by Dante King
The whole walk, though it couldn’t have taken more than ten minutes from the moment that we slipped down off of our dragon’s backs, passed as if in a dream for me. I walked past flowers as big as my head that smelled like caramel and, somehow, reminded me of a Stevie Ray Vaughan guitar solo. I brushed trees that had fingers that clutched seductively at me, walked alongside bushes that were filled with jabbering fairy-like, neon-blue creatures, and passed under one stone, ivy-encrusted arch that I was sure sniffed at me and chuckled to itself.
Eventually, after walking through this ‘shroom trip of a garden, we fetched up at another one of those solid, enormous gates that didn’t look as if you’d need to hack it down if you wanted to get past it, but mine your way through it. There were knot holes in it, but when I reached out a hand and brushed it with my fingertips, all I felt was stone.
Elenari motioned at the guards inside the gatehouse, and the doors swung open.
We passed into the shadow of the main building. The entrance hall was all polished stone and glittering metal and warm wood inserts. It was like standing in the very classiest of hotels.
“Are we in the castle?” I asked Elenari.
“The keep,” she corrected me. “But yes. This is the main entrance to the Crystal Spire.”
“Crystal Spire?” I asked as we walked past another pair of guards, these two distinctly female.
Even though she looked extremely preoccupied, Elenari turned to me and said, “The Crystal Spire is what you might consider, I suppose, the crowning jewel of the Drako Academy. It is the most famous building—the structure that everyone thinks of when they think of the Drako Academy.”
I nodded. “It’s exclusive?”
“Yes, you might say that,” Elenari said.
“Hard to get into?” I asked.
The butt of a spear thudded into my chest and arrested my forward progress. My natural reaction—had I not been in a world that I might most easily have been able to compare with Middle Earth—would have been to brush the obstruction aside and smack the wielder of said obstruction square in their laughing gear. However, on this extra-special occasion, I looked up.
And stared into the eyes of the sort of stunning blonde female that would have been cast perfectly in bikini-heavy movies like Lamprey 4 and Zombie Pelicans vs Cheese. The woman appeared human, as far as I could judge, but human in the way that the messengers of the Swedish Volleyball Gods might have been human. She was lovely. She took all the fight out of me, wrapped it in cotton-wool, and stored it away for later.
“Elenari,” this vision of paradise said to Elenari, “it’s good to see that you’re back.”
Elenari nodded.
The blonde haired, blue-eyed woman turned her gaze on me again. To my surprise, her eyes widened. She gaped, showing the same perfectly white teeth that Elenari had.
“Oh my gods, who is this? You know you can’t bring men in here.”
“It’s the dragonmancer,” Elenari explained. “The one from Earth.”
“The one you told me about? The one the seer showed you?”
Elenari nodded. “That’s correct.”
“You never said he’d be a man.”
“Because I didn’t know. Not until I arrived on Earth.”
“Are you sure he’s a man?” The blonde raised an eyebrow. “Have you checked?”
Elenari, for the first time in the short while that I’d known her, blushed. “I, ah, haven’t checked, no.”
The blonde stepped toward me, her hand outstretched, and her eyes locked on my crotch.
I raised my hands. “You know, I’d be happy to show you, but I’d prefer somewhere a little more private, you know? How about you take my word for it. I’m most definitely a male.”
The blonde, supermodel guard couldn’t have looked harder at me if she tried. She glanced at my face, and I suspected she was looking over the stubble spotting my cheeks and chin. Then, her eyes ran over my muscled physique. She took one last look at my crotch, then seemed to decide against giving me a hands-on physical examination.
“Well hells bells, let me introduce myself to this legend in the making,” the blonde guard said.
She extended a slim, tanned hand toward me and I took it. It was warm and gentle, and yet I was visited with the unmistakable feeling that this chick would be able to kick my goofy ass through a door with complete ease.
“I’m Michael Gilmore,” I said.
“Amara,” the blonde bombshell said. “Bearer of Padymin, Shield Dragon.”
“Absolute pleasure,” I said, speaking nothing but the truth. “Oh, and I’m the bearer of Noctis, Onyx Dragon.”
Amara’s mouth fell open. “Onyx Dragon?”
“That’s right,” I said with a nod.
“Well, blast. You really are special, aren’t you?”
I shrugged. “I’m just here to learn how to train my dragon.”
Amara smiled at me, then turned back to Elenari. “Elenari, you know you should speak to the Overseer and the Martial Council about this. They’re going to want to know about it. You know that they have been umming and aahing about whether to go after this individual for weeks. They were the first to hear about it from the Seer. It was only after they deliberated that the seer told you about it.”
“I thought I was the first to know,” Elenari said, sounding a little disappointed.
Amara chuckled, then stopped herself when Elenari scowled at her.
“We should be on our way then,” the elf said.
The blonde nodded. “I’m sure everyone is eager to meet Michael.” Amara turned to me. “You may continue.”
Elenari led me into a single, clean white room with an enormous egg-shaped crystal in the center of it. This crystal was about seven-feet tall and five-feet across and was carved with neat runes.
“Luck Dragon Blood,” Elenari explained when she caught me staring at the shimmering runes.
There was a counter set against one wall. Behind this counter, dressed in pristine white robes adorned with glittering gold thread at the cuffs and neck, sat a slight, red-haired woman. She had almond-shaped eyes with purple irises, and her bright hair was piled up on her head in a beehive that reminded me of Amy Winehouse. She also had a pair of pointed ears that would have put Legolas’ to shame; they were so pointed that the tips of them were almost higher than the crown of her head.
“Hello,” the red-haired woman said to me. “We are Leuce. We’re afraid males are not allowed to travel into the Spires.”
“He’s with me,” Elenari said. “Leuce, this is Michael.” When Leuce seemed a little unsure, the elf added, “He’s the first male dragonmancer in a long, long time.”
“Wow,” Leuce said, her eyes widening. She composed herself and smiled at me. “It’s a pleasure.”
“This is a transport hub,” Elenari said, sweeping the room with one toned arm. “There are many of them dotted about the Empire. They are used by people who wish to corporeally transport themselves to other sights around our land. There are no stairs to the pinnacle of the Crystal Spire, no way to get up there unless it is through the transport hub.”
“Bit of a fire risk, not having any stairs,” I quipped. “Then again, I suppose being a dragonrider is basically a twenty-four-seven fire risk.”
Elenari raised an eyebrow at me. “You better get used to it,” she said. “Because there’s no way that you can get into the Crystal Spire without being officially transported by one of the wind nymphs, Leuce.”
“She has some kind of transportation magic?” I asked.
“We aren’t dragonmancers,” Leuce answered, “but being a wind nymph, we have a little innate magic that allows us to activate the runes drawn in Luck Dragon blood.”
It was weird to hear the wind nymph refer to herself as ‘we’ rather than ‘I’. Still, it was the least weird thing to happen today, so I let it fly.
“So I’ll need to speak with Leuce whenever I want to get into the Crystal Spire?”
“Th
at’s correct,” Elenari answered.
I blinked. “What, and there’s no way for magical, dragon-flying motherfuckers to get around that?”
I wasn’t sure what made me so cynical. Maybe it was life on Earth. Whatever it was, I voiced it and it earned me a stony look from Elenari.
“Of course there are physical ways for people to scale the tower, if they wanted to,” Elenari said. “But no one would want to.”
“Why not?”
“The amount of magic that would be focused on those people attacking the tower physically would be terrible to behold,” Elenari said. “It would be like someone swatting a moth that had encroached upon a campfire.”
“Stand in the triangle, please,” Leuce said.
“The triangle?” I asked.
Elenari took me by the hand and pulled me to stand in the middle of a bronze triangle set into the floor. The dull amber metal looked darkened and tarnished in places, as if countless feet had scuffed over it.
“We’re about to be teleported,” Elenari said.
“Enjoy the ride.” Leuce gave me a wink. It was a suggestive wink, but the suggestiveness of it was lost—in my opinion—by the fact that I was bodily transported through space and time.
I’m not sure if that has happened to you before—traveling through space and time— but, let me just say, it will deflate your concentration and sex drive like a ballistic missile falling through an inflatable pool flamingo.
The feeling was about as similar to suddenly falling off a ledge as is possible to describe.
My stomach, as we were transported, seemed to slip up out of my guts—where it had spent most of its life, having a fine time in my abdomen—and travel up to my ears. My eyelids fluttered involuntarily, and I had to squint. It was almost like I was flying again; the air buffeting my face, the wind ripping past my cheeks.
Then, my booted feet smacked into the ground with force similar to if I had jumped out of a second story window. I staggered a little and sucked in a breath of fresh air.
Elenari brushed off my shoulders and smiled at me. I shook myself, feeling like I might suddenly fall apart, atom by atom.
Elenari actually laughed.
“What?” I asked.
“You didn’t seem to enjoy that.”
“Well, I can’t say it was the most enjoyable ride of my life.”
Elenari took my hand and dragged me through a corridor lined with statues. Each showed a mighty warrior, clad in spectacular armor, beside an equally armored and impressive dragon. Most of the warriors were female, but I did catch a few that looked male. All kinds of fantastical races were represented, and many of them were completely alien to me.
We emerged from the other end of the corridor and out into the open air. It was as flawless and vibrant. It was obvious, due to the fact that there was no roof over my head, that we had been transported to the very top of the tower. Everything within my sight was green and bright and fresh.
Somehow, I knew that it was the same splash of green that I had seen while on the back of Noctis. It was vividly green, so beautifully sparkling, that I knew that it was saved for the elite of the elite.
Elenari and I walked out into the park. To my left, there was a low wall. I looked over the side of this wall, thinking that I might be peering over a ten yard drop. Turns out that I might as well have been taking a peak over the edge of the Victoria Falls.
“Fuck me!” I said, to no one in particular.
“Excuse me, why?” Elenari asked, keeping her voice down low.
“Sorry, it was just an expression,” I said. “What are we doing up here, Elenari?”
“You shall soon see,” Elenari answered. “Pull up your hood. I’d like to keep your identity a surprise for as long as possible.”
I did as she said.
As Elenari and I walked around an ornate fountain, we came across half a dozen beautiful women that were in the middle of what seemed to be strength conditioning training.
At least, that was what I supposed it was. What they were actually doing was beating the hell out of huge blocks of stone.
“Are they using their bare fists to smash those boulders apart?” I asked, my voice failing to hide how flabbergasted I was by the sight.
“Of course,” Elenari said, looking at the women pummeling the solid rock with as little interest as I might have shown for someone going a few rounds with a punching bag.
For a moment, all I could do was watch with my mouth open. It was such an incongruous sight, these women—any of whom could have quite happily earned a crust as a swimsuit model—pulverizing giant chunks of masonry with their bare hands.
“Who are these ladies?” I asked Elenari out of the corner of my mouth, careful to keep my masculine face obscured beneath my hood.
“They,” Elenari said, “are dragonmancers. They are you. Or, at least, what you will become should you pass the Transfusion Ceremony.”
As I watched, a stunning, athletic babe with ash-blonde hair and skin the color of coffee jumped ten feet into the air. She executed a perfect roundhouse kick that smashed a chunk the size of a basketball out of the lump of rock she was working on.
“That’s impossible,” I said automatically. “You can’t just go smashing solid rock apart like that.”
Elenari laughed and took me by the arm. “Oh my, Michael,” she said. “If you struggle to get your mind around that, you just wait and see what you’ll be doing in a few weeks time. This is simple. This is just the application of speed and strength. Dragonmancers are capable of so much more than this.”
I shook my head and grinned. I liked the sound of that. If I could get to the point where I was breaking rock apart with punches and kicks, then that was fine with me. The idea of becoming a formidable warrior who could utilize that level of raw power against an opponent was an intoxicating one.
I glanced over my shoulder as Elenari led me away from the gorgeous dragonmancers training with their stone blocks, further into the luscious rooftop garden. The woman who had just performed the stone-cracking roundhouse had walked over to the large chunk of masonry she had just knocked free. She picked it up in one hand and tossed it over her shoulder with an ease usually reserved for throwing away a takeaway coffee cup. The chunk of rock must have weighed at least one hundred and fifty pounds—probably the chick’s bodyweight. The lump of stone soared away and dropped out of sight beyond the parapet of the roof.
“Uh, isn’t anyone a little concerned about potentially braining some poor bastard down below with the broken rock?” I asked, picking up my pace so that I could catch up with Elenari.
The elf shook her head. “There’s no danger of that. On the side that the rock is thrown there is a deep pool. No one has ever been hurt.”
“I have to say that the soldiers below were impressive, but these women—these dragonmancers—are something else.”
“They, or should I say we, are the elite, Michael,” Elenari said.
The two of us passed through a gap in a high hedge and, suddenly, there were boobs everywhere.
I blinked.
Gorgeous, fit women were arrayed around the space beyond the hedge. Most were attired only in bikini bottoms, the better to sun themselves. They were arrayed artfully around the place; spread out on sunloungers, reclining on stretches of grass, and chatting amongst themselves. Their dragons, which were all in small forms that ranged from the size of a cat to a Great Dane, were sprawled contentedly beside them.
My eye was caught and held by the rather pleasing sight of one woman oiling up another’s front. As I watched, the woman doing the oiling ran her hands over the other’s breasts without any sign of awkwardness whatsoever. The other’s nipples rose under the touch, and she gave a little groan.
Elenari caught me looking and raised an eyebrow. There was a small smile on her lips.
“Guilty as charged,” I said.
My voice was loud in the sleepy, languid silence that pervaded this side of the hedge. I assumed that
this area must be the designated chill-out zone, where dragonmancers went to take a load off—and work on their tans apparently.
“Remove your hood,” Elenari whispered to me from the side of my mouth.
When I’d done so, Elenari addressed the sunbaking women. “I have returned! With a prize unlike anything seen in millennia!”
I couldn’t help but cringe a little at the epicness of Elenari’s announcement, but it seemed that everyone else found it suitably intriguing.
The heads of the reclining women all snapped to turn in my direction. The looks of sleepy relaxation, which diffused most of their faces, morphed into scowls of suspicion.
Never having been one to let something as surmountable as a fairly frosty reception get in the way of ingratiating myself, I smiled and said, “Ladies, as you were.”
There was a slight relaxing of the tension in the air, and I saw some of the looks of wariness soften into outward interest. There wasn’t another dude in sight, and I was reminded once again of what Elenari had said about me being the only male dragonmancer in thousands of years.
Looking around at all the scantily clad ass in my immediate vicinity, the implications of this fact took on a whole new poignancy.
The only male dragonmancer… You’ve got to love those odds.
At that moment, the sound of footsteps made me turn. A woman built along the lines of Rhonda Rousey, though far more attractive, was marching in mine and Elenari’s direction. She, like the rest of the women here, was topless. Her cans bounced up and down in an extremely distracting manner as she headed toward us, and it took all of my willpower not to openly oggle her.
Every muscle of her abdominals was etched and defined and the muscles in her legs stood out as if they were keen on bursting out from under her tanned skin. She was only a few inches shorter than I was and had shoulder and arm muscles that would have been the envy of every female fighter that worked out at Rosco’s gym back in L.A. She looked like she could have thrown one of the blocks of stone that the women over the hedge were beating on without breaking it apart at all.
For all her ferocious intensity and insane musculature though, the approaching woman was still stunningly sexy. She had bright blonde hair the color of ripe wheat and startlingly blue eyes, like chips of ice. Whack her in a bright red swimsuit and capture her running down Santa Monica beach in slo-mo and you’d have thought a pre-Hep C Pamela Anderson was back in business.