Awakening the dragon

[chaos667]

3 Uktar 174 – The Nomad

The tall man stared outside the window. Heavy rain fell on the city cobblestone as many of its inhabitants sought refuge under a roof, a tavern or a canopy.
He sighed a bit, taking away his hand from the courtain, leaving it return to its former position to close the view.
He slowly reached the chair in front of the fire, with his mind struggling to find anything familiar in the room or that could make him remember something of his former life: an object, a sound, a perfume.
He grabbed the half-filled glass of whiskey on the table, masssaging his right temple as a strong headache assaulted him, blocking his memories and pushing them down in his subconscious.
The tall man rolled up his left sleeve looking again at the half-deleted tatto on his forearm, with the only letters still visible, written very close to each other “Drakan”. The name he choose for himself after the amnesia. Why did he have that tattoo and what was the complete writing remained a mystery, yet it sounded somehow fitting to adopt that name. A sort of echo of his past, an inner voice telling him it was apt.
So many questions and no answers at all.
Who was he? What was he doing, or better, what were they doing to him in that sort of laboratory hidden on the ship destroyed by Amnians so far from the coast? And who would finally be able to decipher the notes he stole from his captors?

He put himself on the bed, not even taking away his clothing, half-drunk and with his head pierced by a thousand pins, falling into a nightmarish dream of fire and pain, soothed only by the memory of the kindness he received from the ilmateri priestess that day, crouching in the bed as the shattered visions of his mind trapped him in a restless sleep.

[chaos667]

8 Uktar 174 – Shattered memories

Shivers ran through his body, from the spine to his toes, making Drakan shake and seeking the warmth of the cloak Sera gave him the day he arrived in Cordor.
Foggy thoughts inhabited his mind, as ripped part of a story whose fabric he still had to figure out.
He felt lifted from the bed, like he was standing with nothing under his feet. He tried to open his eyes, but his sight was clouded by a strange distorsion of a red light and bubbles floating before him. He took a moment to realiize he was under water, or, anyway, immersed in a strange translucent liquid.

“Put him back into stasis, the awakening process is almost complete. We just have to run a few other experiments on the formula”

“What about this other one?” the man's gaze turned to the other tank.

He narrowed his eyes trying to distinguish something, but he merely managed to glimpse what seemed a female body floating inside it, with blurred borders, impossible to recognize.

Another dark figure with a male voice shook his head. “She didn't endure the last injection. I've already told the slave to put the corpse on the table for the autopsy.”

“At least Aveline will have something to work on to improve the serum” commented the other male voice with a vague amusement in his tone.

Soon after Drakan started to feel numb, his eyes closing, unable to withstand the sinister light of that sort of laboratory.
Drakan suddenly opened his eyes, raising from the bed still covered in sweat, out of breath and burning hot with fever.
Still in his bed, still at the Nomad in Cordor.
He then layed down again, trying to calm his burning mind still filled with a lot of unaswered questions and wondering who were those people and what truly happened.