There had never been an avangion on Athas. The sorcerer-kings and their minions had seen to that. They ruthlessly hunted and exterminated any rivals, either defilers or preservers, and the birth of an avangion took far longer than the creation of a dragon, for it entailed only preserver magic. The path of metamorphosis was long and painful, involving selfless dedication and excruciating patience. Yet, after over a thousand years, there was at least a glimmer of hope. An avangion was now in the process of being born. It would take many, many years, and the sorcerer-kings would do their utmost to seek it out and destroy it before the cycle was complete. But if their efforts failed and the avangion took flight, then the dragons would start to tremble in their lairs.
Still, what were the odds? Before the avangion cycle of creation could become complete, it was more than likely that all the remaining sorcerer-kings would fully metamorphose into dragons, and then it would be many against one. The surviving pyreens would gladly dedicate the remainder of their lives to guarding the avangion until its cycle was complete, but no one knew where the solitary wizard who pursued the arduous metamorphosis could be found. Perhaps, thought Lyra, it is better that way. If we cannot find him, then neither can the sorcerer-kings. But that will not stop them from looking.
Lyra was abruptly startled out of her reverie by the sound of an anguished, desperate cry. A child’s cry, she thought, blinking with surprise and glancing around quickly. But that was clearly impossible. A child could not have climbed the Dragon’s Tooth. Perhaps some freak trick of the wind had deceived her.... And then she suddenly realized she hadn’t actually heard the cry. It had echoed in her mind. It was psionic cry for help, a tormented, unarticulated scream, almost like the dying wailings of some animal. Yet it had been a child, Lyra was certain of it. A lifetime of devotion to the discipline of psionics meant she could not have been mistaken. Somewhere, a child was in desperate trouble, but for the psionic cry to have been projected as far as the summit of the Dragon’s Tooth meant that it was a child gifted with incredible, inborn psionic powers. She had never encountered anything even remotely like it before, and she could not possibly ignore it.
Spreading her arms out wide, Lyra started to twirl in place, picking up speed as her form blurred and grew less and less distinct until, within seconds, she had taken on the form of an air elemental, a whirling funnel of wind that left the ground and swept down the mountainside, heading for the foothills. Lyra focused on that cry, trying to judge the direction from which it came, and then she heard it once again, much weaker this time, as if it were a sob of resignation. She locked onto it and veered slightly to the west, heading directly for the origin of the psionic cry. As she rapidly closed the distance, she marveled at its strength, even in the weakness of it. She swept over the rock-strewn foothills and headed out into the desert. Could it be possible? What would a child be doing out in the desert at night? Perhaps it was with some caravan that had run into trouble. In the desert, disaster always awaited the next step...
And then she saw it. As she skimmed over the desert, she almost overshot it in her anxiety. There was no caravan. There wasn’t even a solitary wagon, or a party on foot. There was but one child, stretched out motionless in the sand, with what appeared to be a feral tigone cub moving in for the kill. She had found it just in time.
Still whirling, Lyra settled to the ground and moved toward the cub, trying to get between it and the child. Even as it flinched and squinted in the powerful blast of sand she raised, the cub would not move away from the prostrate child. Tigones were psionic cats, using their power to stalk prey such as this, but their natural habitat was in the foothills and on the high slopes of the Ringing Mountains. This was the first time Lyra had ever seen one venture down into the desert. She guessed the hungry young cub had picked up the child’s psionic cry as she had, and responded to it instinctively. She changed shape once again, this time assuming the form of a full-grown tigone, and she directed a basic, animal-level psionic thought at the young cub.
“Mine. Move away.”
She sensed sudden apprehension in the tigone cub, and the thought that came back at her was both challenging and surprising. “No. Not prey. Friend. Protect.” The young cub bared its fangs in warning.
Lyra was completely unprepared for such a response. Not only was the cub not interested in the child as food, but it was fully prepared to take on a full-grown tigone to protect it. Lyra reverted to her humanoid form.
“Easy, now,” she said to the cub aloud, reinforcing her tone with soothing thoughts. “I have come to help your friend.”
Warily, the cub allowed her to approach, but remained poised to attack if she made the slightest hostile move toward the motionless child. This, too, surprised Lyra. Ordinarily, she had no difficulty in using her psionic skills to control beasts, but even as she exercised her domination over the young cub, it refused to submit completely to her will, intent above everything else on protecting the child.
Slowly, keeping a wary eye on the cub, Lyra crouched beside the small body of the child and gently turned it onto its back. And she was confronted with yet another surprise. “What have we here?” she said.
The child, at first glance, looked human. It was male, only five or six years old, and yet, as she turned him over, she saw the pointed ears and the sharply defined features—high cheekbones, angular jawline tapering down to a slightly pointed chin, a narrow and well-shaped nose over a wide, thin-lipped mouth. ... All these things indicated that the child was an elf, and yet he did not possess the long and extremely thin, exaggerated frame of an elf. His limbs were proportioned as a human’s, not an elf’s. The legs and arms were too short, and the ears, though delicately pointed, were too small. They were the same size as human ears, except that they had points.
The boy also had some of the features of a halfling—the deeply sunken eyes, the thick and almost manelike hair that cascaded to his shoulders, the delicately arched eyebrows. Halflings, too, had pointed ears, but the child was too large to be a halfling. And yet, he possessed the physical traits of both halflings and elves.
A half-breed, Lyra thought with astonishment. But elves and halflings were natural enemies. And it was unheard of for an elf to mate with halfling, although she supposed there was no reason why it should not be possible. Clearly, it was, for she was looking down at the result of just such a mating. And that explained what the child was doing alone in the desert. Lyra felt a tightness in her stomach. He had been cast out. The result of a forbidden union, he had doubtless, up to this point, been hidden and protected by his mother, but as he grew, it became obvious what he was, and the poor thing had been taken out into the desert and left to die.
However, the child clearly possessed a strong will, for, unaided and without food or water, he had almost succeeded in reaching the foothills of the
Ringing Mountains. Not only that, but he was gifted with incredible psionic talent. Young and untutored as he was, he had nevertheless been able to project his anguished mental cry of rage and despair to reach her at the very summit of the Dragon’s Tooth. Few adult psionicists she knew, even those who had studied the discipline for years, could hope to match such a feat. She had to save him. He was not yet dead, but he was unconscious and very, very weak. That last mental shout had been his mind, pushed to its final extremity, howling out fury and frustration at having come within sight of his goal and yet failing to attain it.