The Cleansing Wars Begin - The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King Chapter 7
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
This chapter is split right down the middle. The first half is present-day Hamanu in his workroom, brewing a dangerous stealth spell. The second half is his memoir, and it is one of the best stretches of the entire book.
So here’s what happened in the present. Hamanu is counting drops of roc egg-sack oil into an obsidian cauldron. He’s at drop nine hundred and eighty-something. Windreaver is being a pest, drifting around the room, reading Hamanu’s manuscript, and dropping barbs like “You’re evil, Manu.” Their exchange is sharp and honest in a way that Hamanu can’t have with anyone else. When Windreaver calls him evil, Hamanu doesn’t deny it. He just says, “You’d do nothing different.”
Then comes a moment that genuinely surprised me. Hamanu picks up a tiny lizard called a critic. Scholars say critics won’t live in an evil household. They’ll choose death over staying somewhere wrong. And yet the palace is full of them. Hamanu feeds it honey from his finger, whispers the word “Rajaat,” and lets the lizard read his mind. Then the critic leaps into the cauldron as a living reagent for his spell. The workroom goes dark. Windreaver and the critic are both gone.
I love how Abbey uses this scene. The lizard that shouldn’t tolerate evil chooses to help the sorcerer-king. It says something about Hamanu that the text never spells out directly. He sits down to write his memoirs feeling “every one of his thousand years.”
And now the memoir section. This is where the book goes from good to great.
Young Manu has just killed the veteran leader Bult and taken his sword. He drops into a swordsman’s crouch he’s never tried before and it fits him perfectly. The men call him “Ha-Manu,” meaning Worthy Manu, and he takes command. Just like that. No hesitation.
He goes through Bult’s belongings and finds coded orders from the Troll-Scorcher, Myron of Yoram. This is where Manu cracks the whole thing open. The war against the trolls was never meant to be won. Yoram was herding the trolls like livestock, keeping the war going forever. The bands of human veterans were shepherds, not soldiers. Their entire purpose was a lie.
So here’s what Manu does with this information. He reads his translations aloud to his band. A one-eyed veteran picks up where his voice fails. And then his people just… sit there, staring at the fire. Their sense of betrayal goes deeper than his, Abbey tells us, because the war was their entire reason for existing. Their parents fought this war. Their grandparents fought this war. All for nothing.
Manu stands up and says one word: “Perdition.” He promises to tell the truth in every village, kill any officer who tracks them, take the war back to the trolls, and then come back for the Troll-Scorcher himself. This time there are cheers.
What follows is a recruitment montage that feels earned. Twenty becomes forty becomes sixty. Renegade bands try to absorb his group. He duels their leaders and wins. He visits villages and learns the art of persuasion through trial and error.
Then the Troll-Scorcher’s army finds them. Hundreds of soldiers closing in from all directions. Manu’s people are on a hilltop with nowhere to go. One-Eye, the wise old veteran, says to scatter and run. Manu says to attack. They argue. Manu almost cuts his throat. Then he actually listens.
“We’ll run, One-Eye,” he concedes. And then destiny takes over. He invents the spear formation on the spot: everyone shoulder-to-shoulder, punching through the enemy’s thinnest point like a weapon. It works. They roll up the line. Officers surrender.
The aftermath is where Abbey really shines. A round-faced officer leads them west toward the troll lands. They cross the sinking lands, a prairie riddled with hidden chasms and sinkholes. At night, they camp at the base of strange cone-shaped mountains. And then the trolls come from the north while everyone sleeps.
A hand grabs Manu’s neck. His strength drains away. A mind-bender pulls him through the Gray. A raspy voice says “Put him below.” Something hard hits him from behind. He wakes up in a brick-lined pit.
“I never knew how the last battle of my human life ended,” Hamanu writes, “but I can guess.”
That last line is devastating. Abbey cuts the memoir off at the exact worst moment. You know what’s coming, but you don’t know the details yet, and the waiting is part of the horror.
Next up in Chapter 8: Back in the present, Hamanu wakes from an unprecedented nap to find Urik under siege from multiple directions, and a dead queen delivers a terrifying message.