Draxus Flameheart's Arc

Chapter 1 of 9

Draxus Flameheart crouched behind a snowbank and watched strangers burn his family's fire. Below him stood the ruined clan-hold where his ancestors had guarded a dragon-hoard for generations. Raiders had stolen that hoard long before his birth. He had come home to find the maps and records that would lead him to it. Instead, he found scavengers camped in the broken gate, roasting meat over his forefathers' hearth. He counted eleven of them. Frost clung to their furs and their spear-tips. They had fortified the entrance with ice-packed rubble. A woman on the wall spotted movement and shouted. "Off our ground, lizard, or we bleed you where you stand!" Draxus stood. He was tall, black-scaled, and twice the width of any of them. He lifted his warhammer from his back. Its head burned bright even in the snow, ringed with black ice that never melted. The flames threw orange light across the wall. Two scavengers stepped back. The woman did not. "This was my clan's home," Draxus called. His voice stayed warm, almost friendly. "I don't want your camp. I want what's under it. Let me pass and nobody dies today." The woman spat. "Everything under here is ours now." Draxus sighed. He hated fighting people who were only hungry. But he had crossed frozen wastes for this door, and no cold clan would turn him back. He walked toward the gate with the burning hammer low. A spear flew. He knocked it aside. Three men rushed the rubble wall to meet him. Draxus swung the hammer into the ice-packed stone. The blow cracked the barrier and threw a man off his feet. Heat hissed against frost. He did not aim to kill. He aimed to break their nerve. Then a strange sound rose behind the wall. A high, doubled shriek. Two small shapes scrambled from a gap in the fallen stones, chained by the neck to a post. One crackled with blue lightning. The other trailed cold mist from its scales. Wyvern hatchlings, half-starved, kept as camp guards. The lightning one snapped its chain when Draxus's fire warmed the metal. The ice one followed. Both bolted straight to him, hiding behind his boots. The scavengers froze. Their guardians had chosen a side. Draxus lowered the hammer. He looked at the woman on the wall. "Your beasts want to leave. So do you. Take your people and your meat. Go." She stared at the two hatchlings pressed against his legs. Then she called her clan down off the walls. They gathered their furs and filed out into the snow without another spear thrown. Draxus stood alone in his family's ruined gate. The hold was his again. But when he stepped inside to search for the old maps, he found the scavengers had torn the place apart for firewood and scrap. Whatever records once pointed to the hoard were gone, burned or carried off. And two hungry hatchlings now looked to him to feed them.