Knight of the Silver Circle by Duncan M. Hamilton

Author:Duncan M. Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

* * *

Pharadon was ambivalent at having witnessed the slaying of a dragon. There were many moments when he had been tempted to intervene, but he’d resisted.

The dragon had been a large, but not quite fully grown, blackscale. It was difficult to say how old it was—depending on how much food and Fount was available, a dragon could reach its full size in anything from a couple of weeks to several months. Both were more plentiful than Pharadon had ever known, so he guessed this dragon had hatched very recently.

That raised another issue—and an alarming one. This dragon had advanced to a level of maturity beyond which enlightenment was no longer possible. That was why he had allowed the human to slay it. If the man had not, Pharadon would have been forced to do it himself. Base dragons, never brought to enlightenment, were a scourge—violent, aggressive creatures driven by instinct. He had hoped to bring these young dragons to enlightenment, but both this one and the greenscale were too mature. He could sense only one more, and worried now that he was too late. Beyond this last creature, he detected no more of his kind.

All dragons were born base and would remain so if an enlightened dragon did not intervene and lift them from their wretched fate. That was a normal thing for a dragon hatched of enlightened parents. Within days of their breaking out of their eggs, their parents would ensure that the ceremony was carried out and they would join their enlightened brethren.

On a rare occasion, something went wrong and the offspring of an enlightened would not be raised in time. The window of opportunity was short—juvenile dragons grew fast even at the worst of times. When that happened, it was a tragic thing, the kind of devastating event that a parent rarely recovered from—to see their child descend into darkness.

All dragons had been base once. At some point, long before even Pharadon had drawn his first breath, the spark of enlightenment had taken hold in a goldscale and it had been able to share that spark with others. That had created the divide between enlightened and base. The first enlightenment seemed to have been a matter of luck, if the old stories were to be believed—simply a case of being in the right place at the right time.

Those who were not elevated had to suffer on as they were. There were those amongst the enlightened who tried to set that wrong to right; they had spent their lives seeking out base juveniles and enlightening them. It was a difficult, overwhelming task, and often dangerous—base dragons were hostile to everything they did not understand.

Those who were missed—those base beasts that grew to adulthood—caused problems for all the rest. They sought out territory and would fight to the death to possess it. The enlightened were eventually forced to keep them under control, and so, for a time, Pharadon had found himself killing troublesome base dragons.

The large blackscale the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.