Free Demon Lord 5: Silver Crown King by Morgan Blayde

swept on to the next image: a bedroom scene where a looming golden dragon spitting lightning as my father reached for his sword.  His black armor was near a rumpled bed.  A horde of Slayer fanatics had caught my father with his pants down.  Off to the side, on a dresser, his green crystal necklace lay neglected, until a slayer pounced on it and retreated, my father throwing curses after the man.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    SEVEN
     
    “Where’s the fun in running with
    scissors if they aren’t sharp?”
     
                                                        —Caine Deathwalker
     
     
    Several hours later, I emerged from mental fog, knowing that these crystals were my father’s.  The stones contained audio-visual playbacks, still images, and raw data that to simply be absorbed: Slayer operations, safe houses, and legend.  A good bit of the information went to the origins of the Slayers.  In ancient Greece, a spot of prime real estate belong to a dragon of Ares.  Red dragon clan.  He guarded a spring, making his home there.  A Greek named Cadmus came along, wanting to found the city of Thebes.  With divine help—meaning he cheated—Cadmus and his men killed the dragon. 
    The goddess Athena told them to sow half of the dragon’s teeth in the earth.  They did, and an army of dragon-fierce, armored men sprang up.  Cadmus was too afraid to take them on, so he tossed a rock in their midst to stir up trouble.  Old tricks were new at some point in history.  When the dust cleared, five Spartoi , the “sown”, remained.  Cadmus befriended these men.  The building of Thebes went on fairly well after that.
    Here, my father’s the story took a direction not recorded in Greek myth.  One of the wounded Spartoi wasn’t as dead as the others thought.  He lay among his dead breather until night, at which time he stole the other half of the dragon’s teeth and fled.  In time, the Spartoi would have their own village, The Village .  The hunters-of-the-dark.  Selective breeding with the best human warriors—and with not-quite-human creatures—made the Village warriors monsters on the battle field, and a threat to any city-state dreaming of empire.
    Having the whole world against them, the Village saw the wisdom of vanishing, hiding itself behind dimension-twisting barriers, pinching off for themselves a little pocket of time-space.  Those that did not want to leave Greece, the failures in the breeding process mostly, stayed behind.  These dregs would one day found the Slayers.  According to the crystals, the Black Crown Project is the Slayer’s attempt to make “Villagers” of their own, borrowing a little of the monster to fight monsters.  The crystals also documented Slayers killing children born too monstrous, because they couldn’t be easily controlled.
    With a world full of Slayers wanting my father dead, I could see why he and my mother might want to fall off the grid.  What I didn’t understand was why my father couldn’t take mom and me back to the Village, or why a gold dragon would give up her son.  Ever.
    My phone rang, breaking me out of my distraction.  My current Ringtone played: Dio’s Rainbow in the dark .  I answered.  “Yeah?”
    A deep voice boomed.  “Haven’t you wasted enough of my time yet?”
    It was the Old Man, breaking my balls, so I lied.  “Oh, I’d have come down in another hour or two.  I’m trying to set a world’s record for jacking off without Viagra.”
    “We have a lot of people sitting in on this evening’s clan review.  Haul ass down here before I send up a pair of shadow hands to wring your chicken for you.  You will experience all new dimensions of pain.”
    He would, too .  When I was growing up, he’d be a dozen feet away when a shadow hand would briefly form and smack the back of my head.  Shadow magic.  My own fault for time traveling