Part I
“Come they will under Freya’s purple lights in the five-and-thirty winter of our Fenris not yet. An enemy who will kill many of our wolves and give final harm to Olafr’s human. And will they the future of our fenrir and his queen take.”
?Sorceress Bera, Her Viking Wolves
Prologue
They came underneath a violet sky of dancing lights, winged shadows converging from every direction. Later this collision of charged particles cast off from the sun and the earth’s gaseous atmosphere would come to be known as aurora borealis or the Northern Lights.
The future etymology of the upright primates mattered little to Damianos back then. But for the rest of his life he would recall how appropriate this plasmatic solar windstorm seemed. How utterly dramatic a background it was for the wrong they would right that morn.
He and the other drakkon set down in the agreed upon assembling space, a wide expanse of land on the south side of a mountain. The mountain stood between them and the village his horde planned to attack, gargantuan and intimidating. Damianos supposed the sight of it alone might have been enough to turn back their weaker enemies.
The south face of the mountain was covered in glittering ice and inclined so steeply, the path up could almost be described as vertical. And there weren’t many alternatives to surmounting the monstrous marriage of rock and earth. An angry sea crashed formidable waves into one side the mountain. A dense forest filled with the heat signatures of all manner of predators, stretching as far as even a drakkon eye could see.
Indeed, the North Wolves had positioned their seat of power well. They’d surrounded themselves with a natural fortress of mountain, forest, and sea. The mountains and forest were nearly insurmountable, while the sea allowed the village’s wolf mutations to easily spot an incoming fleet of enemy ships, well before they had the chance to storm their shores.
A lesser army would have given up without a fight.
Fortunately their horde had wings. What was impossible for the second most advanced species on this planet was but a bit of work for them.
Damianos was the first to arrive but the last to land. He circled above, waiting until there were no more incoming drakkon on the horizon before setting down himself.
All the world’s drakkon had been called forth to wage this battle, but Damianos picked his father from the others in the horde easily. Only three dark blue drakkon were left in their species after their numbers were so tragically reduced by the Terrible Destroyer. Those remaining drakkon were his father, the Royal Overlord; his cousin, who everyone continued to refer to as the new king several millennia after his unexpected assumption of power, and himself. The Royal Overlord always arrived early and the new king, Damianos noted with one scan of the gathered forces, had not yet shown up.
He was late. Again.
It had been the new king’s idea to use one of the Royal Geneticist’s fating portals to take them to a time before the destruction of their planet. The plan had met with great cheer and instant agreement. Yet, after securing their agreement to wage attacks on several North Wolves villages in order to find one of these fating portals, the new king of the drakkon had barely been in contact.
Damianos was not surprised the new king had failed to show up this morn. Their king had achieved his current position through unexpected inheritance. Before that, he was the prince his brother had ordered Damianos and his father to assassinate, so as to erase any competition for the throne.
After their planet’s destruction by the Royal Geneticist, the remaining drakkon had let his younger brother assume the mantle. That choice, the Royal Overlord pointed out to his son had been lazy and based purely in tradition. It certainly had nothing to do with any performance metrics. If those had been taken into account, the other drakkon would certainly have chosen Damianos as their new king. For none better exemplified the superiority of their race than his son, a drakkon who’d been named to the most venerable position of Royal Huntmaster when he was little more than a millennia old.
Before his undeserved ascension, the new king had held two titles: Second Prince and, for the purposes of their mission, Royal Fate Maker. The second title only meant that the former Second Prince was a fating portal specialist, someone who’d spent more time writing lab reports than leading. And that was before he disappeared for many solar rotations, not showing up again until shortly after their planet was destroyed.
The Royal Fate Maker was no great hunter. Nor was he strong or particularly intelligent outside of his chosen field. And as far as Damianos could discern, the new king had no talent for execution.