CHAPTER 1 - THE FIRST HUNT
“I believe, there was a time when dragons gathered in their hundreds and their thousands. Built thriving and beautiful groves and communities among them. There was a time when family was everything to their kind, firstborn of all the creaturely races.” Siegyrd stood just below six feet in height. His hair was a striking, shining silver, and his eyes were pools of mercurial platinum. His face was porcelain white and smooth as silk, young, and vibrant. He carried the slight scent of snow lilies with him. His voice was a low tenor with a musicality that pulled you along.
“Some believe angels live in heaven and devils in the hells too, rather than look into reflections and see the truth in their own eyes.” Mareth’s voice had a severe kind of humor, middle tenor, and he spoke with an element of the minor key, somewhat darker than the bright major of Siegyrd. He was shorter than Siegyrd and their third companion, and somewhat squat, though not fat. He was healthy and young too, eyes glowing with a blue sapphire sparkle that hinted power.
The third man, stood just a few inches taller than Siegyrd. His hair was white like fresh-fallen snow, but wispy like a willow tree. It cascaded down his back in a tight warrior braid. His face was an ashen sort of grey and his beard the same stark white though it seemed specked with flashes of molten silver. His eyes were like diamonds set in a pool of thick fog. He did not speak.
The three stood at the crest of a small butte. Before them there was a landscape of broken crags and intermittent vegetation, mostly low scrub in browns and sickly greens. The strange rows of buttes and miniature cliffs, bluffs, and lowlands were like standing in the carvings of a giant stonemason whose engravings were upon the earth itself. Dust left grit in the air and in their teeth.
“I only claim that it is at least possible for there to be multiple dragons in a single place.” Siegyrd’s voice sharpened.
He nodded to his taller companion and the two leapt from the multi-story high bluff into the vegetation below.
Mareth yelled down, “And I contend that possibility is not the same as likelihood. We ought to count on a single creature, based on the reports.” He then muttered something to himself, made some strange movements of his hands, spoke a word of power and leapt. He floated slowly down to meet the two who had already begun walking away from the base of the cliff.
“Not intending to change our current understanding of the situation, rather musing on the possibility of draconic gatherings, of families even – community perhaps.” Siegyrd said absently but loud enough to be heard by his floating companion.
“Ha! A dragon of a size to gather her own horde suffers no opponents. Power does not play nice with power - territorial creatures they are, right, Aerendir?”
The tallest man looked back and cocked his head ever so slightly, opened his mouth, then paused.
Siegyrd and Mareth sensed the meaning behind that pause. Something had gone still, and a sense of foreboding grew. The slightest tremor moved beneath their feet. Siegyrd and Aerendir locked eyes in a flash, then both reached for their swords and dove to their right side. As they did, the earth where they had been standing erupted in a geyser of rock and sludge and strange gases mixed with spurts of flame and purple fumes. Mareth staggered backward and watched as a great head, the size of a small hut protruded from the ground, followed by a grasping claw which dug out of the dirt and rocks, sizzling them with heat and some kind of acid oozing from the creature’s skin.
Siegyrd sang a single warhorn note that held a melodic pitch, and then seemed to pluck the note from the air in a golden strand of light which he threw toward Mareth. Mareth reached out his hand to receive the light and pressed it to his chest as he tried to step back away from the emerging draconic figure, massive, snarling, acrid smelling acid oozing, and spitting strange sickened fires. He didn’t move fast enough as the creature fully emerged and spun in a wide arc and smashed Mareth in the chest with his tail. A light flashed as the golden glow flared into an aegis of force, cracked, and then failed and Mareth was thrown back ten feet.
The creature turned to face Aerendir whose two-handed bone white greatsword was high above his head ready to strike. It snapped its jaws at the larger man in his dragonscale armour, snarling like a mad dog. Aerendir spun in the air, twisted his body and reoriented for a thrust at the dragon’s neck which struck home, skidded on the oozing scales, hissing with acid, and then pushed between the scales into the great beast.
Siegyrd wove his sword and hands in arcane motion and whispered a song of storm, slapped his hand to the hilt of his sword and released a bolt of lightning which attached to the dragon’s skull linking the two. It burned at the dragon’s eyes, as the beast screamed in rage and began to curse in the draconic tongue, filling the valley with fell utterances in a language made for song. Then it swiped up at its own neck with a wicked claw and caught Aerendir in its grasp and slammed him to the ground.
The dragon roared then and spewed poison gas mixed with spiraling flame in a line toward Siegyrd who tried to dodge, but took a portion of the breath across his left leg, and limped away grinding his teeth as the flames grasped upward and tried to dig poison tendrils into his veins. The skin bubbled and stank. The lightning from his sword faded as he slipped away. The dragon turned its focus toward Aerendir held fast on the ground. The bonewhite greatsword still stuck out of the dragon’s neck, but Aerendir couldn’t reach it. The dragon looked down at him through burned eyes and specks of poisonous acidic drool dripped onto Aerendir’s armour with a sizzle.
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Mareth drew himself up gripping a small staff about the size of a club and chanted in deep, booming song, before he slammed the club onto the ground as if trying to crush the universe. The earth erupted. A creature shaped almost like a giant man formed itself out of the very earth. It stood twice the height of a man and had eyes of almandine. Arcane sigils covered its form and glowed in a flash of brilliant orange as it bull tackled the dragon from the opposite side of Aerendir trying to force the dragon back. As the stone met the dragon’s oozing acidic scales the elemental’s form began to melt slowly and it made a rumbling moan as close to what a man could call the pain of stone.
The stone form persisted though and the dragon was forced to refocus its strength, and just that fractional change gave Aerendir what he needed to grip the dragon’s claw in both hands and press it straight upward with a heave of force that sent the much larger creature further off balance. A tumbling scramble between elemental, dragon, and man began. Siegyrd hailed a song of mending and a blue-green light bloomed around him, closing the wounds in his legs.
Mareth was chanting and moving in a kind of arcing, waving dance, gathering storm energies around him that crackled with blues and pinks and reds and whites and a hint of golden light. As the three scrambled continually, Siegyrd, from his opposing position took up a mimicking dance, swinging his sword and chanting in harmony with Mareth. The arcing lights around each began to mesh and meld and synchronize as the scramble slowed to a standstill with the elemental holding the dragon by one wing and leg, and Aerendir now gripping around the dragon’s large neck, his bare white arms burning against the acid scales. Between Aerendir and the elemental, they managed to pin the dragon in place.
The two casters, spinning and twirling in a whirling dance of power and melodic song moved toward one another to reach the optimum position for resonance. Aerendir boomed in brilliant bass across the battlefield, “Now!”
Between the statement and the flash there was the barest fraction of a second where a kind of knowing grew in the dull eyes of the dragon. Those eyes were filled, Aerendir thought, with resignation, rage, and, oddly, relief. The dragon and Aerendir and the elemental were swallowed in a kaleidoscope of radiant electrical rays which flashed into expansive whiteness.
Aerendir blinked his diamond eyes up into an azure sky, heard the ringing deafness tingling in his ears. He felt the heaviness of firm adamantine in his bones, and he lifted his head with great pains, turned and looked. There the dragon lay, a hole the size of a small wagon burned through its side straight through, tearing off one wing and leaving a clear picture into the internals of dragons. Where three hearts should have beat in harmony, there was only one in frail and sickly form, diseased. The lungs and breath sac were gone, but the other two hearts were nowhere seen.
On the other side of the hole, Aerendir could see Mareth kneeling and leaning on his staff. Siegyrd reached Aerendir’s side a moment later, and a burst of warmth like a plunge in warm ocean waves swept over him in a bloom of turquoise light. The ringing in his ears was gone, and his eyes refocused. Everything snapped back.
"Ta, Brother."
Siegyrd just smiled and pointed to the side of the dragon’s neck where the sword was still stuck and sizzling against the scales.
Aerendir’s voice boomed low, “Ah, yes.” He stood and retrieved his blade from the creatures hide, pulled a cloth and small flask from his pouch and sat down there in the shadow of the dragon to clean his blade.
Mareth made his way around the body and raised an eyebrow at the image, a large white haired armoured man, burned and scarred, cleaning his weapon casually next to the smouldering corpse of a diseased dragon. “Never seen that before.”
“A professional? You’ll learn.” Siegyrd slapped Mareth on the shoulder and laughed.
“The path to professional is littered with corpses in your work.”
“Don’t be so serious, Mareth,” Siegyrd prodded the wizard with a finger, “if you end up a corpse at least you’ll lose the weight you wanted.”
The wizard huffed, and then grew more serious, “Your warding song…”
Aerendir broke in, “We fill our roles, keep each other safe. Thanks is for the over and above.”
Siegyrd walked around to the front of the dragon, and a sadness swept over him. In death the corruption that held the creature seemed to be fading away, and a miasma of purple rose upward away from the creature and sent a strange lilting song high into the sky. When it passed, the dragon’s face was clear, no longer the scarred black, muck scales but a lovely copper sheen, eyes closed almost in sweet repose. Siegyrd said a prayer and set his hand on the nose of the dead dragon.
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A vision fired through his psyche. A broad plain was there hosting a single massive tree, many stories high, higher than any tower made by giants or men that Siegyrd had known. Its branches stretched out over leagues and beneath it there were dragons of every color and shape and form. They were dancing on the ground in strange steps, and flying in whirling patterns in the sky but still beneath the gargantuan tree. Hundreds of dragons danced, and Siegyrd thought, if he focused, that he could make out the tiniest hint of a song, something resonating in some infinite distance he could not quite sense. There was joy.
The vision shifted and the same tree was shrunken, shriveling and dying. The dragons were gone, and a great hoard of wealth, gold and gems, and artworks, were piled in great hills beneath the tree. A single dragon, copper complexioned but fading, lay atop it, eyeing Siegyrd through pupils burning with Avarice. The vision zoomed, pulling Siegyrd to the foot of the tree and face to face with the dragon. It was huddled over something, clearly protecting it above all the rest of the treasures there. Siegyrd leaned to look at an ebonwood case, scrawled with sigils more ancient than any of which he had heard. Fear and desire were beings held within that case, tangible entities which called for him. He reached out, heard a series of notes like a distant crystal song in his head and withheld his hand. The vision ended.
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Mareth and Aerendir were speaking and waved Siegyrd over. He shook off the vision and strode toward them.
“Found the entrance to its lair.” Mareth said.
Siegyrd had a distant stare, but replied, “Let’s take a look.”
Aerendir said nothing.
The tunnel from which the dragon emerged had largely collapsed, but Mareth had dug into an adjacent one that looked connected to a giant root of some kind. He thought nothing of it, as they passed through the musk and decay of the dead earth and into a broad space of darkness. Mareth struck his staff, and light bloomed forth throughout the wide chamber which looked more like a pocket in dull earth than any sort of cavern.
“Never heard of anything like this.” Mareth mused aloud as the light revealed molten gold and silver, gems smashed to dust, what looked like art pieces scoured with fire and acid. In short all the treasures of the beast looked destroyed.
Aerendir and Siegyrd looked at each other for a moment, and then Siegyrd spoke, “Each dragon we’ve slain in recent years has been like this.”
“All the stories say there’s treasure where dragons lair!”
“Stories told by none brave enough to enter. As you said before, few professionals in such a deadly trade.”
“Legends have a hint of truth, eh?” Mareth pulled out a sketchbook and began capturing the space they were in as best he could.
Aerendir raised an eyebrow, “Why draw this and not the dragon?”
“This is interesting. Why immortalize death? To draw a living dragon would be a great honor, though I hold little hope one will ever sit for me rather than eat me.” Mareth laughed and continued, “besides, lack of treasure is disappointing but the truth of what dragons do with their treasures is its own reward for my research.”
This time it was Aerendir who laughed a big, booming, beautiful laugh that filled the otherwise malign space with joy that seemed almost proper.
It was Siegyrd’s turn to say nothing.