Dragon Tears
novel
Five years ago, Ezra was found wandering alone in the Linrielle forest in the Northern part of Cerenarii with no memory of who he was, where he came from, or what his own name was. Blind and seemingly without a past, he was taken in by Ivar, chieftain of the Bear Clan and given a place among people who never quite knew what to make of him. Now approaching his twentieth winter, Ezra has learned to live with being different. Though his eyes still see nothing, he possesses an extraordinary awareness of the world around him. He can follow trails by scent, hear disturbances others cannot, and read the forest through the smallest changes in sound, wind, earth, and silence. To the hunters of the Bear Clan, his abilities are useful. To Ezra, they are simply the way he experiences the world. His teacher is Sana, an eccentric old hermit. Few in the clan take the old man seriously, but Ezra has spent years learning from him. Sana taught him to trust his gifts and to question what others accept as reality. Yet there is far more to the mysterious hermit than Ezra understands. When game begins disappearing throughout the region and the Bear Clan faces a difficult winter, Ivar leads a hunting party deep into Linrielle. Ezra tracks a wounded stag into a part of the forest where the animals have begun behaving strangely. There they discover something that should not exist, but before they can understand what happened, a creature emerges. It is almost completely invisible to Ezra's senses. It