“There is nothing anyone can do. Once it has her throat in her hands, she is dead,” he boasted, then proudly prattled on about why nothing would work. While the other two were contemplating what could be done, I had a stroke of motivation. The sorcerers had brought out the vase with the lady on it, the vase that Morgana was trapped in, the vase that would entrap my soul instead of killing it. The vase wasn’t too far away—Mordon snapped at the retreating sorcerers and nearly snared one without moving from his place.
“Mordon, get me over there,” I said softly.
Mordon turned to face me, his head alone massive. He shook his head.
“It’s my only chance, trust me!” I hissed, barely making any noise.
“No one has ever returned,” he grumbled, but he picked me up gingerly in his mouth—I think one of his teeth drew blood, but I was too numb to feel any pain.
I had a hard time seeing much of anything now, but as he set me down, the shadow began to take form. I threw all my effort into raising my arm and reaching towards the mouth of the vase. Mordon’s roar jarred my hand, and I saw the wendigo on his back, tearing up scales with bony claws. Barnes scrambled up Mordon’s shoulder, his hands black with magic.
Ignoring the stench of seared rotten meat, I turned back to the vase, looking the painted woman in her blue eyes as my hand shook on its path to her.
A dark, forked tongue wrapped around my arm and pulled it towards the misty mouth of the shadow dragon, his body coiled around mine. He squeezed. I couldn’t breathe. If he didn’t let go of me, I was going to drag hundreds of souls with me down into the vase—including Railey’s. I hesitated, and the dragon gained a few more inches his way.
I stretched out my arm again, my fingers wavering, almost ready to touch the vase when something hit me over the head and my eyelids dropped.
My consciousness faded in and out, but I awoke to the rustle of feathers, the scrape of talons, and an eagle’s white head jutting over me. Propping myself up on my elbows, I snapped at the griffon before me, “What do you want? Where am I?”
“Awaiting your destiny,” Griff said, his talons gleaming as they crossed the dusty floor.
Despite my dizziness and the distant tingling in my arms and legs, I pushed myself to sit upright. “I’m fine with destiny, but I don’t want to wait,” I growled. The shadow was still about my body, but it seemed to have stopped about my shoulders, as though it were sleeping. This had a surreal feeling, as though time had paused for Griff to talk to me. It might have. Griffons had unusual and uncharted powers that they preferred to keep that way. This place he held me in was not a real place, not quite, it was half way between reality and a dream.
He didn’t seem to listen to me, he was enraptured with his own image reflected in the remnants of a shattered mirror as he said, “That drake is dead, and you are destined to be Morgana’s vessel...unless you give me your consent.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You wouldn’t have something to do with my destiny, would you?”
Griff spoke to the mirror, laying his impeccably clean feathers flat as he ignored my words. “I left a small scroll for you in your pocket. Read it and you can join me in the skies. It is what you have always dreamed: To fly free, to soar through the clouds. Read it. Come with me.”
I found the tightly wound scroll no longer than my forefinger. My fingers unfurled the roll, but I didn’t read it.“You said the drake was dead.”
Griff answered with a nod, a sharp jab with harsh eyes, a completely inhuman response.
“Which drake?” I pressed.
The griffon cocked his head in the mirror. “The one that’s been tricking you. He lead you into this. He endangered your life, and I am here to save you.”
Griff had read too many of the old fairy tales. He possibly thought humans easy to manipulate—which they might be, but I wasn’t just human. I was part fey, and feys did not take well to being toyed with.
“Tricking me?” I couldn’t resist wondering what his strategy was to convince me.
“Perhaps himself, too. He doesn’t love you—he might think it, but the only one he will ever love is his dream dragon. Trust me, darling, I know how these drakes work, and I swear to you you will lose him as soon as she sticks her nose into the room.”
I shouldn’t have listened to a word Griff said, but I did. His words stuck a chord, no matter that just an hour or two earlier, Mordon had told me otherwise. But wasn’t that how it was with these things? A man could give all the flowery promises he had breath for, but a woman would not believe him until he proved himself. Lilly might believe in promises, but not I. Not until the value of his word was established.
I knew the value of Griff’s word. My body shook as I got to wobbling feet, to no apparent interest of Griff. Even now he wouldn’t spare me a dart of the eyes. The parchment crumpled in my fist. “You swear Mordon, Drake Lord of Kragdomen, is dead.”
Now the griffon looked up at me, his feathers slicked back on his head, same expression as before. “I do.”
He went back to admiring himself, fluffing up the feathers ringing his neck.
I took one finger and pushed the mirror on its fragile stand, and it fell with a crack of brittle wood, the glass popping out of its place, tinkling on the tile floor in a thousand shattered pieces.
Griff’s feathers raised up his head as he watched the last shard of glass come to rest by his talon I now noticed had deep ridges and cracks in. His eyes, all-black in the shadows, looked into mine.
“Then,” I hissed, “understand my answer.”
And I focused on the paper, remembering the first time I smelled Mordon’s spiced ember circle as I brought him back after the bogart.
A small spark flew from my ring, nothing more than a sheen of light bouncing off the star-streaked sapphire, and that spark touched the tip of the parchment. With a breath of honeysuckle perfume, the paper bolted into flame so completely it left not a cinder, not a whiff of smoke to mark its passage.
Giff stared at that one shard at his talons.
Despite myself, I wondered what had gotten him tangled up in this mess—and then I knew. A resurrection needed a skilled enchanter and scroll maker, and it would not take long for them to realize Griff’s questionable business dealings made him vulnerable to blackmail—particularly when he wasn’t on the best terms with the market judges.
“I won’t let you leave,” Griff said.
“You don’t have a choice,” I said, took a breath, and forced my eyes to come open.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Yells, chants, and crashes rushed back to me as I regained awareness on the floor. Wet earth was beneath my cheek, and a deadly shadow tightened about my neck. Hundreds of souls made this thing real. Hundreds of souls trapped into the slavery of one. I did not know if Griff was a hallucination, a dream, or a magic-induced alternate reality, but right now I did not care.
Gathering up the last of my strength, I yanked my hand free of the shadow and grabbed onto the lip of the vase.
The world went dark; it was past dark, it was like night out in the desert when there were no moon nor stars to shine, no light for hundreds of miles, and out in that dark there was something darker, something that made goosebumps raise on the back of necks and made even the most stout of heart plead for just a sliver of luminescence.
With the soft breaking of clouds, the moon did come out, and the black shape was the haunted house of Ferret Drive, and the something darker was the back of Railey as she dug a hole by the garden gate.
“I’m tellin’ ya, help me or leave!” she said.
I stood just behind her, laboring under fever and cold sweats and muscle aches up and down my body. I hadn’t told Railey then about my new curse—I was afraid it was coming true. And there had been a large part of me that hoped if I told no one and continued on life as normal that the curse would not come true. The aches had grown worse since Railey had tapped on my window and told me her nightly excursion—though she knew better than to tell
me where she was going. I’d told my parents on her before, and she was determined to fulfill tonight’s quest.
But she had been depending on me to guard her.
And what good was a guard with no magic? I decide to try to change the past.
“Railey, I have something to say.”
“Quit the yammerin’ and git diggin’!”
I stared at her back. Were we so short then? So little? Just children, really, children with big goals and bigger dreams for what we were going to do when we were big. It seemed that as we grew bigger, our goals grew smaller, and our dreams grew tiny.
I find myself digging, wondering if I could remember where the attack came from. It was a jumble, a blur, shattered into a thousand forgotten nightmares until all that was left was a shadow. This was no shadow, no dream. This was happening again.
This was purgatory.
The shadow dragon woke from beneath the dead bushes and he struck Railey, his teeth sinking into her chest. She screamed. I froze in place, my eyes scrunched shut just as they had been before. Before I ran. I had returned, of course, but much too late. Much too late.
Was I doomed to repeat this forever and ever? Was this as unchangeable as the past? Was this some demented movie I played in to amuse the Lady of the Vase? Or was it to teach me a lesson?
I had learned my lesson the first time this happened, and I would not bear to see it repeated. Magic-less, past the point of exhaustion, my weak muscles cramping at every twitch, I faced down the shadow dragon with Railey’s shovel in hand. The wood and metal passed harmlessly through it, but I couldn’t stop. I screamed at it to leave and let Railey go. It had no effect, but I refused to back down. Gripping Railey by the waist, I pulled her. She screamed in pain as the shadow dragon’s teeth cut skin.
Nothing was working! Nothing I could do would save Railey, nothing could change the past, just the same way that nothing I could do would change the future. I was being drawn into the dragon, being taken into it with every scratch he made. There was nothing I could do.
...but if there was nothing I could do, why was I so worried? Faith is what I needed now. Faith in something—or someone—bigger than me and bigger than my petty problems. I needed to let go and have faith.
I let go of my friend, and for an instant, both she and the dragon stared at me. I took the shovel in both hands and drove it deep into the hole at my feet.
The dragon released Railey. She fell to a heap on the grass. I struck the earth again and again. Claws tore at my back, at first shadow claws, then real claws, slicing my back to slivers. And a beak pecking at me. I smacked the griffon with the handle and feathers fluttered down to my feet.
There was the femur in the hole.
“Stop! Stop! It’s black magic!” Griff’s voice hissed in my ear. “I’ll give it back if you stop now!”
Would he have come out if this was how I had done this scene ten years ago? Would he have revoked his jealous curse?
I did not care.
“Get out of my life!” I cried, knocking him aside.
When he hit the ground, he was no longer a griffon, but instead became a woman. A tall, slender woman with coal curls luxuriating down her back, ruby red lips on her pale face, and eyes dead and dull and sunken. She wore a noble woman’s dress, burgundy and sable, velvet and silk, with fine embroidery decorating the hem and bodice, tiny pearls sewn in.
“Morgana.”
The woman stood, and the dragon curled his head beneath her jeweled hand. “We should not fight. Not mother and daughter.”
It did stay my hand; if she was trying to arouse my curiousity, it was working all too well. “You are not my mother.”
“Not directly, but you are a descendant of the feys? And am I not Morgana Le Fey, mother to all feys who swore to protect and guard their sacred mother.”
It was a phrase I had heard my mother use, but it was widely accepted that the sacred mother meant mother earth, and tending to her with farming and gardening—not worshiping the world’s most wicked witch.
“I do not know you, nor do I want to,” I said, hefting up the shovel again.
“Side with me, and I will restore your lover to full health. What is more, your friends will survive and accompany you. Be my willing host, and I will find a new one swiftly, and I will pass from you without harm. While you are here, my pet will guard and protect you against the darkness in your soul.”
For a heartbeat, I considered it. I was not so sure that my shivering hands could deliver even one more blow. The ache in my legs made me want to curl into a tight ball and roll into a hot spring. The fever overrode my sensibilities, and I wished only for rest and wellness. Though my friends may survive, Morgana made no promises they would not be slaves.
I placed the shovel tip over the femur and I jumped on the shovel head. Once, twice. I used the blade like an ax and I chopped it, striking the bone over and over, becoming coated in sticky sweat and bitter blood, ignoring the cold teeth that sunk into my shoulder, until finally the bone split in two with a brilliant flash.
Falling hard onto my tailbone, I heard Morgana cry in anger. The shadow dragon had dissipated, collapsing into hundreds of pinpricks of light. Souls, I knew, though I didn’t know how.
Morgana’s hands were about my throat and they were squeezing, lifting me up off the ground and high into the air. Over the porch, past the roof line, over the trees and into the clouds she took me.
“You will pay for your betrayal.”
There was no more air. I was a tiny sorceress by comparison, a weakling with feral magic. I had no hope of defeating her, not by a contest of brute strength. Even my cleverness was failing me, for she was the founder of it all.
I couldn’t give up.
Her words came back to me. Darkness in your soul. Only Morgana could defeat Morgana, and that was exactly what was going to happen.
I focused on my slim illusion magic and made several illusions of myself from across time in my life when I had been facing challenges. Morgana giggled, a shrill noise that sounded as though it should have come from me, and she flicked them with her finger, shattering them into a thousand tiny shards.
“Is that all you can do? I’m ashamed to call you kin.”
“Look again,” I said.
No sooner had she turned her eyes to the broken mirrors about her then she started to scream. Reflected in each piece was a dark memory. And each time she broke a shard, more dark memories took its place. I could not see it; it was for her eyes, and if I were to look, I would be caught in the same trap that she was.
“No! No! Not this again! Merlin, how I wish you would have seen it my way!”
I hit her forearms and fell free. I was falling down through an endless sea of clouds, staring upwards, knowing that at some time, my back was going to hit the ground and I was going to die. Or was I dead already? Could I die again, and be truly dead this time?
A claw caught me, a frosty claw that gave too much before the second claw stopped my descent. I was lowered to the ground, staring up at a silvery dragon.
“Thank you,” whispered Railey.
“I wish we weren’t all going to be stuck here in dreamland,” I whispered back.
“That could be arranged,” said a woman.
I found her walking down the porch steps, a smile on her face.
“I am the Lady of the Vase, and I thank you for containing my most famous prisoner.”
I did not ask why she hadn’t done it. There was something to this dream world that made sense, and right now it made sense that with hundreds of souls contributing to a massive dragon, she would loose track of one person.
“You will let us go?” I said, though I knew the answer.
“I will let one of you go.”
I was tempted to step forth myself, but I knew I could not stand to live with having abandoned Railey. I could send Railey, but then that didn’t do much goof for the other souls. “I want to send the dragon back. He came here as one, didn’t he?”
The woman paused, considering my request. It was a borderline request that almost went against the rules I somehow knew existed, but she nodded. “Very well. And you shall remain.”
“Can I strike a bargain with you for the release of my soul?”
“I do such bargains frequently. You may leave after three hundred years.”
“That was not what I had in mind—I mean, I have something you want.”
Her cool eyes studied me skeptically, as though wondering what I could have that she did not. Certainly not food or material items or information. “Oh?”
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