The Dragons of Winter (49 page)

BOOK: The Dragons of Winter

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“How did you get these?” Jack said in amazement as he examined the flame-scorched stones of the gate. “When we set fire to the second keep, I assumed the remains were left in Abaton. And after the Archipelago fell . . .”

“Abaton isn’t in the Archipelago,” said Fred. “It exists in one of the Soft Places, which abut this dimension. We had access to them the entire time—but, like you, we believed the power was in the doors. It wasn’t. Only Will figured that out.”

“So the trip into the deep past you’ve proposed is possible?” asked Jack.

“Yes, well,” Shakespeare said hesitantly. “In theory. There’s only one slight glitch to the gate I haven’t yet been able to overcome.”

“Uh-oh,” John said, frowning. “Here it comes.”

“It operates on the same principle as the doors within the original keep,” Shakespeare said with obvious melancholy. “Through the work I had been doing with Rose and Edmund, we can basically calibrate it, and point it at the time and place we need to go . . . . But we still can’t activate it, not without a power source—and the keep operated on a very . . . ah,
unique
source of power.”

“How unique?” asked John.

“The Dragons,” Shakespeare said. “Without a Dragon on one side or the other, there’s no way to activate the portal. The stones simply won’t work. And we’ve tried everything we can think of—but in truth, we really just need a Dragon. And unfortunately for us, there are no Dragons left.”

Epilogue

Somewhere beyond Elsewhere and Elsewhen, the last of the Dragonships waited.

It had carried out the duties for which it had been created, including this, the last voyage into the Archipelago of Dreams. It had been many years since its creation, and it had grown accustomed to waiting, and serving. This was its purpose, its function.

Those who had sailed the ship here to what was once a great island had not returned. So the ship waited on the long, lonely expanse of sand where it had landed, but no one came.

Then there was an explosion of darkness at the center of the island, followed by a spreading shadow that covered land and seas alike. The island was slowly consumed, but still, no one came to take the ship away, to find safer waters or another sheltering harbor. The ship vibrated with restless energy, anxious for action, but it held its place and waited. Then, finally, when the darkness had nearly devoured the island and rose up to blot out the sun itself, the Dragonship decided to act.

Gradually, almost painfully, it slid itself back into the waters from where the beach had begun to make a claim on the ship. Farther down, another of the ship’s siblings had not been as fortunate—but
then, that ship no longer had a living Dragon on its prow.

Somewhere within, the Dragonship felt a pang of shame and regret, then steeled itself against the distraction of the emotions to better focus on the task at hand as it turned from the island and headed for more open waters. The darkness sweeping across the horizon behind it was almost as foreboding as the darkness ahead.

The Frontier was a living storm front, and the very air reverberated with the constant sound of thunder. From ocean to the limits of the sky, lightning flashed and exploded with violent energies, and the sea itself rose up into crushing waves that battered the ship as it crossed the threshold.

The journey across the expanse of the Frontier seemed to take an eternity. In reality, it was only a thousand years. In times past, the transition was between worlds, from the Summer Country to the Archipelago of Dreams, and back again. But the Archipelago was no more, having been swallowed up by an evil from outside space and time—and what was hours or days on one side was centuries on the other. The ship was crossing the boundary between entropy and order, and it was not an easy passage.

The stresses of the transition nearly ripped the ship apart—stresses that it bore because it was built by a Maker; and because it had will. Will to endure. Will to return. Will, because something greater had reached across the vast distances and spread of years and called to the Dragon within—and it was a call it could not deny, from someone it could not abandon.

Someone to whom the Dragon had given its heart.

Someone to whom the Dragonship it had become was determined to return.

Someone who needed the help that only it could provide. And so it
would not brook failure in this—it would, somehow, cross the uncrossable barrier.

And then, it was through.

The ship slid roughly onto another beach, on an island that was of both the Archipelago and the Summer Country. In the distance were the familiar towers and minarets of the place that was its home—the one place the ship had sought to find.

The last of the Dragonships had returned to Tamerlane House at last.

The
Black Dragon
had come home.

Author’s Note

This is not the book I intended to write.

In point of fact, it isn’t even the book I
wrote
—not at first. Between the initial draft of a book and the final revision there are often a lot of changes made, but I don’t think I’ve revised anything as dramatically as I did between the first two passes of
The Dragons of Winter
.

There are challenges that are unique to writing series fiction, the biggest of which (for me) is making sure that each book is a standalone read while keeping the momentum of the overarching storylines going. It was difficult with Book Four, harder with Book Five, and darn near impossible to do with Book Six. I think the realization that the final volume was quickly approaching only added to the difficulty. I’d known for a few years now that Book Seven would be the conclusion of the story I began with
Here, There Be Dragons
, and so it was tempting to leave a lot of threads unresolved in Book Six. By now readers have become accustomed to my unusual mix of literature, history, mythology, and pop culture, and fully expect that the details (of which there are many) really matter, that story bits planted in one volume may not fully spring into bloom until a later book. But that wasn’t the reason for the change.

I rewrote the book in its entirety to make certain that it fulfilled the primary goals—being a satisfying read while advancing the series storyline—while also augmenting the one thing I felt was lacking in the first go:
hope
.

I rewrote the entire book in order to point everything toward these final pages of the epilogue, to those final lines, to the
last
line. Because to me, that last line is what ties together the entire series. It is what matters most to me, in both fiction and in waking life—the knowledge that when it seems everything is on the verge of utter disaster, someone will still step forward, extend a hand, and say, “Don’t sweat it. I’ve got this,” and be believed, and in doing so restore hope where before there was none.

I love the idea of someone being capable of saving the day—that’s part of what makes all heroic fiction so thrilling, I think. I’ve tried to instill that in my own work, and I knew that I was going to be bringing everything together in the final volume in a (hopefully) exciting and satisfying way. But while this book had all of the necessary dramatic elements, and all of the really fun things I enjoy writing, it was lacking in hope. And that, to me, is too necessary an ingredient to exclude. The first draft, as it stood, was already a good book—but I needed what I’d written to be questioned aloud. And once that was done by my editors, the path was absolutely clear to me.

The story was a huge amount of fun to write. I’d been waiting a while to use some of the new characters, like Aristophanes; the same goes for the collected Mystorians. Uncas and Quixote all but write themselves; young Telemachus opens up the backstory to include some of my other works; and the chance to include battle goats made me a hero to my children. But all of that whimsy and
spectacle and drama was to get to the last pages of doom and despair, so that I could end with the epilogue that I wrote.

The conclusion is coming, but no story—not even that of John, Jack, and Charles—is ever truly over (this is a series involving lots of time travel, after all) and there is one more chapter to go for the most unlikely hero of them all, who chose redemption, and in doing so, restored hope. I can’t ask any more of a character, or a book.

James A. Owen
Silvertown, USA

James A. Owen
is the author and illustrator of the Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica series; the creator of the critically acclaimed Starchild graphic novel series; and the author of the Mythworld series of novels. He works at the Coppervale Studio in Silvertown, Arizona, where he lives with his family.