by Dante King
Dragon Breeder 2
Dante King
Copyright © 2021 by Dante King
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
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Chapter One
“Hold on a second,” I said, looking from Claire the Seer, to Elenari, to Saya, and back to Claire again. “A dragon breeder? What the hell is a dragon breeder? And how are you absolutely sure that I am one?”
The Seer, Claire, tipped her head to one side and regarded me out of her mismatched, almond-shaped eyes: one a greenish-blue, the other a glowing ruby red. They were eyes that reminded me of The Matrix, when Morpheus offers old Keanu Reeves the red or the blue pill.
Something told me that I was about to get sucked down my very own bizarre rabbit hole in the near future, whether I wanted to or not.
“You are indubitably a dragon breeder, Michael Noctis,” Claire said in her fluting, sure voice. It was a voice as calm and kind as summer, and there was not a trace of doubt in it. “As I said before, I myself would not have believed it were it not for the evidence of my own eyes. Not to mention the incantations I have spoken over your two female companions and the potions I have given them.”
Claire was as tall, slender, and long-limbed as any Milanese catwalk model. Her skin was milky pale and flawless, her braided hair an otherworldly silver color. As I had noted when I first met her, she looked like Galadriel after a day at the spa. What with the long, trailing white dress that she wore, it might have been fairer to compare her to Galadriel if she were to enter the Eurovision song contest.
“You’re saying that the proof is, uh, in the pudding, so to speak?” I asked her.
Claire grinned and inclined her head.
“Watch who you’re calling ‘pudding,’ buster,” Saya said to me in a warning voice.
I looked over at the gorgeous and tanned, blue-eyed blonde bombshell. Even when she looked seven months pregnant, she still reminded me of Pamela Anderson as an Amazonian warrior.
I raised my hands and smiled at her. I had seen Saya literally squeeze a man in half with nothing but her prodigious strength. It would be a foolish man indeed who pissed her off, especially now that she had a bun in the oven.
“Hey, you’d know that was a compliment if you knew how much I love pudding,” I said.
Saya gave a little snort of laughter and shook her head.
There was a dull rumble, like distant thunder, and the Seer’s dragon wended its way out from behind her quaint lime-washed cottage. The apple tree that grew out from the thatched roof quivered as the dragon’s furry flank brushed against it. Even though it was the dead of night, the bright moon illuminated the little glade.
The Seer’s dragon was the largest I had yet seen. It was about twenty-five feet long and five feet wide and covered in bone-white fur. A long neck tapered into a pointed face like that of an arctic fox. It had huge paws, rather than the usual reptilian clawed feet. A pair of long, ebony teeth protruded from its upper jaw and overlapped its lower lip. It reminded me of Falkor, the big, fluffy dragon from The Neverending Story. Falkor’s bigger, more badass cousin.
“Ah, Sonos,” the Seer said, laying a long hand on her dragon’s snout as it came and lay next to her. “You’re glad to be here to witness such a thing as this, are you? Luck Dragon that you are, it’s no surprise that you would find yourself at such a portentous moment in time.”
Luck Dragon? Well, that made the comparison to Falkor all the more apt since he was a Luck Dragon, too.
Sonos growled a subterranean growl, which I took to be a sound of assent. Its long neck snaked out, and it dipped its muzzle in the crystal pond that we stood by and began to drink.
“Seer,” Elenari said, watching the fantastic beast out of her bright jade eyes as it slurped up gallons of water in a single mouthful, “are you sure that we can stay here with you until… Until the dragonlings are born?”
I realized then that Elenari—as brave and badass a woman as I had ever met—looked a little worried.
“It’s just… Will we not get in trouble with our commanding officers back at the Spire?” She ran a hand through her auburn hair, tucking a loose copper-colored strand behind one pointed elven ear. “We have stringent training schedules to keep to and duties to perform.”
I might have known. The elf woman was not worried about the whole giving birth thing. She was more concerned about how much of a bollocking Sergeant Milena or Lieutenant Kaleen could be expected to rain down on her and Saya if they missed too many Drako Academy classes.
“You will be safe here in Augury Grove,” the Seer said. “Safe from the disgruntlement of your superiors, and safe from other, more malicious, things. My little parcel of land, my orchard, may nestle against the tors and woods of the Eldritch Forest—a name that is black in the minds of many who do not know it—but there is a magic here that will protect you. Besides, I have a special dispensation from the Empress herself. Should your superiors find themselves displeased with your absence, then I will speak with them.”
I nodded. That sounded good to me—even if the casual mention of “other, more malicious things” struck a less than promising note.
“That’s all well and good,” I said, focusing my attention back on the Seer, “but let’s clarify things for those in the cheap seats. What exactly is a dragon breeder? I’m presuming, with my Holmes-like powers of deduction, that it’s a guy capable—somehow—of knocking chicks up with dragon babies? That about right?”
The Seer extended a pale arm and indicated the two very beautiful, very pregnant, female dragonmancers standing next to me.
“Your language is a little earthy,” she said, “but I would say that you have captured the gist of the thing. As I said before, the evidence before our eyes speaks for itself. However, allow me a brief demonstration.”
She turned her ethereal attention on the two pregnant ladies dressed in matching shifts of sheer, white material, through which the bulge of their heavy breasts and their enlarged nipples could easily be made out.
“Saya, Elenari,” Claire said, “if you would be so kind as to summon your dragons?”
Instantly, two more dragons materialized to join Noctis and Sonos. One was Elenari’s Emerald Dragon, Gharmon, who was a lovely female dragon with scales that flashed and gleamed like new leaves in the
daytime. The other creature was Scopula, the Gargoyle Dragon that had been bonded with Saya. She was a wedge-headed, dark gray beast with a low-slung body set upon legs that one might describe—though not around Saya—as stumpy.
As the two new dragons appeared, Sonos continued to drink from the pond without looking up. Noctis’ head moved this way and that on his sinuous sable neck for a moment or two as he took in the newly arrived dragons. After a second’s appraisal, my dragon went back to cleaning his claws.
“So, you see, here we have two male dragons,” said Claire, indicating Sonos and Noctis, “and two female dragons.” She pointed at Gharmon and Scopula. “In most other creatures, you might expect increased interest between the sexes. Dragons are at least, if not more, as intelligent as we are, and yet they consider each other with the same respect whether they are female or male.”
“You’re saying that they’re like that dude from Game of Thrones who looks like an egg,” I said. “The guy with no sex-drive.” I snapped my fingers a couple of times, trying to recall the word I was looking for. “A eunuch,” I said after a couple of seconds.
Claire gave a little smile and said, “Your specific reference is lost on me, Michael Noctis. But I understand what a eunuch is, and yes, you might say that dragons are supremely unconcerned when it comes to procreation.”
“But, I’ve seen Noctis sort of flirting with Saya’s dragon, Scopula,” I said. “In our dorm room, the two of them were definitely paying attention to one another.”
The Seer gave me a penetrating look—and when someone who can look into the future gives you one of those, it really cuts to the heart of you, let me tell you.
“Tell me,” she said, “what were you and Saya doing at that moment in time?”
It didn’t take me long to rifle through my thoughts and remember that. In fact, if my brain had been a drawer, that memory would have been at the top, not down at the bottom with the loose change, forgotten bits of candy, and miscellaneous keys.
“We were, ah… We were about to, you know… Make the beast with two backs…” I cursed myself for not answering with more confidence, but the Seer’s intense stare had me weak in the knees.
Claire nodded sagely. “You see, that makes perfect sense. You and your dragons are bonded. They are extremely sensitive creatures for all their ferocity and size. Just as a horse can feel a fly land on its back, so a dragon can pick up on the slightest fluctuations and changes in the mood and emotions of its rider. Because of this, because of the bond you share, they often mimic how you feel. They would not have been showing interest in each other for their own sake. It would have been more about mirroring the pre-coital tensions that were building between you and Dragonmancer Saya.”
I nodded, not quite sure how to respond to this admittedly intriguing bit of information.
“Why?” I blurted out suddenly.
“Why what?” the Seer asked politely.
I cleared my throat, looked at my two beautiful fellow dragonmancers, and said, “You know, I just don’t understand why they wouldn’t be interested. Not caring about getting laid doesn’t seem like much of a survival trait in my book. Or much fun.”
Elenari giggled and looked at me. “You’re a hot-blooded Earthling, Mike,” she said.
I winked at her.
“Have they ever had the desire to engage in a bit of whoopie?” I asked. “Or is the lack of desire one of nature’s great ironies?”
Claire’s smile was wide and white under the light of the waxing moon. “You are so much more than just a warrior, aren’t you?” she said softly to herself. “It is true dragons have never procreated in the usual manner. They are ancient beasts that regenerate in much the same that phoenixes do. Even when they die, they are not always dead in the way that we would think.”
“So how do they multiply, then?” I asked.
The Seer regarded me through her eerie, otherworldly eyes. In the moonlight, they sparkled like gemstones.
“It is a tightly kept secret, known only to a handful of men and women in this world,” she said eventually, “that there have been certain male dragonmancers, throughout our history, who possessed a potent seed.”
“I’m guessing you’re referring to partly hydrogenated ballbag oil, rather than an actual seed, right?” I said drily.
“Yes,” Claire said simply.
I nodded. I could see well enough where this was going.
“So, I’m one of these rare male dragonmancers who has the ability to produce dragons?” I asked.
Claire nodded. Sonos finished drinking, raised his dripping snout from the pond, and regarded me with extremely intelligent eyes. Water trickled from his furred muzzle like drops of mercury.
“You are one of these rare individuals,” Claire confirmed. “An individual who has the ability to harness and channel the creative magic of our world to produce new magical beasts.”
There was silence then. The only sound was the gentle hiss of the wind through the long grass of the orchard. Part of my brain wondered at why it wasn’t colder than it was.
When Noctis and I had flown to Augury Grove, the air had been biting and chill. Here, in the Seer’s private little slice of alpine paradise, it seemed that a little pocket of late afternoon temperature lingered. It should have been cold, since we were high in the craggy hills surrounding the Crystal Spire, the castle below, and the town of Drakereach below that.
The air was full of the lush, slightly alcoholic scent of fallen apples. It made me hanker for a nice tall mug of cider—the normal boozy kind, not Lightning Cider, which was the Mystocean Empire’s version of a strong coffee.
“Mike,” Noctis’ deep, relaxed voice echoed through the telepathic pathways of my mind, “this ability, this skill that you possess. It, like all rare things, may present a danger to you.”
I was getting more accustomed to Noctis projecting his thoughts directly into my brain. It had come as quite a shock to be sure, the first time that he had spoken, using the telepathy we shared. It had been on the evening that, on the way home from Drakereach with our squads, Saya had taken out a thief and I had found the weird crystal he had been attempting to steal. That had been followed by a fight with gray-clad ninja warriors that Elenari and Saya believed were part of some guild called the Bloodletters.
Despite our bonding at the Transfusion Ceremony, it still felt strange that someone could just beam their deliberations right into the privacy of your mind without giving you even a microsecond’s chance to prepare yourself.
However, according to Penelope, the Knowledge Sprite who had inducted me into the workings of the Grand Library and the Training Halls, Noctis and I shared a strong bond—and that surely had to be a good thing.
“What d’you mean?” I asked, my thoughts linking and merging with the dragon’s as fluidly, easily, and naturally as one breath followed another.
“I mean what I say,” Noctis said, in his imperiously pragmatic tone, which I imagined was shared by all dragons. “I mean that, just as there is great potential for you to help the Mystocean Empire with your gift, it also holds the possibility to bring out the very worst in your kind.”
“I suppose it’s like any new resource or weapon,” I replied mentally. “There will always be a bunch of assholes that are looking to exploit it or harness it.”
“You speak the truth,” my dragon said, looking at me out of one ancient yellow eye. “It is my experience that elves, men, and all other humanoid races rarely think in terms of what is good over a relatively long period of time. They are far too concerned with furthering their own fleeting ambitions, with what they can achieve in their meager lifespans.”
“Tread carefully and keep this under my hat for as long as possible then, you think?” I asked.
Noctis ducked his equine head. “It always pays to tread carefully, dragon rider,” he said, the thought bouncing weightily around the inside of my skull, as if he had put a special emphasis on it. “It’s too late to wish that you had walked m
ore cautiously when you are plummeting from the cliff edge.”
“Hold on one second,” I said to Claire as the import of the Seer’s words permeated my busy mind and mingled with Noctis’ warning. “Surely, if there are no more dragons being born, and I can somehow breed them, well, that’s a bit of a big deal, right?”
“Just a little bit of a big deal,” Saya said, her words dripping with syrupy sarcasm. She rested a hand on her swollen belly.
“An important event such as this only happens once every millennium or so,” Elenari said with an air of theatrical indifference. “Nothing to write home about, really.” She smirked at me.
“Ha-ha-ha, you two,” I said, looking from statuesque blonde to athletic redhead, “but this is exactly my goddamn point. If I’ve got this ability, surely that’s going to excite comment amongst the high and the mighty.”
Claire looked at me thoughtfully. “I imagine those on the Martial Council might have some strong opinions, were they to learn of it.”
“Right,” I said, my imagination running away freely now that it had got going, “so that means I could inadvertently become some sort of fucking career sperm donor, couldn’t I?”
“What are you talking about, Mike?” Saya asked, leaning against Scopula.
“I’m talking about me being harnessed up like a fucking dairy cow somewhere,” I said, this terrifying though growing larger in my mind’s eye until it was all I could see. “Milked and pumped of this magical seed that my nuts are supposed to be producing, then left to recuperate before being drained again—all for the good of the Empire, I imagine.”