Into the Light - The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King Chapter 15
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
The Last Chapter
This is it. The final chapter. And Abbey opens it not with Hamanu, but with Ruari, the young half-elf druid, wedged into the corner of his bed, so drunk he thinks he might die. When a woman appears in his doorway, he literally thinks she’s Death come to claim him.
She’s not. What happens next between Ruari and the mysterious woman is tender and strange and clearly Hamanu’s doing. They fly above the city. Ruari wakes up on the palace roof wearing one of the Lion-King’s silk shirts. He sends the girl back to Pavek’s house and runs for the south gate tower.
Here’s the thing about this scene. When Pavek discovers Ruari missing, he assumes the worst. He thinks Hamanu consumed Ruari the way champions consume mortal lives. A linen shift on the floor next to the scroll case. The evidence of another betrayal. Pavek’s faith in Hamanu shatters. The one man who believed in the Lion-King concludes there’s no difference between Hamanu and his enemies.
And then Ruari shows up. Alive, bewildered, wearing silk. He’s fine. Better than fine. He’s in love.
This is Hamanu’s last gift. Not destruction, but creation. He spent his final night giving Ruari something the half-elf never had: connection, love, a future. Pavek gets a vision of Ruari and the woman with children, one of whom has yellow eyes. The Lion-King’s bloodline, continuing in the most unexpected way.
Javed understands. “He was stronger than his nature,” the old commandant says. “There’s hope.”
The Dragon Is Born
That hope doesn’t last long. While they watch from the tower, a second sun rises on the southern horizon. Every templar wearing a medallion collapses as Hamanu releases them. Pavek wraps his arms around his head as the connection he’s had since age fifteen is severed. Not by violence. By mercy. Hamanu let them go rather than destroy them.
The Dragon of Urik takes shape inside a pillar of dust and light as tall as a volcanic eruption. The armies of Nibenay, Gulg, and Giustenal are consumed. Their champions sacrificed their own soldiers to fuel the transformation.
Then the dragon turns toward Urik. Black, scintillating, massive. Lidless yellow eyes like openings into fathomless dark space. Still unfinished, shifting, not fully realized. Bigger than Borys ever was.
Pavek tries to evoke the guardian and fails. “They can’t be in the same place, Hamanu and the guardian.” The guardian IS Hamanu, or at least part of him. It can’t fight itself.
But the golden eyes of the Lion-King portraits on Urik’s walls flash with light and drive the dragon back. The guardian found another way. Each time the dragon surges forward, the walls answer with golden fire. Stalemate.
Rajaat Arrives
Then the blue storm comes over the southern horizon. Rajaat. The War-Bringer himself, arriving to claim his creation.
The dragon doesn’t notice. It’s mad, mindless, battering at the walls of its own city. So Pavek does the bravest thing anyone does in this entire book. He opens the postern door and walks toward the dragon.
“Rajaat is coming to destroy Urik,” he shouts.
The dragon reaches for him. The guardian lights drive it back.
“Urik, Hamanu! Rajaat will destroy Urik!”
Another surge. Another flash.
Then Pavek finds the right words. “The fields, Hamanu! He’ll destroy the fields where the green grain grows!”
And the dragon stops. It cocks its head. It looks at Pavek. A brimstone sigh washes over him. The dragon turns south, sees Rajaat’s storm, sees the green fields on the horizon. It roars and runs to meet its creator.
The farmer’s son. A thousand years later, still a farmer’s son. That’s what finally reached him.
Under the Stone
What follows is told in broad strokes. The dragon and Rajaat’s storm fight across the Sea of Silt for three days, all the way to Ur Draxa. Rajaat tries to find Hamanu’s mind inside the dragon, to manipulate the farmer’s son the way he always has. But there’s nobody home. The dragon is instinct and hatred, nothing Rajaat can grab hold of.
The dragon dives into the lava lake. Its hide burns away. For one instant, there’s thought inside the agony. Rajaat spins promises. Heal your wounds. Grant your wishes.
“I wish for your bones, your heart, your shadow.”
The dragon shatters the crystal matrix around the Dark Lens, gathers Rajaat’s remains, and takes himself into the stone heart of Athas.
Athas claims him. Strips away Rajaat’s bones. Seals the dragon in a tomb that shrinks and squeezes until there’s nothing left of the dragon. Then it gives Hamanu back his sanity and leaves him encased in stone. Immortal. Unable to die. Reliving every moment of his life over and over, with the weight of the world pressed around him.
For a thousand years.
The Guardian and the Light
When Athas finally spits him out, Hamanu is mortal. Truly mortal. No illusions. No power. Just a young man’s hands, a young man’s body. He’s in a glowing chamber, and sitting on his own ridiculous throne is the Lion-King guardian of Urik.
“It took you long enough,” the guardian says.
They argue, because of course they do. Hamanu insists Urik is his city. The guardian pushes back. “No man can possess a city.” But Hamanu won’t back down. “My city, because I gave it its shape. I gave it its strength. You are me, and Urik is my city.”
The guardian bares his fangs, then relents. “Our city, Manu. Our city endures.”
A curtain of light appears showing what Urik has become in the thousand years since the dragon departed. Then the guardian commands him to pass through. His destiny is fulfilled. Urik survives. Urik will survive.
And Hamanu walks into the light.
There’s music. A reed pipe melody, the same one from the Kreegills, from his childhood, from every good memory he ever had.
There’s a woman to welcome him.
And further on, they found a waterfall.
What It All Means
I’ve been sitting with this ending for a while now. Abbey could have given Hamanu a heroic death or a tragic fall. Instead, she gives him something much harder to earn: peace. Not forgiveness. Not redemption in any simple sense. Just peace, after two thousand years of carrying the weight of every terrible thing he did and every terrible thing that was done to him.
The waterfall is the detail that stays with me. In a world where the oceans dried up and the forests burned, Hamanu finds a waterfall at the end. The thing Athas lost. The thing the Cleansing Wars destroyed. It’s there, waiting for him, after everything.
Lynn Abbey wrote a book about a genocidal immortal tyrant and somehow made me hope he finds rest. That’s not a small thing. That’s the kind of writing that sticks with you long after you close the book.
Next up, I’ll wrap up the whole series with some final thoughts on what makes this book work and where it sits in the Dark Sun canon. Stay tuned.