Rebellion and Reckoning - The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King Chapter 9
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
If Chapter 8 was a war chapter, Chapter 9 is the emotional core of this book. Abbey slows everything down and lets Hamanu sit with his own pain. It’s devastating.
The chapter starts with cleanup. The Tyr-storm passes, the Raamin templar collapses, and Hamanu interrogates the poor man’s mind. Raam has fallen into anarchy since Abalach-Re’s death. Templars found the shard on the docks by the Sea of Silt. Hamanu kills the Raamin templar when he’s done, granting him a death no one can reverse. Mercy by Athas standards.
He also pulls the story from the elven runner who brought the Todek shard. Former Balic templars showed up with a “truth token” from their imprisoned king. One drew lots to unwrap it and died badly. These shards are getting more dangerous with each appearance.
Here’s where things get strategically grim. Hamanu can’t figure out if all these attacks are coordinated by one enemy or several. The puzzle doesn’t fit together, and that uncertainty is more frightening than any single threat. He meets with his commandants and actually listens to them. He takes their advice because “together, the mortal minds he’d assembled had more experience.” That line says so much about why Urik has survived this long.
Then he sends Pavek to his workroom to babysit the iron-bound chest containing his stealth spell. And here’s where the chapter becomes something special.
Pavek has been reading Hamanu’s memoirs. When Hamanu sneaks up on him, Pavek nearly destroys everything by knocking the table over in fright. The shard almost hits the floor. Hamanu catches it faster than sight or sound. They stare at each other. Pavek drops to his knees and calls himself an oaf. It’s funny and tense at the same time.
Hamanu asks what Pavek thinks of the manuscript. Pavek says, “I think, O Mighty King, that it is not finished.” Hamanu loses it. He wants understanding, validation, something real from this mortal. He’s been keeping secrets for ages and he just handed them to someone, and all he gets back is “it’s not finished.”
So Pavek asks the question that cuts to the bone: “Were you Rajaat’s favorite?”
And Hamanu realizes, for the first time, that the answer is yes. He hated Rajaat. Rajaat knew he hated him. But hatred doesn’t protect you from someone’s favor. Hamanu sees the parallel with his own relationship to Pavek and it breaks him a little. “I have become what I hated when I was a man,” he admits.
Then Abbey brings in the memory of Telhami, the druid woman Hamanu loved. She lived with him in the palace for years, maybe decades. Every day was bright. And then one morning she was dressed in traveling clothes. She’d had a vision of a waterfall beyond the mountains. Druids cannot stay, she said. And he could not go. Urik needed him. He could have forced her to stay. He could have killed her. Instead, he asked, “Will you return?”
That question, Abbey writes, was something Hamanu had never asked anyone before or since. The vulnerability of an immortal being asking a mortal not to leave him. It wrecked me.
Windreaver drops in and asks Hamanu a question Pavek also wants answered: why did Rajaat choose him? Hamanu says he never asked. Then he asks Windreaver something he’s wondered for a thousand years: “Were we betrayed? Did Myron sell my veterans to the trolls?” Windreaver says no. The trolls were already there. But the Troll-Scorcher didn’t expect Hamanu to come back.
Pavek asks what happened after the pit. Hamanu tells them. Burning sticks thrown down. A rope. Climbing into blinding sunlight after months in the dark. Meeting Myron of Yoram, a huge shapeless man in flame-colored silk who needed two men to help him walk.
And then the eyes of fire.
Hamanu’s blood boiled. His tongue became flame. His ears crackled. His eyes burst. He died in a black inferno. But he didn’t die. Yoram pulled him back from death and redoubled the agony. Over and over.
The chapter ends with Hamanu crushing his brass writing stylus into molten bronze in his bare hand without realizing it. Smoke seeps from his fist. He stares at the new crater in his ruined flesh. And Pavek, mortal Pavek who doesn’t understand, pours honey over the wound and wraps it in cloth. An old soldier’s remedy.
I love how Abbey writes: “Hamanu closed his eyes and reveled in a newfound pain.” Not the old pain. Not the memory. But the pain of being cared for by someone who shouldn’t care about him at all.
Next up in Chapter 10: Hamanu tells the story of how Rajaat remade him into a champion, and we witness the birth of the Troll-Scorcher.