Jason smiled. “I’m not so sure that is my choice to make.”
“You’re saying that you don’t speak for the dragon.”
“I don’t.”
David headed over to the blue dragon, resting his hand on his side. “Thank you for summoning me.”
“I don’t know that it did anything.”
“If it disabused you of the notion the Dragon Souls were responsible for this, it has accomplished something. It would have accomplished something valuable, as well.”
“You could work with us,” Jason said.
He believed that David would be useful in their understanding of the dragons. The others from Dragon Haven might dislike him allowing it, but Jason had to believe having him be a part of their studies, and trying to work with him in order to better understand the dragons, would be far more valuable than having him remain in Lorach.
“I’m afraid you don’t understand,” David said.
“What don’t I understand? You’re an Auran. I know that every time you’ve been given the opportunity to harm the dragons, you have chosen something else. You even spoke the words of the flame, preventing you from doing anything to harm us.” Jason turned and faced him. “That tells me that you want to help us.”
“It’s not a matter of what I want to do. It’s a matter of what I am duty-bound to do. You can’t understand what it means for an Auran to have a commitment. I’ve made a pact with my people, and it requires I serve. It requires I return to Lorach, that I do everything in my power to offer them the help my powers and my strength will allow.”
“Even if that means working with the people of Dragon Haven?”
“The people of Dragon Haven have attacked my people over the years. They have led the rebellion.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“They’ve attacked the dragons. They have attempted to free them. They’ve attempted to take our—”
“The dragons are no one’s possession.”
David smiled at him. “See? This is where we begin to differ. Where we don’t differ is that I recognize a sense of duty within you as well. You feel as if you must take a certain path, much like I feel as if I need to take a certain path. It drives us both. I understand that about you, Jason. I respect that about you. Much like I would ask you to respect my needs, as well.”
“I wish we could find a way to work together. I wish the people of Lorach would understand the people of Dragon Haven only want to live in a world where the dragons are free.”
“And I wish the people of Dragon Haven would understand the threat of the dragons is real. What you know of the dragons, your experience with them, is unique. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It’s just different than what I know of the dragons.”
David reached for the blue dragon and climbed up on his back, situating himself there for a long moment and looking around the clearing.
“The misfits, as you call them, are really quite remarkable.”
“I am going to do whatever I can to protect them.”
David smiled at him. “As you should. You might be the only one able to do so.”
“Why?”
“I’m not the only one in Lorach to know of the dragons. I’ve done my best to try to protect them, but Therin had others he worked with, followers, and…” David looked as if he wanted to say something more, but he squeezed his eyes shut, a pained expression coming across his face. “Be prepared to protect your dragons.”
“They aren’t my dragons.”
“If they aren’t your dragons, then they will become someone else’s dragons. Protect them.”
As David tapped on the blue dragon’s side, Jason watched, waiting for a moment, and let out a heavy breath. “We could work together,” he suggested again.
“We could. Perhaps one day things will change.” He glanced up, frowning again, before turning back to Jason. “I will look into what Therin did with the dragon eggs. If I come up with anything, I’ll send word to you. At least, my dragon will send word to you. I do want to understand these dragons. I do not want to harm them. I hope you understand that.”
Jason nodded. “I understand.”
David looked as if he wanted to say something more, but he instead shook his head. There was a pained expression on his face. As far as Jason could tell, David was keeping something from him, though likely because he had no choice.
He was an Auran. He was a Dragon Soul. He was from Lorach.
All of those were reasons to keep secrets from Jason.
David smiled at him a moment, and with that, they launched into the air.
Jason stood in the clearing again, lingering there for a moment, waiting.
There was no movement around him. The iron dragon had curled up around one of the trees and was breathing softly. He slumbered.
Jason focused on the image of the jungle dragon, determined to see whether or not he could craft an illusion that would re-create the dragon. As he attempted to do so, he found that he didn’t have the necessary strength. It was almost as if in attempting to create the jungle dragon, it dissolved. Its form faded.
Maybe there would be something more he could do, but he wasn’t going to be able to do it without help. He was going to need the assistance of the forest dragon.
Besides, it was time he returned to the forest dragon anyway. It was time for him to gain an understanding of illusions, if only so that he could better craft his own.
Jason took a deep breath as he looked around, focusing on the jungle.
He thought about what David had told him. The dragons took on aspects of where their egg had been. He knew that. He had seen that with the forest dragon and the ice dragon, along with the iron dragon. Therin had been looking beyond Lorach, as if to find something he’d lost. It was why he knew there had to be other hatch mates.
After attempting to create an illusion again, he headed over to the iron dragon, touching his side softly. The dragon stirred.
“It’s time for us to go into the forest,” Jason said.
With a rumble, the iron dragon got up, lowered his head, and Jason climbed on.
As they took off, heading toward the forest—and the forest dragon—he looked down at the clearing. He stared at it as it grew ever more distant, and wished that he would’ve had an opportunity to know the jungle dragon.
He wished the other dragons wouldn’t attack. He wished for a great many things. The only way he could ensure the dragons’ safety would be by finding the other hatch mates. And, he realized, it might involve dealing definitively with Lorach—and their dragons.
Even if it meant going up against David.
4
The trees in the forest were incredibly dense, blocking out Jason’s view of the sunlight overhead. He had been sitting in the forest, staring straight ahead, for the better part of an hour, searching for signs of the forest dragon. He knew she was there, but he couldn’t find her.
Would she have known what had happened in the jungle? His connection to her wasn’t as strong as it was to the other dragons, and he didn’t know if she could share in what he detected the way they could.
Though he couldn’t yet detect her, the power he could sense was significant, mostly coming off the distant iron and ice dragons. The quiet of the forest gave him a chance to reflect and focus, thinking about the misfits.
They needed him. He felt certain of that.
At the same time, he needed them too.
He focused on what he could make out of the forest dragon. When he’d started to perceive her, he’d used the sense of the breeze blowing through the trees, the way it had shimmered through her scales, changing his view of her. Even now, he thought that he could pick up on a hint of that, but it was not as easy as it could be. He was connected to her, and the glowing green along the surface of his hand, the veins deep beneath, gave proof to that, and yet he wasn’t able to locate any sense of her when she wanted to truly hide from him.
That was the challenge. All of this w
as for him to better understand how to form an illusion, and be better prepared for the possibility he would have to create one. That was her gift to him, the connection they shared. The more he used it, the easier it was to spot illusions all around him.
So far, nothing she showed him was an illusion.
It was possible she could have placed him inside an illusion. The more he worked with that, the harder it was to determine what was real and what was not, but knowing how she was able to function, the way that she was able to use power, he thought he could detect the layers of power around him. And as much as he wanted to master it, he was still a novice compared to her.
He focused on the sense of her. He honed in on the power all around him, the energy he knew was there. And as he focused on it, he continued to feel for the telltale triggers of an illusion, borrowing power from her—and also from the iron dragon nearby.
With the forest dragon, there were no triggers. As much as he looked, he couldn’t find any sign of shimmering, not the way he had when someone else was holding an illusion. Others weren’t nearly as skilled as the forest dragon, and when they attempted to hold on to one, they weren’t able to do so with any real power.
Jason focused on it, trying to use that power, trying to draw through it, wanting nothing more than to know the energy of her illusion.
She was here, and he could feel her somewhere.
He had another advantage, and it was one that he tried not to use when he was peering through the illusion. With his connection to the iron dragon, and to the ice dragon, he was better able to detect other things.
He combined the power of the ice dragon with what he used of the iron dragon, bringing them together into a faint fog. As he did, it rolled out to the forest, creating a dense moisture that radiated away from him. Jason had started to attempt to learn how to control that fog.
Jason directed that foggy moisture all around him. The fog provided answers which he would be able to uncover, and he thought he could feel them around him.
Somehow, he would find the forest dragon.
He pushed on fog, bringing together the ice and iron dragons. He sensed amusement from the ice dragon. It was unusual for the ice dragon to show any sense of emotion like this, but he enjoyed this challenge in particular. It helped him understand the nature of the hatch mates, as he called them, and in doing so, he was able to master the way she held on to the illusion.
From what Jason could tell, the ice dragon wanted to better understand whether or not she could confound him. The ice dragon needed to find a way to see beyond her own illusion.
For all the effort that he put into it, he still didn’t detect any illusion around him.
That meant either there wasn’t an illusion, or her control over it was even more skilled than he’d known before.
As his ability over the illusions grew, so did hers. The forest dragon had grown in skill, her technique evolving over time. And she had been powerful from the beginning. Now she was exquisitely skilled, more so than even he had experienced before.
The fog continue to waft away from him, rolling outward, and Jason held on to it, straining with it, trying to detect whether there was anything within it that he could use. As he pushed, he didn’t feel anything that would be helpful.
Strange. The more he worked at it, the more certain he was there was something here. It was a hint, nothing more than that, and as he pushed against it, he could feel that hint shifting.
And he smiled to himself.
It was subtle.
“Clever,” he whispered.
Jason continued to let that fog roll away from him. He pushed it against the ground, and against the sky, and he stretched it all around him.
When he did so, the trees around him started to shimmer. It did so slowly, gradually fading into a different shape. When it lifted, he was back out in the sunlight.
Everything had been an illusion. The challenge was that it had been so subtle, he hadn’t even realized it. She had shifted it around him so carefully that when he’d walked, he’d believed he was walking into the forest when in reality he had been walking into the illusion all along.
“I would’ve expected you to detect that by now,” he said to the ice dragon.
The ice dragon was there, flying overhead, swirling in the clouds, maintaining a connection to the cold. He detected faint amusement, less than he would have were it not for the lost jungle dragon.
“You can come out now,” he said to the forest dragon.
In the distance, the forest began to grow in front of him. He suspected that was real, but with her illusion skills, it was possible that she had fortified even that, making it so he couldn’t tell what was real and what was not. He drew a hint of heat and cold, pushing it together and sending it away from him in a dense fog that rolled across the ground. When it struck the forest, it rolled through, no resistance.
Then again, when he had attempted it before, there had been no resistance he detected, even though he knew that there was some. He watched, waiting for any sign of her, but the forest dragon didn’t appear. Jason strode forward, waiting for her, and when she didn’t emerge, he looked around.
Could she have camouflaged herself out here?
She would do something like that. It was her way of trying to test him. Not that he was much in the mood for a test, but when it came to her, perhaps his mood didn’t matter.
Jason hesitated, focusing on the sense of the forest dragon. As it usually did, it flowed through him. The sense of it worked its way up his hand, through his arm, and disappeared. That familiar connection and sense of different powers granted to him by all the dragons rolled through him.
He used that connection, and he turned.
She was behind him.
When he saw her, he smiled to himself. She had been there the whole time. The power she was holding on to was impressive, and it shimmered through everything around him. Jason took a step toward the forest dragon, and as he did, everything shimmered again.
“Even this is an illusion?”
She let out a strange roar. It came across as something like a laugh, high-pitched and sharp, and the longer that he had been around her, the easier it was for him to know what she felt when she made sounds like that.
“Unless you are the illusion,” he said.
He reached her, touching her side. She was velvety soft, and there were strange fibers that ran through her, the vines and veins that worked their way through her skin. Every so often, he would notice power coursing through them.
“You did better that time,” he said to her.
She lowered her head, meeting his eyes with her deep green ones. “You did better, too.”
“I didn’t know it was an illusion until just at the end.”
“I have discovered ways of masking it.”
“Will you teach me?”
“When you can learn,” she said.
She made her strange laugh again, and Jason shook his head. As much as he thought he was learning from her, there was still much he couldn’t. Even when he asked, she would tell him he wasn’t prepared for that kind of knowledge. He had to build upon what she was teaching him. Until he mastered certain basic levels, he wouldn’t be able to achieve anything more complicated. She seemed to find that entirely too amusing, and Jason could only shake his head.
It was similar to the way he was learning from the iron dragon. He spent time focusing on the heat he could use, the way he could borrow through the iron glove. As he learned from the dragon, the dragon learned from him, and between the two of them they worked back and forth, honing in on how they could use their power. He was gaining increased skill. The more he worked with the dragon, the easier it was to know just what he could do with its power.
And the ice dragon was the same. He was perhaps the hardest to understand, which was surprising, considering the ice dragon was the first dragon Jason had connected to. With the ice dragon, he had come to know a different sort of power, and a certa
in sort of healing, though it was a unique one.
When he had defeated Therin, he had been repeatedly warned by him how little he knew. Jason might not have the experience to train with the Dragon Souls, and he might not have the same understanding that those within Lorach had, but he could use the dragons as his teachers, and the more that he learned with them, the better he became.
And they had to learn, too.
Much like him, the dragons didn’t fully understand the nature of their abilities, and the longer they worked, the easier it was for them to master what they could do.
“You are far too amused by my failings,” Jason said to the forest dragon.
“I don’t find them failings. I find you learning. When I first came into this world, I struggled with using this ability.”
She didn’t talk about it very often, though the ice dragon had. He had lived alone for quite a while before he was ever discovered. It shocked Jason that the ice dragon had been able to hide for as long as he had, but then, he hadn’t been born in the mountains near Jason’s home. He had crawled there, looking for an escape, much like the iron dragon had thought to escape. In the case of the ice dragon, he’d managed to get away, though the iron dragon had been captured and trapped, held captive.
“What was it like in those earliest days?” It was an easier question than mentioning the lost jungle dragon.
“I wandered alone in the forest. I fed. Slept. Enjoyed the warmth of the sun through a break in the trees. I would wake up and do it again.”
“Was it lonely?”
“Was it lonely for you when you were alone?”
Jason smiled at her. He sometimes thought the ice dragon was the only one who understood him, but there were times when the forest dragon seemed to fully understand him in a way he couldn’t quite fathom. He wondered if she were able to read him, to dig into his mind, but he didn’t know if that were possible. Maybe it was only the fact that her power now flowed through him, connecting to him in a way that he didn’t have with the iron dragon. That was more of a superficial connection, although he could use it to see through the iron dragon’s eyes.
Storm Dragon: An Epic Fantasy Adventure (The Dragon Misfits Book 4) Page 4