Ren of Atikala Read online

  SOMEONE WAS DRAGGING ME. THAT was the first thing I realised when I woke up and felt my knees and footclaws scraping along the stone floor. My head felt like it was on fire, pounding and throbbing, my vision returning in a blurry mist.

  Khavi was beside me, dragged as well. He was limp and unmoving and his face was covered in blood. His left arm hung at a strange angle. He had a second elbow; the bone beneath snapped. I knew he had put up a fight.

  The humans dragged us upward, up past the battle site, past the dark curtain between the underworld and the surface, then out into the brilliant light. It stung my eyes, but my head hurt from where Vrax had hit me. That pain was little compared to the thumping in my head. I managed to stand.

  The humans we had fought were waiting for us by the hole in the ground. Their retreat, it seemed, had not been far. I was led into the middle of them. I kept my head down, and I could see my armour and my weapons were missing.

  “Well now,” said a voice I remembered. Pewdt. “Fancy seeing you here again.”

  I looked up, into his eyes, trying to will him to death with my hatred. “I knew you had something to do with these humans.”

  “Of course. Who do you think leads them into the underworld? Who guides them on their raids?”

  “You murdered unhatched eggs,” I spat. “I have nothing to say to you.”

  “Eggs?” Pewdt reached down and touched a pouch at his belt. It bulged with something oval. “Why would I kill that which is valuable to me?”

  Faala’s egg was still alive. I could not, however, let go of my anger. “One egg, then. There’s a circle of the lower planes reserved just for you. You’re going to roast for what you did.”

  “Perhaps,” said Pewdt, his childlike smile unnerving me, “but not today.”

  He said something to the humans who held me. They let me go. I crouched beside Khavi who lay limp in the grass beside me. I gave him a shake. He groaned feebly.

  “Hey,” I whispered, “wake up.” I coaxed him into a sitting position.

  “What the hells happened?”

  “Vrax knows the humans,” I said. “He gave us to them.”

  “I know that much.” Khavi rubbed his face ruefully. “That bastard can really fight. Took me down on his own without trying. The humans just watched.”

  “Tzala will save us,” I said. “She knows we are missing. She’ll come for us.”

  Pewdt’s attention returned to us. “So,” he said, “enjoying your time on the surface, murdering human children?”

  I just glared at him. He was trying to bait us.

  He patted the pouch that contained the egg. “Kobolds don’t count as sentient,” he said. “You speak, but you’re just monsters.”

  “You’re the monster.”

  Pewdt’s face fell. “You’ll change that tune when Contremulus is through with you.”

  The golden helmed human put the horn to her lips and blew. No sound came out. For a moment nothing happened, although Pewdt and the humans clearly expected something to.

  I heard it before I saw it. Beating wings. Huge wings, moving such a volume of air that a cloud of dirt and dust grew in its wake. A mighty creature flew over the treeline, twenty kobolds long and ten high, a sinuous snakelike form with four powerfully muscled legs, held aloft on two gargantuan bat wings. Its scales were an iridescent gold, its whole body seeming to shimmer in the morning light.

  The largest dragon I had ever heard of, with scales just like mine. Male. I could tell from the horns.

  He banked, his wingspan blocking out the sun as he landed, flaring his wings into two giant crescents. The golden light of the dawn broke behind him, highlighting his perfect draconic form with lines of pure gold. Hovering in the air for just a moment, he touched down with astonishing grace, the groan of ground a faint murmur as it took his weight.

  The humans around us slowly knelt, placing one knee on the earth and lowering their heads. Even Pewdt knelt. Khavi and I threw ourselves into the dirt, whimpering and cowering in fear as we were taught to do. The dragon watched us with eyes full of intelligence and cunning, evaluating us, studying us. We were a curiosity brought before genius.

  Then it began to melt. Its perfect draconic form faded, and its body shrank. The dragon moved to stand on his hind legs, his tail retreated into his body, and his maw shrunk into his head; his face reshaped before my eyes, and the dragon became a man, tall and strong and with blonde hair, keeping his wings as he slowly stepped closer and closer towards us until these too—the last vestigial remnants of its dragon form—slipped into his body.

  “Prisoners?” asked the man, in the tongue of the dragons, mild disdain filtering through his voice. “I’m sure you have a good reason for taking them, Jhora.”

  “Apologies, My Lord, there were too many questions we couldn’t find answers to.” The golden helmed woman handed over the pouch to the dragon in the form of a man. I recognised them as my pouch of eggshells. “We needed to know why they were on the surface and what they knew of the falling star.” She looked directly at me, pointing with an armoured glove. “One has golden scales.”

  The dragon-man looked at me then, his golden eyes a perfect mirror of my own, then upended the pouch. He stared, curious, at the egg fragments, then slowly tipped them back into the pouch and hooked it into his belt. “She certainly does. Some distant descendant of mine, no doubt. I rarely consort with their kind, but on occasion I have found some worthy of my blood.”

  Even in the guise of a human his whole body radiated power. There was too much might stored in too small an area. I could see Khavi’s face pressed into the ground, his eyes averted, and I struggled to summon the strength to look at the dragon-man, but I forced my cowardly eyes to remain fixed upon him. Somehow despite the overpowering awe he radiated that threatened to crush me with its sheer power, I found my voice.

  “Are…are you my father?”

  He approached me, and the force of his strength was too much; I stared down at the ground, at the dirt, my muzzle pressed firmly into the dry soil. Fingers, soft and human, lifted my chin and inspected my face. I found myself looking at him once more.

  “Golden scales,” he said. “No more than one generation diluted. She has my eyes, too. I would say it would be an absolutely extraordinary coincidence if she were not directly related to me.”

  My father. My progenitor. The answers to all my questions, less than a foot away from me, talking to me. Filling my ears with the answers I’d spent a lifetime craving.

  “F-Father. I…”

  “How old are you?”

  It was such a simple question, but I was a fool for the time it took me to answer. “Six winters, Father.”

  He seemed to accept that answer. “Then you would be Tzala’s hatchling, laid a month after she came to me. The timing fits, and your colouration is undeniable. Fascinating.”

  Tzala was my mother? The thought hit me like a warhammer to the heart. She had always taken a special interest in me, always treated me better than the rest of her students. She was different than other kobolds. It made perfect sense. A stab of anger cut through my fear; Tzala must have known all along but said nothing. Still, as I looked to this golden dragon in human form, I knew why. The city would never accept me if they had known for sure that I was born of this creature’s blood.

  But for some strange reason I trusted him. His human face was not enraged, nor hateful. He was only curious.

  “Tell me,” he said, “it is strange that you managed to survive. In times where I’ve laid with your kind, the eggs were always inert and lifeless.”

  “Yes, as was mine when it was laid. But when the keepers cast it into the furnace, it was unburned, and was found glowing with an inner light.” I pointed my claw towards the pouch on his belt. “Those are fragments of the shell. The glow of the flame remains to this day.”

  The dragon gave me a long stare, and I lowered my eyes once again.

  “So you mean to tell me you came back from the dead?”
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  “I-I don’t know if I did, all I can tell you is what I know.”

  Another pause, then the dragon spoke again. “What do you know of the shard of the sky that fell near here?”

  I looked to the great hole in the ground, to the walls of the crater that led down into the underworld and the lump of star that had crushed my city flat.

  “The villagers said it fell weeks ago,” I said, “crushing Atikala and the gnome city of Stonehaven above. The stone destroyed them utterly. There were two tremors shaking the earth. One that destroyed Atikala, one later.”

  “The second tremor was probably debris settling.” He considered. “What was the star’s colour?”

  “They say it was the brightest red, Father. Red as blood with a red mist following in its wake. All the mist touched drowned where they stood. I did not see it in the underworld, nor did I know to look.”

  I hoped that my answer would have meaning to him and to my intense relief, it did. “Then it is the red stone,” he said, “as we suspected.”

  He stood, and I buried my face in the dirt once again, but the air above me shifted as his hand lowered itself down. “Stand,” he said, “and come with me, my daughter. We have a lot to discuss.”

  Trembling, unable to keep the wild excitement from surging throughout my entire body, I pushed myself up. He had his soft skinned hand outstretched to me, welcoming me, to offer me assistance back to my feet. Jhora helped Khavi stand.

  “I am Contremulus the Sunscale.”

  I took the hand in mine, standing, my eyes affixed upon him, hope and joy filling every corner of my heart. “I-I am Ren, Father. Ren of Atikala.”

  My father smiled at me with his human mouth. “Ren? Nothing? That cannot be your true name.”

  “Ren is what they call me. I do not know my true name.”

  He considered a moment. “Then that will be a mystery we solve together.” He nodded to the gold helmed Jhora. “Change of plan. This one comes with me to Northaven.”

  “Of course, Master.”

  Contremulus glanced down to Khavi. “Kill the other one instead.”

  The faint scrape of human steel on leather scabbard was the only warning I had, Contremulus’s words coming too suddenly for me to process. My eyes met Khavi's, and in them I could see a sudden realisation. It was painted all over his face as the truth of Contremulus’s final, offhand comment became clear. I stared at my friend, the kobold I had shared almost all my life, that I was to make an egg with.

  Khavi’s head was neatly sliced from his shoulders, bouncing away a short distance, his decapitated body spraying black ichor as it slumped over, lifeless, pouring his lifeblood onto the strange green grass. Spurts of his black blood landed on my feet.

  I couldn’t think. I couldn’t breathe. All I could do was stare down at the lifeless corpse, his eyes dull and empty, his blood pouring out onto the ground.

  When my mind came back, when I realised what my father had done, I roared in rage and denial. I leapt towards the one who had killed Khavi, my size giving me the advantage, but humans were faster than most gave them credit for. My father’s soldiers moved in, grasping hands wide, but they misunderstood my intent. I was not concerned with escape. I bit, and I scratched, and I thrashed around like my body were on fire. I fought the humans with every ounce of me; I wounded many, and in the end, it took three of the strong, skilled humans to hold me down, pinning my arms and legs to the earth. But even such a final defeat would not stop me. I spat and swore and screamed and screamed and screamed.

  At Contremulus’s command the humans used the flats of their blades, the hilts of their weapons and their armoured fists to subdue me, first trying simply to batter me into submission, to use pain to make me stop, but through my rage I could scarcely feel such things. One slammed his boot into my snout, another knocked my knee out of alignment with his gauntleted fist, and a third drove his pommel into my temple, but even these injuries were ignored. I was heedless of pain, of minor contrivances. I shrieked for whatever divine spark was left in the world to rain fire from the sky and burn them all to ashes. With every fibre of my being, I pleaded with the silent dead Gods for revenge and fought as hard as I had ever fought for anything I had ever wanted.

  But wishing for something does not make it true. The humans continued to beat me, pummelling me with their giant fists, slamming them into me over and over, tearing off my scales and battering my eye closed. Yet I continued to struggle. Finally I bit one and took her finger; in return, she swung her mace and shattered my jaw. Spots exploded in my eyes, bright balls of light that faded to a misty grey and whatever shreds were left of my self-preservation cut the link between my mind and my body. I went completely limp, golden blood running from my lips and a dozen wounds. It was with considerable ease thereafter that the human soldiers bound me and carried me away.

  I stared at Khavi’s headless body until it was gone from my sight. With my limbs restrained, my jaw broken, and my will to fight completely drained, all I could do was cry.

  EPILOGUE

  No Mercy for Monsters