Page 236 of Dragon Champion (Age of Fire 1)

“You were the cause of this, they tell me,” the Wyrmmaster said as AuRon landed. Natasatch circled once more overhead, then dropped down beside him.

“I wasn’t the cause of it. I’m the end of it.”

The Wyrmmaster looked as though some cavern inside him had collapsed. His hair streamed in the wind, his thick-featured face even more masklike. He looked at AuRon out of the corners of his eyes.

“I liked you. I liked you from the first. You were a dragon of rare quality. I spoke for you when others warned me against you. I should have known the elves sent you. What will the payoff from the dwarves be, I wonder?”

“An elf bade me come here. You’re right about that. You’re wrong about everything else, though.”

“They’ll kill your kind, if they can. The elves and the dwarves. One by one, you’ll dwindle and die. An alliance with men against them was your last chance.”

“The things you were raising here weren’t real dragons. It was no solution to the dilemma of dragons. Just another problem. If dragons, with all their gifts, are to die, it’ll be the fault of dragons. Not their assassins,” AuRon said.

“When you’re older, when you have eggs of your own, you may think differently. One of the follies of youth is the belief that you shape events. It’s the other way around, and always has been. Now you, AuRon the all-knowing, AuRon the all-powerful, AuRon the ambitious, comes to close the book of my life. A creature as strong as you completes the victory by killing a wobbly old man in his chair.”

“I had hoped—”

“Well, I won’t let you,” the Wyrmmaster said. He pulled a dagger from between his legs, one of the wide-bladed kind used by the Dragonguard. He plunged it into his stomach and snapped off the hilt with a cry. The Wyrmmaster let out sort of a strangled rattle. His body convulsed in the chair, leaving a pair of open eyes sightless to the sun.

Natasatch sniffed at him. “Men are such fools.”

“He was a great man. He just poured his greatness into the wrong river. Let’s be done with this.”

Natasatch spat out her foua. The carven wooden chair burst into flame along with the corpse. The cinders of both mingled as they rose into an annihilating blue sky. The Isle of Ice belonged to the dragons now.

Epilogue

Big as it was, the Isle of Ice and its archipelago surrounding it could not remain the home of all the dragons there when the Wyrmmaster’s men quit. AuRon and Natasatch stayed, as did the brooding trio of dragonelles and those who had hatchlings to care for.

Some, like Shadowcatch, had their own aspirations and left gladly. The black dragon Shadowcatch of the breeding stock lumbered south, where he played no small part in the wars against the armies of the Men of the Golden Circle and their dragons.

A few of the fighting stock stayed. They could not father clutches of their own, but Epinonia and Alhala each took one as mates, and they raised their hatchlings to breathe their first fire as if they were eggs of a mating. Others lived out their lives on smaller islands of the archipelago, which were rich in both fish and ores dear to the stomachs of dragons.

AuRon and Natasatch took as a home a pleasant cave on a cliff on the Isle of Ice. Natasatch found it, that is. AuRon explored it and pronounced it ideal. It was near enough to the sea so AuRon could count on a successful hunt in the waters of the Inland Ocean, and there were even a few blighters to remind him of his days in NooMoahk’s cave and make improvements to the egg cavern. He would move some of his library there in later years, that which did not go to the Hypatian archivists or the Longhalls of the Golden Dome in Dairuss.

But in their first year together, they cracked stone, as the saying was, and whispered words of love and comfort to each other the night Natasatch laid their first clutch—five eggs on an egg shelf of her own choosing. AuRon showered her in beef, goat, sheep, and fish, until she begged him to stop out of fear that she’d grow too big to ever leave the cavern again.

He thought to them, formed images in his mind as he watched over the eggs. His own parents in the cave, Wistala tasting rainfall, a wolf howling at the moon, a dwarf frying sausages, a berry-smeared girl, a great, gaunt black dragon, a mountaintop signal-flame on their Isle of Ice.

A month later came the first stirrings within.

“Did you hear a tap?” AuRon asked, woken from sleep. Sometimes they spoke; sometimes they used their minds. It made no difference.

“I’ve been listening to them all night, my love,” Natasatch said. She rarely fell fully asleep, and never when AuRon was out hunting. “It’s a regular Blighter Summer Gathering, there’s so much noise.”

“When will they come out?”

“Oh, it won’t be for hours yet. Be calm.”

“I am calm. I just can’t bear waiting. Five is what my parents had. Three males and two females.”

“We should be so blessed.”

“If we are, I’ll need your help,” AuRon said.

“You know you have it. What is in your mind?”

“I want to keep the males apart. Until we can make them learn not to kill each other.”

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