“Where did you come from?”
The dragon raked the ground. It seemed to understand, but its answer was vague and made no sense.
Zannnnnaaaa, it growled.
“Zannnnaaa? What is Zannnnaaa?” Bernard said, frowning.
The dragon swung its head. The chain links rippled in the flashes of daylight streaking through the holes in the derelict roof.
Muuuuutthherrrrr.
The word rumbled around the stable. In a glassless window high in the gable away to their right, the raven landed with a flutter of its wings. A tic developed at Brother Bernard’s mouth. “Mother?” he whispered.
The dragon whimpered.
“Then who is your father?”
With another fierce toss of its head, the dragon graarked as though the question was worthy of a bolt of fire. But no fire came. That area of its body still bound by mailing tape bulged with the instinct to spread its wings. But there was no release. Its muted tail pounded the floor in frustration. Its talons raked the earth. It gave no answer.
“Tell me,” said Bernard, his throat growing sore from the demands of a language so lacking in vowels.
“Who is your father?”
Caarrkkk! went the raven, making Bernard jump. This bird was beginning to make him uneasy. There was a dark light in the center of its eye. Why was it so often in attendance to the dragon? Was it some kind of familiar? he wondered. A spirit that served the needs of the creature? He heard footsteps nearby. The raven heard them, too. With another moody caark, it circled the barn and swooped back into the open air. Startled voices remarked upon it: Brothers Terence and Peter.
Bernard centered on the dragon again, “Quickly. Your father?”
The yellow eyes closed. The arches of the nostrils flared like trumpets. Gaaaawwwaaaaaainn, said his distant descendant, Grockle.
Bernard backed away with a hand against his throat.
Gawain.
That was all the proof he needed.
Meanwhile, Brother Vincent is locked in his cell, and an off-island envoy sent for, to establish what should be done about the situation.
Unfortunately, when G’reth brought back the young Fain entity to this world, another Fain being came, too. This one was a killer, out to punish G’reth’s newfound friend, and to stop the fire star portal between Earth and the home thought-world of the Fain, Ki:mera, from opening. This entity took over the body of the envoy to Farlowe Island, desiring to find Grockle also, and cleanse this world of dragons. However, Grockle starts a fire, reclaims Gawain’s claw, and escapes from the island, making his way to the Arctic, the Tooth of Ragnar, and the portal. The evil Fain follows. David is also in hot pursuit, using Bergstrom’s invisible dragon, Groyne, to take him there through time and space.
Having reached the Tooth, David finds that Tootega is already there, but his body has been taken over by the killer Fain being. A dramatic confrontation occurs, with unforeseen results for David and all those connected to him.
Did Grockle make it through the portal in time? Why has Gwilanna been trapped as a raven in an ice block? What will Liz do when she discovers that Arthur’s mind was entered by the evil Fain, leaving him terrified, confused, and nearly blind? Did the young Fain escape its evil pursuer? And just what exactly is Bergstrom up to?
Five years have passed since the end of Fire Star. David has been missing in the Arctic for all this time, and is presumed dead by all but Lucy. Despite this, daily life in the Crescent has returned to relative normality for the Pennykettles — and for Zanna, David’s long-term partner, and their child, Alexa, who now both live with Lucy and Liz. Arthur has moved in, too, having been nursed back to relative health by the family. He remains blind.
Alexa is nearly five. A very bright child, she has powers and awarenesses that are only just becoming apparent, and are yet to be taken seriously. On the anniversary of David’s disappearance, Zanna presents Alexa with a gift.
“Listen carefully,” said Zanna, dropping down on one knee. She brushed a curl of black hair off Alexa’s forehead. “You know we talked about polar bears and the icy place they live?”
“Yes,” said Alexa, possibly hopeful of receiving one.
Zanna looked at her a moment and tried to frame the words. Those eyes. His eyes. That rich, dark blue. Unsettling and comforting, all in one glance. “Your daddy gave me a dragon there once. I want you to have him, because … because Mommy can’t take care of him anymore.”
The little girl frowned and tilted her head. “Mommy, why are you crying?” she asked.
Zanna bracketed her hands as if she were holding an invisible piece of rock. “You have to look very, very hard to see him. But he’s there. He’s real. His name is G’lant and his is a flame that will never die out.” She opened her hands — as if she were scattering the ashes of her grief — and set G’lant down on Alexa’s palms.
The girl looked thoughtfully at the space above her gloves. “I like him,” she said.
This gesture seems to set Zanna free of some of her grief, and when a handsome young man named Tam Farrell appears to show an interest in her, she considers responding. Tam, however, is a journalist who has been contacted anonymously by Lucy, who believes it is high time that someone did something about trying to find David. She thinks Tam might be able to help in the search. Tam visits the shop that Zanna owns and buys a (“normal”) clay dragon, while casually probing for information about David Rain.
It’s not long before the Pennykettle dragons work out that Tam is not quite what he claims to be. Determined to put matters right, they set up a chain of events that result in Tam’s girlfriend giving the game away to Zanna just before Tam is due to have a reflexology consultation with her. Zanna, of course, is angry and upset with Lucy, but with Tam especially.
“You know, for one foolish moment, I let myself believe that you could be something special, like David, when all you were giving me were lies and deceit.”
“I can help you,” he insisted, coughing out pungent, oil-sweet smoke. “If you tell the world the truth, it will only raise your profile even more.”
“Truth?” said Lucy. “What do you mean?”
Tam shook his head. “That he never existed. The author of the book: David Rain. He’s a cipher. It’s all just a front, isn’t it?”
In an attempt to prove Tam wrong, Lucy persuades him to take her to the address David wrote on his letter to Liz when responding to her original “room for rent” ad. However, events take a terrifying turn when, having found the place, Lucy is pulled through a rift in space by an evil force. She finds herself on Farlowe Island, among the community of monks who live there. But the monks have been taken over, en masse, by the Ix.
The Ix are the negative version of the benevolent Fain, and use the power of fear to break down any resistance to their plans. They are particularly interested in Lucy because of her ancestry of dragons and her ability to create sculptures, inherited from her mother. They force her to make an antidragon from a compound called obsidian. The template for this creature, which they call a darkling, is generated from a hallucination based on Lucy’s deepest dread.
In general shape it resembled a dragon. Serpentine body. Powerful wings. But it was thicker-set and ugly. Cabbage ears. A gargoyle. Its feet and paws were stout and immensely strong, the claws inside them conical, tapering to points. It had no ordered rows of scales. Instead, the surface of its body was pocked and ridged as if the skin had been sheared from brittle rock. And apart from its pulsing, bile-colored eyes, hooked green tongue, and gray-tipped claws, it was completely black. Yet Lucy could see lightning spidering inside it, as though she had opened a box of mirrors. She shook her head in fear as the creature turned toward her. With a granitelike click it unlatched its jaw. From its throat came a bolt of pure black fire.
And when she has done that, they intend to send her back through the same time rift they took her from but commingled with an Ix assassin….
In the meantime, David has found out a lot m
ore about who and what he is, his history, and his purpose on the planet. We also learn where he has been and what has happened to him in the past five years.
David is now in the Arctic, attempting to save his beloved polar bears — and indeed the world. He has teamed up with two of them, Kailar and Avrel, to search for the opening to the Fire Eternal, the most creative force in the Universe. David has in his possession the stone eye of Gawain, which has been brought up from the ocean depths by the sea goddess, Sedna. David intends to open the eye and free the spirit of the dormant dragon at last.
David is also accompanied by Gwilanna, who was left as a raven and trapped in a block of ice at the end of the previous book. Despite being a nuisance, Gwilanna agrees to help David with his quest, on the promise of being returned to human form by the end of it.
However, events take a surprising turn when an ancient mammoth appears in front of them all.
David is quick to recognize it as a projection sent by his daughter, Alexa, as a token of her love. However, Kailar is hexed into perceiving it as something else.
Kailar gave out a fighting growl and immediately drew up parallel to the mammoth’s flank. Ignoring Ingavar’s previous instruction, he began pacing back and forth in a threatening manner, his head held low, his black tongue issuing from the side of his mouth. It was a gibe to the creature to come and challenge him.
Avrel tightened his claws. There was going to be trouble.
Indeed there was.
David urgently sends Gwilanna back to Wayward Crescent to protect Alexa when he realizes that his daughter’s auma trail must have been detected by the Ix, via the projection she sent. Gwilanna returns just in time to face the Ix:risor, or assassin, that is Lucy. There are devastating and far-reaching effects as a result of the confrontation, some of which echo throughout the rest of the series.
David, meanwhile, is nearing the end of his quest, and polar bears in their hundreds are gathering around the gateway to the Fire Eternal….
What does David intend to do with all the congregated bears? Can he open Gawain’s eye? Who does Lucy try to kill? And does she succeed? Which Pennykettle dragon is in dire danger of extinction? And why is an ornamental “fairy door” so important? Will David ever return to Wayward Crescent?
The fifth book in the series is the darkest of them all. It deals with (obviously!) dark fire, the most destructive force in the Universe.
The weather has gone completely weird; there is a mist over the Arctic that nothing can penetrate, and natural dragons are back to recolonize the Earth. As if all this worldwide hoo-ha wasn’t enough to be getting on with, things are not so straightforward back in leafy suburbia either….
David Rain appears unannounced one day in the Pennykettles’ kitchen, where Zanna finds him sitting calmly at the table, apparently unconcerned about the upset his disappearance, and subsequent reappearance, has caused.
“Five years you were gone.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Five Christmases, five birthdays, five Father’s Days, five … Valentine’s.” Five letters, she was thinking bitterly, remembering how she’d always written one to him on that day in mid-February, the anniversary of his apparent “death.” “And then you just turn up out of nowhere?”
“I couldn’t help it,” he repeated. “The Fain took me back. Into the world they call Ki:mera, a place where time is meaningless.”
“Not to me.” She forced her pretty face forward. “Just go, David. Disappear into your weird Fain world. Leave me alone to look after my child.”
Zanna is doubly upset as she has just discovered a strange rash on Alexa’s back while bathing her. The little girl doesn’t seem to be troubled by it, but it is yet one more thing to add to the growing list of anxieties that pervade the Pennykettle household.
Liz is pregnant again, this time naturally, and Lucy is not her old self at all. Although the Ix assassin within her has gone, she is still feeling guilty and in shock about what it made her do. As if all this wasn’t enough, Henry, the Pennykettles’ cranky next-door neighbor, is ill, and his sister, Agatha, arrives to look after him. Agatha turns out to be another sibyl, one of many that seem to be popping up all over the world as the twelve natural dragons from the old Wearle, or colony, are being awakened from their prolonged sleep.
The whereabouts of these dragons’ resting places is becoming the subject of intense interest since Arthur received a phone call from an old friend, Rupert Steiner. Rupert has been visited by a small dragon, later identified as Gadzooks, who has left a message on a piece of Steiner’s best notepaper.
Arthur, with Liz and Lucy (and Lucy’s special dragon, Gwendolen — along for the ride as a GPS) go to see Rupert at his home in Cambridge. There, with Gwendolen’s help, they discover that Gadzooks had written the word “Scuffenbury” — but in dragontongue. Steiner recalls that he has seen some similar marks in some photographs he was once sent, taken in a cave at a place called the Hella glacier, in the Arctic. Using Gadzooks’s message as a key, he ultimately manages to decipher the writings on the wall of the cave. They turn out to be the record of a meeting between the last twelve dragons in the world (the Last Dragon Chronicles, in fact). The writings are subsequently published by Tam in his newspaper’s magazine.
Lucy is thoroughly thrown by what she learns from this article. It becomes obvious that one of these twelve dragons is lying dormant at Scuffenbury, beneath a hill called Glissington Tor. David persuades Lucy to go there with Tam.
“I’ve booked us in here.”
“The Old Gray Dragon?”
“It’s a guesthouse,” he said. “Bed-and-breakfast. Right on the side of the Tor. It says in their blurb that on a still night you can hear the dragon snoring. I thought it might make you feel at home.”
But “at home” is the last thing that Lucy feels. A terrifying nightmare while asleep on the first night is followed by a series of further nightmares in broad daylight. The owners of the guest house, Hannah and Clive, seem like perfectly pleasant people; the only other guest, a Ms. Gee, while a little eccentric and “standoffish” appears to want nothing more than to be left alone; and as for the cat — well, the guesthouse owners deny any knowledge of a cat….
It all starts off innocently enough with Tam and Lucy deciding to take a walk up the hill opposite the Tor, to survey the land. Lucy, looking across the valley, spots something out of the ordinary.
“I think there’s someone on the Tor.”
His footsteps halted. She saw him squint in that scary polar bear fashion, just the way David sometimes did. “Probably a tourist. People come here all the time.” He started along the path again, almost bounding where it hollowed out into a dip.
Lucy scrabbled after him, glancing at the figure every now and then. Comparatively speaking it was nothing but a matchstick, but Lucy, blessed with the eyesight of youth, could still work out its basic movements. She saw the arms come parallel with the shoulders. Half-stretched, not full, as if the person might be cupping their hands above their eyes. Or holding a pair of binoculars.
But things deteriorate rapidly from there, especially once they discover that the person watching them is yet another sibyl.
And speaking of sibyls, Gwilanna has gone missing, along with the isoscele of Gawain and an obsidian knife, which she had stolen from the Ix that had invaded Lucy. David is eager to find Gwilanna, not only because she is highly dangerous in her own right, but also because the knife contains a spark of dark fire. The leader of the new Wearle, a natural dragon called G’Oreal, gives David the task of recovering the dark fire, which is then to be taken north to be destroyed.
David solicits Zanna’s help in locating Gwilanna, and Zanna obliges by tracking and following the sibyl to Farlowe Island. Once there, Zanna finds she has walked into a trap. Gwilanna is in a maudlin mood, lamenting the fact that she should have been granted illumination (a spiritual merging) with the offspring of a dragon called Ghislaine, but was cheated out of it. Gwilanna has c
reated a force field around the circle of standing stones in the middle of the island, within which Zanna, and the dark fire, are held.
“The circle will magnify the spark behind you and the Fain will see it from here to Ki:mera. By the time they arrive, I will be gone — with the obsidian — and my terms will be written in your blood across the stones: Give me illumination — or I take the dark fire to the Ix.”
But Gwilanna’s plans go awry, and the spell that was intended to put the specter of the dragon Ghislaine to rest instead attracts the auma of a very different — and terrifying — creature. A flock of ravens roosting nearby are also affected by the energy flow and begin to mutate … with far-reaching consequences.
These raven-mutants cause mayhem and destruction wherever they go. But in the initial confusion at the stone circle, the one saving grace is that Gwilanna, although still free, has been forced to leave the dark fire behind. This Zanna gives to David, who retains it for his own purposes, rather than take it north to the Wearle, as directed. But possession of the dark fire brings interest from the Ix. Zanna is concerned that the Ix are too much of a threat in a general sense, and is worried for the family’s safety specifically. David decides to tell her more about the situation.
“[Y]ou’re right, the Ix can’t be defeated as such — but their negative auma can be transmuted.”
“Oh, yeah? Tell that to Lucy. She’s still scared out of her wits by them.”
“I have talked to Lucy,” he said. His gaze drifted sideways, compressing into bitterness. “She was attacked by an Ix:risor, a highly intensified Ix grouping, sometimes called a Comm:Ix or a Cluster. When they’re concentrated into a conglomerate like that they become almost impossible for the human mind to resist. But that’s exactly the state we need them in: one huge cluster. It’s getting them there that’s the difficult part.”
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