The Dragon Sword

The Dragon Sword, Burning Cross Publications, Rodney McFinister, Jan 2008, Hardcover 427 pages.

The Dragon Sword is the first volume of the Dragons in Drag trilogy. It is loosely based on a demented usenet discussion in rasfw. (Anybody who wants their words back can have them.)

Prolog

The prolog tells the story of the creation of the Dragon Sword. Long ago at the end of the Age of Dragons, the last of the great dragons preserves its mortality by being incarnated into a great sword cast by the elves of Elvenhome. The Dragon Sword is bound by the Oath of Ahimsa, which forbids it to slay the innocent and the just. The Dragon Sword was first wielded by the first True King of Men and can only be truly wielded by his heirs.

Fast forward.

The Last True King is slain by an Evil Sorcerer, who dresses in black,lives in a big castle on top of a mountain, and is planning to take over the world. The Evil Sorcerer fears nothing save the Dragon Sword which is the only thing that can slay him. Worse still, the True Prince lives and can wield the sword. The Evil sorcerer solves two problems at once by casting the soul of True Prince into the sword. The Sword is carried off by Yellow Toad Barbarians, giant intelligent toads who live near a bunch of hot sulfur springs.

The Evil Sorcerer attempts to use the now soulless body of the prince by casting his daughter’s soul into it in the hopes of using the “prince” as a legitimate ruler. His daughter’s now soulless body is placed in a glass coffin on an island in the center of a lake within a dank and dismal cave.

The melding doesn’t work properly and s(he) keeps flying int psychotic rages and massacring anyone in the vicinity. After she accidentally offs her Beloved Retainer, the last member of her mother’s family, she goes into self-imposed exile, accompanied only by a telepathic flying unicorn and a cat that pops up every so often giving cryptic and trite advice.

The cat turns out to be the avatar of the Goddess that Mommy worshipped before Daddy carried her off to the mountain. Daddy finds out mommy was secretly teaching the princess the ways of the Goddess in order that when she inherited her Father’s rule she might be a more enlightened leader. Daddy proceeds to kill Mommy and tells his (not too bright) daughter that the One True King killed her mother.

The unicorn is a perfectly normal telepathic unicorn that was sent by the Goddess from the mystic land across the Leftern Sea to come to guide and aid her on the quest. She doesn’t know this, of course. She only finds out that the Goddess was behind the unicorn’s arrival when he Dies Nobly towards the end of the book.

His other purpose is to have lots of politely-off-screen sex with various mares they come across, in order to raise the general level of sexual frustration in the female adolescent readership.

Personae:

There are two viewpoint point characters. The first is the Dragon Sword, which is desperately trying desperately to find its true wielder (or possibly a blacksmith who will turn it into a ploughshare).

The other viewpoint character is the princess, who was cast into the body of the Dragon Sword’s prince by her evil sorcerer father. She now roams the countryside, righting wrongs and trying to leave before she kills people.

Overall plot:

She believes herself to be the prince and decides she Must Stop the Evil Sorcerer. However, the only weapon that will harm him is the Dragon Sword. So she must go on a Quest to find it.

In turn the Sword (which doesn’t know it has the soul of the True Prince) is on a Quest to find the True Prince. On the way numerous plot tokens are dropped; they get picked up again later.

Once she finds the sword, they hate each other immediately, which of course means that they fall in love later. Finding each other is not enough. The have to fight their way through the evil priests in red cassocks, whose job is to make certain the peasants stay oppressed, lurk about menacing heroines, and of course sacrifice a child or two, in order to gain “blood power” for the Evil Sorcerer.

When they arrive at the mountain they discover that is defended by blood power, power that is strong enough to lay waste to continents and enslave millions. It is blasted into atoms when the heroine wishes hard enough to gain her super-duper-mega-mind powers that have lain dormant in her, but which she uses expertly the first time.

The Princess (she is royalty on her mother’s side) wields the Dragon Sword and kills the Evil Sorcerer. The Sword is totally confused at this point and expects to die itself. Instead all of the Sorcerer’s spells are nullified when he dies; the Princess goes back to her own body, the Prince goes back to his body, and the Sword happily thinks dragonish thoughts.

The cat alerts the Prince that he has one last task, rescuing the Princess from her glass coffin. There is no time to be lost because the mountain (once held together by the Sorcerer’s spells) is crumbling about them. The Prince mounts the flying unicorn (he is a virgin waiting to be released by the Princess) and flies into the cave to the island and breaks open the glass coffin. They fall into each other’s arms. The cat reminds them that it would be a good time to get going. They mount the flying unicorn who gets them out safely but who dies heroically whilst saving them from falling rocks.

The book is accompanied by a pretty fold out map.