Trial of the Dragon (The Chronicles of Dragon, Series 2, Book 6 of 10) (Tail of the Dragon 7) by Craig Halloran

Author:Craig Halloran [Halloran, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Two-Ten Book Press
Published: 2016-11-25T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 22

Selene trekked with Sansla Libor through the Valley of Bones. For weeks on end, she and the winged-ape Roamer King had scoured the skies with their eyes, following the flight patterns of the wurmers from the Chamber of Murals. The flocks of the dragon-like insects that hummed like locusts with a mind-jangling ree-rah, ree-rah sound had led them to where they now stood.

Squatting with the sun at her back, she picked at the scales and bones of a dead dragon. It was a gray scaler, little bigger than her. Its body had been torn apart, its flesh devoured and burned. It was one of many loners she’d come across in this search. “There was a time when this wouldn’t have even made me sad.”

“Are you sad now?”

“No, I’m angry.”

She stood up. Selene no longer wore the robes that hid her tail. With the help of Nath’s mother and Dragon Home’s vast array of storage rooms, she had opted for a different look, embracing what she was: a dragon in the form of a woman. She wore a steel breastplate similar to Nath’s that covered her torso. A skirt of iron links covered her legs to the lower thighs. Her arms and calves were bare of clothing but covered in black scales with sparkles of gray when the sunlight hit them right. Two daggers rested on her hips. A sword was strapped to her back. She wasn’t just a princess now but a warrior princess.

Sansla’s nostrils flared. “The surroundings of this valley decay. It didn’t used to be this way.” He touched a branch where portions of the green leaves had wilted. “Something sucks the life out of the lands beyond the valley.”

The Valley of Bones wasn’t a graveyard as the name suggested but rather a small stretch of land among the hills and valleys that had once all been a massive graveyard. Many races had buried their dead here long ago, but it hadn’t been a place of mourning, rather celebration. The grounds had always remained green and fertile year round, the soil rich and hallowed. But now the greenery had become sparse, and the varmints that darted from tree to tree and chuck-hole to chuck-hole had vanished.

All over the hills, plains, and savannas, there were caves. Many were in the hills, but others were fresh holes in the ground, where the resting dead head been disrupted. These caves were marks of burrowing wurmers. The mindless things desecrated the dead.

Selene and Sansla had spent day after day searching the caves, trying to find the hive of the queen wurmer.

With the tall grasses licking against her knees, she bent her ear to the sky and stopped. The droning sound of the wurmers came from the northern hills. She and Sansla hunkered down. Wurmers by the hundreds flew overhead like a swarm of bees. The ree-rah sound was so deafening that she fought the urge to cover her ears. She remained still until the danger passed and the terrifying sound was gone.

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