Opal of Light: An epic dragon fantasy (The Keeper Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  Opal of Light

  Norma Hinkens

  Dunecadia Publishing

  Contents

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Afterword

  Also by Norma Hinkens

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  Chapter 1

  Orlla stilled her breathing to a measured hiss as she parted the dew-laden leaves with the tip of her bow and nocked an arrow against the taut string. A single droplet of sweat took shape beneath the finely-etched leather headdress on her forehead before trickling down the side of her nose.

  Her bow trembled in her right hand for a tense heartbeat as she aimed down her arrow, wrestling with her decision. Broken phrases from the Keeper pledge flitted through her mind.

  Noble, honorable, just, these I strive to be.

  Bravery, restraint, trust, these I offer.

  In just a few short weeks, she’d be asked to swear fealty to those words and more. Would she be ready? More importantly, was she worthy of serving Efyllsseum, the chosen kingdom, guardian of the light dragon stone that powered the ancient runes?

  Vaguely, she registered the early morning trills of the wood warblers loitering in the branches above her, oblivious to the human life that hung in the balance—hers for the taking. A warranted kill, by her estimation. Bravery and restraint warred with one another in her heart.

  Twelve long years ago, she had watched, with her stomach rising up her throat, as plundering Pegonians carried off her mother—Orlla’s scrawny seven-year-old frame wedged into a mildewed tree hollow for hiding. The terror of that day was forever branded on her mind. The fat fingers of traders prodding her mother’s flesh, forcing her lips apart to check her teeth, their overpowering perfumed stench as they rustled around in rich robes, appraising her mother with the practiced eye of a huntsman inspecting prey.

  “This one’s blemished!” an unpleasant rasping voice had croaked, yanking with disgust on her mother’s hair. “Won’t fetch much coin, but bring her anyway.”

  Orlla had instinctively run her small, trembling fingers over the long strands of white hair that flowed from the crown of her little head, contrasting sharply with the rest of her raven locks.

  “A sign you are blessed, my child,” her mother had often assured her.

  The other children in the village of Dorsching were fascinated by the snowy streaks in their midnight tresses. Orlla had always considered her mother, Enndolynn, beautiful. Evidently, the traders didn’t.

  A thickset, one-eyed guard with a knot of dyed red hair had shoved her mother to her knees in the dirt and bound her hands behind her back. The whistling sound of his braided leather whip, studded with bone, haunted Orlla in her dreams. She squeezed her eyes shut, blotting out the rest of the memories, as she fought to keep her composure. The images from that fateful day still stung like a fresh wound scraped clean.

  Reluctantly, she lowered her bow, sparing the life of the badly bleeding figure in her sights. Dressed in the garb of a Pegonian soldier, he lay by a shallow gully on the other side of the trees cupping his hands to the trickle of water running through it. She was a Keeper, not a murderer, duty bound to a pledge of honor and restraint. She couldn’t bring herself to kill a wounded man. Even though his presence here could weaken the veiling runes, his vulnerability moved her in a way that prompted her to forgive his folly in wandering this close to the pass that shielded the island kingdom of Efyllsseum from the rest of the world. He would be dead before nightfall and posed no real threat to their security.

  Silent as a shadow in her doeskin boots, Orlla slipped backward through the frail mist that hung in the air, retreating to the grove of waist-high grass where her mentor waited.

  Akolom looked up on her approach, his ice-gray eyes a seamless mix of penetrating and benevolent. “Is the pass secure?”

  She nodded, fighting a twinge of guilt at the lie on her lips. “I thought I heard a muffled footfall, but it was only a squirrel foraging for acorns.” She replaced the arrow in the leather quiver attached to a sturdy belt around her waist with as careless an air as she could muster.

  Akolom smoothed out his long, trailing blond mustache and beard, and nodded, apparently satisfied by her explanation. He had no reason to doubt her—she had never lied to him before. “Then our work here is done.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small piece of jerky. Holding out his gloved left hand, he looked skyward, whistling for his falcon, Abe, and motioning with his other hand. Before long, a black speck surfaced, and Abe swooped down, skimming gracefully over the screen of heavy oaks in the surrounding forest. Talons outstretched, he glided toward the grassy clearing where they stood, landing with impeccable grace on Akolom’s wrist.

  “Well met, my feathered friend!” Akolom’s lips curved into a satisfied smile. He fed Abe the meat and then turned to Orlla. “We should leave for Narto. The boatsmen await us.”

  They hiked over rocky gullies and through a dense network of lichen-encrusted trees interspersed with occasional shafts of daylight. Only the scurrying of tiny paws peeling off into the undergrowth, and the periodic clapping of wings broke the dense silence of the hidden pass. The narrow trail they climbed wound a perilous route through the wind-chafed Angladior mountains before leading down to the boat that would ferry them back to Efyllsseum—the island kingdom where the Opal of Light had lain buried for centuries.

  According to legend, the High Dragon King had grown tired of the contentious dragons and their constant bickering over dominion in the human world and hurled the Opal of Light and the Onyx of Darkness from the heavens five hundred years earlier. The Opal was the islanders’ most deeply-guarded secret, the source of their eternal youth, and they would die to protect it.

  Orlla looked out over the bow as they glided out onto the silky darkness of the open water. The honeycomb orb of the sun, half-obscured behind the towering jagged rocks that framed Narto’s harbor, spilled a brilliant glow over the water that did not extend to the shores of the mainland. Silhouettes of seabirds dotted the skyline as they flapped overhead catching the eddies. She was thankful to be returning to her adopted homeland and leaving the gloom of the mainland behind. An iron dusk had gripped it during the devastating fifty-year war that had followed the demise of the light and dark dragons, and the sun had never fully broken through since. Shivering, she pulled her cloak tighter. “It will be good to feel warmth on my skin again.”

  Akolom grunted in agreement. “The mainland is a bleak and unwelcomin
g place.” He rubbed his hands together briskly. “I’m ready for home and some fresh meat.”

  Orlla let out a contented sigh. “A roasted fowl does sound appealing after three days of dried deer strips.”

  The islanders adhered to the belief that consuming meat from the mainland would render the Opal of Light powerless to protect them from aging. Although it had never been proven, nothing would induce the Keepers who fortified the runes on the pass to risk spurning the incredible blessing of eternal youth.

  Orlla rolled her tense shoulders. Despite this being her favorite time to arrive back on Efyllsseum—when day and night blended briefly, then splintered apart in a vivid burst of light—the weight of her responsibilities quickly crawled from its lair back into her mind.

  “You look uncommonly pensive,” Akolom said. “Are you not happy to be returning to your family?”

  Orlla forced a smile that belied the dull ache in her gut at the thought of going back home. Her wayward younger brother, Samten, was the source of most of her woes. She had obligated herself to oversee his studies and make sure he graduated from the Keeper Conservatory. It was the least she could do to repay her adoptive father, Magnulf, for saving her life more than a decade earlier and giving her a place in the house of Radmount.

  He had discovered her huddled inside that musty tree hollow, half-frozen, dehydrated, and eating the sour-tasting ants that swarmed the scaly bark. Risking the ire of the other Keepers at the Conservatory for polluting the island with mainlander blood, he had taken her back with him and raised her along with his six-year-old son, whose mother had drowned the previous summer. Orlla grimaced. She had learned early on that while the enigmatic Opal of Light preserved the islanders’ youth, it could not shield them from death in its myriad forms.

  “I’m worried about Samten,” she conceded with a sigh that bespoke weariness of the topic. “As you well know, he has already been called before the Conservatory mentors thrice and disciplined for insolence. He has a brilliant mind and could easily master the runes if he chose to apply himself, but his unwillingness to submit to the rigors of the program worries me.”

  She directed her gaze to the cottony, tangerine-daubed horizon bleeding into focus. “It would break Father’s heart if he failed to complete his training. He longs for his son to follow in his footsteps.”

  Akolom gave her a commiserative smile, his eyes infused with a wisdom gleaned from two centuries of living. He was far too kindly a man to point out that her father didn’t even know who Samten was anymore, let alone that he was now a Keeper-in-training. Orlla had not spoken plainly of her father’s deteriorating mental faculties, but the Conservatory was well aware that the elderly mentor’s mind was unraveling even as his body remained firm and strong as a young man’s.

  “You burden yourself with things beyond your control,” Akolom said after a moment’s reflection. “Samten chose unwisely when he selected Barhus as his mentor. Barhus’s love for mead has long since overtaken his senses. All that is left of him is the exhaled breath of his legend.”

  Orlla flattened her lips into a tight ribbon at the harsh truth in Akolom’s softly spoken words. Keepers-in-training had the privilege of selecting their mentors. A mentor could elect to decline the request, but it was a rarity. Most considered it their sacred duty to pass on to the next generation of Keepers everything that was essential to keep Efyllsseum hidden from the outside world.

  Orlla was only too aware that Samten had opted for Barhus because of the unprecedented freedom it gave him to do exactly what he wanted to while Barhus snored in a drunken stupor on a bench someplace—Samten had boasted of it to her no less. Orlla, on the other hand, had been circumspect in her selection and chosen Akolom, the sitting master mentor, for his uncanny ability to know a person’s heart—sometimes better than they knew it themselves. His measured words were a balanced blend of encouragement, correction, and insight as he pushed her to master ever more complex combinations of runes.

  “What else ails you?” Akolom probed, his piercing eyes emanating a warmth that melted her defenses.

  “My father,” Orlla admitted with a vexed shrug. “His mind is entirely gone, yet he does not age. How is it a blessing to live so defeated an existence?”

  Akolom’s eyes narrowed at the irreverence in her tone. “The mentors themselves do not claim to understand the mysteries of the Opal of Light, but we must be grateful for what it bestows upon us. Its presence ensures bountiful harvests and protection for our kingdom. And for us, the sun shines strong and time does not run out. We are not subject to the decay and destruction experienced in Macobin and Pegonia, or the darkness lurking in the mainlanders’ hearts. We live in peace while they tear at each other’s throats like jackals.”

  Orlla clenched the wooden railing of the boat and stared down at the diaphanous froth churned up as the bow plunged through the water. For us, time does not run out. They did not age past adulthood, yet, they all died eventually. Death found them, even on the island.

  “You say the Opal of Light protects us,” Orlla said, after a few moments of contemplation. “But isn’t it true our ancestors were struck down when they dared to look upon it?”

  Akolom cleared his throat, his brows inverted into jagged peaks above his deep-set eyes. “There are rumors of death and madness, and everything in between. Perhaps, in concentrated form, the power the Opal of Light exudes is too much for us mere mortals. That is why the stone remains buried, by edict of King Ferghell, to protect us from the folly of our own curiosity.”

  Orlla thought back to the pilgrimage she had made a few years earlier with her father and brother to the rune circle near the volcanic crater in central Efyllsseum where the otherworldly stone lay buried. Only Keepers, and future Keepers-in-training were permitted to visit the rune circle, the sacred site where the runes were practiced and perfected, drawing on the power derived from the Opal of Light.

  Day and night, a luminescent glow lit up the crater. A single underground passageway led to the dragon stone, hewn centuries ago by islanders curious to find out what the source of the light was—now guarded by King Ferghell’s personal Protectors. Legend had it the few who made it back to the surface and spoke of the indecipherable rune inscribed on the dragon stone, had died within hours, their bodies bathed in a peculiar honey-colored glow that glistened through their graves for weeks after they had been buried.

  Orlla knew better. Her father, a former master mentor himself, had secretly entered the tunnel over a century earlier and deciphered the rune before his mind had gone. She had found the vellum he had written it down on and seen the formula he had used to interpret it. When she had spoken of it to him, he had made her swear never to wield the forbidden rune unless the fate of the world was at stake. She dreaded to think what the rune was capable of should that day ever come.

  She allowed a thoughtful pause to ensue before asking, “Do you think the dragons will ever rise again?”

  Akolom stroked Abe’s feathers, contemplating the question. “In his infinite knowledge, the High Dragon King cast the dragons’ stones to earth to end their perpetual warring. If even he could envision no other way to stop them, we must hope they never rise again.”

  As a Keeper, Orlla could never voice her deep-rooted suspicion that somewhere the Onyx of Darkness still existed, working to defeat the purposes of the Opal of Light. No one spoke of it, no one dared utter its name for fear of the malevolent power that might be unleashed upon them.

  “You performed well on this rotation.” Akolom steepled his long, slender fingers as he stared out over the ocean. “You fortify the veiling runes with an ease beyond your years. My recommendation to the Conservatory that you be sworn in as a Keeper will be without reservation.”

  Orlla pushed down a pang of guilt. Would Akolom still recommend her if he knew the truth—that she had failed to report a Pegonian soldier wandering dangerously close to the pass to their kingdom?

  She was still puzzling over what he had been doing so
far south. As far as the mainlanders knew, the Angladior mountain range, hewn by centuries of wind and ice, was impenetrable. Perhaps the man had been wounded in a skirmish with Macobites and had skirted south to evade his attackers.

  Whatever the reason, Orlla didn’t rue her decision to let him live. Even at a distance, it was apparent his wounds were severe enough to kill him without assistance from her arrow. And if by some stroke of luck he survived, she was confident the intricate runes she had woven to keep the pass safe were more than adequate to hide it from the roving eyes of a lone, wounded man.

  When their boat docked later that morning at Grisalt Wharf on Efyllsseum, Akolom laid a hand on Orlla’s shoulder. “I have a friend here I wish to visit. I’ll see you at dawn training. Rest well, and don’t concern yourself further with Samten. I will speak to Barhus about him.”

  Orlla shot him a grateful smile as he walked up the street with Abe on his wrist. Although she doubted it would change anything, it heartened her to know Akolom cared enough about her and her family to involve himself in their troubles. He was the only mentor in the Conservatory who did. The others were less then enamored with her brother’s reckless abandon when it came to taking up the mantle of responsibility as a future Keeper. Even their father’s legacy as a former master mentor would not be enough to shield Samten from the consequences of his actions forever—a fact she had tried to impress upon him countless times.