by Zara Stark
The strand of hair transformed into a coal black feather. I rose my fingers to grab the end and hold it up. The sunlight hit the feather, making it shine with a mix of all of the colors of the sun, yellow, orange, red and glittering gold.
“Pluck it from your head and we’ll know you’re in grave danger, we’ll come for you,” Tefra nodded to me, patting me on the head in a brotherly gesture.
My heart panged. A brother, how different were the feelings that I had for Mab and these guys than I had for my Aurelius dragons. All those years I saw them as best friends and brothers and now that I knew the true feeling of having an adopted sister and group of brothers did I recognize how different the feeling was. I never felt like this about the Aurelius’ guys. I had loved them all along. How strange and freeing it was to realize it.
Mab went in for a hug one more time and I hugged her back.
“You four be safe, if you don’t hear from me in three month’s time then I am dead and you can proceed how you wish, otherwise our plan is on,” I whispered to her and she nodded, sniffling.
“Please, Octavia, be safe, differentGodsand Monsters rule the lands across the Mediterranean be careful,” She whispered.
“I will,”
Chapter 9
It took me a month to reach Alexandria, walking on my sandaled feet until I found a port. I bartered my gold jewelry for passage on a ship. The four dragon marks on my neck kept people away from me, whether it was a washerwoman who had been hoping to make conversation or a man who had less than honorable intentions. One look at my bare neck and the four elemental marks emblazoned on my skin and everyone would turn away.
Riding on such an ancient rickety ship should have given me terrible motion sickness but I found the rocking sounds of the sea and the lapping of the waves on the wooden craft soothing in my otherwise newly silent world.
Overall I found a newfound appreciation for modern transportation. If I was back in my time I would have made it to Alexandria in twenty-five hours rather than twenty-five days.
I mostly stayed in my small cabin, trying to glean the power of the tarot cards. I didn’t dare try to use them, my old paper playing cards back home were destroyed after one use of my magic and only the metal cards Cobalt made me functioned past one use.
I found myself missing voices, missing talking. The other passengers aboard the vessel stopped speaking whenever I would pass by. I feared to demand anything, just giving them a friendly smile. I didn’t want to get thrown overboard. Only one person aboard the ship would meet my eyes, another woman traveling alone, also with a neck covered in marks. Unlike me, she looked right at home aboard the ship and the others spoke to her and bowed their heads to her as she passed them by. She never initiated a conversation with me and every time I tried to approach her, she immediately moved away, a calculating look in her eyes. It brought me all the way back to grade school, rejected by other kids on the playground. At least back then, rejection didn’t smart as badly as it did at that moment. Azar and Nevada had been more than enough during my school years, friends, protectors and study buddies. It hadn't been until high school that I had realized what it was like to be friendless. Maybe that was why I had attached to other men so easily, trying to fill the void that my dragons had left behind.
It hurt now too, perhaps that woman could have been a friend in other circumstances. My first true female friend was Mab and just freshly separated from her, I was desperate for companionship. I kind of hated myself for it. I spent most of my time, trying to connect with my new cards. They weren't cardstock like my modern playing cards nor were they the strong nigh-indestructible metal that Cobalt fashioned my special deck out of. They were a strange sanded wood, ornately carved with a knife and stained with a coffee polish. If I sniffed them they smelled like my favorite coffee back home, not like the terrible ancient concoction that Raiden tried to pass off as coffee. I knew they would last longer than my paper playing cards but I knew for a fact they weren't as limitless as Cobalt's deck. I didn't dare test them aboard the ship. The trip across the sea was terrifying enough aboard the ancient ship as it was, I didn't want to add magic into the mix. I didn't know what the other marked woman would do either. I couldn't figure out what species she was. Was she a human mated to dragons as well? Why was she alone? She didn't have that same quality to her that I had seen in other dragons, that same air of raw strength and power that exuded off of dragons whether they were my mates or even Mab. She was for sure not a dragon but I couldn't figure out what else she could be. She wore fine clothing, nicer than the silks I had gotten in Tartarus. Where were her dragons? Had hers been similarly transformed and now she traveled in hopes that the creature terrorizing Alexandria was one of her mates?
What if it was? I shook my head as if doing it could shake away that terrible thought right out of my head. It had to be Cobalt, there was no other option. A great black and silver dragon with red eyes eating all of the metal it could find? I laid the facts out in my head. Metal dragons were rare. Dragons came in a wide variety of scale and eye color pairings. What were the chances that there was another black and silver metal dragon with red eyes out there at the exact time as mine? Slim to none I hoped. I refused to even think that it might not be Cobalt. It had to be. Instead, I focused on my plan. Would just appearing before Cobalt make him come to his senses and change him back? I hoped. If not, I was in for a fight. It was hard to strategize for a fight when you didn't know what your weapons would do. I had my bone dice, if I had to I would use my dice to float away from danger. Or perhaps I would use the opposite dice to pin down Cobalt so he couldn't fly away from me. What I wouldn't give to have Raiden here to strategize with me. I was more of a roll-with-the-punches kind of woman, not a master of strategy like Raiden or even Nevada to an extent.
Finally, after nearly a month of the rough Aegean Sea, the Lighthouse of Alexandria came into view on one of the peninsula arms that protected the port of Alexandria. In my modern world, I knew it as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the tallest building of its time, much like a modern skyscraper only a tad shorter, it stood tall and proud marking where it was safe to sail to the bustling Egyptian city. I tightened my satchel looped over my shoulder, pulling it so the small bag resting in front of me, nerves wracked through my body.
The merchants quickly ushered off all of us passengers so they could start unloading their wares. I followed the group of people off of the boat and into the wharf. I looked all around, overwhelmed by the crowds of people and all of the new sites and smells. For a different country, it didn't seem much different than Rome had. Very loud and full of people, chattering in languages I didn't understand. Groups of ladies shopping together, surrounded by guards. Men peddling items from carts and stalls. Children running around laughing. Alexandria was just as multicultural as Ancient Rome, full of people of all shades of human speaking different languages. It must have been a port city thing, so full of travelers from merchants to diplomats of other nations. It was beautiful. I suddenly wished I had my Alpha of Shields so that I could wander about invisible and intangible to take in the beauty of Alexandria without seeming suspicious. Already I was drawing stares from people. My dragon-marked neck might protect me from people who wished to hurt or use me as I traveled alone but it also made people suspicious and fearful and it was worse here. Even coming from the docks, I could see damaged spots of the city where the dragon had struck. A dragon appearing in Alexandria and then a woman showing up with dragon marks. As I walked through the crowds, people of all different cultures and social statues locked onto Cobalt's mark on my neck. The tribal sword design marking my skin in black that not only marked me as a dragon's mate but the mate of the very dragon that had been terrorizing them. They would look at the rest of my marks next, drifting from the sword to the rest. Realizing in horror that I had followed the metal dragon here so who was to say that the other three dragons weren't following me?
My eyes scanned the crowd for the other dragon marked w
oman to see if she was getting the same scrutiny as me but she wasn't amongst the group of passengers that had left the ship. She was simply gone.
An overwhelming sense of anxiety filled me, everything crashed down on me at once. I was alone in a foreign city where I knew no one, I didn't have a place to stay and had no idea where my next meal was coming from. And those were just human problems! My eyes scanned the horizon, what magical problems lie ahead in Egypt? My heart raced in my chest and I started hyperventilating. I looked around frantically until my eyes found an alleyway. I bolted for the alley passed shocked people until I was alone in the darkened corridor. I slid down the stone into a sitting position and put my head between my legs, trying to catch my breath. Of all the worst times to have a panic attack, this had to take the gold. I wasn't sure how long I stayed like that, head between my knees, trying to calm my racing heart. I was completely overwhelmed and couldn't' stop my heart from frantically thumping in my chest. Just when I was about to give up on controlling the panic attack and was ready to give in to the tears threatening to fall, I felt a magic hum in my very loose card holster. I must’ve lost weight on the ship ride.
Brows furrowed, I reach for the wooden tarot deck. Holding the deck in my hands, I realized that it wasn't the whole deck thrumming with magic but one single card. I pulled the one out and tucked the rest back into my holster. I flipped it over in my hands and looked at the face of the card. Marked with the Roman numerals for seven, I recognized it as the Chariot card. On the card man stood in a chariot, his eyes closed, head tossed back and arms outstretched, confident like he had just won a race. Surrounding him was a sun carved with different symbols I couldn't identify. The card thrummed with magic, telling me to activate it. I gasped for breath as my racing heart made my panic attack even worse, I was desperate and if this tarot card wanted to help me then I had to let it. I shoved down my fear of tarot cards.
I knew panic attacks weren't exactly rational, they happened when you were a hundred thousand million percent overwhelmed. It was the absolute worst time to have one and yet that's when they always happened, isn't it? Everything I had been through slammed into me at once, violently repeating over and over in my head. Being trapped two thousand years before anyone I knew was born, thousands of miles away from home, my home didn't even exist in this time, killing people in the tournament, nearly dying an unfathomable amount of time, fighting off the Concilium, watching the four men I loved fly away from me, leaving me all alone, being imprisoned in a supernatural prison, traveling to a country where I didn't know anyone or even the language. The anxiety burned through my mind, making my entire body shake in pain and terror.
I flipped the card over a few times in my hand and felt the magic flare to life in gentle, serene waves. Magic poured from the card in translucent, sky blue tendrils enveloping my body and cocooning around me.
I sighed and it was as if all the tension and stress left my body. My heart rate slowed down to normal and I closed my eyes, feeling a bit better. I opened my eyes and looked all around the alley, taking in everything through the blue haze of my magic. A blue glowing trail of magic led down the other side of the alley opposite of where I came from.
I stood and clutched the card to my chest and followed the trail of light. I truly didn't understand tarot cards. What was this cards power? Calming the hell down or showing me the way I needed to go?
I thought as I walked next to the magical path. It led me to the end of the alley and down a larger one, winding between buildings and across streets and over hills. By the time the blue trail of light ended, the sun was starting to set, I had been walking for hours, concentrated on the trail. I should feel nervous. A woman alone in a strange city at night with no place to stay, my stomach should be growling, I should have been starving but I couldn't think of anything but staying the course and following the trail, all of my worries washed away by the determination my magic filled me with.
I followed the trail, so fixated and unable to look away from the light, that I froze when the trail ended and looked around with large doe eyes. The card deactivated itself and I was left in the dying light. I looked behind me at the city of Alexandra. Nervously, I turned back to see what was in front of me. A large stone archway, not the Roman arched ones held up by columns but a square archway made of milky, pale sandstone. Hieroglyphics and other ornate symbols were carved into the stone in beautiful patterns.
I didn't need an understanding of hieroglyphics to know what I saw. The dog headed god Anubis was carved at the top center portion, weighing a heart against a feather and deciding whether or not to let a dead soul pass into the afterlife. The breath hitched into my throat, the trail had taken me to the Necropolis of Alexandra. The large ornate graveyard of the noble and rich of Alexandria. Why had it taken me here? The Necropolis led into the main structure and surely was dug out into a large underground structure but not large enough to contain the gigantic dragon that Cobalt's true form was.
Or was I wrong in assuming that the card was showing me my correct path to where I needed to go?
The cards in my holster thrummed again and I pulled the deck back out, adding the Chariot back where it belonged. Now the card marked with an XIV glowed, the number fourteen major arcana card called to me.
Temperance, my mind whispered as I took into the wood carving on the card. A skeleton with angel wings pouring water from two goblets, a gentle, kind smile on their skeletal face, a glowing halo hovering over the top of the skull. Its feet hovered above the ground.
What would this card do? I didn't have a lot of other options. I twirled the card in my hands and felt it's magic activate and waited. I knew the magic was there and real, alive and thrumming with power, ready for use and yet I couldn't see any sort of immediate effect or use. The card's magic was both as gentle and powerful as the creature engraved on the wood. Unwavering, I would call it.
"You don't have permission to be here Roman," A strong female voice echoed all around me, speaking in perfect Modern American English with no accent.
I looked all around.
"Who’s there? I'm not Roman, I'm here looking for someone,"
"What are you doing here Roman? With no permission or warning?" She asked again and I still couldn't pinpoint where the voice was coming from.
"I'm sorry if there's been some sort of misunderstanding, I recently reached my thousand from the Dragon Gladiator Games, I'm not Roman, I'm only still dressed like one, I'm looking for my husband, we were separated and I heard a rumor that he had sought refuge here," I explained. It wasn't a lie, I had his mating mark, he was at least husband-equivalent.
"Refuge," The voice laughed. "Is that what you call it Roman? I should rip your lying tongue from your mouth."
"I'm sorry, do you understand what I'm saying? I'm not Roman, I heard my husband was here and I've come to find him," I continued, not sure why I was speaking so calmly and pleasantly. In another sort of confrontation like this, surely I would have lost my temper and lashed out. I had never been good at biting my tongue.
"I speak your terrible, guttural sounding language just fine, I want to know why you think it is okay to come here, into foreign territory and flex your power, you are not allowed to have power here, it is not your domain," The voice snapped.
"Um, I'm sorry," I said evenly, trying to play nice. "I didn't mean too. I'm don't know a lot about my magic, I think it was leading me right where I needed to be."
"Then why would it lead you directly to us? The last place a Roman like you should be, a place where you are the least safe," The voice snapped.
Panic thrummed through me for a moment. I clenched my card hard in my hands, letting the tingle of my magic calm me.
"I'm not Roman, I'm just a woman out of place in time, looking for my dragon so I can go home, if you can just direct to where he is, I can collect him and get out of your city, your country," I continued.
"From millennia from now or from back when the lands were all connected into one, I don'
t care, your blood is Roman and the laws have been in place since the world began to turn, you are not to flex your magic here, your home is in Rome, that is where you belong," She snapped at me.
"I'm sorry, I'm just here from my dragon, if I'm Roman, he must be Roman too right? We fought in the Dragon Gladiator Games together, the Concilium turned him into a mindless monster and I'm the only one who can turn him back into a sentient man," I blabbered on, sensing that the voice was getting angrier by the moment. "I don't know much about my magic, I was born on a continent across the ocean. I'm not talking about Europe but the Americas, very far west of here. My ancestors might be Roman or Italian or whatever you want to call it. I don't know much about it. I spent so many years hiding my magic powers from my parents that I forgot to ask them anything important about our family or of our heritage. I've lived in Iowa all my life, a state dead center in our country, not many pay attention to it, a lot of the midwestern states get overlooked. I know my magic isn't midwestern and it sure isn't American but I've lived there my whole life and I've used my magic ever since I was a small child and no one ever had a problem with using it there and I--"