The Dragon of Crystal and Frost, page 1
The Dragon of Crystal and Frost
The Dragon of Crystal and Frost, Volume 1
Isis E. Prosser
Published by Isis E. Prosser, 2023.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
THE DRAGON OF CRYSTAL AND FROST
First edition. January 28, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 Isis E. Prosser.
ISBN: 979-8215038901
Written by Isis E. Prosser.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
The Dragon of Crystal and Frost
THE DRAGON OF CRYSTAL AND FROST
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About the Author
I want to dedicate this book to my mom and my friends for their support, and to my cats who did nothing except sit on my laptop when I was trying to write
THE DRAGON OF CRYSTAL AND FROST
The Diamondpeak Mountains had been named for the snow and ice upon them, which glittered like the finest diamonds. They could also have been named for being such a harsh, unforgiving environment that you would have to be as hard as a diamond to even have a shot at surviving them. For as long as anyone could remember, the mountains had been said to house untold treasures and grand secrets, but the line between history and legend had long since blurred.
What was fact, however, was the presence of a grand tower built almost a thousand years ago, when the landscape of the continent had looked much different. There had been brave adventurers, in recent days as well as the past, who had made the treacherous journey up the mountains and returned with tales of the tower... and the Winter Dragon that guarded it.
Legend told of an elven mage who had been imprisoned within the tower for a thousand years, kept from escaping by the ever-watchful eye of the dragon. Many a knight had climbed up to the highest mountain's peak to slay the dragon and free the mage. Not a single one had ever been heard from again.
Melanie knew from the start that she would be different. A knight from a far, far away queendom named Starhaven, she was going to be the one to slay the Winter Dragon and free the elven mage. She would become a legend in her own right, just like she'd known she would ever since she was a child.
Her horse, Haley, snorted as if responding to her thoughts. With a luxurious black coat and a white star on her forehead, Haley seemed to think herself a queen and vastly superior to Melanie, who she only tolerated because Melanie had access to wonderful things like apples and carrots. The stuff that true queens deserved.
On her own, Melanie wasn't anyone remarkable, but she commanded a quiet presence all the same. The sunlight on her light skin didn't make it glow, and her red hair was mostly obscured by her iron helmet, but her green eyes held the full depth of her determination, her hopes, and also her doubts. The polished iron and orange cloth of her armor covered a muscular body, but not the persistent slouch of her spine, or the ache within in.
Haley's hooves clopped against the rocky surface that barely qualified as a road, cracked and covered in a dusting of frost. Snow fell and the wind picked up, and Haley whinnied in dismay at the increased chill in the air. The trail ahead grew blurry from the snow, but Melanie could still make out the Diamondpeak Mountains. They need only stay on the road.
The snow quickly coated the ground, but Melanie barely made out slivers of the gray stone. She listened for the solid thud of Haley's hooves against the rock following the crunch of the snow. As long as she could still hear that, they remained on the path.
Melanie's sword, safe within its sheath, rested against her back. The warmth of the Fire Ruby set in its gold hilt kept the force of the blizzard from overtaking her and Haley completely. The magic burned eternal, having started Melanie was born; it would continue, she assumed, long after she passed on.
She had no skill in magic herself, mostly because she had never focused on it. She could create a small flame in the palm of her hand, but not a true fireball. She could heal minor scrapes and cuts, but gashes still required nonmagical means to properly mend.
The Fire Ruby was the most magic she had ever possessed, and she didn't fully understand how to actually wield it. She knew it contained great power, but most of the time it saw use as a regular sword, and a portable heater the rest. Her mentor, Rory, had given it to her, not because she had proven herself particularly worthy, but because Rory had no one else to give it to, and he had been dying.
"Are you sure I'm worthy of this?" she had asked him when he handed it to her. She had been afraid to even hold it, having never seen a magical weapon before that point.
"It's not about being worthy," he'd told her, his true expression unreadable underneath the Spring Dragon mask that he always wore. She'd never seen his face, for reasons she could only speculate upon. Had he been cursed? Or was he hiding from someone or something? He never told her.
But he told her everything he knew about the sword, to give her a chance at completing the task he himself had failed to do. Their order of knights had been an order of two. Just a mentor and his apprentice, nothing more and nothing less. Starhaven's other knights had rejected Melanie time and time again.
"Not good enough," they would always say.
But to him, somehow, she had been good enough. Of course, he too had been rejected by them.
"The sword is a key," Rory had said. "Passed down through the Order of the Lost Flame, each knight trying to find what door it unlocks and right a grave wrong committed so long ago that nobody remembers what it was anymore. I won't be able to find that door, but I believe that you can."
Slaying the Winter Dragon didn't appear to have any connection to the sword, but without a single lead Melanie felt compelled to take whatever chance at glory fate cared to give her. And she had noticed that old tales of the elven mage used symbols similar to those of the Order of the Lost Flame and the etchings on the sword's hilt. That had to mean something.
Or maybe it was pure coincidence. It had been so long since the legends had started, and since the sword had been recovered from the rubble of an old castle. Perhaps the symbols were derived from a similar origin, but separate factions. She couldn't be sure.
Admittedly, her decision to seek out the Winter Dragon of the Diamondpeak Mountains had been born almost entirely out of self-centeredness. Perhaps there was a connection between the dragon and the sword, but her main reason for making this journey was, again, to become a legend. Or at least try to. She didn't know where she'd even start for the Lost Flame's own journey.
She hoped Rory would understand this detour. She didn't know what the World Beyond was like, or if he could watch her from it. Well, she'd go back to aimlessly wandering the continent searching for where the sword belonged after she set the elven mage free.
The village within the shadow of the Diamondpeak Mountains came into view amidst the windstorm, sending relief surging through Melanie's body. Shelter, warmth, and blessed rest at long last. The houses were made of wood and brick, nestled within a wall of snow-covered trees, the pathway into the mountains buried under the snow.
But what Melanie found most striking about the village was how... quaint it all looked. For a village that lived within the shadow of a great dragon, no special measures seemed to have been taken to defend it from the mighty beast. There were no watchtowers, no obvious storage facilities for weapons, not even any shelter besides the trees which couldn't possibly conceal the village if the dragon flew overhead.
The village presented itself as if the dragon didn't exist at all, aside from a cute painting on the sign of their one inn, the Yawning Dragon. It struck Melanie as incredibly odd. Had she been misled? Were the Winter Dragon and the elven mage all a simple child's tale?
The idea that she'd come so far for... nothing hit her like a ton of bricks.
Well, she wouldn't give up just yet. She'd have to stay for awhile anyway. She could talk to whoever was willing to speak to her and learn what was real and what was pure fiction. If nothing else, she could put a persistent rumor to rest and move on, however underwhelming the idea felt. She'd come here for more.
There was a small shelter for animals next to the tavern, and with Haley safe and warm (but probably unamused), Melanie made her way into the building, only to be greeted by silence. Everyone inside, having presumably been engaged in conversation before Melanie walked in, stared at her like she was a ghost, and she couldn't meet any of their gazes, her confidence cratering in that moment.
"Another one?" The tavern keep, a pale-skinned woman with hazel eyes who wore a green coat, looked at Melanie. her face entirely unreadable. But the tone of her voice told Melanie enough: she definitely wasn't awelcome here, for reasons she wasn't yet sure of.
"Another what?" Melanie asked, even though she had a feeling the answer was either "adventurer" or "knight". "I'm just here to see—"
"You're here to see if the legends about the elven mage in the tower, guarded by a dragon are true, yes?" the tavern keep asked, her voice holding something back. "I'm sorry to disappoint you, but the dragon is dead."
"...The dragon's dead?" Melanie blinked, feeling like someone had punched her in the face. "What about the elven mage, then? Is she—"
"There never was an elven mage, that was simply a story concocted many centuries ago," the tavern keep said. "The dragon died several moons ago. Maybe it was old age, or maybe it ate something th
Disappointment struck Melanie, yet a part of her saw through what seemed to be a ruse on the tavern keep's part. There was something she was hiding, but Melanie wasn't sure what. Nonetheless, she didn't want to question or pry. "Well, news travels slow, then."
"That it does..." the tavern keep said, looking Melanie over, like she was searching for something in particular but keeping whatever it was to herself. "But you're welcome to stay until the blizzard clears. You've come a long way, after all."
That couldn't be argued with. Melanie was exhausted, and she knew that Haley was even more so. And even with the magic of the Fire Ruby, they'd freeze solid if they tried to go back out under the blanket of night. A warm bed would be nice, if she could quiet her mind enough to sleep for once.
MELANIE WAS NOT, IN fact, able to calm her mind down long enough to drift into a proper slumber. Her thoughts danced with the imagined form of the dragon, and with the words that the tavern keep had said. She went over the conversation several times. The dragon was alive, and the villagers didn't seem to mind the dragon—that much she was almost sure of. She also suspected there was an elven mage, but not necessarily in the role the legends claimed.
This was no longer about claiming glory, she soon realized; instead, she was now chasing after a mystery that her brain had chosen to latch onto in place of processing her grief.
The Fire Ruby glowed softly within the leather sheath at her bedside. It looked the same as always, yet she sensed a different kind of energy emanating from it, like it was reaching towards something and trying to pull her along. She swore she heard a whisper in the wind, just outside the window. Like a voice calling her from the dark.
Exhaustion ebbed away, her strength renewed by a sense of purpose. The whisper came again, louder this time. She fumbled about in the dark, awkwardly putting her armor back on by only the dim light of the Fire Ruby to help her see what she was doing.
She needed to go up to the mountains. She needed to find where the dragon was, whatever the truth was. She reached for the sword, slinging the sheath over her back.
The blizzard had mostly subsided, but the wind was still bitingly cold. Everyone in the village seemed to be asleep, and she was able to step out of the tavern without anyone noticing her.
"I'll be back for you," she whispered to Haley inside the shelter, holding a treat under the horse's mouth while stroking her mane with her free hand. "I promise."
She hoped she'd be able to keep that promise, if the dragon turned out to be alive and as fearsome as the legends assured. But she didn't know what to expect now, with the tavern keep's words ringing in her head. Not the things she'd said, but the things she hadn't.
She had to know what was up there.
Her hand fell from Haley's mane, but she felt the horse's eyes follow her until she disappeared into the darkness of the night. It was better this way. With Rory gone, Haley was the only one that Melanie had left in her life. It had never been the plan to put her at risk against the dragon. She couldn't bear to even think of it.
But that also meant she'd be making the trek up the mountain alone, with only a vague idea of where she meant to go.
The strange energy in the air pulled at her again, and unconsciously, she followed it. Her boots sank knee-deep into the snow, the cold seeping through steel and cloth to bite at her. She hissed quietly, the frigid air igniting the pain in her spine to higher levels. Only the warmth of the sword at her back gave her some sense of relief, but now that she was walking instead of riding Haley, the fatigue got to her.
She pushed through it. She knew she would pay for it later, because ignoring her body's demands to rest never ended well, but it wasn't a lesson she planned to learn any time soon. Her patience came and went with all the fickleness of, she realized with some irony, a dragon. And right now, she couldn't wait until the sun rose. She had to reach the peak of the mountain.
The Diamondpeak Mountains were as far from the Queendom of Starhaven as could possibly be, and making the journey up them only made Melanie long for home all the more. In the cold darkness of the everwinter, she longed for the warmth of Starhaven's beaches and the golden sun.
She wanted to see the stars, but all that greeted her when she looked up was a sea of black. She could barely make out the snow as it descended. The landscape itself was all white snow and gray stone, without a single splash of colour that she could see under the blanket of night.
The Diamondpeak Mountains were a harsh place to live, yet people called them home all the same. She could respect that. The magic of the world called out to different people; to whoever would listen.
Magic lived in everything, including the land itself. The wind, the rock, the people, the creatures. The magic sang and danced with the wind, a performance that Melanie could sense but struggled to follow. The magic of Diamondpeak was cold, harsh, yet somehow fair.
And it beckoned her, a stranger from beyond the ice and snow. It felt like a siren's call, and she couldn't refuse it, wherever it brought her. She retained a sense of caution, but she followed it all the same.
The pathway leading up to the peak of the tallest mountain wasn't as treacherous as she had been led to believe, even with the weather. Covered in snow, it still showed telltale signs of being well-traveled. Signs and markers made of pristine wood where she would have expected them to be old and weathered; shelters lining the trail, aged but maintained, new planks of wood amidst the old.
If the dragon was dead after all, had the people come up to see it when it was alive? Were they still climbing up here? Or were these built and repaired by adventurers?
It did make the desolate mountain seem a little less empty. There was life here, both transient and permanent.
When she finally reached the peak and the tower came into view, her heart skipped a beat. With the top obscured by the snowy wind, she couldn't see how far it reached. Its white bricks were covered in snow, yet they didn't look weathered. The steel door looked like it had been forged the day before.
As she adjusted the sheath, readying sword and shield, deep rumble arose within the howling wind. The Fire Ruby glowed a stark red against the sea of black and silvery white. The rumbling grew louder, punctuated by the unmistakable sound of a wing beat from a massive creature. And then she saw it. The silhouette of the dragon, alive, against the sky, growing larger and larger until the dragon was upon her, silver eyes shining under the few strands of moonlight that slipped through the clouds.
Melanie had thought she was prepared to face the dragon, but seeing it flying towards her forced her to confront the fact that she had never been ready to fight such an opponent. She screamed, leaping to the side before the dragon could swallow her up, the blade slicing across the dragon's snout. The dragon shrieked, stumbling into a landing.
Steadying herself, Melanie pointed her sword at the dragon, trying to appear somewhat intimidating despite shaking uncontrollably. The dragon was alive and so much bigger than she had expected. Under the darkness of the clouded night sky and winter storm, the dragon almost blended in, but for her eyes, which stared into the depths of Melanie's soul.
Blood from the dragon's snout dripped onto the snow, staining it red.
"Another one..." The dragon spoke, and the sound of its voice sent shivers down Melanie's spine. It boomed like thunder, yet carried an unmistakable bitter edge.
Melanie hadn't considered that the dragon might be able to talk. Dragons hadn't been seen in Starhaven in centuries, and stories about them couldn't be relied on as completely true. She had thought the ones where they spoke were little more than simple bedtime tales.
"I don't need to ask why you're here." The dragon lifted a clawed hand to its snout, trying to hold back the trickling blood. "I've met many like you over the years. But this doesn't have to end in violence. You might find I am quite the reasonable sort."
"Stay back!" Melanie yelled when the dragon took a step closer to her. "I'm not here to talk to you! I'm here to free your prisoner!"
