Dragonforge by James Maxey

might have been driven mad in the timeless dark. Blasphet philosophically accepted his confinement as an opportunity to contemplate the error of his ways, free from normal distractions.
    Unfortunately, Blasphet still had a few abnormal distractions. When Shandrazel had captured him, he’d known of Blasphet’s reputation for concealing poisoned needles and small tools among his feather-scales. He’d unceremoniously plucked Blasphet like an oversized chicken. Now his scales were growing back, with an itch surely unprecedented in all history. To lie in tomblike stillness and be aware of each new feather-scale seeping from its follicle, like a billion tiny insects burrowing from his hide… Was it possible his hatred of Shandrazel was even greater than his hatred of Albekizan?
    Albekizan had been the central focus of his hatred for half a century. As those years passed, Blasphet had enjoyed a thousand enticing visions of how his brother might suffer. Over the years, his schemes had grown in complexity. Once, he’d imagined sawing off his brother’s limbs, then hooking his mouth to a tube and force feeding him for months until Albekizan was a bloated blob. Then he would starve his brother, melting off the fat, reducing him to little more than a skeletal torso draped in an enormous sheet of flesh. Finally, he would cut Albekizan open, breaking and rearranging his bones, wiring and pinning them into the shape of a throne. Blasphet would rein over the kingdom from the living throne of his brother, leisurely looking down upon the former king’s plaintive eyes, reveling in the despair he would find in them!
    He sighed at the memory, and reminded himself that he was here to learn the error of his ways. His biggest error, he knew, was his need to torment his enemies rather than simply kill them.
    For Shandrazel, there were no visions of elaborate torture thrones. He would simply close his jaws around the bastard and rip his throat out! The thought filled him with a warmth that defeated the chill of the bedrock.
    Above, Blasphet heard the creak of a door. Once a day, guards would come to feed him gruel and muck up the pool of filth that Blasphet had excreted since their last visit. Blasphet hadn’t yet killed any of his guards, though he had thought of a dozen possible ways. Perhaps today he would indulge himself. A faint light seeped through the darkness. The acrid odor of an oil lamp reached his nostrils as the guards descended the stairs.
    Something was different. Blasphet cocked his head to better to catch the guards’ footsteps. The sound was wrong. Whatever approached wasn’t as heavy as earth-dragons. Humans? Perhaps coming to take revenge? It seemed so unfair. Human genocide had been Albekizan’s vision; Blasphet had taken up the challenge only out of intellectual curiosity. He bore no hatred of mankind, as a whole. Humans had been the only species ever to grant him proper respect. Humans once worshipped him as a god—the Murder God. It hadn’t been hard to convince an army of assassins and spies of his divinity. Humans believed in gods with the same obvious certainty with which they believed in weather. It was simply in their nature. At the height of his power, before Albekizan had crushed the cult, Blasphet’s worshippers had numbered in the thousands.
    Keys rattled in the lock of the iron door. Tendrils of light glowed around the edges of the frame. Slowly the door groaned open, pushed by a half dozen earth-dragons, their legs straining. A single earth-dragon should have been more than strong enough to open the heavy door.
    Blasphet tilted his head to watch as the earth-dragons marched into the cell. Four more followed, carrying a man-sized bundle of canvas bound tightly with coils of rope. Silently, the earth-dragons advanced, rings of keys jangling in their fists. The six who had opened the door went to the shackles that held him. Without a word of explanation they crouched, slipped the keys into the locks, and