After glancing behind himself, the warrior returned his attention to the kender in the decimated grove. He couldn’t see them, though he noticed twin wisps of orange smoke twisting upward from the spot where they had stood before.
“Fools,” he whispered again. “They don’t know what they trifle with.”
As more townsfolk gathered excitedly, the level of noise grew. The warrior could hear only some of what they said.
“It was magic that destroyed the tower,” a tired-looking man proclaimed suddenly. “Earthquakes aren’t so selective that they only swallow one building.”
“There were probably sorcerers in the tower,” another interjected. “They experimented with something they shouldn’t have. I saw one running from the place. Dressed all in black, like a piece of coal, he was. He told me to flee.”
“I think it was the gods.” The new speaker was a butcher. He wiped his hands on his bloodied apron and shook his head. “The gods were angry at the sorcerers.”
“The gods are gone, and so’s magic,” an old woman sighed. “And I think neither will ever be back. But I bet what little magic might have been hanging on in that tower caused the quake.”
“Did you see the dragon?” asked a kender who tugged on her skirt.
The old woman said nothing.
A haggard-looking young man answered. “I saw the dragon. It was a great blue one. Never saw anything so big.”
“He could have killed us,” the kender uttered with a hint of awe.
“He should have killed you,” the warrior whispered. “All of you. Chaos wanted you dead.”
The warrior was birthed during the recent war in the Abyss. In the heat of the struggle, Chaos, father of the gods, called a star down from the heavens and demolished it with but an impulse. From the flaming fragments of rock that resulted, the deity shaped the watcher and his evil brethren, worked them into magical, manlike images in much the same way a sculptor would create a series of statues. Chaos breathed life into his creations by tugging memories from the knights who swarmed about him, drawing out their worst nightmares and using them to inspire his daemon warriors, to start their dark hearts beating. The evil constructs fought in Chaos’s defense and by his command.
Most of them died in the battle. The daemon warrior overlooking Palanthas saw most of his brethren perish and fail. He had been spared when the mortals won. And he and a handful of others like him felt their creator pull away from them, abandon them. Without orders, and without Chaos to guide them, the surviving daemon warriors left the Abyss and found their way to Ansalon. They were forced to find a new reason to keep living.
This one was obsessed with revenge. He vowed to make the humans pay for chasing away the all-father. The warrior shifted his shape to a conical, swirling mass and grew foggy claws and a snakelike tail that whipped about. Chaos had gifted his warriors with the ability to alter their bodies, to ride the winds, and to move through water or the earth as effortlessly as the mortals walked upon the ground.
“Everyone should be dead, moldering in their pathetic graves,” the warrior hissed. “They should be food for the worms.”
The daemon warrior knew the people of Palanthas were already starting to rebound from the war. The people were mourning the many heroes who died in the battle against Chaos, crying over the pitiful Knights of Solamnia and Knights of Takhisis who fought side by side. The bodies that had been recovered were buried. Those forever lost beneath the carcasses of the dead dragons and the collapsed caverns of the Abyss were honored with markers and kind words.
No one mourned for Chaos and his lost shapeshifting children. No one mourned except his brethren. The daemon warrior’s piercing red eyes turned toward the expansive Palanthas harbor. A soft breeze sent ripples across the bay. The setting sun coated the water with a fiery orange glow that reminded the creature of smoldering embers, of the bits of the broken star that had birthed it. Some of the docks had been damaged by the backlash of energy from the Abyss, and he could see teams of men laboring to replace them.
“The blue could have destroyed the harbor,” the daemon warrior ranted. “But the blue is too weak and fosters a spark of respect for these ants. Fortunately, I sense another who is not so weak, who has no attachments. She will bring her raging fire to this world. And I will help to kindle it.”
Thousands of miles from Palanthas, a young black dragon stalked deer on the rain-soaked plain of Misty Isle.
He paused in his hunt when the sky grew dark. An enormous red dragon, one larger than any he had seen before, was blotting out the sunset. With scales colored a deep crimson, she hovered in the sky and returned the black’s stare. The dragon’s wings were stretched out to her sides, billowed like the sails of a schooner. The black had to turn his head from side to side just to take in all of her.
Her glistening ivory horns rose tall and curved gently from atop her massive ridged head. Her amber eyes were unblinking orbs that held him mesmerized. Steam curled upward from her cavernous nostrils. The hunt forgotten, the black dragon rose on his hind legs.
She is as large as Takhisis was, perhaps even larger, he thought. Only a god could be so huge. His heart leapt with that thought. Perhaps the red is Takhisis—the Dark Queen of the evil dragons—returned to Krynn to lead her children!
His mind had touched hers once, many months ago, when she was summoning her children for the battle in the Abyss. The black had begged to be chosen to be among those dragons who would fight for their Dark Queen. But Takhisis had passed him over, saying he was too small and would not be able to contribute. The black had not felt her presence since, nor had he seen many other dragons. The black so badly wanted to know about everything that had transpired in the Abyss. Perhaps Takhisis would tell him now.
He breathed a stream of acid into the air in tribute, and the great red glided forward. The luminous rays of the dying sun touched her scales and made them glimmer like flickering flames, made her look as if she were a bonfire brought to life.
He reverently bowed his head as she landed. The ground trembled from her weight, and the black squinted as mud showered all about him, thrown everywhere by the draft from her wings.
A gout of flame arced through the sky above him, fanning out to touch the forests on both sides of the plain. The searing heat of the red’s dragonbreath was intense and painful, and he heard the snap and crackle of the trees around him that had caught fire despite the dampness of the Misty Isle. The black looked up and opened his mouth to speak and saw a red claw stretching out toward him.
The claw struck him hard, sending him flying several yards toward the old forest. The impact knocked the air from his lungs. Dazed, he shook his head to clear his senses and stared at her.
The red dragon’s massive claw raked his side. The talons slashed through his thick dark scales and dug into the softer flesh beneath. Then another claw pinned him to the ground and threatened to pierce his ribs.
“Takhisis, my queen!”
The black dragon’s blood flowed from the wound. He cried in surprise and pain, struggling futilely beneath the weight. Through a haze of tears he looked up, his eyes locking onto hers, pleading with her, questioning.
Her immense head filled his vision as it bore down on him. And the smell of her breath was hot and sulphurous like the fire that was now raging in the forest.
She opened her mouth, and her enormous tongue snaked out to touch the tip of his nose, then retreated to lick her lips.
“No!” the black screamed. “Takhisis would not slay one of her own!” He summoned all his strength and fought to budge the claw that held him to the ground. But the black couldn’t move, the red was too massive.
“Please!” he cried as he gasped for air. “Please!” he called again, surprised to hear such a human word escape his jaws, but desperate to make himself heard.