In a feeble, stammering voice, Joanna said, “The spacedock…gone?”
“Yes,” said Sir Rawn. “I’d only just arrived when the explosion happened. I had my ship’s sensors scan the explosion for anyone that I could help. I piloted my ship into the interior of the spacedock with shields up, which I lowered just long enough to get out and help the one person my sensors picked up who was in the most immediate danger. I wish I could have helped more, but it was too late; the spacedock was coming completely apart. Life support was minimal; artificial gravity was failing. There was nothing more I could do.”
He shut his eyes and drew a heavy breath, bowing his head. “So many are lost, so many I couldn’t help.” He opened his eyes again and fixed them on her. “At least I was able to get you out. That’s something. I’m sorry for the others. If I’d gotten here sooner…”
“You don’t have to be sorry,” Joanna said breathlessly. “You did get me. And…thank you, Sir Rawn.” She blinked again and tilted her head. “Wait… Sir Rawn Ullery, you said?”
“Yes,” he replied. “And you are…?”
“Joanna Way. I’m a mediate. I was covering the…,” she trailed off again, scrambling in her head to gather up information, and suddenly she remembered something. “There were pieces of the dock falling in front of us. I thought we were going to hit them, but… There was fire, this blast of fire. It came from…” She clapped her eyes hard on him, the delirium of what she had just been through now falling away as Lacerta Five had fallen away around her. “It came from you! You…you breathed fire and melted the…” Her mouth hung open speechlessly for a second before she managed to say, “There was only one weredragon who could ever actually breathe fire…”
“I am Sir Rawn Ullery,” the Knight repeated.
“But…but that was back in the…back in the wars with…,” Disbelieving, Joanna sat up straighter, her trauma forgotten as her reporter’s instincts took hold. “You’re Sir Rawn Ullery?”
“I am,” he said once more.
The inside of the spaceship was quiet now. A thousand questions formed in Joanna Way’s mind, and she fought for her voice. Dozens of old stories that she and every citizen of Earth knew went rolling and careening around inside her head. Joanna had been to so many worlds and met so many men, so many beings, the greatest and the best and the brightest in Commonwealth space, but in all her work and in all her travels, she had never been face-to-face with anyone like the man who stood with such calm, quiet pride before her now.
Until now, she had never met a legend.
CHAPTER TWO
Joanna, sitting on the edge of the bed in the spacecraft, remembered aloud, “Sir Rawn Ullery. But it’s been fifteen years. It was fifteen years ago, the end of the wars with the
Chimerians. You took your ship into the Chimerian warp nexus to destroy it from the inside…”
“…and sacrificed my life to stop the spread of the Chimerians across space,” the Knight finished for her. “At least, that was what I meant to do, what I was prepared to do. But the universe had other plans.”
“Everyone thought you’d died stopping them,” said Joanna, looking up at Rawn, still trying to comprehend what had happened and what was happening. “People mourned. I was still just a girl, but I remember the people crying, the memorials all over space. There was a week when the Knights and the Corps of Lacerta all wore black; I remember that.”
“I expected that,” said Rawn. “I knew I’d be presumed dead. I thought there would be some sort of honor. I didn’t know there’d be such a display.”
“What did you think people would do?” Joanna asked. “You were the most admired man in space. Everyone looked up to you.”
“I was a Knight doing my duty,” he said.
“You meant more than that to people,” Joanna said. “If anyone had thought it was possible to survive the collapse of artificial wormholes that powerful…”
“There would have been search parties looking for me in over half the galaxy, using personnel and resources better spent on protecting and serving the living,” said Rawn. “And they would have had no idea where to search. I was thrown so far away, and randomly. I was fortunate that the spacetime explosion only threw me as far as it did.
I could still be trying to get home from a much more remote sector. I had no way of getting a message back to tell the Knighthood that I still lived. I fended for myself as best I could and made the best possible time. I had just reentered Catalan when the Fleet spacedocks began to explode.”
Joanna gaped at the thought. “You mean it wasn’t just Lacerta Five?” Then, she realized: “No, all the Fleet spacedocks were taking part in the disposal. They all had Scodax ship parts aboard.” A look of dread came over her. She slumped where she sat. “All of them. All those people. Oh no…”
Rawn said, “I know nothing of Scodax or what was aboard the spacedocks that destroyed them. I know only that countless comrades I’ll never meet have died today. I’ll stand with those who escaped and honor our dead—when we get back planet-side. I’ll be landing my ship now.” He knelt down on one knee before her, looking so gallant in spite of the weariness on his features, the weariness of a Knight who had been through something she could not even imagine. He put the fingers of one gauntleted hand under her chin and lifted her face to meet his. “Joanna Way, you are safe now. You were correct before. For all that I could not save, at least I have saved you, and for that, I am grateful. Lie down now, and I will take us back to the Spires.”
A quiet moment passed between them. Joanna, mesmerized by his Knightly handsomeness and subtly tingling from his muscled and manly presence as if it were a physical force emanating from him, acknowledged his words with a small nod. She leaned back and stretched out on the bed, where he must have rested for all these years during his long journey home. She shut her eyes, and in her mind rang the words, Fifteen years…
Rawn stood up and walked away. Joanna heard his footfalls receding to the bow of the ship, where the controls must be. Her thoughts turned hazy again.
_______________
The Spires, the headquarters of the Knights of Lacerta in the city of Silverwing, greeted Rawn’s identification with an even greater incredulity than Joanna did. The usual protocol for an incoming craft requesting to land at the Spires was a computer check of the ship’s registry and serial codes.
But when the pilot of the craft identified himself as Sir Rawn Ullery, the communications center at the Spires added the measure of having an inbound flight controller personally do a remote scan of Rawn’s retinas via monitors on his end and theirs and checking the scan against their records.
In a numb and hushed voice, the controller cleared Rawn’s approach and touchdown. Rawn mentally began to prepare himself for the reactions he would get when he landed and stepped out onto the surface of his home planet for the first time in a decade and a half.
When his ship, the Justice Claw, landed, it was a vessel in stark contrast to the other ships in the Spires landing field. Its hull was faded, darkened, streaked with dirt and crusted with dust from the length of time that Rawn had been away. It showed small dents and pits and burns from encounters with things and beings unknown to Lacerta or any Earth-allied world, hostile things that Rawn had faced in his travels and done his best to put behind him.
The ship was intact but would take much refurbishing. Perhaps it would be decommissioned altogether. All these thoughts Rawn pushed to the back of his mind as he let Joanna climb down the ramp and onto the paving ahead of him.
Climbing down from the Justice Claw, Joanna looked out into a sea of faces and uniforms standing between the landing space and the towers of the Spires on the other side of the field. Epaulette lifted itself from her shoulder and immediately began to record, taking in the unfolding history of which Joanna was now a part even as she documented it. Joanna felt her skin turn to goosebumps from the soft, cool breeze in the air and the charge of anticipation around her, an energy that was almost tang
ible.
She searched the faces of the gathered Knights and, on each one, she found what she could describe only as a look of mixed awe and reverence. The stories of the man they were about to see had become a part of the education of every Knight and every schoolchild. Not a whole generation had gone by since Rawn disappeared and was thought to be gone forever, but the years had turned to history, and the name of Sir Rawn Ullery had grown bigger than the man himself.
Joanna stepped to one side and looked up the ramp that she had just descended, Epaulette turning with her to capture what she was seeing. This was truly a moment to record, a moment that would not be forgotten. The tall, muscular shape appeared in the darkened hatch and stepped forward onto the ramp.
He walked down and out into the open, and the light of the star, Catalan, shone at last on the face of Rawn Ullery’s as he took his first breath of Lacertan air in so very long. He shut his eyes for a moment, breathing deeply and feeling Catalan’s warmth, as if to convince himself that he was truly home. And then, the cheering started.
It hit him like a wave of something in the air, like a physical presence breaking against him and flowing all around him, the voices and hand-claps of comrades he had never met, who held him to be their brother all the same. Rawn paused halfway down the ramp and looked out onto the throng of men and women wearing the shining colors of the Knighthood.
He looked solemn and yet warm, appreciating their welcome after so long alone, so many years without ever setting eyes on a fellow Knight. Inside, he wept at the sight and sound of them. This moment had lived in his heart for so long, he felt as if he would dissolve into un-Knightly tears now it was here.
Instead of weeping, Rawn walked proudly the rest of the way down the ramp to the paving and stood on the ground of Lacerta for the first time since the day he willingly offered up his life to protect it. His heart raced and leaped at the feeling of his world under his feet. He made his way past Joanna, who stood dutifully recording the scene, and walked a few feet forward.
Then, after his first few steps, he paused, drew the hilt of his powerblade and thumbed its activator, and lifted high the glowing sword of power that extended from it. He stood before the gathered Knights, holding the radiant weapon over his head in tribute, and continued to drink in the sounds of their cheers and applause. Sir Rawn Ullery was home—home at last.
Joanna kept her place a couple of meters behind Rawn and circled round in an arc, Epaulette remaining over her shoulder, to capture what happened next. Rawn retracted his shining blade and reattached it to his armor, and at once, his peers came forward to greet him. The long-lost Knight was quickly surrounded on three sides by smiling well-wishers, the ones in front reaching out to shake his hand, the ones farther back straining and craning about to get a better look at him.
A chorus of excited, wonder-struck voices welled up. And front and center, addressing Rawn directly, was a female in Mentor colors. “Epaulette,” said Joanna, “select audio input for the Sir Rawn and the Mentor.”
The AI adjusted its sensor-recorders to capture specifically the exchange between Rawn and the female in front, whose coloring suggested an ancestry in the Asian continent on Earth. She shook Rawn’s hand warmly and introduced herself. “Sir Rawn, I am Dame Sienna Oda, Mentor of the Knighthood. On behalf of the Knighthood, the Spires, and the Ruling Aerie, let me be the first to welcome you officially back to Lacerta. Welcome home, Sir Knight. Welcome home.”
Rawn gave a slight, modest bow of his head. “Thank you, my Dame Mentor. It’s good to be home. I never lost faith that I would see this day.”
“Spoken like a Knight,” said Dame Oda. “Let me show you to the quarters at the Spires. We’ll have a maintenance crew out to assess your ship and take it for repairs. I expect we may want to put it on display in the Spires Museum…”
While speaking, the Dame ushered Rawn across the paving to the grounds of the Spires on the other side, and the Knights who had rushed out to meet Rawn with the Mentor kept pace, watching him with rapt fascination and hanging on his every word. Joanna kept up behind them, continuing to marvel at the history taking place in front of her.
_______________
If Rawn had wanted to weep at his arrival on Lacerta, the sight of the Spires as he, Dame Oda, and the little throng of other Knights walked onto the grounds only doubled the feeling. The time that he had spent here still lived in his heart. This was where he first presented himself to the Mentors as an initiate for training. This was where he had lived, studied, worked, trained, made friends, and even found his first lovers as a young dragon male. He first donned the silver uniform of a newly minted Knight in this place, and it was to this place that he came to have black and red added to his armor skin.
And it was at the Spires that Rawn received the fateful Mythos Formula that enabled him to become the first—and as fate would have it, the only—weredragon ever to breathe fire in his reptilian form like the dragons of ancient stories. How well he remembered the kindness of Dr. Phifer, the human who created the Formula—and the treachery of Dr. Sabian, who murdered Phifer and destroyed his work. Sabian had made a mortal enemy of Sir Rawn Ullery that day—an enmity that came to an end on that later, terrible day when Sabian met the fate he had earned at Rawn’s hand, and Rawn himself disappeared in his hour of triumph, never to return. Or so the galaxy thought.
Rawn’s heart both sang and wept to see the Spires now, in the wake of the battles with the Scodax, for many were the times he had conjured up the sight of this place when he was alone, so far from home. The Spires was, in fact, a colossal, jewel-like pyramid with gleaming towers reaching for the sky at three corners and a circular, dome-like entrance way at the remaining corner. It was most magnificent at dawn and at dusk, when the setting Catalan Sun made it sparkle and shimmer with tons of gold and peach. It nestled among groves of trees and labyrinths of hedges, and the grounds were all in shining tile mosaics arranged into pictures of serpents and dragons of yore.
That was the way Rawn remembered it. But the glory of the Spires was tarnished now in the wake of the violence that had lately come to Lacerta. Two of the towers were broken, the tops blasted from them, and the pyramid itself had huge, long cracks across its alabaster faces. Many parts of the tiled grounds all about were blasted to pits of blackened rubble. Trees all across the grounds were snapped in two, or snapped and burned; and so many places on the immaculate green lawns had become craters or scorched places. Coming onto the pathways that he had walked so many times, Rawn slowed his pace and looked around, taking in the sight of the wounded majesty of the Spires, until he could not walk another step and only stood still with a pained expression and a hung head.
Dame Oda put an understanding hand on his shoulder and said, “I know how you must feel now, Sir Rawn. It’s enough to break the heart of the strongest among us. But the Spires still stand, and the Knights still fly, and with them stands and flies the strength of Lacerta itself. And we’ll be all the stronger with you in our ranks again.”
Rawn lifted his head to face her, and in spite of himself, his eyes had turned moist. “Thank you, my Dame Mentor. I’m only proud to see the Spires broken but still standing, and our Knights as firm and undaunted as ever.”
“As we will always be,” said the Dame.
Still hanging back to witness it all, Joanna could not help but smile. Her admiration of Rawn overtook her objectivity as a reporter. What a man he was, and what a dragon: proud and unbowed, yet humble. Noble and dignified, strong but not haughty or arrogant. A man among men, a warrior among warriors, moved almost to tears—she could tell by the slight crack in his voice—to find that his home had stood up to violent aggression and come through it shaken but unbroken. Much like the man and the dragon himself. Yes, what a man.
The group began to move again, and Joanna with them. As they approached the entrance dome of the Spires, something caught Rawn’s eye, and he stopped again.
At the end of an oblong courtyard facing the entrance stood
three statues, two at either end and one in the middle. Halting in his stride, Rawn peered curiously at the middle statue.
“I don’t remember that being there,” he said.
Dame Sienna replied, “The center statue? We commissioned it after the Chimerian Wars ended. It’s stood there ever since.”
Rawn broke away from the Mentor and the rest of the group to walk down the courtyard towards that statue. Sensing the importance of this moment, Joanna moved along behind him, not wanting to miss a second of what unfolded. Rawn stopped a few paces from that statue, which towered over him on a marble pedestal, and looked up—into his own face, wrought in alabaster.
His eyes traveled down the pedestal to the simple words carved by lasers into the marble: IN MEMORY AND HONOR OF SIR RAWN ULLERY, GREATEST OF DRAGON KNIGHTS.
He stood like a statue himself, eyeing his own likeness and the words carved into the marble. And he shook a bit, as if feeling the weight of fifteen years’ absence, fifteen years alone in a space that was not his home. He breathed heavily and trembled harder.
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