Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
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Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
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What Now?
Copyright © June, 2016 by Travis Simmons
The Chronicles of Dragon Aerie
Plague Born Book Three:
Dragon Forged
Published by: Wyrding Ways Press
Cover Art by: Kip Ayers
Formatting by: Wyrding Ways Press
Editing by: Wyrding Ways Press
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or in any means—by electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise—without prior written permission.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either are the product of the authors imagination or are used factiously. Any resemblance to actual places, events, and people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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It was no wonder the day of Wylan’s first circuit would be celebrated with a dragon attack.
The red dragon roared before her, flames billowing from its mouth. A blast of fire surrounded Wylan, her red scales blazing in the torrent of dragon fire. Her inner eyelids closed against the wave of heat that was largely ineffectual to her own fiery form as a red wyvern.
The rush of power from the dragon’s fiery breath blew her backward. Her wings flailed for purchase against the rush of heat and the force of the blast, but she was smaller than the dragon, and it was harder for her to fight against it. The fire threw her into an updraft of air she hadn’t anticipated. The word tore at her, throwing her like a ragdoll up and away from the fiery battle. She spiraled up into the clouds, lost in a sea of white. The mist broke and swirled around her, blinding Wylan to anything outside of their embrace. Silence fell around her. The clouds deafened her to the battle that raged in the imperial city beneath her.
Her talons clutched the mithril dragon saber as if her life depended on it. Mithril was the only ore known to pierce dragon scales. Without it, she was as good as dead. Without it, she had no weapon against the dragon. Her fire would work even less on the dragon than it’s had worked on her.
Wylan broke free of the clouds, the dazzling light of the sun bathing her in its brilliance. The rays glowed through her milky inner eyelids, making the light bearable, instead of blinding. The coldness of her altitude surrounded her, pressing in on her super-heated scales. Her breath came in vapors. Along the horizon she could see the bend of the earth, the sun sitting atop the curve like a gem resting on a ring. Above the sun, everything was dark. The wind was forcing her too high. If it held her any longer, she was going to be claimed by the fires said to guard the bend of the world.
She felt Lissandra—the soul of her wyvern form—brush against her skin. Wylan felt the serpentine awareness come to her, and her panic that she couldn’t do this, that she couldn’t control where the updraft was taking her, melted away.
:Hold on,: Lissandra said. Her wings throbbed as the wind tore muscles, and stretched her joints in ways they shouldn’t be stretched. Still she held tight to the blade, though she didn’t know how. The soul of the wyvern slipped over her mind, and as the other awareness took hold of their joined body, her wings steadied, the current of air suddenly working for her instead of against her. The dragon fire that had clung to her moments before whispered to smoke as her own fire rose to claim the dragon’s heat.
She broke free of the updraft with an artful backward arc, and Wylan drifted for a moment in that frozen space before Lissandra loosed her grip on their joined body, and she turned her sight to where the red dragon had attacked her. She shifted her grip on the sword, angling it toward where the dragon had been. She tucked her wings and dove through the clouds. The silence of the void of clouds surrounded her, but only for a moment. Like an arrow, she shot out of the clouds, vapor swirling in her wake, intent on driving the saber through the dragon’s burning heart. She held the sword steady, gripped in the talons at the first joint of her wings.
But the dragon was gone.
She snapped open her wings and winced as the wind caught them, slowing her fall. Her muscles screamed liquid fire, her wings flapped and stretched to hold the air, to stop her decent. There she hovered, treading air, and searching for her attacker.
Her eyes cut through the fray of battle beneath her. Amidst the wisp of clouds above the Elven District of Darubai, she could see the golden wings of gryphons shimmering in the sun, their high-pitched cries pierced the air. Upon their backs elven riders readied powerful bows equipped with thick arrows with mithril tips, ready to take down a nearby dragon. She watched gryphons tear into dragons with talons and beaks. The gryphons were as deadly as they were lovely, and their talons knew precisely where to pierce between scales to puncture the hearts of the beasts they clung to. Their beaks were powerful enough to paralyze when they struck into a spine.
Some of the elves that were too close to the immediate battle either focused their arrows on dragons farther away, or they used their arrows like spears against the dragons their mounts grappled with.
Above the Dwarven District, dwarves rode on the backs of their scaled and bearded rams known as qilin. The beasts’ manes and beards floated on a wind that seemed to only surround the beasts. Their cloven hooves dug into the sides of brick buildings, their dwarf riders clinging to their mounts with one hand, their mithril weapons ready to strike from their other hand. She watched as a dwarf leapt from the back of his qilin as a dragon swooped by. The dwarf clung to the wyrm, bringing his axe down in the center of the dragon’s head. The green dragon roared, poisoned mist streaming from his mouth in a cloud that enveloped the dwarf as they crashed to the streets of the imperial city. The dwarf stood, stumbled a few steps, and then collapsed to the ground. When she looked away, Wylan could see healers and their helpers streaming out of the infirmary built into the mountain face, racing for the dwarf.
Still Wylan couldn’t see the red dragon she’d been fighting before.
The only warning she had of attack was a snap of wings behind her. Wylan banked hard to the left in time to miss a small purple dragon’s talons as they raked the air where she’d been. Wylan looped around, letting the wind of the dragon’s passing spin her. She struck with her sword, and the hard edge of mithril slipped easily through the tip of the dragon’s tail. The barbed end flipped off the end, and fell through the misty clouds passing beneath them, leaving a trail of blood in
its wake.
The dragon roared a deafening cry and spun on Wylan. She rolled to the right as its powerful jaws snapped at her. The teeth glanced off the scales of her leg. The force of it knocked her roll askew, and her sword swung up without her urging, slicing open the yellow’s paw.
The dragon roared again, but this time its cry carried power. The air between the dragon and Wylan shimmered, like heat rising off the hard-packed streets of Darubai at noon. The power rushed around them, condensing into purple lightning that crackled around singed the air. A bolt of blinding violet light leapt from the dragon’s mouth, and before she could move, it slammed into her chest.
She was falling through darkness. She couldn’t see where she was going, but she was aware of air rushing around her. A couple times the silence of clouds surrounded her, blocking out the only sense she had remaining to her.
And then there was a great weight on her back, and someone was yelling. Her vision slowly began to clear. Her joints hurt more than simple strain could account for, and she wondered at the strength of her wyvern form to take the brunt of a purple dragon’s attack and not be blown to bits.
“Snap out of it,” the voice shouted into her ear. Wylan could tell by the thick accent of the voice, and the great weight of the armored body that the person on her back was a dwarf. She snapped open her wings as she realized she was falling, and moments away from crashing into the highest peak of Dragon Aerie. She landed hard, the air slammed out of her, and the dwarf was pitched from her back. He hit the ground in a roll, and slid several feet from her where he flopped over on his back, and let out a long, whimpering groan.
She didn’t want to shift into her human form while the dwarf was there to see her. She’d be naked, and she certainly wasn’t okay with the dwarf seeing her like that. Instead, she slipped between the white tree trunks of the Fire Fruit Forest, and let the orange leaves hide her. The wyvern form melted away in a series of snaps and pops as her bones reformed. Where once the wyvern had stood, now there was a human again. She looked down at her tanned skin, brushed her black hair away from her face into some semblance of order, and tried to ignore her one scaled arm—the arm she’d lost when fighting the blue dragon who’d destroyed her home. It was the same arm that the wyvern soul, Lissandra, had helped the green wyverns heal. At least she still had an arm.
It didn’t take Wylan long to find her clothes. She tugged the brown trousers on, slipped the white tunic over her head, and hoped she’d concealed herself enough from prying eyes. Most wyverns were as comfortable walking around naked as they were walking in clothes or in their wyvern form. Perhaps even more.
She wasn’t.
When she reemerged from the Fire Fruit Forest, the dwarf was gone. It was just as well. She didn’t have time to talk, or the mind for it either. She tried to forget the dwarf who’d saved her, but one thing stuck with her—he didn’t have a beard. It was a strange thing, seeing a dwarf without a beard. Like looking at a lumpy rock, really.
She turned her back to the streets below the mountain and looked at Dragon Aerie. She loved this mountain, so named because the dragons who helped protect Darubai had claimed this highest peak as their home. Wylan didn’t have to wonder why she loved the mountain peak so much. For one it was cooler here, far away from the heat of the long desert. But more than that, the mountain was green, as she remembered the elven settlement she’d visited before. Lush green trees in the distance framed the orange of the Fire Fruit Forest, setting it apart as something magical, almost fairy in nature. She didn’t know if she’d ever get used to the feel of grass beneath her feet, or the sweet, crisp smell of the air. Her body tensed against the cold, but she didn’t care. It felt amazing.
She heard a rustle of movement in the Fire Fruit Forest and turned her attention in time to catch a glimpse of dragon scales among the trees. It was the good dragons, those that protected Darubai from dragon attacks, going back to their homes to rest. They moved languidly, almost dreamily, and Wylan found herself wondering how such magnificently large beasts were able to move so gracefully. She didn’t see any specific dragon in full, but instead glimpsed a shimmering green leg here, the twitch of a blue tail there, or the hump of a yellow back above the tops of the orange leaves.
The good dragons weren’t specifically good out of any choice of their own. She suspected some of them were but certainly not all of them. When Wylan had begun her venture to Darubai, she teamed up with two soldiers from the dragon guard. It was a chance meeting, really, they’d all been drawn to the same town in search for a baby whose magic had plagued their dreams and pulled their wyvern souls to a ghost town in search of her. The baby they’d found was Kira Dragonkin, and she was a dragon tamer. The first dragon battle Wylan had taken part in when she arrived in Darubai was the same one in which the baby had stretched her power and ensnared a clutch of dragons for Darubai, charging them with the protection of the city.
The good dragons hadn’t wanted to stay in the city below because of the human’s fear of them. After years of savage attacks from the dragons, humans had a right to this feeling.
But the dragons were also afraid. They were afraid that the humans would form a mob out of their own fear and attack the dragons when they weren’t expecting it.
There were other tensions too. Mostly because the good dragons refused to use their powers on the Fire Fruit Forest. Any dragon power used on a tree would produce fruit that would allow the one who ate it to be immune to dragon attack. The good dragons feared what the humans might do with that kind of power. They couldn’t destroy the trees either because using their powers on the white trees wouldn’t destroy them, but instead imbue them with their magic.
But it would take more than fire fruit or mithril swords to keep Darubai safe. As long as dragons could find the imperial city, no one was safe. It wasn’t hard to see the city from anywhere within several miles of the city, and that was just with human eyes. Dragon’s had keener eyesight, and from flying overhead, spying the motions and movements of the humans on the ground, Darubai was a vast beacon in the rubble of the long desert.
The sound of battle ebbed behind Wylan, and she could almost feel the moment the last dragon fell. She didn’t have to turn to know that the gryphons were carrying the dead dragons off to the base of the cliff where harvesting would start.
They’d since learned that every part of the dragon could be used. Bones could be fashioned into wands that retained the power of the dragon, and the blood could enhance the power of potions. The scales would be plucked, ground, and used as a powerful sedative for people undergoing surgery, or recovering from a terrible wound.
The meat would largely go to the military and the dragon guard to help bolster their strength and endurance for fighting the dragons when they came.
As the friendly dragons settled around the Fire Fruit Forest, Wylan let her eyes skim across the white bark and the vibrant orange leaves. She would be leaving today for her first circuit, and her stomach fluttered with nerves and excitement. She was hoping the calmness of all the greenery would help soothe her, but it wasn’t. The jittering was getting worse, if anything. She hoped it wasn’t anything to do with the lightning strike. More than that, she hoped no one had seen her take the hit and postpone her trip.
Josef would be on board with that. He’d be first in line for any excuse to keep her home, she was sure. His protectiveness was charming, even if it did set her teeth on edge at times. Her nervous side said she’d willingly take any excuse she could to stay home. She hadn’t truly been out in the long desert since her parents had died. What she remembered of the venture had been full of danger and close brushes with death. She certainly didn’t want a repeat of that.
But this was her first mission, and Wylan was anxious to see how her training stacked up against what the desert could throw at her.
She felt Josef’s presence behind her before she heard his footsteps. She could always sense when he neared, or maybe Lissandra could sense the wyvern soul within
him. Whatever it was, she couldn’t deny the excited leap her stomach did, or the way her heart fluttered at the thought of his smiling face. A smile spread across her lips. When they’d first met, Josef fell hard and fast for her. She figured—and had been right—that it was something that tended to happen with him. His quick attraction to her, and his desire to protect her and be with her, had scared her at first. Not thinking she was long for this world, she’d pushed him away, but over the weeks and months, he’d calmed a lot, which allowed her to warm to him on her own.
But now he wanted something more than she was ready to give. Marriage. Even the thought soured her mood. She wanted a place to belong more than anything, but Wylan still wasn’t sure she belonged here. She’d made a couple friends, but there was a gap between them, a fissure that she couldn’t span with the darkness that waited if she fell…with the undoubted exile that faced her if she completely opened up. And why was there a reason to rush marriage? Marriage was something older people did, not her. It just didn’t feel right, at least not yet. She felt as though there was still so much to do. And she certainly didn’t want children. Wasn’t that what came after marriage? It wasn’t that she was exactly against the idea of marrying Josef…actually, yes it was, and for good reason. She couldn’t give him the future he wanted yet, not with the name the blue dragon had called her—plague bearer.
When the dragon plague came to the long desert, it destroyed life as they knew it. People were infected and either they died of the high fevers that accompanied it or they went mad. Few people had transformed into what she was—a wyvern.
What if the dragon was right? she thought. What if she was the plague bearer?
How could she move forward with her life when she was the reason for so much death. She was the plague bearer. She was the reason humans had gotten sick and why some of them had turned into wyverns, and why the good majority of humans through the long desert had died. Not only that, the coming of the dragon plague had been the reason dragons had returned to the low lands—to kill off wyverns, or as they called them the impure breed.
Dragon Forged: Chronicles of Dragon Aerie Young Adult Fantasy Fiction (Plague Born Book 3) Page 1