color. His limbs lengthened and changed proportion. Though he remained upright on two legs, it was clear as his torso grew more massive that he’d be more comfortable and more powerful if he balanced his burgeoning weight on his arms as well.
“I offer myself.” Borys shaped his words with sorcery and left them hanging above the insufficient prison. “Help me finish the metamorphosis, and I will keep Rajaat in the Hollow.”
Dregoth roared, but he wasn’t nearly the dragon Borys already was. His outrage was moot and impotent.
“Think of the risks,” Hamanu said, thinking of himself and the metamorphosis that lay before him. He was unaware that he’d spoken aloud.
I have, Borys said in Hamanu’s mind alone. My risks are not so great as yours would be. I will finish the dwarves—the elves and the giants, too—but humanity has nothing to fear. Athas will be our world, a world of humans and champions where Rajaat has no power, no influence.
* * *
“I believed him,” Hamanu said to Windreaver when they had talked and recounted their way through events they both recalled.
Windreaver had been at the white tower the night when Hamanu and the others champions had fledged a dragon, with the Dark Lens’s help.
“Champions always lied,” Windreaver countered flatly. “Then and now.”
In the ancient landscape of his memory, Hamanu recalled Dark Lens sorcery shrouding Borys in a cloud of scintillating mist. The cloud grew and grew until it engulfed the white tower and threatened to engulf the champions as well. Wyan and Sacha had screamed together, then fallen silent. Two small, dark globes had flown out of the mist and vanished in the night. The globes were the traitors’ severed heads, still imbued with immortal life, because Borys hadn’t had been able to kill them outright when he consumed their bodies. Uyness had cheered, then she, too, had screamed.
Borys couldn’t stop with the traitors: he needed every one of them. They’d all underestimated how far Rajaat’s metamorphosis would go, how much life the spell would consume before the dragon quickened. In agony and immortal fear, the champions had torn away from the Dark Lens, saving themselves, but leaving a half-born dragon behind.
For a hundred years Borys had ravaged the heartland, finishing the sorcerous transformation he’d begun beside Rajaat’s tower.
“He was not Rajaat.” Hamanu stated, which was half of the truth. “He wasn’t what I would have been.”
“You can’t be sure,” Windreaver chided.
“I’ve looked inside myself. I’ve seen the Dragon of Urik, old friend. I’m sure. There were no choices, no mistakes.”
Chapter Thirteen
Sunset in the Kreegills: a fireball impaled on a jagged black peak, the western horizon ablaze with sorcery’s lurid colors, and, finally, stars, one by one, crisper and brighter than they were above the dusty plains.
Hamanu held out his hand and gathered a pool of starlight in his palm. He played with the light as a child—or a dancer—might play, weaving luminous silver strands through moving fingers. In his mind, he heard a reed-pipe melody that lulled all his other thoughts, other concerns and memories. Alone and at peace, he forgot who he was, until he heard Windreaver’s voice.
“The world stretches far beyond the heartland. There are lush forests beyond the Ringing Mountains and who-knows-what on the far shores of the Silt Sea. Wonders lie just over that horizon,” the ghostly troll said, as if they were two old merchants in search of new markets.
“Leave Urik to its fate? Without me?”
“You chose Urik as your destiny. But you’re Hamanu; you are your own destiny. You’ve always been. You can choose somewhere, something else.”
Hamanu thought of the leonine giant he’d seen guarding the Black and the Hollow beneath it. “Hamanu is Urik.” He let the starlight dribble off the back of his hand. “If I went somewhere else, I’d leave too much behind. I’d leave myself behind.”
“What of yourself, Hamanu? Borys is dead. The War-Bringer’s prison cannot hold him. If you can believe what he said—if—there’s nothing you can do to save Urik. If he’s lying—as he usually does—then what do the champions of humanity do next? Whose fear is stronger than his greed? Which one of you will become the next great dragon and burn the heartland for an age? There is no other way.”
“There must be. There will be!” Hamanu’s shout echoed off the mountain walls. A cloud of pale steam hovered in the air where his voice had been. “I will find a way for Urik to survive in a world without dragons and without Rajaat.”
Windreaver merged with