Dragoncharm (The Ultimate Dragon Saga Book 1) by Graham Edwards

Author:Graham Edwards [Edwards, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-06-12T00:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

Winter

21

Awakenings

Once it had a name.

Once it had many things: the companionship of its deathless brethren, the citadel they had carved for themselves then abandoned. Once, but no more. Now, it simply slept.

Old memories submerged themselves in its dreams. Worlds — this one and others — were spawned from primal light, and the Sleeper watched their births with a fascination that could not last.

Eternity is a long time to have lived, and many worlds live and die in that immeasurable time. Fascination gives way to boredom, and eventually despair. The despair of the deathless, that they must see everything before they themselves can die. If they can ever die.

The Sleeper had lived forever, and would live forever, and when this knowledge had finally numbed its every nerve, clogged its every thought, it had chosen the only course of action left open to it, the same course of action long ago chosen by its five undying brethren as they had each in turn reached the final understanding that eternity erodes. And that the only way to deal with that awful knowledge is to turn away.

Yet, even in its sleep, the Sleeper could not escape the curse of its deathless state, for eternity intruded even into its dreams. Worlds lived and died, worlds congealed and crumbled.

Worlds turned.

In its dreams, the Sleeper felt its spirit fill and refill its body. Many bodies it had used, yet always a new one was ready at the point of death, ready for the weary, aching soul to be transferred into its new and sickeningly vital flesh. The Sleeper had spent long millennia searching for the sadistic god responsible for this endless reincarnation. It had a plan for any supreme being it might find, and that plan had very little to do with a quick death.

Through the individual life spans of its successive bodies — each identical to the previous in its lack of sex, its mastery of charm, its sheer resilience — it had travelled far across many worlds, yet in all that time the Sleeper had found no gods to blame, no devils to punish.

It dreamed of those travels now, of all the failures, as it slept in its shallow reservoir of charm beneath the mountain. The Sleeper had finally lifted its barriers against the world, and buried itself beneath the nightmare of its existence. Aeons had passed, and the magical reservoir had strengthened as charm had gripped the world more fully, shaping its course through the stars.

As the magic had grown, so too had the Maze. Unconcerned, the Sleeper had dreamed on.

However, recently the charm had begun to move, sluggish at first, then at breathtaking speed as dragons had manipulated it. One dragon in particular had been strong enough to draw magic from the skin of the Maze itself, putting it to work building defensive barriers in the solid rock of the Plated Mountain.

Around the Sleeper, that charm now flowed like lightning, and the lightning had a taste — the taste of dragon who commanded it.

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