“How …?” Klassh whispered.
In reply came the strong mental voice of the elf.
You were tricked, dragon. It is as simple as that. The terrible and mighty Klassh was tricked.
“Mindspeak? You have it?”
Yes, Klassh, and I have always known who you were; I have the gift. That is why you couldn’t read my thoughts freely. In fact, though you didn’t know it, you read only the thoughts and emotions I allowed.
“Who…?”
I truly am B’ynn al’Tor, half-breed son of the House of Tor, but my story is not as you supposed it. The elves are more enlightened these days and realize the strengths that the human-elf pairing can produce. Many of us are recruited to special assignments, for which our combination of superior strength, constitution and agility make us ideal. I am a Dragonsbane, a killer of dragons.
“Never heard … of you,” Klassh muttered.
None of your kind ever will. We leave no trace, just a dead dragon, killed by accident. It has done wonders to demoralize the dragonarmies. That’s right, Klassh, B’ynn al’Tor continued. I came to kill you. Once I locked my mind onto yours, you didn’t have a thought I didn’t hear. You never made a move I didn’t anticipate. I fed you the emotions and thoughts you wanted to hear. I played you like a fish, reeling you in, then giving you some slack, until the final yank lured you into my trap.
“How did you know about the sword?”
The sword is the Blade of Tor, an ancestral heirloom lost during the Kinslayer Wars. The same dwarves who gave me the secrets of Cobb Hall also informed me their ancestors had recovered the blade and hidden it in the great hall.
Silence from the dying dragon. Just the ever-slowing breath pumping in and out of his tortured lungs.
Nothing to say, dragon? B’ynn al’Tor asked. Goodbye then. You will die shortly and I will go on to kill many more of your brethren.
The elf watched as the dragon’s eyes slowly closed for the last time, and he waited for a few hours to be sure Klassh was dead. Satisfied, B’ynn al’Tor, Dragonsbane, turned and climbed back up the ravine, never looking back.
* * * * *
In another century, Dunstan Van Eyre, student of Astinus, would write about the Dragonsbane:
During the Third Dragon War, a secret group of highly trained elves and half-elves was formed. It was chartered to hunt down and kill important dragons. The members were remarkable warriors and magi. They were Dragonsbane. Schooled in the physiology and psychology of their prey, the Dragonsbane used stealth, deception and consummate planning to eliminate the dragons one by one. They left no trace, ensuring every death looked like an accident. Though they operated for decades and though the dragons must have had suspicions about the many accidental deaths of their brethren, the dragons never uncovered any evidence of their existence. This sage only learned about them by accident, from a descendant of arguably the greatest Dragonsbane of them all, B’ynn al’Tor.
The motto of the Dragonsbane was: “One Dragon, One Bane.”
Rumor has it that they still operate to this day.
Glory Descending
Chris Pierson
The summer wind bore autumn’s faintest chill as it snapped the castle’s blue-and-gold pennants. The knights on the castle walls wearily stamped their feet, squinting across the Solamnic plains toward the southeast. Always the southeast. One bold squire had been heard to say that if an army came upon the keep from the northwest, it could knock down the wall and be taking tea in the outer ward before anyone noticed. On learning about the jest, the boy’s master had sent him to muck out the stables for his loose tongue. Good humor had been scarce in the keep for some time: the coming war with the Highlords had seen to that.
Still, Sir Edwin couldn’t help glancing to the north-west with a grim smile as he emerged from the building that had once been the castle’s chapel. That was before the Cataclysm, before the gods had turned their backs on the world. He shook his head as he marched up the stairs to the keep’s high inner wall. The joke, he knew, had been harmless: though the knights were surrounded by the enemy, they knew there was no danger from the northwest. That wasn’t where the bulk of their foe’s army was concentrated.