Kalara replied thoughtfully, “Ravanan, think back to those eyes that were watching us and sent you away, they were full of colors – those weren’t Annette’s eyes, hers are brown.”
“She has my treasure. I’m sure of it.” Ravanan answered solidly.
Kalara could see that she wasn’t convincing him, giving up the argument she went back to glancing around the room. Aside from the weapon rack, there were chests, cabinets, and a basket of amulets that were not as much priceless treasure as they were enchanted tools that were jumbled up in a loose pile.
She also saw display cases. Each glass case contained an outfit, masculine in appearance; all were neatly hung and pristine. The most ornate of the cases was embellished with sapphires on all the edges, but it was empty, signifying it must be where Ravanan kept his sapphire wizard robe that he was currently wearing. She noticed his blue shirt and jeans in another, she casually commented “Oh, I see the clothes you were wearing when you found me – are they enchanted also?”
Ravanan looked at his blue shirt and jeans, he was half distracted with thoughts of killing Annette but he answered anyway. “The jeans intensify the mind blanketing effect while the shirt amplifies the heartbeat of my target to single it out in a crowd.” Ravanan replied – bragging. “Targeting spells are the most fun, to craft a spell centered around the sound of a racing heart...” He stopped himself as the thought occurred to him that Kalara might not be quite ready yet to hear about those gruesome details.
Then Ravanan’s thoughts about targeting turned back to Annette as an idea formed in his mind. He went over to Kalara and helped her up. “I’ve got it. You are an Acama and you can summon Annette to us right here in this room! Kalara you have got to do this, for me, for us. Bring her here and I’ll deal with her.”
Kalara was hesitant. “I can’t. There is no way I can do that.”
“Yes you can, just try.”
“You said yourself that I’m not ready to be an Acama.” Kalara could not see it. “I’ve only just begun to feel magic work again within me. I’m not ready.”
Ravanan would not back down and his excitement was mounting. “Kalara, listen to me. You’re right OK? Being an Acama is beyond you right now, but you still have the ability to summon dragons.”
“How do you know that I do?” Kalara asked.
Ravanan looked into her purple eyes “You have something that the four of you put inside your bodies. I don’t know any more about it than that, but I’m sure even if you are morphed, it’s still there. Why wouldn’t it be?”
His reasoning made sense the more Kalara thought about it, although she didn’t know what could be inside her – she felt nothing odd or extra in her body. With an eyebrow raised she asked him, “And you really think I’ll be able to bring Annette to me when I couldn’t even summon my bow?”
“I do.”
His excitement made her want to try it. “Well how do I do it then?” she asked.
Ravanan stepped back a little and coached her. “Just think about Annette, target her. Think fully about her, everything about her, then speak out loud and order her to come to you. Expect Annette to appear. Use whatever words you want, your blood will know your will. This shouldn’t be hard because it is a basic thing for Acamas to do – you used to do it. You would say ‘Come here whoever!’ – and say the dragon’s name instead of whoever.”
Kalara was quiet for a moment, thinking. She was an Acama – or so he said – she ought to be able to. But then she wavered and shook her head. “I’m sorry Ravanan.” The failure to evoke her bow to her was clouding her mind.
“Kalara please.” Ravanan was easily reading her thoughts about the bow. “I told you, Annette must have destroyed your bow. That is why it didn’t come to you. You didn’t fail to evoke it, the bow you made no longer exists! You must move on and stop thinking about that; it is in the past now and has no effect on what you are doing now. You will not fail in this, your magic is in you. You felt it when you made me kiss you. Just recall how that felt to you.”
She breathed deep. “OK. I will try it, but I will need to relax right?”
Looking around the room she noticed a bare spot where the bed must go and thought about relaxing with Ravanan. A smile crossed her lips “Why don’t you bring the bed back........”
Kalara forgot all about summoning Annette when her eyes froze on the back wall of the long room. There were more display cases back there, all glass – the same as his – except they contained feminine clothes, her clothes – they had to be.
She walked over there with Ravanan following. Holding her breath, she walked around them, looking at the different outfits she had worn throughout a two thousand year history. She marveled at them. There were two empty cases, one of them was like all the others and was probably for her healing robe, but her eyes were drawn to the other one, it was made from carved ivory and jeweled with luminescent fire opals. Kalara froze while she searched her mind to figure out what outfit was supposed to be hung in there – it had to be the cream robe that Annette had taken, the same one she was wearing in her dream. Her heart sank. That had been her robe. What enchantments did it have? She reached out and ran her fingertips over the bright fire opals, thinking, wishing she could see through the haze in her mind, it was a special robe, if only she could remember more about it. Her white robe..... Aggravation built up at the road block of her amnesia. Why couldn’t she just remember?
Not being able to remember anything more about the robe she turned in frustration to Ravanan and asked “What do you know about that cream colored robe? The robe that goes in this case here...” she pointed “....These are my clothes, right? You said you brought my things here.”
She looked at the clothes some more, thinking and trying to put the pieces of a puzzle together. Ravanan was watching her, listening to her mind work it out, he didn’t answer her right away to give her time.
Kalara’s mind followed an old trail of thought, a trail that she hadn’t known since before her amnesia. She slowly asked, “Why were you the one to come find me? Please tell me. Don’t avoid it anymore, tell me the truth, I’m ready.”
He took a breath, “It would seem you are going to make yourself ready whether your mind is ready or not.” Ravanan paused regretting last night, he hadn’t intended to complicate her mind more than it already was. “I was chosen by the other Acamas because I lived the closest to you. They asked that I find you and, if required, kill you.” Ravanan smiled at his smoothness.
But his smoothness might as well have been sandpaper to Kalara as she looked at the centuries of dust on the top of the glass display cases. She could feel in her heart that there was more to it, whether it be her magical alertness or simply woman’s intuition, his story wasn’t right. “You’re lying. These cases look like they were put here centuries ago....”
She ran her fingertips over the top of one and they became coated with the soft gray dust.
“....and why would you bother to bring the empty ivory one? I’m thinking my stuff belongs here. There was something between us before wasn’t there? How else could last night have happened so easily?”
Ravanan was quickly trying to circumvent the upcoming disaster, “Kalara, you’re confused. Affection between dragons is complicated because of our auras. You have been all over me ever since I found you, it has confused you into thinking I’m attracted to you but really you are attracted to my magic, you can’t help it. It’s difficult for me to continuously resist your charming aura, last night shouldn’t have happened. There is nothing between us.”
Kalara exploded with anger at him skirting the truth. “I’VE HAD ENOUGH OF YOUR LIES! WHY WERE YOU SENT FOR ME INSTEAD OF SOME OTHER DRAGON? WHO ARE YOU TO ME?”
In her anger the air around them instantly turned cool from Kalara’s aura although she was too upset to notice it.
But Ravanan did. He had been able to detect her warm aura all along since he’d found her, and only now in her anger did it turn cold, punishing every
thing around her with a fierce onslaught of an arctic front. The frost aura of a purple dragon was magnitudes colder than the aura of dragons born in cold climates; and though rare it was just as deadly a tool as his lightning was.
Kalara’s cold anger stole Ravanan’s breath and caused his human skin to raise goose bumps. Instantly his aura released its bio-anti-freeze into his blood for cold protection as it had done for him so many times before.
His eyes begin to tear, there was hope that Kalara was finally making progress, maybe this is what she needed to have happen. Even within her arms’ reach and bone-chilling magic Ravanan could have fought Kalara but he couldn’t fight himself anymore. He had to answer her. His teeth wanted to chatter but he wouldn’t let them, if he was going to tell her it would be with clarity and a solid claim.
Ravanan locked gazes with her “I am your mate.”
Kalara was still as a statue.
She heard every word and her heart was proclaiming itself the victor. Her heart raced. She had been right in her desires and suspicions. He was hers, all of him, his muscles, his scales, his magic, his long flowing black hair that could twist up into black horns, he was her mate! The room warmed up with her elation and smile.
Somehow, deep down, Kalara’s mind had remembered her lover even in its addled state. Ravanan wasn’t lying, he was hers. In every sense of the word he was her mate and would never leave her.
Kalara took hold of his hands. “Why didn’t you just tell me when you first found me?”
Ravanan sighed and went back to the Mayan table, he found a chair and sank down onto it, Kalara eagerly followed, although it was obvious that he did not share her excitement.
“Imagine how I felt,” he implored her “Not knowing what had happened to you, my dragoness, Kalara the Mighty Amethyst, my own personal Acama, my most precious treasure. I had to find you, even if it was only your bones in the ocean, I had to know where you were so I could grieve. I searched for you non-stop from the moment I knew you were gone, I would never give up. And then I found you, alive, only you were no longer the dragoness I loved....” Ravanan paused in silent grief.
He found his voice again, “....You were a fragile, ruined hatchling of a dragon who could get herself and all of dragonkind killed by humans. To know that I might have to kill you to uphold the law that you agreed to enforce; to have to kill one of the only four living amethyst dragons, I ached for your plight and you never even knew it!” He spat the words at her. “You were so wrapped up in yourself, lost inside your own mind, that you couldn’t even notice my remorse.
“But then to be dismissed after finding you,” his eyebrow raised, “I thought you had set a trap for me, found another mate, a better dragon and had devised a plan for my undoing. I decided then and there on that hill that you would both die. I would drag you back to Black Blade Lair so that I might extract the location of your new mate from your hidden memories and hunt him down, just as I had hunted you. I would find him easily enough, after having cast detection spells continuously for almost a year.....I’m pretty good at them.” Ravanan dryly smiled at her before continuing, “Two things didn’t make sense to me though – why was your mind taken from you and why you were injured at that anchor?
“Regardless of my concerns I carried your limp, wounded body into our lair and what did I find?... Not only had I lost my mate, but now my treasure was gone as well. You can’t even begin to understand in your state just how much our treasure is worth; and locked within your hidden past was the key to getting it back – it still is,” he smirked at the thought. “So even though I hated you and was going to kill you and your new mate I had to heal you first and get your memories back to find my gold.”
Ravanan leaned back and propped his feet up on the table with a sad smile on his face. “But now I know from seeing your thoughts, none of this was your doing. You are a victim just as I am. Annette of Anarchelos Vya is to blame for all of our grief and I will enjoy killing her immensely.”
Ravanan became distracted with thoughts of Annette. His eyes unfocused as he considered various spells and attacks he would use against the vile dragoness. The battle would need a lot of pre-thought. He needed to study her more and be sure of her strengths and favorite spells. His attack would be swift and perfect......
From the corner of his eye Ravanan noticed Kalara repositioning herself in the chair, waiting for him to go on. The motion jarred him back to what he had been saying, he pushed Annette from his mind and continued.
“I didn’t want to tell you about us because as you currently are, you are not my mate. You have none of her memories, memories of us, things we have done, treasure we have mined, and even the little humans we have made deals with throughout the years. You think you are a human! You even think like the food we eat. You don’t remember anything from our lives! It hurts to remember our history when I am the only one who does. Every time I say anything about our past it doesn’t even faze you. You are a stranger to me and I feel like I am the one who lost everything.
“You don’t act like the Kalara I know and love. My Kalara would already have killed Annette and brought our treasure back to Black Blade. Kalara the Mighty Amethyst was a powerful dragoness, independent, and she wasn’t scared of seeing my dragon base form because she was a dragon! She understood why our treasure was important, what it meant to us. My Kalara was as powerful as me, her magic was great. We were a team that could not be beat.
“No,” Ravanan’s voice cracked with emotion, “you are not her and I’ll not ask you to pretend to be her. I knew if I told you you’d feel obligated to be with me and that is not love, there is no choice to it.
Kalara reached out to him, “But last night.....”
“Was one last flame.” Ravanan cut her off and pushed her hand aside. “I admit you are quite beautiful to look upon. You look like her human form, but I don’t feel any connection to you other than that. Making fire with you last night was different than it used to be. As I said, you don’t act like Kalara. You didn’t even recognize the runes I drew on your back!”
At hearing that Kalara had to interject. “That doesn’t matter – I can learn! I want you. I choose you.”
“You forget I am not human. I’m only in this lesser form to make you happy. You may want this human form of me but I don’t want to be with a weak human no more than you want to be intimate with a dragon.” He got up to leave the wardrobe chamber.
“Don’t say that!” Kalara said, rising to stop him by flinging her arms around him.
Ravanan didn’t pull away and allowed her to hold him but he didn’t hug her back. He knew nothing had changed in her. She was accepting him, showing him that she was willing to stay with her captor. It disgusted him. Her wet eyes told it all, she was volatile and emotional, acting just like the herd. He knew she wanted him in human form, and was frightened of him when he wasn’t the human of her desire.
Mistaking his silence for change of heart, Kalara said earnestly “I am still me. I can learn how to use magic again and you know we’re attracted to each other. We can help each other get through the pain.” She ran her fingers up his chest, feeling the softness of his velvet robe and then circling behind his neck.
He closed his eyes and felt her touch then took in a breath of regret, thinking to himself that she didn’t even touch him like she used to. She was foreign to him.
Ravanan peeled her delicate arms from his body so that he could hold her hands in his. Catching her tear-stained gaze he told her, “But I don’t want to be with you like this. You are not the dragoness I love. Yes, your magic is getting stronger, but your identity is still lost to us. You are seriously flawed. I mean look at you, you move and love like a human.... and you don’t even want to eat bloody fresh meat!”
Ravanan’s response did not thrill Kalara, in fact it had the opposite effect; she became hostile and vehemently opposed to him. The air turned cold. It was obvious that he was still reading her every thought.
Kalara backed away
from him, her eyes were full of hurt. She couldn’t understand how Ravanan could be so mean and uncaring. The air grew colder with her every heartbeat and it sparkled with floating micro-crystals of ice. Never before had Kalara felt so angry. She was aggravated that she’d forgot to block her thoughts from him and that he felt the need to bring it up at that exact moment.
Everything about her became an arctic rage, even her skin tinted to an ice-blue. Kalara noticed that Ravanan’s hair was gathering frost, everything was, the floor, the wardrobe cases, even her. The ice crystals seized up as water molecules tightened and grew.
It was at that point Kalara realized she was making it happen. The tingling and popping of hardening ice crystals was a forbidding warning as the temperature continued to drop. As the air dried out to zero humidity a gratified satisfaction filled her heart – the entire lair seemed to be holding its breath for her – waiting. The noisily growing ice crystals was anything but peaceful – and the sound was quite possibly the quietest battle cry every heard on Earth.
Kalara’s anger climbed to new heights of empowerment. She burst out with a furious rage “YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO LOVE ME – OR HELP ME! And I don’t want your help anymore! I don’t want anything from you, including this!”
She wretchedly tore away the black healing robe that Ravanan had given her and bunched it up in her hands; it crackled and froze stiff from her anger. Using more willpower than brute strength Kalara forced the robe into a ball, moisture from her palms fed ice into it. It was the weirdest feeling as water from her body started to freely seep out of the pores in her hands to soak the robe and freeze it solid. With a growing thirst and a boiling anger the black ball grew denser as it filled with all her rage. Her wrists felt strangely numb and yet ticklish as they became conduits with her body water flowing quickly through them.
The Cursed Dragon Page 16