The Last Dragon Lord

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Miri took the long way home. It was a cool night, threatening rain. She debated whether to hail a cab. It was chilly, but warm enough for walking. The weather in the capital often changed quickly, and a decision to walk could have turned into one she regretted.

She listened to the news in her earbuds as a drawling voice read a report.

“We’ve’ll have to expect rain tonight. But not until what after the candidates’ speeches.”

She had time.

“We ought to be grateful for a cool summer. We waitedt’all winter for the rains and the renewal’a spring. The heavens blessed us this year with renewed vigor in the aquifer, too, and if you don’t pray on that, there’s a problem with you. The Magic Index is eighty-five, pollen, high, with a little bit’a haze over the northern districts. The Half Eight is surprisingly clear tonight. Heaven is smiling on the governor for his speech, and let’s hope his positions’re as clear’s the skies. Over to you, Jim.”

Another reporter took control. “Indeed, and we always appreciate your insights, Frog. Tense crowds are gathered at the stadium tonight ahead of the governor’s speech...”

She switched the news off and took her earbuds out.

She was going to walk.

She followed a paved stone path through the Boulevard of Saints, where flags with runes inscribed on them rippled in the wind and street lamps ran on magic, tingeing the area with a faint pink glow.

The windows of the Administration Hall, a wide stone building with a gabled roof, were all black. The staff had gone home for the night. Across the grassy lawn, the Academy of History and Magical Sciences was lit up like a skyscraper. She imagined the other professors at their desks with their hands on their heads.

She, it appeared, was the only one with the courage to leave for the night.

She passed the Academy of Business. It was dark.

Figured.

The Academy of Modern Construction, an enormous brick building (the oldest and most expensive on campus) with a sculpture of the Governor in front. It was all dark.

The Academy of Economics. Dark.

The Academy of Performance Arts. Dark.

Miri seethed.

You want to cut my department, fine. But then you make us work harder as punishment? This isn’t right.

Her anger rose at Dean Rosehill. She tried to let it go.

She turned and walked through the Lawns of Destiny, the place where the college held student orientations and students played sports and ate lunch on sunny days. Beyond, the cafeteria with its glass exterior lay ahead, smelling of fried fish and roasted vegetables, harkening to the earliest time of elves.

Miri was half human, half elf. But her father killed himself when she was young, so she had a hard time identifying with her elven side.

The obsession with magic, the fetish over history—she understood. But the mistrust of dragons, the insistence on tradition and values in a society that no longer cared about them, that she couldn’t understand.

She wondered why she was even at the university sometimes.

She walked through an avenue of trees. The patch of oaks wavered in the breeze and let down their rustling, like so many hands crinkling up paper. There weren’t many trees in the Half Eight, but the university was full of them.

She heard the whoosh of wind. Above, a shadow soared hundreds of feet in the air, flapping its wings then coasting toward the buildings downtown. It spread sideways as it flew between two high-rises.

A deep, throaty roar filled the sky.

Majestic. Graceful.

It was a Keeper.

Dragons had always mystified Miri. She had spent her entire career studying them. Long nights in the library, reading about the way things used to be: how dragons ruled the world like gods, demanded loyalty and respect, and set into motion many of the customs that now governed the world, like currency, religion, and order.

But history was lost on most, even her students.

She loved dragons. She knew how to talk to them, a rare skill. You could say she had an affinity for them.

But the world had changed, and the dragons who roamed thousands of years ago, living remnants from the past, changed with it, so much that she didn’t recognize them from the history books anymore. The oldest of them became quiet and vengeful; the new generations, aloof and self-serving.

She came to the end of the university lot and turned into a street flanked by brownstones. The buildings were clustered tightly together, the floors bulging out over each other like malformed clusters attached to a metal post. In the ancient times, elven villages were built into trees, and modern builders figured out a way to mimic the construction while marrying it with human sensibility. Such was the power of magic that every building was like an abstract painting.

A lone car zoomed by.

She walked in darkness, avoiding puddles where she could. The multi-colored fraternities and sororities, normally full of music and laughter, were empty for the summer. The moon was in the sky and the smell of wisteria in the air.

Beautiful night for a walk.

She rounded a corner, into a barrage of lights. It was as if someone had flipped a switch and turned on all the lights in the city.

Bars. Elves sitting on verandas and terraces drinking wine.

A band played jazz on the corner. She snapped her fingers as they played. Paper lanterns hung over the sidewalk. More cars rumbled down the street with their windows down.

She felt alive. The vibrant air of the Half Eight rejuvenated her. She could think of nowhere else to live. Originally a slum, it had been overhauled by the university and was now the go-to place for college kids, hipsters and other trendsetters in the capital. It commanded an important influence in the political bloc. No politician was able to win without it.

Miri had made her home in this twenty-block section. It was a slice of the world that shouted, ‘We’re going to be conscious. We’re going to be aware. We’re alive. And we’re going to be good stewards of the environment, damn it!’

Miri waved to a couple on a terrace who held their glasses up to her.

“Join us, Miri?” the woman asked.

“Not tonight,” Miri said. “But I’ll be seeing you.”

A human waiter in a tuxedo and a buzz cut offered her a sample of sushi, a slim piece of tuna resting on a bed of rice.

She picked it daintily off the waiter’s silver platter and ate it. She felt a tingle in her cheek, and flavor exploded in her mouth. It tasted like prime rib, rich and meaty.

Surf-and-turf redefined. Gastropub at its finest, enhanced by magic.

The waiter gestured for her to enter the restaurant, down some shaded steps into a quiet, dimly lit bistro. But she declined.

She heard a commotion nearby. A group of people were gathered in front of a giant stucco building that looked like a mistake among all the old brownstones.

Gavlin’s, a chain of magic stores, was thoroughly human, on a stable foundation with no bulging floors or magical construction. Its logo, a silhouetted figure with a glowing scepter riding a dragon, glowed from the top of the building.

She checked her purse and pulled out a memo that she had scribbled earlier in the morning. She was running low on lipstick, lotion, and perfume.

She made her way through the crowd of people, who stood around talking and laughing.

A neon sign in the window dazzled neurotically.

NEW GRIMOIRES TONIGHT!!

A new grimoire was an event. The Grimoire Company hadn’t launched a new one in over a year. Lucan Grimoire, the CEO, was too busy running a campaign. Besides, there were so many grimoires that it was hard to think of another one. She owned a professor grimoire that helped her decode spells and explain their historical context to students. She couldn’t have lived without it, so naturally this was a big event. She had been so busy grading papers that she hadn’t read the news.

Two men whispered as she moved through the crowd. She paused to listen, pretending to check her phone.

“What do you think it’s like?” one man asked.

“They say it ties into the election,” another man said. “It’s for voters.”

“Figures. I wondered when Grimoire was going to throw his money around.”

“You gotta love the balls on the guy.”

“Oh, no doubt. But when it comes to elections, I don’t care about balls. I care about facts and what the hell he’s actually going to do about the magic shortage.”

“I wouldn’t be upset if he crushed a few dragon skulls. They’ve all been flying d***s since the campaign started.”

Miri rolled her eyes. Typical conversation. Politics was the only thing people talked about lately.

She was sick of the viciousness, the attack ads, the piss and vinegar from both sides.

Gavlin’s was a standard grocery store, with tiled floors, can lights far up in the ceiling above, and shelves upon shelves of food, jars, and plastic cards representing spells that you could take to the front counter and redeem.

She cradled a basket under her arm and picked a jar of lotion off a wooden shelf. Then she tested a bottle of perfume, spraying a sample of a vanilla scent on her wrist.

She was making her way toward the grimoires in the back when the store erupted into applause and photoflashes.

All heads turned to the door as an entourage of people entered. She could only make out several pairs of sunglasses and pointy ears, and a bald head in the center.

Her stomach sank. She knew that head anywhere.

Several voices cried out. “Mr. Governor! Mr. Governor!”

The bald head stopped and a hand went into the air, waving.

“Hey, guys.”

Two people moved out of the way and Miri seized the opportunity, hurrying toward the cash registers where the governor greeted shoppers.

Ennius Grimoire was tall, with silver tufts of hair sticking out from the sides of his head. He had a trim goatee. Like all politicians, he wore a slim navy blue suit and tie. She could smell his cologne from across the room, a scent like a sickly blend of cigar smoke and lies.

He had won re-election twice, and if he won this year, this would be his third and final term. Few governors served less than three terms, and if he lost, it would be a notable historical moment.

Two men in suits stood a few feet away from Grimoire. A white orb hovered around him in a strange, elliptical orbit. Rumors were that the governor had made a deal with a dragon for protection, and that the orb was a dragon in Abstraction. If it was true, the dragon had never revealed itself, and no one knew what the Abstraction was.

Maybe it was Corruption—at least that’s what Miri had always thought.

The crowd quieted as Ennius spoke.

“You’re probably wondering why I’m here today,” he said. He straightened his tie and glanced around with a sly smile. “I had to see what my nephew’s new grimoire was all about. Since I’m the governor, I wanted to rule out any product defects for myself...”

A few people said “Oooooooh.”

Miri groaned. The trash talking was about to begin.

Ennius held up a plastic card with a rainbow pentagram printed on it. It was the new grimoire.

“Don’t worry, I paid for it,” he said as the crowd laughed. “I don’t dislike Lucan that much.”

The cameras flashed wildly as he put his finger in the middle of the pentagram. The card lit up, suffusing his face with an astral glow.

The pentagram projected off the card and into a three-dimensional hologram in front of his face, an emanation of bright light. He touched one of the points on the pentagram, and a wheel of faces hovered over his fingers: his, Lucan’s, and several others.

“It’s actually not bad,” Ennius said.

He dialed through the wheel with his finger until the image of his own face hovered in front of his. “Let’s see what this thing actually does, shall we?”

He tapped his face. Glowing words sprung up around it.

Governor Ennius Grimoire

Age: 64

Party: Magisical Party

Positions: Pro-magic, Anti-dragon (sometimes), Pro-business…

And then a biographical paragraph scrolled in front of the governor’s eyes. He read it silently, his face flushing redder as the words rolled by. His lips tightened, and he stopped the scroll abruptly.

He tapped on Lucan’s face and a similar profile appeared. The governor pursed his lips in thought, and then he swiped away the pentagram. It dissolved like ink in water, and the store, so full of light for a moment, grew dim again.

“This appears to be a simple informational grimoire, a wonderful service by a company that’s deeply committed to our political system—there’s no question about that,” Ennius said. “But don’t be fooled by the innocuous façade. You might think that The Grimoire Company is doing you a favor in providing side-by-side information on the candidates. However, my nephew, Lucan, thinks he can influence how you think. There’s a simple law that many of you who run businesses understand. It’s called the law of reciprocity. He gives you some harmless information today. But tomorrow, he will ask more of you. And after all, you bought a cheap grimoire that his company toiled to create … and then it becomes all too easy to act out of guilt. You see, Lucan is using this grimoire to steer you away from me. To steer you away from your true beliefs. We have a word for that in government—it’s called electioneering. That’s why tomorrow, I’ll be filing a lawsuit against The Grimoire Company for this egregious act of politics. Draw your own conclusions when the verdict drops.”

A few people booed. The governor seemed to take the insults personally, and he held up his hand to silence them.

“You know what pisses me off about all of this?” Ennius said. “What kind of man trash talks the patriarch of his own family and runs a smear campaign against him?”

He was going off script. Tension was building in the room.

“I raised Lucan,” Ennius said. “I was practically his father. When his dad died, I promised to help out. I put him up in my mansion. Loira and I treated him like one of our own. Just like the rest of our children. And when he told me he was going to drop out of college, I supported him because he was starting a business. Look how successful he’s become. He’s made more money than I’ll make in my lifetime. But the truth is he’d be nothing without me. But for my advice, there’d be no Grimoire Company. Just a bed of broken dreams, filled with hookers and drugs.”

The crowd booed again, fully enjoying the show.

“Because you all know that, right?” Ennius asked. “About his substance abuse? I can’t tell you how many nights I scooped him off my porch.”

Ennius smirked, and then paused.

“Lucan keeps talking about how I’ve done nothing for the capital. How I’ve done nothing for the Half Eight. Before I came along, this place was a slum. A shanty town! The university was on the verge of shutting down. And when a group of business owners sold me on what this place could be, I invested my own money. Is Stella Gavlin here tonight?”

A wrinkled woman in the back of the room raised her hand, laughing joyfully.

“Stella—how are you, sweetie? This woman helped bring this neighborhood back. I’ll never forget when I met her the first time. She had plan after plan after plan—and those plans made this wonderful place a reality. Ladies and gentlemen, I have plans. You know what they are; you’ve lived them for the last twelve years. So when Lucan speaks next, why don’t you ask him what his plans are?”

Ennius crumpled the grimoire and tossed it into the trashcan.

A reporter raised her hand. “Mr. Governor, you’ve accused your nephew of being thin on magical policy. Can you elaborate?”

The governor smiled graciously.

“You all have a choice,” Ennius said. “It’s a simple choice. Vote for the man who made this city what it is, or vote for the little boy masquerading as a political candidate. I love my nephew, but this isn’t about family ties. It’s about making you all feel safe. It’s about saving our environment and figuring out a way to solve the magic crisis. I’ve already set up task forces. What has he done?”

Another reporter raised a hand. “Do you think he’s really a serious threat, being twenty points behind?”

“No. He’s not a threat,” Ennius said. “But I’m the head of my family, and I won’t be smeared by my ungrateful nephew.”

More reporters raised their hands with questions, and Miri quickly stepped forward. “I have a question, Mr. Governor.”

“Miss Charmwell, what a surprise,” Ennius said, grinning wide.

“You said that magical conservation is a priority. Do you think dismantling the Academy of History and Magical Sciences really supports your platform? Removing the only access to Magical Science education?”

The governor’s face went harsh. “Your current so-called education is full of errors and opinions, Miss Charmwell. And I intend to clean it up.”

One of the guards whispered to the governor.

“That’s all, everyone,” Ennius said, smiling and turning back to the crowd. “Have a good night!” He headed for the door; stealing an angry glance at Miri.

Miri didn’t look away.

I’ve got nothing to lose. Do your worst.

The governor climbed into a limo and it sped off.

The people in the store murmured.

Miri paid for her things, proud of herself. She had dealt him a blow. If he had stayed longer, she would have grilled him even more.

It was drizzling when she left, and after a few blocks the area grew empty again. The dark, gritty streets of the Half Eight stretched before her.

She heard a soft metal whine behind her. Headlights switched on. A black car inched toward her. As it got closer, it appeared to be a government car, with silver fins, tinted windows, and a sleek, elongated body flared out on the sides.

Was it the governor? Was he coming back to tell her what he really thought?

She suddenly regretted her outburst.

“Think, Miri, think,” she muttered as the car picked up speed.

It was coming for her.