The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking - By Lynn Abbey Page 0,18

Rebirth races—humankind’s younger cousins: elves, dwarves, trolls, gnomes, pixies, and all the others except halflings—were cast out. My ancestors were farmers, though, not fighters. Once the army turned the trolls into refugees, my ancestors settled in a Kreegill Mountain valley, east of Yaramuke.

But Deche had never been a troll village. The trolls were mountain dwellers, stone-men—miners and quarriers. Throughout their history, they traded with the other races for their food and necessities. That was their mistake, their doom.

Dependence made them vulnerable. Myron of Yoram—the first Troll-Scorcher—could have sealed the trolls in the Kreegills and their other strongholds. He could have starved them out in a score of years. He would have needed sorcery, of course, if he’d besieged them, and sorcery would have laid waste to the Kreegills. The valleys would have become ash and dust. Deche wouldn’t have been founded. I wouldn’t have been born…

So much would have been different if Myron Troll-Scorcher had been different. Not better, certainly not for Urik, which would never have risen to glory without me. Simply different. But Myron of Yoram was what he was: a vast, sweeping fool who drove the trolls out of the Kreegills with a vast, sweeping advance. He turned the stone-men into the stone-hearted fighters that his army could never again defeat.

Later, when I was the Troll-Scorcher, it was different. Much different. But that was later.

When I was born, the pixies were gone, the ogres and the centaurs, too. The center of the heartland—what was left of the once-green heartland after the Pixie-Blight, the Ogre-Naught, and the Centaur-Crusher had purged those races from it—belonged to humankind. The remaining wars were fought along the perimeter. Myron of Yoram fought trolls in the far northeast, where the barrens reach beyond sunrise to the middle of last night.

Once the trolls abandoned the Kreegills, it was destiny that human farmers would clear the valleys. All the rest was destiny, too.

After my birth, my destiny was tied to the Troll-Scorcher in ways that no one in Deche had the wisdom or magic to foresee. We weren’t ignorant of our place in the Cleansing Wars. Twice a year, our grain-loaded wagons rumbled down to the plains where the Troll-Scorcher’s bailiffs bought and sold. Men went down with the wagons; women, too. They gave their names to the bailiffs and got a weapon in return.

Sometimes—not often—veterans returned to Deche. My middle brother didn’t, but an uncle had, years before I was born. He’d lost one leg above the knee, the other below, to a single swipe from a troll-held axe. In time, all of his children made their way to the bailiffs. One of those cousins returned when I was ten. He had all his limbs, but his eyes were haunted, and his wits had been seared. He cried out in his dreams, and his wife would not sleep beside him.

I asked him what had happened, what had he seen?

“Fire,” he said. “Fire as bright as the sun. Trolls screaming as their skin burned. Flames exploding from their eyes.”

My cousin’s words frightened me. I saw what he had seen, as if it were my own memory… as it is my own memory, now. When the Troll-Scorcher slew, he slew by fire that consumed from within. That was Rajaat’s sorcery: all his champions can kill anything with a thought. Each champion had and retains a unique killing way that brings terror as well as death. But I was ten and ignorant of my destiny. With frightened tears on my cheeks, I ran from my cousin to my father.

“Don’t make me go. Don’t send me to the trolls! I don’t want to see the fire-eyes!”

Father held me in his arms until I was myself again. He told me there was never any shortage of folk who wanted to join the Troll-Scorcher’s army. If I didn’t want to fight, I could stay in Deche all my life, if I wanted to, as he, my father, had done. As I clung to him, believing his words with all my heart and taking comfort from them, Dorean joined us. Silently, she took my hand between hers and brought it to her cheek.

She kissed my trembling fingertips.

It was likely that Dorean was a few years older than I; no one knew for certain. She’d been born far to the east of the Kreegills, where the war between the trolls and the Troll-Scorcher was an everyday reality. Maybe she’d been born in a village. More likely she’d been born in one of