“Eyes down, boy! You kneel before a matriarch!”
For several heartbeats longer, he peered into the matriarch’s scarlet eyes, before finally, with great reluctance, he lowered his gaze to her plump, round…
“Lower, you reeking goresnout!”
His eyes drifted downward, settling on the sweetest spot, between her—
A squawk of outrage escaped the matriarch’s lips as she strode forward, suddenly looming over him in all of her bejewelled glory. Claws raked across his cheeks, spraying his blood onto the dirt.
“Matriarch not say how far down to look,” he said, licking blood from his lips. “Matriarch should be more specific.”
“I should feed you to the vorgandol for your insolence!” she growled.
“If matriarch desires. I tough and stringy, though. Vorgandol might choke.” He frowned. “What is vorgandol?”
In the distance, a groaning growl echoed on the air, accompanied by the sound of trees being smashed aside.
“That,” said the matriarch, “is the vorgandol. Tell me why you intrude upon my clan-home, boy, or you will be sleeping in its belly.”
Dougan frowned. “I came seeking shelter from vorgandol.”
She was silent for a long moment. Then she gave a single short, sharp laugh. “You are a funny one. What shall we do with him, my clan-sisters?”
He glanced about at the other she-trows who had gathered behind the palisades of the tiny enclave. There were only a few he-trows. They looked worn and weary.
“We will put him to the test, great mother,” said one of the clan-sisters. “Perhaps he will outlast the others.”
“Very well,” said the matriarch. “If you can please my clan-sisters, boy, I will let you live another day.”
Three of the she-trows led him into a small hut. There, they tore off his furs, and looked at him in the same manner as the vorgandol eyeing its next meal.
A slow smile crept across Dougan’s face. “Good kind of test.”
Some time later, his smile had turned to a broad grin. His body was streaked with blood and sweat. Some of it his own, and some theirs. A pair of clawed hands kneaded his chest. Another set of hands worked his back. The matriarch was standing in the doorway with raised eyebrows, and the clan-sisters were pleading with her.
“We must spare him, great mother!”
“Please! We have so few males to play with.”
“He is young, but has skill far beyond his spans. I have never been with one so… We will get many babies out of him.”
His grin widened. Little did they know that he was older by far than even their matriarch. Precisely how old, he didn’t know. He had been wandering for so long, he’d lost count of the spans. And there had been a time before the wandering. A frozen flame; now but a faint ember, shrouded in the mists of a half-remembered world. He had wandered far, across many branches, before he’d encountered others of his kind. Here, in this rugged, untamed land known as Grongarg, the trows held dominion. Trows of many shapes and sizes and skin-tones. Some like Dougan. Some very different.
But most importantly, there were she-trows. He couldn’t get enough of them. At first, he had been clumsy, his advances spurned more often than not. In time, he had learned. Now there was rarely a she-trow he could not please.
“I will test him myself,” said the matriarch. “Only then I will decide if he is worthy.”
The next morning, he staggered out of the hut, bloody and exhausted, yet not unhappy. The matriarch had stamina to match his own.
“I have decided to keep him for myself,” she announced. The clan-sisters were less than pleased, but she silenced their outburst with a raised hand. “You will each get a share of him as well, but he will sire the next matriarch with me.”
“How can it be that you still look so young?”
It was not the first time his matriarch, Voska, had asked him this question, but he could sense that this time it was truly bothering her. She would soon be entering her elder spans, while he…he didn’t look much older than their eldest daughter, Heska.
“I…older inside,” he said.
“That is no answer,” she said.
“It is only answer I have.”
In truth, he just didn’t know why he aged so slowly. He suspected he had known, long ago. But no matter how hard he concentrated, the memories wouldn’t rise to the surface, and all he earned for his trouble was a headache.
Dougan had been with the Riverside Clan for over five spans now. Not since the dimly-remembered before-time had he lived in one place for so long. Sometimes he wandered for years at a time, but always he returned to Voska and her clan-sisters, and their many progeny. The clan had grown to encompass a large swathe of the Grongargian riverlands, assimilating several neighbouring clans in the process. Eventually, it would cease to be a clan, and become a kingdom. A kingdom to rival the ones he’d encountered on Ulugmir and Ciendil. Maybe he would be king someday.
He smiled at the thought. No. The trows of Grongarg would never be ruled by a king. His daughter, though; she would be queen. He liked the sound of that.
They were walking back to the great hall when a shadow passed over him, darker than that which any cloud could cast. His eyes turned skyward, and he beheld something he had never expected to see on Grongarg. Azure wings pounded the air, while tongues of lightning licked the ground in its wake. Some of the Riverside trows ran for cover. He and the matriarch stood in silent awe.
The storm dracken was not alone, he realised. Tiny figures sat astride its back.
“They are not coming for us,” said Voska.
“No,” he agreed. “Heading toward Krakura.”
“Why would they go there?”
“I not know,” he said. “Maybe they look for challenge.”
What this might portend, he couldn’t imagine, but he suspected he would find out soon enough.
A fiveday passed, and then another, and he thought perhaps the dracken had come and gone without him.
Then he began to feel the call.
It started as a gentle tug. Whenever he tried to walk in a straight line, he would find himself veering unexpectedly to the southwest. The feeling became stronger, and within a few days, he could no longer fight it.
“I will go to Krakura,” he said.
“What?” said his daughter, Heska. “Why would you want to go there, Papa Dog?” Even now, on the cusp of adulthood, she still used that pet name for him.
“She is calling.”
Heska’s eyes narrowed. “Who is ‘she?’”
“I not know. I will go there, find out.”
Voska was not pleased to see him go. Neither were the clan-sisters, nor his children. But it was not the first time he had left them; sometimes, without a word of farewell. They had come to accept his fickle nature. If fate willed it, he would be back. And if not, then he wished them long and happy lives.
Barely a hundred steps into the jungle, a deafening growl shook the trees, and a wide beak emerged. Dougan reached up and lightly scratched the folds beneath the vorgandol’s lower eyes. The growl turned to a low croon.
“Come to Krakura, good friend?” said Dougan.
He leapt atop the vorgandol’s shell, and the great beast bore him away. Through the eastern riverlands she slithered, and into the primal jungles of Krakura. Many were the predators that tried to take a bite out of them, but it was he and the vorgandol who dined well on this journey.
Soon, the calling grew so intense, he could think of little else. At last, on the ninth day, they came upon a hillside plateau, surrounded by cliffs, and he knew that he had at last reached his destination. He bade the vorgandol to wait for him below, and stepped across the slender bridge of rock to the plateau.
That was where things started to get a little odd.
From the outside, he’d spied nothing but trees and marsh atop the plateau. But the moment his foot crossed the threshold, the air seemed to hum, and he found himself walking on a wide grassy field, beneath a dark sky sprinkled with tiny lights. A stone temple with peculiarly smooth, straight walls stood at the centre of the field. Beside the temple coiled a sleeping storm dracken. A motley assortment of small creatures had gathered around it: a skinny, pale, hairless drengar, a burly dwarrow, and a linked couplet of geblings. But his eyes were immediately drawn to a tall figure in a gold dress, standing on the temple steps.
She looked almost—but not quite—like the drengari he’d encountered on Ciendil. Her ears were round like a dwarrow’s, and her skin undappled. Somewhere in the fog of his forgotten life, he’d seen a creature like this before.
“Welcome to the Night’s Dream, dear trow,” she said, speaking the hill tongue with a heavy accent. “You are the first Grongargian to answer my call. I am Sarthea.”
“You call…me?” he asked.
“Not you specifically,” said Sarthea. “I seek those with a certain spark. The potential for greatness, if you will. To hear my call, you must possess that spark.”
“What need have you for trows?”
“I am relatively new here,” she said. “I seek allies. Friends I can count on. In exchange, I will offer you…the world.”
“World not yours to give,” he said.
“Oh isn’t it?” Her lips curled up in an enigmatic smile. The dracken stirred, and lifted its gargantuan head, until it loomed just an arm’s length from the two of them. She reached up and pressed her hand to its lower lip. “Iscaragraithe can bear us to any branch of the world tree. Think on it. You could go anywhere. See anything. Do anything.”
Dougan considered her words for but a moment. Climbing between branches was a long and perilous undertaking. And there were places not even he could reach. But with a dracken…
“I accept.”
Dougan stepped through the dank, dark depths of Ulugmir, watching Oppa’s silvery gemlight flit across the cavern walls around him.
Sarthea of the Night, goddess of the middle realms, glanced back at him, and smiled. She smiled a lot, he’d noticed, and whenever she did, he felt the urge to please her. Not the way he would please a she-trow. Sarthea had her night maidens for that. No, he would please her by anticipating what she wanted, and doing everything in his power to fulfil her wishes. It was a different kind of devotion. Less intense, but perhaps more enduring.
Today, she wanted nothing more than for him to stay alert, and be ready to stomp anything that might leap at them from the shadows. He could do that. Stomping squishies was his speciality.
“Why must we come to such an inhospitable place?” grumbled Anduis the dreamer, walking behind them on skinny, pale legs that would buckle under a mild breeze. “I should not be away from my research for so long.”
“Your ‘research’ wouldn’t happen to involve a certain comely drengari lass, now, would it?” said Ragnold the elementalist, arching his eyebrows at his friend.
“The proper term is drengesse, and that is none of your business,” said Anduis, bristling against the jibe.
Gebling lightbearers, Oppa and Vyr cast threads of silver into the pair’s eyes, making them flinch. “No idle talk!” hissed Vyr. “Within these hollows, monsters may lurk!”
As if prompted by his words, a low rumble echoed through the cavern. Dougan stepped in front of Sarthea, eyes straining to discern movement in the shadows. A slender beam of light darted into a far corner. And that was when he saw it. A large, lumbering form, standing on stout legs forged from solid rock.
“Stone guardian,” murmured Ragnold. “Very tough to crack.”
“Hold,” said Sarthea, reaching up to place her hand on Dougan’s spear arm. “It will not harm us.”
“How can you be so certain?” asked Anduis.
“It belongs to an old friend,” said Sarthea.
“You not old enough to have old friends,” said Dougan.
She smiled up at him, and gave a soft chuckle. “Appearances can be deceiving. You, of all people, should know that. Some of my friends—and enemies—are very old indeed. But they, like me, are not from around here.”
Sarthea strode toward the stone guardian. Dougan kept close, ready to throw himself between them if the great construct made a move against her. It shifted at her approach, but its mighty stone fists remained at its sides.
As he drew near, Dougan saw that the guardian was damaged. Down one side, the rock had sagged and reformed, leaving its crystalline innards exposed. What could do that to solid stone?
Sarthea pressed her hand against the construct’s side. “Cool to the touch. The one who did this is probably long gone, but be on your guard, all the same.”
Dougan nodded, and followed her into the darkness.
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More stone guardians awaited them in the next tunnel. These ones had been reduced to lumps of stone, with only the remnants of limbs and shattered crystal as evidence they were ever more than that.
There was a blue panel on the wall, cracked and pitted. Next to it, the shattered remnants of an iron door. They stepped inside the blue chamber, and there they found him. A charred body and shattered skull. Mouth gaping wide.
Sarthea let out a long sigh. “It is as I feared. I’m sorry, Murgle. I was too late.”
Ragnold stood in the doorway, his own mouth agape. “This is the stonefather? What could do this to a…?”
“To a god?” said Sarthea. “Too many things, unfortunately. But I know who did this. And we’re going to pay him a visit.”
With a crackling roar, Iscaragraithe swooped low over the dunes of Thrikaxis, her wingtips casting spears of lightning down from the sky as they lashed the air. Gripping the storm dragon’s spines tightly, Dougan bared his teeth at the skarakh hordes pouring across the sands below. They rode golden chariots, hauled by six-legged sand crawlers. A billowing orange cloud followed in their wake, churned up by thousands of wheels and clawed feet and thumping tails. In the sky behind them hung a red demon, blazing with the heat of nine suns.
Okael, the Fire Across the Sky.
From the horde came a flurry of fireballs streaking skyward. Iscaragraithe dove and pivoted in the air, avoiding the firestorm by a trow’s length.
Oppa and Vyr waved twin beams of silver across the charging horde. A hundred skarakh charioteers fell screeching into the sand.
More fire streaked toward them, but this time it fizzled into steam, which instantly formed into shards of ice, slicing back into the ground on streams of chilled air, driven by Ragnold the elementalist.
Lacking magic of his own, Dougan had to content himself with firing his trow-sized crossbow at the enemy. He hoped they would get a chance to land soon, so he could really let loose.
Sarthea’s eyes were closed, her forehead creased in concentration. Anduis turned his pale eyes groundward, lending his will to her efforts. Below, chaos broke out among the skarakh. Scores of them leapt from their chariots and began to swing wildly at unseen foes, only to be trampled by their fellows.
“Cease!” Okael’s bellow lashed the air like a burning whip. Immediately, the skarakh halted their charge, and drew into orderly columns.
Sarthea raised her hand, and her companions likewise ceased their assault. Iscaragraithe’s wings beat in a steady rhythm, holding them in place.
Okael shot forward on streams of flame. He came to within a dracken’s length of their position, and hovered there, fire licking down toward the sand.
“I heard whispers that you had come to Arbor Mundi, Yonalea,” said Okael. “Or should I call you Sarthea, now?”
“I care not what you call me, Infernal One,” said Sarthea. “You murdered my friend, and I have come to claim recompense. The price will be your life on this world and the next. And the one after that.”
Okael snorted, and a puff of smoke billowed from his nostrils. “It was a fun game we played, Murgle and I. Sadly, in the end, he went out like a little bitch. As for you, I will enjoy incinerating another of your mouthlets, but this is neither the time nor place for our contest. Here, you are but a mewling babe. It will be no challenge at all.”
“Tell that to your skarakh fodder we just slaughtered by the hundreds,” said Sarthea.
Okael eyed the horde disdainfully. “These? These are nothing. A mere distraction.”
He spun in the air, sweeping his arms about like a nilbian dancer.
And that was when Dougan heard it: a distant thrum, like the wingbeats of a flock of very large birds. Birds or…
The drackens flapped across the desert, belching fire from their open maws. Scores of them, approaching from every direction.
“Would you believe the dragons of this world don’t normally breathe fire?” said Okael. “It’s a travesty! It just won’t do. So I’ve been experimenting with a new breed. They’re a lot dumber than their storm dragon forebears—nothing more than animals, really—but they serve my purposes well enough.”
Looking visibly shaken, Sarthea spoke in a strained voice. “If you don’t intend to kill me today, what do you propose?”
“We will meet again when you are ready to put up more than a token resistance,” said Okael. “Nine local years should be enough. A span, they call it. A ridiculous number for a ridiculous world.”
“As you wish,” said Sarthea through gritted teeth. “We will meet on the field of battle nine years hence.”
“I look forward to it,” said Okael.
It was some years later, during one of their extended stays at Sarthea’s palace in the garden city of Ambiellarine. Dougan was reclining in the sun room, when a shadow fell across his face. He opened his eyes to see Sarthea standing at one of the wide windows, looking out across the city.
“Goddess?” he asked.
Sarthea’s eyebrows twitched as she turned to him. She didn’t like him calling her that. Which was why he did it, of course.
“It has been seven years since you joined my inner circle,” she said. “I couldn’t ask for a more loyal friend. But among all of my closest companions, only you have refused my offer to make you my vassal.”
Dougan frowned. She already knew why he had refused. The very idea of being leashed to another person—even one as benevolent as Sarthea—did not sit well with him. There were other reasons, too, that had come to him of late, making him even more steadfast in his refusal.
She raised her hand. “I have no desire to rekindle an old argument. In fact, it may be to our advantage. You have been especially resistant to manipulation.”
Dougan remained silent, as he began to realise where she was going with this. He wanted to hear her say it.
“I fear one of my vassals may be exerting an undue influence over the others.” She sighed. “And over myself. Making us blind to certain things happening under our noses.”
“Anduis,” he said.
Her eyes widened. “You are aware?”
“I suspect,” said Dougan. “Insufficient evidence to make judgement.”
“Well perhaps this might help you come to one. At the moment, I trust your judgement more than my own.”
He frowned, feeling more than a little disturbed to see her profess such self-doubt.
“Someone has been preying on my night maidens,” she continued. “You know who may be behind this. I want you to go with Ragnold and Anduis to the lower quarters. Find the one responsible, and bring him to me.”
“They brains,” he said, smiling at her. “I brawn.”
“We both know that’s not true,” said Sarthea. “But if it helps, let them believe that.”
“Why are we the ones doing this?” grumbled Ragnold as they stepped through the lower gardens. “Could the guards not handle the matter?”
“Goddess says go,” said Dougan. “We go.”
The night maidens ushered them into their quarters, eyeing Dougan warily as he stooped and struggled to fit through their door.
“She’s in there,” said a young drengesse, pointing to one of the bedrooms.
Inside, another drengesse lay motionless on the bed. Foam gathered at the corner of her mouth. A trickle of blood ran from her ears.
“Did you get a look at the one who did this?” asked Ragnold, as he checked her head for signs of injury.
“I…in a manner of speaking,” said the night maiden.
Ragnold looked at her expectantly. “Well what did he look like? Or she?”
“I…I was asleep! In the same room as her. When I woke up, she was like this. But I had a dream…”
“A dream,” said Ragnold.
“The mist demon,” she whispered. “He came into my head. Told me to join with him. I ran.”
Ragnold heaved a sigh. “You brought us here for a dream? This is a brain burst, most like. Sad, but not caused by anyone but fate herself. What do you think, Anduis?”
“Most regrettable,” said Anduis. His voice was steady, but he looked like a skittish animal, ready to bolt at the first opportunity. He wore a hood over his head, and only his chin was visible.
“She’s the second to suffer the same fate in the past three days!” said the night maiden.
“Where’s the other one?” asked Ragnold.
“Dead. She died soon after we found her like this. But there’s something else you need to see. Look!”
She pulled open her friend’s eyelid.
The eye was a very pale shade of grey. Not rolled back in her head, showing all whites. The pupil was still there. Just…paler than normal.
There was only one person Dougan knew with eyes like that, and he was standing in this room. Anduis shifted uncomfortably.
“So she has eyes like his,” said Ragnold, pointing at Anduis. “So what?”
“They weren’t like that before,” said the night maiden. “What do you mean, like…his?”
Dougan reached down and pulled Anduis’s hood back, drawing a curse from the drengar.
The night maiden shrank back, eyes wide with terror. “The mist demon!”
Ragnold barked out a laugh. “What, so you’re saying Anduis is a demon, who stole into your dreams and…” He looked at Anduis. Then he gave another snort. “No. No, that’s absurd.”
“Dreamer,” said Dougan, looking at Anduis. He turned to the night maiden on the bed. “Dreams.”
Anduis bolted for the door. Dougan was faster. He pinned Sarthea’s vassal against the wall.
“Y-you did this!?” Shock and outrage registered plainly on Ragnold’s face as he stared at his old friend.
Friend no more, thought Dougan wryly. Ragnold and Anduis had always been close, but no subtle manipulations were going to make the dwarrow blind to this.
“I take him to goddess,” said Dougan. “She know what to do.”
At the top of the Skyreach Tower, Sarthea was waiting for him. The moment she saw whom he was dragging, she knew. Speaking his judgement aloud was unnecessary.
“Thank you for bringing him to me, Dougan,” she said. “You had best leave. This will be…unpleasant.”
Throwing Anduis at her feet, Dougan strode away. Then, thinking better of it, he turned around, and stood peeking over the lip of the stairs.
After a brief and futile attempt to wiggle out of his fate, Anduis faced a goddess’s justice. Bright tendrils unfolded from Sarthea’s back, snatching up the terrified drengar. Anduis vanished in an instant, pulled from the waking world as if he’d never existed. Then, a few heartbeats later, she too was gone.
Sarthea would be back. It was not the first time Dougan had seen her disappear. But he didn’t think the same could be said of the dreamer, Anduis.
“You disappoint me!” bellowed Okael. He gestured at the charred wreckage washing up on the shore of Sarthea’s island fortress. Hundreds of ships had been set afire by him and his drackens, and now he stood before the last of her defenders, eyeing them disdainfully.
Sarthea had chosen to make her last stand on this remote island in the middle of Grongarg’s northern sea, not because it was a particularly defensible location, but because fewer lives would be lost if they fought here. The ships had been crewed by the bare minimum of sailors, and those sailors had been ordered to leap overboard as soon as the drackens came near.
This little detail appeared to have been lost on Okael, as he nonchalantly blew a hole in the fortress walls, and stepped through. He could have just flown over them. The drackens circled overhead, ready to smother the island in flame at a moment’s notice, but he seemed to want to finish the job by himself.
Standing atop the highest parapet, Dougan waited by Sarthea’s side as Okael rose on streams of fire, and stepped over the brink to meet them. Both of them wore lightforged argnum, and Dougan carried a mirror shield. He didn’t expect it would do much good against the full force of Okael’s flame.
“I seem to be missing something,” said Okael. “Where are all your minions?”
“I prefer not to waste their lives in a pointless gesture of defiance,” said Sarthea.
Okael made a disgusted sound. “After I’m done here, I think I’ll lay waste to Grongarg and Lumium and Ciendil. Perhaps that’ll teach you to take our contest more seriously next time.”
Face hidden behind her visor, Sarthea raised her fists at him. “Let’s just get this over with.”
He raised a reptilian eyebrow. “Really? You expect to take me in a fistfight?”
“Come closer and find out!” she said.
Okael smiled. He spread his clawed hands. Fire rippled across his flesh, and Dougan found himself driven back by a wave of intense heat. He could feel his skin beginning to blister beneath his armour.
Sarthea stood her ground, although the strain was evident from her wilting posture.
Mouth spreading in a wide grin, Okael stepped forward…
…and halted. His grin faltered, and he stared down at the floor. A silvery liquid flowed up his leg, and seeped into his burning flesh. The leg began to turn from blazing red to charcoal-black.
“What…?” gasped Okael. He clutched at his leg—and pulled back his hands, as they too began to blacken. The heat from his body did not lessen. If anything, it became even more intense.
“While you were playing with your dragons, I was out looking for other ways to defeat you,” said Sarthea. “This was a most fascinating discovery. It’s called anti-arlium. But I think from now on I’ll give it a new name: Okael’s Bane.”
“Bitch!” said Okael. Then he began to laugh. “This is what you come up with? This isn’t a fight! I was hoping for a good fight.”
The heat from his body increased yet further. Dougan stepped in front of Sarthea, trying to shield her from the worst of it. She stepped aside, and blew Okael a kiss. “See you in the next world.”
Then she reached for Dougan, and—
He lay on the ground, choking, as bile rise from his stomach and threatened to pour forth.
“Sorry,” said Sarthea, standing naked before him on the sand of a beach. “It’s not a pleasant way for flatlanders to travel.”
Unlike her, Dougan still wore his armour and carried his shield. He didn’t know where they were—only that it wasn’t the island they’d been standing on moments ago.
Across the sea, an immense column of white fire rose up and up and up. Dark clouds rippled outward across the sky.
“Blast,” said Sarthea. “Okael may be gone, but now we have to clean up his mess.”
Saskia came awake slowly, her sense of self returning with some reluctance as she shook off the dream. A stack of Rover Dog’s memories jostled about in her head. And too few of her own.
Again, she was in an unfamiliar locale. She lay before a crackling campfire, under a cold night sky. Rover Dog, Ithanius and Zarie slept close beside her. Ruhildi stood guard nearby, next to Iscaragraithe.
Saskia looked up at the ancient bones, lined with metal and blue arlium, and shivered. It was hard to reconcile these bones with the living creature she’d just witnessed in the dream.
But there were some things that didn’t quite add up. In her earlier vision, Iscaragraithe had apparently died while flying Sarthea and Rover Dog back to what would later be called Fireflower Isle. There, Sarthea had sealed the rift opened up by Okael’s death-throes. But if Iscaragraithe had died on Grongarg, how had Calburn gotten his hands on her bones, back on Ciendil? Had he travelled to Grongarg sometime before or during his conquest of Ciendil? She’d seen nothing to suggest he had.
Well, however it had come to pass, this was the same Iscaragraithe. She was sure of it.
Overhead, several distant branches shone with reflected sunlight. Combined, they were about as bright as a full moon on Earth. Those branches were not the same as the ones seen from Lumium or Ciendil or Grongarg. The scenery was also rather unlike any she’d seen before: lots of jagged rocks and few trees.
Another branch, then. The last she remembered, they’d been soaring up the trunk. And then…?
Feeling a growing sense of dread, she brought up her oracle calendar. It was somewhat of a relief to discover that only a day had passed since that moment, not an entire month. Still, it was another day she couldn’t remember.
“Och bollocks,” muttered Ruhildi. “I have to tell you again…”
“Tell me what?” asked Saskia, approaching her friend with a growing sense of alarm. “What’s happening to me? Why can’t I remember?”
“We don’t ken for certain. ’Tis either your…condition…” Ruhildi looked pointedly at the corruption that had spread across Saskia’s arm and shoulder. “…or your new vassal.” She glanced at Rover Dog’s sleeping form. “Mayhap both.”
So she had made him her vassal. That would explain the flood of dream-memories. It might also explain her own memory problems, if she’d inherited them from him, somehow…
The fact that he’d agreed to become her vassal seemed strange now, in light of his repeated refusal of the same offer from Sarthea. Of course, had he known of the potential to regain lost memories, his decision might have been different back then. And if he had been Sarthea’s vassal, then he would have been susceptible to Anduis’s influence…
Her mind raced with the possibilities; none of them pleasant to contemplate.
Rover Dog’s ears twitched. He stirred, and awoke, and rose to join them.
“I saw everything,” she told him. “Well, not everything, but a lot. Your time with Sarthea. Anduis. Okael. Do you remember any of that?”
Rover Dog looked at her with sad eyes. “I already told you, princess.”
“Yeah, well, it seems I’m the one with memory problems now. Remind me.”
Rover Dog nodded slowly. “So much time has passed. My mind is clear now. I remember all. It is…almost too much.”
Something definitely seemed different about him. For one thing, he was almost using complete sentences, but it was more than that. There was a look sorrow in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. How many friends and lovers and children had he lost over the long years of his life?
“Well that’s…good, I suppose,” she said. “Now, maybe you can tell me where we are, and why we’re here?”
“This is Tarthaxis,” said Ruhildi. “We’re here because…” She looked at Rover Dog. “Mayhap you should tell her. ’Twere your idea to come here.”
Rover Dog nodded at her, and turned back to Saskia. “To fight drackens, we need drackens. This is where we will find them.”
“You intend us to recruit dragons?” said Saskia.
“Storm drackens,” said Rover Dog. “We will need them, princess.”
According to her oracle truth-sense, there was more to it than that. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“The fire drackens have attacked Grongarg, Sashki,” said Ruhildi. “They’ve destroyed Cloudtop, and other queendoms besides. Doggi is right. If we are to have any hope of defeating them, we need drackens of our own.”