by Dante King
On that promising note, Dasyr snapped her gauntleted fingers.
“The bond you now share between your dragon, it is something that will last until you die,” Tanila told me matter-of-factly, reaching out a hand to stroke the massive cheek of her own impressive Tiger Dragon as the world around us whirled into a hazy fog of mixed colors. “Remember that.”
“I think it’ll be hard to forget after what we just went through.” I went to clap Noctis warmly on his sleek and muscular flank, but I found that the dragon was no longer there—and neither was my hand. I felt myself lifted from the ground, which was then whipped away from under my feet like a rug.
Then, blackness.
This time, when I came to my senses, I found myself unbound and standing in the moody chamber in which Noctis and I had had our bloods mingled. I was back in my standard Rank One robes again; my blood spattered armor gone. Noctis had vanished too, though I could feel the dull warmth of the onyx crystal emanating from where it hung around my neck.
The place was empty except for Tanila and Dasyr. The two strange women had their hoods up once more, but I could now see their bright eyes—gold for Dasyr, blue for Tanila—burning in the darkness of their cowls.
“How do you feel?” Tanila asked me.
I took a deep breath and considered this question.
I feel…
I feel…
“I feel like… I feel like fucking Steve Rogers!” I said.
It was the first thing that leaped to my mind just then; the only analogy that I could use. I’d gone suddenly from drab to fab, in the same way that spindly Steve Rogers became Captain America. I felt like I was suddenly walking taller.
A Marvel comic book universe reference was probably not the analogy most likely to strike a chord with Tanila and Dasyr—despite the ironic fact that the pair of them looked like they could have quite happily stepped out of Guardians of the Galaxy—and I was predictably greeted with blank looks.
“I mean,” I said, trying to break the feeling down in my own head so that I could clarify it to myself, as much as the two robed women. “I mean, I feel… powerful. Like there’s storm running through my veins.” I rubbed my stubbly jaw as I sought for words.
“You think you have an inkling as to how a dammed-up river must feel?” Dasyr put forward. “You can feel the built-up force behind you, waiting to be unleashed?”
I nodded. The woman had a way with words. “That’s exactly it,” I said. “It’s like every sinew and bit of muscle in my body has been carved out of raw potential.”
I flexed my hand. I pulled the sleeve of my shirt up and prodded at my forearm muscle. It might have been carved out of oak, and I wasn’t even tensing. I had been in good condition before this, what with the hours and hours of training I had put myself through every day, but this was different. Admittedly, my muscles had definitely taken on more definition and mass, but it was the intrinsic strength that I could feel inside them that was the most noticeable change.
I could have walked into any octagon on Earth with utter confidence right then. I could have faced Conor McGregor, Alistair Overeem, and Khabib ‘The Eagle’ Nurmagomedov under the bright lights of Vegas and been completely certain of annihilating all three of them.
“I swear, I can even see… and hear better than I could before,” I said musingly.
“I don’t doubt it,” said Tanila. “As we said, you share the strengths of your dragon now.”
I took a long, slow sniff of air. Even the simple act of smelling seemed to have been enhanced for me. In some way that I lacked the eloquence to describe, I was able to sift the air for scents like a prospector might swill his pan for flecks of gold.
Now that my nose possessed this acuity, I couldn’t imagine having ever lived without it. I could scent the animal fat in the candle, could tell that it had been taken from a cow or an ox—though how my brain made this assumption when I hadn’t ever seen an ox was a mystery to me. I could smell the dry dust of the cavernous room we were standing in, could smell the distant minerally tang of the water flowing through the rock of this subterranean place.
“Shit, but I feel alive,” I said. “Is this what makes dragonmancers so formidable? This feeling of invincibility and virility?”
“Yes, this is why we undergo the Transfusion Ceremony,” Tanila said. “That feeling is what it means to be a dragonmancer.”
With a lazy wave of her hand, Dasyr conjured a portal out of the air, the fabric of reality parting with a wet, tearing sound.
“It is worth remembering, Earthling,” she said, “that though you may feel invincible, this is not the case. Bravery is an important cornerstone tenet for the dragonmancer, but it is not everything. Prudence, a sanguine mind in the face of adversity, logic, and humbleness are also extremely important.”
I walked over to the portal. I could see a hazy image of my dormitory room through the wavering opening. Saya and Elenari weren’t there anymore.
I glanced back at the two enigmatic women.
“I guess this is my cue to get out of your hair, huh?” I asked.
Tanila’s shining ice-chip eyes narrowed in a way that suggested she was smiling.
“This is your cue to go out and build your legend, Michael Noctis,” she said.
“No pressure then,” I said with a grin. “Wish me luck.”
As I stepped into the portal, which would take me back to the Drako Academy and the new and exciting world that I now found myself a part of, I heard Dasyr say, “Luck cannot be wished into being, Michael Noctis, it must be forged out of the fires of necessity.”
That, I thought, as I stepped down into the dorm room and the portal sucked closed behind me, was a badass exit line!
Chapter Twenty-Three
The significance of what I had actually achieved by beating the six-headed sinbeast was, as it often is in these sort of intense situations, lost on me at the time. However, as I looked around the quiet and comfortable dormitory room, it seeped slowly through my consciousness.
That hadn’t just been the most insane and otherworldly fight that I had ever been in, that had been the Transfusion Ceremony.
I had been bonded, intravenously, to a real-life dragon…
My blood had mingled with a creature that, up until only a few days ago, I would have only expected to see after ingesting bath salts or bad acid.
I held my hand up to my face once again, as if I expected to see the difference, see the glow of dragonfire coursing through my veins. But, barring a couple of little circular white scars on my wrists where the supernatural crystalline tubes had punctured my skin, my hands looked just as they ever did.
I poured myself a cup of Lightning Cider, a jug of which had been thoughtfully left out on a thaumaturgical hotplate to keep warm, and plonked myself gratefully onto one of the low couches surrounding the firepit.
So, I thought, a little dazedly, I’m in.
I took a sip of the Lightning Cider and felt that special brew battling with the deep-seated fatigue that wrapped my body. Now that I was sitting and was able to catch my breath, I felt the low hum of muscle weariness enveloping me.
The individual components of the scrap with the sinbeast might not have been the most taxing—requiring skills of interpretation and cool logic almost more than combat skills—but it had been prolonged. Being on edge for so long, wondering when something covered in hair and claws was going to jump out with the express idea of liberating my internal organs from the confines of my abdomen, had taken a mental strain as well as a physical one. I had been as tense as an electric wire the whole time, my brain on high alert for any sign or sound of something evil creeping in my direction, my muscles stretched taut and ready to spring into action. It had been draining.
I leaned my head back, exhaled, and grinned up at the ceiling.
Michael Noctis: Dragonmancer.
Ah, actually, that’s Michael Noctis, I reminded myself.
I couldn’t deny it, it sounded better. More the
sort of name you could imagine seeing on a plaque under a large statue in the town square, maybe?
I shook my head and chuckled.
“Maybe, you better slow your roll, boy,” I said to myself. “You’ve a fucking ways to go yet, I’ll bet. This is doubtless just the tip of one hell of an iceberg.”
Speaking of tips and icebergs…
“Elenari and Saya might be knocked up, man,” I said to myself, feeling my stomach tighten. “That might throw a spanner in the works as far as my training is concerned. I wonder what the Drako Academy policy is as far as making milfs of your female colleagues goes?”
Try as I might, as I sat there with my mulled drink, I couldn’t get my head around how the fuck they could have gone from naught to pregnant over night. It simply made no biological sense.
Biological sense! my brain crowbarred in at this juncture. You’re still thinking like an Earthling. You just defeated a ravening six-headed beast hand-picked from the Nightmare All-Stars, and you’re still laboring under the impression that anything you used to know holds any sway in this world.
My noggin had a point. What if, despite everything I thought I knew about the birds and the bees, I was going to become a father? Was I ready?
I guessed it didn’t really make any difference whether I was ready or not. What was going to be was going to be. I’d just have to do the best I could when the future came a-knocking.
One thing’s for damn sure, I thought vehemently, I’m going to take responsibility and do better at this fathering business than my old man.
I took a sip of Lightning Cider and swilled it around my mouth thoughtfully. I’d been so excited to tell my roomies that I’d passed and that we were officially fellow dragonmancers and colleagues. Now though, now that I had passed that particular test, I was struck by the fact that the three of us might have a quite different sort of trial ahead of us.
Still, we were dragonmancers, we could get through this sort of thing if anyone could.
“No rest for the wicked,” I muttered. I drained my cup and refilled it.
I sat quietly for a while, just resting. I savored the many complexities of the Lightning Cider that my Noctis-heightened senses of taste and smell allowed me to enjoy now.
It was as I put my feet up on the edge of the firepit, toying with the idea of catching a quick catnap, when there came one of the little messenger-drakes—the tiny dragons that acted as interpersonal couriers for the Crystal Spire and the surrounding castle grounds.
The messenger-drake, as shiny and bright a green as a Jackson Chameleon, landed in front of me. It looked a bit exhausted, as if the little creature had had to come farther than it was wont to, and fast. Its wings drooped tiredly as it alighted, and it yawned, showing a mouthful of spiny little teeth. It looked up at me expectantly through sparkling black eyes.
“Deliver your message then, buddy,” I said.
The little dragon hiccuped a couple of times, and then spewed a small gout of fire into the firepit. The fire took shape and morphed into the upper torso of a truly stunning woman.
The woman had the aquiline, slightly otherworldly features of a runway model. She had a long neck and wore her long hair in intricate braids. As the fire blossomed a little more, the message was brought into technicolor, and I saw that the woman’s skin was pale, her hair silver and her almond-shaped eyes mismatched—one was a bright greenish-blue of a robin’s egg, the other a ruby red. As the image refined further, I made out something huge in the background.
It was a giant bone-white dragon slumbering in a meadow.
“Michael Noctis,” the woman said, “newly appointed dragonmancer of the Mystocean Empire, I am the Seer, Claire.”
The Seer! The Seer whose prophecy compelled Elenari to come to Earth and find me? I thought she was supposed to be a dusty relic? Ancient as—
But the woman was talking again, and my thoughts shut themselves off.
“Presently, I am residing in my orchard, the Augury Grove. I am here with your friends and fellow warriors, Elenari and Saya.”
“Shit, I hope they’re okay,” I muttered out loud.
“They are fine,” Claire the Seer said.
“We can communicate through this message?” I asked, wondering how else she could have heard me.
“No, we cannot,” the Seer said. “I have simply foreseen what you would ask, and have answered those questions in this message.”
“Weird,” I said.
And she chuckled. “Your women, Saya and Elenari, are more than fine, in fact.”
My women? That was a weird way to refer to the pair, but then this was very much a pre-modern world.
“They are,” Claire continued, “as they both assumed, with child. What is more, it would seem that these infants are not ordinary children… They are dragonlings.”
“What?!”
Claire smiled. “All will be explained when you arrive here.”
“I’m going to you? I don’t even know where the hell your glade is.”
“Doubtless your coterie will be able to point you in the right direction,” Claire said.
The flaming message flickered and faded, and the figure vanished. With a little snort that sounded very much like a sigh, the messenger-drake took off and disappeared.
I was on my feet before I knew what I was doing.
I summoned Noctis from his crystal home. My dragon pawed the ground impatiently, his claws leaving long grooves in the rug. Clearly, he was picking up on my agitation.
“The only question there’s time for is this one: where the fuck is this Augury Grove?” I asked. I still wasn’t used to Noctis speaking to me, so I was a little surprised when he answered.
“I can take you there,” replied the Onyx Dragon. “I once lived many moons ago in this world, and I still bear memories of this grove.”
“You think it’s the same place?”
Noctis nodded his head.
“What’s the quickest way out of here?” I wondered aloud, and this time, Noctis didn’t provide me with an answer. I glanced over at the floor-to-ceiling windows leading onto the balcony. “We can’t fly up, but I bet we can fly down.”
I considered simply flying through the glass windows but figured that, while theatrical, it would probably get me into trouble, so I thrust them open before I mounted Noctis. I gave Noctis the mental spurs, and we leapt over the balcony.
Noctis ripped through the chill night air like a sable thunderbolt. We passed by the Crystal Spire on our right and the town proper on our left before we headed out toward the Eldritch Forest. In the bright moonlight, I spied a foaming silver river below us at the same time that Noctis banked to follow it. The river snaked its way up into the steep, wooded tors that overlooked the town.
Within three minutes, Noctis dropped his right wing and began to circle down, aiming at a large natural orchard set on the edge of a cliff. In the midst of this orchard, by the side of a still pool, was a quaint lime-washed cottage with a small apple tree growing out of the thatch.
Noctis landed and, before he had even come to complete halt, I had slid off his back and was moving toward the house.
As I ran for the house, three female figures had emerged from inside.
The woman in the lead was obviously the ethereally stunning Seer, Claire. She smiled at me as I jogged up to meet them. She was even more spell-bindingly attractive in real life. Everything about her seemed to radiate health and prosperity and wisdom. She looked like Galadriel on vacation. She was dressed in a simple dress of white that trailed through the meadow grass behind like a train of summer clouds.
“I’m not going to lie to you, Claire,” I said, standing before her, “I imagined you to be old as hell.”
The Seer smiled even more widely, and I suddenly became aware of the slight crow’s-feet at the corners of her mismatched eyes.
“But I am, as you put it, old as hell,” she said.
She stepped aside then, and I saw Elenari and Saya walking slowly over to
us. To my astonishment, both dragonmancers looked as if they were about seven months pregnant. They were dressed in sheer shifts, and I could clearly see the curvature of their bellies pressing against the thin material. I couldn’t help but notice their large dark nipples through the semi-transparent fabric—Elenari’s were particularly noticeable against the pallor of her fair skin. Both womens’ breasts also looked swollen and larger. This was saying something as far as Saya was concerned, because she was already sporting a rack that would have left Sofia Vergara green with envy.
I walked over to the two women, trying not to stare at just how insanely pregnant they looked, and kissed them both on the cheeks. The three of us exchanged slightly bashful, slightly disbelieving grins.
I turned back to Claire, the Seer, and my brow furrowed a little as I recalled her words in the message.
“In your communication,” I said, “you mentioned that these offspring would be dragonlings. What does that mean?”
The Seer beamed at me, stared up into the dusky sky, and sighed happily. Then her mismatched eyes came back down to earth to focus on me.
“You can be assured,” she said in her fluting voice, “that they will be dragons.”
I blinked dumbfoundedly.
“Dragons?” I said. “As in dragon,” and I pointed at Noctis, “dragons?”
The Seer nodded happily.
I turned to Elenari and Saya. Both women looked extremely composed for two people who had been told that they were carrying fire-breathing reptiles within them.
“Can you believe it?” Elenari asked me.
“It is truly unbelievable,” Saya said, cradling her stomach.
“Mike, you’ve given us such a gift,” the red-headed elf added.
All I could do was smile. Despite myself, that smile turned into a broad grin.