The Time Weaver

Chapter Thirteen

Despite the many myths that abound regarding these two mortal enemies, the truth is that the dragons existed in peace before the dragon-hunters decided to shatter them.

Dragons drew their first breaths into raw lungs ages before mankind thought to mine the iron from the earth, to forge it into steel and shape it into barbs that might—might—stab through a glossy drakon scale.

Before spears, before swords or crossbows were the serpents of the skies, magnificent in their lives, solitary in their deaths.

But humankind does not well abide magnificence above it, and so the sanf inimicus came into being.

A loose collection of human clans at first, slowly they gathered forces, recruited more, refined their skills. The sanf shone most brightly in what we now call the Dark Ages, when men in chain mail took pride in wounding or destroying all things lovely and mysterious. All things of magic and stars.

It was the drakon , in fact, who granted them the title sanf inimicus: the soft enemy, villains without scales. It was meant as both a warning and an insult... but the humans seized it as a compliment instead.

They were the declared enemy of the dragons. They had caused actual suffering among the beasts, and it gratified them mightily to be so noticed.

Their wars swelled and lessened and swelled anew; the human weapons did reap their toll. Remorseless sanf chased the drakon over continents, over the seas, yet small as their numbers became, the dragons retained their unbending majesty. They would not surrender.

Surrender, no. But hide, on the other hand ... hide to safeguard their offspring, to ensure their future, to disguise themselves as their very foes .

For a long while, for time stretching into centuries, the sanf discovered there were no more dragons to easily hunt. Men who had bathed in the blood of the dying monsters were themselves dying out, until their stories became worn, thin and distant, and their lessons washed over the fresh ears of human youth with barely a ripple of meaning.

Eventually, the very notion of knights and dragons invoked little more than daydreams among the Others. Fairy tales, silly parables, nothing more.

So matters stood for lifetimes. Until one day there came a creature who decided to change all that.

Who decided to reignite the wars between monster and man, because the wrong side—the creature's own-blooded side—had survived, and so had won.

And thus, in the mad, latter days of eighteenth-century France, the sanf inimicus were reborn.