Note: The following is a cleverly concealed new-release notification. If you’d prefer to skip straight to the good stuff, click here.
I just re-released The Dragonswarm (The Dragonprince’s Legacy, #2) with a new Afterword. I thought my regular readers here might find its contents interesting, so here you go:
Welcome to the end of The Dragonswarm. Since you’ve made it this far, I’m going to act as though you enjoyed the story. Now I need to take a moment to tell you how to keep enjoying the story.
I originally wrote the tale of Daven Carrickson becoming the Dragonprince–everything you’ve just read in two volumes–as a single mega-epic novel called Taming Fire. That was fifteen years ago, and the story has changed a lot since then, but it always started with Daven meeting Othin on the little hill outside town, and it always ended with him battling Pazyarev in the skies and then sending the king packing.
Back then, I expected Taming Fire to come with a sequel–a story that’s now available as The Dragonprince’s Heir. It skips ahead fifteen years from here, and finds the dragonswarm mostly subdued, but Daven has been lost (as in “missing in action,” although most everyone does assume he’s dead), and the story is told from the point of view of his first-born son.
I published The Dragonprince’s Heir in June 2012, six months after The Dragonswarm, and it completed the original trilogy. If you’d like to read the story as my original artistic “vision,” that’s your next step. Grab a copy of The Dragonprince’s Heir and discover the ultimate conclusion to the story that started when Othin confronted Daven by the little brook.
However, I also always intended to spin out some additional (maybe supplemental?) stories about the time between this novel and the next one. But when I skipped fifteen years and changed protagonists, I forgot that my readers didn’t know my secret intentions.
Because of that, The Dragonprince’s Heir elicited a minor outcry from fans who wanted to see more of Daven in action, who wanted to see how Daven used the powers and resources gained in The Dragonswarm to overcome the tide of dragons, who wanted to meet the “famed dragonriders” who get mentioned in the final book but are already lost by then.
We live and learn. So now, before you jump ahead, I can give you that warning. I’ve outlined ten novellas exploring those stories (which will eventually be collected in The Dragonprince’s Arrows and The Dragonprince’s Blades), as well as an additional feature-length Daven novel (The Dragonprince’s Odyssey), all of which take place between The Dragonswarm and The Dragonprince’s Heir.
And, even better than a warning, I can give you an opportunity to sample those stories. The first of the ten novellas, A Darkness in the East, is available now! It picks up the thread a few months after the end of The Dragonswarm and starts with Daven riding into battle on the back of the mighty Pazyarev.
He’s also a little concerned because he hasn’t heard anything from Vechernyvetr since that fight. And now there are rumors of really terrible things happening in the shadow of the mountains that Daven and Vechernyvetr briefly shared as a home.
The novella works as a standalone story, but it also introduces some of the plot and much of the story dynamic that will drive the other stories in the collections. And I won’t lie; it’s pretty fun to see the Dragonprince in action. Daven kills a lot of dragons in this piece.
Check it out. And thank you for reading. I really hope you’ve enjoyed the experience.
And, because it’s so much easier to embed a functioning hyperlink in a blog post than it is in an ebook, I’ll go ahead and give you the link (in addition to the name). Click here to grab your own copy of the new Dragonprince novella for just $2.99!
