Excerpt: Shadow of the Dragon

For a long time he sat there, alternating watching the patterns cycle with writing down notes, drawing diagrams, and documenting everything from the temperature of the air to the time of night. It took several hours of nothing new to dampen his excitement, and soon he realized that the light between the posts was remaining as a bright blue ball and nothing more. Still he waited, watching, hoping, but the thrill was leaving his bloodstream, and soon he felt the weight of exhaustion land on his shoulders and he knew it was time to return home. He was making his way to his horse, packing away his notes for the second time in as many hours, when he heard a great roar behind him. Instinctively he grabbed the greatsword sheathed in his horse’s tack, spun on his heel, and came face to face with a massive, silvery dragon.
Shock froze him to the spot for more than a few moments. What in hell was a dragon down here in the lowlands? The beasts had been sighted on The Sphere for sure, and he had fought his fair share, but always in mountain caves and amongst the northern peaks. Never had a dragon been sighted here on the Low Plains, where not even the creatures it fed on survived. As he reached back and freed his horse from the tree, Arturis realized that this dragon was nothing like those he had fought before. The mountain dragons of The Dark Plains stood only half as tall as this monstrosity, and normally where colored not unlike the mountains they lived in. He imagined their coloring helped them catch unsuspecting elk or mountain goats that happened upon their dens. Blending in with the walls would make them particularly hard to find. It was one of the reasons that so few people reported seeing dragons; they were there, it was simply a fact that they were incredibly hard to see.

This beast, on the other hand, stood several stories tall. It was massive enough to be able to pick up his horse and swallow it whole, which was why he had shooed the poor creature over the rise. The dragon’s coloring was striking; even in the night its silvery scales seemed to glow in the reflected light from the Portal – a portal it was just now dragging its gigantic tail through. For a moment Arturis imagined what it would be like to ride a dragon of this magnificence, to soar through the clouds at breakneck speed, clutching his arms around a neck the size of a water barrel. He imagined the feel of the wind in his hair, the blood pumping through his veins as they cut through the clouds, arriving above the cursed canopy, to chase the sun as it settled in the West.

It was hard not admire the beauty of the dragon’s elegant movements, the way it swung its head toward him, the way its bodied tensed, the way it lunged – snapping its jaws at him. Instinctively, Arturis rolled out of the way, landing with one knee planted and his bastard sword angled protectively between him and what he realized now was a very angry dragon. It roared a second time, clearly looking for someone to blame for being wrenched out of its homeland. And it had found him.
All thought of fantastic flights through a cloudless sky fell quickly from his mind as the dragon lashed its tail in his direction, collapsing the Portal in the process and sending stones raining down on his head. Now it was his turn to be angry. Not only was the thing trying to eat him, it had also destroyed the Portal, the only one he knew of to have activated like this. Now he wouldn’t be able to step through and see where it went – although, truth be told, if the dragon came from that place, perhaps it was best that he didn’t visit after all. Like it or not, the dragon was here, angry, and looking for blood.
Again the tail whipped around, aiming for his head, and Arturis saw his opening. Leaping up into the air, he landed on the tail as it swept back toward the rubble pile that used to be his Portal, lodging his free hand in between the scales and gripping with his knees. When the tail finished its arc he launched himself again, flipping backward to land between the beast’s hips and safely away from the tail. From there he ran deftly up the spine, the way street urchins might run along the parapets of the rooftops of Dahlbuorn, coming to a stop right between the wings.

Screaming in rage, the dragon tried to pummel him with its wings, beating them against each other in an attempt to bash his skull in. Arturis responded by spinning around and, while gripping the beast’s neck with his knees, swinging his bastard sword at the closest wing with all his might. He severed the wing right at the joint, and the dragon howled in pain. Somersaulting backwards as the dragon bucked and shuddered, Arturis deftly plunged the bastard sword between the vertebra at the base of the dragon’s neck. Suddenly, the monster tossed its head, and him with it, lashing out as the life oozed from the wound at the back of its skull. No amount of writhing could dislodge the sword, however, and as Arturis landed into a roll, the dragon roared one last time, and came crashing down, breathing its last fiery breath. Climbing up its jaw, Arturis retrieved his sword, cleaned it, and jumped back down amongst the wreckage of the Portal. He whistled for his horse, and when the black returned and meekly lowered its head for him to mount, he resheathed his sword and bent to pick up the nearest stone. Now that the Portal was nothing more than a pile of rocks, he might as well take a sample. It might come in handy.

He rode out of the Low Plains without a second look back at the shimmering silver dragon corpse, steam still rising from its nostrils to travel amidst the breezes on the night air.