The Weight of Command - The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King Chapter 4
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
Previous: Chapter 3 | Next: Chapter 5
Chapter 4 is where everything ratchets up. The present-day storyline takes over, and suddenly we’re dealing with politics, dark sorcery, and the question of whether Hamanu can be trusted by the one person he actually needs.
We open with Urik at rest in the midday heat. Even the obsidian mines get a break. Hamanu is standing in his secret cloister, watching Pavek sleep. And this is such a telling detail about who Hamanu is. He could wake the man instantly with a thought. But he doesn’t. He watches Pavek’s dreams instead.
Through the shimmering images above Pavek’s sleeping body, we see the people he loves: a blond woman named Akashia, a boy named Zvain, and a half-elf named Ruari whose emotional vulnerability calls out to Hamanu’s predatory instincts like honey.
Here’s the thing about Hamanu watching dreams. It’s invasive. He knows it. He does it anyway. He’s studying his subjects the way a lonely immortal studies anything alive, fascinated by the short, bright lives of mortals because his own has become so long and jaded.
When Pavek wakes up, Hamanu asks him to demonstrate druid magic in the dead garden. Pavek has been clearing it with hand tools instead. The soil is scorched, he says. Nothing will grow. That word hangs in the air.
Then Hamanu offers Pavek his freedom. “Walk through that door. Leave, and know in your heart that I will never follow you.” He pulls back his supernatural influence and sits there, waiting to see what a free man will choose.
Pavek stands up, grabs a shovel, and says: “Tell me to come, and I’ll come. Tell me to leave, and I’ll go. Ask me to choose, and I’ll stay where I am because I am what I am.”
That line is perfect. It’s not submission. It’s not defiance. It’s a man who knows himself well enough to stop pretending the choice matters. He’s a templar. He stays. And Hamanu exhales.
But there’s no time to sit with that moment. Commandant Javed, an elf who’s been scouting the Nibenese army, contacts Hamanu through his medallion. He’s racing back with something important. Hamanu clears the roads, projecting his glowing eyes over a barracks village and shouting commands.
Javed arrives carrying a leather-wrapped parcel. Inside is a shard of black obsidian that radiates pure malevolence. Two soldiers died just wrapping it up.
When Hamanu unwraps it with his bare talons, a smoky serpent erupts from the shard and wraps around his body. He impales its head on his thumb-talon, summons a knife from the void, and cuts it apart. Then he bleeds his own lava-hot blood onto the remains to destroy them.
But what matters is the message that came with the shard. It’s from Gallard, the Shadow-King of Nibenay. He claims Rajaat is making sorcery from inside his prison. The Hollow is weakening. They need a new dragon, and Gallard says he’s found a spell to make Hamanu into one without the madness that consumed Borys.
Hamanu doesn’t buy it. If Gallard had such a spell, he’d use it on himself. The real plan is clear: Gallard wants to become a dragon himself. He’s coming for Urik.
Hamanu orders Javed to summon the first army levy. But he also keeps Pavek in the palace. He tells the druid to send a message to his mentor Telhami. “Tell her it’s time. The end of time.”
The chapter closes with Hamanu alone on the marble bench, face buried in his malformed hands. Windreaver appears. The troll admits he missed the shard completely, that he’s grown careless. Hamanu sends him to Ur Draxa, Borys’s demolished stronghold, to find out how Rajaat is making sorcery from inside his prison.
What gets me about this chapter is the layering. Political crisis, existential crisis, personal crisis, all at once. And the scene with Pavek is the emotional heart of it. Hamanu needs this man’s genuine judgment, and Pavek is the one person whose thoughts Hamanu can’t read when it counts most. That’s terrifying for someone who’s had perfect information for a thousand years.
Next chapter takes us back into Hamanu’s written history. Young Manu, five years in the Troll-Scorcher’s army, a mercy killing, a solo troll kill, and a confrontation that changes everything.