A Sunday sample from The Bones of the Earth
“Why did you take my dagger in the first place?”
It is not yours. You are merely the bearer. As was your ancestor, in his time. The dagger is very important. It was made not by humans, but by a member of an older race to protect this world. Now our world’s survival is in jeopardy. The war could destroy it utterly.
“What war?”
The war between the gods.
The dragon’s eye grew until Javor could see nothing else. He was in the dragon’s eye, and then he was the dragon, seeing what it saw.
He looked down from an unimaginable height. He saw mountains, sharp under a yellow sun. Wide oceans tossed blue and white waves against rocky shores. Broad rivers crossed high plains and shallow valleys. Thick forests shone with leaves the bright green of spring.
It was the beginning of the world. Some corner of Javor’s consciousness told him the dragon was telling him its story of creation, just as his parents, the Christians and the Gnostics had.
Sun poured out its energy and life spread thick, green and changing across Earth’s surface and deep in her waters.
Great forms rose out of the soil and the rock, shaking their earthy hides in joy under Sun’s warmth, ecstatically breathing in the clean air. No two were the same. They grew, lengthened, ate, roared, slept, defecated, mated. After a time longer than a human mind could grasp, they settled and merged back into the earth, not dying but becoming features of the world that gave rise to them.
The first dragons. The bones of the earth.
The Bones of the Earth
The Dark Age, eastern Europe: the earth has decided to rid itself of humanity with earthquakes, volcanoes and new plagues. Civilizations, even the mighty Roman Empire, crumble under the pressure of barbarian waves that are fleeing worse terrors.
Rejected by his own people, pursued by a dragon, young Javor heads for Constantinople, the centre of civilization, looking for answers to the puzzle of his great-grandfather’s dagger and the murder of his family.