The Storm Lord

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The great upturned bowl of the Plains’s sky was drenched with the blood of sunset. The sun itself had fallen beyond the Edge of the World. Now, before the rising of the moon, only a single scarlet star gemmed the cloak of gathering twilight.

A group of about twenty men were crossing the arid slopes—hunters, but not of the Plains. They rode thoroughbred animals, with here and there a light hunting chariot of Xarabian design, yet they were not Xarabians. They moved with a special, almost a specific, arrogance, which pronounced them alien to this landscape far more than did their black hair and black-bronze burnish of skin. Yet it was the scale markings of their metal that told the precise nature of their menace, for they were Dortharians, dragons, and they carried a High King in their midst.

Rehdon, King of Dorthar, the Storm Lord, that god-given title which essentially meant mastery of the entire continent of Vis, this now darkening planet: a king, ruler of kings. Even the hunting helm bore the spiked Dragon Crest. Beneath it, age had infected, with its own reptilian markers, a pair of eyes that were staring upward, toward the gem of the scarlet star.

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