Dragonfire Warrior, page 1
Dragonfire Warrior
Secrets of the Lost Dragons
Book 2
Isaac Keyes
Copyright © 2025 by Royal Guard Publishing LLC
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Check This Out!
Chapter One
“Dodge this!” Astrid flew through the air, just below the clouds. She threw her hands wide, and with a vicious smile, she conjured a monstrous wall of fire that she flung straight in my direction.
Or so she thought.
It warped the air as it traveled along, an inferno that would incinerate anything in its path.
I watched, smugly, from behind her as it enveloped the illusion of myself that I’d conjured when I passed through a cloud moments ago.
Our magic couldn’t hurt each other. This, I had to assume, was an effect of our special bond, because her fire certainly worked on everything else, hence our aerial practice sessions.
She stopped to hover in the sky, staring down at “me.” “What was that, Lys!? You didn’t even try to avoid it!?”
“Didn’t I?” I whispered in her ear.
“AAAHHHH!” She spun and launched another attack right at me on pure reflex.
The smug grin on my face didn’t budge a bit as I conjured a ward against the flames. I didn’t need the ward for my own safety, as even though I could feel the heat, it wouldn’t burn my skin or my clothes. We’d tested it out, and there seemed to be a small aura surrounding us both that nullified the harmful effects of our spells. But our practice sessions were exactly for this sort of thing, and I would have lost the game if I had just let it wash over me.
I set my hands on my hips and met her eyes. Still smiling.
“Oh! You bastard! When in the world did you even do that!? I’ve been watching you this whole time!”
“I passed through a cloud a few minutes ago. I cloaked myself and made a double. You’ve been following it since.”
She clenched her jaw, trying and failing not to grin back at me. “That’s… well…. Dammit, that was pretty smooth. I didn’t even notice! You’re getting better at making the illusions completely lifelike!”
“Thanks. I still have to master how to make convincing sounds that emanate from them, but I managed this one under duress and you couldn’t even tell despite playing with it for a little while.”
She shook her head and floated over to me. “I really couldn’t. And I was looking for it! Imagine pulling that on someone that didn’t know it was coming. There’s no way they’d know.”
“Well, that’s the hope, of course. But you’re getting a lot more fluid with your fire as well.”
She drifted inside my personal space and flexed both arms. “That’s right. So nice of you to notice.”
“Boop.” I tapped her nose with my finger, channeling a little lightning as I did so. It arced from my skin to hers in a flash. “Gotcha.”
I couldn’t match her inborn offensive capabilities yet, but I had been working pretty heavily on lightning to pleasing results.
Her eyes drew down and she frowned at me. “We weren’t playing anymore. That doesn’t count.”
I leaned in. “Are you sure? Who said we’d stopped?” She opened her mouth to reply, but I cut her off with two more illusions of myself. The three of us circled her, all speaking with my voice. At this close range, I could pull that sort of thing off. “You think the enemy’s going to call a time out? Misdirection is misdirection.”
“I… that’s not… aw, dammit. You’re right. An ass, too! But right. I guess.”
All three of me shrugged. “Forgive me for saying so, but you could use a little subterfuge in your attacks.”
She grunted and looked away. “So you’ve said. But I’m a hammer, Lys. I’m not good at being much else.”
“Hmm.” I snapped my fingers, creating a duplicate of her, complete with her vibrant red scales, curving black horns, blond hair, and green eyes. Even her clothes, a rugged set of dark pants and matching shirt, along with a thick set of boots, appeared exactly the same. “Create some fire for me, eh?”
She peered over at her illusion. “Wow. Is that what I look like?”
“I’m pretty sure you’ve looked in a mirror before.”
“Yeah, but… this is a little different.” She floated in close, gazing into her own eyes.
I made her reflection look back. “True. I thought so the first time I did this as well. Do you not like it?”
Her lips turned up in a tentative smile. “No, I do. You didn’t, like, make her prettier or something? A better version of me?”
“Of course not. She’s your exact copy.” I made the illusion smile.
“I’m….” She ran her hand over her head. “I’m kinda pretty.”
“Astrid. Now I know you’re fishing for compliments. You are pretty. You know that. And I say so all the time. In many different ways.”
She turned my way and shrugged a tiny bit. “Knowing you think so, knowing it objectively, and feeling it are different things.” The world had been much less than kind to Astrid, being Wyrmborn as she was.
I tried at every opportunity to raise her up.
It was a process.
We were doing pretty well.
“That’s fair. But still, this duplicate is you down to the last detail.”
She stared into her own eyes for a moment longer before shaking her head. “Okay. Back to reality. You wanted me to conjure some fire or something?”
“Yeah. Just whatever. Nothing too huge. I want to see if I can recreate that.”
“Oh, sure.” She raised her arms, an affectation, before a mass of red hot fire bloomed around her.
I did my best to mimic it, but the flowing nature of fire proved much harder to catch than someone’s likeness. Something resembling fire appeared around her illusion, but it wouldn’t be convincing in a real situation.
“Um.” She pursed her lips. “Needs a little work.”
“More than that, but that’s no problem. I didn’t think I’d be perfect the first time. Anyway, my thoughts were about making doubles of you in combat, complete with fake fire, so you could get close and deliver the real blows.”
“I like it,” she mused. “I still get to be the hammer, and someone else provides the subtlety."
“Just so. Want to head down? I’m getting kind of tired.”
“Yeah. Same.”
Our magic — or my magic that we could both use — had grown leaps and bounds in the days and weeks since our failed assault on the Empress. The discovery that sex bolstered our abilities had come as a welcome shock, even though that first time necessitated me throwing Astrid into the pond to stop the raging inferno. But even more remarkable, the more we were together, the more the magic grew.
Not that we needed a reason.
After our first few times, the explosive, uncontrollable fire didn’t appear. Still, we both felt the flow inside us open up a little more whenever we were together.
That, coupled with the training we engaged in on most days, and we were quickly nearing the power of the world’s elite, as far as I knew.
We’d fought and killed a few of the Empress’s own guards. Although, if I was honest with myself, I knew the element of surprise and a few lucky breaks carried us through that fight. The fact that the Empress herself didn’t raise a finger in her own defense the most glaring one.
I must have lapsed into a pensive silence, as Astrid drifted over and nudged me on our way back to my manor.
We kept our practice sessions over a series of rolling hills some distance away, since our secret needed to remain exactly that.
“What’re you thinking about in there?” she asked.
“The Empress. Our fight with her guards.”
Her face screwed up. “Ugh, why? Haven’t we rehashed that a million times by now?”
“Yep. Probably way more. But we still haven’t answered a single quest ion about it, have we?”
She grumbled and bumped into me again. “No. But still. We’re not going to without more information.”
“I know. I just can’t stop.”
She let out a long and dramatic sigh. “You want to read through more of your books tonight after dinner? Would that help?”
“For a bit. Before the hot tub.”
The Empress, while flinging us out of the Shadowed Bell, the hotel we’d assaulted her in, had whispered in my ear with a little spell. “Find the Exiled Failure in Blackfall.”
Whatever the hells that meant, I had no idea.
I didn’t believe searching for this Exiled Failure would get us anywhere, which left Blackfall. Unfortunately, I’d never heard of such a place. Or thing. Hells, I didn’t even have the slightest frame of reference of what it could be. I might be looking for an ancient city, an oddly-named business in another country, or literally anything in between.
My guess, however, was that we were looking for a place. Somewhere not on any current maps. Because it was either hidden, forgotten, or omitted.
It would have helped to know which one.
Or if that guess was right to begin with.
But, with no clear path, I decided to peruse my vast collection of esoterica in my secret basement. The name didn’t ring any bells with me, but I had books and tomes and grimoires cluttering many bookshelves. I might very well have read the name a long time ago but never remembered it as it would have meant nothing to me at the time.
Astrid and I had been skimming my collection most evenings. It, as expected, bored us both terribly. I loved the subject matter but hated the task. Blazing through page after page looking for a single reference taxed me greatly and Astrid even more. We did what we could before retiring to our bed, the hot tub, or the gardens with a drink.
I hesitated to ask anyone else about such a thing. I knew scholars that might be able to answer such a question, but I worried that Blackfall might be forbidden knowledge, and even asking would draw the wrong eyes to me.
Which was the last thing I wanted.
We’d escaped our little adventure unscathed as it were, but there were forces out in the world that I didn’t understand. I couldn’t afford to blunder into their grasps.
So we read.
We landed outside her cozy forge, nestled out in the woods on my estate, right next to a large pond. I had initially just wanted her forging to be kept secret from the rest of my people, but the location quickly became our favorite place to spend time together, either by bringing out a picnic, forging together — she did the work while I provided the magic — or by having some intimate time on a blanket by the water’s edge.
When our feet touched the ground, I let out a long sigh. “Almost overdid it today.” Even though we commanded powerful magic, it had its limits, and our practice sessions came with their own natural endings.
We took the long path through the trees and back towards my manor, not seeing anyone inside on the way down to the secret basement.
With Astrid’s help, we had brought down some large, comfy chairs. I had nice pieces down there already, but they weren’t the sort you’d want to lounge on for boring hours at a time. Bringing the chairs down the thin spiral stairs ended up being both aggravating and hilarious in equal measures.
“Well,” she said when we entered the room, “where were we?”
We’d cleaned off one of the many bookshelves, creating a buffer between the books and tomes we’d read through and the ones we hadn’t. So far, we’d filled two shelves.
The partially empty one sat between those and… the seventeen more to go.
I gestured to the fourth set of shelves. “Pick one.”
I’d amassed my collection over many years and had personally read all the books in the room. That did not, however, mean I wanted to go through them all again, one by one, looking for some vague reference.
Astrid chose a random volume from the fourth set of shelves. Her lip curled at the title. “‘Draconic Mating Rituals for Blue-scaled Variants in Mountainous Regions.’ Ugh. Seriously?”
“It’s not porn.”
“I know,” she said while sneering down at the book. “I wish it was. It’s going to be a very dry read if some of the past books are any indication.”
I had, in my pursuits, obtained pretty much any and all books I could that contained the least amount of information on dragonkind. Some were valuable tomes written by draconic mages, centuries ago, from direct experience.
Others were dry reads written by contemporary scholars with information gleaned from secondary sources.
The more recent the book, the less reliable the information.
We didn’t discriminate, though. Reading through all books one by one remained the plan. I couldn’t imagine how awful it would be for the name Blackfall to be in this room and we never found it because we scoffed at some obscure title.
More than an hour later, the sound of a book hitting the stone floor startled me out of the sleep creeping up on me. I’d chosen Heretical Mages of the Fourth Era. I thought it would be interesting, but once I began, I vaguely recalled having the same thought years before when I’d purchased it, only to have it turn out to be mostly filled with legal proceedings and long diatribes about how much the author agreed with the punishments handed down to these heretical mages.
He often thought they were lacking, even the barbaric ones.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the barbarous sections were glossed over. Perhaps I wouldn’t have wanted the mental images, but it would have helped me stay awake.
I glanced over to see Astrid’s head lolling to the side, the book about mating rituals on the ground underneath her limp fingers.
“Astrid!”
She jumped and nearly tipped her chair over. “Shit! What?”
“You were almost asleep.”
“No I… shit.”
“Wanna call it there for tonight?”
She sighed and slowly picked up the fallen tome gingerly, like it might bite if she wasn’t careful. “Absent gods, yes. If I have to read a single paragraph more detailing, very accurately, blue dragon cocks, I’m going to burn this book to cinders.”
“Not doing it for you?”
She curled her lip and gave me a look that could have withered a forest.
I laughed as I snapped my book shut over a scrap of paper I’d been using as a bookmark. “Come on. We’ll get in the hot tub for a whi—”
“Lys!” A voice echoed down the staircase. “Are you down there?”
“Yes, Eliza,” I called back up.
“Jess just arrived!”
“Oh, wonderful,” I said to Astrid. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Two
Jess stood in the foyer, her hands on her hips, flanked by two large trunks.
She worked as my fixer, among other things. She knew about a lot of my clandestine dealings — and helped with many of them — but she didn’t know everything.
Her brown hair had been tied up in a severe bun for traveling, and her clothes had the dust and grit from a journey. “My Lord!” she exclaimed when Astrid and I came into the room.
“Jess, good to see you.” I peered down at the double trunks. “I trust you were able to find everything, then?”
Outside, I heard a motorized coach lurch into motion, most likely carrying “the boys” off to their next job. Jess had many subordinates of her own, which she gladly used at my bidding. While I got along with them all, they preferred to leave dealing with me to Jess. I never asked why, but I assumed they weren’t confident in front of a Viscount, even though I had always praised them for the good work they did.
“We sure did!” She kicked open both trunks, revealing the armor sets Astrid had forged and we had worn in our attack on the Empress.
They had saved our lives ten times over in the few minutes the battle had lasted. I ran a finger across my breastplate, smudging the thick layer of dirt. And possibly blood. Not mine.
After the Empress had thrown us out of the Bell and across the entire city, we’d slammed down in a forest outside the walls.
The landing had nearly been fatal.
As it was, it remained the single most painful moment of my life. The force of it had crushed our bodies and bones. Only the magic of my golden dragonscale saved us, but it hurt. A lot. The power had forced our bones and tissues back to where they needed to be, heedless of the pain it caused.
