by T. J. Klune
A Destiny of Dragons
By TJ Klune
Sequel to The Lightning-Struck Heart
Once upon a time, the wizard’s apprentice Sam of Wilds got his happily ever after in the arms of his cornerstone, Knight Commander Ryan Foxheart. A year has passed, and while Sam’s been captured five or six more times since then, things are pretty great. His parents are happy, Gary and Tiggy still eat sass for breakfast, Randall is somehow alive despite being older than the gods, the King rules with a gentle hand, Kevin the dragon is as gross as ever, Morgan sighs a lot, Ryan continues to be dashing and immaculate, and Sam is close to convincing Prince Justin they will be best friends forever.
Life is good.
Until it’s not.
Because Vadoma, the leader of the gypsy clan and Sam’s grandmother, has come to the City of Lockes with a dire prophecy written in the stars: a man of shadows is rising and will consume the world unless Sam faces his destiny and gathers the five dragons of Verania at his side.
And she brings along her second-in-command, a man named Ruv.
Ruv, who Vadoma says is Sam’s true cornerstone.
Table of Contents
Blurb
Dedication
Prologue: The Bird
I: City of Lockes
Chapter 1: Best Friends 5Eva
Chapter 2: A Vision and a Warning
Chapter 3: The King is Such a KILF
Chapter 4: The Wolf of Bari Lavuta
Chapter 5: Vadoma Tshilaba
Chapter 6: Shit Just Got Real
Chapter 7: The Boner Carriage to Holy Fuck Me Town
Chapter 8: Getting Bad-Touched by Grandma
Chapter 9: The Vision
Chapter 10: The We-Hate-Sam-A-Lots
Chapter 11: Decisions Made
II: The Desert Dragon
Chapter 12: The Will of the Gods
Chapter 13: The Gypsy City
Chapter 14: The King of Sorrow
Chapter 15: That One Time Kevin Was Possessed
Chapter 16: Sam Go Boom
Chapter 17: Snake Dragon Monster Thing
Chapter 18: And That Was How I Met a Teenage Emo Dragon
Chapter 19: The Magic of Zero Ravyn Moonfire
Chapter 20: Tripping Balls Again
Chapter 21: The True Cornerstone
Chapter 22: Something Wicked
Epilogue: Taking Flight
See what happens next in The Consumption of Magic
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Copyright
For my eighth-grade creative writing teacher who told me that my stories would never amount to anything.
Suck it.
Prologue: The Bird
I WAS seventeen years old when I brought a bird back to life.
I never told anyone about it.
I had felt particularly sorry for myself that day. There was a knight in the castle I’d been harboring a crush on, but he didn’t even know I existed. And there was a rumor going around that he was dating the Prince. I thought (hoped) that was just gossip amongst the staff in the castle, but then I’d stumbled across the two of them in the library, heads bent close together. The Prince’s hand had been on the knight’s thigh, and the knight had this look on his face, this soft expression I’d never really seen on him before. It was directed at the Prince, and I’d felt this furious curl of jealousy in the pit of my stomach, acidic and hot. It rolled through me like nothing I’d ever felt before. I was young and stupid and had a crush on a man who had never looked at me, not even once. And why would he? The Prince was everything I wasn’t: powerful and beautiful with a future that was certain.
I was this scrawny kid who’d been pulled from the slums because he accidentally turned a group of teenage douchebags to stone. I was grateful for everything I’d been given. My parents were living a life they never thought they could have. I had the best friends in a hornless unicorn and a half-giant. I thought my mentor was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I was healthy. I was happy. I was whole.
But there were also days when I was a little sad too. I was a teenager, so of course I thought the best thing for unrequited love was to mope about it. I kept a journal (diary, the unicorn would insist, it’s a diary where you write your depressing little teenage thoughts, Sam. Don’t try to call it otherwise) under my mattress filled with such asinine meanderings that only seventeen-year-olds are capable of, like I would love him as deeply as the ocean and His eyes are as green as the grass in summer and I want to lay on that grass and rub my face in it and get grass stains on my face and S.H. + R.F. = TRUELOVE 4EVA.
So, naturally, I was devastated and utterly convinced that I’d be alone for the rest of my days, having to watch the Prince and the knight grow more in love with each other and then eventually marry. I’d have to witness it every hour of every day because I was going to be the King’s Wizard, and their love would bloom right in front of me for the rest of time. They would be happy together, eventually have a family, and I’d always be skulking in the background, emo as shit in a black robe, dyed black hair, and thick black eyeliner, giving enigmatic advice that wouldn’t look out of place in a Gothic horror: Oh, you want my opinion on the crops? I shall give it to you. The crow flies inverted to peck out the eyes of its enemies and lament its existence in the face of such bourgeois conformity. This is lame. Everything is lame.
And since that was my inevitable future, I decided to start practicing by brooding along the edges of the Dark Woods outside of the City of Lockes. My mentor had sent me on an errand to collect something or other that he probably didn’t even really need. My best friends volunteered to come along, but I flipped up my collar, thrust my hands in my pockets, and said I needed time to reflect on my own mortality and that it was best if I did that by myself, like I always did.
“Oh boy,” the unicorn said. “You do that, Robert Smith.”
I frowned at him. “Who?”
The unicorn shook his head. “This guy I knew. Crazy hair. Sad all the time. Used to sing about it. It got old real fast. Before your time.”
Whatever. It was probably stupid old people music, anyway.
So there I was! Sad and despondent and alone and in the Dark Woods, which was a pretty terrible combination. No one understands me, I thought to myself as I kicked a rock into the trees. No one appreciates me for who I am. My life is hard. I have deep feelings and everything hurts. I’m seventeen years old and everything I think matters and I will feel this way for the rest of my life.
It probably would have gone on for quite a bit longer in that ridiculous teenage vein had I not stumbled across the bird.
I was about to kick another rock when I saw it.
It lay on its back in the grass beneath a tree, wings spread out underneath it, the left crooked at an odd angle. Its feet stuck in the air, yellowed and curled, little black talons at the end. Its plumage was white on its chest, with a gold stripe on the underside of its tail. From the wings and the top of its head, the rest of it was black, with little specks of white dotting the feathers. It must not have been dead long, as the ants hadn’t yet found it. I didn’t know if it’d hit a tree or if it’d been attacked by something larger than it, but it’d died here, in this spot.
I didn’t know why I cared so much. I didn’t know why it struck me as poignantly as it did. One moment I was sulking over something that would never be mine, and the next I was on my knees, hunched over this little bird, hesitating to reach out and touch it. In the grand scheme of
things, this was nothing. Things died every day. It was the way of life. This was absolutely nothing.
But I reached for it anyway.
The bird wasn’t stiff when I picked it up from the ground, meaning it’d died even more recently than I first thought. There was a little wetness on the back of my hands, and I felt the gash near its neck through the feathers where it’d been slashed by some creature that had left it here instead of swallowing it whole. It wasn’t breathing. There was no heartbeat. It was dead.
I held that bird in my hand and I thought to myself, It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair. And it was the thoughts of a seventeen-year-old boy who believed his heart to be broken, though in the grand scheme of things it might not have mattered. There was the sharp sting in my chest that only worsened when I saw his face, that happy smile when he looked upon the Prince, like the Prince was everything he could ever hope for.
And who was I to ever compare?
It isn’t fair. This isn’t fair.
I cupped my hands together, hiding the little bird away.
I didn’t think of anything else.
No wishes upon the stars.
No ancient words in the tongue of those that came before me.
And there was this pulse, and I thought maybe I cracked, just a little, the pieces jagged and sharp. There was green and gold, the colors of the forest around me. It was almost effortless, really, more so than magic had ever been before. It started in my heart; I knew that for a fact. I felt lightning-struck, the beat erratic and heavy.
The colors whirled around me, a spinning corona of light that pooled between my cupped hands, so bright I almost had to look away. It began to cascade downward, like a waterfall, the drops of light spreading along the ground, pulsating slowly. The forest faded around me. The sky above darkened. Everything else melted away.
I thought, It isn’t fair.
And then something hooked itself into my head and heart and pulled.
The air sizzled around me.
The lights grew brighter, and I had to—
There was a flutter of wings against my palm, the barest of touches.
I took in a great, gasping breath.
The magic around me began to fade, the light and sounds of the Dark Woods returning as if they’d never been silenced at all.
And from my closed hands came the smallest of chirps.
I looked down as I lifted my fingers away.
The bird blinked slowly up at me.
Its feet opened and closed.
The crooked wing moved back into place even as I watched, the feathers scraping against my fingers.
It took a moment, maybe two, before it righted itself, the talons digging lightly into my skin. There was a little smear of blood across my palm. The bird hopped around, looked up and down, to the left and the right. As it turned its head, I saw the ruffled feathers on its neck, but the skin looked intact. It chirped again.
And then it flew away into the trees, lost amongst the branches and leaves.
I sat there for a long time, in those Dark Woods.
Eventually I decided to head for home. My heart was still heavy, but it no longer felt shattered in my chest. I could do this. I could be who everyone wanted me to be. I didn’t need the knight. He had the Prince, and I… well. One day I’d find someone made for me. And I would show them why I was made for them. It was going to be okay.
I put my hands in the grass to push myself up and—
I stopped, because the grass crunched under my fingers.
I looked down.
It was blackened. Burnt.
All around me. In a large circle. And everything in that circle was charred. The ground. The shrubbery. The trees. Everything. It was as if I’d burned the life out of it. To… to give—
I stood, my legs shaking, breath hitching in my chest. I took a step back. And another. And another. And then I turned and ran toward home.
I was seventeen years old when I brought a bird back to life.
I had taken life from the earth to do it.
And I never breathed a word of it to anyone.
I: City of Lockes
Chapter 1: Best Friends 5Eva
“DO I even want to know what we’re doing?” Prince Justin asked me as we walked down a side street in the City of Lockes, trying to avoid detection.
“Absolutely,” I said. Probably not. “I have the best ideas.” There was plenty of evidence to the contrary, but it was usually spouted by excessively negative people, and I hated excessively negative people. “You can trust me.” This was going to end in tears and death, most likely my own, but he didn’t need to know that. At least not yet. I grinned my most trustworthy grin as I led him into an alley.
He stared at me.
I widened my smile so he’d understand.
“Are you… are you about to be ill? Because you look like you’re about to be ill. Like you just ate a plate of bad beef and are entirely unsure of what end it’s going to come out of. I suppose that’s how you normally look, though, so I don’t really think there’s much of a difference.”
“I’m smiling at you. To show my trustworthiness.”
He grimaced. “Funny how that works. I still don’t trust you at all.”
“Lie. You trust me a little bit. Otherwise you wouldn’t have snuck out of the castle with me without asking me why.”
“I didn’t do anything with you. You put your hand over my mouth and told me I had to come with you if I wanted to live. And I repeatedly demanded you tell me the reasons for—”
“We’re the best of friends,” I told a rather large alley rat as it scurried along down the cobblestones. “He hugged me once in the forest while a naked man with wings tried to get us to touch each other inappropriately.” I frowned. “Huh. What does it say about my life that that sentence makes complete and total sense to me?”
“We’re not anything of the sort,” Justin snapped. “In fact, my first act as King will probably be to behead you. Fair warning. And the hug was against my will, like most of the things you do to me. And it was made worse by the fact that the King of Fairies kept telling you to lick my—”
“You can’t kill me,” I reminded him as I stopped us at the entrance of the alley. “You would miss me too much and would probably feel really bad.” And I would also be dead, which would suck for me.
“I highly doubt I would feel anything at all but immense relief.”
Okay, I could work with that. “The people would revolt.”
“Or there would be celebrations in the streets as they would no longer need to hear your inane prattling.”
My trump card! “Gary would come after you.”
Justin sighed. “Now that I believe. He still looks at me like I wasn’t the one left standing at the altar on my wedding day while my fiancé stared lovingly into the eyes of another man and spouted disgusting platitudes of jerking off your heart or whatever the hell else was said.”
I glanced out the alley to make sure we hadn’t been noticed. “I don’t know if that’s quite what happened.”
His glare was rather ferocious. “Care for me to refresh your memory?”
Nope, not at all. “You’re distracting yourself from what’s important.”
He gaped at me. “Your level of self-awareness would be remarkable if it wasn’t so terrifying.”
“Thank you.”
“That wasn’t—”
“Don’t you want to know why we’re here?” I asked.
“No.”
“You did just a second ago.”
“I’ve since changed my mind.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to know? Not even a little bit?”
“Sam, if you don’t take me back to the castle this instant, I’m going to make sure you’re miserable for the rest of our lives.”
My heart swelled. It was inevitable.
He took a step back. “What. Why are you looking at me like that? Like you’re having feelings?”
> I needed to hug him very badly. “Because,” I said, taking a step toward him. “You just said you wanted me to be miserable for the rest of our lives. Like we’re going to live long and miserably together. Forever. As best friends.”
He blanched as he held up his hands, back hitting the brick wall of the building behind him. “That’s not what I meant. You stay back! You hear me? Godsdammit, Sam, you stay back—”
“We’re going to hug,” I demanded, taking another step.
“No, no we’re not.”
“You can’t stop it,” I said, holding my arms out wide. “It’s gonna happen.”
“Godsdammit, I will kick you in the—”
But before he could move, I had him pressed up against the brick wall, arms wrapped tightly around him. His arms were trapped at his sides. I laid my head on his shoulder, tucking my nose against his neck. “Shh,” I said. “Shh. It’s okay. It’s okay. Just let it happen.”
“You are hugging me against my will.”
“There’s no such thing,” I whispered. It was a good hug. Maybe not the best, but we had time to get there. Justin had just all but admitted that. It was glorious. I would probably write a poem about this day when we got back home.
He sighed heavily, like he couldn’t believe I could be so wonderful. “You really don’t understand boundaries, do you?”
“Only that they’re made to be broken,” I said. “Also, I would let your arms go, but you’ve already proven you can’t be trusted to hug me back.”
“It’s not my fault you bruise so easily,” he muttered.
“Yet you still seem to try—”
“Are we done yet?”
“It hasn’t even been a full minute. Everyone knows that hugs last for at least two minutes. It’s mandatory.”
“No one thinks that. Sam, literally no one.”
“Maybe we should,” I said, squeezing him tighter. “Maybe there’d be no wars if people just hugged all the time. After all, you can’t be armed if you have someone in your arms.”
“Unless I stab you in the—”