Throne of Dragons

CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

“There will be a celebration at the turning of the moon,” Lina said, and Nerra smiled. Her friend seemed always to look for bright things in the life of the island.

“What is there to celebrate here?” Nerra asked, grinding corn with a quern, the heavy stone scraping down upon it as she and Lina walked it around and around. Today, they were working on milling flour to bake with, helping to produce the bread and cakes that their small community needed.

“That we are still here,” Lina said. “That there are still things in life that are joyful.”

It was hard to be sad when Lina was around. It seemed that even the most bestial of those with the dragon sickness brightened up as she passed. Nerra wished that she had the same gift, but every second seemed to fill itself with thoughts of the home she had lost, the family that she would never see. Would Lenore be married now? Would Erin have come back from wherever she had run to?

“Here, let me help you,” Nerra said as Lina started to lift a completed sack from her side. She went over, helping her friend with the weight of it, the two of them taking it toward a pile of similar sacks out in the open air of the village.

They’d only gone a few steps before Lina stopped.

“I don’t feel…”

Something twitched in her face, the lines of the dragon sickness seeming to shift and move across her skin. Nerra stared in horror as her friend’s features seemed to move like water affected by a breeze. Lina cried out, fell to her kneels, collapsed.

Nerra felt as though her heart was being torn out as she watched Lina writhing on the floor, her body seeming to twist out of shape even as she watched. One arm seemed to crack and twist, becoming something else, while her eyes stared up in horror, eerily the same as they had been before.

The attack had come out of nowhere. One moment, the two had been working together in the village, the next, Lina was screaming. She was doubled over in agony now on the floor, hands clutching her belly. A few seconds later, and Nerra was staring down at her newly acquired friend, watching her body tear itself to pieces.

Finally, she fought past her shock enough to cry out, to seek help.

“Kleos!” she called out. “Somebody fetch Kleos!”

She could already see him from the corner of her eye, running toward this, trying to get there in time to help. All the while, though, Lina was screaming, until even her screams broke into something else, something guttural and strange and twisted.

Kleos stood over her, staring down, his face filled with pity. “It… this happens sometimes. The sickness can be held at bay for years, then come upon someone in a rush to try to transform them.”

His words were tinged with sadness, but it didn’t seem like enough to Nerra. He wasn’t doing anything, wasn’t trying to change anything, wasn’t trying to help her.

“Why are you just standing there?” Nerra demanded.

“This is the dragon sickness at work,” Kleos said. “There is nothing that can be done.”

On the ground before Nerra, Lina continued to shift and change, utterly inhuman now.

“She will not survive,” Kleos said. “She has no strength to withstand the change.”

He said that like he was observing an animal in the wild, not looking down over the body of a young woman who had supposedly been there on the island with him for years. It wasn’t that there was no pity there, but there seemed to be something resigned about it, something that merely accepted the inevitability of what was to come.

“No,” Nerra said. “You have to help her. You have to do something.”

It was too late, though. Nerra could see the way that Lina’s flesh was pulling itself apart, see the great tears in it now. For a moment, a rent appeared in her flesh that seemed to show Nerra the inner workings of her body, even the beating of her heart, frantic and fluttering, struggling to keep up.

Then that heart stopped.

“No,” Nerra said, looking away. “No.”

“It is a sad moment for us all,” Kleos said. “But you must remember that—”

“Don’t you dare say anything!” Nerra snapped back at him, pointing one accusing finger. “Don’t you dare! She was my friend, was kind and gentle, and you just stood there watching her die like even comfort was beyond you.”

“I have seen more death than you ever will,” Kleos said. There were tears in his eyes, but they were nothing compared to the ones in Nerra’s. “Do you think if I weep for all of them, it makes it any better? I’ll be here watching over this island long after the dragon sickness claims you!”

Yes, he would. He would be here, and Nerra… She looked back at the body of her friend, but she couldn’t bear to look for long. Not when the dragon sickness had taken her friend from her so brutally, and so utterly.

Nerra had thought she might have years here, thought she might be able to come to terms with it, as Lina seemed to have. Now, she had seen firsthand just how swiftly, and how brutally, the sickness could strike.

She knew what she had to do. Even the death Kleos had warned about the waters bringing was better than this.

***

Nerra walked across the island, the heat bearing down on her. It seemed to grow as she crossed the slopes of the volcano, walking without stopping, knowing that if she stopped, she might lose her nerve to do this.

She had to do this, because the alternative was just sitting and waiting for death. All her life, Nerra had tried to learn about the world, tried to help and heal others. She couldn’t accept a world where death could just snatch at her at any moment.

The way was treacherous beneath her feet. Nerra found her footing giving way every few steps, the rocky slopes of the mountainside uneven, the slope itself steep enough that it was hard to think of the way she was walking as a path.

Yet there was a path, leveled into the slope, only broken here and there by fallen rocks, some larger than Nerra herself. The sight of them made Nerra look up the slope, and it was that which saved her. She saw a tumble of rocks heading down toward her, each large enough to easily kill her if it struck her. She ducked out of the way just in time, watching the boulders roll on past.

She kept going, yet one thing seemed determined to stop her: a pain that started as a dull ache inside her, but seemed to grow with every step. Strangely, it receded when Nerra backed away a pace or two, but grew again when she kept going, almost as if there was something there pushing her back, trying to keep her from her destination.

Nerra didn’t stop though, just gritted her teeth and kept going.

The pain built, and built, so that it felt as though every part of her was pulling in a different direction. The world seemed to swim in front of her eyes, and her body seemed to long for her to stop. Nerra stared at her arms, fully expecting them to be twisted and misshapen, the way Lina’s had been. No, though, this wasn’t the scale sickness killing her; this was a purer kind of pain that had nothing to do with it, and everything to do with whatever force was trying to keep her back.

Nerra fought her way on, step by step, stride by stride. On this side of the volcano, there were live patches of lava, forming pools crossed by basalt spans that looked as though they might fall away at any moment. She kept going past them, crying out with agony now, but not stopping.

She saw it then, round a bend in the track, a structure of black pillars that seemed to have an impossibly green space within, while all around it was empty rock. At the heart of that was a circle of more black stone, from which water bubbled up in a fountain, falling into a pool around it.

With that target in mind, Nerra forced her way forward, eyes on the pool. One step, then another, getting closer to the pillars with each one. Her hand found the black stone there…

Instantly, the pain vanished, leaving Nerra to stumble forward onto the grass around the fountain. She knelt there for a moment, looking around, and that was when she saw the bones. They lay scattered in piles around the fountain, bleached white by the sun but otherwise untouched. They had to be those who had come to the fountain before, the ones who had been so sure they would survive, the ones who had needed its cure so badly.

Nerra could feel the fear of that welling within her. She knew that the waters here might well kill her, could see the evidence all around her. Was she really arrogant enough to believe that she might survive the deadliness of the waters? Wasn’t it better just to turn back, to live out her life…

“No!” Nerra shouted, forcing herself on.

She didn’t dare to stop, instead crawling forward until she pulled herself up to the lip of the fountain, looking down into the waters that sprang up there. They were clear and deep, with no sign of anything within them other than the reflection of Nerra’s features. Nerra gasped as she saw them, and the way the scale mark had crept its way onto her features in the time that she’d been there. She touched a hand to it, imagining all the ways it might change her, all the horrors that it might inflict upon her flesh.

That gave Nerra the courage to do what she hadn’t been sure she would do, even now. She had no wish to end up like Lina, destroyed by her own body, or like one of the bestial things that Kleos put down with his blade. She wanted to be free of this sickness, free to go home. She wanted to see her sisters again.

Nerra dipped her hands into the water. It was warmer than she had thought it would be, although that might just be the effects of the volcano close by, with nothing magical about it at all. What if that was really all it was? A pool poisoned by the volcano’s minerals, with stories linked to it for so long that it still gave hope to the hopeless.

Even then, it would be better than the alternative.

Cupping her hands together, Nerra drank.

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BORN OF DRAGONS

(Age of the Sorcerers—Book Three)

Did you know that I've written multiple series? If you haven't read all my series, click the image below to download a series starter!

Books by Morgan Rice

AGE OF THE SORCERERS

REALM OF DRAGONS (Book #1)

THRONE OF DRAGONS (Book #2)

BORN OF DRAGONS (Book #3)

OLIVER BLUE AND THE SCHOOL FOR SEERS

THE MAGIC FACTORY (Book #1)

THE ORB OF KANDRA (Book #2)

THE OBSIDIANS (Book #3)

THE SCEPTOR OF FIRE (Book #4)

THE INVASION CHRONICLES

TRANSMISSION (Book #1)

ARRIVAL (Book #2)

ASCENT (Book #3)

RETURN (Book #4)

THE WAY OF STEEL

ONLY THE WORTHY (Book #1)

ONLY THE VALIANT (Book #2)

ONLY THE DESTINED (Book #3)

ONLY THE BOLD (Book #4)

A THRONE FOR SISTERS

A THRONE FOR SISTERS (Book #1)

A COURT FOR THIEVES (Book #2)

A SONG FOR ORPHANS (Book #3)

A DIRGE FOR PRINCES (Book #4)

A JEWEL FOR ROYALS (BOOK #5)

A KISS FOR QUEENS (BOOK #6)

A CROWN FOR ASSASSINS (Book #7)

A CLASP FOR HEIRS (Book #8)

OF CROWNS AND GLORY

SLAVE, WARRIOR, QUEEN (Book #1)

ROGUE, PRISONER, PRINCESS (Book #2)

KNIGHT, HEIR, PRINCE (Book #3)

REBEL, PAWN, KING (Book #4)

SOLDIER, BROTHER, SORCERER (Book #5)

HERO, TRAITOR, DAUGHTER (Book #6)

RULER, RIVAL, EXILE (Book #7)

VICTOR, VANQUISHED, SON (Book #8)

KINGS AND SORCERERS

RISE OF THE DRAGONS (Book #1)

RISE OF THE VALIANT (Book #2)

THE WEIGHT OF HONOR (Book #3)

A FORGE OF VALOR (Book #4)

A REALM OF SHADOWS (Book #5)

NIGHT OF THE BOLD (Book #6)

THE SORCERER’S RING

A QUEST OF HEROES (Book #1)

A MARCH OF KINGS (Book #2)

A FATE OF DRAGONS (Book #3)

A CRY OF HONOR (Book #4)

A VOW OF GLORY (Book #5)

A CHARGE OF VALOR (Book #6)

A RITE OF SWORDS (Book #7)

A GRANT OF ARMS (Book #8)

A SKY OF SPELLS (Book #9)

A SEA OF SHIELDS (Book #10)

A REIGN OF STEEL (Book #11)

A LAND OF FIRE (Book #12)

A RULE OF QUEENS (Book #13)

AN OATH OF BROTHERS (Book #14)

A DREAM OF MORTALS (Book #15)

A JOUST OF KNIGHTS (Book #16)

THE GIFT OF BATTLE (Book #17)

THE SURVIVAL TRILOGY

ARENA ONE: SLAVERSUNNERS (Book #1)

ARENA TWO (Book #2)

ARENA THREE (Book #3)

VAMPIRE, FALLEN

BEFORE DAWN (Book #1)

THE VAMPIRE JOURNALS

TURNED (Book #1)

LOVED (Book #2)

BETRAYED (Book #3)

DESTINED (Book #4)

DESIRED (Book #5)

BETROTHED (Book #6)

VOWED (Book #7)

FOUND (Book #8)

RESURRECTED (Book #9)

CRAVED (Book #10)

FATED (Book #11)

OBSESSED (Book #12)

About Morgan Rice

Morgan Rice is the #1 bestselling and USA Today bestselling author of the epic fantasy series THE SORCERER’S RING, comprising seventeen books; of the #1 bestselling series THE VAMPIRE JOURNALS, comprising twelve books; of the #1 bestselling series THE SURVIVAL TRILOGY, a post-apocalyptic thriller comprising three books; of the epic fantasy series KINGS AND SORCERERS, comprising six books; of the epic fantasy series OF CROWNS AND GLORY, comprising eight books; of the epic fantasy series A THRONE FOR SISTERS, comprising eight books; of the new science fiction series THE INVASION CHRONICLES, comprising four books; of the fantasy series OLIVER BLUE AND THE SCHOOL FOR SEERS, comprising four books; of the fantasy series THE WAY OF STEEL, comprising four books; and of the new fantasy series AGE OF THE SORCERERS, comprising two books (and counting). Morgan’s books are available in audio and print editions, and translations are available in over 25 languages.

Morgan loves to hear from you, so please feel free to visit www.morganricebooks.com to join the email list, receive a free book, receive free giveaways, download the free app, get the latest exclusive news, connect on Facebook and Twitter, and stay in touch!