Douglas Niles - The Puppet King

Aeren wanted nothing more than to hide, to wait inside his lair and hope that the awful storm would pass. But somehow now, confronted by Toxyria’s strength and determination, he couldn’t allow himself to cower away from the world. The pain of his burns was a chorus of agony, seeming to penetrate everywhere through his body. Fear numbed, almost paralyzed him, but he would force himself to be strong for her.

“This is a good plan,” Aeren agreed. “But be careful. Now that I have found you, I should grieve to lose you.”

She blinked, leather lids drooping over her slitted eyes in a touching gesture of affection. “I will be careful—and you do the same, won’t you?”

Aeren nodded and gently nuzzled the female’s long snout. Finally the two dragons took to the air, soaring over the forests of Qualinesti. Toxyria disappeared, following the coastline south, and Aeren flew in the opposite direction. His goal was specific: He had seen the blue dragons rising from an encampment to the north, and now he went to seek them. Though they had not been in the sky recently, they could certainly have been waiting, hiding on the ground. Distrustful and admittedly afraid of his kin-dragons, he had not been bold enough to check as far as their lair.

Now, for Toxy, he would.

All the while the sun stood high in the sky, red and implacable, shining downward with radiation of powerful, unforgiving heat. The vault of the heavens was an expanse of deathlike pallor, white, hot, and dead. The pain in Aeren’s burned limbs soon returned, but he ignored the discomfort, emboldened by the knowledge that Toxy, who had been hurt even worse than he, had somehow found the courage to fly forth.

At times the green dragon bellowed aloud, braying the distress call of a chromatic dragon, a cry that should have brought any of his kin-dragons in earshot flying to the rescue. But he saw no sign of scale nor wing, nothing to disturb the relentless sameness of the forest. In the distance, plumes of smoke rose from the woodland and seemed to promise that elsewhere, too, there were attackers of chaos and fire wreaking their destruction upon the helpless world. Once, far away, he saw a conical mountain, spires of jagged rock rising from the steep slopes, while a curious swath of darkness seemed to seethe and writhe around its base. The place had an eerie sense of menace, and he circled wide, giving it a broad berth as he continued his search.

He found several camps of the blue dragons, but these were abandoned and—judging from the dried droppings the green dragon inspected—looked to have been vacated several days earlier. Of the human knights who had brought these dragons here, there was no sign, and Aeren concluded that the dragons and their riders had all departed in response to some command from their distant and unknown masters. They had gone, leaving this part of the world to the mercies of the Chaos storm. It seemed obvious that if this forest was to survive, Aeren himself would have to play a large role in protecting it.

The green dragon calculated that he searched for many hours, even for more than a day, but always the sun remained immobile, fixed and glaring as it scorched him, scalded the poor forest even as it seared the wounded flesh on the green dragon’s back, neck, and shoulders. Sometimes Aerensianic wondered if the fires he saw in the distance were caused merely by the dryness of the woods, the helpless tinder yielding to conflagration upon the first spark. But he readily recalled the unnatural horror inspired by the blazing, spark-trailing dragons, and in his heart, he knew this was not the case, knew that the forces that had attacked Toxy and himself were striking everywhere upon the world.

Finally he circled back, winging southward again, flying toward the rendezvous at the oceanside lair. His course again took him within sight of the same conical peak he had seen earlier, and once more he noticed the broad swath of unnatural darkness. Biting back his fear, Aeren cast his spell of invisibility over himself and resolved to investigate the strange phenomenon.

Unseen by anyone on the ground, he soared close to the jagged bluff and noticed that the sides of the mountain were teeming with elves. Still cloaked by concealing magic, he winged through a wide circle, looking around. He noticed griffons flying through the air, circling over the summit... and among those fliers, he was startled to see a creature of silver-feathered wings, a griffon unlike any other in the world.

More frightening, and unnatural in the same bizarre manner as the dragons of fire, he saw that the shadows at the base of the hill were thick and alive, seething with a motion like angry waves. Aeren’s blood chilled at the sight of them, and he knew that these were beings of Chaos, every bit as deadly and unnatural as the burning serpents. The dark shapes swarmed around the hill, thick in the woods, projecting an unmistakable aura of chill and death.

And like the fire dragons, they seemed to indicate nothing so much as the very end of the world.

Finally Aerensianic glided southward, following the coastline back to the lair he had found in the sea cave. In places, he passed forests that had been decimated by fires, and then he would fly beside long swaths of still pristine woodlands. So far as he could tell, he was the only dragon in this part of Krynn.

Eventually he recognized the spit of land just north of his cave, and he dived, anxious to return to the lair, hoping that Toxyria would be here as well. He came to rest on the rocks of the shoreline and ducked his head into the cavern.

“Toxy?” he asked with a hopeful snort.

Only then did he catch a whiff of the sulfurous taint of soot and smoke, unnatural evidence of flame in this moist environment. With a reflexive leap, he sprang into the air, barely avoiding the gout of fire that exploded outward from his lair. Straining his huge wings, the green dragon rose, desperately gaining altitude, pulling away from the ambush that had been laid for him.

He banked and flew along the coastline for a few strokes, then caught an updraft and rose higher, away from the surf and beyond the crest of the coastal bluff. His mind was torn by fear, anguished by one question: Had Toxyria returned and been slain in the lair by the hateful wyrms of fire?

He looked below, seeing that no fewer than three fire dragons had emerged from the cavern. Trailing sparks and smoke, they were flapping after him in determined pursuit. If she had been in the cave, she was certainly dead.

Rage clouded his senses, driving him into a battle fury as he tried to imagine the fate of the female that, he had hoped, would someday become his mate. His own forlorn flight and fruitless search only aggravated his bitterness. If they had killed her, he vowed that he would not allow them to survive.

The fire dragons swept upward from the cave, and with a bellow of rage, Aerensianic turned about and dived toward his fiery pursuers. He roared, a wave of sound that echoed off the cliff and thrummed through the air. Jaws gaping, he spewed his breath of green gas at the first of his pursuers.

The first burning serpent shriveled and steamed, then tumbled from the sky. The next wyrms came after him, and once again Aeren flew into a conflagration of hellish heat. His claws ripped at fiery skin as he felt the membranes of his wings curl and tear from the onslaught.

And then there was more gas around him, and the last two fire dragons were plunging toward the ground. He felt a blast of cold against his wings and actually relished the chill as it soothed the pain of his burns. He saw white dragons diving past, breathing their icy breath to douse the last of the fire dragons. The lifeless bodies of the Chaos wyrms plunged, sizzling, into the sea, and the dragons of ice and poison soared side by side over the western cliffs of the Qualinesti shore. Aeren banked, ignoring the pain that shrieked through his torn and scalded wings. Proudly he nodded his thanks to these kin-dragons, ice-breathing cousins who dwelled on the vast glacial reaches to the south.