Dragon Fire
by
Pedro L. Alvarez
Copyright 2011 by Pedro L. Alvarez. All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, locales, or actual events is entirely coincidental.
Cover design copyright 2011 by Hector J. Coto.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Tom Holihan for his continuous nudging for me to give him yet another chapter to read. Thanks for your incessant push for me to finish this book.
And to Hector J. Coto for his simple, yet elegant cover design. You captured so clearly the image that was in my mind all along.
And, most of all, to my children – Christian and Ariana – for their love, laughter, and infectious joy for life.
~
In a land long ago forgotten, where kings and magic ruled, a farmer’s son and a princess who dreamed of becoming a knight were born under the same moon; when all hope was lost, together they took a stand and forever changed the course of their world.
~
Prologue
Bathed in moonlight, the tops of the forest trees swayed to the whisper of an eastern breeze; their silver-clad leaves winked and shimmered. To Roimas, it seemed as though beauty itself had lost its way and had stopped to rest in Paraysia’s haunted forest. Beyond the woods, behind a thin cloud cover, the Twilight Mountains loomed like an illusion.
He gazed into the darkness among the trees, watching the Shadows—creatures of the dark with storm clouds for eyes, liquid skin like the night itself—dance in and out of moonlight, taunting him, calling out to him in whispered howls. The first chill of winter pressed against his over shirt. As the gusts changed direction they lifted his hair from his shoulders. The long strands flowed behind him, exposing the back of his neck to the cold. It drove a shiver down his spine.
He brought his hand to his hip and rested it against the hilt of the sword his shirt concealed. Despite its roughness—no carvings on the scabbard, no gold or jewels on the hilt, no mark of the royal smith on the steel—the short sword reminded him of the elegant weapon he once wielded as a young man in the King’s service. He caressed the worn leather strips wrapped around the hilt of the sword and sighed, breathing as if drawing strength from it until the shivers subsided.
Telias stood at the open door of the farmhouse behind him. Roimas knew she was there; he sensed his wife in the same way he often guessed when a storm would fall upon the kingdom—a gentle tug at the back of his mind begging for attention. He lowered his gaze, away from the wraiths in the forest. In his mind ran a memory from only days ago of Telias standing before him with grinning eyes, proclaiming that he was gifted, that he could pass his fingertips over the very surface of the world and tell the reasons for its suffering. "You are truly a sorcerer in hiding," she often said. "So I am glad at having married an enchantress," he responded.
It always made her laugh, he thought. Not so long ago, so much made her laugh.
With his back to her, Roimas pictured Telias standing in the threshold, her milk-white face haggard, dominated by purple sacks of anguish under her eyes. He did not turn around to look at her; a part of him didn’t want to—he felt shame in that. When at last she spoke, it was against the wind.
“He has no strength left,” she said. Her voice trembled.
Roimas shut his moist eyes, sure that tears filled hers, as well. His shoulders ached with the weight of that thought.
“We’ll surely lose him.”
“The Spirit watches over him,” Roimas said. “It—“
“The Great Spirit never listens anymore; it is dead,” Telias shouted. The wind swept up her voice and thrust it back at her, transforming it into a whisper in Roimas’s ears. When the echoes faded, she sighed. “Has been for years.”
“I know,” Roimas murmured and, as the words left his lips, a sense of defeat settled upon him.
He searched for comforting words that would take her pain away, but his heart felt like a boulder in his chest, cold and dry.
She deserves more. And Delcan deserves more.
For hours he had sat at Telias’s side, holding her, stroking her hair while she held their dying son in her arms, caressing him, and whispering his name. “He will awaken soon,” Roimas had assured her in the stillness of the night. “He will open his eyes and they will be as bright a blue as yours.” Now, all he knew to do was to close his own eyes and hope he could gather the strength to console her when Delcan lets out his final breath.
Telias walked back into the farmhouse. Her steps fell on the floorboards like thunder. She threw the door closed against the night, against her husband of fifteen years. Roimas’s lips, bruised and sore where he had bitten them, ached as he muttered a whisper no one else heard. “I am losing you both.”
Roimas looked at his hands. He traced with his eyes the scars from sixteen years of farming the fertile land at the edge of the woodland. Land surrounded by shrieking creatures who lived within the trees—beasts afraid to step into the land of men just as men feared to enter the forest. Among the blemishes on his hands, markings far older than two decades covered his dry skin. Scars from a past that, like a creature itself, still gnawed at the back of his mind.
From the forest, the Shadows beckoned; their cries like steel biting steel. He watched them rustle the trees and felt a tempting urge to walk into that gloom, to join them, to let them embrace him and steal his breath. To close his eyes and never again behold in the darkness of his mind the forewarning vision of a royal soldier’s boot breaking open his door in the quiet of night. To let his thoughts wander and yet evade the notion that the hand of King Orsak himself would some day stretch across the kingdom and wrap around his throat in vengeance for his betrayal of twenty years ago. To no longer hide his past, and, at once, escape the present.
Telias’s desperate weeping seeped out through the farmhouse walls and candle-lit windows. Roimas rubbed his eyelids with the heels of his hands until specks of white light danced in the darkness behind them. He looked up at the night.
"Delcan—my son." As he blinked, a curtain of tears blurred his vision. "He’s lived only twelve short hours. Don’t take him."
A passing cloud slowed as if to look down upon him in sympathy, and then moved on.
"Allgad, Great Spirit..." Just as the words escaped him, a doubt that the Spirit, that anyone or anything, was listening drifted into his mind—an unfamiliar shadow Roimas once thought would never descend upon his heart. The feeling made him uneasy. "Paraysia buried you," he whispered, "but to me you are as you have been always.” He lied. “I beg of you... come for me instead."
The stars, gathered around the moon like children, gazed at him in a silence that grew like a storm. He clenched his hands into fists.
"Come," he cried at last. "Show yourself, coward. Come down and reveal why you want him. Come!"
The Shadows wailed mockingly before breaking out into cackling laughter. All else remained quiet. When Roimas spoke again, the thunder had left his voice.
"I shall serve you well, as I once did," he said, "just don’t... don’t take him," and he dropped to his knees.
The window shutters on the house knocked against their frames at the urging of the wind. The gusts picked up force, rustling the leaves and quieting the Shadows. In the absence of their bellows, Roimas heard a distant roar from beyond the forest. He raised his head and glanced toward the trees. Through squinting eyes he noticed a figure emerging from the forest and sprung to his feet.
The stranger, dressed in a gray, hooded cloak, walked laboriously toward Roimas. A tall, rugged walking staff carried most of his weight.
As he drew closer, the man pulled back the hood to reveal an ancient face marked with deep lines, surrounded by thick, gray hair.
Roimas stood with his hands at his sides, uneasy, ready to reach for the hidden sword. He glanced past the approaching stranger, at the night gamboling through the timberland, then back over his shoulder toward the east. Berest, he thought. He must have come from Berest. The kingdom’s western-most village lay ten miles east of his farm. To the west, there was nothing but the leafy canopy of the woods, and the mountains.
"Hello." Roimas nearly pulled back the hem of his over shirt to uncover his sword but caught himself before revealing the hilt. It had been a long time since his life relied on the blade, and even longer since things were as they seemed in Paraysia. "Where are you heading, old man? Folks do not frequent this remote part of the kingdom during moonlit hours."
The old man glanced at Roimas’s hip, clearly having noticed the weapon, and stopped. "More for fear of being suspected of plotting against the King than for fear of bandits, I’m sure," he said.
His voice was that of a young man, smooth and even-toned. It flowed like water. From the man’s appearance, that of a frail, old, near-corpse, Roimas had expected the stranger’s speech to quiver and his voice to be packed with coughs as if speaking through a mouthful of smoke. He looked down the length of the man’s body. The black cloak shrouded the stranger’s feet and dragged on the ground; dry mud covered the cloth.
"Do not focus only on what your eyes feed you; it limits one's vision," the stranger said. He shuffled past Roimas and sat on a nearby rock. With his frail body bent in what seemed an odd way in which to find comfort, the man appeared even more fragile, like brittle twigs holding up rags of flesh.
"A wicked place in which to make a home, this one." The old man looked up at Roimas and grinned; his eyes were polished stones. "Quite apart from the rest of the village."
Roimas looked down the path leading away from the farmhouse, past the corn fields and the one-horse stable. The timber rooftops of Berest were gray outlines in the distance. Beyond them, the road east cut through the land like a blade. A thin fog rose from the ground. None of it seemed real. The landscape seemed nothing more than a painted sheet hung with strings from the stars. He said nothing.
"I suppose such a setting justifies a farmer wielding a sword. And for him to conceal it.” The stranger spoke in a slow, knowing tone that made Roimas turn to face him. "Which came first? I wonder. The need for the sword or the need for concealment?”
“What do you want?”
“This is the farthest from Castilmont one can go without leaving Paraysia. I would find hiding a banned weapon to be much more effective here than in any other part of the island. That is, of course, unless one ventures into the forest."
The old man’s eyes, blistering with life even as the folds of skin around them announced the coming of death, unnerved Roimas. A pestering whisper in his ear warned him that the stranger knew why he had come to settle in this isolated place; that he knew why Roimas was hiding and from whom. That the man knew him. Knew everything about him.
The more he turned it in his mind, the way the old man had appeared out of nowhere—He walked here from Berest. Berest... or did he come from the forest itself?—this man who leaned on a staff as he walked, the more anxious Roimas became.
"Yes, it is from the dark woods I come. For twenty years I have not seen this side of the world,” the stranger said as if in response to Roimas’s foreboding. "Worry not, I haven’t read your mind, only the puzzled look upon your face.”
“Twenty years?” Roimas shook his head in disbelief. "Twenty years in the forest?” Roimas laughed. The man grinned, as if with satisfaction.
“Once, ages ago,” Roimas said, “the King’s bravest knights could last only half a day within that forest. Those days are long gone, and so are the lionhearted. This world may have once fallen for tall tales, old man—for spells and the promise of grand things—but folks are not easily fooled these days. I have lived too long to take your words as anything other than the ramblings of an exhausted man."
The man nodded.
Roimas turned again to the umbra of the forest and sighed. The uneasiness that had earlier run throughout his body, tightening the muscles on his legs and back, was reduced to a minor twitch behind his ears. This stranger, who only seemed to know to grin at him, posed no real danger, just a villager gone mad and who had lost his way.
“How long have you been wandering; how long have you been lost?” Roimas asked him. After a moment of silence, and staring at that toothy grin, he shook his head and smiled. “From whence do you come, old man?”
"Your face, it is darker than it should be,” the stranger finally said. “It has been long since I last spoke with one such as you, but I am yet to forget the sorrows of men. They cast a shadow on your face like the night itself." He glanced at the stars then gazed back at Roimas. "Something troubles you so. What is so heavy upon your heart?"
"There is much in my mind," said Roimas, "and much pain in my heart, but none of this you can mend."
"Believe as you may." The man crossed his arms against his chest. "But I am certain that your wife and dying son would both welcome my presence."
Roimas sprang back. His eyes were afire; his heart raced. He drew his sword. It was heavy and awkward in his grasp. "What do know you of my son and wife? Who are you?"
The old man stood, straightened his crooked back, and walked toward Roimas; he left the walking staff behind, resting against the stone. He stopped when the sword's point was just a pebble's width away from his chest.
"Who are you?" Roimas whispered.
"You know me, Rojimon."
Where did you hear that name? Roimas nearly asked, but his lips were dry and his tongue as heavy as a bag of sand.
"You know the length of my shadow,” the stranger continued. “You know the years of my age, and you know the blood in my veins."
That voice, Roimas thought as he dropped his sword; the metal made a blunt thud against the packed earth. That voice. His body shook. He had not responded to the name “Rojimon” in twenty years though his life had been twice as long.
The man smiled, his face all at once youthful and full of life. The lines, carvings of time’s passing, faded. The color of his skin turned a deep black, second in darkness only to the Shadows themselves. The dirty gray hair softened and fell around his shoulders in a waterfall of intertwined silk strands the color of an overcast day.
"You know my duty and my promise; you know the prophecies. You know me, Rojimon. You know me."
"Galyan." Roimas stood in front of the dark man in the gray cloak and trembled as he felt a slow fire rise from his feet, through his arms, to his shoulders and to the top of his head. The fire warmed him. His breath escaped his mouth in a white mist when he spoke the name again. "Galyan."
The stranger's smile widened and he nodded. “My dearest friend,” he said, placing his hand on Roimas’s shoulder. “It has been too long a time.”
"I believed you dead by now, wizard." Roimas looked up and down the length of Galyan’s body. "I have not seen you, have not heard of you, since the day we both left Castilmont. All these years, you hid in the forest?"
"It is my home now. Even with such darkness and the creatures you men so foolishly fear, the forest is peaceful."
Roimas glanced at the woods, where the Shadows chuckled as they dashed between the trees. "Peaceful.” A pang of desire struck his heart. “You have lived as I, some days, wish I could. Why would you return to the world that cast you out?"
"It is coming to an end, this age; the next shall bring change to Paraysia. He shall bring change." Galyan pointed a long, thin finger at the farmhouse. "He is the prophecy fulfilled. Your son. He shall unseat Orsak."
"Delcan?" Roimas turned to face Galyan. "The prophecy… it declares that Orsak would have no heir, that only a commoner would take his place. Noble blood runs through Delcan—mine.”
"The pro
phecy calls for a commoner. Your son’s common blood is his mother’s—a merchant’s daughter. That is why I have come. Orsak’s nemesis sleeps in your wife’s arms at this moment."
Roimas turned toward the house. In his mind, behind the hanging fog of distress, a thousand frantic apprehensions ran into one another. He gazed at the closed door and listened to Telias’s weeping from within. “That is no sleep. That is death.”
Galyan grinned. "Be not troubled. All is well.”
Roimas said nothing.
“Delcan is not your only worry, is he? Orsak. You still worry he shall come for you, and now you worry he shall come for your son."
Roimas turned his gaze on the stony path at the door of the farmhouse. "His heart is as vile as ever," he said. "His want of power has only grown. And he has not forgotten me. He has not forgotten you. Twenty years and I know he still searches for me."
He set his gaze on Galyan’s gray-blue eyes before continuing. "Not a year passes that a villager is not hung by royal guards in Berest Square—boys, most of them, whose hearts were filled with their fathers’ passion and fancied themselves heads of yet another rebellion. Not a summer fades that I do not find myself standing at the back of a mourning crowd with my head shrouded in shadow, watching a father cut his son’s body down from the gallows. And not a hanging do I witness that I don’t want to stab my heart with a dagger, once for each boy for whom I should take his place among the dead."
"None of them," he went on. "Not one of those rebels hung posed a threat to Orsak’s precious crown. But the prophecy—that curse you put upon him, upon all of us—has made him mad. He stomps his boot upon the kingdom, afraid to let us breathe, waiting for the commoner who will crawl out to push the tyrant king off the throne—the way the prophecy so declares."
"The same way you and he once slew a tyrant king as young men."
Roimas nodded at the reminder and dropped his eyes. "We were all very young, then. Fools."
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