The outcast - By Simon Hawke Page 0,2

destroy them, and defilers could accumulate power much faster than any preserver. No ordinary magic-user could ever stand against them. There was only one chance, one being that could hope to match their power—the avangion.

There had never been an avangion on Athas. The sorcerer-kings and their minions had seen to that. They ruthlessly hunted and exterminated any rivals, either defilers or preservers, and the birth of an avangion took far longer than the creation of a dragon, for it entailed only preserver magic. The path of metamorphosis was long and painful, involving selfless dedication and excruciating patience. Yet, after over a thousand years, there was at least a glimmer of hope. An avangion was now in the process of being born. It would take many, many years, and the sorcerer-kings would do their utmost to seek it out and destroy it before the cycle was complete. But if their efforts failed and the avangion took flight, then the dragons would start to tremble in their lairs.

Still, what were the odds? Before the avangion cycle of creation could become complete, it was more than likely that all the remaining sorcerer-kings would fully metamorphose into dragons, and then it would be many against one. The surviving pyreens would gladly dedicate the remainder of their lives to guarding the avangion until its cycle was complete, but no one knew where the solitary wizard who pursued the arduous metamorphosis could be found. Perhaps, thought Lyra, it is better that way. If we cannot find him, then neither can the sorcerer-kings. But that will not stop them from looking.

Lyra was abruptly startled out of her reverie by the sound of an anguished, desperate cry. A child’s cry, she thought, blinking with surprise and glancing around quickly. But that was clearly impossible. A child could not have climbed the Dragon’s Tooth. Perhaps some freak trick of the wind had deceived her… And then she suddenly realized she hadn’t actually heard the cry. It had echoed in her mind. It was psionic cry for help, a tormented, unarticulated scream, almost like the dying wailings of some animal. Yet it had been a child, Lyra was certain of it. A lifetime of devotion to the discipline of psionics meant she could not have been mistaken. Somewhere, a child was in desperate trouble, but for the psionic cry to have been projected as far as the summit of the Dragon’s Tooth meant that it was a child gifted with incredible, inborn psionic powers. She had never encountered anything even remotely like it before, and she could not possibly ignore it.

Spreading her arms out wide, Lyra started to twirl in place, picking up speed as her form blurred and grew less and less distinct until, within seconds, she had taken on the form of an air elemental, a whirling funnel of wind that left the ground and swept down the mountainside, heading for the foothills. Lyra focused on that cry, trying to judge the direction from which it came, and then she heard it once again, much weaker this time, as if it were a sob of resignation. She locked onto it and veered slightly to the west, heading directly for the origin of the psionic cry. As she rapidly closed the distance, she marveled at its strength, even in the weakness of it. She swept over the rock-strewn foothills and headed out into the desert. Could it be possible? What would a child be doing out in the desert at night? Perhaps it was with some caravan that had run into trouble. In the desert, disaster always awaited the next step…

And then she saw it. As she skimmed over the desert, she almost overshot it in her anxiety. There was no caravan. There wasn’t even a solitary wagon, or a party on foot. There was but one child, stretched out motionless in the sand, with what appeared to be a feral tigone cub moving in for the kill. She had found it just in time.

Still whirling, Lyra settled to the ground and moved toward the cub, trying to get between it and the child. Even as it flinched and squinted in the powerful blast of sand she raised, the cub would not move away from the prostrate child. Tigones were psionic cats, using their power to stalk prey such as this, but their natural habitat was in the foothills and on the high slopes of the Ringing Mountains. This was the first time Lyra had ever seen one venture