The Confliction (Book Three of the Dragoneers Saga) (Dragoneer Saga) Read Online Free PDF Page A

that hurt Jenka’s eyes to read. He recognized the first few words in one of them. He read aloud softly and was overcome with a giddy tingle afterwards. Jenka’s vision blurred. He took a few deep breaths and wondered if he had just accidentally cast a calling spell.
    Jenka started looking at a charcoal sketch of a Sarax, with marks and carefully written text detailing sensitive and dangerous parts of the thing’s strange body. Then he saw something else and pointed it out to Lemmy. He was showing Lem a drawing of a bee’s honeycomb full of little tiny Sarax. The queen was larger, ten times as large as the Sarax. It was bulkier, too, formed like a larva, or a giant grub, with several long snaking limbs on each side of an elongated torso.
    I wonder if they really follow that thing,
said Lemmy, as he took the parchment to study it closer.
    Jenka’s mind had moved on. He was searching for anything else they could use to more effectively destroy the beasts. He found a small wooden chest and forced it open with a sealing blade. Inside were several hundred golden coins with a strange feline animal on one side and two lines with a slash through them on the other. He wondered, for a long while, from where they had come. Then he pondered where the Sarax had come from and a certain fear of the unknown began to creep into him like a chill.

    Lemmy started sifting through the papers lying about and gurgled out a noise of surprise when he read something Clover had written. It was about the Sarax, and the first druids to venture into the mountains away from the kingdom. It turned out that other Sarax had escaped the encasement in the past, and one of them ended up under a spell an old High Druidon had cast. The creature was kept in the depths of the Temple of Dou and studied. In fact, the passage spoke of a room being constructed around the thing. In Clover’s day she visited the Temple of Dou often. Some of the same ogres that built the Dragoneers’ castle had apparently helped build the temple. Lemmy was over seventy years old, ninety years if you heard Herald tell it, and he remembered hearing tales of the flame-haired dragon lady from the deep Orichs, but he’d always thought she was just another Crix Crux tale. As he read on, he learned that three of the full-blooded elves that washed up with the Dogma’s wreckage two centuries ago were the ones who sealed the star ship closed after it first crashed. He also learned that the main reason for sealing it in Dour-formed crystal was that the stuff dampened the call of some greater beast inside.
    There was a drawing of a pack-like satchel rig that had a vine running from a bladder-sack. Lemmy guessed it went with Clover’s saddle designs as something to keep from getting parched on long flights. Clover was obviously a clever designer of things.
    This land seems to attract survivors,
Lemmy observed. For the first time in a long while, he was afraid.
The Sarax’s ship crashed here just like the Dogma,
he told Jenka.
This Confliction is a battle for the right to call the land home. I have a feeling we are missing something about them, though. I wish it were me instead of Zahrellion taken there.
    “How did you find this room?” Aikira asked from the door. Her eyes were puffy with sleep and her face had lines pressed into it from her blanket.
    I tried to pull my favorite book from the shelf and the whole thing came free and swung open.
Lemmy forced a grin.
I’ll go fry up some of those goose eggs the ogres brought up. They’ve just about cleared the cavern out.
    “We need to find a way to draw a bunch of the bastards to us and then get ‘em all at once.” Jenka spoke more to himself than anyone else.
    “Your sword, and spells that are so powerful we can only cast them sparingly, are all that have worked so far.” Aikira shrugged and followed Lemmy out of the room. “I’d love to find a way to kill all those devil damned things.”
    Insects,
Lemmy mumbled as he led Aikira to