by T D Raufson
“Nothing yet, keep going, Elaine.”
“Right, that’s the thing. I can’t. The story ends there, or at least all I’ve been able to find so far. Wy Li just says that the ruler asked for the ransom, but he disappears and the story ends. Either no one wrote an end to the story or the ending was intentionally obscured. I think the ending was hidden for some reason that no one has ever explained. I think Helena was about to tell it. That was where her next book was going. It was turning out to be the tell-all on what happened. As you know, its title is Renard’s Payment, but it’s an incomplete manuscript. It’s filled with errors, misspellings and ramblings that make it nearly impossible to read. I’ve not been able to make any sense of it. Quite disappointing, too.”
Everyone sighed with Elaine’s revelation about the manuscript, but she continued.
“The wizard ruler Wy Li was talking about was named Reynard. Too close to ignore, right? He was powerful, and he was in her last book as the dark brother to a prince who was in line to be king, if his brother died. The dark brother, Renard, was into something sinister, but she never revealed what it was in that book. In the end of Helena’s last book Herald disappeared, and the king believed Renard had something to do with it. The king asked Heliantra for help finding his son. She agreed to help before she realized it meant she had to find out if Renard was involved. She was interested in the darker brother if not involved with him. In fact, she implied that Heliantra might have been involved with the plot Renard had crafted to remove his brother from the line of succession.”
“Oh. My.” Kaliastrid stood up and walked over to the window.
“What?” Charles asked.
“He wasn’t dead. Renard had captured him and locked him away in the dungeon of his castle. Heliantra was going to rescue him. She told me that Renard was going to kill him and that it was her fault. Renard planned to ransom him, but he would not hesitate to kill him. That was the night before she went to rescue him. I never saw her again.”
“Why didn’t she tell me that? I had no idea,” Melissa asked her mother’s back and got no answer.
“So, what happened?” Charles asked, looking at Elaine.
She raised her hands to indicate she had no idea where the story went from there.
Aldrich shifted from speaker to speaker, trying not to miss any critical detail and continued to siphon pain from the dragons.
Kaliastrid answered for her. “Renard caught Heliantra trying to release his brother. She was captured. The brother was a trap to see if Heliantra really loved him. He had figured out she was a dragon, or he had known all along because his father knew. She was the key to the Great Wyrm because she was the ambassador. This was not common knowledge. The king knew nothing about the Great Wyrm, so how Renard knew surprised us all. But he knew and he also knew she was his key to the power of dragons, the Heart of the Dragon. With her, her scepter and the Heart of the Dragon he could control us all. He could control magic.”
“This scepter?” Melissa held up the pendant.
“Yes.” Kaliastrid looked back from the window with tears flowing down her cheeks. Melissa felt a little jealous for a moment. Why did her mother know this and she had no idea? She looked up at her with the question on her face. “I don’t know why you don’t know. I don’t know why I’ve spent centuries in my human form hating Helena. I was her friend, apparently her very close friend, and you were her choice to be ambassador. I only know now that she trusted this story to me before she went to save Herald. She was ashamed of what she had done, and she couldn’t disappoint you with her failure. She said knowing the truth would make your task harder. I never understood what she meant, not until just now.”
Melissa looked down at her hands. She couldn’t look at her mother, who was obviously suffering with the pain of betraying her daughter. Aldrich had freed them to wander in memories blocked before, but he would not be able to funnel their pain away much longer. He was turning pale.
“Meliastrid, you were her selected replacement. She was teaching you and you couldn’t be corrupted by her shortcomings. That’s why you cast the spell, but she had to recast it each time it expired.” Kaliastrid turned to look out the window again.
Elaine, who had been the storyteller sat down to listen to this part.
“There was no choice, his ransom was something dragons couldn’t surrender. It took all the magic we knew or could call on to cast the spell. Heliantra had worked on the spell with the Great Wyrm as she maneuvered to stop Renard. He wanted the talisman. If he had it and Heliantra, he had unimaginable power. We couldn’t let him have it. As a race and at the instruction of the Great Wyrm, we cast the spell.” Kaliastrid turned to look at Melissa with the look of consolation in her eyes. “You were just the voice of the spell. We all had to agree to the entrapment in order for the magic to work.” She turned back to look out at the grave as she continued her tale. “We, dragons, had to trap Renard with the one thing he would be blind to. He had to think he was getting his ransom. He had to think he had won. He had to believe it. Heliantra knew that. She knew he had to think he had dragons trapped in an unwinnable situation. We trapped him with his own greed and our sacrifice. Now, oh what have we released on this land?”
Kaliastrid covered her eyes and sobbed. Melissa realized suddenly what she meant. With the dragons emerged, it meant that something far worse than a few half-dragons was loose now. The spell and the dragon sacrifice that was meant to trap him was broken. That was why it was critical for Melissa to cast the spell again as the first act as she took over as ambassador. That was why it was critical that she not fail. Melissa had not only released the worst evil dragons had ever faced onto the world, she had dumped the dragons into a world they were not prepared for with a broken memory of the past and a burning desire to fix what was wrong. The one fact that redeemed her for casting the spell was lost in fractured dragon memories.
She stood up from her chair and turned to leave the room. Both Charles and Aldrich started to follow her, and she waved them both away. She needed to be alone. She now knew the answer, and she was more afraid than she had ever been. It was not about dragons. It was not as simple as why had they been trapped in human form. Where was the Talisman? Where was the last human, the only human, to ever possess it? It was not in her control like it should be. Now she understood what was missing. Now she understood what she and other dragons were longing for but could not reach. There had to be an answer. Heliantra had to have a plan. She always had a plan. What had her mentor planned to do when the spell failed. Kaliastrid said she expected it to fail. What was the backup plan?
At the foot of the stairs, Melissa opened the door and walked down the yard to Heliantra’s grave.
“Why didn’t you trust me? Would it have mattered if I had known? Did I know it all and just can’t remember it? You had to carry all of this alone for so long.”
Melissa sat down on the grass next to the headstone and waited for another sunset. She needed to be alone for a while to figure out what to do about her failure.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
T.D. Raufson spent his childhood as a software engineer and project manager. Once he finally figured out what he wanted to do when he grew up, he focused on writing his favorite kind of stories and sharing them with the world. He currently lives in Tennessee with his wife and three cats while searching for time to write all of the other stories he has never been able to write.