Blood on the Sand - The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King Chapter 8
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
This chapter is a lot. Abbey throws crisis after crisis at Hamanu and doesn’t let up for a single page.
It opens with Hamanu catching himself napping. That might not sound like a big deal, but this is a guy who sleeps once a decade. He wakes up disoriented, his illusion flickering between human and dragon, grit in his eyes. The palace is in chaos. His templars are screaming for help through their psychic links, and he’s been responding to routine requests in his sleep. That’s a wild detail. He’s so powerful that he can grant spells while unconscious, but he didn’t even know he could do that.
The situation is bad from every direction. Templars died at a place called Todek village, so fast that their final thoughts revealed nothing useful. Elven runners are sprinting toward the palace with news. On the southeastern border, an undead army is marching on Urik from Giustenal, and Hamanu’s templars are getting slaughtered.
The border sequence with Andelimi is gut-wrenching. She’s a war-bureau sergeant, a veteran of twenty years, and she just watched her lover Rihaen get turned into one of the undead. He tried to turn the enemy zombies and got consumed instead. Nothing recognizable is left of him except his silver medallion and a few strands of hair floating in gore. Abbey does not pull punches.
Hamanu takes over Andelimi’s body to see through her eyes. He forces her to look at things she can’t bear to see. He plants a complex spell directly into her memory, which would normally shatter a person’s mind, except grief has already numbed her enough to survive it. Then he commands the maniple to retreat, dripping enchanted water that will ignite any undead that walks through it. As a parting order, he tells them to burn a hidden oasis of runaway slaves on their way back.
Here’s the thing about this sequence. Hamanu is saving his templars’ lives. He’s also being utterly ruthless about it. He uses Andelimi like a puppet, makes her smile with a lion’s fangs where her teeth should be, and reminds everyone that there’s no hiding from him. The cruelty and the mercy are the same action. Abbey never lets you separate them.
Back in the throne chamber, things get worse. Hamanu lifts a stasis spell he’d cast over the whole room, and people start falling over. One woman is dead. The stasis killed her. Just collateral damage from existing near an immortal mind.
The elven runners brought another shard, but this one is different. Instead of dark glass, it becomes a sky-blue serpent that strikes at Hamanu’s ankle. He grabs it behind its eyes and crushes its skull, calling out Rajaat directly: “Thirteen ages beneath the Black has dimmed your wits, while mine have grown sharper in the sun.” Great line. But the bravado doesn’t last.
A Tyr-storm hammers the city. Blue lightning, deafening thunder, black rain that will require every wall and monument in Urik to be scrubbed clean. And then, in the darkness of the throne room, the voice of Abalach-Re speaks. She was the dead queen of Raam. Her luminous ghost appears around a blond Raamin templar who’d been carrying the second shard.
Her message is simple and terrifying: Rajaat is coming for Hamanu first. The champions want Hamanu to become the new dragon, to replace Borys as the guardian that keeps Rajaat imprisoned. They’ll offer him thousands of lives to fuel the transformation. Hamanu is basically being told: become the thing you’ve spent a millennium refusing to become, or the world ends.
I love how Abbey builds the dread in this chapter. Every time Hamanu deals with one crisis, another one appears. Inenek from the west, Dregoth’s undead from the southeast, shards from Raam and Balic, a Tyr-storm overhead, and now the ghosts of dead champions telling him his time is up. He’s the most powerful being on Athas and he’s running out of options.
The world-building detail that stuck with me most is the undead mechanics. Templars can raise the dead using Dark Lens magic without it costing life energy the way sorcery does. But if a stronger mind is controlling those undead, your necromancer gets consumed and becomes one of them. It’s such an elegant, horrible system. War in Athas isn’t just about who has the bigger army. It’s about who has the stronger will.
Next up in Chapter 9: Hamanu interrogates the Raamin templar, deals with the storm’s aftermath, and has one of the most honest conversations of his immortal life with Pavek.