"Elizabeth Haydon - Rhapsody 5 - Elegy for a Lost Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haydon Elizabeth)

sensed she was pointed north-northwest. Across the miles she could feel
it calling, her lair, her stronghold, though the details of what it was were
still scattered.
It mattered not.
Once oriented in the correct direction, she set off, crawling through the
earth, still believing herself to be human, dragging a body that did not
respond the way she expected it to relentlessly forward, resolute in her
intent, slowly gaining speed and strength, until the ground around her
began to cool, signaling to her that home was near. Then, with a burst of
renewed resolve, she bore through the crust of the earth, up through the
blanket of permafrost, hurtling out of the ground in a shower of cracking
ice and flying snow, to fall heavily onto the white layer that covered the
earth like a frozen scab, breathing shallowly, rapidly, ignoring the sting of
the cold.
She lay motionless for a long while beneath that endless night sky
blanketed with stars, thought and reason returning with her connection to
this land, this place to which she had been exiled, in which she had made
her lair.
The dragon inhaled the frosty wind, allowing it to slowly cleanse her
blackened lungs as the dragon sense in her blood was cleansing her mind.
And along with thought and reason, something else returned as well,
burning hot at the edges of her memory, unclear, but unmistakable,
growing in clarity and intensity with each moment.
The fury of revenge.



2
The king of the mountainous realm was away when the peak exploded.
A man born as an accidental by-product of depravity and despair, of
mixed bloodlines that came from the earth and the wind, his skin was
almost magically sensitive, a network of traceries of exposed nerves and
surface veins. He was, as a result, innately aware of the vibrations in the
wind that others defined as Life, could oftentimes tell when things were
not as they should be, when something was disturbing the natural order of
the earth, especially the earth that was his domain. Had he been in his
kingdom when the wyrm awoke from her sleep, he would have known it.
But Achmed the Snake, king of the Firbolg and lord of the realm of
Ylorc, was half a continent away, traveling overland on his way home
when it came to pass.
So, like his subjects, the guards who walked the edge of the grave itself,
he missed the chance to intervene, to stop what was to come.
And, by chance, because of a weapon of his own design, the cwellan,
which he had adapted just for the purpose of penetrating the hide of a
dragon, he alone might have been able to do so while the wyrm lay in her
sepulcher, prone and disoriented. His weapon had drawn her blood
before.
By the time he returned home, the beast was long gone.
His mission in the west accomplished, he had chosen to return to his
kingdom in the eastern mountains alone, riding the same route as the