Gorn paused again, clearly disturbed by what he was going to have to tell me. His son had begun to pet my legs in a way that embarrassed me greatly, but I said nothing for risk of interrupting the man’s thoughts. He finally took a deep breath and continued.
“These big guys, they’d been walking for three days from the Port, and they said that on their way they saw one of them. A dragon-kin. Right here, on our island. Well, these guys weren’t having any of that, so they said to Will. But when they went to tell that dragon off, they couldn’t say what happened next. It was two big guys against one of them, and that dragon scared them out of their skins!” Gorn chuckled morosely. “But that isn’t the worst part. They said that dragon was coming this way. Now why, do you think, would any scaly monster like that want to come here?” His gaze turned to me, expectantly.
“Your guess is as good as mine, friend. I’ve never even seen one of those creatures.” Gorn’s son was playing with the pleats of my skirt now, gently tugging at the fabric. What neither Gorn nor I was saying was what, exactly, the presence of the dragon-kin meant for the village.
The dragon-kin had long lived at peace with the rest of the world until about a century ago. A new king came into power in Estelhein, and this ambitious young king decided to finally unite the world under his eternal reign. However, when he sought the allegiance of the other dragon-kin nation of Zephilon and was rejected, the king used a very deadly and unknown weapon to wipe out their capital city. Any Zephilonian survivors of the incident were either enslaved or converted to Estelhein’s cause. After the triumph over Zephilon, Estelhein turned to the border of the human Republic, but could not break the ranks that defended it. It had been one hundred years of battle with neither side backing down. The fact that a kin was coming for an undefended human village unannounced boded nothing but ill, but I could tell that was not the end of Gorn’s story.
The man grunted, and the stern look returned to his face, “Even if you and I don’t know, the people in town have made up their own conclusions and, as usual, they are ill-founded.”
My stomach went cold, and my skin felt far too warm. I knew exactly what sort of conclusions the paranoid townsfolk of Readimina would jump to when they heard what Old Will had to say of the strangers’ warning.