Dark Hope of the Dragons Read online

  “There has been no sign of Dephithus since he killed Garen.” She choked on a sob and shook her head, brushing away more tears. “I guess our times have taken a dark turn. Poor Myara found a couple of lads torn apart by some animal in the woods the day after Dephithus killed young Garen in front of her. The poor girl is a mess. She has hardly spoken to anyone since.”

  Amahna waited patiently while Avaline fought down some more sobs, making a few soothing sounds and placing a hand on her shoulder. She had a feeling the bodies in the woods might also have something to do with Dephithus, given his disappearance and the state of things, but she was not going to suggest as much to Avaline. The fact that Dephithus had not fled the area long ago said volumes for the power of his bond with Myara.

  Eventually, she calmed and Amahna could speak.

  “Can I see Myara?”

  Avaline looked puzzled then she shook her head, though the gesture was uncertain. “I don’t think Myara will want to be bothered. We have been trying to give her time until she is ready to talk about it.”

  “Give me a chance. The poor child can’t work through this trauma with only her memories for company. I had some hard experiences after I left here. Perhaps I can help.” Amahna assumed the most concerned expression she could manage, nodding encouragement while Avaline considered her request.

  “Well, I don’t see how it could hurt. It is kind of you to want to help, sister.”

  Amahna was forced to endure another adoring hug before she could go. Squeezing Avaline’s hand once to reassure her, Amahna excused herself and followed the directions she was given to the room Myara occupied. A knock on the door brought no response so she opened it enough to put her head in. Myara looked up from where she sat, curled in a blanket in the far corner. Seeing Amahna, she attempted to make her pathetic position a little more dignified by sitting up some. With her face swollen from crying and her clothes disheveled, the effort failed miserably. Amahna felt a bit sorry for the pale, shaky looking creature.

  With slow movements, as though approaching a frightened animal, Amahna entered the room and closed the door behind her. Myara appeared a bit confused as she watched her pass by the chairs in the room to sit a few feet away on the floor. When Amahna reached for Myara’s hand the girl pulled away so she settled for keeping her hands in her lap.

  “I won’t pretend to know all that has happened, Myara, but I need your help.” Myara pressed back further into the corner. Amahna pressed on, hoping to profit from the young woman’s unbalanced state. “Dephithus is very sick. You know that don’t you?”

  Tears began to spill silently down Myara’s cheeks as she nodded. How much did she know? What had happened between them?

  “I believe I know where he is and I know someone I think can help him, but he does not know me that well. I don’t think he will trust me in his current state, so I need you to come with me to convince him.”

  Even before Amahna was finished Myara had begun to shake her head frantically and her hands were trembling now. “I can’t. I can’t see him after—”

  Interesting. The girl was afraid of Dephithus now. That made things a little trickier.

  “I will be with you,” Amahna added a soothing flow of daenox to increase the persuasion in her words. Soothe her. Draw her in. This young woman was going to help her find out what the dragons were doing. “He needs help. I can tell you have loved him.”

  “I still love him.” More tears spilled over with the statement.

  “Then you must remember how he was before he became sick.”

  Finally, Myara wiped away her tears and nodded, and Amahna had to fight back a smile.

  *

  In the late afternoon they rode out, leaving Elysium behind only after a long delay at the outer gates. They told everyone that Amahna was taking Myara to get a sip of good ale and listen to a bit of lively music to help her feel better. The lie slowed them down several times simply because everyone had recommendations on where to go. The delay at the outer gates involved several such recommendations as well as a dispute over whether they needed an armed escort.

  Once free of the outer wall they rode through part of the city and promptly back out toward the forest. Amahna could easily focus in on the daenox in Dephithus now because it was so strong and so completely out of control. The lesser power of smaller daemons roaming the area in surprisingly large numbers was only mildly distracting. Amahna smiled at the amount of daemon power that had accumulated here, drawn out through Dephithus.

  “What is it?”

  Myara’s suspicious tone alerted her to how inappropriate her smile was in that moment. “I’m sorry. I know this doesn’t seem like a time for smiling, but I am certain we will succeed. You must be confident.”

  Myara did not look confident at all and the longer they rode, the more often she cast glances back in the direction of Elysium. If this took too long, the young woman might bolt, but Dephithus was moving and that made him a bit harder to track. A hint of unease began to make her mount restless. They had to find him before Myara turned back and, judging by the young woman’s wide eyes and the death grip she had on the reins, it was starting to look unlikely. The strong concentration of daenox was very close now, but she could not quite pinpoint the location clearly. It seemed to be coming from all around them.

  Her nerves started to crackle with unease. The underbrush here was thick and the canopy cast dark shadows on the forest floor. There were many places to hide. If Dephithus had been driven so far past the brink that he had attacked and killed a young man in the palace gardens, he would be a dangerous enemy, especially given how much reason he had to hate her. Perhaps they should turn back.

  A loud growl made them both start. Dephithus burst from the bushes, his eyes wild, charging directly at Amahna. Her mount panicked, twisting sideways and slamming into Myara’s horse. Amahna’s horse went down as the other mount reared up, tossing his already terrified rider. Amahna was able to roll clear of her mount and draw her dagger. He was undoubtedly the better fighter when he was thinking clearly. Now was not that time. He had myriad small scrapes and cuts from wandering through the thick underbrush and he was hunched and snarling like some kind of feral animal.

  He charged her again and she slashed at him as she leapt agilely out of his path, drawing a line of red across the back of his arm. Dephithus turned on her once more, seeming unaware of his injury, and charged with the serpent dagger bared. The rage in his eyes was colored with the blood he hoped to spill. None of the elegant young man she had met the first time was left in those silver-green cat eyes.

  Realizing she was going to need a lot more than a silver tongue to escape with her life, Amahna dodged the second charge and grabbed hold of Myara who had backed up against a tree. A cry of terror escaped the girl when Amahna twisted her arm behind her back and held her between them with the dagger at her throat. Dephithus hesitated, his eyes focusing on Myara for a moment, clarity changing his expression for a second. Anguish flickered across his features, then, with another growl, he locked eyes with Amahna and bared his teeth in a very animal gesture.

  Amahna no longer cared about Dephithus. A delighted laugh escaped her lips as she tightened her hold on Myara’s arm. There, in the young woman’s pulse, was power and more. Myara was pregnant and the dragons had placed their pool of power within that new spark of life along with the power that had passed to it from Dephithus. He must have raped her. Given how mad he was now, it could not have been anything else. No wonder the young woman was such a mess.

  Myara was only a few days pregnant, but the unborn child harbored more dragon power in it than Dephithus had. It made perfect sense now. Because of how they were imprisoned, the dragons could pull a limited amount of power to place in Dephithus, much weaker than the concentration of daenox in the daemon-seed. Their link to the outside world through Dephithus allowed them to pull in more power, which they now placed inside another child. His child. This child would be the one to free them, Dephithus had be
en nothing more than a necessary stepping stone.

  Myara’s elbow caught Amahna in the ribs and she grunted in pain, almost losing hold of her. Realizing she could not fight them both, she sent a surge of daenox into Myara, using it to drop her into a sudden sleep, and let her fall limp to the ground. Now that Dephithus did not matter, her reluctance to harm him vanished in a surge of blood lust. Enough of the daenox was free now that it would continue to work free even without the daemon-seed in him as an anchor. Dephithus was no use to them or to the dragons anymore, unfortunately for him.

  Pulling on the power of the daemon-seed in her opponent, Amahna sapped at his strength, using it to boost her own. Dephithus heaved a deep breath and his grip tightened on the dagger. He looked confused, but it did not stop him from attacking again, but without as much power this time. Amahna dodged him easily and brought her weight around, driving the dagger into his back with the force of all the power she had stolen and sinking it through into his heart.

  Dephithus staggered and fell to his knees. He wavered there for a moment, kneeling like a repentant child, then fell forward trying to catch himself on his arms and failing. He landed near Myara. With his face against the cold ground he stared at her sleeping form and tears ran from his eyes. One arm began to reach out for the sleeping girl. Amahna stepped over him and pulled her knife from his back, letting the blood run free and fast from the wound. Dropping that dagger in front of his face, she took the serpent dagger from under his other hand and sheathed it at her belt. His right hand fell still only a few inches away from Myara. Dephithus stopped moving and drew in his last breath.

  …and the stone dragon in the graveyard beyond Imperious became flesh.

  *

  There was natural power in a great many things. Two of the strongest accumulations of this power occurred at the moment of birth, when the first breath of air was drawn in to newborn lungs, and death, when the last breath passed the lips. It was this power that Vanuthan used, the power in her son’s death, to free herself from her stone prison. It was a forbidden thing to use these natural powers because they were recycled back into nature and used again, a non-renewable resource. However, breaking the web of dragons was so much worse that the Mother Dragon thought very little of this violation. There was no time for her to deliberate over her actions or seek the council of the others. The natural powers would right themselves before long, taking back the power she had stolen, and she could not be sure what effect that would have on her.

  Vanuthan knew exactly where Dephithus was and she flew there fast spreading her massive wings to the sky. The feel of wind under her wings, a sensation so terribly missed, only added to her misery. It was a sensation that nothing else could compare to and one that would soon be lost again. Where Dephithus lay there was no longer any sign of his killer or anyone else. The sight of him made the massive dragon cringe inwardly, her heart twisting in her chest as she sensed the daemon-seed still within him. Her pain at the loss of her human son clouded any good sense that might have sent her back to the web of dragons and she picked Dephithus up gently in her jaws. Rising into the sky again she turned to the north where she hoped to find safety, if the structure still stood.

  There was a temple, construction began on it not long before the dragons and the daenox were imprisoned, that had been built utilizing power from the dragon web. It was originally designed as a place of protection for the dragons when it became apparent that religions rallying against them intended to see them destroyed, but the temple had not been completed in time. It was finished later by the Alcatith, a nature-driven religious group who believed the dragons were good, necessary creatures and hoped to find a way to free them someday. Most religious groups had since disbanded after discovering that their powers had been drawn from the power of the dragon web and the daenox which they no longer had sufficient access to after imprisoning both sources.

  Uncertain how long she would be in the temple and even if what she planned to try would work, Vanuthan snatched up a few meat beasts from a farmer’s herd. With the two beasts dangling in her murderous claws and Dephithus in her mouth, the smell of death was nearly overwhelming. It was Dephithus, his body so lifeless in her jaws and his blood in her mouth, that drove her to fly faster and stronger still. The temple was nearly invisible in amidst the mammoth trees of the old forest, but Vanuthan knew where to look. She dropped the meat beasts in front of the entrance, its structure overgrown with massive vines and moss, and landed.

  Laying Dephithus in front of the temple entrance, a massive granite archway designed to allow a dragon to enter, Vanuthan consumed the meat beasts quickly. That done, she lifted him gently again, wishing as she did that he would stir and save her the agony of what she planned. Folding her wings in close she passed through the massive halls of the temple until she reached the large central chamber. A small statue of a dragon served as an altar to one end of an elaborate granite floor. Using the finest craftsmen, the floor had been engraved with an elegant pattern depicting all sixteen of the original dragons of the web. Those sixteen dragons had created the web many ages ago. With the dragons imprisoned as they were, the strands of the web could not be moved in any way, leaving Vanuthan no method for contacting the others after breaking free.

  What she hoped to do was restore the natural power that had left Dephithus upon his death. It would take much power to restore that natural power to him and heal his wounds, and that was only the beginning of the challenges she faced. Because she did not have access to that kind of power all at once, it would take considerable time to gather it in. They would have to enter a hibernation state, requiring her to delegate some of her limited power to keeping them alive during the sleep. Lastly, she would have to delegate more power to suppressing the daemon-seed and keeping it that way while she worked. There was no way to be rid of it now. The daemon-seed was part of his body, made as essential as his heart by its design.

  Vanuthan laid his still body in the middle of the carving of the web and curled her massive form around him. Careful of her deadly teeth and the power of her size, the Mother Dragon moved his head up to pillow it on her leg. For a moment she lay her head out on her own likeness carved into the floor. Another of the original sixteen dragons had broken from the web. Only one other had done so, before their imprisonment, and that had been the Death dragon, Theruses.

  Change was upon the world again, and it would suffer the daenox until the dragons could be freed to restore the balance. With the child of Dephithus taken by servants of the daenox, that balance might never return.

  How long would it take to bring him back? Curving her head in and lying it next to Dephithus, Vanuthan closed her eyes to all the questions she could not answer.

  She used her own power and the power in the temple to draw his life out of herself and wrapped it around her mental image of him. In her mind he was a dragon with silver scales and ever-lovely silver-green eyes. It did not matter what she saw him as, the part of herself she had placed in him at his conception connected them and would guide her power. Layering over it with her own powers she forced his life back into him.

  Dephithus screamed in mental and physical anguish, and the daemon-seed pulsed in response. Suppressing the daenox with another layer of power and drawing Dephithus into her hibernation state so that his body would not shut down again, Vanuthan started to heal her son.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  It took Amahna most of a month to get back to the Dunues Mountains with her captive.

  Something had changed.

  The dragon web was inaccessible, so they had to make their journey by the speed of horses and her captive insisted on stopping regularly to tend her needs or rest their mounts. Amahna had not been able to even look upon the web using the daenox since the day she killed Dephithus. It made her nervous, not knowing why the web had seemingly vanished from her sight, but she had the unborn dragon-child. She had to believe that was the most important thing.

  Myara was not as difficult a
travelling companion as Amahna might have expected given her situation. The young woman wept sometimes, curling forward as much as she could on horseback while her body shook with endless sobs, and she was sick many times, which might have been nerves or early morning sickness from the unusual child she carried. A couple of times she tried to run, and she tried to kill Amahna in her sleep three times only to be thwarted by daemons drawn to the daenox in Amahna. The rest of the time it seemed that she receded completely into herself, glaring silently at the world in general and Amahna in particular. Perhaps she had simply gone away to hide away from a world that had dealt her more than she could handle.

  Myara had given up asking why she had been taken. Amahna refused to answer. As far as she could tell, Myara did not know she was with child. Knowing she had an unborn child to protect might make her fight harder and give her hope. That would only make things more difficult. The only question she did not hesitate to answer was when Myara asked if Dephithus were dead, which Amahna responded to with a pleased and enthusiastic affirmative.

  For a time, she considered killing the young woman and the child, but it occurred to her that Theruses might prefer to do the honors of vanquishing the dragons’ last hope himself, so she was patient.

  For whatever reason, she often caught herself caressing the hilt of the serpent dagger she had taken back from Dephithus. His silver-green cat-like eyes visited her in her dreams. One dream sequence haunted her over and over in the night, sometimes so vividly that she would wake and be unable to return to sleep anymore. In the sequence she would be standing in the midst of a perfectly black landscape facing Dephithus. She would place her hands on either side of his face and lean forward, closing her eyes and kissing his lips with the softness of a lover. When she leaned back and opened her eyes, she would be holding a clay mask of his face that would crumble to dust in her hands. Then the sequence would end with her standing alone in the darkness next to the pile of dust from the clay mask.