Part II The Warrior
WHEN TOL WAS A BOY, his heart gave out.
He remembered the slow agony of it. The thunderous sounds of battle, the nauseating smell of sulfur and smoke and blood.
Lying with the other injured, unable to move as the wound above his knee turned black and putrid from the rushed amputation he’d endured—his leg having been mangled by one of the eldritch beasts that attacked his village.
A phantom impression was left behind by the missing limb.
The healers, wherever they were, if they were still alive at all, would not reach him in time to set the wound properly.
Help did not come for him.
But Death did.
Death, Tol discovered, was a weather-worn woman with features like a hawk.
She swooped down to him and rested a cold hand atop his feeble heart.
Her mouth twisted to whisper something that Tol was too weak to make sense of.
It sounded almost comforting, like the lullabies his mother would sing to him before bed, or the last words of comfort she spoke to him before Death came to claim her, too.
Tol thought of his mother as Death gathered him in her talons. It was easy to accept this too-quick end to his too-short life if it meant being reunited in the afterlife with his mother and father and sisters, his entire family ravaged by war.
The sound of beating wings enveloped him as Death carried him off. They were flying, Tol realized. How nice of Death to offer him such a gift—to give him a taste of this sweet freedom on the way to the heavens that awaited him.
What Tol did not realize was this:
Death was not here to claim his life, nor was she Death at all.
She was a woman indeed, with features more draconic than hawklike, and great golden wings with which to carry him to their destination—not the sunlit heavens above, nor even the dark chasms of hell below, but rather a place in between, where death could be transformed into life, hearts of flesh made into gold, and broken children chiseled and shaped into valiant heroes.
“Do you swear to follow the light, child?” the woman asked him, her voice a beacon cutting through the fog of death. “This oath, once taken, can never be broken.”
At the time, Tol did not understand what such an oath meant. A small sound escaped him, neither consent nor refusal, but enough that the woman brought him to the legendary draconic forge where children like him, bound for death before their time, were made anew.
It was a rare gift, this marvel in alchemy that would turn his heart to gold and make him into something more than a boy.
Here, he would become a draconic, a shifter like the woman herself, able to manifest wings and talons.
This feat of magic and alchemy required the sacred flame of a dragon, a treasure not so willingly relinquished and ever more difficult to come by.
The first step was death.
Tol did not remember the moment his human heart gave out. What he did remember was the scorching heat and searing pain that followed.
It started in his no-longer-beating heart, a pain unlike any he’d ever known that traveled through his body like burning, molten liquid. He screamed as this terrible fire tore through his veins. It burned every inch of him from the inside out, molding him into something different, something bold.
This place was a forge, and he was the lump of metal being melted and molded and beaten and honed into what was to become a powerful, gilded weapon.
Such was how a draconic was born.
Tol was not the only one of his kind. The knights of the Chivalric Fellowship of the Light tried to save as many dying children as they could by gifting them this new life forged by dragon fire.
Together, the children grew up in the legendary halls of this ancient, sacred order, learning to master their new forms—some of them, like Tol, having to relearn the use of their bodies with prosthetics for their severed limbs, for the strange magic of alchemy could not grow back human bones or cure human hurts.
It only turned human hearts into hearts of fiery gold, gave human limbs the ability to sprout wings and grow talons, an echo of the almighty dragons to whom they owed this second life.
While the world was full of beasts—legendary monsters and eldritch horrors born of darkness, whose sole purpose was to sow terror and death—the dragons were divine, believed to be descended from the sun itself.
The draconics were their disciples, trained in the arts of battle and alchemy and all things beastly.
Their one purpose was to serve the land and protect its people from the eldritch beasts who sought to take away all light and warmth and heart.
Tol’s formative years with his draconic masters were thus spent surrounded by children like him who had lost families and limbs and their own human lives to these never-ending eldritch wars. And yet, despite this shared history of theirs, Tol could not help but feel isolated.
He had been a strange boy in his first life, aloof and stubborn. But here he was a true maverick who always challenged the lessons of his draconic masters.
“Why do we slay the monsters instead of trying to mediate with them?” Tol would ask, to which the masters would answer that there was no mediating with the forces of evil.
“How do we know they are evil?” Tol would wonder, and the masters would scoff and say that the monsters were killers, and that taking a life was the definition of evil.
“Are the draconics not evil, too, then, for taking eldritch lives?” Tol would counter, and the masters would explain that their knighthood—this link they had to the dragons—meant they were meting out just punishment.
That their slaying was not only reasonable but holy.
They carried an ember of the divine sun within their hearts, and with it they would chase away the dark stain of these evil beasts.
The older Tol got, the more pointed his questions became.
Some of the masters grew wary of him, seeing this rebellion in him as a challenge to their ways, an endangering of their order.
Others, few though they were, thought it gave him the qualities of a leader.
That he would make a fine general one day.
And though Tol did indeed have skill in battle, his heart lay in the alchemy of it all, not the fighting. He was endlessly fascinated by this transformation he had suffered through—even more so by the strange ability it had ignited in him.
To feel the emotions of others, both eldritch and draconic, human and animal, was entirely unheard of.
Tol could see the truth of their hearts, how their lives were tied together in intricate ways.
He could feel those lives end, something he’d discovered upon slaying his first beast and feeling a part of him die with it.
And, perhaps most curious of all, he could feel her in his mind.
Tol did not know who she was, or whether she was a person at all.
All he knew was that when he took his first scorching breath as a newly born draconic, he did not take it alone.
She was there, having also died and been remade.
He knew that she lay slumbering somewhere in the depths of the earth, and that his heart was an echo of her own.
His pulse beat to the rhythms of her steady breathing.
Her mournful song resounded in the gilded chambers of his heart.
Sometimes, she shared with him glimpses of faraway places she had seen in her time, verdant forests and shimmering seas and snowy peaks so unlike the arid landscape Tol called home. Beautiful, peaceful places that did not know the endless war and death that stained this one.
“You have been touched by the Sun Forger,” declared the woman who had saved Tol from the brink of death, whom he had come to see as a mother, when he confided in her about the existence of this strange bond. “You are light-blessed, my child.”
And because there was weight to her words, to her title of Knight Commander, no one contested her declaration.
Not even Tol. What else could this bond be if not divine?
The godly Forger who had created the dragons from the fire of the sun itself.
He bore her mark on his breastbone, a mark no other draconic could boast of, seared in gold on his tawny skin during his rebirth.
The Sun Forger’s presence in him was the hope Tol clung to when life was too bleak to bear, when his loneliness was so unendurable that he thought he might die from it.
But as the world grew stranger, darker, so too did his connection to the Forger.
Suddenly the impressions he got from her were of decaying forests and uncontrollable floods and deadly avalanches, a dismal understanding that the world as they knew it was dying.
His own corner of the world was bathed in blood and death.
The more monsters the knights slayed, the more monsters appeared.
As if slicing off the head of one beast made it sprout four more, each more lethal than the last.
Tol couldn’t bear their deaths. He felt each one, saw the shining golden threads that bound them all extinguish, and knew in his heart that all this senseless killing was not the answer. Surely there must be another way—a better way. He brought it up to his masters again, but no one would hear him.
The knights’ way was the proper way, he was told; there was no alternative.
The masters’ answer to this growing darkness was to see their own ranks grow, and for this, they required more dragon fire with which to forge new draconics.
But dragons were elusive, choosing to remain hidden in all the faraway, deep places of the world.
And knights could only earn their heart-flame through acts of bravery, something that required time. Time they did not have.
But then, Tol had his bond with the Sun Forger, the source of their holy order. No one knew where she slumbered; rumors and folklore were all they’d had to go on for centuries. But if anyone could find her, persuade her to help their holy cause, it was Tol.
Certain he’d found the solution to all their problems, Tol rushed to the Chasm where he knew the Knight Commander was posted.
The Chasm was many things: a prison for beasts and humans alike, the fighting arena where they were pitted against each other for sport, and below that, the alchemists’ workshop where all draconics were made, a place only those who had mastered in alchemy could enter.
Tol was called to it now by an overwhelming sense of wrongness, his feet guiding him to the site of his rebirth as if of their own volition.
The workshop was aflame. Shouts and screams echoed off the walls, and there was a distinct smell of burning flesh as robed alchemists and armored knights tried to appease a great, raging beast thrashing about the workshop.
No, not a beast—a dragon, eyes wild as it tore through its most loyal servants with fire and teeth and claws.
Tol didn’t understand. There was no reason for a dragon to turn on those who venerated it.
Pain stabbed through him, felt from both the dragon and the draconics.
Their suffering became his own. And just as he began to understand why one had turned against the other, just as a crack formed in the foundation of his world, threatening to bring down everything he knew, a pain like no other erupted inside him.
Tol fell to his good knee, his scream making the earth beneath him tremble.
When Tol was a boy, his heart had given out.
And despite all the unthinkable hurts he’d endured since, all the battle wounds his body had weathered throughout his draconic training, there had never been a worse agony than that first death and the painful remolding of his heart and body that followed.
Until this.
Tol felt that same pain again now, only tenfold. It was the pain of a life ending. A heart ceasing to beat. A sun forever setting, never to rise again.
Death had a certain taste to it, one that was easy to recall even years later. It filled his mouth as he screamed toward the heavens, scorched through his senses as he writhed on the ground, tore through his body like a raging inferno.
Tol thought his alchemized heart had finally given out. That the flame within its golden chambers had been snuffed out like the torches in a great echoing hall blown out on a sudden gust of wind. That he had been deemed unworthy of this second life, and now he would know true death.
But it wasn’t his heart that gave out.
It was hers.
He felt the Forger die, their connection severing in the most horrid of ways.
Tol raged and cried at the sudden emptiness within him.
He wished his heart would stop with hers, because that would be a far better fate than having to endure her absence.
He wanted to dig his own heart out, throw it into the very flames that had forged it, angry that it could feel so much pain.
When the dragon turned its attention to Tol, a dark promise of death in its eyes, Tol held his head high. This time, when he died, it would be for good. He gladly accepted this fate, knowing what he now knew.
He was too full of pain and grief to realize that the very heart he was mourning had started beating again, ever so faintly.
The world could burn for all he cared; he very much intended to burn with it.