Akiri: Dragonbane Read online

  A KIRI

  DRAGONBANE

  By: Brian D. Anderson & Steven Savile

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First Published Longfire Press, Aug. 2017

  Cover Illustration Gene Mollica Studios

  Copyright © 2017 Brian D. Anderson & Steven Savile

  Books In The Akiri Saga

  Akiri : The Scepter Of Xarbaal

  Akiri: Sands Of Darkness

  Akiri: Dragonbane

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  No table of contents entries found.

  PROLOGUE

  Thunder rumbled, announcing the storm like some fell herald.

  The old man had been out there alone since an hour before sunrise, battered by the icy wind blowing in from the sea. He didn’t move. He stared out over the churning whitecaps, two steps from the edge. The drop was sheer and dizzying. Far below, the sea hurled itself against the jagged rocks, scattering spray and foam high into the air. It was pure; elemental; the clash of one unstoppable force against the stubborn determination of an unmovable landscape. The fine sea mist, caught and carried by a strong updraft, stung his face. It soaked into his beard and burned at his eyes.

  There was nothing to be done other than suffer through it.

  He had arrived far too early, but his quarry was unpredictable – not bound like mortal men by the constraints of time – so, better to arrive days early than risk missing the moment. He was no fool; he knew full well this might be his only chance, and a few days of discomfort was a price worth paying.

  Time crawled.

  He lost himself amid the rolling waves. They were endless, building as they surged towards the rocks and then breaking; only to be reborn far off the coastline and to come rolling in again. And always it ended the same way. There was a metaphor for existence in their pointless plight.

  At last, he saw the dark shape forming within the firmament, black against the otherwise endless gray of the clouds. A new sound underscored the thunder. A slow smile spread across the old man’s face; even blind he would have recognized that monstrous call at once. It was the immense roar of a great wyrm. It was a creature of such tremendous power and spectacular beauty it was as though the gods themselves sang a hellish chorus to mark the moment forever.

  He took a deep breath and steeled his mind.

  He was ready.

  This moment, this singular clash, was his destiny. His entire life had been leading to this clifftop. All doubt left him. He had faith. This was just. This was right. He was the only man who could succeed where all before had failed.

  He had stood on this clifftop once before, as a small boy holding his father’s hand. Together they had watched the great beast soar high above, its roar shaking the ground beneath their feet. He had learned what it meant to be afraid that day, though his father had tried to reassure him.

  “He has no interest in the likes of us, boy.” His father knelt to take up a handful of dirt and let it trickle through his fingers. His eyes welled with tears. “We are nothing more than dirt to him.” He raised the last black grains to his lips and blew them away on the wind.

  He had never seen his father weep and never would again. But for the briefest moment of time – those minutes together on the clifftop watching the glorious flight of the ancient wyrm – the old man might have been a loving father. The tragedy of that young boy’s life lay in the fact there was no love in his father’s withered heart for him; only for the magnificent creature that ruled the sky.

  Again and again the dragon swooped below the precipice, skimming across the surface of the water, so close he could make out the shimmering gloss of the black scales on the great beast’s back and the thick veins in its immense wings as they cast their shadow across the whitecaps. He reached out, imagining the feel of those scales beneath his fingertips, imagining his hand running along the length of the massive horns that protruded from its head like a demonic crown. The dragon’s yellow reptilian eyes shone in the sun like jaundiced jewels, never blinking. Could they pierce his flesh and see all the way into his soul? He might have believed that, if he believed he actually possessed a soul for it to see.

  As his father had promised, it completely ignored their presence. Of course, that could easily have been a memory planted by his dreams and embellished by the years; shadows of a past he dearly wanted to be true. He had been barely six years old. Sixty winters and more had come and gone since that day. But so little had changed. He still felt the same combination of fear and awe in the wyrm’s shadow.

  His father’s last words that day echoed down the ages: “Dragons possess incredible power, my son. Their spirit is unlike that of mortal beings. Take its life…and you take its magic. Take it, and you will have life everlasting. Think on it, boy. Slay the wyrm and you will become as the gods. Isn’t that something?”

  “Will I see it again?” he had asked.

  His father’s tears were gone and his voice was now cold and hard. “That is up to you. If you become the man I think you could, then perhaps. But know this: to do so demands sacrifice. We shall see.”

  To become as the gods. Immortal. Free of the icy grip of death and the ravages of old age. It had been his father’s words more than anything that had driven him always and endlessly to this moment.

  From that day, he saw his father differently. Unlike most boys, he no longer sought approval or love. No. His father had become a conduit to the knowledge he needed if he were ever to slay the wyrm.

  Two years later, he took his first fiery salamander.

  Found in the marshlands just to the south of his home, they offered little but still demanded caution, as they were capable of maiming those foolish enough to get too close. Physical contact was essential for him to draw out the rudimentary magic his father had taught him.

  The salamander twitched beneath his touch. The convulsions intensified until they became violent, and still he whispered the words of the invocation, fascinated by this death playing out before him. In the last throes of life, the salamander surrendered its spirit and power. Elation surged through him. It was like nothing he could have imagined. In an instant, he understood its most primal urges – more than merely its desire to cling to life. As it saturated into his being, he could feel himself grow stronger. It was a small change – a tiny increment. But he would never forget that moment.

  As his young eyes gazed upon the dead body of his victim, he understood what his father had meant by sacrifice.

  It would take a will of iron and a heart of stone to complete the journey, but the first step was taken.

  He would master the forbidden art.

  The power of the necromancer would be his.

  But that thrill faded. Even before re
aching adolescence, he had grown weary of robbing small creatures of both life and the spark of magic. He wanted more.

  More than his father would allow; but that didn’t stop him. By the time he turned fifteen, he saw genuine fear in his father’s eyes. Their lessons ceased. There were secrets left, but the old man refused to teach him. He spent his days and long nights delving into the darkest recesses of his father’s Arcanum, learning, always learning. His hunger for knowledge was unprecedented; his desire for the power that knowledge promised unbridled. He sought out ever more powerful creatures, leaving home for weeks at a time to hunt them down. And with each life he took, his strength increased.

  But it was never enough.

  That hunger gnawed at him. He knew it would consume him one day because no matter how much he fed it, the mindless beasts he absorbed simply lacked the power to sate it.

  Until the day he finally confronted true power and its infinite price.

  He returned from the hunt high on the life force flowing through his veins. That high would fade soon enough, he knew, but for now it was thrilling. Little did he know what he was walking back into. Nobles, cowards one and all, had discovered that his father practiced the dark arts of necromancy and ambushed him on the road. Mortally wounded, his father had managed to escape, but there was no denying what would happen next. It was nature at its most fascinating.

  He looked down at the ravaged body of the dying man helpless in his bed, gripped by the fever sweats. He should have felt something. Sorrow? Grief? But staring down at his father, the closest he came to recognizable emotion was rage – not at the men who had done this to him, not because he had no choice but to flee the place he called home, but because his father held secrets that he had refused to pass on. And now it was too late.

  “I can feel the need in you, son,” his father said, his last thoughts coming out of his mouth in brittle words. Soon he would be silent forever. “It has been there ever since that day on the cliff. It is my fault. I did this to you. I should have never taken you there – never shown you…” He coughed blood onto his chest, flecks of red spittle raw on his chin. He didn’t wipe them away. The grip of death grew tighter. “I know you hate me, boy, but I have good reason for not feeding the darkness I see within you. It is the eater of worlds. And I cannot allow it to claim you. It is gone. I have taken steps. That ancient knowledge has no place in this world. When I am gone, it will be lost forever.”

  A fury the like of which he had never known blazed through him, molten lead in his veins. He looked at his father with utter contempt. It was in that moment his life was irrevocably altered. He placed his hands over his father’s chest and began whispering the forbidden incantation. The thread that tied the life he sought to the world they shared was frayed to the point of breaking. He had no choice but to draw in all the magic he had accumulated over the years, willing the thread to hold long enough for him to feed, but still it slipped beyond his grasp.

  He would not be denied.

  He drew the dagger from his belt and spread his arms wide. “It is my birthright!”

  His father lacked the will to speak, but the sheer terror in his eyes was unmistakable. He looked down at the old man, savoring his fear. “Beg,” he said, his voice so much more reasonable now that he was in control. “Plead. Implore me to spare you. Find the words, Father. Beg me to spare you this fate, which we both know is so much worse than death.” But the old man didn’t; he said nothing as the dagger sank into his heart, the words of the spell coming in a chill whisper so much more terrifying than rage could ever be.

  Then there was silence.

  He felt the briefest flicker of power – the promise of magic so close, so ready, waiting for him to claim it. It was vastly different than any magic he’d ever tapped. This wasn’t the flood of some relentless force rushing out of the corpse of a wild animal.

  This was a slowly building storm.

  It was gentle in the beginning; almost pleasant, in fact, even as it gradually increased in depth and scope. The thrill of it was tantalizing – irresistible. That first taste could never be enough. He craved more. Always more. He tore his father apart, pulling the dagger free, and as if in response, the torrent of magic and knowledge poured out of him, drawn into the core of his being with such ferocity he dropped heavily to his knees, struggling to contain it.

  Pleasure became pain.

  He clawed at his face.

  He tore at his robes.

  But more than anything, he could not bear the idea of it ending…ever.

  Within the life force mingling with his own, he realized there was something else. Something more. It took him a moment, the silence between heartbeats, to grasp what they were: the memories of his father. They scattered throughout his essence like leaves on a high wind. He caught the moment of horror as the blade ended his life, still burning bright at the forefront of his being; but underscoring it all, every other emotion, was another deeper, darker fear: the all-consuming darkness within his boy and his obsession for the Elder Dragon.

  Time lost all meaning as he fed on his father. It could have been seconds, it might have been days, but finally the pain subsided and calm returned.

  The dead man was a husk. The knowledge was his. Everything his father had known was within him, but it was spread throughout his mind in a shattered mosaic of images and emotions that refused to come together. And the magic… the magic was his.

  And it was so much more potent than he had dared to dream.

  His father had been… special.

  Something touched the back of his hand and distracted him from his musing. Something wet. His father’s blood was dripping from the bed onto the floor. He spread it over his flesh with the tip of his finger. This was the price of power. This was what the old man had meant by power demanding sacrifice.

  He had been a young man then, filled with passion and vigor. The years since had taken their toll. Though his magic was powerful and his abilities unmatched in the mortal realm, his body decayed with each passing year, unable to contain so much death within it unchecked.

  But that would change today.

  He reached inside himself, tapping into the enormous wellspring of death magic that he had gathered to his soul throughout his life. His father was just the first in a long line of human souls who had fed him their dreams and desires, and he now drew on every beast he had absorbed down to the first salamander he had taken as a child. Every last one of his unwilling victims filled him with their life force. A lifetime of death, gathered for a single purpose: to grant him everlasting life.

  He felt the sparks chase across his fingertips. The air began to shimmer and crackle around them. The aura spilled down his arms, surrounding his entire body with a cloak of impure magic. He was ready.

  And that the Elder Dragon was to be found here, in this place, on this day – it was nothing short of destiny.

  He turned his gaze to the tempest above.

  It was there the gods dwelled.

  And soon he would be their equal.

  He turned his attention to the fell beast skimming across the whitecaps. Just as it had the first time, the dragon ignored his presence. He was nothing more than a gnat on the cliff top – insignificant. It did not sense the danger it was in, but it would soon learn the folly of underestimating the threat this particular gnat posed.

  Lightening leapt from his fingertips, splitting the darkening sky as he unleashed his terrible power. It arced beyond the cliff’s edge, and the turbulent swells of the sea rose to meet the shimmering bolts of bluish lightning as though in greeting. The ferocity of the waves intensified. The churning whitecaps pounded against the cliffs again and again and again. The surface of the sea boiled, spewing immense spumes of steaming spray, and still the sheer elemental rage grew, the water becoming a bubbling cauldron of death.

  Even this far apart, the roar of the dragon reverberated through the bones of his chest, the harmonics resonating through the marrow. He grinned viciously.
His heart danced to the tune of the dragon’s roar, surging with excitement and fear.

  He had caught its attention.

  The great beast banked and swept low, across the roiling sea. Its immense body moved with all of the terrible grace of a bird of prey. It rose again, twisting, spiraling, gaining momentum as it came out of each fresh corkscrew, its dizzying ascent fueled by the unfathomable power harnessed within its wings, up and up, banking across the firmament as fresh lightning forked across the heavens followed by the physical battering of thunder, the elements shrieking their rage as the Elder Dragon circled directly overhead.

  The air beneath the dragon sizzled and popped, spitting spiteful little static irritants into its underbelly.

  The dragon grumbled, its anger growing, as it searched out the source of the incessant shocks.

  “I am here!” he cried, his voice torn away by the wind. “Do you see me now? Open your eyes, ancient one, truly see, and know fear. I have come for you.” His words were punctuated by a rapid succession of needle-sharp darts of raw current striking the beast from both above and below.

  The dragon’s huge wings unfurled, the veins in the stretched-taut flesh lit scarlet by a huge bolt of lightning that speared down into the sea, splitting into forty forks and forty more from them. There was nothing natural about the lightning.

  The dragon’s eyes, at long last, fell upon him.

  He felt as though his soul had been set ablaze.

  It was glorious.

  Those timeless eyes peeled away the layers of his essence one by one, seeking to reveal the very core of who he was. He welcomed the invasion; this was a trap in which he would not be caught. He was prepared for everything the beast might hurl at him. He whispered the words of power, erecting an unassailable barrier within his mind that shut the dragon out completely.

  “Come, beast, let us see the nature of true power, shall we, you and I, to the end of time.”

  The dragon glared, and mental barriers or no, he could feel the malice burning off the ancient wyrm as it began a new spiraling descent. It was predictable. That would be its undoing. In its mind it was the predator, not the prey. It saw only an irritant, a pest, and didn’t grasp that the smallest thorn could leave the mightiest beast lame. He watched it come – controlled, measured.