RD-Epilogue

Book 1's Epilogue (but also) Book 2's Prologue

/He saw a great white dragon, the size of a god./  

He also remembered a dream. A dream in which he survived, or at least came back to life from, being electrocuted in the brain.  

 

/It just went up and up, extending unfathomably high into the dark, cloudless sky above./ 

Everything, before he killed himself with an electric blast to the face, was clear. Defeating the Titans, rescuing the pleasure-whelps, meeting and fighting the Cromags, and the three other dragons, Twilight, Jafaar, Dawn, Hope, Warla. 

 

/There was an all-powerful demonic rhythm of bassy vibrations./ 

Everything, after he killed himself, was fuzzy. He could remember only the highlights: The squirrels putting him back together while cutting the knight into as many pieces as possible. Changing his mind about sparing the Princess when he saw Warla's signature cape stuck to her shoe. Killing half a dozen Titans with one eye, one arm, but with the Knight's spiked mace and a powered-up Radiant as his Rider. Learning the secrets of the world with Jafaar in the Cave of the Dragons. Dying (again) as some new terrible enemy consumed entirely the kingdoms of both the North and the South.  

 

/Then, a great ripping noise and a scream./ 

Even more fuzzy were fragments of other dreams in which he had made vastly different choices. He raised a family of Cabbits with his mate, War, feeding on the kingdoms of the South until they joined with the armies and Dragons of the North to finally put him and his unusual lover down. 

 

/There was a crescendo in the bassy rhythm, then another scream./ 

Once, he joined the Cromags to feast on Squirrel-manity, until none were left except a perpetually anxious Twilight who lived forever on his head. Another time, he ran off with the Cromag Dragon, and they lived together, just them two, making love as they survived and explored new lands. 

 

/There was yet another scream, this one sounding more human than the last./ 

The dream fragments went on and on, throughout which he fell in love with, and lost, so very many people. Twilight, Dawn, Hope, Warla, so many other squirrels, even, somehow, the arrogant genius, Radiant. 'Wait, why must I feel that that is so unusual?' he thought. 'If I can romantically love a squirrel the size of my foot, then why not a man?' He loved, on multiple occasions, both the Lydia of the grasslands and the Lydia of the North.  

 

/He (What was his name, again?) felt a sudden, insistent pressure on his brain like a headache, as the white, rat-like creature stared in his eyes as if pleading for something./  

'I'm so sorry, little guy,' he thought, 'but you must suffer and die in fear, so that I may live to protect the others.' One thing was certain and consistent; if he survived to his third winter, the Mother would rise, the Stars would fall, and everything and everyone he loved throughout all his dreams would perish and be consumed. 

 

/The rat's eyes and guts melted away into white smoke that was sucked into the bare, hard earth between his feet, and he grew one more time./ 

What he couldn't be sure of: this accident of remembering past lives/alternate histories might never occur again. He had just over 2 years to prepare himself and everyone else in his little world to survive the apocalypse of the falling Stars and the challenge of extinction. If he succeeded, he would finally, rightfully, earn his true title as the "King of Dragons".