Midnight in Urik - The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King Chapter 1
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
Previous: Series Intro | Next: Chapter 2
So here’s what happened. We open on the city of Urik at night. Stars overhead, sulphurous eyes glowing from the city walls, and a curfew that’s been in place for a thousand years. Nobody is supposed to be on the streets. But of course, people are.
A sedan chair carried by mul slaves gets stopped by a templar patrol near the Elven Market. The passenger calls himself Lord Ursos, supposedly from Draj. The whole thing feels suspicious from the start, but the escorts have the right bribes, so the templars wave them through. The party slips into a hidden alley and enters an underground amphitheater.
Here’s the thing. What happens inside that amphitheater is genuinely disturbing. Three prisoners are bound to posts on wheeled carts. A “night master” uses a steel knife to cut them while musicians play alongside their screams. The guests are drugged up on sipping bowls and dream pipes, getting high on the suffering. It’s a concert of torture. Abbey does not hold back here. The whole scene is built around this twisted merging of art and cruelty, and it lands hard.
Lord Ursos watches it all stone cold. No drugs, no flinching. He just absorbs the melody. And when the victims die and everyone leaves, he sits there alone and hums the tune back. An eight-tone trope. Four ascending, then the lowest, then a three-tone cascade. Remember that melody. It comes back.
Then Abbey shifts to something completely different. A young mother named Cissa wakes up to her teething baby. Normal, domestic, relatable stuff. But there’s a stranger in the room, a woman glowing with light, holding the infant and singing her to sleep. Same melody. Same eight-tone trope. The stranger tells Cissa to rest, that no one in Urik is safer than her child. And Cissa believes her.
I love how Abbey sets these two scenes right next to each other. One is pure horror. The other is pure tenderness. And they’re connected by the same song. It tells you so much about this character before you even know who he is.
Next we meet a crippled beggar making his painful way to a baker’s stoop. His name is Janni. Three bullies jump him in an alley, and the baker, Nouri, charges out with a kneading mallet to save him. It’s a small, human moment of bravery. Nouri beats two of them bloody and the third runs. But when Nouri looks for Janni in the alley, the boy is already back on the stoop, crutch and all. And the crutch Nouri left in the alley is gone. Something is very wrong.
“Whim of the Lion,” Nouri whispers. And yeah, the Lion was there.
Because the final scene of the chapter gives us the reveal. Hamanu, the Lion of Urik, King of the World, sits on his palace rooftop having breakfast. He was Lord Ursos. He was the glowing stranger. He was the crippled beggar. All of them. The sorcerer-king walks his city in disguise, borrowing shapes and lives.
And what does he do with this knowledge? He rewards Nouri the baker. Sends him the finest flour and a purse of silver, orders a score of loaves delivered to the palace. He knows the gesture will change the baker’s life. Then he tells his steward Enver to put something in Janni’s begging bowl too.
This chapter is basically a character study of Hamanu, and it’s brilliant. He’s a tyrant who tortures people for entertainment and also gently rocks babies to sleep. He lets street thugs beat a beggar just to see if anyone will step up. He kills with a thought and rewards with generosity. He’s fascinating precisely because none of these things cancel each other out. He contains all of it at once.
Coming up in Chapter 2, we go deeper into Hamanu’s mind. We meet a brave merchant woman, learn about the political nightmare unfolding across Athas, and watch Hamanu confront what he’s become. It gets heavy.