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Prologue

They emerged quite unexpectedly into our world, and the war followed close on their hapless heels. Both their emergence and the war occurred so very suddenly, in fact, that it was almost surreal.

The first reports of them were disregarded. Nothing more than the hallucinations of crazed, drunken, or druggie hikers--officials scoffed--or else the tales of liars and poor liars at that. But soon came photographs, footage, and artifacts of irrefutably non-human origin. At first, evidence and reports painted the dragons as being reclusive, pale scaled and sickly colored, seeming rather averse to the direct sunlight, as though they had been underground for a great, long time. In a matter of weeks though, they grew accustomed to the sun, and their colors became vibrant and vivid, exposure to sunlight apparently lending them renewed strength and vitality. They also grew bolder, or at least less reclusive... amiable, even. It wasn't long before they were reportedly flashing small, furtive smiles and friendly nods at stunned hikers and campers (and at the occasional Bigfoot hunter too).

Three months after the first sighting, amid the lauded cries of hoax and_humbug_ that still frantically railed at their very existence, a trio of the intrepid creatures strutted purposefully into a town in the vast, shimmering desert of prewar New Mexico. Reportedly, they walked down Main Street, eyes wide, curious, and very much intelligent, toting bags that witnesses described as large rucksacks or satchels slung across their torsos, muttering to one another in low, wondering tones. Aside from a myriad of gawping, cell-phone-picture-taking bystanders, the dragons--walking on all fours and not much larger than a mid-sized horse--caused no direct disturbances, but rather seemed very compliant. They even stopped and waited to cross a street when directed to do so by a traffic cop (who promptly renounced all coffee drinking and poured out the remainder of said beverage that was in his thermos).

After walking into a mercantile that had its doors propped open due to a broken air conditioner, they approached the counter and spoke to the very startled clerk in a language that sounded like it was straight from The Lord of the Rings. Leery of the shotgun that was promptly swung their direction (a universally understood gesture) they drew back and proffered several items from their satchels. They held the items out in their upturned forefeet, smiling nervously and signing as best they could that they wished to trade. They made the six o'clock news all across the state, and the internet was promptly abuzz with articles about the incident (some truthful and short, others exaggerated and not entirely candid). By the next week, photos (some sharp, others dubiously grainy) of the three dragons were everywhere. By the week after, the three dragons were practically celebrities.

There has been little, if any, agreement on whether or not any trading actually took place that day, or if so, whether or not the dragons were very satisfied with what they got.

Such incidents began to happen more and more frequently, and it was a surprisingly short time before some obscure linguist got ahold of a recording and declared that the dragons consistently spoke in a language that might as well have come from The Lord of the Rings, as it was almost certainly heavily influenced by, if not directly related to Norse and Old English and other such languages. Shorter still, however, was the time it took for the religious nuts and humbugs alike to seize onto the events and take full advantage of them, crying that the apocalypse was approaching and the beast of the pit had arisen. Occult activity and the sales of prayer-cloth scraps cut from the shirts of T.V. preachers rose at almost the same, incredible rate of skyrocketry.

Soon it was discovered that the dragons were emerging from great, extensive cave systems--vaults--in which their kind had spent centuries and millennia... and despite what some expected of them due to the savage behavior of some of their lesser cousins through history, the race that had begun to emerge from hiding was quite peaceable, courteous, and polite, even hospitable, and they were very advanced. Their technology, a bizarre hybrid of science and magic that baffled the brightest human scientists of the day, was sophisticated and extremely magnificent. Not only that, but they were still bright-eyed and curious, the lot of them... very apt and happy to teach and share, as well as to learn what they might. As a race and as individuals, the dragons were very willing and desirous of friendship. It was our world that they were reentering. It had been ours for a very long time, and they acknowledged that fact quite openly (once enough of their leaders had learned our modern tongues well enough to do so). They did not wish to take the world from us, they only wished for us to share it with them. They had wonders to make that possible too. Environmental concerns that had plagued our society for decades, slummy living conditions, food production, water purification... the dragons possessed solutions and methods that had never been dreamed of by any human mind. And why shouldn't they? They had spent millennia underground without devolving into savages, after all! As much technology and knowledge as they had, and they were willing to share so long as we were. The future looked so bright... so very, very hopeful.

Had it not been for the Revelationist Movement, the war might never have happened.

There were those fanatics who had seen too many of the wrong movies and read far too many of the wrong books, those who had spent too long with boring lives, and those who had a thousand other reasons... but they were all driven to stand behind the same heretical, cultic conclusion. The dragons, they declared, were the emissaries of the beast whose number is six hundred threescore and six. Accusing the dragons of being the servants of the Antichrist, they swept the world with their zeal, shouting their dark message in the streets, spreading their propaganda, marching through towns and then rioting in cities. Even in places that were primarily non-Christian, and so would have made little fuss over a supposed antichrist, the people were taken up in the surging madness of the movement. With terrible swiftness, the Revelationists uprooted the most widespread peace and prosperity that the world had ever known and razed all hope of unity to ashes.

Misunderstandings, outright abuses and attacks, abductions of dragons from cities and from places where they had been allowed to settle aboveground, blatant genocide... those, along with the sudden realization and understanding that all of those preachers on street corners and rioting demonstrators in the streets were speaking and acting against them as a race, lead swiftly to retaliation from the dragons. Had the United Nations let the matter alone, the dragons might well have eliminated the issue through their own legal systems, but the U.N. never had been the sort of group to leave well enough alone, and they put a stop to the retaliations with post haste. Tensions rose. The dragons were a peaceable people, but they would not stand by and watch their own slaughtered. Their blood boiled over the hurts dealt their kind, and they would not stay their rage for long.

In a final bid for a peaceful solution, a meeting with humanity's leaders was requested by those of the dragons, seeking to ensure the discontinuation of injustices toward their kind or else to have freedom to exact justice on those responsible without fear of incursion with the established human governments. The meeting was hijacked, those who had not the authority spoke for all of mankind, and the delusional minority dragged every single person on God's earth into a massive and destructive conflict. The blazing wrath of the dragons flowed sudden and swift, and the war was long and brutal.

If the dragons had seemed advanced and capable in peacetime, then they were truly mighty and terrible in warfare. Our sheer numbers and our ability to quickly steal and recreate their technology were the only reasons we were not utterly wiped out in the first two months of conflict. Their vaults became fortresses overnight, and their calm, amiable settlements developed into organized war camps and outposts with remarkable efficiency and speed. Great, majestic, fearsome, ferocious, and armed with technology far beyond our own, they put their distant doppelgangers of ancient myth and legend to shame. They cut easily through our ill-prepared military and took a great deal of territory in a single, unified push. The winter slowed them enough to even the scales, if not tip them. Our first victories were in the snow. Their frost mages were fewer then; there was less iciness in the world.

Civilian casualties were low at first--low on the human end--as the dragons seemed to recognize the fine and often ignored line between desperate defender and malignant foe. They appeared to refuse to kill those who were defenseless if they could avoid it, and there were even reports of them providing humanitarian aid to the inhabitants of captured towns and cities. All of that changed as soon as they realized that we, honorless, desperate, underhanded, and cunning, would make no such distinctions. Whenever the opportunity arose, we slaughtered male and female, young and old, leaving none alive if we could help it and disdaining even to take any prisoners. That was a grave and regrettable mistake. The dragons retaliated with incredible unity, wiping us out with grim brutality and horrifyingly serene calculation--man for male, woman for female, child for child. One slain for every one slain. Absolute justice.

Scarcely ten years into the war, nuclear strikes were ordered and executed. Hell truly broke loose then, the dams of order and civilization breaching entirely and letting the floodwaters of chaos smash its mighty torrent across the planet. With so little but wilderness left intact, the remaining urban areas were easily targeted by both sides. Towns were razed, cities left uninhabitable. Established governments collapsed as the people lost all faith in them--another in the ever-lengthening list of grave mistakes made by humanity. Guerilla warfare became the rule. Astoundingly, amazingly, unbelievably, our technology and, in a few cases, our grasp of magic caught up with theirs over time, and we were at last able to push back with significance, broken though we might have been. Their own race began to fracture under the strain, splitting into factions that fought amongst themselves... just as our kind had already done and had been doing since Cain first slew Abel in that bloodied, fateful field. Sadly, even in the destruction of our enemy's unity, there was no hope of unity for us.

The earth felt the conflict heavily, and she groaned wearily beneath the weight. With large swatches of land nothing more than shimmering, radioactive slag and entire continents reduced to rubble, both races diminished. Guerilla warfare devolved into passively hostile nomadic wanderings. The internet, the cell phone, and the automobile, once the crux of civilized humanity, were lost as HAM radios grew to supremacy in long-range communications and the already dwindling supply of gasoline and oil finally gave out. A great deal of technology became lost to both races, and most of the dragons' fantastic vaults--those that yet remained habitable--were lost, sealed off or else destroyed. Knowledge of magic too dwindled, fading with the memories of lost greatness. Wind moaned its lamentations over shattered streets. Nuclear winter dropped a sheet of white over most of the grey and withering world.

With the passing of years, the broken husks of tall buildings and skyscrapers, ruined as they were from fire and bombs and blasts of magic, soughed beneath the mighty weight of time and the winter snows and crumbled to dust, as bones are wont to do when left for long enough. Residual magic, like anti-radiation, acted ever so slowly upon the desolated world. Under that influence, forests regrew, and even alien, snowbound jungles sprang up in places. Strange creatures, mutated by radiation, altered and strengthened by magic, sprang from what wildlife remained, and they inhabited landscapes just as otherworldly and twisted as themselves. Those places where houses and buildings still stood or half-stood became ghost towns, feared and shunned by all but packs of bandits and the grim phantoms of the unhappy dead.

As the world spun itself into a dark, desperate new era, factions settled down, small groups staking out their lands and establishing settlements. After a time, many people forgot why there was such enmity between man and the dragon, even as the dragons slowly forgot how great a people they had once been. Even then, sparse fighting continued. It was the return of the dark ages. A feudal period filled with a strange mingling of magic and guns with looters and seekers-out of secret buried places.

***

The old man fell silent, looking up from the small, hand-bound book that was only partially filled with his own, scratchy handwriting. He waited patiently, the lantern casting his worn, wizened features in a strange glow that looked much warmer than it felt. Getting no reaction, he raised his eyebrows to the silent group of younger people who were huddled across from him in their slipshod shelter of snow and canvass tarp.

"Well? What do you think?"

"That you've just fed us a load of bull," one girl declared, clearly fed up to her ears with having to listen to the ramblings of an old geezer while being cold and cooped up because of the storm. She fingered her knife dangerously, itching to flick it into something... her sharp, hazel eyes feyly hungered for the hearty sound of the steel sinking into something--anything--solid. The old man's own eyes flashed in the lantern's light.

"Cara! Shut up and put that knife away!" the other girl shouted, throwing her arms briefly into the air before giving a slight shiver and pulling them close to herself again. The air was cold, even here, sheltered from the wind and the falling snow. Even through her coat. The girl--a woman, really, well into her mid-twenties--turned her calmer, blue eyes to the man, apologizing and entreating all at once with aught but a look.

"I thought..." she started, but she bit her lip and hesitated a moment, apparently also feeling that the story she'd just been told under the banner of history was, indeed, a load of bull... but not really wanting to say so. The old man smiled softly. Those girls never believed what he told them, but at least the older of the sisters was polite about it.

"Hey, if he says it's so, then why shouldn't we believe him? It explains a lot... and it's not like he's some charlatan peddling gryphon's teeth or anything."

The man who'd spoken was crouching behind the others, nearer the back wall, where it was coldest. There had been strange magic in the lad's blood ever since he stumbled over an old spell trap some time ago, and he'd been rather akin to frost ever since. Again, the old man smiled, musing distractedly about the interesting things that passive spells do after centuries of magical decay. There before him was a man imbued with a magical inclination by a spell that was originally cast as a passively harmful ward. Fascinating. Had it been a rune trap now... unlike spells and wards, the meanings and exact effects of sigils and runes were not subject to decay, and only rarely did they weaken with time. Had it been a rune trap, that lad would be frozen solid right now--and quite dead for it--as opposed to actually enjoying the frigid cold that plagued his companions.

"Yeah, put a lid on it, Cara," another man said. He was younger than the first. He was rather a boy actually; not quite a man, but getting on near it. "Dan's nearly a dinosaur himself. I'd expect he did live to see those things, just like he said he did. Just because you don't know what a cell-phone or a knuckler-strike is doesn't mean there was never any such thing."

Cara harrumphed and grunted, "Fine. Sorry. Can I light some warmth in this icebox now, Dan, or do we have to shiver through another chapter?"

Daniel Backminster--who was indeed very, very old--smiled a third time and closed his book.

"Light up the stone, Cara. That was only the introduction, but I have to write the next chapter before you can hear it. I've got stories aplenty, but histories I'm just starting to put down onto paper."

With an utterance of "Thank God" that hardly sounded thankful or reverent at all, Cara pulled off her outer gloves and unzipped her outer coat. Quickly, eagerly, actually smiling with anticipation, she took a steel chain from about her neck and grasped the opaquely red quartz that dangled from it in her still-gloved hands. She knelt and muttered a few harsh words, and growled when nothing happened. The younger boy knelt beside her and offered to help.

"Shove off, Dylan. I know how to work my own blazestone."

"Yes," he agreed, softly, almost subtly, "You do, and you've got the right words, but you're pronouncing them wrong."

Ahhh... yes. A runemaster young Dylan truly was, or would be. With an uncanny instinctive understanding that let him read dragonish sigils and runes (without ever being taught), he was naturally more able to grasp the magics connected to the writing and utterance of those words. Cara accepted his help--begrudgingly--and there was a small but warm blaze flickering merrily before the group in short order.

"Ryan," the older girl chided jokingly, turning around to face the man, "Come sit where it's warmer. If you freeze solid, I'm not dragging your be-icicled butt through the snow."

Ryan let out a short laugh and stepped a little nearer to the lit blazestone, but seemed to recoil slightly before he stopped and knelt, still closer to the wall than the fire (though their shelter was small, so the wall wasn't very far from the fire to begin with). Dan frowned thoughtfully. He'd have to watch that kid. Magic was a very dangerous thing and could have strange effects on people. It wasn't unlikely that there had still been some efficacious malignance left in that ward spell... it could be luring him into his death of frostbite. He shook his head. If that was the case, it would have happened long before now.

"I would think," said Dan, earning the attention of the three who had been eagerly warming their hands over the flames, and the one who was slightly leery of the heat, "That those who make their living breaking into prewar buildings and old dragon vaults would be a little more willing to believe what is proven by the very artifacts they seek and sell."

"I believe in whatever gets me a full stomach," Cara grumbled morosely, shifting a seething death-glare to her older sister. "Which means I don't believe in Amber's hunting skills."

"Hey!" Amber retaliated, "You're the one who scared it away!"

"See? You don't even know what it was, so you couldn't have been that close anyway."

"We're always seeing new wildlife! We see stuff all the time that hasn't been given a name yet. And I was close enough to shoot it, if you hadn't played twinkle-toes and scared it off."

"Frankly, Cara," Ryan cut in, "I'm more worried about the fact that you tripped and wasted, not one bullet, but three."

He held up three ungloved fingers and wiggled them emphatically. Cara ground her teeth and prepared to send a flurry of blows smashing into Ryan's face, but Dylan dug an elbow into her side chidingly, distracting her.

"Yeah, Cara. If Amber's a bad hunter, then you're worse. See? You lost your gun, didn't you?"

He received exactly three blows to the gut, delivered courtesy Cara's balled up fist. Precisely one punch for each wasted bullet.

"I don't need a gun," she muttered.

The wind howled outside of their shelter, more pronounced than before in the silence. The tarps had stopped flopping half an hour ago, the snow having collected too heavily on top to allow them the movement. The steel poles they'd used to support the tarps would hold--they always did--but that didn't make it any less disconcerting to think that they'd be digging themselves out in the morning just to see if the weather had let up any. And if it had, they'd be excavating the truck so they could roll out and search onward. If it hadn't... well, they'd be stuck for a while. No one wanted to think about that possibility.

"Don't beat yourself up, Amber," Ryan said gently, "we'll survive. You made up for it in advance by spotting that artifice from up on the mountain, and with any luck, it won't be cracked open yet when we get to it."

With a grin and a louder, teasing tone, he added, "It isn't like we won't be attacked by perfectly edible carnivores as soon as we reach the forest anyhow, so we won't have to worry about finding food for much longer, because food will come find us. Apparently, gyrbears and hulkwolves think humans are tasty snacks."

Dylan began to disassemble and clean his gun with an emphatic nod of agreement. It was an old piece, a pre- or mid-war model M16 assault rifle--a possession he'd scored rather unexpectedly in a burned-out vault. Dan was fairly certain it had belonged to a soldier that was killed during whatever attack had left the vault burned, but Dylan maintained the small comfort of having convinced himself that the weapon had been taken as a war trophy by a dragon and brought back to the vault. Ryan, like Dan, knew better--and they knew that Dylan knew better--but they'd long given up trying to argue the rather morbid and frankly moot point. What mattered was that (barring a few scuffs and a semi-melted portion of the plastic extendable stock) the weapon was in perfect condition after at least three hundred and fifty years of existence. They figured it was some magic tied to the vault that had preserved it. There was a surprising amount of such magic floating about the buried and crumbling places of the world, so pre-war gear was not as hard to come by as it should have been after so long a time... though working firearms were certainly a rarity.

Whipping out an oilcloth, Dylan began humming a jaunty tune. The rest stood or knelt in silence, brooding, musing, or fuming each about their own thoughts. A low, keening cry rose briefly over the noise of the wind. Daniel grinned, old, knowing eyes flashing blue humor.

"Hulkwolves indeed, Ryan, or else something that sounds remarkably similar."

Ryan grunted and sat on his pack, an old pre-war external-frame job that had more patchwork and duck-tape than original material. The temperature in the shelter was rising, and it took only a moment for him to remove his coat and strip down to his inner two layers with a sigh of relief. Cara shrugged her outer coat off as well, and her inner coat, but shot Ryan a dubiously befuddled look and pulled the inner coat quickly back around herself with a shiver. Ryan fingered a knife of his own for a second before pulling a bottle and a rag from his pack and setting to work oiling the blade. He joined in with Dylan's humming, occasionally muttering a few words of the old song. He raised his voice on the chorus, grinning at the ridiculousness of it.

"I don't know... I don't know... I don't know where I'mma gonna go when the volcano blows!"

Humming along with the boys, Amber stuck two thin steel poles into the ground about two feet apart, one on either side of the blazestone, and produced a third pole and laid it over the other two. Her spit assembled, she pulled a pot from her pack and filled it with snow from the hill-ward side of their shelter. The pot was hung from the spit by means of an S-hook, and Dan prepared a beaten old percolator with coffee for when the snow was melted to water.

Dylan finished with his rifle and reassembled it. Propping it up on his pack, he laid another rifle across his lap--Cara's rifle--and set to work on it with an enthusiastic grin.

"Always more fun," he chuckled, "to clean a gun that's been fired. Feels more useful than preventive maintenance against misfiring an unused weapon."

Cara's rifle was a cobbled conglomerate of various arms, mostly of more recent, post-war make. Dylan had made it for her as a peace offering a few years back, and it functioned well. An old, M1 carbine stock and magazine housing was the base--and one of the only two prewar parts--and the rest was dull gunmetal, burnished brass, and dull duck-tape. A retrofitted ACOG scope, which he removed and laid aside while he worked, was the only attachment. She had kept her flashlight and bayonet. When he was finished, he checked the magazine and, satisfied that it was full, popped it firmly into place and clicked the safety on.

"Alright, Cara," he said, voice thick and almost singsong as though talking to a small child, "This..." he pointed to the engaged safety switch, "is the safety."

She glared at him, but Dan laid a hand on her shoulder that silenced her seething retorts of "I know, jerk," and "Shove off, Dylan," before she could start them. On a single breath, he pushed both of them away from the imminent scuffle.

"You rather earned the lesson, kid. Dylan, don't be a jerk. She's liable to beat you senseless."

Dylan laughed meekly, casting a furtive and rather disconcerted glance at Cara... eyes showing that he knew she just might beat him senseless indeed.

"O' mighty master of firearms," Ryan said, voice bright and enthusiastic, "Would you, I pray, take mine rifle and mine handgun and oil them securely against the cold and the rust?"

Dylan laughed, holding a stout machete and the sheathed bayonet to his M16 out toward the other. "Only, o' keeper of knives, if thou wilt oil mine blades against the same dangers... both mine barrel knife, and my longblade also."

Ryan took the blades and handed over his guns, saying, "Forsooth, I wouldst do even so."

He flashed a grin at Cara and Amber as though they should find the exchange impressive. The girls only rolled their eyes at the running joke.

"No bard is more worthy of praise," Cara remarked, sarcasm thick as frozen syrup in her voice, "than the two morons we have to be stuck with."

Amber chose to pour water into the waiting percolator and hang that over the fire rather than to give any response. All she uttered, in fact, was some muttered remark about the fact that they at least had plenty of coffee.

After a short time, mats and bedrolls were laid out, and four of the five were soon asleep. Dylan took the first watch as the others slumbered.

Then, unable to sleep, he took the second. He should have waken Amber up for her watch, he knew, but he felt uneasy. Some foreknowledge dangled just within the perception of his mind, but he was unable to grab ahold of it and see just what it was. Intuition was churning his gut, making him feel uneasy. Even though he knew he'd get an earful for it, Dylan let Cara sleep through her watch as well. He woke Ryan for his watch, but still found himself unable to sleep for the doomful churning of his gut. Ryan stood his watch, poking at the blazestone with the tip of his machete, bored, then roused Daniel and went back to sleep.

Daniel and Dylan talked through the remaining hours of the night. The coffee was gone by the time they decided to poke out of their shelter and have a peek at the weather. The snow reflected the red-pink light of clear, dawn skies.

~~~

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It's a goofy Jimmy Buffet song. (It was either that, or Hey Jude.)