If the drake had any notions of taking Aariac out for a stroll, she didn’t show it. Once Wylan was back in the cell, the door clanged shut behind her.
Nighttime in the caldera was the worst. By day the city was serene, almost quiet. By night, however, it came to life. The air was serenaded by chirps and croaks louder than anything Wylan had ever heard. The sound of insects was near deafening, and if they weren’t loud enough, the drakes seemed to be at the peak of their activity.
The sound was primal, and if there were any words in the mix of screams, hisses, and chortles, Wylan couldn’t make them out. It sounded like the wildest hunting party she could ever imagine. Drakes raced by her cell, screaming and shouting as they went, and when they did, Aariac shivered harder, crying out in some tormented dream.
She placed a hand to his head; he was burning up. If she had any hold of her powers, she could sap the heat from him, but she didn’t, and she couldn’t.
Thundering hoof beats sounded from the trail outside her cell, and Wylan rushed to the door to see what the new commotion was. Silver scales shined in the full moon, and she stumbled back, a gasp on her lips, her hand on her chest. At first what she thought she was looking at was a dragon, but as a startled, brown eye sidled up to her cell door, she saw that it was a tellik, like those the drakes rode through the desert.
Its nostrils flared, and the terrified look in its normally placid eyes scared Wylan. Its front legs pawed at the door, and when she got over her initial shock that the tellik was going to batter its way inside to feed on them, she realized the beast was scared of something.
It let out a low baying sound that quivered deep inside of her, resonating with the fear she felt at the wild night and the beastly hunt outside. She rushed to the beast, placed her hand on its large muzzle, and shushed it. The beast reminded her so much of the tellik her parents used to keep, and her heart went out to it.
Its eyes began to calm, its breathing not as terrified as she hummed to it, and stroked its muzzle. His eyes began to close, but then flared open, a painful shriek bursting from its mouth at the same time a spear exploded from its chest. The spear jutted a good two feet through the door, and barely missed Wylan.
She cried out, but didn’t step away from the beast. Instead, she threw her entire weight against the spear shaft, ramming it hard against the cell door. The wooden spear snapped, and the bladed tip skittered off into the darkness at the side of the cell.
The tellik bled, and as it did, its eyes fluttered shut for the last time.
Screams and cheerful shouts rose up from outside, and soon a horde of drakes were lifting the full weight of the large beast, and parading it away from the cell.
They never noticed the spear was broken. She listened to the shouts, cheers, and howling recede into the base of the caldera. Her eyes scanned the shadows, and she could see a glint of steel against the far wall.
She crouched beside the spear. It wasn’t well made, but it was effective. The blade was attached to the end in a way that she could easily work the metal free of the wood.
Weapon and splint.
The terrifying sounds from outside ended with a loud, dragon-like shriek. Wylan raced to the cell and strained her eyes to see what she could, worried that a dragon had found them…found them before she could get the shackles off her wrists.
But it wasn’t a dragon. There, raising up off the throne was a yellow drake.
Days passed much the same. She wasn’t taken out again, and Aariac was getting worse. She was certain he would die if she wasn’t able to get him home and get him healed. Even then, it might not be enough. The wound had festered, and the dark veins had blackened the wound and were spreading further up his leg.
The wound was infected, and the infection was spreading. There was little she could do for him. Aariac had barely stirred when she felt around for the break, or when she yanked the bone back into place. That worried her even more.
Wylan wasn’t sure precisely when she’d fallen asleep, but she was certainly aware of waking up. The nights were hectic, and they were chaotic in the caldera, so the absence of noise was louder than a shout in her ear, and tore her from a sound sleep. Her heart racing with fear, she peered around the inside of the cave. It was too dark to see if Aariac had woken her, but she listened for several moments to hear if he was in pain, or needed her help.
But it wasn’t Aariac who’d woken her. Drifting through the darkness, carrying to her cell as if by butterfly wings was a haunting melody. She didn’t know what the drakes were singing, but she recognized their language. Typically, guttural and harsh, the song soothed away the rough edges of their words, and lulled her into a near trance.
When she thought she was about to drift off to sleep once more, the song ended, and the trace slaked. With the help of the cell bars, Wylan pulled herself to her feet, and tried to see past the road outside her prison, and down to the base of the caldera.
There was a hush of light gathered in the center of the city that existed in the basin. It wasn’t the light of houses, instead it was light that glowed from upstretched hands. Thousands of drakes had gathered in the city, as close to the square as they could. Within the square stood a ring of drakes, facing in. The ring of drakes were the ones with the glowing hands, and she recognized it as a play on the very same fire magic she possessed.
As she watched, a line of drakes formed behind the ring, directly across from the figure in the center, who she assumed was the wyvern. When the wyvern gave a motion, the ring of light bearers parted, and the first of the line of drakes stepped into the circle of light. Wylan couldn’t tell what the woman was wearing, if she was wearing anything, but she could see that she carried a bundle in her arms, because a long swath of cloth dangled from the bundle, trailing across the ground between the drake’s legs and behind her.
The drake came to her knees before the wyvern, and she held the bundle up to him. Graciously, he accepted it and Wylan’s mind raced as to why the drakes were giving him gifts. But when the bundle of cloth dropped away, a harsh cry broke the night. A tiny, shrill cry and the wyvern soul within Wylan knew what it was—a baby.
What’s he going to do to it? Wylan wondered. She expected a knife to flash in the light of the raised hands. She expected him to dash the little baby against the stairs of his dais. She expected any number of staggering, villainous things. But when the wyvern leaned over and kissed the babe on the forehead, and handed it back to its mother, Wylan stood stunned.
She stood transfixed that a race she thought was so primitive before was holding some kind of baptism. She wasn’t sure how long the ritual went on, but it was so provocative, so beautiful, that she stood there for several hours, watching as the line of mothers brought forth their babies to be blessed. Some of the babies were little more than newborn, while others seemed to be almost a year old.
A yearly thing? She wondered. Or was this the first? As the ritual came to a close, Wylan didn’t have enough energy to wonder. She sank to the floor, rolled on her side, and fell fast asleep wondering if her own birth mother had ever planned something so beautiful for her before she’d died.
The door had barely shut in her chamber when a voice spoke from the darkened corner.
“I see you’re not giving up the pursuit,” she recognized the voice of the little boy before she turned to see him. He stood in the corner, his hands folded before him, his bald head bowed, his eyes trained on the floor, but seemingly hundreds of miles away. “Foolish of you.”
This is it, this is the end, Leaghan thought. If she knew how to cast any kind of magic, she would have done it then, but she didn’t. Even a shielding would help. But if what she’d been told of Andraal was right, a shielding wouldn’t have mattered.
“If you insist on pursuing magic, I will let you be…on one condition. Send the dragons back beyond the ward. Do what I had done. Stop them, and save the long desert.”
She didn’t have time to answer, Andraal’s form faded into the shadows, as
if he’d been nothing more than a figment of her imagination.
Her heart in her throat, Leaghan sat the flickering lamp on her small desk and pressed her back against the door, worried that Andraal would be back, and he would attack her as he’d done before. She worried more than anything that she wouldn’t live through another attack. She didn’t care about her body, he’d barely wounded her before, but she worried that the magic of his attacks would have more damage on her mind. Was it in his power to wipe the magic from her very body? Would he call it forward to consume her as it nearly did in High Haven before she found Wylan and Josef?
The thought of the wild magic taking over her body was more than she could bear. She had to keep learning more about magic. She had to learn to control the wild magic. The wardings on her mind were tenuous, Andraal had proven that before. If she didn’t learn more about magic—if she gave up on her studies—she would struggle with the wild magics all her life, and for an elf, that was a long time.
She shook her head. She had a choice. He’d given her a way that she could study magic and remain alive.
Get rid of the dragons. That wasn’t such a bad idea. Despite having a clutch of good dragons helping protect the city, dragons had given the long desert nothing but trouble, and that was putting it lightly. Even most of the good dragons, if not all, wasn’t helping Darubai out of the goodness of their heart. They were doing it because the dragon tamer, Kira, was forcing them to.
She turned her attention to the journal on her desk. What she wouldn’t give for a few minutes to read through the journal and see exactly what he’d done to get rid of the dragons, but she didn’t have a few minutes. She still hadn’t studied the rune for the light spell, and she had to make sure she had all the components for the ritual. She’d checked several times before retiring to her room, and Leaghan was certain she had everything she needed, but she wanted to double check.
Still, she had to learn to write the rune perfectly, or there could be repercussions. Marcone hadn’t gone into the consequences, but she’d read before that a spell that had been done wrong could have a number of outcomes. Mostly, the spell wouldn’t work, but there were several other issues that could arise from the components burning up, to the destruction of the caster. There had been rare cases that a wizard had cast a spell wrong, and it destroyed an entire city block. She doubted that would happen with a simple light spell, but she also didn’t want to fail on her first attempt.
Leaghan tried to imagine the worst thing she could from a light spell blowing up. She imagined a towering beacon of light radiating from the dank Wizard’s Keep. A white glow infusing every part of Darubai like a welcoming pinion for the dragons to attack. If there’s anything left.
She doubted that would happen. The rune was simple, but it had to be written precise. Anything that looked like a smudge in the book could very well be a part of the rune…or it could be a smudge because the book was so old. More than that, the rune had to be scribed in one motion.
Marcone said she’d know when she’d written the rune correctly, but also hadn’t elaborated on that either. She thought someone so versed in magic would give a bit more detail. It’s not like she had a teacher looking over her shoulder to keep her hand steady, tell her what she was doing wrong, or help affirm that she’d done it correctly if she failed to read the signal right.
She tried to push the thought of Andraal and his ultimatum from her mind. It was unlikely that he expected a fledgling wizard to drive back the dragons right away anyway. She hadn’t even cast her first spell.
Still the thought intruded on her that Andraal had done some terrible things, the most terrible being the destruction of all the wizards who’d lived at the same time he had. Now that he was an arch-mage, who knew what he could do? She had the faint, sickening thought that the only arch-mages she’d heard of so far were both evil. Leaghan wondered if that was a requisite for being an arch-mage.
Again, she drove the thoughts from her mind and focused at the task at hand. She’d scribed the illumination rune wrong three times already. The first one had left a small, smoldering gash in the parchment. The other two just sat there, as if taunting her that she’d never learn how to do this.
Several hours later, the rune she scribed—which she’d promised, failure or not, was her last—began to glow the moment she’d closed the last loop.
Leaghan sat back in her chair, a smile spread over her dainty face. How could she quit now? She replicated the rune several more times. The first three attempts did nothing, and she started to grow frustrated when she found her error on the first upward arch. Correcting her mistake, Leaghan wrote the rune ten more times, and each of those ten runes glowed a small, plaintive white light.
Marcella’s breath gurgled in her chest, her eyes the white glaze of cataracts. She pointed down to the three ringed circle that sat to the back of the laboratory, close to where Leaghan had found the door to Andraal’s private library. The door stood open to her back, and Leaghan had the tickling feeling of eyes creeping up her spine to have the dark maw of the personal library behind her. She tried to ignore the doorway, and focus on the ritual at hand.
“This first circle,” Marcone said, pointing to the outer circle of—what he called—planetary figures. “This one protects you against attacks from beyond the grave.” He pointed to the second, one he said was made-up of mathematical formulae. “This one protects you against physical attacks.” Finally, he pointed to the last ring, the inner circle. She recognized the flowing script as magical language. “This one protects you against magic attack. Tonight, I want you to study this circle until you know it by heart. Tomorrow we are making your robes, and this circle will be inscribed on the hems of your sleeves, neck, and feet.”
“That seems like a lot of work,” Leaghan remarked, remembering how hard it was for her to learn the illumination rune.
“That’s why most robes don’t protect fully against all attacks. As you get better at magic, you can make more robes, and your proficiency with each will increase. It’s likely your first robe will only protect against basic attacks.”
“What about the non-basic attacks?” she wondered.
Marcone shrugged. “The wards will keep out some of the magic attack. If it were inscribed perfectly, it would block all attacks. Inscribed poorly, it will minimize attack. The worse the translation, the less it will protect.”
“Then I should make it perfect.”
Marcone laughed, a wheezing, phlegmy sound. “You would be the only wizard in history to ever have inscribed it right. Not even Andraal made a perfect robe.”
At the mention of the arch-mage, Leaghan’s eyes flickered to the doorway to his library and the thought of his appearance last night came to her mind. She wanted to discuss it with Marcone, but there wasn’t any time. Soldiers were moving into the keep today, and Marcella would tire before the ritual for her staff was done.
“Just study it, and do your best tomorrow.”
“So I will need more components for tomorrow?” Leaghan asked.
“Yes, but we will go over those after your staff. Now, into the circle.” Marcone clapped his hands together, and Leaghan stepped into the circles, carrying her staff and her bag of components with her.
When she stepped over the first circle, she felt a wall of cold slither across her body, as if she’d stepped through a freezing fog. She shivered, and looked around her. It seemed to her eyes that the runes were wavering on the ground. When she stepped to the next circle, she felt a dense compression upon her skin, as if the very air was pressing in on her. The last circle cause a shiver to slip over her mind. Her head spun, and she barely caught her footing as she stepped into the clear floor in the center of the circles—an island of stone amidst the magic. Leaghan turned to look behind her. There, in the air, wavered ghostly blue runes, as if they’d floated off the floor to hover in the air around her.
“Good,” Marcone said. “The rest is up to you. I will give you instructions, but you mu
st remember them, because there will be no talking while you work. All of your focus must be on the staff and what you’re doing.”
Leaghan nodded.
He ran through the list of instructions for her, and though it didn’t seem complicated, Leaghan worried that she might get the execution wrong. What would happen if she slipped while carving the rune in the top of the staff?
“Don’t worry about that,” he told her when she voiced her fears. “The more you worry about it, the less prepared you will feel, and the more room for errors. Clear your mind and concentrate on what I told you.”
And so she cleared her mind. As she did so, Leaghan took the items she’d need out of the bag, one at a time. She’d researched the use of blood in rituals, and found it wasn’t necessary to use her own. She decided, instead, to use a bit of the dragon’s blood that Drex had given her before. She set the bottle on the floor at her knee, and sat cross-legged in the center of the circle.
As if by some other hand, Leaghan remembered the exact curve of the rune. The knife sliced through the white wood of her staff with precise strokes. The natural twists and curves of the top of the staff framed the rune, as if cradling it there, where it belonged. Her hand cut upwards, and then looped around. As she carved, the rune began to shimmer. She tried not to let the shimmer distract her, but she felt a swell of pride, and a giddy sense that she was doing well. No matter what she’d thought before, that she was going to be a terrible wizard, or that Marcone had been wrong and she wasn’t the first real wizard in ages, fled from her mind. She finished the rune with a flourish, and it flared to life—a soft illumination that bathed her face in light for a brief moment, and then faded.
Marcone said it would do that. The rune gave the spell life, but the other components would allow that life to flourish when she called upon it. She sat down the knife and the staff, and unstopped the bottle of blood. She dipped the white quill into the dragon’s blood, making sure the end was nice and full before she sat it to the rune. She followed the exact pattern she’d done before, her hand tracing out the rune as if she hadn’t already carved it in the wood. No matter if the rune was already engraved, Marcone had stressed how important it was for her to follow the same path, the same mind frame when tracing it in blood.
Dragon Forged: Chronicles of Dragon Aerie Young Adult Fantasy Fiction (Plague Born Book 3) Page 11