Ivy's Dragon: Dragons of Telera (Book 7)

by Lisa Daniels

  Footsteps could be heard resounding in the narrow chasm outside the cave. The Supreme chuckled as Faith continued her advance, lumbering because of the injury.

  “I look forward to fighting you again. You might be the one to kill me. You might…” a strange, almost fond smile stretched its lips, before it backed away, beginning to dissolve into the walls, out of the sphere of influence of Faith’s living body.

  Faith gasped, swords clattering from her hands. The pain surged through the adrenaline haze. It shouldn’t be a fatal wound, she deliberately plotted that out – but the blood loss and pain rapidly spiraled her system into shock.

  Erlandur burst into the cavern, gaping at the dead Supreme, followed by others – others Faith didn’t recognize.

  “Faith!” Erlandur flung himself beside her, eyes darting frantically from her face to her wound. “No! What happened?”

  “By the moon,” one of Erlandur’s companions whispered. “She killed a Supreme.”

  Borderline worship slid across his face – his black veined face. Faith stared at him through her blossoming fever. What was this?

  Who were these people?

  “Ssh. It’s okay.” Erlandur seemed truly panicked, hand twitching as he grasped the blade. “Should I?”

  “No,” one of the companions said, her voice low, almost a growl. “Take her to our care unit. That blade is serrated. It may cause more damage coming out of her than going in. She’ll have more chance with our med unit.”

  “What’s going on?” Faith’s voice rasped, as she clutched at Erlandur’s armor. “Who…?”

  “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have left you. It was stupid of me. Oh blasted moon.”

  “She fended for herself very well.”

  “This is Aria’s body,” a black veined male said, examining the head. “She doesn’t use weapons.”

  The people in the room took time to digest the news.

  “What happened, child?” The oldest member of the group, a wizened woman, old enough to be Faith’s, no, she couldn’t use the word grandmother without a deep sense of pain – old enough to be her elder.

  “I fought two of them,” Faith wheezed, struggling to keep herself conscious. Her body wanted to shut down, to remove her mind from the pain. Erlandur clasped her hand, and she found herself reaching out to him, soothing him of all people.

  She saw the terror in his eyes. He didn’t want to lose someone. He didn’t want to lose the woman who had seen the secrets under his armor, who understood a glint of that emptiness inside.

  “Blast! I think this is Grace’s blade. You know.”

  “Yeah,” Faith said. “My grandmother’s body.”

  Surprised mutterings broke out.

  “No wonder. Two Supremes, my word. You weren’t joking, Erlandur. You said you’d put together the best fighting force the north’s ever seen. You’d help us…”

  Faith almost screamed when she saw a Shadow walk in behind the babbling group. “S-Shadow…”

  The Shadow in question waited for the humans to step aside. “That I am.”

  Faith felt her whole world toppling upside down.

  A Shadow.

  Black veined humans.

  Erlandur, not reacting to the Shadow’s presence, even smiling at it.

  What in the moon…

  Why was no one reacting? Why smile at it?

  I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything. I just fought my grandmother. I found the secret under Erlandur’s skin. And there are humans near the Fractured City?

  “There’s a lot to explain,” Erlandur admitted. “I think we should save it for after the operating theatre.”

  Faith noted that all of the people in the room wore crescent necklaces. The same symbol Erlandur had told them to watch out for.

  Even the Shadow wore it. The Shadow with the face of a white-haired woman.

  “I’m not falling unconscious,” Faith said. “You’ll carry me, and you’ll be giving me some blasting answers. If you want me to trust you. If you want me to stay by your side.”

  “Of course,” Erlandur said, kissing her forehead, stroking her short hair. “Anything. And I’m so sorry. I should have waited. I didn’t think it through very well at all, did I?”

  “To be fair, I doubt you’d expect two Supremes to be walking around the chasms.”

  “Not a good sign,” the Shadow said. “They’re already aware something’s up. They’re trying to flush out the rats.”

  Faith squinted at the Shadow. “I need a name from you. Otherwise I will see you as nothing but as an enemy.”

  The Shadow nodded. “Helena. Or, at least – this is what this body used to be called.”

  Helena. Not a name I’ve heard. She is not anything significant to me or the legends I know. “I hate Shadows, Helena.”

  “I wouldn’t expect anything less.” Helena’s peculiar silver eyes clouded over for a moment.

  “This was what the original scouting party was meant to do,” Erlandur said, carefully draping Faith in his arms. They began the walk, everyone quiet as they moved, the black veined humans, the Shadow known as Helena. “We needed to find the Fractured Ones – those who live near and within the city, resisting the absolute influence of the ruling council.”

  Ruling council? “Wait. The Shadows have a society?”

  “In a word,” Helena answered for Erlandur, her soft, melodic voice carrying over the darkness. “They also have a human population they subjugate to their demands. If you fail to satisfy them, they’ll turn you into a Tormented, and set you out into the wastelands. There’s millions of people here. The Fractured City is at least as large as your Lunar Wastes.”

  The information processed through Faith’s brain.

  All these years, she’d assumed the City was in ruins. The Shadows mindless entities. The north and south suffering the brunt of their evil for centuries.

  She winced as Erlandur took a particularly heavy step, and he winced with her.

  “Sorry.”

  “You keep saying that.” She buried her face into his chest, taking comfort in it. “When I get better, I’m gonna kick you into the sky.”

  He let out a half laugh, half scoff. “You can kick me around any time. Just get better. I need you. We need you,” he amended, but Faith most definitely caught the flush in his cheeks, the slip in his mind.

  For whatever reason, this knight of the Lunar Wastes wanted her.

  He didn’t act intimidated by her, afraid of her powers, afraid of who she was.

  That touched her somewhere. Deep inside, where an icy fortress encased her heart. It thawed the cold there like the hot springs under Ghost Lake’s Mirror of the Sky. It left her with something more than just the thought of living, fighting and dying.

  What if she could live for something? What if she could live for Erlandur? To see a smile upon his lips?

  The thought warmed her up inside, breaking apart the bonds of her mind as he continued carrying her, towards whatever base that belonged to the self-proclaimed Fractured Ones, with the Shadow called Helena, a new mystery in the vast jigsaw puzzle the Lunar Wastes offered.

  A new face to the war they fought.

  I believe him. Faith reached up absently to stroke Erlandur’s stubble cheeks.

  I really believe he’s not lying when he says there’s a way to end this once and for all.

  She scowled at Helena’s back, where black energies unfurled out of her skin.

  Answers lay within Erlandur. With this creature. And in the way that somehow, a Shadow had managed to procure the body of her long dead grandmother, who should have been buried under the snows.

  Her grave had been desecrated without their knowing.

  How many other witches had suffered the same fate, knowing no rest in death?

  The implications of that thought terrified her.

  They made it at last to an odd slit within the chasm, and a new network of caves, barely visible to the human eye.

 
“You’ll be treated soon,” Erlandur crooned to Faith.

  “We’ll set up search parties for your missing scouting party as well,” Helena assured Erlandur. “Then we’ll try and figure out just where we can hide your army.”

  “I can hardly wait,” Erlandur said dryly.

  Faith grinned. She felt woozy, light headed, and more than a little nauseous, but she also felt confident. Hopeful.

  Purposeful.

  She breathed in Erlandur’s natural earth scent, her mind full of thoughts for the future that awaited.

  Just as soon as she got patched up, of course.

  That would help.

  The End

  Nox’s Rescue

  Guardians of Lunar Wasteland

  (Book 6)

  Chapter One

  Echo cowered in the rundown building. The market place, which resembled a ghost town at the best of times, shivered itself into non-existence as the Shadow parade filtered through the street. No one wanted to be picked, or to suffer the wrath of the upper class, or those finicky Supremes who meted out punishment as they saw fit. Didn’t matter if you were a model citizen or slave to them – sometimes the madness took over their souls and they’d lash out for no reason. Five mindless Shadows shuffled in front of a Supreme, who wore the face of an entitled bitch. Echo doubted the Supreme would pay any attention to her, but she didn’t want to conjure up any sort of suspicions her way. She was, after all, in the nature of doing illicit errands.

  Living in the Fractured City wasn’t a life for the faint hearted. The Supreme herself appeared mildly disappointed that everyone had skittered off. They acted hurt, sometimes. Hurt that no one wanted to be around them, when they were known for their manic behaviour. Echo knew for a fact that a Supreme couldn’t feel. They mimicked emotions, sure. But basic human empathy? That lay beyond their skills.

  Those poor, wretched souls though, the ones that ambled in front of the Supreme now – Echo wondered what slight they had committed. Now the Supreme would unleash them into the Wastes, so they could wander aimlessly, trying to devour any souls they came across.

  Echo scratched at her black veined arms, watching the Supreme disappear from the quiet street with their batch of former citizens.

  Within a moment, the stalls and shops declared themselves open again, and hooded figures emerged from their respective buildings or rubble to sell their wares. Chewing upon a strand of white hair, Echo ventured over to the market stall responsible for selling medical supplies. “Ho,” she said, striking a confident pose, so she looked less like a street rat without money, and more like a shady underground dealer, which of course, most of them were. Out of hours, anyway.

  “Ho,” the man responded, narrowing his eyes, before scratching at his armpit.

  She looked into his dark brown eyes and smiled warmly. “I’m looking to buy the flesh pills that I know you have tucked in a hole in the floor somewhere.”

  The man bristled, his gray beard almost crackling with suspicion. “Why would I be selling something like that, even if I did have it, to a street urchin like you?”

  In response, Echo slapped down a vial of Shadow blood on his stall table. The trader’s eyes boggled at the sight. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “It is. So, now you know I have something illegal as well, I’m also supposed to tell you that I’ve been sent by Helena herself.”

  At the name drop, the man’s face paled. The slight hesitation told Echo everything she needed to know. “Right. Right. Well, if you wait here a second, I’ll just go in and grab the… pills.”

  He turned and went inside the dilapidated building. Throwing caution to the wind, Echo vaulted over the stall and followed the trader inside. He glanced back nervously. “Why are you following me inside?”

  “Because I don’t trust you.” Echo concentrated, and the headache formed in her skull. Magic coursed through her blackened veins, and she delved into herself, into the darkness that was a part of her and tore it out.

  The darkness coalesced into a monstrous, shadowy form, growling ominously. The trader made an odd squeaking noise.

  “If you try to contact any of the authorities, you traitor, I’ll set my friend on you. It’s not too picky about flesh, bones and clothing. Echo felt momentary relief upon separating the evil, in giving it a form, rather than letting it nestle inside her. Just a shame she couldn’t control it for long.

  The trader began to sweat profusely, knowing he’d been caught. “They have my wife. They said if I didn’t cooperate, they’d turn her into a Shadow. What choice do I have?”

  “Easy. Give me the pills. You can take this vial. Don’t breathe a word about this to anyone. And I’ll tell Helena you’re compromised.”

  The trader shivered, but did as she asked, goaded by the threat of what Echo had dubbed as Monster. Monster crept after the trader as he hastily dug up the flagstone of his stone floor, and pulled out a bag of pills. He flung them her way, refusing to go near her.

  Echo wondered if he’d try to follow her after they departed, since she knew the desperation he must be feeling, missing the love of his life. She had no time for that, though. If need be, she’d kill the trader to cut out the complications in her life. The last thing Helena needed was a Supreme and upper class raid upon their hide outs. Not before they had secured everything in order.

  The underbelly, the heart of the resistance, had scooped up Echo as a baby. No one knew the parents of the body she possessed, but the resistance relished the chance to train an upper child. Given a normal life, Echo would have grown up in the dense spires of the Fractured City, learning the ways of the Shadows, spouting the ideology that humans had taken everything from them.

  Helena changed that.

  My soul came from the origin land. I am a Shadow in a human body. A body that has emotions, conflicting with a Shadow that does not.

  With the bag of pills, she left the trader’s ruined house, letting Monster dissolve. The headache throbbed, but she kept a calm, almost sedate pace, as if nothing scared her, and she didn’t feel the desperate urge to get as far away from the outskirts as possible.

  She glanced back a few times along the snow-flecked street, but saw no peep of the trader. Just as well. He would have been moon-cursing foolish to do so.

  Soon, she left the main trading slums of the outskirts, heading for the ruins to the south-west, where the caves and the villages accumulated, next to the great chasm that split the land.

  I get tired of living on scraps. Of always fearing a Shadow’s whim, of letting them see the humanity in me. If there’s one thing they hate more than a human, it’s a traitor.

  Echo smiled darkly to herself. Abomination. I belong to nothing.

  She kept up her jaunt, taking around three hours to approach her destination. The snows whirled bitterly around, and she tucked her hands into her fur robe pockets, and buried her chin into the lump of fur by her collarbone. She stared resolutely ahead, that same empty feeling inside – the conflict of the Shadow which did not feel emotion the same way a human did, and the human body which served to override the hollow.

  Still, if she didn’t cast Monster often enough, her emotions slanted over to empty. They made her do atrocious things at times and feel no remorse.

  A memory flashed. A child, pointing at the chasm, laughing. Teasing Echo with his friends. Echo the loner, with her quiet, diminutive nature.

  She still remembered the precise pitch of his scream, the hint of despair it embodied, as she shoved him over the abyss, then listened curiously to hear if his body would make a crunching noise as it hit the ground.

  About a day after that, Helena discovered her.

  Abomination. That’s all I am. I belong nowhere. I don’t fit in.

  Still, even an abomination could be useful. So that was something. Out of a secret thrill, Echo edged herself close to the chasm’s vast drop, so she could peer down, and look at the jagged rocks, or the murk that obscured the bottom with the lack of light below. Nothi
ng penetrated the deepest cracks, and sometimes, when Echo had nothing better to do, she explored them with Monster.

  Shadows, for the most part, left her alone, sensing her as one of them.

  She wasn’t, though.

  She stopped. Something seemed out of place in the gloom. In the spidery embrace of the chasm, with the jutting crevices that punched into the sides like wide yawns, she saw something. A body? A skeleton? She continued walking, dismissing it as another unfortunate accident, when she saw it stir.

  Oh. Hello. She crouched by the gap, noting the feeble movements of the person she’d mistaken for a corpse. Whoever they were, they looked seriously messed up. From what sort of height had they fallen from, as well? This whole area surrounded the basin of one of the mountain range that soared about eight thousand meters each. She bit her lip for a moment, contemplating. With her recent use of Monster, she felt more empathetic than usual, though the headache rang in the back of her skull.

  I won’t be able to reach them from here or from down there. Reluctantly, she let the Shadow magic trickle through her veins again, and Monster formed beside her.

  Fetch the one who has fallen. They would likely be too weak to try and lash out at her abomination. Monster’s form undulated down, its blue eyes glowing with that icy chill which unnerved so many people. Monster bobbled through the walls in places, until it reached the body. Monster grasped the body in tendril-like arms, then slithered up the cliff face again, shivering from the snow that hit it. Shadows did not like the cold, Echo included.

  Let me see this one’s injuries. Monster set the body down, and Echo observed the male form, the thick robes, the snow caked all over him. He’d most certainly come tumbling off the mountain. She moved one of his eyelids, then cursed and snapped it back.

  Yellow eyes. Werewolf. Of course. Only a werewolf or witch with their robust constitutions could survive such a sheer drop. But blasted skies and broken teeth, she didn’t want to be responsible for a werewolf. Even if there were still missing members of Erlandur’s scouting party floating about.