“Mymopholous!”

“Stop botching words you know not.”

“Then stop yelling!”

“I NOT YELLING!" A pause as the large man with tattoos swirling over his dark skin runs a hand over his bald head. "Quit be making me yell,” he says, softer, as his friend bites into some food stick he bought from a vender off the street.

Heather watches the two with a slight smile on her face, even as Shasta hangs from her neck, almost knocking her mother over when she points exuberantly at a man walking down the street with black hair.

“Is that him?”

“I’m afraid not, honey. Roland will be back... but I don’t know when. He has a lot to do.”

The little girl nods sagely from her mother’s back. “He’s going to be important. There is much on his shoulders, and the time for change has come. The dragons have told me so.” Heather cranes her head to look back at her daughter, but the moment passes and the little girl only grabs at her mother’s hair, bouncing and pointing, accidentally cranking her mother's head to the side and almost falling off before Heather catches her. “Black hair! Must be him.”

David and General Brackenridge watch on from the porch of the inn where it all began.

“How goes the moat?”

General Brackenridge doesn’t take his eyes from the people in the streets as he responds to David, “Few more feet, and it will be ready for the miracle device of yours. The Shifter sent it back?”

“He did. Heather brought it back when she came from the Werecats." David raises a brow at his friend, his lips tight to prevent a smile. "And as you well know, it is no miracle device. It brings water from deep below that is already there, hidden beneath the surface.”

“You know more of such things, my friend.”

“What news?”

The General grunts, his hand caressing the well-worn hilt of the sword strapped to his side. His face grows hard. “The men are ready. Your little group of townsmen have dubbed themselves the Werewolves. They put the fire in my soldiers; called them out for being lazy skrisaurs. The soldiers are better for it after getting their hind ends handed to them on a platter during the mock battle a few weeks past. If only the relationships between the townfolk fighting force and my soldiers were better—we would be something to be feared.”

David nods. “If only Roland were still around. He manipulated those men as if they were putty.”

A smile breaks past the stone-faced man. “The wolf didn’t know it, but half my men were ready to throw their lot in with him and overthrow me. I was grateful the day he disappeared.”

“General, much as I respect you, don’t make light of such. Heather almost died.”

The smile is wiped from the general’s face as his stony eyes dart to study David. “Many of us have almost died many times, my friend, and we yet live by the will of the Allfather. Let us not quarrel over such things.”

David shakes himself, his eyes once again drawn to his daughter and grandchild, who sit in the dirt drawing stick figures and playing games. “I would do anything for them.”

General Brackenridge sets a hand on David’s shoulder. “I know. You’ve turned our little world upside down with your ideas. If this rebellion is to be, there will be Sixth to pay in the end, especially should your idea come to pass. Our souls are black, but such is the lot of leaders.”

“Such is the lot of leaders so the rest may remain innocent,” the man quotes from a war book of old, his eyes on his daughter. She came into his life as a wide-eyed girl barely able to toddle around on pudgy feet with her mother, a golden-haired beauty he would always call his first and only love. The two flipped his life upside down... but he came to love both dearly. And then Shasta came into their lives... the little girl a bright light after a dark night.

The General was right. There would be Sixth to pay should his idea come, but perhaps not in the way the General expected. David had already created a rebellion; why not set a rogue Shifter on the thrones of all nations?

It would take an act of the multitude, a greater act of combined reach and might than had been seen for thousands of years. It would take forgiveness and acceptance, as all creatures would need to be of one mind to overthrow the growing reach of the Empire.

And David well knew Roland would fight tooth and claw to keep from having such responsibilities. But what Roland had yet to know... the Dagger of Ra had already chosen its master. Had already appointed the king.

And since the days of old, when the dagger first went into hiding, it had not chosen a man or creature in over a thousand years. But now it was time for the High Kings to return again.

The Dagger of the Allfather had chosen.

But David knew it would be an act of the Allfather indeed for one stubborn Shifter to actually take the job he was chosen for.