From Embers Read Free Page A

unwilling to intrude on the scene. A part of him was grateful for this distraction. It had united them, in its way. It had distracted them from Gunther's defiance and swept Erik's challenge to the side. A part of the prince was grateful, but the greater part felt grief at his wife's fear. He stroked her hair and touched her cheek and whispered in her ear.
    "Come back to me, my Elsa. I am here."
    "Oh, Wotan," she moaned against his palm. A shadow passed over the room again, and Wotan frowned. He brushed the tears from his wife's cheek with a calloused thumb and trembled at the mindless panic in her eyes. She licked cracked lips, and a childish little sob escaped her. "My Wotan." Her voice cracked. "You were right."
    Behind her words a piercing shriek tore the air. It was the sound of a hunting falcon magnified a thousand times. It pressed hard against his eyelids and twisted in his guts. Elsa gave a scream of her own, almost in answer, and then she fell limp in his arms. Her courage and strength had burned like a candle, and there was nothing left.
    The prince heard the sounds of nervous confusion among the chieftains, but he ignored them. He gently, carefully laid his wife upon the ground next to his sleeping boy. Then he rose and turned to the Council. They were assembled in half a circle, five paces away; silent, anxious, and afraid. Wotan met their eyes, one-by-one, and he gathered them in. He bent the fingers of one hand, beckoning, and they came to stand behind him as he turned back to the door. That same terrible cry came again, but the chieftains stood together now.
    Nothing came through the door. Instead, an explosion tore away two-thirds of the wall, leaving a jagged, gaping hole in the Hall of Meeting. "You were right," she had said. He felt molten steel in the pit of his belly, and winter-cold iron behind his heart. Wotan drew the axe hanging from a loop on his belt, and he heard the Councilors behind him reaching for weapons that had long been useless. They were a warrior people. All these servile centuries of man could not take that from them. Perhaps they could not carry a message to the king, but they could make a warning here and now.
    Wotan felt the thunder of his heart. He felt the fire in his veins. He screamed his fierce defiance and more than a dozen voices shouted right behind him. And then they were moving, leaping through the rent wall, and Wotan sensed Gunther at his side, Erik at the other, both ready and willing to fight by their prince. Their heads turned this way and that as they scanned the woods for any sign of the unknown threat.
    But Wotan knew better. "You were right," she had said. He raised his axe and pointed to the sky, and fourteen warriors' faces turned up. And there above them was a dragon out of legend. Shades of black and violet to match the midnight sky. A tail as long as the Council Hall, a head at least as tall. Its wings could hide the sunlight, and its teeth could chew through stone. It dove at them now, claws outstretched and flames roiling in its gaping maw. And in the distance, dancing over the trees, a dozen living shadows flew to join it. A dozen distant, piercing screams echoed the elder legend's cry.
    "You were right," she had said. The dragonswarm was come.
    Then the monster was upon them.
    THE END

Afterword from the Author
     
    My family moved around a lot as I was growing up. Not as much as a military family, maybe, but every five or six years we'd pull up roots and cross a state line. I never really took it that well. I was born in Dodge City, Kansas, but while I was still a baby we moved down to Dallas, Texas. Just before I started elementary school, we moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma. Then I transitioned over to middle school by moving north to Wichita, Kansas.
    I settled down in Wichita. That was two decades ago, but half the friends I have today I met in Wichita. That's also where I started dating the girl who's now my wife. I became a writer and dreamed up most of the