The war had raged for ten years.
Balfure had fallen but not easily. They had fought him for half that time and spent the rest of it learning that as long as the free races of Avalyne stood apart, they would never defeat him. No race was safe in their kingdom, not the men in their grand cities, not the elves in their enchanted forests and not even the dwarves in their vast catacombs beneath the earth.
Balfure, a lesser spirit and former servant of the Celestial Gods, had come to Avalyne with all the power and dark sorcery he could draw from the Shadow Realm. Establishing his own kingdom in the harsh, rocky wastelands of Abraxes, he had sent forth his Berserker warriors from his Iron Citadel and began the conquest of the known world.
It was the dwarves who suffered first when the Shadow Lord moved quickly to secure the realms belonging to the dwarven warlords of Iridia. Requiring the expertise of Avalyne’s greatest weapon smiths to arm his forces, he attacked their strongholds beneath the earth. Sending in his servants, the goblin armies of the Cinder Mountains, who were more than accustomed to moving through underground cities with speed, Iridia was taken in a matter of days. Much of the dwarf population succeeded in fleeing, avoiding the enslavement that befell those who had not, and so they sought refuge in other kingdoms.
The elves, who normally had little to do with men, had watched the carnage indifferently. That is until Balfure was able to use his dark power to penetrate the enchanted veil that protected their forest kingdoms from invaders. Until the green of Eden Ardhen, the home of the Elf High Queen Lylea, was breached and despoiled, the elves had believed themselves to be safe from Balfure. However, when Lylea was forced to flee following her son’s murder by Balfure’s Berserkers, the elves were awakened to the reality of how vulnerable they truly were.
While the immortal elves were still reeling from their losses, Balfure made his final push to dominate the free lands of Avalyne. For ten years the kingdom of Carleon held fast against the relentless attacks upon their borders, until exhaustion and overwhelming grief had driven them into defeat. As the first city Sandrine burned, only the quick thinking of a royal nurse had saved the House of Icara from complete ruin.
For twenty-five years, war raged from one corner of Avalyne to another. With Carleon occupied by Balfure, neighbouring Angarad fought against invasion as the elves reinforced the enchantment that kept their realm safe, sometimes with success and sometimes with tragic consequences. Meanwhile, the dwarves had become refugees, driven to exile because of the loss of Iridia.
On the thirty-fifth anniversary of Balfure’s first attack, a young man of Carleon was admitted to an audience in Eden Taryn—the new home of High Queen Lylea—by an elf of neighbouring Eden Halas. The young man, calling himself Dare, had come to make a proposal to the elf Queen, and he offered a suggestion that none of them had considered before.
Alliance.
Although Dare presented himself to her as just an ordinary man, Lylea’s Sight knew that he was in fact the exiled King of Carleon—Alasdare of House Icara.
During their flight from Sandrine, Dare’s nurse Rachel had stumbled into Eden Halas, mortally wounded and carrying the babe she had saved at the cost of her own life. Fatefully, they were happened upon by Queen Syanne, wife of Halion, the ruler of that land. Already on her last breath, Rachel begged the Queen to take the child, revealing his parentage and beseeching her to keep him safe. A mother herself, Syanne could not bring herself to refuse the woman’s final plea.
Returning the babe to her husband’s court after poor Rachel had been welcomed by Father Death, she demanded he be given sanctuary. Halion had no interest in a human child, but could not refuse his wife. Acquiescing to her request, he allowed the infant to stay, content to let his wife do as she would as long as he was not inconvenienced. Her children already grown, Syanne was more than happy to care for a babe, even one that was from the race of men.
As a result, Dare grew up with an elvish education and the benefits of learning from an immortal people. Syanne gave him all the love that Halion would not while Aeron, their youngest son, grew to be best friends with the young boy. By the time Dare was eighteen years old, he had come to understand who he was and how he had come to be exiled in Eden Halas. As Syanne explained his heritage, the boy accepted his fate and knew that he would fight Balfure to free Carleon and avenge his family.
With the friends at his side that would come to be known as the Circle, he travelled across the realms, forging friendships and learning all he could about the different races of Avalyne. He journeyed to the mountains of the Jagged Teeth, where he had heard of an ancient wizard, the last of his order, had recently awakened from his sleep of thousands of years. Tamsyn, a seraf mage from the Order of Enphilim, was the last of his kind, the rest vanished during the Primordial Wars of millennia past. Enlisting Tamsyn’s aid, for magic was something he could not fight without a wizard, Dare had reached his twenty-fourth year by the time he faced the High Queen.
Lylea had looked into his heart and saw that Dare could bring about a golden age of peace and prosperity, not just to Carleon but to all the races of Avalyne. After gaining her support, Dare spent the next five years building an army equal to any that Balfure could envision. He convinced the dwarves to join him. While revealing nothing of his heritage, he travelled through occupied Carleon and rallied his people to fight, inspiring in them the dream of freedom.
After five years of preparation and evading Balfure’s attempts to kill him, Dare was finally able to face the enemy on the battlefield.
United by their belief in him, Dare earned the title of War Dragon and led the campaign against Balfure, driving the dark sorcerer back to his lands in Abraxes and then laying siege to his Iron Citadel. When that too was overcome, it was Dare with the help of Aeron, the dwarf Kyou, the warrior maid Celene and Tamsyn, who ended Balfure once and for all.
Or so they thought.
For evil was never just confined to one dark lord.