The Dragon Star (Realms of Shadow and Grace: Volume 1)

by G. L. Breedon

  The yutan. He had seen her use The Sight to send and receive reports from their masters, but had not expected her capable of such subtle seeing and willing. He did not remember much after the battle with the militia, but he had certainly felt dead. Now he lived. In darkness.

  Why had they put him in the cellar and left him in the dark? An insult? For his protection? To give him time to heal? The yutan had unpredictable ways of repaying a debt.

  He sat up slowly, his eyes drinking in the faint glow from beneath the door. Best to discover where his quarters were before finding out why he resided in them. To his surprise, the door opened when he pulled at it. A lantern hung on the stone wall far down a narrow corridor with several doors on both sides. He looked at himself in the light, seeing that his shirt had been removed, his pants and fur stained with blood. His blood. It made him long for a bath or a long dip in a pond. Even a rain shower would do. He detested filth, especially when it clung to his pelt.

  He noted the absence of his sword belt and dagger, and felt thankful his boots still remained on his feet. Knowing that he had only two choices, walk above and discover what he could, or wait for someone to come and tell him the meaning of his dark confinement, he chose the one path his nature allowed. As he walked along the corridor, his stomach rumbled, confirming the wisdom of his decision.

  The corridors ended in a stairwell, a dark mountain of stone steps spiraling upward toward the light. As he climbed, it became clear that the light did not emit from the sun but merely another lantern. At the first level, where the stairs met the inner grounds of the castle, he paused and looked out the door. He stood in the shadows of the southern tower, where he had been earlier that day. That day? How long had he slept? How long had he been dead? Why had they brought him back? Why did no one ever leave well enough alone?

  He saw a few humans around the courtyard working by the light of fires burning in iron braziers. They seemed to be digging holes in the ground. Most of the others slept. From the placement of the two slivered moons at the lip of the castle wall, Shifhuul guessed the hour to be just before dawn.

  He ignored the impulse to cross the yard and demand answers and a hot meal. He instead followed an instinct that drew him upward. He climbed to the head of the spiral stair, avoiding the sight of the human guards on the wall and continuing his ascent up a ladder and through the wooden hatch to the platform atop the tower. He silently closed the trapdoor and walked to stand at the edge of the tower behind a large crenellation to shield his body from the view of the guards below on the wall.

  He looked down upon the courtyard to see the humans still divided into three camps, a contingent of pilgrims holding hands in prayer even in the predawn hours. They had completed his project of disassembling the stable and piling the stones before the castle gate. It did not look impregnable, but it would hold against the kind of battering ram the militia had been fashioning during the outlander’s attack. It gave him a foreign sense of pride to see a product of his imagination given form and purpose. Would that he could so easily fashion purpose in the rest of his being.

  This thought brought him back to the battle in the town. He looked out to see the shadowed forms of the human militiamen stationed near the gate. He counted ten and wondered how many still lived and who now commanded them. He vaguely made out the remains of the battering ram and an abandoned attempt to construct another near it.

  Contemplations of the battle carried him to the memories of his choices and his actions that brought him to death — or near enough. These memories fetched other, silhouetted thoughts representing the real events and actual persons he struggled against bringing to mind. His daughter tumbling over the edge of the balcony. His mate screaming in agony. Her tears and wails for months afterward. Seeing her hanging from the branch over the breakfast balcony, the knot tight around her neck.

  He shook his head, forcing away the memories and the tears. He heard the wooden hatch rising behind him and turned, wiping his eyes as he prepared … for what, he did not know.

  Yeth’s head rose through the opening, a look of relief washing over her. She climbed up the ladder and closed the door. He watched her, saying nothing, wondering what would come next. She stepped to stand beside him and stared out at the courtyard. He moved to follow her gaze.

  “You worried me.” Yeth placed both her hands on the stones of the parapet around the top of the tower. “I went down to the cellar to check on you and found it empty. Did anyone see you?”

  “I wyrin.” Shifhuul let that statement explain what needed to be explained. He could hide from the view of inattentive and easily distracted humans with ease.

  “You should remain unseen then,” Yeth said.

  “Why?” Shifhuul had many questions he wanted to ask of the yutan, but he would start with the simplest.

  “They all believe you to be dead.” Yeth glanced down at him. “It would be awkward if you came back to life now.”

  “How?” Shifhuul touched his uncovered chest, running his paw through the fine fur over the scar across his breastbone.

  “I healed you.” Yeth frowned. “After I let you die.”

  “Dead.” Shifhuul had been correct. Odd that he had no memory of the death. No knowledge to bring back from beyond the veil between worlds.

  “The humans were atop the wall in number when we returned,” Yeth said. “I could not use The Sight to heal you without revealing my ability. To do so would have jeopardized my life and our mission. I had to wait for you to die and take you away to heal you. A risk existed that you would be out of breath for too long, but I was able to revive you after only a few minutes. Too long and the mind of one brought back is never right. Even a great seer can only heal so much, and I am only middling with The Sight. Fortunately, the one thing I possess some skill in is healing. I cannot easily burn a giant log with fire, but I can make wounded flesh whole again. It took the remainder of the night and a good part of the next day, but you are complete once more.”

  “Body?” While Shifhuul did not doubt that most of the humans in the castle would little notice the absence of a body at his death, he knew Leotin to be far too observant to miss something so obvious.

  “Yes, the body.” Yeth frowned again. “Tarak and I took the bones of a roasted piglet with a few hocks of flesh, wrapped them in a blanket, and burned them on a small pyre. I even said a few prayers. I made them up, of course. I have no idea how wyrins treat their dead. Palla and Leotin said nice words about you. Tarak sang a roagg death hymn. A good funeral.”

  Shifhuul scowled at Yeth’s reply. He could not decide which he found more offensive — the fabricated funeral rites or the notion that the bones of a roasted piglet might be mistaken for his remains. A pyre! He shook his head at the notion. The wyrins lived in forests. If they burned their dead, they’d risk torching their villages and towns. The wyrins buried their deceased in sacred groves of trees tended for centuries, feeding with their useless bodies the lives of the forest’s greatest citizens. More annoyingly, the thought of the piglet who took his place on the fire elicited another rumble of his stomach. Better to focus on the question Shifhuul most wanted answered — why not leave him dead? Why not let him go? Could she not see this to be his true mission? To make right what he had wrongly fashioned in his ignorance. To heal the rift within himself that ran deeper than the cut of any blade.

  “Why?”

  “You saved my life.” Yeth looked down into Shifhuul’s eyes, her own blinking, wet with emotion. “You gave your life for mine, and I could not honor that debt by abandoning you to the great darkness that becomes us all.”

  “No wish come back,” Shifhuul voiced in the mangled verbiage of a tainted language the thought he could not speak in his own tongue. He had not sacrificed himself thinking of collecting a debt. He had hoped to die with the honor he lost a year past when he failed to act, when he froze in fear and confusion, when he allowed his love for his mate and daughter to help strangers kill them — his daughter that night and
his mate later of wounds that could not be seen from without. Better that he had remained in Mannis, the endless dark desert that awaits the wicked and black of heart in death.

  “I know.” Yeth reached out a hand and rested it on Shifhuul’s shoulder. “I know the look in your eyes. I held that look myself once, long ago, staring into the blackness, wishing it would envelop me and carry me into some eternal place where no memory and no pain could reach me. You are better than that blackness. You do not deserve it.”

  “Thank you.” Shifhuul did not feel certain he knew the nature of his gratitude — whether for his life or the yutan’s words. It did not matter. He lived, and he would need to live with the fact of living.

  “Thank you.” Yeth gently patted Shifhuul’s shoulder.

  He noted she did not stroke his fur and appreciated her restraint. He intended to speak, to voice his need to fill his stomach, and ask how long he had been asleep, when a cry arose from the road leading to the castle gate. He and Yeth looked to the ground, finding the entire militia of humans assembled in the dim light of the sun just cresting the eastern edge of the world. He counted twenty-two human males. Fewer than he expected. He smiled in spite of his dour mood.

  “Open the gate!” one of the militiamen called up to the man on the wall above the entrance. “Hurry! Open the gate!”

  “Come to fight?” Shifhuul did not have a great deal of familiarity with human intonation, but the man sounded frightened rather than angry.

  “I do not believe so.” Yeth leaned on the pointed stones of the tower ledge.

  “In the mercy of Ni-Kam-Djen, open the gate!” A militiaman stepped forward from his comrades. “The Tanshen army is coming and they will kill us all!”

  Shifhuul listened to the human’s words, wondering what they meant for the castle, for the carnival, for the outlanders, for himself. As he considered the implications, he began to realize that the eternal darkness of Mannis might be preferable to the future that looked likely to form around them with the light of the coming dawn.

  To continue reading the Carnival story arena follow this link.

  THE PHILOSOPHER

  SKETKEE

  “TOO MANY.”

  “Yes. Far too many.”

  “We could sneak into their camp at night.”

  “We have no alternative available to us.”

  Sketkee raised a scaly brow in frustration and stepped back into the shadows between the houses in the small town. Kadmallin stood beside her, continuing to watch the merchant convoy preparing to leave. Five wagons, five drivers, and ten hired guards — one for each of the wagons with the other five mounted on horses. They had observed the caravan closely for nearly half an hour as it prepared to depart, uncertain they had the right merchant until a worker loaded a small chest with multiple locks onto the middle wagon. The worker had called out for the merchant by name to assure him it would be safe. Lan-Dal. The man they sought.

  “We should have ridden through the night.” Kadmallin stepped back beside her. “If we arrived even an hour earlier, we might have had a chance.”

  “You were dozing on that ridiculous beast as it was.” Sketkee did not blame Kadmallin for the misfortune of missing an opportunity to steal back the artifact. He would do that himself. Humans were oddly inefficient in knowing where to place the culpability of a situation gone wrong. But then, they were oddly inefficient in most things.

  “A night raid will be tricky,” Kadmallin said. “Hopefully, they will leave the chest in the same wagon. It’s easy to spot. It was painted black once, years ago. You can see some of the paint still holding near the back right wheel.”

  “You could create a distraction now, and I could poison their wine,” Sketkee said.

  “You’re not serious, are you?” Kadmallin turned to her, his face twisted in surprise. “They’re merchants, not bandits. Wait. Is that a joke?”

  “No.” Sketkee shook her head in mild confusion. Even after years in Kadmallin’s company, she did not understand the human concept of humor well enough to attempt making a joke, even if for some inexplicable reason she desired to do so. “I meant that I could dilute the poison so that it would only make them sick.”

  “I see.” Kadmallin frowned. “Difficult to make sure they all drink it. Hard to insure the right dose. Risky given the numbers.”

  “I agree. It is not an entirely viable notion.” Sketkee returned her attention to the merchant caravan. They would track it through the day and wait for the men to make camp. Then they would steal what had been stolen from her — what she had stolen from others. She reflected that too much of her life of late revolved around theft. It could not be an indication of thorough planning. She would endeavor to devise a more rational means of progress toward understanding the nature of the artifact once she had it back in her possession. She hoped that would be soon. She found that the more time she spent with humans, the more she imitated their impatience.

  To continue reading the Philosopher story arena follow this link.

  To continue reading Sketkee’s storyline follow this link.

  INTERLUDE

  A VERDANT plain of velvety wild grass ripples with the wind, churning in dry waves before dropping away as the land plunges straight down, a tree-high wall of lime-white rock smashing into the thin strip of stone-strewn sand along the edge of the ocean.

  A wyrin female and a roagg male stand on the beach beneath the Bone Cliffs of the Stone Realm, the hunting grounds of the roagg Ragnag clan. They look to the horizon as a low-masted ship sails to where the azure of the sky and the sapphire of the seas meet and become one infinitely thin and unreachable line in the distance.

  “They are authentic.” The wyrin glances at the roll of papers in the roagg’s massive paws.

  I do not doubt that, the roagg thinks.

  Will he see what must be done? the wyrin wonders.

  “You would not bring them to me if they were not.”

  And you would not be here if I ever had cause to doubt you after all these years, the roagg thinks.

  “We are faced with a choice.” The wyrin looks back to the ocean.

  If only that were true. The roagg looks down to the parchments he holds.

  “There is only one decision that can be made.”

  “Then you agree?” The wyrin turns and tilts her head back to stare up at the roagg.

  “We must convene the council of four.” The roagg looks down at the wyrin, far below his eyes.

  And hope we act in time, thinks the wyrin.

  And hope we act in time, the roagg thinks.

  To continue reading the storyline of the Interludes follow this link.

  EPISODE SIX

  THE PHILOSOPHER

  SKETKEE

  SLENDER FINGERS of wood gloved and intertwined — branches of brown and leaves of green intermingled beneath skies of blue. Sketkee pulled her eye away from the glass of the distance magnifier and watched the scene with her unaided eyes. The merchant caravan stood to the eastern side of a crossroads in the middle of a grassy stretch of hills between two forests. Four trees grew at the edges of the crossroads, their limbs interlocking to create a canopy of leaves above the intersection of the two dirt paths.

  She and Kadmallin had tracked the merchant and his wagons all day, finding them at the crossroads near sunset. Kadmallin wisely suggested taking up an observational position on a nearby hill, assuming the men below would break to make camp for the night. But the men did not make camp. They relieved themselves along the roadside, watered the horses, but gave no indication they intended to do more than stop and rest.

  “They’re meeting someone.” Kadmallin reached over with an open hand. Sketkee placed the distance magnifier in his palm.

  “Yes. A buyer for the artifact, no doubt.” Sketkee brushed away a small bee that buzzed around a wildflower near her head where she lay in the grass atop the hill.

  “Someone else to track and rob.” Kadmallin held the tube of metal and glass to his eye and scann
ed along the three possible roads from which the potential buyer might arrive.

  “If we are fortunate, it will be someone with fewer armed men at their disposal.” Sketkee had hoped to reclaim the artifact after nightfall, but a transfer of ownership could complicate things, especially if the new owner held residence nearby and did not need to make camp before returning home.

  “The gods have not favored us with fortune so far.” Kadmallin adjusted the focus on the two tubes and the lenses of the device in his hands.

  “There are no gods.” Sketkee frowned at her companion. “Events occur through the random action of natural processes or the willful choices of sentient beings. There are no unseen actors driving circumstances toward a predetermined conclusion.”

  “You know what I mean.” Kadmallin continued to scan the roads.

  “Yes. Of late, we have not been the beneficiaries of random occurrence.” Sketkee still experienced great annoyance for being foolish enough to leave the artifact unguarded, even with the pilgrim camp under attack. A lack of foresight that threatened to upend her plans permanently.

  “You still think there is a natural cause for the dreams and the star?” Kadmallin lowered the glass from his eye as he looked to Sketkee.

  “Possibly not natural, but certainly rational,” Sketkee said. “While the most likely explanation is simple random occurrence confused with divine will and magnified by the human propensity for mimicked thought patterns, it is possible the dreams were put in motion by a seer or a group of seers. A number of well-planted dreams might be taken up by other humans, who might then have similar dreams due to the suggestibility of the human mind.”