Shadow Of The Mountain by D.A. Stone Read Free Book Online Page B

disappear. Back then the world was not divided by invisible lines on a map, great mountain chains, or raging rivers. It was not kings who made the kingdoms, but beasts. They could be found all over the realm, from the Western Isles to the frozen north, all of them different sizes, shape and temperament. No different than the rest of the world, the Danaki had their dragons as well. To be more precise, they had a dragon.
    “They called her Kra-and, which translates loosely to man hunter in the Danakian tongue. She was a different kind of dragon, flightless and without wings. With six legs and scales the color of sand, Kra-and could dive deep beneath the desert and travel at great speeds. Few who saw her lived to tell the tale. Often she could be seen far across the dunes through the shimmering waves of heat, stirring up vast clouds of sand.
    “As man’s population increased, so too did Kra-and’s boldness. Entire settlements of tents and Danaki travelers would disappear, their belongings ripped and scattered across the sand. One day the Shuri gathered a Danaki force, mounting a dangerous expedition to track Kra-and through the desert and see her destroyed. For two years they searched, and the dragon was never found, but they found something else. The expedition found Kra-and’s nest, and within that nest, her eggs. Not believing their luck, the desert men swiftly destroyed all within the cavern, save but one. A dragon’s egg could be of tremendous value to their mystics, so one was taken back to the city in the sand.
    “Furious at the loss of her eggs, Kra-and went on a murderous rampage like never before. Hundreds lost their lives and the small Danaki army was powerless to stop her. The mystics, however, had ideas of their own.
    “For months they examined the egg. They touched it, feeling its power and magic surging through them. Spending so much time with it, the mystics were affected by its magic. They suffered terrible hallucinations in their sleep as Kra-and’s egg poisoned their minds.”
    “How could an egg poison someone?” Tenlon remembered wondering. “It hadn’t even hatched yet.”
    “Dragons were creatures of this realm long before man. Some say they can read minds and control our bodies, if they so choose. The main point of the story is that even before it is hatched, an egg still possesses a dragon. And since it already had a proclivity towards violence from its mother, the egg was set to be a vile creature, yet still it wanted more,” the man paused. “Do you know what proclivity means?”
    “Yes.”
    “Of course you do. So, it wanted more power, more strength. It wanted to be greater than its mother.”
    “What did the egg want?” Tenlon asked.
    “It wanted to fly…”
     
    Tenlon awoke beside Graille, not sure what had happened. He hadn’t been sleeping much on the march and seeing Draxakis fall must have triggered something inside him. He’d passed out from stress and exhaustion. The dream was something from his youth, but already it was slipping away like figures through the fog. Looking around, he saw the rest of his class scattered across the hillside beneath the wide storm cloud that formed earlier in the day. Graille told him Paktorian and the twenty apprentices had never returned.
    It seemed that after the Amorian fleet was routed, there was a lull in the battle. Tenlon couldn’t understand it, for the day was lost.
    The flats whispered the sounds of death in their ears, moaning and screaming beneath a rumbling, lightning-forked sky. Tenlon tried to shut out all the terrible sounds from his mind, but the act was impossible. He just sat there and stared at the ground, his mind buzzing and blank, lost. Hours passed. He knew not how long.
    “Tenlon.” A portly apprentice was tugging at his sleeve.
    He lifted his head up.
    “What is it, Forgan?”
    “Soldiers are looking for you.”
    The boy nodded in the direction of two green-clad warriors walking through the hillside, speaking