s eyes carried such profound sadness, a release of anger, and then surrender into forgiveness.

  And then Aradma’s mind was no more.

  There was only the Green Dragon.

  PART 2: THE DEMON CITY

  17 - Aradma’s Legacy

  Fernwalker huddled behind the balcony wall at the mouth of a bridge spanning two of the Artalonian towers. She leaned out from behind it and fired her rifle, providing cover for Yinkle as the ratling ran towards her. Yinkle tumbled and rolled behind shelter.

  “I’m getting way too old for this,” Yinkle complained. She was right. Her fur had a gray sheen to it now, which grew more prominent each year. She turned and crouched, firing two rounds from her pistols and forcing the orcs at the far end of the bridge to duck back under cover.