by Jade Alters
“I-it’s alright,” I stumble. I’m only about halfway to the Dragon’s Quarter when he steps out from a branching hall. The second I gulp down the shock at the loss of all my prep time, I realize the opportunity before me. A perfect segway. If I can just compose myself in time. “What are you doing all the way over here?”
“I wish I could spend all my time in the Obsidian Cave,” Dorian sighs. “I’m doing what I do everywhere, besides that cave and the sky. Taking care of business. Or rather, I was, before you got here.” He smiles at me with such pride that it gives me a pang in my stomach to know what I’m about to say could lead directly to his undoing.
“You mean Dragon business? Or…” I lead him. Dorian’s eyes climb up to the ceiling, arcing from one side of his sockets to the other.
“Yes…among other things. Just now, I was heading for the Fey Forest to speak with Fey Rorelia about rations this month,” Dorian explains. “But that’s nothing you need concern yourself with. Days like this are for delegation. I simply didn’t expect you so soon. Consider my business for the day taken care o-”
“Actually,” I butt in as gently as I can, “I really wanted to ask you for a tour of the Stronghold, anyway. Lucidous walked me past some pretty interesting stops, but I wasn’t about to ask him for a show and tell.” Dorian hides a chuckle behind a tight fist.
“Lucidous can be a little…aloof, I’m sure you gathered in your time at the Academy. But he’s an absolutely brilliant man. If you think you know what he’s thinking, it’s really only what he wants you to think,” he tells me. Then he straightens up, which must be something a bit closer to his business mode. Only now do I see just how much taller than me Dorian is, even in his human form – at least six inches. “Are you certain? You’d rather do chores all day than go for a flight?” God no.
“Yeah,” I say, doing my best not to cringe. Not only is it a complete betrayal, which I suddenly care about, but it sounds boring. Besides, of course, visiting all the hidden sectors of a mythic Stronghold. “What better way to give a tour than to see the place in action?” I prompt. Dorian’s lips twitch in a temporary smirk of genuine glee. He does his best to flatten out the expression as he crosses the hall to a path on the other side.
“Well then…I suppose the first stop is the Fey Forest, upper floor,” Dorian says. I turn to follow him into the dark. Dim flashes of yellow light from lanterns hanging in the stone over us is all that lets me see where to follow. I gather Dorian’s walked this way more times than he can count from the brisk pace he takes the sharp curves at. All the while, we hike upwards with the grade of the cave. “How is the Academy, anyway?”
I’m not sure whether to laugh, scream or stay silent. Did he really just hit me with the how’s school? Or does he mean strategically? Does he expect that much of me – already – to betray the secrets of my home for the past three years?
“I remember my first few years there. I was a mess,” Dorian muses as he walks on.
“You went to the Academy?” falls out of my mouth as we climb upward and around.
“You thought I hated the place without an ounce of experience with them? Just what kind of man do you think I am?” Dorian prods me. We both laugh right afterward to fill the space neither of us wants me to use as an answer. “Yes, the Broken Academy was where I first learned control… Control. What a joke. They helped me stop involuntarily combusting objects around me, but…everything I learned after that wasn’t control. Not self-control anyway. Sorry – I’m preaching.”
“No, no, it’s…it’s alright,” I tell him. But it’s not. Not because I’m disturbed or shaken by the Kyrie ideology rearing its head…but because I wanted to hear more. There are so many pieces of the puzzle Dorian and I are part of missing. The idea of scooping one up from the underside of the metaphorical couch…it doesn’t sound so bad to me right now. I know that’s not alright, but I keep listening anyway. “What do you mean, it wasn’t self-control?”
“Much of what they teach at the Broken Academy are limitations, dressed up as facts. Take the Phoenix Maneuver, for example. The Academy would tell you it’s impossible, because they don’t want young Dragons to go around scorching their wings. They think they’re helping, protecting us, but all they’re really doing is spreading misinformation. That’s what happens when people like you and I have no other place to turn. When one group controls the wealth of knowledge,” Dorian goes on. I watch his hands dance at his sides as he talks. He doesn’t even realize how animated he’s getting.
“The Council, you mean?” I prompt him. It’s not as hard as I expected it’d be to pretend I’m not frightened. The Kyrie: big, horrible separatist sects obsessed with power and allied to get it. And yet here’s a man proclaimed by many to be their leader…making some sense. Even if it was for my own protection, I have been lied to, by the Academy already.
“Yes. The ones who sit atop the hierarchy they designed. The final jury of all supernatural matters of contention… Monopoly of knowledge can make someone a god. No one group should have such power,” Dorian grumbles. I gulp at the gravity of his voice, then doubly hard at how he stops talking for the remainder of the cave.
Light stabs my eyes with a serrated edge as we emerge abruptly into the mountains above the Stronghold. In an instant, the dank cave walls fall away in favor of open, arid plains and peaks. On the sides of the monumental wall of trees, anyway. Straight ahead of us is the border of the Forest Lucidous barely mentioned in passing. It’s a marvel of bent nature.
The top branches of the Fey Forest reach higher than some skyscrapers Their trunks are splotched about in perfect symmetry, just enough to enchant the human eye and offer plenty of walking room between. A high archway of interwoven branches marks the shadowy entrance. About a hundred different shades of green-skinned bodies wander in and out. Dorian and I integrate into the crowd and ride the current into a massive dome made from interlocked trees. I take the cleanest breath of my life and follow my father to his first job of the day.
Serge,
The Kyrie Stronghold, Fey Forest
I don’t need to listen in on Dorian to know who’s behind this mystical feat of growth. Trees don’t get this big in North America anymore. Not without a National Forest representative coming to size them up and sell them off to paper companies. No, this is a Fey Forest, the same kind I’ve learned about that blanket Thornegarde. I never imagined they’d grow one here in our Realm. That is, until I followed Dorian and Cece here.
It wasn’t exactly my mission to track Cece. Bart was my original target. The Dragonlord was beginning to suspect her old friend of something other than honor, with his lack of information to report. I mean, according to Thise, Bart spent most of the week at the Kyrie Stronghold. Yet he came back with nothing. I hardly needed a reason to follow him all the way out here anyway. Not with the way Bart’s been looking at Cece lately. The problem is, he’s by far the less interesting of the two who left the Academy earlier today. Therein lies the suspicion. He’s been part of this operation for months and he has nothing to show for it. Yet, watching him, I get the impression he doesn’t feel an ounce of the pressure that’s on.
I’d be scrambling up and down every inch of the Kyrie Stronghold, asking questions and peeping through keyholes. Not Bart. With the personal tweak of a simple trick, I watch him stroll up and down halls of other Vampires, Magicians and Fey. He floats through the flow of foot-traffic in the same general direction as Cece, but on a different route. They both come up from the earth at the edge of the Fey Forest, but Bart lingers on the edge while Cece ventures deeper inside on Dorian’s heels. The ASTF’s sole Vampire member kicks up dirt and chats with more than one of the mint-skinned Fey who line the outer groves of the Forest. Through the link created by my trick, I listen in on every uninteresting word.
Bart shoots the breeze over exotic vegetables from Thornegarde and whether various Fey think they could grow it here. He asks one of them how big they can grow their bodies, if they really try.
He does something like flirting with one Fey girl, and even plops down to eat a sandwich for about twenty minutes. It takes me about that long to realize that he probably knows I’m watching him. Why else would he be wasting so much time while he’s supposed to be on a mission?
That’s when I veer off course to follow Cece, instead. I see the family resemblance between her and Dorian instantly. But I know better than most how little similar looks mean in terms of family bonds. It’s more from boredom than anything else that I tune into their conversation with a little illusory sound trap. From the second I do, though, I find myself instantly captivated. I lean forward over the crest of the shrubby hill I use for cover, to listen more closely.
“So…the Fey are responsible for food for all the Kyrie?” Cece asks.
“Most of it. Dragons and Vampires do a little hunting here and there, so the meat supply is spread thin. The Fey’s supernaturally-grown vegetables are what gets most of the job done,” Dorian explains. Something about the thirsty edge in Cece’s voice draws me in. She sounds so genuinely curious, not the slightest bit like she’s playing along. So I throw a surveillance caveat into my trick. With my eyes shut, I can peer through an invisible lens over Dorian and Cece like I’m hovering right there. She stands close to him, and leans in every time he speaks. I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen her so engaged.
“We’ll spread to the eastern fields tomorrow. More rice. More potatoes,” says yet another voice I recognize. I turn my lens just slightly to the side, to find Fey Rorelia. She appears to have been working on some sort of written plan with Dorian. I’ve only caught the tail end of it, which is enough to gather that it’s about food. Funny. You don’t picture a supernatural supremacy group needing to feed itself.
“I want an update at the first harvest,” Dorian orders, before the obligatory, “Thank you.” So, he’s a business-first kind of man. I can’t help but notice the sharp contrast in the voice he uses with Fey Rorelia versus the one he used with Cece, either. Compared to the way he orders others, he speaks to her with the softness a father might, were she still the age he last saw her at.
“Next stop is the Magician’s Lab,” Dorian says.
“Lab?” Cece echoes. She chases after him the second he starts moving beneath the high, interwoven basket of a canopy. It has to be an act, to get him to trust her. It has to be. But that glint in her eye… I’ve seen it before, and it’s no act. Remember why you’re here, Cece. I murmur in my mind. Then I feel like a huge hypocrite. But Bart is still lounging on the fringe of the forest, making tender love to the last sliver of his sandwich. So, when Dorian leads Cece out the back arch of the Fey Forest, I give silent, distant chase.
I haven’t heard my father’s voice in two years. I haven’t seen his face, or any other face from the Dalshak clan besides my sister, in that long either. It jars me to watch my lover and her father traverse a secret supernatural Stronghold to their “Lab”. True to family form, I never heard a word of this facility. Not of the Stronghold or the Magician’s Lab deep inside its caves. When Cece and Dorian stop moving a few hundred feet beneath me, I lay down and put my ear to the arid earth. The trick that links us is weak through the magically-warded mountaintop, but I can still make out most of what they say at least.
“A Lab… Do they do experiments here?” Cece asks. I detect a healthy hint of suspicion in her voice. Good. She’s not completely taken by the Kyrie’s impressive facilities.
“Just research. They use samples recovered from old facilities and battlegrounds to isolate the effects of different phenomena and substances on us,” Dorian tells her. I wonder who he means by us as much as Cece.
“Us?” she echoes.
“All of us. Dragons. Magicians. Fey. The whole lot of supernatural species. What frequencies of sound irritate us. What spectrum of light our eyes pick up. What chemicals harm us. It’s all different from humans, and there’s remarkably little research on it,” Dorian explains.
“Because…knowledge is power?” Cece asks. “The more the Kyrie can offer that the Council can’t…the more people will listen. Is that it?” Is this a new development, or has she been holding back on her reports to Thise? I had no idea she had this sort of rapport with Dorian already. But it isn’t Dorian’s voice that answers. It’s one that makes every muscle shudder under my skin. I grab a fistful of clay in each hand when my father says:
“That’s part of it. Hello, Cecelia.” The sound of her full name is so alien it makes me cringe. There’s a good reason no one speaks it.
“How many times do I have to-”
“My daughter prefers to be called Cece,” Dorian jumps in to contain her explosion before it can spread. The next words to leave his lips are so heavy, so dark, I feel like he’s threatening me, hundreds of feet above him. “I trust you’ll respect that.”
“Of course,” Horace answers a few moments later. “Since you are so curious, Cece, come over this way. I’ll show you the Inhibitor Chamber.” I creep low to the ground to trace the footsteps of Cece, my father and hers across several feet of cracked mountaintop. When they stop, I put my ear to the ground again.
“What…is that, in there?” Cece chokes when she sees whatever new atrocity the Dalshaks have dreamed up. All for the greater good, I’m sure. It turns my stomach to think how devoutly I once followed the same credo.
“Skin and muscle. From a deceased Warlock,” Horace tells her, like it’s nothing more interesting than a potted plant.
“Don’t be cryptic, Horace. Tell her what you’re doing with it. He gives the worst tours,” Dorian murmurs to Cece. I have to snuff a chuckle at hearing my father scolded so. Now, that I could listen to all day.
“We’re exposing preserved samples from all supernatural sects to different mediums to find limiting effects. For Witches and Warlocks so far, we’ve found the most effective thing to be trace radiation,” Horace explains. “Their bodies thrive on the harmony of the natural world. The disruptive particles of man-made radioactive elements seem to have a much more extreme effect on them than anyone else, even in very low doses.”
“I imagine this sounds rather frightening,” Dorian says openly.
“I’d be lying if I told you it didn’t sound like a supremacy scheme,” Cece admits. I can’t believe how candidly she says it, to the leader of the organization. This same gall that frightens me now is the same thing that first entranced me about her when she set off my room amulet on her first morning at the Academy.
“This may be hard to believe, but it’s actually the opposite,” Dorian tells her. Of course, he would. The thing I have to listen for is how Cece responds. “It’s not just Witches and Warlocks we want to be able to limit, should they disrupt the balance of power between races. It’s Dragons. Magicians. If everyone has access to their own Realm of Power, it’s going to change the nature of things. Naturally, we’ll need counteractive measures for situations in which things get out of hand. Even against you and I.”
“And who controls these counteractive measures, if not a Council?” Cece asks just the question I hope.
“It’s not a matter of controlling them, Cece. The Lab is only the birthplace of these technologies and techniques. A place that belongs to no race and distributes to all. It will be the will of all, not just Six, who decides what is too dangerous. What is too powerful. No more reserved executive decision rights,” Dorian says. All I hear is chaos, dressed up as democracy.
Cece says nothing. I flatten the side of my head against the mountain, to listen for anything. A skipped heartbeat. A short breath. A murmured disagreement. But I can’t pick up anything. She’s completely silent.
The rest of Cece and Dorian’s afternoon is mostly just a tour of the facility. Much as I want to linger and feel out the strange bond forming between them, I feel a little dirty for it. Not to mention there’s a real mark that needs attending. So I go back to Bart. After three more hours, I’m more certain than ever he knows he has a tail, and he’s doing everything he can to throw me o
ff. He spends most of that time sitting by a fountain near the entrance, and the rest playing chess with Lucidous. In this whole time, they exchange hardly more than a few jests and pleasantries.
“I’m pretty sure Bart knows we’re onto him,” I report to Thise, later. “He found a way to pretty much do nothing all day, in different parts of the Stronghold.”
“Which means there’s something to be on to,” Thise sighs. “Old friend…I’d hoped the years had been kind, but they’ve twisted you.” She mulls over what to do about Bart. What I saw between Cece and Dorian lingers on the tip of my tongue, and apparently my face. “Is there something else, Serge?”
“No,” I assure her with all the false confidence I can muster. I’ve already violated Cece’s trust part-way by watching her. I at least owe her the courtesy of talking to her myself. “Nothing else. Just a long day.”
Dinner Plans
Cece,
The Broken Academy, D-Wing
I give his door four hard pounds. I consider busting his chops a little with another sequence of obnoxious knocks. Just enough that he might get a noise complaint from someone else nearby, only to have to tell them he knows, because it’s his room. But I haven’t been by to see Serge at his room in so long, I decide to cut him a break. Cut us both a break, actually. There’s only so much subterfuge a girl can take.
The second Serge’s face appears through the crack in the door, I push it in. I spin him around against a wall and catch the door with my toe in one graceful maneuver. I pull the door shut and smush Serge under my body.
“Nice of you to visit,” he manages to squeeze from his deflated lungs, just before I trap his mouth with mine.
I push into him three times, which should be plenty for his body to catch up. I feel him stiffen through the smooth fabric of my athletic pants. But his lips don’t seem to remember what to do. He kisses me so loosely. I feel no motion from his tongue, and I notice in a blink that his eyes are still partially open. He’s watching me for something. He’s thinking, when he should be feeling. I pull back from him to dangle around his neck like an amulet. It’s all I can do while we’re standing, with the difference in height between us.