The Eye of the Chained God

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The first time Vestapalk, as a young dragon, had flown high, he’d felt like the world belonged to him. Not in the sense of boundless opportunity, the way lesser races seemed to mean it, but in a way that woke something in his dragon heart. The world belonged to him. From horizon to horizon, everything below was his to possess, nurture, or destroy as he saw fit. And the higher he flew, the more the distant horizons expanded and the more his territory presented itself.

Oh, he had been a naive wyrmling. His quest for power in the years since had nearly killed him more than once. But he was still flying and his territory was still growing. Soon the world would truly belong to him.

In distant Nera, a human woman fled from him down a dark alley. She did not realize he only drove her into a trap. Vestapalk shifted his focus so that the woman ran toward him, lurking near the alley’s end.

Outside the gates of a shadowed dwarf town, he gripped a struggling guard with four wiry legs and chewed on his shoulder with sharp teeth. The dwarf screamed. Other guards appeared. Vestapalk leaped from his original prey straight into the midst of the would-be rescuers. He bit a second and raked claws of red crystal across the face of a third. None of them would die, not as such. They had his saliva and fragments of his claws in their wounds, though. They were infected.

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