Dragons heir, p.1
Dragon's Heir, page 1
Dragon's Heir
Book 2 of the Blood of the Covenants Series
Leah E. Welker
Lightbound Media
Copyright © 2024 by Leah E. Welker
Visit the author’s website at leahewelker.com
Published by Lightbound Media LLC, Columbia, Maryland
Book cover art and design by Rebecca Frank
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Leah E. Welker has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024940469
Print ISBN: 9781964174044
Ebook ISBN: 9781964174037
First Edition
Contents
Key Terms & Translations
The Six Realms
Prologue
1. Talk
2. Thinking
3. Secrets
4. Weapon
5. Power
6. Stars
7. Darkness
8. Angel
9. Niceties
10. Even
11. Queen
12. Duty
13. Date
14. Gone
15. Shots
16. Senses
17. Reach
18. Mad
19. Idiots
20. Sleep
21. Awake
22. Buzz
23. Monster
24. Pull
25. RSVP
26. Won
27. Push
28. Questions
29. Look
30. Plans
31. Parting
32. Dream
33. Star
34. Trust
35. Steam
36. Appearances
37. Want
38. Jinx
39. Moondaughter
Epilogue
Sneak Peek
About the Author
To my siblings—Tia, Mark, and Jenessa—for a lifetime of love, laughter, adventure, and friendship. You will always have a place in my dreams.
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.William Butler Yeats
Key Terms & Translations
Races
draká (“druh-KAH“): the original “dragons.”
amá (“ah-MAH“): human(s); the sentient inhabitants of Earth.
dramá (“druh-MAH“): the term for the race that emerged from the combination of draká and humans.
Blood Manifestations
drakón (“drah-KOHN“): dramá chosen to have far greater magic and gain a drakáform.
amón (“ah-MOHN“): dramá who are not chosen, yet still have the Blood of the Covenants and cannot accurately be called “human.”
Distances
Rough equivalents
ild: inch.
foot: literal translation.
erd: yard (only a couple dramá feet).
ald: 100 dramá feet.
eld: half an English Imperial mile.
elden: an English Imperial mile.
Time
dek: Roughly 1 minute, made of 56 moments.
deken: Roughly 1 hour, made of 56 dek.
day: 28 deken.
The Six Realms
Prologue
From “An Earthren’s Introduction to the Realms,” by Eskala Brightflare
In the beginning were the Creators.
Most all we know about Them, those highest of all beings, are encapsulated in that very title: Creator. They are the omnipotent, immortal beings that form the stars and worlds of the cosmos, and when They are done forming the suns and planets of a system, They create life itself.
The first life They create in each world is that world’s Tree. For it is the Tree that protects a world from the darker powers that prowl around the outskirts of the light, ever searching for a way to defy the Creators’ purposes. A Tree forms an invisible, intangible barrier around Her world that almost entirely shuts the dark ones out.
Once the Tree is planted and grows powerful enough to form that shield, the Creators make all the other forms of life, from the kind too small to see to the kind too vast to comprehend. Once the world is flooded with such life, and all is set into balance, then, and only then, do the Creators form the Tree’s children.
Each Tree is given one sapient race to tend and guard from the dark ones that would destroy them. Thus, She is the race’s Mother in spirit, even if not in flesh.
Like any mother, however, She can only guide. She cannot coerce—for choice, by the Creators’ decree, is sacred. Her children are free to choose to ignore, abandon, or even weaken Her…and Her protections around their world. The greater heed Her children pay to Her wisdom, the more power She has to protect them, the more they prosper; the less heed they pay to Her, the less power She has, the more Her children suffer from their own foolishness, and the more the dark ones slip in and take hold.
Sadly, this happened to the race that first inhabited Ythra, the mother world of our Six Realms. The draká, whom you would know as dragons, were the Tree of Flame’s first children, and from the scant records they left, we believe they lasted for millennia, waxing and waning in their faithfulness to the Tree, as all civilizations do.
Finally, a thousand years ago, their greed and pride became so severe that they nearly annihilated themselves through famine and war. Then, as their Tree’s power to protect them flagged, a dark one struck.
The Devourer of that time was an immense, dark spirit of terrible power with a never-ending hunger for all that lives. By then, it had amassed a mighty army from the dregs of its other conquests, for if the Devourer managed to at least partially consume the spirit of a living being, that life became its slave, what we call a “consumed.”
Long had the Devourer slavered after a race so large and full of power as the draká were, with whom it could conquer worlds without number and on whom it could gorge for eons. Long had it watched and waited for its opportunity, and long had the Tree of Flame warned Her children of its plans, but to no avail. The Devourer launched the First Invasion at the draká’s greatest moment of self-inflicted weakness, easily tearing its darkrifts through the Tree’s thinned barrier across Ythra.
It is a miracle the draká even survived. Even then, it was only at great cost. To belatedly bolster the Tree’s waned power brought on by their own neglect, many draká had to give their blood and very lives to the Tree. With that freely offered sacrifice, the Tree strengthened enough to close the Devourer’s gates and allow the draká to disperse the Devourer’s forces now trapped in their world.
Once a dark one invades, however, it is no simple thing to keep it out. In this case, the Devourer’s consumed armies scattered and hid themselves. Some broke free of its control, but some generations still slavishly serve it to this day and do its bidding to erode our safety and prosperity.
The draká of that time were in especially perilous straits. Famine, war, and then invasion had brought them nearly to extinction. Battered, bloodied, and starving, the draká finally turned as one to the Tree of Flame and asked Her how they were to survive.
She told them: they would have to change, and to change, they would need the help of another Tree’s children. To reach those children, they would need gates of their own—gates of the Creators’ original design, fueled by the Tree Herself.
To be worthy of such gates, the draká swore the First Covenant. The terms:
To guard the gates as they guard the Tree.
To only use the gates to go where the Tree permits.
To never claim a world with another Tree’s children as their own.
To never take whatever belongs to another Tree’s children by force, only by trade or gift.
When all draká who remained swore the First Covenant, the Tree revealed to them how to construct a sungate. So, at great sacrifice, they did.
One thing you must understand about the draká is that they were magical by nature—there would have been no other way for such large and remarkable creatures to exist except if magic were in their very blood. However, their magic could go no further than that; all the power they had went into maintaining their very lives. So it is with our drakón when they enter their drakáforms to this very day; even our King, the most powerful drakón among us, can barely light a candle while he is in his drakáform.
The Tree could give some of the power to the blaze that first sungate required, but the draká still had to give the first spark, and that spark required the sacrifice of yet more lives, even if it was to power the gate for only a few seconds. The moment the gate was alight, the Tree’s chosen Seven rushed through…and set foot on Earth.
Yes, Earthren, this was when dragons first came to your world. For your people were the ones the draká needed—the children of Ice.
Tragically, your people had long since abandoned and entirely forgotten your Tree, the Tree of Ice. Even when the Seven found a clan of humans willing to listen to and then help them, the group had to follow the visions of their wisewoman and rely on the dogged determination and ingenuity of their chief to find the Tree in the frozen wastes of the place you call Greenland.
Yet find Her they did, and before Her, seven humans and the Seven draká swore the Second Covenant. The exact terms and wording, we do not know. Only that all fourteen of them became new creatures, a new race entirely—the dramá. The word itself reflects the merging of two races into one, combining draká with the Drona word for human, amá.
Moreover, all fourteen were granted the Blood manifestation of drakón, and thus were able to be in amá- or drakáform at will, so long as they had enough power to maintain the latter form. But now, in amáform (“humanform,” if you will), all the magic of a draká’s body condensed into a smaller, more efficient form, leaving an unprecedented excess. For the very first time for both races, they were capable of wielding power.
No lives had to be sacrificed to power the gate to return to Ythra. The Fourteen were able to light it with no harm to any of them, and they and the rest of the human tribe who had agreed to come to the new world went through.
When they arrived, a new order began on Ythra, with the Covenants as their foundation and the Tree as their guide. The original Seven draká and the seven humans who changed with them became the founders of our seven clans, and the formerly human chief was appointed the first Sunfilled Monarch, with the draká who swore with him as his Heir. Thus both races were represented within the Golden Crown, and a new era of hope and increasing prosperity dawned.
Not all ran smoothly with the two races’ integration, however. Only a few generations later, amón—dramá with only an amáform (whom you might consider “human,” though they have the Blood of the Covenants, even latent as it is)—outnumbered drakón. Yet drakón, being more physically and magically powerful, did not equally share their power and privileges with the amón as the Tree commanded, beginning to think themselves inherently superior, destined to not just be their people’s protectors but also rulers.
The dramá became divided, and the drakón increasingly arrogant and abusive toward the amón, ignoring the Tree’s warnings and commands. Finally, the Tree declared that the Moontouched—the clan with the most amón and thus considered the least of the clans—would be the next clan to receive a Realm of their own. When the Brightflare Clan hotly protested, the Queen sided with the Brightflare, citing the need for peace.
Then, at that delicate juncture, the Lord of the Moontouched Clan died and the other clans rejected his amón Heir. When she came to Crownhold to contest her claim, she was assassinated by an unknown hand.
Enraged and afraid, the Moontouched Clan as one petitioned the Tree of Flame to allow them to leave the other six clans and return to Earth, the only remaining place where they thought they could belong. Before the other clans could react, the Tree granted their request, and the Moontouched left.
Then, at their second, secret request, the Tree shattered the sungate that connected Ythra to Earth, allowing the Moontouched to fully sever themselves from the other six and shattering the bedrock order established by the First and Second Covenants.
Mournful and repentant, the dramá changed their ways once more, putting in safeguards to protect and elevate amón to their equitable place. Even so, their actions were too late to reclaim the Moontouched, whom they thought lost to them forever. Thus the Seven Clans became the Six Clans, and what should have been Seven Realms became the Six Realms, and appeared as if they would always be so.
Little did the common dramá realize that the Covenants, the very foundations of their magic and thus existence, had been torn asunder and unraveled more with every passing century. Only the people’s and Monarchs’ increasing faithfulness to the Tree shored up that magical reserve enough to prevent an entire collapse.
Then the day of our redemption dawned, in the most seemingly unremarkable of ways: a young Earthren woman, Sarah Lind, an unknowing descendant of the Moontouched Clan, fell through a frozen creek near her home on Earth and into the “least” and “last” of the Six Realms: Ykran, Realm of the Peacegrowth Clan.
There, the Golden Heir, Koriben Sunfilled, found her. Together, along with Koriben’s rightwing bodyguard, Yvera Battleblood, and leftwing adviser, Korinth Starkissed, they began their urgent quest of finding Sarah’s way home and restoring the Covenants.
Near where Sarah first emerged, they discovered a new kind of gate, a moongate, and went through it to find an abandoned mountain hold—not on Earth, nor any of the Six Realms, but on a new world entirely.
There, Sarah and Koriben received a message from the Tree of Ice that the new world was to be given to the Moontouched Clan as the Seventh Realm, and Sarah was the Tree’s chosen leader to restore that very clan. Sarah and Koriben were instructed to find the five other moongates hidden in the five other Realms, and then the Trees of Ice and Flame would reveal the final gate that would lead to Earth, where the Tree of Ice waited to invest Sarah with the power Sarah would need to help the dramá in their darkest hour. For the Tree of Ice warned them that on the Winter Solstice, the Devourer would invade again, this time striking straight at the heart of the Realms: the Tree of Flame.
Which meant Sarah and Koriben had only ten days to find the gates, restore the Covenants, and save us all.
In my opinion, it is then that their story truly begins.
Chapter one
Talk
Sarah
As I sat in my newly gifted kitchen and faced the two drakón who were glaring at me, I did my best to stave off a headache.
It had long ago begun pounding in between my eyes and didn’t feel like it would let up soon; at least the warm mug of tea in one hand had taken off the worst of it, the steam and the tea’s mildly spiced flavor helping clear my sinuses. The healing Ben had given me earlier that day to drive off my previous headache felt like a lifetime ago.
I glanced at Kor, thinking to address the more reasonable of the pair. Surely he understood I was only the messenger in this tense situation.
Ben’s leftwing (meaning his primary adviser, diplomat, and spy) was sitting across from me, his brown, aristocratic face twisted with a scowl. His dark sapphire eyes—the color of which perfectly matched his short, luxurious, perfectly styled curls—were unusually hard, their normal charismatic, mischievous glint gone to reveal the cunning core I was coming to learn always rested just below the surface.
“I told you,” I said to him, scowling in return. A few days ago, I would have never been so bold. Now, I was simply too darn tired to be shy. “I’ve told you every single word the Tree told me. In order. Do you know how ridiculous it is that I can even remember every single word?”
“Of course you do,” Yvera snapped.
As a proper rightwing and bodyguard to Ben, she was perhaps the most fearsome young woman I’d ever met. She must have been over six and a half feet tall, with a warrior’s body, high cheekbones, perfect eyebrows marred only by a single scar, olive skin, and violet eyes and hair, the kinky strands currently tightly bound in her usual long, thick braid.
Yvera wasn’t the most patient of souls normally, but ever since I’d said the word “Devourer,” she hadn’t been able to stay still, and she was currently doing her best to wear a track into the stone floor of my kitchen.
My floor, I thought with wry amusement. My kitchen.
Would wonders never cease. But then, this one had already done wonders for my heart. I hadn’t realized how soul weary I’d become from the constant moving on Earth. How listless, how powerless I’d felt, like driftwood at the mercy of the sea. I loved my parents and knew they loved me; yet the work that they had chosen had taken a toll I hadn’t yet been able to put into words to them. Not until I’d been given a home, all my own. One that no one was going to take from me—not if it had been made for me a thousand years ago and then declared to be mine today by the closest thing to a deity that I would probably ever encounter.
