The Wizard And The Dragon

by Joseph Anderson

  I discovered that Tower had been such a good teacher because he knew where I would stumble. He had stumbled at those same places. The boy also stumbled at them. I already knew which areas would need the most review and could plan accordingly.

  It was a surreal experience. The changes in those months were minimal at first but in time they snowballed until I could barely recognize our day to day life. I was setting Bryce up to be a different man than I was and I couldn’t tell how drastic the changes might be.

  He was understandably afraid of the giant spider and it took several weeks of careful planning and kinetic shackles before he would go near it. This slowed down our collection of spider silk and the tower was much colder in the first few days of winter. By spring, when he could create the shackles himself, Bryce was closer to how I had been with the spider. I was cautious when he went into the cell alone. He was not attacked like I had been when I was a child.

  Teaching him the basics of reading and writing took longer than it had for me. Conversely, he grasped magic faster than I did and could focus himself weeks earlier than I had managed. Transforming gems into food came easier to him even as he struggled to read more complicated words.

  Most curious of all was how he reacted to fire. Although he was still too afraid to handle it himself, he was less terrified of it than I had been. I had to wonder if it was Candle’s presence that caused that change, or if it was because of the spider’s attack. Perhaps the constant reminder of that pressing fear caused the other to dwindle.

  The thunderstorms that came with spring gave ample opportunity for practice. Like most magic, the boy took to keeping his focus steady even in a heavy rain better than I had fared. I pushed him harder in those sessions, driving him to excel. I hoped he would be a better wizard than I because of it.

  When I opened the study to Bryce, and he began reading on his own, I began to copy the books on healing magic. It was the biggest change in my lessons: I planned to leave him with the potential to heal his finger. I copied the books with my own notes, in a way that I knew he would understand, and left them on the bookshelves.

  I would often look down at my left hand and stare at the finger that should be missing. The boy did it too when he thought I wasn’t looking, though he would poke and prod at the stump that was left. Of all the changes that I had inflicted on him, that was the one that bothered me the most.

  Spring turned to summer and in my last months I began showing Bryce how to heal directly. The tunnels were closed and I refused to torture the spider. I took it upon myself to be the test subject.

  “Why can’t we practice on the chicken we make? That’s flesh too,” the boy said.

  “It’s not the same. We get a lot wrong when we make the food. Imagine carving an apple shape out of wood. All you have is a knife. It wouldn’t be too hard. Now imagine chopping that apple into thousands of small pieces and putting it back together again. Much harder. You might even get a piece wrong and not even know it.”

  I was holding a piece of stone in my right hand. I had grinded it down to a fine point. It was our first lesson on healing and he wasn’t pleased that I was about to slice open my finger. I was having second thoughts too, but one glance at the boy’s mangled hand was all I needed to persevere.

  The cuts were shallow at first, small enough that his early mistakes could be corrected. I showed him the pattern and he struggled to be precise where he manipulated it. I would often be left with uneven skin and small bumps in my finger. I would cut them out and let him try again.

  The pain was at its worst when he caused a rampant growth from the energy in my hand. I had been older and more experienced when I had taught myself, and had weeks of practice on the farren. The boy would burn through the energy in the surrounding muscles and leave me with bulging masses on my fingertip.

  He finally mastered restoring the simple flesh and skin when summer was near its end. I knew I couldn’t delay the inevitable for any longer. I dreaded each night that I put off announcing that he was ready to create his own familiar. We had found the sollite core months before and it was a constant reminder of my last day.

  I didn’t want to leave the boy. In an odd way I felt more like an older brother than the same person. I was protective of the child and didn’t want to leave him alone. His safety wasn’t guaranteed: his missing finger was proof of that. Had I taught him enough? Had I fulfilled my role sufficiently?

  In those final days I considered forcing another change and not teaching him the familiar spell. In the end it was Candle that convinced me otherwise. He had been my companion all those years alone and I don’t think I would have survived without him. It was too big of a risk to think that the familiar spell was linked to Tower’s disappearance. Perhaps I would put it off and still be taken away, leaving the boy without a familiar to fill my place.

  “You’ll keep learning how to heal like this,” I said to him the first time he mended my finger.

  “I will,” he said.

  “You’ll be able to heal your hand one day, just you watch.”

  “You’ll still help me though, right?”

  “Of course,” I lied. I turned my head from him and rubbed at the new skin. After all the cutting I had done, I could hardly feel anything there at all.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The day arrived and I met Bryce in his room. I left Candle in the study. I had spent the afternoon staring at the massive gem in the corner. I knew that it vanished with me but it was still there. I was ready to fight whatever came for me but I needed to give the boy his final lesson first.

  At the time my memory of that conversation was flawed. The events that surrounded it were too potent: meeting Candle and losing Tower. I remembered vaguely that I would give the directions on the spell and the warning about using fire that came from his own self. My eyes paused on the candle flame for a brief moment at that.

  “I want a fire elemental like you,” the boy said after I asked him what kind of familiar he’d like.

  “Is that because I taught you magic? Fire elementals are not easy to keep,” I said.

  “No. It’s because of the dragon. I don’t want to be afraid of fire. You have a friend made of fire. I’d like one too,” he said.

  “That,” I said, as a chill ran down my back, “is a very good reason.”

  I felt like I was on the precipice of something. I had expected to be ambushed in the study, not when talking to the boy. Something was coming and I couldn’t remember it. Something important.

  “We’ve never spoken about the dragon,” I was compelled to say the words. “Do you ever plan to go back to your village? To see if someone else survived?”

  He answered too quickly. There was no thought or reason to his answer. It was an emotional response, something that he knew down to the core of his being.

  “One day I will kill the dragon.”

  I felt as though I had been struck by what he said. It took effort not to shake as I stood there in front of him. I remembered how much I meant those words. In that moment, as a boy, I truly believed that I would grow strong enough and one day leave for my revenge.

  In that moment it all made sense. I should have been relieved but I wasn’t. I knew why Tower left that day because I suddenly knew that I was leaving too. He left to kill the dragon, stirred up by my words rekindling the rage that had been forged when my village burned. The tower had given me a gift. I had been a helpless boy when my home had been destroyed and now, only a year later, I was strong and powerful.

  “Your familiar,” I said.

  “What do I do?”

  I reached over to the sollite core on the table. It was identical to Candle’s. I had been certain I would have to be dragged out of the tower to leave the boy alone. Candle would look after him, just as he always had for me.

  “This will act as the core for the elemental. You’ve had it so long that you probably already have a connection to it. It’s why I wanted you to keep it here. You’ll sit and focus
on the sollite until you’re aware of that connection. You’ll need to smother it with flames until it catches fire,” my eyes flickered to the candle on the table.

  “Should I do it now?”

  “Yes. It will take a few hours. Don’t rush,” I needed the time to get ready. “It’s important the fire comes from you, Bryce. That’s part of making sure the familiar will be connected with you.”

  He nodded at me and I smiled.

  “Good boy,” I said. “I’ll leave you to it.”

  I hesitated at the door. It didn’t feel right to leave it at that. I turned back to him.

  “Bryce,” I said. He turned to me and I thought back to how I analyzed every part of this conversation for any clue to where he had gone. How much would a goodbye, even a veiled one, change things? I couldn’t do it.

  “Ah. Nothing, never mind. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  He grinned at me. I closed the door behind me and walked slowly down the stairs. I had only a few hours if he got through the procedure faster than I had.

  In the cellar, I gave the spider food and water for the last time. I took one of the larger bags and a small pouch. I tried not to think of the impossible task before me as I climbed back up the stairs. Were there any books on dragons in my collection?

  I filled the small bag with gems when I reached the tower’s main chamber. There were only a few dozen in the bag but I didn’t dare to take any more. I had to leave the boy with enough to survive. In the study I filled the large sack with loose papers and my writing book. I frowned at the quill that was magically linked to it and remembered that it wouldn’t work outside the tower. I’d have to find some ink in the outside world.

  The realization that I was actually leaving didn’t sink in until then. I slumped down on my bed to steady myself and looked around the walls of my room. The tower had been my home for longer than my village. I would have to be careful in the wild, from both animals, monsters, and people. I’d have to talk to people. It had been sixteen years since I had seen another person.

  That was assuming the dragon didn’t kill me. I thought of my struggle with the krogoth in the underground. The dragon was easily twice the size of that, maybe bigger if my memory hadn’t exaggerated it. The krogoth had been resistant to magic. Would the dragon be also? Were they distant relatives like the farren and the trolls?

  I had read through every book and had found no trace of dragons. There had been an entry on them in the beastiary but I had skipped over it, too afraid when I first saw it as a boy. The drawing of it alone was enough to stir up my nightmares. I placed the book down at my desk and brought Candle out as I turned through the pages. He needed to hear what we were up against too.

  The picture was as I remembered it. This dragon was red whereas mine was brown. There was fire all around the page, spewing forth from the dragon’s mouth. Whoever had drawn the picture had dedicated more space to the flames than the actual dragon. No wonder I had been so frightened of it as a boy.

  “The Dragon,” I began.

  “A complex topic about a complicated species. Much of the information on dragons is either warped as stories pass from person to person, or outright fabrication. An example can be seen in this very book. The depiction of the dragon here is shown to be breathing fire, whereas we know that is not the case. Dragons are capable of manipulating magic, just like humans. Their use of fire is no different in technique than our own.”

  I paused there and closed my eyes. I thought back to the dragon above my town. Its wings were beating down on us. The fire started there, on its wings, and spread out over its body. I remembered seeing it the same way when Tower first channeled it in front of me. It was the same when I drew the fire from a crystal into my other hand.

  The krogoth had been resistant to magic, not capable of using it. The dragon’s capabilities were surely the more daunting of the two. I pressed on and continued reading.

  “Much of the false information on dragons comes from two factors: their rarity, and the large amount of possible differences between each individual dragon. They are fiercely territorial and, as such, most do not live long enough to reach maturity. A newly hatched dragon may already be the size of an adult human, but they have the capability to grow far larger than that. The exact limit on a dragon’s size is unknown; however, the largest reported have been from sea vessels that were attacked far from land. Those that survive claim the dragons are twice the size of the ships that they destroyed.

  “They are intelligent creatures, able to match the problem solving capability of a human at the least. Some stories claim they can reproduce human speech through magical means, but this is either a rare trait or another fabrication. The dragon’s intelligence seems to be a weakness as well as a strength. Dragons rarely mate as they are suspicious of each other and clash frequently.

  “In the early days of dragon hunts, feuds between the creatures were exploited to destroy their eggs and young while they were fighting. Adult dragons were too powerful to be defeated directly and their population was culled by infanticide. As humans grew more adept at manipulating magic, groups were able to bring down mature dragons. It is thought that the species is near extinction at this time, endangered to the point that they avoid humans and keep their presence hidden.”

  I frowned at the book and then looked around the walls of the study. Once again I found myself wondering how long the tower had stood. The books and structure were maintained by the focal point of magic it had been built upon. I had seen that much for myself to confirm what Tower had said to me. How old was the information in this book?

  Was the dragon that attacked my village an exception to the rule? I suddenly wished I had paid more attention to the news brought in by travelers to the village. Had the dragons come back? Or was this book thousands of years old and out of date?

  I left my desk and began pacing down the bookcases on the study wall. There were more books there that I had added than the original, leather bound tomes. Many by my hand were merely copies, but a fair amount were filled with new information. I had only personally added a few and yet there were many shelves filled with my handwriting.

  For the past few months I had been teaching my younger self how to use magic, just as my older self had taught me. How many generations did it span backwards? The books filled up the shelves with more information with each cycle, just as the next Bryce knew a little more about magic. Each time the cycle looped it was with a better, more accomplished wizard and a better, more adept teacher. How many times had I lived through this? Hundreds?

  I thought of what a horror of a time the first boy must have had. Alone in the tower. Too afraid to leave because of the dragon. Starving even though the tower was keeping him alive, as it had kept me alive when I had nearly killed myself with exhaustion. How long had he struggled to teach himself to read from the meager scraps of knowledge he knew? Had those first few gone mad when they were cycled back to the beginning? I thought of the words etched into the wall of the windowed room. “I’m so hungry.” I shuddered.

  I stopped suddenly as the thought came to me. My Tower was dead. I knew it as clearly as I knew that I was leaving the tower. The dragon had killed him. If he had lived he would have came back to explain things to me, just as I had now decided I would not risk the boy to that madness. Eventually the cycle would produce a wizard accomplished enough to kill the dragon. It was an inevitable thing, but it had not been my Tower. Was it me? Would I be the first?

  I went into my bedroom and collected spare sets of clothing to put in the sack. I tried to remember what I had found as a boy. What had been missing from what I saw now. I opened the drawer containing the sollite objects for the first time in a year and stared at them. Tower had taken them when he left.

  The first time I had seen sollite it had been with Tower. He had fused a gem within it and stored the energy inside it. I held up the dagger in one hand and the harness in my other. I gently centered my focus and found that they were empty. No
magical power in either of them. I still held them as I walked back into the study. Had he used these to store the energy instead of keeping a pouch of gems?

  Candle flared up at the sight of the sollite. His acorn core was still within his form, powering his body like it had for years. There was an immense capacity for energy in Candle’s core. The harness had a smaller amount of sollite amongst the straps but the dagger was larger than the acorn. I don’t think I had enough gems to come close to filling it.

  I smiled when I saw it. The last mystery that was solved before I left the tower. The massive gem I had made in the corner. I almost laughed as I walked over to it. Such a simple solution that I should have known when I first saw the objects.

  The harness went first. I pressed it against the gem and I felt a wave of power wash over my focus. It was like my magical sense had been blinded and I couldn’t gather myself around anything for a few minutes. The gem was visibly smaller now, but not by much. Only a fifth of the magic was within the harness.

  The dagger went next and the movement of the energy was strong enough that I felt a hot blast hit my body. The gem was gone. The dagger was gleaming as the energy settled within it. It was no bigger than it was before, but the delicate appearance it had once had was gone. Parts of it still showed hints of the rich brown that it had been, but most of it now resembled shining steel. When the light caught the surface of it a spectrum of colors would be in the reflection.

  When my focus recovered the dagger still felt like it was pulsating with magic. It looked stable to my eyes but it felt alive to my magic sense. I took off my shirt and put the harness on. It was surprisingly warm against my skin and I could feel the connection to the energy when I concentrated on it. The dagger could be knocked free of my hand but the harness would remain, a stash of energy for emergencies.