by Sever Bronny
“ ‘None so stalwart as a heart running to the sun,’ ” Laudine whispered, squeezing him tight and flashing a dimpled smile, one of her hair clips askew.
“Looks like the academy dance will have to wait,” Olaf said as the friends clapped each other’s backs.
“Think of us when you go on an’ wreak havoc, Stone,” Alyssa whispered, nodding firmly after they hugged. “Because we’ll be thinking of you. Y’all take care of each other now, you hear?”
“I’ve never been more terrified in my life, Aug,” Jengo whispered as they hugged. “But I’ll keep up hope, I swear.”
“We’ll watch over each other, we’ll be all right,” Haylee said, taking her turn. “We love you all. Good luck and goodbye.”
Olaf and Bridget took an extra-long time holding each other sweetly, with him whispering things into her ear and her nodding. And all the while he rubbed out the pain from her cheek with a gentle caress.
“Enough,” Katrina spat, forcing Olaf and Bridget to part, their hands slipping past each other tenderly.
When the friends stepped away, the Lady High Inquisitor motioned at her brown-robed inquisitors, and one by one, they placed arcane shackles on the prisoners before leading them away. Each friend and Jez looked over their shoulder at the trio all the way to the door, before disappearing from their lives.
“All but alone,” Katrina cooed. “How appropriate, don’t you think? Hey, eyes down, ladies. There’s a Path Disciple present.”
Bridget and Leera, faces wet with tears, dropped their furious gazes.
“You have until the seventh afternoon bell tomorrow to bring me the Heart of the Colossus,” Darby said.
“Don’t you mean bring it to your father?” Augum asked.
Darby’s smile faltered before returning. “Same thing.”
No it isn’t, and you know it. But Augum kept his fool mouth shut lest Darby place the girls under arrest too.
“Father informed me your order does not condone vengeance,” Darby said with a smirk. “A shame.”
“No, but it allows for justice.”
Darby’s eye twitched but he forced an anemic smile.
Katrina snorted, chirping, “Good luck,” as Darby led her off.
When Darby, Katrina and their retinue departed, Bridget fell to her knees while Leera stood with a distant and lost expression. After a time, Leera fell to her knees too, as if the only thing that had been holding her up was a thread of hope that had finally snapped.
Augum ran one hand through his unwashed-in-days hair before he crouched in front of the girls. Both refused to meet his gaze, looking utterly exhausted and defeated, with deep rings under their eyes, hair disheveled, robes stained.
He wanted to say something brave and brilliant and moving. Instead, he blurted, “Well, this sucks.”
The girls looked up at him. Bridget burst with a laugh, quickly followed by Leera. Before they knew it, all three of them were rolling around in the sand, heaving with sleep-deprived laughter. They laughed at the ridiculousness of the situation, at the hopelessness, and the sheer improbability of a successful outcome.
When their laughter sputtered and died, they were left lying on their backs staring at the infinite ceiling, their only company total silence.
A Fateful Return
“Dragoon Pelagia, Mirror of the Dragon, please,” Augum said. “Seventeenth hour. All three of us.”
“Mirror of the Dragon, seventeenth hour, for Squire Stone, Squire Burns, Squire Jones.” The woman gracefully strode past them and opened a portal.
The trio glanced at each other.
“Final four hours,” Bridget whispered. “We ready?”
Augum and Leera nodded. Augum worried about spending that much time in the class. Whereas they’d taken most classes in one-hour chunks, after the tenth hour the classes were grouped into six two-hour chunks, with a final four-hour chunk at the end. Each was more difficult than the last and had to be completed in one go—and should they exit for any reason, they’d have to do the whole chunk over again.
They took a collective deep breath and stepped through the portal—and onto a vast field of tall yellow grass in autumn. It was cloudy, with a chill wind undulating the grass in slow, sweeping waves. A stone healing fountain stood nearby.
“It’s the Tallows,” Augum blurted, glancing around the familiar vast plains that spanned a swath of the center of the kingdom. His eyes fell upon a man who stood behind them, not far away. His throat went dry, for the man was the spitting image of a man in a painting in his castle, a man who had defeated Occulus the Necromancer over eighteen hundred years ago, a man who had built a castle and named it after himself, a man whose Leyan-gifted scion had been passed from one generation to the next … for over eighteen hundred years, until it was destroyed during the vanquishing of the Lord of the Legion.
Leera squinted. “Who’s that?”
Augum could only swallow dryly.
“Augum’s ancestor,” Bridget whispered.
Leera started, then punched Augum’s shoulder. “Well I’ll be.”
Atrius Arinthian wore brilliant steel armor overtop a shimmering white robe. The armor had a sprawling lion emblem on the chest. The family blade, Burden’s Edge, forged for him by Dreadnoughts, hung from his hip. A small crystal orb floated around his head, blinking with silent lightning. Like the man, the scion was an illusion, but it stirred Augum’s heart, for memories of feeling its power coursing through his veins galloped across his mind like an army of charging knights. He recalled violently flipping a floor, using corridors to crush enemies, and sweeping hordes of undead from a bridge as if they were straw dummies.
“Squire Burns, Squire Jones, Squire Stone—my name is Dragoon Arinthian,” Atrius said in a deep voice, showing no sign that he knew Augum was his descendant. “I am one of the advanced lesson Arcaners. Welcome to the final four hours of Mirror of the Dragon.” His features were sharp and strong, proud and full. He had steel-blue eyes and a dark mane of hair that rippled in the wind.
Augum’s mouth hung open. He had not expected his ancestor to be the final trainer.
The legendary man wandered around them in a circle. “Congratulations for making it this far. Should you master these final four hours with me, you will qualify to take the Arcaner dragoon trial. But the quest will not stop there. As you progress in degree, you will be allowed to return and learn new skills and spells with myself and the other mentors—assuming you do not hit your ceiling.”
He chortled at the minor jest that seemed rehearsed, as if he had said it thousands of times before to thousands of students over hundreds of years, in the exact same tone and iteration.
Atrius playfully swept a hand through the yellow grass as he strolled around them. It was a gesture Augum remembered doing countless times, for he had grown up among this very grass.
“And should you pass your final trial,” the man went on, “a wonderful ceremony will await you, thrown by your colleagues. You will make new friends and hear stories privy only to dragoons. You will learn old traditions and ancient secrets, which you will be tasked to pass on to future Arcaners. But you will also assume new responsibilities, for an Arcaner’s life is one of service. You will serve your kingdom, whichever kingdom that may be, with pride and honor. And you will uphold the Sacred Chivalric Code of the Arcaner that forever binds us as brothers and sisters of the order.” He opened his hands. “Now, are we ready?”
“Yes, Dragoon Arinthian,” the girls chorused, with Augum still unable to speak through the lump in his throat. He couldn’t believe he would learn from the Atrius Arinthian, his mythical ancestor!
“Then ready yourselves, for the most difficult training of your warlock lives begins now.” The trio exchanged wild looks of excitement as he stopped to face them. “You have thus far learned how to cast the Mirror of the Dragon in training. What I will now teach you is how to master the spell in battle. Your first task is to knock all your opponents off their steeds using only said spell.
”
The trio nervously readjusted their stances—this was a whole other level of challenge.
Atrius raised a hand theatrically. When he dropped it, six charging knights on horseback appeared two hundred feet out. But these weren’t Ordinary knights—they wore the colored robes of warlocks and steel breastplates with runic symbols.
The trio’s battlefield instincts kicked in and they spread out as the ground rumbled from the charge. Each faced a pair of crimson-robed mounted warlocks with three golden shoulder patches, indicating 12th degree. The warlocks gestured fiercely as they hissed spells, and the trio found their minds under a fierce bombardment of mind attacks, making concentration difficult.
Augum’s stamina drained as his Mind Armor sustained the assault of spells like Fear, Confusion, Blind, and Sleep, all cast at 12th degree strength. Wincing, he weathered them as only a battle-hardened warlock warrior could, and stayed cognizant of what each knight would do next. He chose not to reflect these spells for they might not knock the riders off, and waited for the more physical spells to come. Sure enough, as the pair of mounted warlocks neared to within twenty feet, they let go of their reins and lobbed First and Second Offensives.
The lead rider, a woman, slammed her wrists together. “Annihilo bato,” she said, face as placid as a stagnant lake. Two prongs of water shot at Augum at a blistering clip.
As trained in the first sixteen hours of this class, Augum pictured his soul turning into a mirror that became the antithesis of that exact spell, much like two perpendicular joints forming a cross—a concept Trintus named arcane perpendicularity. The trick with Mirror of the Dragon was to understand the basics of how the incoming spell worked, even if he could not cast it himself. Thus, for a successful reflection to happen, it was imperative that he study up on every type of spell, something he and the girls had diligently done during a portion of those sixteen hours with other Arcaners.
Infused with the concept of arcane perpendicularity, Augum simultaneously threw up his arm, shouting, “Mimicus!” The dual prongs ricocheted off his suddenly mirrored shield, and blasted back at the attacker.
The woman grunted as the bolts slammed into her armor and knocked her off her horse. She smacked into the ground with a splash—for she had turned to water, disappearing in the process. Her horse did the same, melting mid-gallop into a wave of water that splashed Augum’s boots before also vanishing.
An eye blink later the second charging warlock released his reins and slammed his wrists together, incanting, “Annihilo bato!” Twin thick ropes of vine snapped at Augum, who found himself ill-prepared for the speed of this second attack, and only managed to summon his shield in time to save his head from being caved in. There was a double thwack as the vines smashed into his shield, and then he dove aside lest he be trampled.
As he recovered, he saw the girls had performed similar feats—both had taken out the initial warlocks but were not quick enough with their casting to take out the second attacker.
Instead of galloping around for another charge, all three adversaries disappeared with a whoosh.
“Unsatisfactory,” Atrius said matter-of-factly, standing with his arms folded across his barrel chest. “When facing multiple attackers, you should expect to cast the spell in rapid succession. Your challenge is not only speed, but making quality decisions. You must correctly identify the incoming spell and adjust your shield to antithetically and perfectly match its energy using the concept of arcane perpendicularity outlined in the first sixteen hours of this class. Have you been paying attention? Let us hope so. And remember that the more efficient you get with making those quality battle-instinct decisions, the less energy the spell will require on secondary castings, for you will have already entered the flow of reactionary combat. Now take a moment to collect yourselves before we try again.”
“Gods, did anyone get that?” Leera mumbled.
“Think so,” Augum and Bridget chorused, and flashed each other competitive grins.
“Then I’ll get it too,” Leera said, dusting herself off, a determined gleam in her dark eyes.
Atrius raised his arm. “Prepare yourselves, for they come again.”
And so it went. Atrius challenged them with variations of this attack for the entire grueling first hour. Sometimes he used charging foot soldier warlocks, other times he had them jump out from behind summoned boulders. The trio used the fountain several times each after suffering injuries. But Atrius was fair, allowing them time between onslaughts to meditate and renew their arcane stamina. They did this sitting with their backs to each other, using each other as props.
Just before they entered their second hour with Atrius, and after they finished another round of meditation, Leera stretched her arms skyward and arched her back, sighing contentedly.
“You think they had meditation practice in his day?” she asked.
“Quite possibly,” Bridget replied. “After all, Atrius went to Ley and was a Leyan himself in the latter few hundred years of his life. And back then the kingdoms shared knowledge with the Leyans, so I would not put anything past them.”
“Let alone what happened to Arcaners,” Augum added, rubbing his sore limbs and biting into an apple.
Leera snatched the apple from him and stole a bite. “One thing’s for certain—he wasn’t kidding about the difficulty of that training. I don’t think I’ve had my butt handed to me so many times in the space of an hour.”
“Luckily the wounds weren’t as serious as they could have been,” Bridget said. And she was right, for their reflex combat training had allowed them to minimize damage—a last-moment duck here, a rapid dodge there, all adding up to glancing blows.
Leera pinched the front of her robe and let it go. “Robes are bloody.”
“They’re the least of our concerns.”
By the time Augum and Leera finished the apple, having no qualms about sharing it—or playfully and telekinetically stealing it from each other—the clouds parted to reveal a crimson sky ready for sunset. The wind died and they heard the distant buzz of cicadas, bringing back memories for Augum of traversing these yellow-grassed Tallows in desperation and hunger. It sharpened his focus.
Atrius stepped up to them once more, armor glinting with rays from a dying sun. “For your second hour, a greater challenge. Come, we travel to the Canyons of Sabhatha.”
“No way,” Leera mouthed in shock.
He summoned a portal and gestured for them to follow him through—and the trio gasped upon arrival, for the Canyons of Sabhatha, which they had only read about in books, were like reverse mountains—deep fissures in the earth with their own weather. At the place they had entered, a windstorm blew through the canyons, causing their robes to rabidly flap about them. And they had to factor in that wind when a whole legion of barbarian warlocks charged at them. These were brutes of the first order—large men and women with unrefined features and rags for clothes. Their arcanery was pure and wild and difficult to predict. But by taking on over a hundred of them over the course of an arduous hour—with Atrius pausing the fray now and then to remark on a nuanced point or pass along a piece of hallowed wisdom—they further refined their crucial battle instincts and spell identification speed which allowed them to intuitively counter incoming spells, regardless of their complexity or obscurity. That one hour alone ended up doing more for their Mirror of the Dragon spell than all seventeen hours combined.
By the end, the trio had each retched once from exhaustion, yet they still had two more hours to go. Atrius once more showed mercy and a strategic mind, for he allowed them time to recuperate around a healing fountain, sheltered from the wind in a rocky cave. And then, miraculously—and for the first time ever during their Arcaner training—he took them on a side excursion to an exquisite ancient dining room in an ancient castle, where they found a feast sitting before them on a long table draped in a white tablecloth and surrounded by numerous seats and two opposing throne chairs. Golden candelabras brimmed with fat candles, and th
ere was a line of windows obscured by red velvet curtains.
“Congratulations, for you have earned your first Feast of the Half,” he proclaimed. “Consider this next hour a free hour to indulge, rest and regenerate. I shall return at the end, and you will continue training for your final two—and most dangerous—hours,” and he left them there.
The trio descended upon the fare like ravaged wolves. There was roast beef smothered in rich and fatty duck sauce; a whole chicken resting in a foreign spiced gravy that was simply divine—perhaps Tiberran; buttered and peppered potatoes with sliced shallots; bowls of vibrant and exotic fruit that would have cost a fortune at the warlock markets; twenty kinds of cheese from all the kingdoms; ten kinds of bread; seven different stews to dip the bread into; and five kinds of juice to quench the thirst. And then came the dessert, which Leera squealed over before diving in, fingers twiddling and eyes dancing. Custard pie, caramel apples, candied ginger, chocolate pudding, figs, and on and on. It was miraculous, impossible arcanery, but not a peep of complaint was heard.
After half an hour, the trio slumped onto a large plush daybed crowded with cozy pillows. It sat by one of a pair of gently crackling marble hearths with lion fixtures.
Leera groaned as she patted her stomach. “My tummy is a balloon,” she mumbled, and she curled up against Augum like a cat and promptly fell asleep. Lulled by the gentle scent of cinnamon and vanilla, Augum and Bridget lay near cross-eyed in an after-meal haze. Soon, even Bridget was peacefully snoozing, cuddling a fluffy cushion like it was Olaf.
Augum stared at one of several lion sconces, finding it strangely familiar. He slowly got up, muscles screaming from soreness, to examine it.
“No, it can’t be,” he whispered. And then he looked around and realized he knew this room intimately, but he hadn’t recognized it because everything was brand new, freshly built, and adorned with the most luxurious items he had ever seen, items given to a king.