Building an Empire - The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King Chapter 11
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
Hamanu Wakes Up, and So Does the Plot
So here’s what happened. Hamanu has been sitting in his workroom for three straight days without moving. Not sleeping. Not eating. Just writing his history and drowning in memories of the past. His loyal dwarf steward Enver finally breaks through the warded door with a loaf of bread and a room full of worried faces.
Here’s the thing about this opening. It tells you everything about where Hamanu is mentally. The past is literally swallowing him whole. He’s been so deep in memory that he forgot who he was, forgot where he was, forgot the face of his own steward. When he reads the last words he wrote on the parchment, “the onus of genocide, rightfully, falls on me, on Hamanu,” you can feel the weight of a thousand years pressing down on him.
But Hamanu doesn’t have time for a breakdown. Urik is surrounded. Rival armies from Nibenay, Gulg, and Giustenal lurk beyond the horizon. Pavek, his druid-templar, is out in the city squares drilling ordinary citizens with barrel staves and mud-caked laths, getting them ready for a war they probably can’t win. I love that detail. Pavek doesn’t lie to people. He tells them the walls might be breached and they’ll need to fight for every step. And people listen. Not because templars are forcing them, but because Pavek is honest.
The Spy Mission Goes Wrong
The main action of this chapter is Hamanu’s reconnaissance mission. He’s cooked up a stealth spell to let him investigate two extremely dangerous places: the Hollow beneath the Black, where Rajaat’s essence is imprisoned, and the lava lake in Ur Draxa, where Rajaat’s bones and the Dark Lens were sealed.
His trip to the Hollow nearly kills him. He gets too close, his shadow expands violently, and he starts tumbling toward the Black. Then something saves him. A huge leonine figure, standing guard above the Black, redirects him. It looks like the Lion-King of Urik. The guardian of his city. But Hamanu has no time to process what he’s just seen.
He gets flung all the way to Ur Draxa, the ruins of Borys’s old city, which is now a fog-choked swamp thanks to Tithian’s rage inside the Dark Lens. Abbey’s description of this place is fantastic. Squishy plants covering every surface, stagnant water seeping through everything, and the farmer in Hamanu can’t help noticing that the streets are more fertile than Urik’s best fields. Even in crisis, the farmer’s son thinks about soil quality. That’s such a great character detail.
Rajaat Speaks
Then things get truly scary. Hamanu approaches the lava lake and realizes Sadira’s warding spells are failing. Her power comes from shadow, which means by night, she’s just a regular sorceress with cobweb-thin spells. Rajaat has been using those nightly gaps for five years to explore the resonance between the Dark Lens and his own bones.
Tithian speaks to Hamanu first, the pathetic worm, offering to become the next dragon if Hamanu will free him. Then Rajaat himself speaks. And what Rajaat says changes everything.
“Three days, Manu. Three days and they’ll draw their noose around Urik so tight that a dragon will be born.”
Rajaat wants Hamanu to become a dragon. Not because dragons are powerful, but because the transformation would make Hamanu consume every living thing around him. The other champions are already closing in on Urik, not because they want to fight Hamanu, but because Rajaat manipulated them into creating the exact conditions that would force the transformation.
Hamanu barely escapes, diving into the Gray with lava at his ankles. And as the chapter closes, he’s alone in the netherworld with no allies, no plan, and three days until doom. The only comfort is that tawny-skinned giant with the golden sword and a lion’s black mane, still standing guard above the Black.
What I Love About This Chapter
Abbey does something really clever here. She weaves Hamanu’s backstory naturally into the present crisis. We learn how he settled Urik, how the Urikites invited him to be their god, how he fought Kalak and built his city from a sleepy town into a walled empire. But it’s not just flashback for the sake of flashback. Each memory reflects on his current situation. He built Urik by being a farmer who understood growth, patience, and culling. Now that same city faces a threat that patience can’t solve.
The chapter also makes clear that Hamanu’s greatest weakness isn’t Rajaat or the other champions. It’s his own past. Three days frozen in memory. The trap isn’t outside the walls. The trap is inside his own head.
Next chapter, Hamanu goes looking for help in the last place you’d expect. And it does not go well.