War Comes to Urik - The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King Chapter 13
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
The Noose Tightens
Chapter 13 opens with one of the most unexpectedly quiet moments in the book. Hamanu is in the Kreegills at sunset, weaving starlight between his fingers like a child playing with thread. For a few breaths, he forgets who he is. Just a man watching stars come out over mountains.
Then Windreaver’s voice pulls him back. The ghost-troll is still around, at least for now, and he delivers his final counsel. Leave Urik. Go beyond the Ringing Mountains. Start over. Hamanu refuses. “Hamanu is Urik. If I went somewhere else, I’d leave too much behind.”
Windreaver points him toward Sadira again. Not as an ally this time, but as a puzzle to solve. Her shadow-sorcery holds by day but fails by night. Find a way to make it hold at night, and maybe Athas can exist without either dragons or Rajaat.
“Sadira’s a fool,” Hamanu says. And Windreaver fires back: “So were you, once.”
Here’s the thing about Windreaver in these late chapters. He’s not just a ghost dispensing wisdom. He’s a mirror. Everything he tells Hamanu is something Hamanu already knows but won’t admit to himself. And that’s why it matters that the troll is fading. Hamanu is about to lose his last honest mirror.
The Reluctant Diplomat
After Windreaver vanishes into the mist, Hamanu walks to Tyr disguised as a peddler. Abbey takes a moment here to show us something interesting about how Hamanu sees the world. He compares Tyr’s farming practices to Urik’s and finds them wanting. He notes that Kalak never understood that a city’s strength isn’t measured by armies or palaces but by the labor of its farmers.
This is the farmer’s son talking. A thousand years of being an immortal champion, and the thing he’s most proud of is Urik’s agriculture. That tells you everything about who Hamanu really is underneath all the sorcery and terror.
The meeting with Sadira is an absolute disaster. We covered the details in the Chapter 12 post, but what matters for the plot here is the fallout. Hamanu burns every bridge. He violates Sadira’s mind, implants his own traumatic memories, backhands her across a room, and then discovers the one thing that could save his city only to have Sadira refuse to help.
He leaves Tyr with nothing but a request and a prayer. Come to Urik in three days.
What Hamanu Learned
But the chapter isn’t about failure. Not entirely. When Hamanu seized Rkard’s sun-spell, he learned something fundamental about the nature of sorcery on Athas. Every spell needs quickening, something sacrificed to power it. Preservers take a little from many sources. Defilers don’t care what they drain. Champions hoard the life essence of the dead. And a few, like Hamanu and Sadira, transform sunlight into shadow.
But Rkard does something none of them can do. He concentrates the sun’s energy before the spell is cast. He’s a living Dark Lens. And inside that discovery is the seed of everything that will happen next. Because if Hamanu can’t have Rkard’s help willingly, and if Sadira won’t come to Urik, then the only option left is the one Rajaat has been pushing him toward all along.
The chapter ends with Hamanu remembering the day Rajaat first tried to force the dragon transformation on him, back in Urik, thirteen ages ago. He escaped that time by throwing himself into the Gray and running to Borys at Kemelok.
This time there’s no Borys. No Kemelok. No place to run. Only the Lion-King guardian, standing watch above the Black, and Hamanu’s own stubborn refusal to become what Rajaat designed him to be.
The clock is ticking. Three days, and counting.