Lyndruss sliced through the waist straps of his harness with his sword and tossed the weapon to the ground. Sliding down the beast’s shoulder, he hit the mud at a run and came to a stop at Tariskatt’s head.
The brilliance of his partner’s eye was already fading as the dragon’s lifeblood stained the puddled rain. Lyndruss could only watch, caught in a welter of unfamiliar emotions. He felt desolate, at a loss as to what to do, and frustrated there was no way to save the great bronze.
“Our fight will be remembered in songs,” the dragon whispered. It almost seemed as if he was trying to comfort the human.
“Only winners make songs,” Lyndruss replied savagely, kneeling in the mud beside the horned face that had suddenly become as precious as life to him.
The one metallic eye the fighter could see blinked once, far too slowly. “You’re a good rider, human. Don’t let it go to your head.” Tariskatt’s chest heaved one last time. His eye closed, he shuddered. The bronze dragon lay completely still.
Lyndruss felt a great, tearing pain. A scream surged through his mind and through his lungs. Raising his face to the heavens, he roared the dragon’s name again and again and again. The best friend he’d never realized. The dependable partner. The great intellect so unlike his own. Only his dragon, who had known and understood his strengths and foibles as no other ever had, mattered.
Frustrated, Lyndruss stared into the skies, watching the battle that, for him and his partner, was over. Lowering his head, the fighter stumbled through the rain toward a cliff rising at the edge of the plain.
The top of that cliff burned in Lyndruss’s mind like a beacon. The warrior climbed the rain-slick height, bruising his hands and knees. He welcomed the small pains that pushed through his dulled senses.
Staring at the battlefield carnage below, lit by a lurid sun setting between two banks of thunderheads, Lyndruss realized what he wanted most. To die with such a great dragon warrior as Tariskatt would have been an honor. But the last act of that crazy beast had been to save him, the human rider he loathed.
Was the final wish of Tariskatt’s dragon-centered mind to die without a human on his back? But Lyndruss had been on his back, ridden the dragon down, been the only witness to the great beast’s demise and his parting words. A compliment. Had the two of them used hate to cover other, more unfamiliar emotions?
Desolation swept his soul. Lyndruss felt cheated by the dragon, an enemy turned friend suddenly gone. He felt cheated by life. He desired release from his mortal body with every fiber of his being.
His eyes dropped to the edge of the cliff on which he stood. All he had to do was step into the fading light, already dim enough to hide the base of the sheer stone wall and the talus that littered its foot far below. So easy. So final. He raised one foot over the void.
So wrong. The warrior threw himself backward, shaking. After fighting Takhisis’s army for many months with Tariskatt, he couldn’t, no, should not make his last act wasteful.
A slow smile stretched his mouth, his blue eyes flamed as a thought arrowed through his mental agony. Quickly he turned away from the brink. He skidded recklessly down the same slope he’d lately climbed, taking small boulders, bushes, and showers of gravel with him.
His new sense of purpose glowed as brightly as Tariskatt’s bronze scales. There was a way for Lyndruss to take final advantage of his skill, as well as honor the dragon. He ran back to the battlefield and began stripping weapons from the dead, collecting as many as he could carry. Distributing them about his body took some time, but the fighter didn’t care. Everything had to be within easy reach-hung from thongs laced through holes punched in his leather armor, his belt, wherever he could find space. It no longer mattered if the heavy leather was ruined. Soon he would not need it any more.
Lyndruss rested for a moment after he’d finished. Then, with his usual thoroughness, he checked the positions of the knives, maces, swords, bows, and arrows he now wore. The fighter began walking toward the largest enemy war camp in the area. He would sneak in under cover of darkness, taking out sentry after sentry. Then, just at the right moment, he would fling himself into the midst of the draconians and the Dragon Highlords, yelling his new battle cry.