The first book in the series, The Fire Within, is an apparently simple, straightforward, and charming story about a young man who comes to stay as a tenant with a single-parent family, helps rescue an injured squirrel, and makes the acquaintance of a few clay dragons along the way.
Even if it was that simple, it gives absolutely no clue as to the power and profundity yet to come in the rest of the books. The stories get deeper, darker, and much more complex as they progress, while still retaining their trademark humor — from slapstick to black comedy — even in the direst of circumstances.
The story lines range from cozy domestic drama to an interdimensional war between races of thought-beings, into which humans are in danger of being dragged. There is mystery, danger, and adventure by the bucket-load, and this chapter gives a glimpse of what happens in each.
The series starts with David Rain about to move into the Pennykettle household on Wayward Crescent. David is marveling at one of the small clay dragons he has seen all around the house ever since he first walked in the door of Liz and Lucy’s home. He does not yet know that they can come to life.
There was a fiery pride in its oval-shaped eyes as if it had a sense of its own importance and knew it had a definite place in the world. Its tall slim body was painted green with turquoise hints at the edges of its scales. It was sitting erect on two flat feet and an arrow-shaped tail that swung back on itself in a single loop. Four ridged wings (two large, two small) fanned out from its back and shoulders. A set of spiky, flaglike scales ran the entire length of its spine.
David picked it up — and very nearly dropped it. “It’s warm,” he said, blinking in surprise.
“That’s because —”
“It’s been in the sun too long,” said Mrs. Pennykettle, quickly cutting her daughter off. She lifted the dragon out of David’s hands and rested it gently back on the shelf.
David soon learns that Liz Pennykettle makes these dragons, styled in a variety of poses and often with certain characteristics emphasized. She sells some of them at the market in Scrubbley. Liz has a studio in a room upstairs, called the Dragons’ Den, and the new tenant is told in no uncertain terms by Lucy that he is not allowed to enter. Needless to say, this piques David’s curiosity, but he manages to stifle the impulse to have a sneaky look in, at least for a while.
In the meantime, Lucy, who is very fond of wildlife, implores David to help her to find an injured squirrel she has seen in the garden, and which she has named Conker. David agrees after some cajoling, but upon meeting the Pennykettles’ next-door neighbor, Henry Bacon, he realizes that he will have competition for this task. Henry’s interest in capturing the squirrel is not benevolent, as he believes that squirrels have been responsible for eating his flowers and digging up his bulbs. To this end, he has gotten the town council to chop down a grand old oak tree that used to be home to a whole group of these creatures, which have now disappeared from the area. Only Conker is left behind.
Back in the Dragons’ Den, Liz has been making a “special” dragon for David as a housewarming gift. Despite Lucy’s dire warning for him to stay out of the studio, Mrs. Pennykettle invites him in, where he gets introduced to several of the small dragons who are resident in the household. David’s dragon turns out to be similar to the other dragons, except that it (he) is holding something….
… It had a pencil wrapped in its claws and was biting the end of it, lost in thought.
“Hope you like him,” said Liz. “He was … interesting to do.”
“He’s wonderful,” said David. “Why does he have a pencil?”
“And a pad?” said Lucy, pointing to a notepad in the dragon’s other paw.
“It’s what he wanted,” said Liz, coming to join them. “I tried him with a book, but he just didn’t like it. He definitely wanted a pencil to chew on.”
“Perhaps he’s a drawing dragon,” said Lucy. “Do you like drawing pictures?”
David shook his head. “Can’t draw for anything. What do you mean, he ‘wanted’ a pencil?”
Liz lifted a shoulder. “Special dragons are like characters in a book; I have to go where they want to take me. I have a writer friend who’s always saying that.”
Lucy let out an excited gasp. “You mean he’s a dragon for making up stories?!”
“Lucy, don’t start,” said Liz. “Now, David, if you accept this dragon you must promise to care for him always.”
“You mustn’t ever make him cry,” said Lucy.
David ran a thumb along the dragon’s snout. “Erm, this might sound like a silly question, but how is it possible to make him cry?”
“By not loving him,” said Lucy, as if it ought to be obvious.
“Imagine that there’s a spark inside him,” said Liz.
“If you love him, it will always stay lit,” smiled Lucy.
“To light it, you must give him a name,” said Liz.
“Something magic,” said Lucy. “Think of one — now!”
David had a think. “How about … Gadzooks?”
Now that Lucy knows Gadzooks is a writing dragon, she asks David to make up a story for her about how Conker damaged his eye. Initially, David refuses. But later, with Gadzooks’s help, he begins a tale about Conker and another squirrel named Snigger, as a present for Lucy on her birthday. This story turns out to be not only a recounting of events that have already occurred, but also a prophetic scribing of the near future. Whatever David writes about, happens.
In time, David and Lucy do manage to catch both Conker and Snigger (the latter accidentally). Along with Liz, they take the two squirrels to the vet at a wildlife hospital, where Sophie, a young woman David likes, works. Snigger is given a clean bill of health, but Conker is not so fortunate. He is given only a short time to live. Hoping to give the dying animal a last few happy days, the group releases the squirrels in the library gardens. David manages to finish his story for Lucy, but the ending is very rushed and unsatisfactory. David is trying to give it a positive outcome, but becomes frustrated and ignores Gadzooks when this seems impossible. Gadzooks becomes very unhappy, to the point where he is in danger of crying his fire tear.
A fire tear is something that a dragon cries at the end of its life. Inside it is all the fire that was within the dragon throughout its existence. This tear then falls off the dragon’s snout, drops onto the ground, and finds its way back to the fire at the center of the Earth, from whence it originally came. The only exception to this is related in a legend that runs through The Fire Within. This legend concerns Gawain, the last-known real (or “natural”) dragon in the world, and after whom one of Lucy’s “special” dragons is named.
David yawned and snuggled into his pillow, faintly aware of movement on the bed. It felt lighter, suddenly. More freedom to move. He stretched his legs and cuddled Winston. His body relaxed. His mind drifted. He saw Gawain on a mountaintop, silhouetted against the shimmering moon; Guinevere, wrapped in a kind of shawl, singing into the shell of his ear. Gradually, the dragon lowered his head. His spiked tail drooped. His scales fell flat. His oval eyes, long-closed and weary, blinked one final, fiery time. His life expired in a snort of vapor. But in that moment, a teardrop formed. A living teardrop, on his snout. A violet flame in a dot of water. It trickled down his face to the tip of his nostrils and fell, sparkling, into Guinevere’s hands.
But could she survive the power of the dragon’s auma? And can David correspondingly save Gadzooks from shedding his own fire tear? What happens when David rewrites the end of Lucy’s story? And what has Spikey, the hedgehog, got to do with it all? Well, some things are best revealed by reading the book….
The second book in the Last Dragon Chronicles series opens with David receiving the latest in a long line of rejection letters from various publishers. He has been trying repeatedly to get his squirrel story accepted, but with no success so far.
By now, David has discovered that, as a child, Liz was given a mysterious snowball, a pinch of which enables her to bring her clay dragons to life. He is interested to find out the secret of this “icefire,” which he knows is guarded by polar bears in the frozen north. When the enigmatic Professor Bergstrom, a visiting academic at the college, tells him about a competition to win a research trip to the High Arctic in Canada, David is desperate to win it. The rules, though, are rather unusual. He must write an essay about whether dragons ever existed on the Earth. David decides to ask Liz for information. At the same time, he begins writing a second book, White Fire, about the Arctic and polar bears.
David gets further help for his essay from a Goth girl named Zanna, who is taking the same course as him. She offers to lend him a book on dragons. As his girlfriend, Sophie, is now away working in Africa for eight months, David feels somewhat awkward about inviting Zanna to Wayward Crescent, especially since Liz and Lucy have gone out that afternoon. Nevertheless, he shows Zanna the Dragons’ Den. While there, she spies a wishing dragon, G’reth, made by Lucy, and a bronze clay egg. Zanna persuades David to make a wish.
David screwed up his face. “I’m not playing wishing games.”
“It’s not a game, dummy. You’re raising his auma. Believe. Wish for something — about Gawain.”
“Such as?”
“Such as finding out where his fire tear is hidden?”
David stepped back, shaking his head. “No. That’s not a good idea.” Not here, he thought, with all these dragons looking on.
Zanna grabbed him by the sleeve and tugged him forward. “The fact that you’re afraid of this only confirms you think it could happen. Do you want to know the truth or not?”
David sighed and looked away. This is ridiculous, he told himself. It won’t work. It can’t work. A wishing dragon? It was the stuff of fairy tales. But knowing he’d get no peace until he tried, he touched his thumbs to G’reth’s smooth paws.
“Careful,” whispered Zanna, “you’re making him wobble.”
David steadied his hands and tried again. “I wish,” he whispered, “that I knew the secret of Gawain’s fire tear.”
Zanna, meanwhile, who feels oddly drawn to the clay egg, somehow manages to “kindle,” or awaken, it. These two actions result in an immediate response from the Universe.
An evil sibyl named Gwilanna turns up, calling herself “Aunty Gwyneth.” She claims to be a relation of Liz and Lucy’s. She demands to see Liz, who arrives home almost at the same moment. Gwilanna has been “called” by the wisher, and is surprised to detect a powerful auma change in Liz, denoting that she is the equivalent of pregnant (“eggnant”?) because of the kindling of the bronze egg by Zanna.
In theory this pregnancy should not be possible. Gwilanna believes that Liz’s auma is getting stronger, while, with all the other descendants of Guinevere (for that is what Liz and Lucy are) it is getting weaker, generation by generation, as expected. “Aunty Gwyneth” questions why this exception might be so. Getting no response from either Liz or Lucy on the subject, she determines to interrogate the wishing dragon instead. Gwilanna demands help from Gretel, another Pennykettle dragon, who belongs to her and is under her power.
G’reth gulped and swallowed a plug of smoke. Under normal circumstances, this would not have caused any problems for him. But the fact that he was hanging upside down, tail knotted around a thin wire coat hanger, which in turn was hooked around the lightbulb holder swinging precariously left and right, had brought on a dreadful bout of coughing, which only added to his predicament — and his fear.
Aunty Gwyneth clicked her fingers.
Gretel, sitting on the ledge of the wardrobe, opened her throat and released a jet of fire. There was a smell of burning and the green ground wire in the core of the light cord sizzled red-hot and duly snapped. The cord lurched, jerking G’reth another millimeter or two toward the mass of rubble littering the floorboards. Though his wings were bound (by Aunty Gwyneth’s industrial-strength hairpins) he nevertheless managed to swing his head upward. All that remained of the electrical cord now was a strand from the outer sheath of white and the light blue neutral wire. With a whimpering hrrr? he looked toward Gretel. She blew a tart wisp of smoke and looked away.
Getting no useful information from G’reth, Gwilanna decides to take a sneakier approach and aid David in his quest to get to the Arctic, hoping that he will discover more on her behalf. To this end she fluences an editor to not only accept David’s squirrel book, but also to publish his polar bear saga. Zanna wins the essay competition, but David can now afford to pay his own way for the field trip, using the money due to him for writing his books.
But what about Liz and the egg?
Liz is semi-comatose while the egg is going through the hatching process. The boy that Liz has been told to expect turns out to be a male dragon, the first “natural” dragon to be born in modern times. Zanna reaches out to touch it, and is scarred by Gwilanna’s fingernails with three jagged lines which never heal. Under cover of this distraction, the dragon escapes through the open window and, aided by G’reth, flies to Bergstrom’s rooms. David, having overcome Gwilanna, follows with Zanna and Gretel. Gretel, by now, has swapped her loyalties to become Zanna’s dragon.
At Rutherford House, where Bergstrom lives, Zanna discovers that the young natural dragon, whom she calls Grockle, has been born without fire. She is upset by this, even more so when he turns to stone in her arms, and totally distraught when she finds out that David suspected this might happen, but failed to warn her.
Zanna disappears, refusing to speak to David. Although he tries to find her, he has no luck. The days pass and eventually, just before David is due to go to the Arctic, the contract from the publisher arrives.
“Sign,” Lucy urged him.
But Liz raised a hand. “Wait. Have you read through this?”
“Sort of. It’s just … legalities and stuff.”
“Exactly. You ought to know what you’re signing. Perhaps Henry could check it for you?”
“It’s all right,” said David. “It’s just boring blurb. Don’t spoil my big moment. Pen, someone?”
Lucy grabbed one off the countertop and handed it over.
“Signed … David … Rain,” David muttered, scratching his name on the line marked “author.”
David has no time to do anything further — his ride to the airport is about to arrive and he therefore asks Liz to mail the contract to the publisher for him.
Liz picked it up off the kitchen table. For a moment she stood there reading a chunk, then she began to quickly flick through it. At the final page, she stopped and stared. “Lucy, you know that pen, the one David used to sign his name. Does it leak?”
Lucy drew a few lines with it, on her hand. “A bit, yes.”
“As much as that?” Liz turned the page around.
From the lower curves of David’s signature, three long trails of ink had formed.
Lucy tilted her head … and shuddered. “They look like Zanna’s scratch.”
Was Lucy right to shudder? What effect will these lines called “the mark of Oomara” have on Zanna and on David? Will David find the secret of Gawain’s fire tear, as he wished? And if so, will he live to regret it?
The mark of Oomara
David makes it to the field trip, with Zanna by his side again, and continues writing his book. Things are beginning to get more and more complex and confusing for him, though, as he realizes that once again, his writing is mirroring real life. This leads him into questioning his beliefs about the world and his role in it, especially when something called a fire star becomes more and more apparent in the sky, and this portal is due to open a way between worlds.
David has been writing that Gwilanna is determined to raise the natural dragon, Gawain, from a mountaintop on an island in the Arctic called the Tooth of Ragnar. This mountain is where Gawain cried his fire tear and turned to stone in ages past. Guinevere, the woman who caught his tear, had allegedly agreed to trade it with Gwilanna for a daughter. However, the trade never took place.
The child, Gwendolen, was brought up by Gwilanna, but eventually turned her back on the sibyl and went to live among the bears, earning their love and respect. Gwilanna has always hated the bears for this, and is therefore prepared to use them selfishly for her own devious ends.
David writes that Gwilanna has promised to heal a bear named Ingavar, who has been shot, if he will retrieve a certain polar bear tooth for her. David carries this talisman around his neck on a cord. Gwilanna tells Ingavar to kill him when he has succeeded.
David’s story finally comes to a head when he and Zanna are faced with Ingavar at a trading post in Chamberlain. Fortunately, Ingavar is tranquilized and taken away to “polar bear prison.” The tooth, however, is lost in the melee, but is picked up by Tootega, the Inuit guide who works at the research base where David and Zanna are staying.
Zanna, by now aware that David has the power to write “fact” rather than simply fiction, is none too happy about this state of affairs.
“This is just too spooky,” said Zanna. “Read the story, Dr. Bergstrom. Now.”
Bergstrom glanced at the open laptop, weaving colored pipework on its flat gray screen.
“No, I’m destroying it,” David said. He stepped forward and moved the mouse. Bergstrom immediately clamped his arm.
“You have a contract, remember?”
David looked into the scientist’s eyes. It wasn’t clear whether Bergstrom was referring to Apple Tree Publishing or the personal promise David had made him to keep on writing about the Arctic. Even so, David said, “I’m wiping it.” And he dragged the file into the computer’s trash can and emptied it.
This was still not enough for Zanna. “Defrag the disk.”
“What?”
“I don’t want it in memory, even in bits. Run a defrag over it. Now.”
“But —?”
“Just do it, David.”
“Be my guest,” said Bergstrom, wheeling his chair away.
Silently furious, David ran the program that would rearrange the disk so all the files were contiguous and any scraps of deleted files were eliminated. “There. Happy now?”
Unbeknown to David, however, Bergstrom has previously printed out a copy — but to what purpose? Anders Bergstrom is definitely not what he first appeared to be. A lecturer, yes, but much, much more than that, for not many professors can shape-shift between man and polar bear … or possess a small dragon not unlike those that Liz makes, who can Travel through space and time, also shape-shift, and become invisible to boot….
Meanwhile, back at Wayward Crescent, Gwilanna has abducted Lucy to be a “Guinevere clone” to aid in the raising of Gawain. Lucy has been taken to a cave on the Tooth of Ragnar, where she is to be held for the next three months, until the fire star is in its correct alignment. While there, she finds an isoscele, the last scale of a dragon’s tail, belonging to Gawain, which she hides from Gwilanna.
After a frantic phone call from Liz, informing him of Lucy’s fate, David returns home early from the Arctic. Zanna remains behind and, with Tootega, helps release the tranquilized Ingavar back onto the ice. Gwilanna, in raven form, creates a blizzard, hoping to steal the tooth at last, but her plans backfire when three polar bears arrive and carry Zanna off with them.
While all this is happening, G’reth, the wishing dragon, is still trying to fulfill his duty and find the whereabouts of Gawain’s fire tear for David. Rather like David, his investigations are about to take him far beyond what he might have expected. He manages to Travel outside the boundaries of the known Universe and there meets up with a young entity from a race called the Fain.
He had a startling impression of emptiness now. No light. No color. No temperature. No smell. And yet he sensed he was not alone.
He was not.
He felt it enter through the tip of his tail, lift the scales along his spine, and whisper through the tunnels of his spiky ears. Intelligence, finding its level, like water. A youthful, happy being, fusing with his auma.
What are you? it said, tickling his thoughts.
What are you? G’reth asked it.
I am Fain, it said. Shall we commingle?
The Fain are thought-beings who have no physical form of their own, but can merge or “commingle” with any other entity, sharing their host’s body. They have a long and benevolent historical connection with dragons, and their ultimate aspiration is to merge with one. G’reth is transformed by this experience, returning back to the known Universe along with the young Fain.
By the time G’reth gets home, Liz has taken Bonnington, the Pennykettles’ cat, to the vet. It is not good news. Bonnington is dying. His plight does not appear to be helped by drinking some melted icefire water. There is one beneficial outcome from this sad news, however. Grockle, the young natural dragon who turned to stone at the end of Icefire, has been brought back to the Dragons’ Den, where he rests in a basket of straw. With the aid of the young Fain being and a drop of Bonnington’s saliva, the Pennykettle dragons bring Grockle back to full life. Once again, Grockle escapes through an open window.
David asks Gadzooks for help to find Grockle.
[Gadzooks] scribbled something fiercely across the pad. Gretel and G’reth leaned in to take a look, exchanging a puzzled hrrr at what they saw. David closed his eyes to picture the message. It surprised him too. A name:
He whispered it aloud.
As usual, he had no idea what it meant (at first). Insight would come a little later, from Liz. Right then, however, she was incapable of speech.
She had just fainted in a heap on the floor.
David discovers that Arthur is the love of Liz’s life. Many years earlier, he was tricked by Gwilanna into breaking off the relationship and has had no contact with Liz since. Eventually, David traces Arthur to a place called Farlowe Island, where he has become a monk, changing his name to Brother Vincent. Arthur has also been writing fact as fiction, using a claw belonging to Gawain as a pen. Grockle, seeking the claw, has been drawn to the island and hidden there by Arthur. Arthur’s secret is given away to the abbot by one of the other monks, Brother Bernard, who later regrets his actions, as Grockle is captured, held in a stable block, and tortured.
Grockle in chains
Bernard, realizing that what Arthur has told him is the plain truth and that the dragon is sentient and capable of communicating with him, asks:
“Where did you come from?”
The dragon raked the ground. It seemed to understand, but its answer was vague and made no sense.
Zannnnnaaaa, it growled.
“Zannnnaaa? What is Zannnnaaa?” Bernard said, frowning.
The dragon swung its head. The chain links rippled in the flashes of daylight streaking through the holes in the derelict roof.
Muuuuutthherrrrr.
The word rumbled around the stable. In a glassless window high in the gable away to their right, the raven landed with a flutter of its wings. A tic developed at Brother Bernard’s mouth. “Mother?” he whispered.
The dragon whimpered.
“Then who is your father?”
With another fierce toss of its head, the dragon graarked as though the question was worthy of a bolt of fire. But no fire came. That area of its body still bound by mailing tape bulged with the instinct to spread its wings. But there was no release. Its muted tail pounded the floor in frustration. Its talons raked the earth. It gave no answer.
“Tell me,” said Bernard, his throat growing sore from the demands of a language so lacking in vowels.
“Who is your father?”
Caarrkkk! went the raven, making Bernard jump. This bird was beginning to make him uneasy. There was a dark light in the center of its eye. Why was it so often in attendance to the dragon? Was it some kind of familiar? he wondered. A spirit that served the needs of the creature? He heard footsteps nearby. The raven heard them, too. With another moody caark, it circled the barn and swooped back into the open air. Startled voices remarked upon it: Brothers Terence and Peter.
Bernard centered on the dragon again, “Quickly. Your father?”
The yellow eyes closed. The arches of the nostrils flared like trumpets. Gaaaawwwaaaaaainn, said his distant descendant, Grockle.
Bernard backed away with a hand against his throat.
Gawain.
That was all the proof he needed.
Meanwhile, Brother Vincent is locked in his cell, and an off-island envoy sent for, to establish what should be done about the situation.
Unfortunately, when G’reth brought back the young Fain entity to this world, another Fain being came, too. This one was a killer, out to punish G’reth’s newfound friend, and to stop the fire star portal between Earth and the home thought-world of the Fain, Ki:mera, from opening. This entity took over the body of the envoy to Farlowe Island, desiring to find Grockle also, and cleanse this world of dragons. However, Grockle starts a fire, reclaims Gawain’s claw, and escapes from the island, making his way to the Arctic, the Tooth of Ragnar, and the portal. The evil Fain follows. David is also in hot pursuit, using Bergstrom’s invisible dragon, Groyne, to take him there through time and space.
Having reached the Tooth, David finds that Tootega is already there, but his body has been taken over by the killer Fain being. A dramatic confrontation occurs, with unforeseen results for David and all those connected to him.
Did Grockle make it through the portal in time? Why has Gwilanna been trapped as a raven in an ice block? What will Liz do when she discovers that Arthur’s mind was entered by the evil Fain, leaving him terrified, confused, and nearly blind? Did the young Fain escape its evil pursuer? And just what exactly is Bergstrom up to?
Five years have passed since the end of Fire Star. David has been missing in the Arctic for all this time, and is presumed dead by all but Lucy. Despite this, daily life in the Crescent has returned to relative normality for the Pennykettles — and for Zanna, David’s long-term partner, and their child, Alexa, who now both live with Lucy and Liz. Arthur has moved in, too, having been nursed back to relative health by the family. He remains blind.
Alexa is nearly five. A very bright child, she has powers and awarenesses that are only just becoming apparent, and are yet to be taken seriously. On the anniversary of David’s disappearance, Zanna presents Alexa with a gift.
“Listen carefully,” said Zanna, dropping down on one knee. She brushed a curl of black hair off Alexa’s forehead. “You know we talked about polar bears and the icy place they live?”
“Yes,” said Alexa, possibly hopeful of receiving one.
Zanna looked at her a moment and tried to frame the words. Those eyes. His eyes. That rich, dark blue. Unsettling and comforting, all in one glance. “Your daddy gave me a dragon there once. I want you to have him, because … because Mommy can’t take care of him anymore.”
The little girl frowned and tilted her head. “Mommy, why are you crying?” she asked.
Zanna bracketed her hands as if she were holding an invisible piece of rock. “You have to look very, very hard to see him. But he’s there. He’s real. His name is G’lant and his is a flame that will never die out.” She opened her hands — as if she were scattering the ashes of her grief — and set G’lant down on Alexa’s palms.
The girl looked thoughtfully at the space above her gloves. “I like him,” she said.
This gesture seems to set Zanna free of some of her grief, and when a handsome young man named Tam Farrell appears to show an interest in her, she considers responding. Tam, however, is a journalist who has been contacted anonymously by Lucy, who believes it is high time that someone did something about trying to find David. She thinks Tam might be able to help in the search. Tam visits the shop that Zanna owns and buys a (“normal”) clay dragon, while casually probing for information about David Rain.
It’s not long before the Pennykettle dragons work out that Tam is not quite what he claims to be. Determined to put matters right, they set up a chain of events that result in Tam’s girlfriend giving the game away to Zanna just before Tam is due to have a reflexology consultation with her. Zanna, of course, is angry and upset with Lucy, but with Tam especially.
“You know, for one foolish moment, I let myself believe that you could be something special, like David, when all you were giving me were lies and deceit.”
“I can help you,” he insisted, coughing out pungent, oil-sweet smoke. “If you tell the world the truth, it will only raise your profile even more.”
“Truth?” said Lucy. “What do you mean?”
Tam shook his head. “That he never existed. The author of the book: David Rain. He’s a cipher. It’s all just a front, isn’t it?”
In an attempt to prove Tam wrong, Lucy persuades him to take her to the address David wrote on his letter to Liz when responding to her original “room for rent” ad. However, events take a terrifying turn when, having found the place, Lucy is pulled through a rift in space by an evil force. She finds herself on Farlowe Island, among the community of monks who live there. But the monks have been taken over, en masse, by the Ix.
The Ix are the negative version of the benevolent Fain, and use the power of fear to break down any resistance to their plans. They are particularly interested in Lucy because of her ancestry of dragons and her ability to create sculptures, inherited from her mother. They force her to make an antidragon from a compound called obsidian. The template for this creature, which they call a darkling, is generated from a hallucination based on Lucy’s deepest dread.
In general shape it resembled a dragon. Serpentine body. Powerful wings. But it was thicker-set and ugly. Cabbage ears. A gargoyle. Its feet and paws were stout and immensely strong, the claws inside them conical, tapering to points. It had no ordered rows of scales. Instead, the surface of its body was pocked and ridged as if the skin had been sheared from brittle rock. And apart from its pulsing, bile-colored eyes, hooked green tongue, and gray-tipped claws, it was completely black. Yet Lucy could see lightning spidering inside it, as though she had opened a box of mirrors. She shook her head in fear as the creature turned toward her. With a granitelike click it unlatched its jaw. From its throat came a bolt of pure black fire.
And when she has done that, they intend to send her back through the same time rift they took her from but commingled with an Ix assassin….
In the meantime, David has found out a lot more about who and what he is, his history, and his purpose on the planet. We also learn where he has been and what has happened to him in the past five years.
David is now in the Arctic, attempting to save his beloved polar bears — and indeed the world. He has teamed up with two of them, Kailar and Avrel, to search for the opening to the Fire Eternal, the most creative force in the Universe. David has in his possession the stone eye of Gawain, which has been brought up from the ocean depths by the sea goddess, Sedna. David intends to open the eye and free the spirit of the dormant dragon at last.
David is also accompanied by Gwilanna, who was left as a raven and trapped in a block of ice at the end of the previous book. Despite being a nuisance, Gwilanna agrees to help David with his quest, on the promise of being returned to human form by the end of it.
However, events take a surprising turn when an ancient mammoth appears in front of them all.
David is quick to recognize it as a projection sent by his daughter, Alexa, as a token of her love. However, Kailar is hexed into perceiving it as something else.
Kailar gave out a fighting growl and immediately drew up parallel to the mammoth’s flank. Ignoring Ingavar’s previous instruction, he began pacing back and forth in a threatening manner, his head held low, his black tongue issuing from the side of his mouth. It was a gibe to the creature to come and challenge him.
Avrel tightened his claws. There was going to be trouble.
Indeed there was.
David urgently sends Gwilanna back to Wayward Crescent to protect Alexa when he realizes that his daughter’s auma trail must have been detected by the Ix, via the projection she sent. Gwilanna returns just in time to face the Ix:risor, or assassin, that is Lucy. There are devastating and far-reaching effects as a result of the confrontation, some of which echo throughout the rest of the series.
David, meanwhile, is nearing the end of his quest, and polar bears in their hundreds are gathering around the gateway to the Fire Eternal….
What does David intend to do with all the congregated bears? Can he open Gawain’s eye? Who does Lucy try to kill? And does she succeed? Which Pennykettle dragon is in dire danger of extinction? And why is an ornamental “fairy door” so important? Will David ever return to Wayward Crescent?
The fifth book in the series is the darkest of them all. It deals with (obviously!) dark fire, the most destructive force in the Universe.
The weather has gone completely weird; there is a mist over the Arctic that nothing can penetrate, and natural dragons are back to recolonize the Earth. As if all this worldwide hoo-ha wasn’t enough to be getting on with, things are not so straightforward back in leafy suburbia either….
David Rain appears unannounced one day in the Pennykettles’ kitchen, where Zanna finds him sitting calmly at the table, apparently unconcerned about the upset his disappearance, and subsequent reappearance, has caused.
“Five years you were gone.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Five Christmases, five birthdays, five Father’s Days, five … Valentine’s.” Five letters, she was thinking bitterly, remembering how she’d always written one to him on that day in mid-February, the anniversary of his apparent “death.” “And then you just turn up out of nowhere?”
“I couldn’t help it,” he repeated. “The Fain took me back. Into the world they call Ki:mera, a place where time is meaningless.”
“Not to me.” She forced her pretty face forward. “Just go, David. Disappear into your weird Fain world. Leave me alone to look after my child.”
Zanna is doubly upset as she has just discovered a strange rash on Alexa’s back while bathing her. The little girl doesn’t seem to be troubled by it, but it is yet one more thing to add to the growing list of anxieties that pervade the Pennykettle household.
Liz is pregnant again, this time naturally, and Lucy is not her old self at all. Although the Ix assassin within her has gone, she is still feeling guilty and in shock about what it made her do. As if all this wasn’t enough, Henry, the Pennykettles’ cranky next-door neighbor, is ill, and his sister, Agatha, arrives to look after him. Agatha turns out to be another sibyl, one of many that seem to be popping up all over the world as the twelve natural dragons from the old Wearle, or colony, are being awakened from their prolonged sleep.
The whereabouts of these dragons’ resting places is becoming the subject of intense interest since Arthur received a phone call from an old friend, Rupert Steiner. Rupert has been visited by a small dragon, later identified as Gadzooks, who has left a message on a piece of Steiner’s best notepaper.
Arthur, with Liz and Lucy (and Lucy’s special dragon, Gwendolen — along for the ride as a GPS) go to see Rupert at his home in Cambridge. There, with Gwendolen’s help, they discover that Gadzooks had written the word “Scuffenbury” — but in dragontongue. Steiner recalls that he has seen some similar marks in some photographs he was once sent, taken in a cave at a place called the Hella glacier, in the Arctic. Using Gadzooks’s message as a key, he ultimately manages to decipher the writings on the wall of the cave. They turn out to be the record of a meeting between the last twelve dragons in the world (the Last Dragon Chronicles, in fact). The writings are subsequently published by Tam in his newspaper’s magazine.
Lucy is thoroughly thrown by what she learns from this article. It becomes obvious that one of these twelve dragons is lying dormant at Scuffenbury, beneath a hill called Glissington Tor. David persuades Lucy to go there with Tam.
“I’ve booked us in here.”
“The Old Gray Dragon?”
“It’s a guesthouse,” he said. “Bed-and-breakfast. Right on the side of the Tor. It says in their blurb that on a still night you can hear the dragon snoring. I thought it might make you feel at home.”
But “at home” is the last thing that Lucy feels. A terrifying nightmare while asleep on the first night is followed by a series of further nightmares in broad daylight. The owners of the guest house, Hannah and Clive, seem like perfectly pleasant people; the only other guest, a Ms. Gee, while a little eccentric and “standoffish” appears to want nothing more than to be left alone; and as for the cat — well, the guesthouse owners deny any knowledge of a cat….
It all starts off innocently enough with Tam and Lucy deciding to take a walk up the hill opposite the Tor, to survey the land. Lucy, looking across the valley, spots something out of the ordinary.
“I think there’s someone on the Tor.”
His footsteps halted. She saw him squint in that scary polar bear fashion, just the way David sometimes did. “Probably a tourist. People come here all the time.” He started along the path again, almost bounding where it hollowed out into a dip.
Lucy scrabbled after him, glancing at the figure every now and then. Comparatively speaking it was nothing but a matchstick, but Lucy, blessed with the eyesight of youth, could still work out its basic movements. She saw the arms come parallel with the shoulders. Half-stretched, not full, as if the person might be cupping their hands above their eyes. Or holding a pair of binoculars.
But things deteriorate rapidly from there, especially once they discover that the person watching them is yet another sibyl.
And speaking of sibyls, Gwilanna has gone missing, along with the isoscele of Gawain and an obsidian knife, which she had stolen from the Ix that had invaded Lucy. David is eager to find Gwilanna, not only because she is highly dangerous in her own right, but also because the knife contains a spark of dark fire. The leader of the new Wearle, a natural dragon called G’Oreal, gives David the task of recovering the dark fire, which is then to be taken north to be destroyed.
David solicits Zanna’s help in locating Gwilanna, and Zanna obliges by tracking and following the sibyl to Farlowe Island. Once there, Zanna finds she has walked into a trap. Gwilanna is in a maudlin mood, lamenting the fact that she should have been granted illumination (a spiritual merging) with the offspring of a dragon called Ghislaine, but was cheated out of it. Gwilanna has created a force field around the circle of standing stones in the middle of the island, within which Zanna, and the dark fire, are held.
“The circle will magnify the spark behind you and the Fain will see it from here to Ki:mera. By the time they arrive, I will be gone — with the obsidian — and my terms will be written in your blood across the stones: Give me illumination — or I take the dark fire to the Ix.”
But Gwilanna’s plans go awry, and the spell that was intended to put the specter of the dragon Ghislaine to rest instead attracts the auma of a very different — and terrifying — creature. A flock of ravens roosting nearby are also affected by the energy flow and begin to mutate … with far-reaching consequences.
These raven-mutants cause mayhem and destruction wherever they go. But in the initial confusion at the stone circle, the one saving grace is that Gwilanna, although still free, has been forced to leave the dark fire behind. This Zanna gives to David, who retains it for his own purposes, rather than take it north to the Wearle, as directed. But possession of the dark fire brings interest from the Ix. Zanna is concerned that the Ix are too much of a threat in a general sense, and is worried for the family’s safety specifically. David decides to tell her more about the situation.
“[Y]ou’re right, the Ix can’t be defeated as such — but their negative auma can be transmuted.”
“Oh, yeah? Tell that to Lucy. She’s still scared out of her wits by them.”
“I have talked to Lucy,” he said. His gaze drifted sideways, compressing into bitterness. “She was attacked by an Ix:risor, a highly intensified Ix grouping, sometimes called a Comm:Ix or a Cluster. When they’re concentrated into a conglomerate like that they become almost impossible for the human mind to resist. But that’s exactly the state we need them in: one huge cluster. It’s getting them there that’s the difficult part.”
“And whose finger will be on the trigger when you do? I’d never seen that mangy crone Gwilanna scared until she talked about you meddling with the Fire Eternal.”
“It won’t be me,” he said, and looked at her hard.
Slowly, the implication in his gaze began to register. “No,” she said, covering the scars on her arm. “If you put Alexa in any kind of danger, I’ll —”
“Alexa is already in danger,” he said, with a calmness she found unsettling. To her deeper dismay, she realized she was trying hard not to cry.
The danger for the whole family continues to increase. Even Sophie (David’s first girlfriend) e-mails from Africa to say that she thinks something is amiss with her “special” dragon, Grace. The tension builds; breaking point is imminent.
Back at Scuffenbury, Lucy succeeds in awakening the dormant dragon there, but with drastic effect and at great cost to herself and those around her. Tam is missing, several others are dead, and although David sends Grockle to help her, she finds that that help may be too little and too late.
When she looked again, Glissington Tor had broken into four distinct mounds, and rising from its smoking center was the most terrifying dragon she had ever seen.
It was green, savage, and at least three times the size of Grockle. When it threw out its wings it blocked the sun and seemed to draw the landscape around it like a blanket. From nostril to tail it must have measured half a small field. For a moment or two it kept its head folded into its chest, but when it raised its snout and Lucy saw the redness in one eye, the bones at the base of her spine turned to jelly. The dragon had been horribly attacked at some time. Or maybe something had failed with its fire tear? Or the eye had become diseased in some way? She couldn’t tell. Nor could she bear to look at it for long. But little did she know she would soon be forced to. For just as the unicorn had sensed her presence, suddenly the dragon seemed to scent her as well. The scales around its neck came up in a frill and black smoke gushed from its long, narrow snout. Paying no heed whatsoever to Grockle, it turned its damaged gaze on Lucy. At first she told herself it couldn’t have seen her. She had to be a mile and a half away, at least. But with a wallop of wings that tickled the blades of grass around her feet, the thing took off and headed their way. In mid-flight, it uncoupled its jaw and let out a squeal that sounded like a pig being forced through a grinder. Lucy saw Grockle tense. The squeal gathered force and grew into a roar, which seemed loud enough to shatter the dome of the sky. Lucy covered her ears and screamed.