Luminous

Book Three: Prologue

With every few emperors, the almighty god Valtor would weave a new story of how dragons came to be. Across his seventy years, the dragon had seen five emperors, and collected three differing myths.

One emperor claimed dragons already inhabited the area when the Nostrans arrived, put there by Valtor as war steeds for his chosen people. His successor mostly agreed, but argued Nostrans arrived first, and dragons were sent down from the sky as Valtor's gift to the Nostrans, to keep the Westerners at bay. The incumbent emperor, who was both the former's son and slayer, ruled that dragons were demons of the underworld. They had spilled over the Edge of the earth in droves, hoping to subjugate the world of mankind, but the Nostrans subdued them, condemning them to spend eternity in servitude.

The dragon received each new origin with the same emotion he saved for the human name he was given—apathy. He measured he had time left for half a dozen more, but he'd heard enough to see a strand uniting all three. Whatever the ultimate deal had been, there had always been a queen—a female dragon—who sealed it with the Nostran emperor of six hundred years ago.

This element fascinated the dragon, for dragons were lone creatures. The notion that a dragon would lead and the rest would follow, like the humans with their kings and emperors, seemed more like humans twisting dragon nature to suit their understanding. And, if the stories had taught him anything, it was what had led their whole kind into this wretched existence, and should not be attempted again.

Still, the dragon was curious, so he sought after the truth. He then learned countless other dragons were also curious, and over the centuries had stolen away, sometimes with their riders in tow, into the Zarel Pass, hoping to find a new home over the Edge of the earth. 

Most never returned, but one that did shared her memories of a tree guarding the gateway to the east. Wide as the channel of the Pass, tall as the walls of solemn rock on its sides, littered with bones of dragons. She didn't know by whom or since when the tree was planted. All she knew was it was gigantic, it withstood her fire, and sang a poisonous song that drove her back.

Her curiosity was doused, but the dragon's only burned hotter. For years, he spent every of his few days of peace prowling the skirt of the Edge, hoping to find a new pass up north, to no avail.

One day, the earth quaked. The temblor shook free centuries of loose debris, unveiling a tiny gap high up the mountain. The dragon leapt into the air, only to find the cave was too narrow for him. Reluctantly, he assumed his hated human form, and for hours he meandered in total darkness, until he came upon a glint of acid-green.

A dragon eye rolled on the coarse stone, caught in a thin ray of silver moonlight from the world beyond the Edge. A crumbling wall of rocks stood between him and freedom. Night had fallen, and he was tired, so the dragon rested his spine against the wall, and pored into the eye for answers for his questions.

This dragon lived four hundred years after the War of Independence. In his eye, he found proof that there was indeed a world beyond the Edge, a land, even, where dragons roamed free. Then, the volcano erupted, and they fled, and fought, and lost, and succumbed to human rule.

This dragon and his pack had stolen a flock of humans and Hybrideans from the human land on the other side of the Edge—Latakia, it was called—because they had been crafting Lattis. They had broken the pact Mirra made with the dragon queen to end the War. So the dragons made them continue their experiments, now for the benefit of dragons. 

However, when the Rota neared completion, the Latakians fled with the knowledge. The dragons pursued, but a Hybridean turned away from the flock, brought the weight of the mountain down onto them. The last the dragon remembered was the pummeling of rocks on his defenseless human form.

When the dragon surfaced from the maelstrom of ancient memories, moonlight had become sunlight, and his strength returned. He dug and heaved and kicked at the mound of boulders. One by one, he uncovered the remains of his forebears, silvery bones forever frozen in their pathetic human disguises, silvery eyeballs glowing green with similar memories of betrayal and death. He toiled until every last rock was cast aside, and the sun blazed from a bright-white mouth of freedom. He leapt into its maw, and emerged to the blackened ruins of a mining village, overtaken by two centuries of nature.

The sun warmed his scaly armor as he pranced from one jagged stone to another down the mountainside, but a dull pain throbbed in his skull, and strength ebbed from his limbs. He knew the sensation—Lattis. Growling and spitting, he clambered back up to the cave, read each and every eye he found, but none belonged to the Hybridean Axel Hild. None could convey to him the way to conquer Lattis. He couldn't even find the Hybridean's skeleton. He must have escaped. 

It had been two hundred years. Hybrideans only lived half as long as dragons. The Hybridean would have been dead, but his eyes remained. And so the dragon's eyes settled on the spires of a castle in the distance, with its red banners flying high in the wind, and his mind honed in on the one name echoing in all the memories, Axel's human accomplice who forged ahead as Axel took his final stand—

Hadrian.