Legacy of the Dragons
Bova Tel-Bera VLADIMIR DZUNDZA
130
If you traveled the caravan routes from Gahanis, you may have encountered her. At first glance, she might not strike you as remarkable from any other caravan guard. Nevertheless, you would remember the distinctive crimson leather armor, the long raven hair woven in complicated plaits, the wiry frame, and the finely crafted greataxe slung over her shoulder. If you sought a further glimpse, her beauty would come upon you swift and sudden, like a hawk on a field mouse. Her features, so soft and tender, would make you ponder why such a woman of 20 summers would choose the life of a caravaneer. But when your eyes met her cold, haunted gaze, you would have felt as if a thousand daggers of ice had pierced your heart. Unavoidably, you would turn away. If you asked about her, you would be directed to a tavern in Gahanis called “The Scarlet Arrow.” Here, you may chance upon Tiber, the innkeeper and the uncle of the woman you saw. The fat, oily man would draw deep from his pipe, his eyes gleaming like his golden earrings, and then recount to you, in a private booth, the tale of Bova Tel-Bera, the wolf warrior, the caravaneer’s daughter. In happier times, Bova grew up with her two brothers Pac and Najo, her mother Iroa, and father Kerris. Her parents were both proud caravan riders, their families descended from the original escaped slaves who founded Gahanis and blazed the first trade routes after the giants’ victory over the dramojh—or so Tiber would tell you. When they were of age, the boys eagerly took up the way of the caravan guard in the family’s merchant house and caravan escort service, while Iroa insisted that the fleet-footed and mischievous Bova be sent to school. When she was 14, weeks after her naming ceremony, tragedy struck. Iroa was killed in a rhodin ambush two days outside Gahanis. The death left her father a shattered man who turned to drink for solace. Her brothers dealt with the blow in other ways: Pac continued caravanning, while Najo took over the merchant house, only to lose it to gambling debts and grave misfortune. Bova quit school to look after her father and help in the tavern, becoming a quiet, bitter, creature who hardly resembled her former vivacious self. Four years later, Kerris embarked on a venture with a verrik named Xeridam to recover the family’s lost wealth. They sought to found a new trade route though the Bitter Peaks to Verdune using a trail that Xeridam knew. To look after her father, Bova joined her brothers on the first caravan escort. Tiber would repack his pipe as he described the party’s threeweek journey through twisted, jagged ravines, mist-shrouded passes, and dead-end gorges of the Bitter Peaks. One evening three weeks into the trip, the party decided to camp at a temple with white marble columns and golden gates. The place had appeared just as they skirted the lip of a caldera. About two hours after sundown that night, the camp was attacked by ghoulish and reptilian creatures in tar-smelling robes. The attackers fell upon the escorts, cutting them down
with black blades dripping with yellow poison. Bova fled, only to be tackled by a pale, rubbery body in robes. In the ensuing struggle, she and her assailant sailed over the cliff into the caldera lake below. Bova doesn’t remember the impact, or what became of her attacker. She only remembers the cold light of a grey dawn as she awoke on the shore of the opposite side of the lake, bruised and bleeding from a multitude of cuts. The rising plumes of smoke on the eastern ridge told her the fate of the caravan. Desolate, Bova wandered the forest, seeking a way out. After three days and nights, subsisting on wild mushrooms and berries, she heard footsteps behind her, and the sound of her father’s voice. Renewed, she ran toward it, calling out with joy. She had sighted her father’s silhouette between the trees when an arrow flew over her head and struck him straight in his eye—without producing a reaction! Then she noticed his purple, lacerated flesh, gore-soaked clothing, and the sewn-up mouth and eyes of the . . . thing from which her father’s voice issued. It continued urging her to come to him. Bova stood motionless as the figure hefted her father’s familiar greataxe and stumbled toward her. Bova claimed she must have fainted, for she awoke, startled, in the crude, smoky hut belonging to a wolf totem warrior named Emer. After cleaning and dressing her wounds, he told Bova that a malevolent spirit dwelled in the deep, dark places of these mountains—places such as the temple, a site left over from the dramojh’s blasphemous works. He promised to take her over the mountains back home as soon as she was stronger. To pass the time as she regained her strength, Emer told her stories of past glories. Perhaps he inspired her, for in the two weeks she spent recuperating, Bova started on her path to becoming a child of the wolf. Though she denies it with an angry silence when questioned, Tiber would tell you that Bova also came to love Emer and would have stayed with him in the mountains if he hadn’t insisted she return to tell her people what had happened. Five days into the trek toward Gahanis, Tiber would recount, the two were crossing a raging river on a fallen tree trunk when Bova heard Emer cry out. Spinning around, she was horrified to see Emer cleft in twain by the charred but animated remains of a skeleton wielding her father’s unmistakable axe. As the warrior’s lifeless corpse tumbled into the whitewater, the skeleton burst into a sickly green fire and hurtled across the trunk toward Bova. Armed only with a knife, she had no choice but to flee the abomination that was once her father. She managed to lose it in a maze of basalt pillars, but spent the next three harrowing days pursued through the wood by her father’s voice pleading her to join him. Finally, she found a narrow lava tube that Emer had described to her. But once in its lightless depths, she again heard the sounds of pursuit—this time it was Emer’s voice! Having no other choice, she waited in ambush for the creature and, after a desperate fight in which he sought to spill her blood with her
