Chapter 1: Emath Has Changed
The tower quivered when the dragons roared at the village perimeter, where they guarded the community of Emath from the jungle beyond and the things in it.
The noise startled Dennis. He didn't much like heights and he was holding onto the railing of the highest of the palace's crystalline spires. He'd thought maybe he could see his father's boat from up here.
He'd been wrong. There was no sign of king Hale or the net-tending skiff which the king had rowed to sea alone this morning and every other morning for the past week. Far out on the horizon, the glittering needle of banned island pinned the dense gray green sea to the blue white sky. . . . but there were no sails, and no little rowboat either.
"The heart which worries," said Chester, "makes it's owner I'll. "
" Do you have to say things like that, Chester,? Dennis snapped at his companion.
"Indeed I must say them, Dennis," Chester replied smugly. " It is to speak such wisdom that I was fashioned. "
The lilting voice came from somewhere in the featureless forty pound metal egg that served Chester as head and body combined. Dennis knew his companion well enough to read Chester's tones as clearly as the facial expressions of a human speaking . . . but Chester had right to be smug; any way, it didn't do any good to get angry with him.
" Well, talk then if it satisfies you," Dennis replied, half resigned and half sulky. " But I don't see that it's ever done me any good, your wisdom. "
He turned from the sea to watch the dragons. It was market day, so the Wizard Parol was opening a path for visitors through the concourse which the great beasts prowled ready to tear and devour anyone who tried to enter Emath unbidden from the jungle.
Dennis craned his neck, but even so he could barely peer past the new house of stone, wood, and tile built right up to the perimeter's inner edge. Emath was growing, had been growing fast for as long as Dennis was old enough to notice. He cod remember when the village was only a straggle of shanties against the walls of his father's great crystalline palace . . .
Or the thought he could remember that; but memory was a funny thing. The present bustling community didn't have much to do with that dim past, when he'd walk clutching the hands of his parents and looking up in wonder at a new world.
Emath had changed. Her fishing boats were richly successful. The magnificent harbor the only good one on a coast wracked by storms made her the center of lizardfolk from the jungle of the interior.
And Dennis had changed even more. At sixteen in three days more he was big as a grown man; as strong as most; and quick than anyone else in Emath.
He was prince Dennis, who wishes his father didn't row out to sea alone and that Hale didn't when he was home snarl as savagely as the dragons on guard.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone