The lightning collected between us, balling in the air before it was driven into the dragon’s skull. The dagger was emptied through that link in the loudest, deepest boom of an explosion I had ever heard. Years worth of collecting gems unleashed directly into the dragon’s body. It screamed one final time, an inhuman sound that echoed throughout the forest around us, and then slumped down into the bed of ash it had made for itself.
The dagger twitched as it still sent jolts into the corpse. I left it and fell to my knees. Around me I could feel the energy in the shards of Candle’s acorn fade away. I slumped onto the ground and wept.
Kate found me. I don’t know how long I was alone. She said something about hearing the dragon die and came expecting me to be dead too. I can’t remember exactly what she did or said to me. I don’t remember much about that night.
She set up a camp near the dragon’s corpse. I stayed in place throughout the night and don’t remember moving until morning. Kate brought me water and went to the dragon’s remains without a word. I slowly moved around the field and collected as many of Candle’s pieces as I could find. I knew that I couldn’t fix him but I wanted keep them regardless. Kate helped me dig out the shards that had been plunged into the dragon’s flesh.
We stayed there for days. I kept my word and helped Kate harvest the dragon, although I took no pleasure in it. She emptied out all of the other jars she had filled, even the troll’s liver that she had been so pleased about. The dragon parts were another class of treasure entirely to her. She crammed as many teeth, scales, and claws as she could into the few bags that she had. She carved pieces of the dragon’s liver and heart and put them into jars, since they were too big to be put in whole. The heart alone was big enough that we both could have climbed into it.
I started this book during the nights when we rested. After I fulfill my promise and help carry the parts back to Kate’s home, I will be returning to the tower to hand this book to you. Of course, Bryce, you already know this since you have the book in your hands. I still haven’t decided if I will speak with you when I arrive. If I do, I hope you understood why I had to leave you alone. If I don’t, then I hope you will read this again until you understand what has happened to us both.
There was no great feeling of relief when the dragon died. I am proud to have put to rest what killed our parents but the cost was too great. Candle is still alive for you now, and for once the cycle of our lives has ended with success instead of death. Decisions that I thought were set in stone could have been different, and your missing finger is proof enough of that.
Stay in the tower, Bryce. Teach yourself and wait for the day that the room in the study will open. Look after the boy as I looked after you, and then go your own way when that debt has been paid. Your Candle can live and you can avoid the dragon.
You can choose to live another way.
Author’s Note:
Thank you for reading The Wizard and the Dragon. I hope you enjoyed it.
On the next page I have included another story set in the same fantasy universe as this novel. It is the beginning of a series of novellas that follows Kate, a character introduced toward the end of this novel. It is set two years prior to her meeting with Bryce and will eventually catch up to when this novel takes place.
Once again, thank you for taking the time to read the book.
The Monster Slayer: Origins.
The memories bled as they died. They bled together, out of her, leaving as images in front of her eyes. They offered a final, fleeting glimpse as they faded into not darkness but nothing at all.
Her thoughts manifested around her as they were stripped away. She was caught in the middle of them while they churned around her, turning and turning like a gyre that threatened to sweep her up. Monsters and nightmares, unwilling to reveal which was which, blended with untarnished memories like they were being mixed together in a cauldron. Friendly recollections became hostile. Moments when she fought for her life became affectionate and warm.
There were monsters in the room around her. Trolls and ogres, vampires and necromancers, shadows hiding shadows before they stepped into the light and were obliterated, washed away by the current around her. She fought a vampire three times, two times, once, then not at all. He had a name. It had a name. All gone, that shimmering memory of triumph and victory, lost along with all the mundane days void of struggle.
The years emptied out of her, too fast to realize how many were leaving. Twenty? Hundreds? Thousands? She knew that she could be taken away with them, washed away in the current that unraveled out of her and then, suddenly, she knew that was what she wanted. She was gone then, hollowed and left staring at the fire that had burned away her lives. Still seeing the fire as it finished burning her away. Still seeing the fire.
Seeing the fire.
The fire.
Fire.
There was a candle next to the bed. There was a fireplace behind it. Her eyes focused on the larger fire and then the smaller flame on top of the candle. Another cycle: her eyes adjusting between the foreground and the background of her vision, blurry and then clear. She was awake, abruptly but gently, staring at the fire. She felt the bed underneath her and had no idea how long she had been laying in it.
She looked around the room with only her eyes, not moving her head. The room was small. No windows. The only light was from the candle and fireplace. There was a single cabinet and a small table next to her bed. There was a book and a candle on top of it. She sat upright and expected the room to spin around her, to feel pain like she had recently suffered a blow to the head. When she felt fine, she only grew more suspicious. The floor was warm beneath her bare feet and she stood up.
She stepped quietly around the room. There was only one door and it was closed. There was a piece of parchment impaled on it with a knife. She turned from it and put her hands on the walls. She crouched down in front of the fireplace and peered through it. There was another room on the other side. She turned her head and saw two other openings. The chimney was a column in the middle of at least four other rooms. She stood then, dumbfounded by her own actions. The parchment on the door. She pulled on it, tearing it away from the knife, and looked over it. Someone had written on it.
Your name is Kate, the note began. There was a date at the top.
You live alone. You are standing in your house. You are in a forest close to a town called Harkam’s Bridge. You are known there as Kate. Just Kate, no last name. I hated when people called me Kathleen but you might like it. Remember, though, that those who know you think you hate it.
You have been poisoned. That is why you cannot remember anything. The poisoner, however, is yourself. You prepared the poison yourself, and then you decided to drink it. You have done this many times before, more times than you and I will ever know. You will learn why it is necessary with time, but it will be from studying the notes left from your past and not by remembering it yourself. Know this, now and forever, that the poison was permanent. You will never remember what you have forgotten.
You are far older and far stronger than you appear. I do not know when we, you, I, began, but I know that we found a way to extend our life far beyond natural means, perhaps even indefinitely. You have been many different people and have learned many different things during those lives. Unfortunately, though the body and mind can be prolonged, they both have their limits. Your muscles can only be so dense and strengthened, and so your mind can only hold so much. Your memories are like a book, and although we have stitched in as many new pages into its spine as we can, that spine is finite. When all the pages are full, an older one must be rewritten to accommodate the new and then, unfortunately, the book must be rebound.
The poison is imperfect, or the mind is more vulnerable than we understand. Your memories have been plucked away but so, too, have your capabilities. It is always a gamble and it is never certain what will survive. The worst case would be that you cannot even read these words. When it was I that woke up, I
had forgotten how to use a blade but had remembered the bow. I could still work metal and stone and built the house you stand in, over many years, but had to relearn how to ride a horse. I could skin an animal and tan its hide but did not know how to thread a needle.
That is all I can say. We are careful and methodical; remain so to not be overwhelmed. You have friends in town. I have listed them below.
There was a space before the writing continued. The list was at the bottom of the parchment but, between it and the note, was a single line. The words were in the same hand as the rest but looked like they were written hastily. The lines were rough and scrawled where the others were neat.
Do not trust Calder.
The list was full of names and the locations of homes. A horse was listed as hers, stabled in town. She rolled the parchment up and put her hand on the door. She listened carefully as she opened it, leaning into the new room before stepping inside of it. The room was much larger than the first. There was no one inside and it was then that the details pressed at her. At each new thing she looked it was like the knowledge of each item was taking a place inside of her head:
A window directly to the left. Dark out. Late evening. Trees outside. The faint rushing of water from its direction. Desks against the outer wall. Quills and bottles of ink, mostly black but some reds and blues. Bookcases next to the table. Another door, closed, and more shelves next to it. The fireplace was visible to the right, another side of the stone column that was seen in the bedroom. A chandelier in the middle of the room—a simple, modest metal frame with four unlit candles. The room was a study.
She put a hand to her head as the information rushed through her, similar to the sensation of a loud noise too close to her ears. Something about the chandelier nagged at her but then so did the rest of the room. The parchment, the ink, and the quills. The thought came to her and she moved while still holding her head. She dripped ink over the table as she held the quill in her right hand. The parchment had other words on it but she ignored them, hovering her hand over it and finding that she didn’t know how to write.
The idea of writing seemed simple and easy. Draw the lines with your hand. The ink dripped onto the parchment and seeped into it, thick in the middle and veiny on the outside. Recreating the lines seemed impossible; they were too intricate and smooth. Each curved line came out elongated and mutated from the original form. She closed her eyes and tried to lose her concentration. She hadn’t thought about walking or reading, she had just done it.
Kate.
Her hand moved so quickly that she was sure the result would have been one continuous scribble; however, her name was there, Kate, a perfect copy of the note she had read. She wrote it thrice more and then the first line. She put the words side by side and nodded once. The handwriting was the same. The note was indeed written by her but that didn’t mean it wasn’t done so under duress. She dropped the quill and stepped away from the table.
“Kate,” she said out loud and reeled at the sound of her own voice. It felt loud in the room around her, with only the crisp crackling of the fire and the gentle roar of water from the window. Kate moved slowly to the fireplace and crouched again, peering through the flames at the other room directly across from her. She listened. No footsteps responded to her voice. It was difficult to recognize anything through the fire.
She opened the new door and stepped back from it, looking into the room. It was the smallest one yet and also the coldest. There were no candles and the only light came from the fire behind her, pressing her shadow through the doorway. There was a door to her left that she guessed led outside. Another door to the right. There were boots on the floor and an assortment of coats hanging on the wall. She stepped quickly to the right door, wincing at how cold the floor was under her bare feet.
The next room brought another wave of details and she felt her mind cataloguing each of them, as if her memory was working without her consent:
The room was the same size as the study. There was a counter on either side of her and a large table on the farthest wall. The fireplace was to her right—she was in the room she had seen through the bedroom. Buckets of water on the counter. Food. Salted meat. Fruit. Vegetables. Apples, pears, potatoes, carrots, turnip, and grain. Bowls and cups. Another fireplace on the wall to the left? No, a cooking hearth, wide and open with its own chimney above it and empty pots on the floor around it. A kitchen.
She grabbed her head with both hands. The image of the chandelier came crashing back to her as she thought about the extra fireplace when the center one could have served equally well. When the disorientation passed, she stepped to the right wall and studied the stone carefully. There were hooks hammered deeply into the stone but the column was thick and wide, so much that she was certain the hooks didn’t break through the inner chimney. There were other pots and pans hanging on the hooks but the opening was too low to use for cooking. She didn’t understand.
The dining area was on the far side of the room and there was more food on the table. She felt like a list was being calculated and checked as she scanned the table top. More food. She took an apple and bit into it and then immediately spat it out. The taste was disgusting and she looked down at the fruit expecting it to be rotten. The flesh of it was ripe and juicy, still appetizing to her eyes but the sour taste felt like an unwanted invader on her tongue. Did she keep apples when she didn’t like them? For guests? Or was it a change, a result of the poison? There were many apples on the table. She frowned.
There was another door that led to what she suddenly knew was the final room. She hadn’t remembered but rather judged the dimensions of the house based on how the walls had been. She would have been impressed with herself if she wasn’t set on guard as she put her hand on the door handle. The last room would be the only place another person could be. She pushed open the door prepared for a fight and, to her surprise, she was deeply calm about that possibility.
The last room was directly opposite the study. The only light came from the opening to the central fireplace. The room was packed with items and tools and their shadows were layered and cast over one another. There was no other person that she could see hiding in the room, but it wasn’t until she stepped inside and was certain that she found herself surveying the items properly. It looked like a workshop.
There were five wooden frames against the outer wall. Two of them were empty, while the other three had animal skins stretched over and pinned into the wood. Sheepskin, she somehow knew, along with the method to prepare them into parchment. There were more hides on the floor that she didn’t recognize. Tools, knives, mallets, swords, and a pile of leather armor. There were scattered blotches of blood on the floor next to small, tidy piles of sawdust. Firewood was neatly stacked between the farthest wall and the fireplace. A horsehair broom rested in a corner next to another door that led outside. The window next to it still showed that it was late evening. She turned and walked back where she came from.
Kate closed each door behind her until she was back in the study. She pulled out books at random from the shelves and leafed through them. Almost all of them were in her own handwriting. Some were even illustrated and she gawked at the detail, simultaneously hoping she was responsible out of pride, and hoping she wasn’t so she didn’t dare have to live up to that standard. There were pictures of monsters and animals, with different body parts in excruciating detail. Teeth, fangs, and organs. She stopped on a section and shuddered at the drawing: a beautiful human girl and then the same girl a monster, her mouth caked in blood. A vampire, she read, and had not the faintest idea about what a vampire could be.
She closed the book and moved onto others. She found nothing detailing the poison that she had supposedly administered to herself. Then, the thought was gone as she took a book down from a new shelf. She opened it up and saw the same handwriting detailing days and events. The intention of keeping a record was stated often. She flipped through the pages quickly. There was a series of numbers at the top o
f each entry. She remembered the concept of days and dates but had no point of reference to determine the age of each entry.
Five more books had been taken down and then replaced before she remembered. She snatched at the parchment eagerly from the desk where she had left it. The books were far older than she would have guessed and she pressed on through them, flipping quickly only looking at the numbers. There were hundreds of the books, each containing a few years. By the end she skipped to the last page for the final date until she found the most recent book; each entry was written by the last iteration of herself, the one that she had been only hours before.
Immediately she knew something was wrong. The book was too small. The thick cover compressed too much in her grasp. She ran her thumb through the pages and stopped when she felt too large of a gap skip over her skin. There were pages missing. Many pages. Pages had been torn out seemingly at random from all throughout the book until the last third all of which had been ripped out and taken. Burned, she guessed.
Do not trust Calder.
There was no mention of the name in the book. She saw others and she skimmed the paragraphs, names that matched up to those listed at the end of the note she found. No mention of Calder, like every page with his name had been surgically removed. She stared back at the fire and wondered if the pages had been thrown into it.
She closed the book and took it with her into the bedroom, keeping it apart from the others with the intention of carefully reading it. The room looked welcoming now that she had explored the entire house. There were things she saw that she had missed when she had woken up, drawn so quickly to the note on the door. There were clothes and a pair of shoes on the floor. On the bedside table, behind the book and candle, was a small hand mirror. She sat on the bed and reached for the mirror.
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