Spear of Destiny by James Baldwin (little bear else holmelund minarik .TXT) 📕

“Ow.” Karalti paced back to me, her tail and wings drooping. “Great. Just as well I can polymorph.”

“Right?” I glanced back at her. “No loot, huh?”

“I got some gross mushrooms?” She winced. “You know, if you ever feel like killing me.”

Sighing, I reached up to squeeze a handful of my hair. It had been a while since I’d had a bath, and the braided mohawk that ran from the top of my skull to the nape of my neck was a frizzled mess. “Come on, Tidbit. Let’s keep on going. We have to find grandma’s house before this fucking place kills us both.”

***

Karalti had to polymorph down to her human form to fit through the small crack in the door. We crept through into the dark, following a dry, hot corridor that wound for half a mile into the mountains before opening up into an airy obsidian hall lined with six dragon-sized biers, where the massive skeletons of Lahati’s Queensguard lay in state. The dragons were surrounded by heaps of treasure, curled as if in sleep. The polished stone around us reflected their images—and ours—up and down to infinity.

“Wow...” Karalti craned her head, looking around. “I think we’re nearly there.”

“I’d say so. And I’m pretty sure I know what’s through that gateway.” I broke into a jog, and my dragon followed at an easy run.

“You know...” Karalti drew up beside me, matching my pace. “Other than the dragons we fought at the Prezyemi Line, I’ve never seen another living dragon before. And they were so warped with Void energy that they hardly count.”

“Now you mention it, yeah.” I thought back, keeping an eye on my stamina bar. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Just sad.” Karalti glanced at the biers as we passed by. “After this... after I gain the Path of Royalty... will we go back to Ilia? To save the others?”

“If we can, Tidbit.” I nodded, brows furrowing. “Believe me. That’s something that’s been on my mind ever since I left the Eyrie.”

I could still remember the first time I laid eyes on the Knight-Commander of the Order, Skyr Arnaud, and his white dragon, Talenth. The rider-dragon pair and a couple other Knights of St. Grigori had rescued me and the Lysian sorceress Rutha from the wreck of a slave ship on its way to Zaunt, the homeland of the Mercurions. Talenth had been breathtaking. Regal. From the moment I saw him, my fate was sealed. I would become a dragon rider, and I ran off to dragon school to do just that.

It took a few days before I sensed something was rotten in the Eyrie. Something was wrong with the Knight-Commander, and also the dragons themselves. My mentor, Skyr Tymos, tried to warn me. But he—like everyone else there other than Arnaud—was physically unable to reveal the dark secret at the heart of the Order. It was Karalti’s mother, straining against the restrictions of the powerful magical geas that bound her and everyone else to silence, who led me to the truth. The dragons in the Eyrie were slaves, blood-bound to the will of the Knight-Commander. And because the dragons were bound to the geas, their riders were, too.

It was only after months of living with a dragon, studying her species, and talking to people like Rutha and Rin that I understood how unnatural and warped the Eyrie really was. The Solonkratsu were a civilized race, with their own social order, mating rituals, family bonds, religion, even architecture. The Order suppressed it all. If Karalti had hatched in the Eyrie, the Knights would have turned her into a flightless broodmare, just like her mother.

That thought had haunted me ever since Karalti and I had Bonded. To save her, I’d had to leave her mother behind, chained deep underground. And the most fucked up thing about it? According to Rin, her suffering—and the geas itself—were non-canonical. The ethical shitstorm in the Eyrie only existed thanks to Archemi’s Number One Control Freak: Michael Pratt, the digital ghost otherwise known as Ororgael. The guy who I was pretty sure now wore Baldr Hyland’s avatar like a skin-suit.

“Soo... What do you think the Heart of Memory recorded?” Karalti asked. “About, you know...?”

I startled back to the present. “Huh? Oh, Baldr. Honestly, I have no idea. We’ll find out once we’re back in Kalla Sahasi.”

“Did he really beat you?”

“I’m pretty sure he beat my ass like a red-headed stepchild. Given he cheated to Level 9000 somehow, I’m not going to give myself too much shit for losing a duel.”

Neither of us even spared a glance at the treasure heaped around the bodies of the dead. We passed them by, heading up the small semi-circle of stairs. There, a pair of huge black doors swung in ahead of us on silent hinges, opening into a familiar chamber.

Chapter 8

All the lava flows in this mountain range emptied into the antechamber of Lahati’s Tomb. A black glass bridge arched over the lake of fire that lay directly ahead of us. As we entered, I looked to my left and saw the small door I’d used to enter this place the first time: a door that led to a small portal room. That portal would warp us back to the main draconic graveyard that lay under Krivan Pass, a vista not that far from Myszno’s capital city, Karhad.

My head jerked back as Karalti gasped, pointing at the billowing, darkly luminous figure who waited for us in the middle of the bridge. “Look!”

Lahati the Chrysanthemum Queen appeared just as she had the last time I’d been here. Her slender, dignified humanoid form towered over the pair of us. She was nearly seven feet tall, made larger by the rippling shadows of her floor-length hair and long gown. They blew out from her like a candle