The Fall of Rajaat - The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King Chapter 10
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
Chapter 10 is the big one. This is where Hamanu becomes the champion, and where we see the full scope of what Rajaat did to him. It’s also the chapter where we watch the birth and end of the troll race through Hamanu’s eyes. Abbey pulls no punches here.
The chapter opens with Pavek refusing to leave. He holds out the honey jar. Hamanu snarls that his flesh doesn’t heal. Pavek says something that stops him cold: “You were mortal when you measured Myron of Yoram and Rajaat. You didn’t hesitate to judge them.” He drops the king’s titles entirely, speaking as an equal. It’s the bravest thing anyone’s done in this book.
Hamanu realizes the bandage Pavek made came from the celadon gown of Sielba Sprite-Claw, the queen of Yaramuke who died with Hamanu’s obsidian knife in her heart. Abbey lets the symbolism sit there without explaining it.
Then we drop into the memoir. Manu wakes from the eyes of fire. Rajaat found him on a cart and wrapped his mind in a soft shadow. Then Manu sees himself on a second cart: a black-boned skeleton with arms fused together. “All the pain I’d felt was nothing compared to my imagination when I saw what had become of Manu, the lithe dancer of Deche.”
Rajaat rebuilds him piece by piece. Manu grinds his regrown tongue bloody rather than let the other champions hear him scream. He meets the ring of champions. One draws an obsidian knife. Borys of Ebe puts up a wall and tells him to knock it off.
The Dark Lens scene is unforgettable. Rajaat shows Manu a blue world of endless oceans and floating cities. Then Manu imagines green fields and forests, a farmer’s paradise, and his heart leaps. Rajaat shatters that vision. “Athas does not belong to us! We are the unclean, the defilers.” The blue world is meant for halflings. Humanity’s debt must be paid.
Rajaat transforms Manu through the Lens. His memories burn away. He’s rebuilt from starlight and dying sun. When he comes out, he’s hollow, empty, hungry. Not for bread. For death.
“Deny your hunger, Hamanu, and you’ll go mad,” Rajaat tells him. Obey willingly and rule the world after it’s clean. Or resist and destroy everything anyway. The illusion of choice is the cruelest part.
The blood-drinking ceremony is fascinating worldbuilding. Champions cut themselves, fill crystal goblets, and swap. Each drink floods the recipient with the other’s memories. Hamanu tastes Borys’s blood and learns the Dwarf-Butcher was a commoner too, a replacement for the first champion the dwarves killed. The others despise each other as much as they despise him.
Hamanu took command of Yoram’s army and spent five years reshaping it. He discovered that every time he channeled Dark Lens magic to his templars, his body transformed. Bony spurs. A keeled breastbone. A black claw from a new knuckle. He could hear Rajaat’s laughter through the Gray. After that, his army fought with weapons and wits, using magic only when absolutely necessary.
Abbey compresses years of genocide into a few paragraphs that are all the more terrible for their restraint. “You will forgive me, though, if I do not dwell on those years. It is enough to record here that the trolls are gone from Athas, forgotten, and Hamanu bears the blame.”
The final battle happens on a rocky peninsula jutting into what would become the Sea of Silt. Five hundred trolls remain. Hamanu appears as the Lion for the first time: half human, half tawny lion, golden sword. His own men fall to their knees. The troll drums lose their rhythm.
And then he can’t do it. Windreaver is bleeding from twenty wounds, one arm useless, demanding a finish. No surrender. Hamanu offers mercy: live out your lives, men and women separated, until the race ends naturally. Windreaver spits in his eye. So Hamanu makes the remaining trolls march off the cliff. Forty-seven fall. Windreaver steps to the edge, slits his own throat, and Hamanu catches his spirit in a gray pebble.
The final lines of Hamanu’s memoir for this chapter are some of the best writing in the whole series: “I was not wrong to bring death to an entire race. The wrong was Rajaat’s and Rajaat’s madness. But I was not right, and the onus of genocide, rightfully, falls on me, on Hamanu.”
That’s the whole tragedy of this book in two sentences. He didn’t start the war. He didn’t choose to be a champion. But he finished it, and he owns that. No excuses. No hiding behind orders. Abbey makes you understand why Hamanu did everything he did, without ever letting you forget how monstrous it was.
Next up in Chapter 11: The aftermath of the Cleansing Wars and the question that haunts everything: what happens to a champion when his war is over?