The Dragon Stirs - The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King Chapter 12
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
A King Without Allies
Chapter 12 is the longest chapter in the book, and for good reason. It’s where everything converges. Hamanu has escaped Ur Draxa, barely survived his encounter with Rajaat, and now drifts aimlessly through the Gray netherworld with three days before the other champions close their noose around Urik.
Here’s the thing about Hamanu’s situation. He has no one to turn to. The other surviving champions, Gallard and Inenek, are either enemies or fools. The heartland’s sorcerers and druids can’t hold a candle to Rajaat. For thirteen ages, the Lion-King disdained allies. Now he desperately needs one, and the cupboard is bare.
Windreaver, his ghost-troll companion, finds him in the Kreegill Mountains and does what old friends do. He tells Hamanu the truth he doesn’t want to hear. “Leave Urik,” Windreaver suggests. “You’re your own destiny. You can choose somewhere else.”
But Hamanu can’t. “Hamanu is Urik,” he says. And that’s not pride talking. It’s identity. If he leaves, he leaves himself behind.
The Visit to Sadira
Windreaver pushes Hamanu toward Sadira of Tyr, the half-elf sorceress whose shadow magic sealed Rajaat’s bones under the lava lake. She’s the key. Her spells are failing, and she needs to know.
So Hamanu disguises himself as a shabby peddler and walks to the Asticles estate outside Tyr. And this is where Abbey really shows what she’s capable of as a writer. The meeting between Hamanu and Sadira is one of the most tense, complex, and heartbreaking scenes in the entire book.
It goes badly almost immediately. Sadira recognizes him and fires off a spell. That spell doesn’t just miss its mark. It destroys the pebble in Hamanu’s arm where Windreaver’s spirit has been cached for over a thousand years. Windreaver materializes in greasy smoke, says his final words, and is gone. The last troll in existence, truly gone forever this time.
This part got me. Windreaver’s final words aren’t about vengeance or anger. “Thirteen ages is too long to think of vengeance,” he says. “I’ll wait for you, Manu of Deche. I’ll prepare a place beside me, where the stone is young.” After a thousand years of captivity, the troll forgives his captor and calls him by his first name.
The Damage Done
What follows is Hamanu at his worst and most human. Grief-stricken over Windreaver, enraged at Sadira, he does something terrible. He rips through her mind, sundering her memories, and plants his own agonizing memories inside her. Dorean. The trolls. All of it hammered into Sadira’s consciousness as rough justice for destroying the last troll.
Abbey doesn’t let Hamanu off the hook for this. He knows it’s wrong even as he does it. The chapter makes clear this isn’t some calculated move. It’s grief expressing itself as cruelty. Champions don’t have friends, he reminds himself, and they don’t attract friendship. But that’s not true. He just lost his oldest friend, and the pain is turning him into exactly the monster Sadira believes him to be.
Rkard and the Sun Spell
Then comes the scene that almost saves everything. Rkard, a young mul who once wielded the sun against Rajaat, bursts in and attacks Hamanu with sun-fire. Three braided streams of flame, white-hot and genuine. And Hamanu does something extraordinary. Instead of destroying Rkard, he grabs the sun-spell in his fist and holds it.
Inside that moment of agony, Hamanu discovers something incredible. Rkard is a living lens who can concentrate the sun’s energy before a spell is cast. With Rkard beside him, Hamanu could seal Rajaat forever. He could counter anything the other champions throw at Urik. He might even be able to stop his own dragon transformation.
His spirits soar. “It could be done! We could do it!”
And Sadira shuts him down cold. “Stand with you? I’ll kill him myself before I let that happen.”
I love how Abbey writes this. Hamanu tries to explain. Sadira listens, considers everything, and still says no. Not because she’s stupid, but because she’s been brutalized by a champion and won’t trust one. Hamanu made this bed. He brutalized the one person who could save his city, and now she won’t help him. Every choice has a consequence, and this is his.
He leaves with one last request. Go to Ur Draxa. See what’s happening to the lava lake. Then come to Urik at dawn, three days from now.
It’s the most pathetic request a sorcerer-king has ever made. And that’s exactly the point.