Champions and Wars - The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King Chapter 3
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
Previous: Chapter 2 | Next: Chapter 4
This chapter is where the book splits open. Hamanu finally starts writing his history, and we shift between two timelines: the present, where he struggles to put ink on vellum, and the past, where he tells us who he was before he became a king.
First, the present. Hamanu has been sitting in his secret cloister for ten nights, staring at blank vellum. He’s sent his steward Enver to fetch a druid-templar named Pavek from the village of Quraite. The history was supposed to be finished by the time Pavek arrived. It’s not. It’s not even started.
I find this weirdly relatable. Here’s this immortal sorcerer-king who can kill with a thought and bend reality. And he can’t start writing. He calls it harder than sorcery. The words writhe like snakes. A thousand years of memories, and he can’t find the beginning.
Enver’s messages from the road are hilarious. He’s basically texting his boss through a magic medallion, complaining that Pavek rides kanks to death and won’t stop to eat or sleep. Four prize kanks dead. Pavek is coming whether they survive the trip or not.
Then Hamanu finally picks up the stylus. And the voice changes. We go from third-person narration to first-person. Hamanu is telling us his story directly.
“You know me as Hamanu, the Lion of Urik, King of the World.” But he was born Manu, fifth son in a farming village called Deche in the Kreegill Mountains. His mother carried him to the fields the day he was born. His father lifted him toward the sun with a golden ear of grain. Every woman embraced the baby. Every man tossed him gently in the air. It was tradition.
Abbey gives Hamanu a warm, ordinary, human beginning. And here’s where the world-building gets interesting. The trolls weren’t warriors by nature. They were miners and quarriers who traded with other races for food. They only became fighters after Myron of Yoram attacked them. Hamanu says it plainly: they could have coexisted. Men didn’t quarry, trolls didn’t farm. But Rajaat’s champion made peace impossible.
Young Manu explored troll ruins in the mountains. He learned their script, their names, their gods. He saw abandoned homes with stone bowls still on stone tables. He felt awe for them, even as everyone around him hated trolls. He fell in love with Dorean, an orphan girl who’d survived a troll raid. Dorean hated trolls. Manu was fascinated by them. They loved each other anyway.
Then came the wedding day. Manu’s seventeenth year. He was dancing the wedding dance he’d practiced for years when drumbeats echoed off the mountains. His uncle screamed “Wardrums!” and trolls were everywhere.
The massacre of Deche is brutal. Abbey doesn’t describe it in real-time because Manu gets knocked unconscious. But he tells us what he learned later about what the trolls did to the dead and the living. It’s awful. And he tells us about Dorean. He found her bound to the well post, her face gone, their unborn child’s cord tied around her neck.
This part is genuinely hard to read. Abbey earns it, though. She doesn’t use the violence for shock. It’s the foundation of everything Hamanu becomes.
When Manu wakes up in the ruins, he’s found by soldiers from the Troll-Scorcher’s army. They’re not heroes. They’re dregs, drunks who feast among corpses and throw meat at him. But a woman named Jikkana takes him under her wing, and a yellow-haired leader named Bult lets him stay. The chapter ends with Manu joining the army. Not to serve. To take revenge.
What hits me hardest about this chapter is the voice shift. When Hamanu writes as Manu, the arrogance drops away. He’s just a kid who lost everything. He’s smart and proud and scared, and he knows exactly what kind of people he’s fallen in with. “I was cleverer,” he says. “I could see them for what they were.” That clarity will serve him later. Right now, it just keeps him alive.
By dawn, Hamanu has filled several sheets of vellum. He needs more. And more time.
Next chapter brings Pavek to the palace, a terrifying magical artifact from Nibenay, and the first real sign that war is coming to Urik.