A quest to bring a king dragon back home unfolds in this thrilling conclusion  to The Crowns of Ishia trilogy! 

After years of separation, Havinger Lilley has finally reunited with his lover, Janan. He now  hopes to heal from the experience that changed his life forever: being bonded to the soul of  a king dragon and to the man Raka who died to save it. But this bond is consuming him,  making his thoughts and feelings not his own. 

Compelled by this to return to the frozen north that was once Raka’s home, Lilley and his  companions Janan and Meka make the arduous journey toward a confrontation with the  power-hungry Kattakans that could result in another devastating war. 

In this final chapter of The Crowns of Ishia series, the survival of the Ba’Suon people, their  dragons, and the land itself rests on the decisions of Lilley, Janan and Meka. 

A Covenant of Ice is due for release 31st July from Solaris Books – you can pre-order your copy HERE

If Dragons Were the Ultimate Apex Predator of the World

by Karin Lowachee

The Year of the Dragon has passed, and another season of House of the Dragon is done and dusted, but dragons have long been a staple in fantasy literature and, indeed, in many mythologies of the world. From the roaring damsel-stealing depictions of medieval Europe to the more elemental representations in Chinese lore, dragons have captured the imaginations of people from diverse cultures for millennia. In a way, dragons have become synonymous with fantasy literature – especially high fantasy, thanks to Tolkien – and this does not seem to be an interest that will ever wane.

When I decided to tackle dragons in my fantasy novella trilogy, The Crowns of Ishia (The Mountain Crown, The Desert Talon, A Covenant of Ice), where the milieu is reminiscent of North American frontier literature (often called “Westerns”), I wanted to explore colonialism and war, where an ancient, once-thriving culture (the Ba’Suon) share an atomically connected relationship to nature, which includes the dragons of their archipelago Ishia—while the invading culture views nature as something to exploit. For the imperial Kattakans, dragons are prizes, game meat, or entertainment. Because of the Ba’Suon’s empathic relationship with all of the natural world, violence is anathema and possesses painful mental, emotional, and spiritual consequences.

The protagonist point-of-view, a Ba’Suon woman named Méka, travels back to her ancestral land to “gather” a king dragon (or “suon”) for her people—an ancient rite practiced by the Ba’Suon for generations. But she is met by the Kattakans that forced many of her people to flee as refugees to another island, and they impel her on a mission to do their dirty work and capture the king suon for their own selfish purposes.

I knew that I wanted to realistically integrate dragons as a species into the natural world, first through their connection to the Ba’Suon who can bond with them in a specific way, and second, by assuming that they were as any other megafauna in the world: prolific (if untouched) and subject to the ebb and flow required to maintain balance in nature. While not a biologist, I had a working understanding of the necessity for species moderation in ecosystems, so posed the question to myself: how would one ensure that dragons who grew to the size of whales didn’t raze the land simply by existing?

While I didn’t go into specifics of how often dragons procreated (or even which of their species tended to procreate, as my dragons grouped into families called “crowns”) or how many “cubs” were usually born, my solution to the problem of how my dragons wouldn’t eat an ecosystem into devastation was to create a rite performed by the Ba’Suon to gather certain kings and queens of the crowns and enter into a covenant with them. This essentially removed the suon from their natural hunting grounds and migratory patterns to live amongst the Ba’Suon families. It would become a mutual relationship, connecting the people to their ancestors and to the ancestors of the suon themselves.

I was adamant that the dragons remained creatures of nature; none of them would be speaking the language of the Ba’Suon, at least not in words, and their very beings would remain, to a certain extent, unknowable. They were highly intelligent, empathetic, and wilful, but they would never act human. They were never tamed. If they communicated with the Ba’Suon, or anyone in their world, it would be through a strange, somewhat poetic “dialect” that presented more like abstract imagery, or impressions and emotions. The connection the Ba’Suon maintained with the suon remained instinctive, not codified (not even by verbal language), and this was important as a throughline to the “magic” in Ishia: the Ba’Suon were so connected to nature, their “magic” did not reside in spells and incantations, but simply by existing.

Admittedly, my reference points for dragons in fantasy literature are quite slim. I can count on one, maybe two hands, the number of novels I’ve read where dragons feature prominently, many of them from years ago (one is, obviously, The Hobbit). I probably haven’t read a novel that featured dragons in over a decade. So I embarked on my creation of the suon from a standpoint of requiring my dragons to simply make sense. If they existed, how would they exist? Not as creatures of evil, threat, or gold hoards. They would not be elusive or mythical. Instead, like many wild animals, they were hard-pressed to interact with human populations unless violently infringed upon, but they were a necessary and known part of the biosphere. And like in our world, they were under threat of abuse by ill-meant societies who generally had no respect for nature in the first place. This tension became the fulcrum of the plot in my trilogy, and indeed, a subject I deeply wanted to explore—the exploitation of the natural world—through the unlikely lens of a frontier fantasy replete with gold mining towns, colonial expansion, and war.

Hopefully, my dragons, my characters, and the world of Ishia will resonate with readers as we look around at what is under threat in our own ecosystems—and in our own connection to the natural world, of which we are a part.

A Covenant of Ice is due for release 31st July from Solaris Books – you can pre-order your copy HERE

Karin Lowachee was born in South America, grew up in Canada, and worked in the Arctic.  She has been a creative writing instructor, adult education teacher, and volunteer in a  maximum security prison. Her novels have been translated into French, Hebrew, and  Japanese, and her short stories have been published in numerous anthologies, best-of  collections, and magazines. When she isn’t writing, she serves at the whim of a black cat.