Chapter 1
For ten years, Zaron couldn’t remember what had brought him to Falgard. He knew it was the result of some violence or tragedy; why else would a human boy arrive at the gates of this secluded dwarven stronghold hiding alone in the back of a horse-drawn cart? Gravin had told him what it was like on the day of his arrival: his face and clothes caked with dried blood, the exhausted horse collapsing in its death throes once the cart was inside the city gate, the hundreds of dwarves gathering around this strange curiosity that had come into their midst.
Zaron’s first memories were of two weeks later—at least that’s what Gravin had told him. He remembered the cool, slightly damp air of an infirmary room deep inside a mountain, with polished stone walls and a polished stone ceiling, and he remembered seeing Gravin perched on a low stool and watching him intently. “Welcome back,” he had said. “Welcome home.”
For the first few years, Zaron tried to remember, tried to part the dark wall of shadows that locked away the memories of his time before Falgard. His attempts were consistently fruitless, like a fly crashing hopelessly into a darkened pane of glass in search of the fresh air and freedom on the other side.
So after a time he stopped. On the fifth anniversary of his arrival in Falgard, he vowed that he would not look back anymore, not to the past or to the perpetual mysteries it held. He would live his life in the moment, one day at a time, accepting his adopted dwarven home as his own. He left Gravin’s rock-hewn abode and moved in with a foster family that farmed the land in the valley behind the city. He worked the fields with his foster brothers and father, and, when he was old enough by dwarven reckoning, he joined the Academy to be trained as a soldier of Falgard.
But then, a month ago, something had changed. He had dreamt of a cottage and a rutted dirt road and a couple and fire. The shapes were vague and indistinct, but somehow he was certain they were his home—his birth home. He felt a reemergence of his old desperate desire to know more, to recover what he had lost, to know of his roots.
Every night the dream repeated itself, but he could draw no closer to the house or the people. The shapes remained maddeningly vague and he was but a distant observer, like a sentry watching a battle from a hilltop, powerless to affect the outcome. Twice he had felt an inexplicable summons to go to Crystal Lake behind Falgard, and he had gone. Each time he had seen shapes rise out of the morning mists on the surface of the water—two figures, the same two as in his dream, but they were no more distinct in the mists than they were in his mind.
Yet every night as he lay down on his cot at the Academy or on his pallet at home, he vowed to peer closer at the mysterious shapes that he knew would greet him once he closed his eyes. If he could draw just a little nearer, see just one more detail…
Tonight he was at the Academy. The chill mountain spring had grudgingly yielded to the uncertain warmth of early summer, meaning that the Academy’s regular training season had nearly concluded. It was the final week of regular training, and then he and the other third-year recruits would face a week of graduation competitions and challenges, punctuated by the Climb up the unforgiving slopes of Mount Kragspir.
Dorag, his foster brother, peppered the air with rhythmic snoring that made it sound as though the race had already begun, the feet of hundreds of runners striking the earth in a discordant symphony. His heart raced in time with the imagined paces, and beads of sweat appeared on his forehead.
Zaron rolled over on his cot and fidgeted with his coverlet. He needed to relax, needed to calm down so that he could get to sleep. They were waiting for him.
He forced himself to close his eyes and to draw deep, even breaths. He focused on his heart, willing the muscle to relax. At first his body resisted, and adrenaline kept him primed and alert. But after fifteen minutes his heart rate eased back to normal. After another fifteen minutes he was asleep. And then they came.
***
He stood to the side of the rutted dirt road, watching the cottage across the road like a neighbor spying through a window. The cottage was small—wattle and daub walls, fresh thatching on the roof, smoke trailing lazily from a hole in the center. He had seen those details before. He tried to focus on the house, to study it. There were bursts of color to the side—wildflowers, perhaps? He couldn’t tell for sure. He tried to walk closer to the scene, but his feet would not move.
Then two shapes appeared suddenly, in front of the cottage. They moved rapidly, as if alarmed. His pulse quickened. He squinted at the shapes, but they were as indistinct as ever, mere hazy outlines that looked like a man and a woman seen from a great distance.
He tried to shout to them, but of course no sound came.
Then a flickering glow appeared atop the cottage and began to spread. Fire. He knew it was fire, even though he couldn’t resolve the individual flames. As the fire spread, the shapes all at once began to shimmer away into a single blurry jumble, and a crushing disappointment crashed over him. This was how it always ended, and he could do nothing to stop it.
Stay! he shouted in his mind. You must stay!
For a moment everything stopped, then suddenly the shapes resolved again into faint man-woman outlines and the burning cottage.
They were back!
He watched them, transfixed. He had never seen these images before. One shape, the man, raised an arm to point or to beckon, and then he disappeared into the cottage. The woman followed him in.
Why did they go in? What had they seen? He focused his dream-mind as clearly as he could and tried to force his head to swivel, to look up the road from the cottage. At first nothing happened, but then slowly, almost grudgingly, the scene changed and his head turned. There were dozens of shapes coming towards him, soldiers carrying swords and axes and torches. Great tongues of fire leapt into the air behind them from other burning buildings.
The soldiers came down the road towards him, some turning off to the left or right, but a group of four of them coming straight for him. He strained to see them clearly, to resolve the details of their faces. Were these the men who had killed his family?
A surge of anger rushed through him. He clenched his sword hand, but felt no hilt under his fingers. He was unarmed. Still the men came on, and now they were close, not ten yards away.
Suddenly, something like scales fell from his eyes, and the armor of the lead soldier came into abrupt focus. He wore a breastplate of blackened steel, and painted onto the armor in scarlet red was a writhing dragon. The great beast’s wings were spread in flight, its claws poised to strike, and a tongue of flame coursed from its mouth.
His heart fluttered. The image was so lifelike. He had seen pictures of dragons before, from the old histories, but never before one so real, one that seemed ready to fly off of the armor and attack him. His legs trembled and he struggled to catch his breath. His eyes never left the dragon.
Then the dragon moved, and he screamed.
***
“What in Morv’s name?” yelled Dorag, throwing off his blanket.
Zaron’s heart was racing, his breath coming in short gasps. Sweat covered his body.
He blinked rapidly and searched the room. There was no dragon; it was just his dream. But the beast had seemed so real. Even in a dream it had been terrifying.
Dorag had completed his own panicked scan of the room, and his eyes settled on Zaron. “You scared the living giblets out of me. That was you, right?”
Zaron slowly caught his breath.
“The scream?” prompted Dorag.
“Yes—I think…a nightmare.”
“A nightmare?”
“Yes.”
“Well, thank goodness,” said Dorag, heaving a sigh of relief. “I thought Ularth had come to ambush us. Actually, for a moment I thought you were Ularth, the way you were looking around so wild-eyed. I thought I was finished.”
“What? No, no,” said Zaron. “It’s not him. Not yet anyway. The night’s not over.” Stars and a half-moon still flecked the sky outside their small window. “Sorry I woke you.”
“It’s all right. Better you than him.” Dorag collected his blanket from the floor and flopped back down on his cot. “You’d better beat that harlscum this week, you know. In everything. I’m counting on you. We’re all counting on you.”
“I know.”
“If that harlscum finishes first in our class, I think I’ll retch when they hand out the Rolls.”
“I think you’ll retch halfway up Mount Kragspir.”
“Shut your mouth.”
Zaron leaned against the wall. His eyes were heavy, but he couldn’t go back to sleep, not after the dream. He needed to think on what he had seen, and he was afraid of what else he might see if he dreamed again. It had finally been different. He had been able to see more, but it had not been what he had expected to see. He still hadn’t seen his parents’—at least he assumed it was his parents’—faces clearly. There was only that dragon, painted in living red on a blackened breastplate.
He shuddered at the thought of it.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” asked Dorag, muffling a yawn.
“I’m fine.” His voice sounded unconvincing, but he had no intention of sharing with Dorag. The only one he had told about the dream was Gravin, and all that Gravin knew was that it had happened once.
“Are you going back to bed?”
Zaron hesitated. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Taking a walk, eh? Do you want me to come?” Dorag sounded like he was ten seconds from sleep.
“No. I’ll get you in the morning.”
“Okay, good,” said Dorag, and he rolled over to face the wall. In a few seconds, Zaron heard the first snore.
He looked outside again, at the stars and the moon in the clear mountain sky, spread like wildflowers across a vast, dark field. He had about three hours to kill before it was time for their training run. Should he go out to Crystal Lake? The thought appealed to him at first, but he felt no summons, and he didn’t want to have to think up an excuse for the night watchmen at the rear gate. Maybe he would just stay here.
He wrapped his coverlet around his shoulders and listened to the rise and fall of Dorag’s hearty snoring. The noise filled the room and pressed against his thoughts, which were turning over and over with questions. Why was he having these dreams? Why had he seen the dragon tonight? Had these dragon-soldiers killed his family? Why had he remembered nothing for ten years, and now this? Why?
There was only one place he could hope to find an answer.
***
Zaron stood outside the heavy oak door deep inside the mountain, staring at the familiar twisting patterns of the wrought-iron bands across the wood, his hand poised in midair three inches from the door. He had a feeling that the old dwarf would be awake, but if he wasn’t, he didn’t want to wake him. Zaron lowered his hand an inch. He could wait until the morning. Maybe.
He remembered the dragon leaping towards him, wings outspread.
Maybe not. He pounded on the door.
“Come in,” said Gravin. “The door’s open.”
Zaron exhaled in relief. He pushed the door open and slipped into the room.
Gravin sat ensconced in a down-stuffed reading chair, a book lying open across his thighs. He was wearing his favorite green and yellow checkered cloak over his nightshirt, even though all three fireplaces in the living room were burning cheerfully. His long silver beard reached down to his belt like a sagacious necklace, and his incisive brown eyes scanned Zaron intently.
“What’s wrong?” asked the old dwarf.
Even though he had specifically come to ask Gravin’s help, Zaron’s defensiveness still burst out reflexively. “What makes you think—”
“That something’s wrong? Well, it’s the second watch of the night, for one. And you knocked loudly enough to wake the neighbors. I assume this isn’t a social call.” Gravin smiled gently. He closed the book on his lap and set it on a small end table next to the chair. Then he gestured to the chair beside him.
Zaron shuffled over to the chair and sat down slowly. He sank into the feather cushions, and the soft fabric enfolded him like a comforting blanket. The tension in his muscles slackened a little, and he closed his eyes and forced down his mental defensive barriers as well. He had kept the true extent of these dreams secret for a month, but now he needed Gravin’s counsel. “I’m sorry. Sorry to trouble you so late at night. You’re right, of course. There is something.”
“Yes?”
“Do you remember that dream I told you about? The one that I thought might be of home?”
“Yes, I remember. You thought you saw your family.”
“Well, I’ve had it again.”
“I see. What was in the dream this time?”
Zaron realized he was holding his breath. Here we go. “Actually, I’ve had it every night for the last month.”
Gravin’s brow furrowed deeply at this, and he leaned forward in his chair, wrinkled hands tightly grasping his knees. “Every night?”
“Yes,” said Zaron.
“By Morv,” Gravin whispered. He sounded surprised, and Gravin was never surprised. “Do you remember when it first started?”
“Well, I don’t remember the exact night. It was sometime during the week of the archery exam, I think.”
“Was there anything in particular that had happened to you to trigger it?”
“I don’t remember anything.”
“Were you talking about your home? Or thinking about how you came to Falgard? Thinking about your future after the Academy? Anything out of the ordinary?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Are you sure? Think carefully.”
Zaron wracked his brain for any clues that might explain the onset of his dreams. He came up empty. “No, I really don’t remember anything. I just went to sleep one night and it happened, like the images were just placed inside my head.”
“Or like your mind broke through a barrier that had been sheltering you from these images,” said Gravin, and he sank back into his chair. “It seems that your mind is trying its utmost to recall events that you had, until recently, blocked out. That would explain the repetition. And I also recall you saying that the dream was blurry, that you couldn’t resolve things clearly.”
“Well—”
Gravin narrowed his eyes.
Zaron hesitated a moment, then he pressed on. “Tonight I saw something different. I saw it clearly.”
“What did you see?”
“There were soldiers attacking the village, lighting everything on fire. I think that must be what happened before I came here. It makes sense, it fits with what we know.”
“Yes,” said Gravin cautiously, “it does.”
“And there was something else…”
“Yes?”
“I saw a dragon.”
Gravin choked on his saliva and started coughing violently. “You saw what?” he gasped between the spasms.
Zaron quickly tried to explain. “It wasn’t real. Well, it was, in a way, but it wasn’t life-sized or flying around. It was painted on the armor. On the soldier’s armor. It was colored bright red, like fresh blood. It was a standard of some kind, at least that’s what it looked like. But then, right before I woke up, it moved.”
Gravin’s coughing slowly subsided, and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. There were wet streaks along the edge of his nose where tears had squeezed out and slithered down his face. “The dragon on the armor moved?”
“Yes. I wouldn’t normally think anything of it. I mean, it was a dream, right?” Zaron laughed nervously. “But it seemed so real. Everything about the soldiers and the dragon I saw clearly, just as clearly as I see you now. And it didn’t feel like a dream. It felt more like…well, like a memory.”
“From the way you describe it, it certainly sounds like one.”
Zaron paused again. He was drawing nearer to the heart of the matter, to one of the questions that he hoped Gravin could help him to answer. “Gravin, if this was really a memory, then…then how did that dragon move?”
Now it was Gravin’s turn to be silent. He pursed his lips and wrinkled his brow and turned away to stare at the far wall of the room.
Zaron watched him and waited. He had his own idea that had crept its way into the periphery of his mind, but it seemed outlandish.
Gravin rose to his feet and began pacing back and forth across the face of the eastern fireplace, his green and yellow checkered cloak dragging behind him along the stone floor. At last he stopped and turned to face Zaron. “There is an explanation, one which you, no doubt, have already thought of yourself.”
Zaron craned forward.
“Magic.”
The word hung in the air like an imprecation.
Zaron’s mind reeled at the thought, yet Gravin was right. It was exactly the thought that had been forming in his own mind. Magic. It sounded crazy. After the fall of the dark wizard Magalandar a hundred years ago, the use of magic had been banned forever, on pain of death. The soulstones that gave the wizards and sorceresses their power were gathered together and destroyed. Magic was banished from Mirynthir, never to return.
It couldn’t be magic. How could it be?
“Perhaps it was just a dream,” said Zaron, the words spilling out faster than water overflowing a cup. “Just my imagination. I’ve dreamt stranger things before. I’ve dreamt I could fly. I’ve dreamt of being killed.”
“Yes, perhaps,” said Gravin. “Perhaps it was just a dream.” He stroked the front of his beard pensively and resumed pacing. “We cannot tell for certain.”
“But it can’t be magic,” argued Zaron. “That makes no sense. There hasn’t been magic for almost a hundred years, since the end of the Purge. It has to be a dream. Right?”
Gravin shook his head as if to clear it. “Yes, you are right, of course. It is by far the more logical explanation. If a fire begins in a forest, which is more likely—that a dragon set the trees alight or that a woodsman was careless with a campfire?”
“Or if a boy dreams of a living painting, which is more likely—that a magical painting really exists or that an overactive imagination full of fairy tales and legends conjured some strange vision in a dream?”
Gravin smiled at him and walked over to the chair where Zaron sat. “Don’t be too hard on yourself. I think that your mind is just trying to fill in those empty spaces from long ago. You must tell me if you have this dream again, or if you see something more. Until then, put your mind at ease.”
“Right,” said Zaron. “I’ll let you know.” And he knew that he would. Gone were the days of keeping these dreams to himself.
The conversation with Gravin had helped to relax him, both mind and body, but now a dull throbbing began at his temples. Probably a headache from the lack of sleep. He should leave, he knew, to let Gravin get to bed. He rubbed his forehead, and then started to rise.
Gravin, however, had noticed the gesture. “Headache, Zaron?”
“Yes. It’s been a while since I slept well.”
“Sit down. Let me make you some tea.”
“Are you sure? I don’t want to keep you from sleep.”
Gravin smiled again. “Do I look like I’m sleeping? Sit down.”
Zaron sat down again, grateful to return for a few more minutes to the gentle embrace of the down-stuffed cushions. The chair was a lot more comfortable than his cot at the Academy.
He heard Gravin moving about in the kitchen—shuffling feet, a clattering pot, water gurgling out of a barrel. Five minutes later, Gravin returned to the living room with two steaming mugs and a pair of homemade biscuits on a tray. “The biscuits are a day old,” he said apologetically.
“Thank you, Gravin.”
The tea soothed his headache, and with the headache gone and his mind now at ease, drowsiness began to overtake him. He started to rise a second time, but Gravin stopped him again.
“Rest here. I’ll wake you in the morning.”
“But I need to be up early,” Zaron protested sleepily. “I’m going on a training run.”
“I know. Dorag told me yesterday afternoon. Don’t worry, I’ll wake you.”
Zaron mumbled an affirmative, and then he slipped into a peaceful, relaxing sleep. And for once, the dreams did not come.
###
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