The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume III: Volume III

dominated every aspect of surviving the Kaalipha’s strange whims and bloodlust.
    Now Yaala laughed and understood that her life could never be complete until she put aside her fears. Yaassima was dead. Yaala’s mother could no longer terrorize her. I am free of her! She laughed out loud, needing to include others in her mirth. But who?
    Powwell, her only friend, was on that lonely desert plateau, lost in time. Nimbulan and Myrilandel were back in the capital. And she was lost in the void.
    I don’t want to be alone.
    The energy swirled in a stronger vortex. Colors erupted around her. Her limbs tingled as they had when she tumbled through the dragongate.
    Abruptly she found herself sitting beside a large tree with a rocky overhang sheltering her from a spring rainstorm.
    Evey joint in her intact body ached and rippled with the residual energy. Especially the base of her spine where she seemed to have landed on her butt on the hard forest floor.
    “Was I in the magicians’ void?” she asked whoever might be listening.
    The tree branches whispered among themselves as the wind rose and the rain intensified. Their conversation meant nothing to her mundane senses.
    She crawled to her knees, searching her surroundings for clues to her whereabouts. She needed a drink. The hours she had spent on the desert plateau had evaporated every spare drop of moisture from her.
    She knew how to survive. And survive she must. Yaassima had taught her that. The only valuable lesson her mother could impart.
    She knew how to survive alone.
    The rocky overhang looked promising. Rain ran down the rocks in heavy rivulets. She lapped at them, refreshing her parched throat.
    A small measure of strength returned to her with the influx of water. She drank more deeply and filled her waterskin.
    Yaala crept deeper beneath the overhang until a large outcropping sheltered her back from the pelting rain and fierce wind. Her prominent spinal bumps fit nicely into the crevices as if made to fit her unique body form.
    “Right back where I started from. Only this time I don’t have Powwell.” A deep ache opened within her, unrelated to the physical distress of her adventures.
    “Powwell!” she howled, more alone than she’d ever been before. More alone than when Yaassima, her own mother, had executed Yaala’s father and dipped her hands in the still warm blood.
    “Oh, Powwell, find me, please. I don’t want to be alone.”

    The city of Hanassa, home of renegades, dragons, magicians, and mundanes
     
    The kardia rumbled and rolled beneath Rollett’s feet in the hellish volcanic crater called Hanassa, home to mercenaries, political outlaws, thieves, murderers, and exiled rogue magicians.
    Stargods? Not again!
    “Everyone out! Get out of the tunnel now!” he yelled as he dashed forward. Two dozen men streamed past him, each seeking the exit. Some of them showed signs of panic as they ran. Rollett touched each man on the shoulder, offering reassurance. They calmed down and cleared the tunnel in an orderly fashion.
    The confines of the excavation amplified the sensation of motion from the quake. Dirt trickled through cracks in the ceiling of the lava tube passage. Instantly Rollett scanned the partially blocked tunnel with every sense available to him.
    He and his crews had almost reached the section where three men had died the last time the only known exit from Hanassa had collapsed on them.
    “I won’t sacrifice any more men to Piedro’s bloodthirsty god Simurgh,” he proclaimed to any who might hear. “I won’t let this cursed city trap me any longer.”
    With his last words he slapped his hand onto the most vulnerable crack. Before he’d had the chance to breathe deeply twice, magic coursed through his fingers into the unstable tunnel. On the third breath the calm of a light trance descended in waves upon his muscles. His mind floated free of the restrictions of his body. He followed his magic into the walls of the ancient volcano.
    He found the imbalance of broken layers of solidified lava and aeons of dirt. A push here, leverage there, and the tunnel stabilized at the same moment the kardia ceased quaking.
    Rollett returned reluctantly to his sweating and exhausted body.
    “Is it safe, Rollett?” one of the masons whispered from the tunnel entrance. Rollett had elevated the man from captive slave to honored workman soon after they began the first digging-out of Hanassa.
    “I think so. Give it a moment.” He breathed deeply