The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume II

unaccustomed sensation of flight.
    A vague tingling ran up and down his leg. He shared Shayla’s pain as magic gone awry pierced them both. His belly cramped as Shayla began her premature labor.
    Anger at the irresponsible magicians below boiled within them both. They opened their jaws wide, sending forth a blast of dragon, fire. He watched as flames engulfed the people below, spread to the dry wheat, and up the few trees. He heard Druulin and his assistants scream in agony as fire took them.
    He took no satisfaction in the revenge. The ghost of dead baby dragons haunted both of them.
    Suddenly he was free of the hypnotic contact and knew who he was and why he stood in this mountain meadow learning a new form of magic.
    (We can give you dreams of what has happened or what you want to happen. Rarely, we can give you a glimpse of what will happen. Nothing else that we can tell you is within our power. Yet we are a source of magic for those who choose to accept our covenant,) Shayla said.
    Knowing her grief, Nimbulan wanted desperately to be among those who formed the covenant between dragonkind and humans, to use Shayla’s magic for peace and control of those who wielded magic indiscriminately and harmed innocent bystanders. Caasser had thrown the spell that wounded Shayla—a spell Nimbulan had devised and taught his fellow magician.
    Nimbulan looked at Shayla and her children with new sympathy. “I take responsibility for those who hurt you. I was not at the battle, but I could have been. I could have woven the spell that cost you the lives of your babies.”
    (Will you work to end the irresponsible use of magic?)
    “I so swear by the Stargods and all I hold dear.”
    The dragons didn’t respond immediately. Nimbulan searched Shayla’s eyes for some indication that he had been accepted by them.
    He fell into the glittering whirlpool of Shayla’s eyes. Dizziness overwhelmed him. Then he awoke, sitting in a thronelike chair padded and covered in blue and silver, the signature colors of his magic. Around him, other magicians sat in similar chairs, each covered in different colors. He recognized none of the men, all much younger than he. Except . . . was that Lyman to his right, his face shadowed by the torches stuck into wall brackets directly above him? In the center of the circular stone room rested a table unlike any he had seen before. One solid piece of black glass. No forge in all of Kardia Hodos could generate enough heat to burn away the impurities of black sand to create true glass of a quality to stand up to daily use. Only one source of clean sand existed that could make the small glass lenses used by magicians.
    No man could afford a table of solid black glass.
    (No one man could afford the table, but a commune of magicians in covenant with the dragons could request dragon fire to forge such a rare symbol of their combined power.)
    Abruptly, Nimbulan was back in the meadow, standing next to Myri, facing Shayla, a live dragon who promised them a way to create peace. His hand still tingled with the cold, smooth feel of black glass. . . .
    “Can you give Myri a dragon dream of her past so that she will know how to gather your magic?” He pressed his temple to push away the lingering memory of the magicians working in concert around that magnificent table. The magnitude of the spell they shaped awed him.
    Beside him, Myri gasped and shook her head in denial of those memories.
    (Myrilandel is not ready. When the time is right, she will know what is important. Her lineage and her childhood will become clear.)
    “What about the near past? The days that come and go without my awareness, though I march through them?”’ She clung to Nimbulan’s hand, her sweating palm nearly slipping away.
    (The near past is under your control. When you can accept what you have done and what has been done to you, you will remember.)
    “But I need to know!”
    “Think of the quicksilver, Myri. The images will come when you need them.” But Nimbulan wasn’t sure. He’d seen several people so traumatized by the wars and the ghastly deeds perpetuated in the name of right that they chose never to remember. Not even their birth name. Some invented exotic pasts that had nothing to do with reality but recreated the person into someone they would rather be than themselves.
    Who was Myrilandel? Could Moncriith’s delusion of demons spring from his interpretation of the dragons that protected her and guided her? Only the