At first glance, it looked as if the bodies that littered the area around what was once the great house had been dead for a few weeks. Dhamon and his second knelt by the corpse of an elven woman. Both fought to keep from retching. What was left of her tunic had practically melted into her colorless flesh. Her hair was oddly brittle, crumbling like spun glass when they touched it. Her exposed skin was bubbled and grotesquely scarred. Bone showed through in places where the flesh had been eaten away— not by animals or insects. No living creatures of any size could be found in the village remains.
“A dragon,” Dhamon whispered.
“Sir?” His second stepped away from the corpse only to find himself staring at another body equally as ghastly, made worse on closer inspection because it cradled a dead babe to its rotting chest. Gauderic whirled and doubled over, vomited until he was weak. Several minutes later when he regained his composure, he found Dhamon kneeling by an uprooted tree, studying something on the ground.
Dhamon pushed himself to his feet, his hand pressing into the scale on his leg. The scale was tingling faintly. It was a warm sensation he dismissed as nerves. “The wind from the dragon’s wings destroyed the homes and uprooted a few saplings. Its breath slew these people. I’d say it was recent, within two or three days.”
“No large tracks,” a young elf argued. “A dragon would leave tracks. Any creature that size would. I’ve seen dragon tracks! I don’t think there’s any…”
Dhamon padded away from the center of the village, careful not to step on any of the bodies. At the edge of the pines that ringed what was once Windkeep, he looked outward and motioned for the young elf.
“Out here.” Dhamon pointed several yards away to a clearing. He headed toward it, the young elf silently on his heels.
“For the love of all the firstborn,” the elf breathed. He was staring at a depression, a footprint nearly as long as he was tall. The clearing he gaped at, one filled with small trees and bushes, had been flattened by a great weight.
“The dragon stood here,” Dhamon said, then he turned and pointed toward Windkeep. “And he managed to kill all those people.”
“How?”
Dhamon gestured for his men to join him at the edge of the village. The troop of humans and elves stood at attention, their eyes—wide in disbelief—continued to scan the ruins and bodies. “This dragon is fairly small.”
“Small?” he saw Gauderic mouth. The once-brave man had grown pale.
“I would guess from the footprint that he’s less than sixty feet long. Palin was certain we could best him with all of you and the men who were to join us. I agree. He’s far from an overlord, and he’s not a brave dragon, taking on this village from such a distance. Perhaps he fears men. The hunting parties he has been attacking have been small.”
“Sir!” It was one of the human mercenaries. Dhamon recalled the man had an elven wife, and though she was safe in their home in New Ports far to the north and on the other side of the mountains, she had close ties to this land. “If we turn back, the dragon will keep on killing. It’s bad enough that the Green Peril holds this realm. But she…”
“Doesn’t so wantonly slay her subjects. At least not anymore,” Dhamon finished. “Aye. But perhaps this young one is simply beneath the notice of the Green.”
“Or perhaps not,” Gauderic muttered. “Perhaps the Green Peril does not care about her ‘subjects’ and…”
Dhamon cleared his throat. “I say we press on and find this dragon and deal with him.”
A chorus of murmurs from most of the men indicated they weren’t eager to face a dragon without adding to their number. But Dhamon began issuing orders, and they nervously fell in line, some continuing to stare mutely at the bodies. Gauderic was quick to assign his two brothers and his friends the task of digging graves, using the few tools they could salvage. And the following morning, after a simple ceremony to honor the dead had been conducted, the mercenary band continued on.
The Qualinesti Forest, called Beryl’s Forest by those who lived outside it, as well as by some of those who lived within and claimed fealty to the overlord, was truly impressive. Even before the dragon staked a claim to the land in the midst of the terrible Dragon Purge, it was a vast, ancient woods with more than a thousand varieties of trees.
But after the dragon arrived and began altering the land, the forest turned strange and primeval. Now, trees stretched more than a hundred feet toward the sky, their trunks thicker around than a bull elephant. Vines choked with flowers that could handle the coolness of winter wound their way up maple and oak giants and scented the air with an almost oppressively sweet fragrance. There were a few patches where something wasn’t growing. Moss was thick everywhere, however, and spread in all directions in dazzling shades of emerald and blue-green. Ferns as tall as a man overhung streams and shaded dense patches of fist-sized mushrooms. Leaves were green and vibrant. Life was teeming.
The birds were plump and healthy from the abundance of fruit and insects. Gauderic pointed out several types of parrots that would normally be found in tropical lands. Small game thrived and skittered out of the path of the men. Rabbits and other animals had multiplied in staggering numbers. There were a few trails, made by the Qualinesti who traveled from village to village or who hunted along the Windsrun River. But the magic of the forest kept the trails from becoming well worn. Moss and vines grew across them almost as quickly as they were tramped down by booted feet. Each trail Dhamon found looked like it had been newly forged.
Dhamon recalled that Feril had talked about this forest, which she had ventured into with Palin and the dwarf Jasper Fireforge. The Kagonesti considered it intoxicating. He could almost picture her face in the whorls of a great oak. His eyes took on a softness when he thought of her, and his fingers reached up to touch the patch of bark he envisioned as her cheek.
“Sir! I’ve found tracks! Over here!” The excitement was high in the human scout’s voice. He was one of four who had fanned out from the main trail. “Look, they’re difficult to make out, sir, and I almost missed them. But here’s an impression. And here’s part of another one.”
Dhamon shook off his musings, knelt, and traced the impression of a print. He was a skilled tracker, schooled by the Knights of Takhisis when he joined their ranks as a youth, taught more nuances by an aging Solamnic Knight who befriended him and lured him away from the dark order. His time with the Kagonesti Feril had further improved his mastery. Feril, he thought again.
The young man waited for Dhamon to say something.
“Aye, they are dragon tracks,” Dhamon confirmed, his voice even but hesitant. “Hard to tell how old they are.”
“And our course follows these tracks!” The young man beamed. He was saying something else, but Dhamon wasn’t listening. He was studying the flowering ground cover that had been pressed into the earth. The tracks belonged to a larger dragon than the one that apparently destroyed Windkeep, and already the forest was recovering from the weight of the dragon’s tread. Moss had sprung up, small broken branches were mending.
Dhamon felt the scale on his leg tingle uncomfortably. “Nerves,” he whispered. He rose and scanned the brush for more prints, noting that the young tracker was doing the same. The man gestured to the west, toward what looked like a tamped-down patch of fern grass, and the pair started for it. But they stopped in a heartbeat when a strangled cry cut through the air behind them.
Birds shot from the trees in a great cloud of squawking color, and small animals that had been hidden by the undergrowth burst away in a wave. There was a thrashing to the south, larger animals also running, and there was the pounding of boots across the ground—the mercenaries were also fleeing.