The Seal of Karga Kul_ A Dungeons & Dragons Novel - Alex Irvine [108]
Remy would walk the path. He jingled the pouch. He would learn to experience sadness and the thrill of victory at the same time. Over his head, the sailors sang, and the ship turned south away from the Quay of the Cliff, heading for open water and the towers of Toradan.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alex Irvine is the award-winning author of five original novels including Buyout and The Narrows, two short story collections, and several shared-world and media-related projects, such as Batman: Inferno and The Vertigo Encyclopedia. His comics work includes Daredevil Noir, Iron Man: The Rapture, and Dark Sun: Ianto’s Tomb. He has worked as a reporter for the Portland Phoenix, and was part of the writing teams for the ground-breaking ARGs The Beast and I Love Bees. He lives in Maine.
APPENDIX
THE BLOOD OF IO
As with all stories that deal with the ancient past, tales about the birth of the dragonborn are hazy in their details and often contradict one another. Each tale, though, reveals something about the dragonborn that is true, regardless of the historical accuracy of the legend—and it often reveals much about the teller.
One tale relates that the dragonborn were shaped by Io even as the ancient dragon-god created dragons. In the beginning of days, this legend says, Io fused brilliant astral spirits with the unchecked fury of the raw elements. The greater spirits became the dragons, creatures so powerful, proud, and strong-willed that they were lords of the newborn world. The lesser spirits became the dragonborn. Although smaller in stature than their mighty lords, they were no less draconic in nature.
This tale stresses the close kinship between dragons and dragonborn, while reinforcing the natural order of things—dragons rule, dragonborn serve.
A second legend claims that Io created the dragons separately, at the birth of the world. Io crafted them lovingly to represent the pinnacle of mortal form, imbuing them with the power of the Elemental Chaos flowing through their veins and spewing forth from their mouths in gouts of flame or waves of paralyzing cold. Io granted them the keen minds and lofty spirits shared by other mortal races, linking them to Io and to the other gods of the Astral Sea.
During the Dawn War, however, Io was killed by the primordial known as Erek-Hus, the King of Terror. With a rough-hewn axe of adamantine, the King of Terror split Io from head to tail, cleaving the dragongod into two equal halves. No sooner did Io’s sundered corpse fall to the ground than each half rose up as a new god—Bahamut from the left and Tiamat from the right. Drops of Io’s blood, spread far and wide across the world, rose up as dragonborn.
This tale separates the creation of dragonborn from the birth of the dragons, implying that they are fundamentally separate. Sometimes, those who repeat this legend suggest that dragonborn are clearly less than the dragons made by Io’s loving hand. Other tellers, though, stress that the dragonborn rose up from Io’s own blood—just as the two draconic deities arose from the god’s severed body. Are they not, therefore, this tale asks, like the gods themselves?
A third legend, rarely told in current times, claims that dragonborn were the firstborn of the world, created before dragons and before other humanoid races. Those other races were made, the legend claims, in pale imitation of dragonborn perfection. Io shaped the dragonborn with his great claws and fired them with his breath, then spilled some of his own blood to send life coursing through their veins. Io made the dragonborn, the legend says, to be companions and allies, to fill his astral