Knights of the Dragon (of Knights and Wizards Book 1)

by A. J. Gallant

  The fact that Ella was red didn’t bother Zedock one little bit, nor did Zedock being black bother Ella, but what everyone else thought troubled them both, at least, a little. They had to live their lives just as everyone else, and they were single-minded in their pursuit to make the best of it. The sky remained blue no matter what their skin color. They now wanted to build a real life together and to raise their little ones to the best of their abilities.

  Zedock lay down as all three baby dragons jumped up and down on his stomach. Ash was trying to prove that he could jump much higher than his sisters when he fell off on his head and started to cry. He was consoled by his mother and Cinder-Ella and Firestorm; he so liked the attention that he was getting he wondered if he could do it again with the same result. When he purposely threw himself off his father’s stomach, he didn’t get the desired outcome. No extra hugs or kisses. Ash noticed his father’s sly look as the little dragon shook his head. Ash thought his phony crying was great but apparently it wasn’t.

  It was a bit before noon when Ash looked up into the sky and was surprised by what he saw. At first, he saw something that was so far away it looked like a speck, and then five of them turned into ten. It was dragons, and then more and more dragons appeared in the sky. A hundred dragons turned into two hundred. “Look at this!” Ash shouted. “The sky is full of them. Are they all coming to see us?”

  Zedock got up and stared as he had never seen so many dragons. “Wow! Look at them all! I don’t think there’s enough room up here for all of them. Ella, how rare is a wizard dragon?”

  “I’ve never seen one until now. Zedock, that I gave birth to a wizard is mind bending. My goodness look at them all!”

  All those dragons were an impressive sight, both red and black flying together; maybe five hundred or perhaps even more. Ella knew that the birth of a wizard was extraordinary, but she now guessed that she was underestimating how special. The word was certainly out that they had a little sorcerer. She had expected other dragons to show up to see her son, but this was overwhelming. The sounds of all those dragon wings beating were harmonious, and Ella hoped she never forgot its melody. It was likely that this day would go down in history.

  “They’re scaring the little ones.” Zedock didn’t like it, but there was nothing that he could do.

  Ash, Cinder-Ella, and Firestorm got in between their parents. Firestorm peeked out from behind her mother’s right leg and then closed her eyes hoping that they would just go away. The dragons commenced to circle and stack themselves one above the other in the sky, waiting patiently for their turn to land, and then they came down by the dozens.

  Questions started flying faster than arrows. “Which one is the wizard?”

  “Will he grant wishes when he’s older?”

  “Will he grow up to be the king that will unite us all?”

  “He must be the legend! Wizards are exceedingly rare you know.”

  “Now how am I supposed to know that?” said Ella. “I can’t see the future.”

  “Will he be able to see the future?”

  “They are adorable.”

  “I never thought I’d see a wizard in my lifetime.”

  “I thought a dragon sorcerer was a myth.”

  Ash walked several feet in front of his mother, feeling important that so many had showed up to see him. He had a little more courage now that he realized that they weren’t all going to try to land at the same time and maybe squash him. “Step right up and see the wizard, that’s me!”

  Ella gave Ash the look. “Don’t you be conceited.”

  “Sorry mother.”

  The biggest black dragon that Ella ever saw walked up to Ash, and what a handsome fellow he was. “Look at him! He is a wizard all right. His aura is incredible!” He slowly turned to his right and saw Zedock. “Zedock! Is that you?”

  “Yes, father.” He certainly hadn’t expected his father to show up. Life was moving faster than the speed of a dragon on fire. He could see the puzzled look in his father’s eyes, and the look on Ella’s face was something else as well. He quickly put the pieces together.

  Ella slowly turned toward Zedock with her mouth open. “Zedock, your father is Aloth, king of the black dragons! And you didn’t think it significant enough to tell me? What is wrong with you? Zedock!”

  Aloth shouted with joy. “The little wizard is my grandson!”

  “Well, your father is the king of the red dragons.” He smiled and shrugged.

  “Yes, but you knew!” If there hadn’t been so many around her, she would consider giving him a good thump.

  Aloth picked up Ash and sniffed him. “You know he does smell a little like me. Here plant one on my cheek little one.” Ash gave his grandfather a kiss and then was placedon the ground. He picked up Cinder-Ella and Firestorm. “Well well well and what are your names?”

  “I’m Firestorm.”

  “I’m Cinder-Ella. But we’re not wizards.” Cinder-Ella was disappointed by that fact.

  “Don’t you worry about that. You two are going to be fantastic dragons! Where are my kisses girls?”

  Zedock looked at Ella with a puzzled look. “How come no one is mentioning that you’re red, and I’m black? Even my father doesn’t care. What is going on here?”

  “We’ve produced a wizard, and nobody cares about anything else. Look at all the happy faces. All these red and black dragons and nobody is fighting or even bickering.” Ella observed the looks on their faces; some with silly expressions as they strained to see Ash. They were pointing and gesturing and nodding.

  “My grandson is a wizard!”

  “All right, all right,” said one of the red dragons. “You lucked out, and you know it.”

  “I don’t know about that. Zedock, can you do something magical for your grandfather?”

  Ash jumped up and down excitedly. “Grandfather, I can turn you into a chicken.”

  Aloth shook his head, but the spell was already on the way. “No Ash I don’t think that would be cluck cluck.”

  Almost everyone roared with laughter as Aloth walked around in the form of a chicken. More dragons landed to see the wizard as others were forced to take off because of lack of room but they were careful so as not to bump into anyone. The dragons that had been uncertain that the little fella was actually a sorcerer now had proof. Gasps heard from various distances in the sky; the rumors were, in fact, accurate.

  Zedock ran to Ash. “Ash, you turn your grandfather back into a dragon right now!”

  “Okay okay.” Ash nodded with conviction and Aloth was once again a dragon.

  Aloth shook his head and laughed. “That was unpleasant. Trust me when I tell you that you would not want to be a chicken.”

  “Father, this is Ella Ash’s mother.”

  Aloth admired her beauty and wondered how Zedock had managed to land her. “You’re Kai’s daughter? How on earth did you two find one another?”

  “It wasn’t easy,” said Ella. “But I guess that some things are just meant to be. I tried hard to resist him but couldn’t.”

  The gathering turned into a bit of a shindig that went well into the night, and even after they took the kids home, they stayed and talked about what the future would be with a dragon wizard in their midst. Aloth knew that one day Ash would take the kingdom from him and perhaps lead all dragons, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  THE WIZARD CLARENCE WAS SO EXCITED that his jubilation could barely be contained; he danced around the giant statue of himself with arms flailing, ending up patting it on the back. He stared into his marbled face. “You’ve done it! I’ve done it! I wasn’t sure that it was even possible! But I’ve done it.”

  It would impress King Chromos he was sure of it. He had taken a project that the now deceased Cynric had been working on for three years, hoping that a fresh pair of eyes would do the job. It didn’t matter that it was only blind luck that was the breakthrough because he wasn’t about to tell the king that. What
was most important was that he had managed to do what Cynric couldn’t. Clarence had always been second to Cynric but now that there was no Cynric. He downed the last of his red wine as a toast to himself and imagined the praise that he would receive from the king.

  Clarence had lugged the eleven crystal cubes filled with dragon tears into his lab. The magical ingredients derived from an ancient tome. Fingers could reach directly into the book’s pages and remove strange unknown elements to form parts of the enchantment. The problem had been that two of the elements had been unavailable; even though the small rectangular spaces were there, they were empty, where the others replenished no matter how many removed. Cynric had put plenty of study into the magical ingredients but could never figure out what they were; they smelled like pepper, and that was it. Many different properties had been added to the tears over the years, hoping to stumble upon the right concoction but to no avail. One such endeavor had resulted in an explosion that had taken out a corner of the castle. Cynric had been unconscious for almost a week.

  Clarence paced excitedly. He spent a lot of hours alone and liked to talk to himself. “The King will now have to appoint me to the title of supreme wizard, and I will go down in history as the highest of the high.”

  The tome, made of luminescent red dragon scales, bled slightly. No matter how much it was wiped the blood always returned. Touching the book would leave one with bloody fingers. Tasting the blood would leave one weak for days and Cynric had done so on one occasion but never again. Leaving the book in the same spot for a week would result in a small pool of blood left behind. Several precious gems formed a triangle on the book, infused into the tome’s cover they were impossible to remove, and inside all of them swirled variations of red. Spiders were invariably drawn to it for inexplicable reasons. It was said that the book had been discovered in an ancient crypt more than a thousand years ago, but no one was sure of its origin. Mysterious things always had plenty of tales attached to them.

  Some believed that the book was alive and could think for itself, although there was no proof of that. Ignorant minds were skilled at making up ignorant things. For some, the facts weren’t nearly as important as the attention.

  Clarence now stood with his arms crossed as he mumbled to himself for several minutes. “A world devoid of dragons will be strange indeed. Even unnatural I would say.”

  When the moon was full, the manuscript would cycle through its pages until the moon waned, and during that time, Cynric had been forced to place it in an empty chamber to get some sleep. The sound of the pages cycling back and forth could be quite annoying.

  Clarence had spent a late night and had stumbled through the morning half asleep when he reached into the page and pulled out a pinch of the orange powder with small specks of black from the area that had always been empty before. The difference had been that the tome had been upside down. It was that simple and yet who would decide to do such a thing? So a mistake had turned into the solution that Cynric had never been able to discover; he had been often heard pacing and mumbling in the halls because of it. Rest had always been difficult for Cynric when there was an unsolved puzzle. Clarence had been refused access to Cynric’s elaborate chamber in the castle even though he was dead but he guessed that this would change that.

  Clarence took one of the crystal cubes and carefully placed it on the stand that was a large eagle’s claw. All the other elements were in the tears except for the two new ones which were only available when the book was upside down. He dropped some of the orange dust into the liquid; the contents commenced to swirl which resembled a mini snowstorm. Then he reached in and took out a pinch of gray powder and stared at it between his finger and thumb. The moment of truth was upon him. What would happen? He knew that crystal would need to be smashed to unleash the spell, but he was willing to bet that something fascinating was about to happen.

  “Here we go.” He held his breath as he dropped in the pinch of gray; the particles in the liquid stopped swirling and formed tiny little purple balls. After more than a thousand of them appeared they started to pop in the tears, releasing bursts of purple that had the consistency of blood in water. They made mini audible explosions as the magical chemicals mixed; Clarence watched fascinated. The top of the crystal sealed itself, and he tapped on it to make sure that it was sealed. The liquid changed from purple to murky white. Then slowly but surely dragon skeletons appeared inside the cube, thousands upon thousands of them floating inside the tears. The skeletons were quite tiny but skeletons nonetheless.

  “Amazing!” The wizard picked up the crystal and stared at it, captivated by the skeletons within. He found the crystal now warm to the touch although the air around him was now cool. The scent of pine permeated the air. When he felt vibrations within the cube, he put it back down fearing that it might explode. An enchantment that wasn’t put together properly could indeed be dangerous because certain magical properties didn’t like one another. Then a scraping noise was heard, and as he looked closer some words were being etched into the glass by unseen hands. Glass dust could be seen accumulating on the floor as four words appeared DEATH TO ALL DRAGONS.

  “It actually worked.”

  King Chromos, told of the events, rushed in with Cynric’s hammer in hand to see the spell and was most impressed by it. He would have never imagined that Clarence would have been able to complete such a powerful enchantment where Cynric couldn’t. Perhaps Clarence would be more useful than he initially thought. The king held the cube as if he was holding the world itself.

  “This will kill all dragons no matter what color?”

  “So says the book, your majesty. Thirteen strikes of that hammer will unleash the contents that will kill all the dragons.”

  The king showed a malicious smile and could hardly believe that the day had come; he could barely contain himself. “Cynric told me of the hammer and the thirteen blows to release the enchantment, but he could never figure it out.

  How did you manage it?”

  “A wizard does not reveal his secrets, your majesty.”

  It was foretold that dragons would be the likely vanquisher of Chromos. He had managed to have some them spelled, but now he could destroy all of them. He had awoken that morning with a feeling that something good was in the offing. The king made Clarence hold the crystal on the table as he held the hammer over his head, bringing it down with an earth shattering crash that shook the entire castle. “That’s one.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  KING DARIUS RETURNED FROM ADOROK’S FUNERAL with a heavy heart; his death had taken the wind out of the kingdom like a punch in the gut. The entourage around him looked as depressed as he was, and it was getting more and more difficult to show fortitude in the face of such adversity. Darius didn’t think that there was now a single soul that didn’t believe wholeheartedly in their impending doom. Some had had hope that Adorok would snap out of it in time to vanquish the enemy, but that hope had now vanished.

  Leeander’s flags replaced with their black flags of mourning, which now snapped in the moderate wind. The enemy outside their walls wasn’t sure if there had been an actual death, or if they were being mocked. Even those flags now worried the Yurrosy. Magic could still tilt the scale.

  Five dragons flew over the kingdom on their way to somewhere else, three black dragons and two red, seemingly in cordial conversation as they went over. The red and the black associating with one another? Had the king become delusional and imagined it? Might it be a good omen? Darius shook his head as he knew he was grasping at air. He thought that if black and red dragons could get along why couldn’t they? He also knew that the only solution for evil was to eradicate it less it spread like the plague.

  The grey sky started to cry a moderately hard rain, and Darius took some satisfaction that the enemy was getting drenched. He’d give them all a bad case of pneumonia if he had the power to do so. The Yurrosy watched with curious eyes as the soldiers disappeared from Leeander’s walls, the king permitting them
to go inside out of the rain. That made the Yurrosy, even more, anxious as some thought the soldiers were going inside to get out of the way of some omnipotent spell that was about to rain down upon them. They would never get over the sight of Cynric falling out of the sky. Some of the Yurrosy took panic attacks as they believed that some awful poison was contained in the precipitation. Some tried to hold their breath. Almost a hundred of them couldn’t take it anymore and attempted to flee but were taken down by their archers.

  A loud cheer went up from the enemy as word had come on the leg of a large raven, one of King Chromos’s personal messenger birds, treated better than a lot of his people. The message was that the king would join them soon to lead the attack on Leeander personally. If the king was going to lead them undoubtedly, their odds of survival was better than they thought. He was out for revenge for the killing of his best wizard; he had wanted King Darius taken alive and kneeling before him if at all possible. He now wanted his head on a pike for all to see and would risk everything to accomplish it. Chromos was determined to see Leeander as a smouldering pile of rubble.

  Darius had fallen asleep on the throne from exhaustion and almost immediately found himself in a colorful autumn forest. Adorok was walking beside him and speaking, but he was unable to hear a single word he was saying; he was also gesturing for emphasis. The wizard brought his fist hard into his hand and where there should have been the sound of impact there was none. The King tried his best to read his lips but couldn’t make out anything; it was as if he was speaking a foreign language. The wizard realised that he wasn’t understood and pointed toward the sky when a huge dragon flew down and grabbed Darius in his claws and flew off; the scene awoke the king as he kicked himself awake. What a peculiar dream.