“I can deflect that beam, or I can shield you. I can’t do both. I don’t have the energy or the control necessary for that,” Papa snapped. It was the most he’d said at one time in a while. For him, that was practically a speech.
I tapped the arm he’d slung around me. “We can practice anytime you want. I like playing with magic.”
Papa gave me a sour look, but I ignored it. He was just tired and running out of patience, but not for me, never for me. He had all the patience in the world for me because I was his son, and he loved me very much.
The star formed by those three beams shot upward, taking those death rays with them, and smashed through the ceiling as a wave of debris struck the shield. Papa did what he does best, and he deflected that debris away from us. It took both hands though, so I hugged his waist until he rose. Then I had to transfer my grip to his leg. That was one of the perks of having a magical Papa. Nothing could harm me if I stayed inside his sparkly green shield.
Even Melinda finally joined us. “What is that?” She pointed at a boxy shape in the dust cloud rushing toward us.
Melinda stood a few feet behind me and unsuccessfully tried to keep the few gawkers from creeping down the damaged staircase in the foyer. But they didn’t want to miss a thing either, so those lookie-loos kept pushing forward, causing our petite Scribe to cede ground.
But I couldn’t worry about a bunch of people with more curiosity than sense right now. Melinda had sounded rather faint, which was worrisome. She’s usually cool-headed in a crisis, but this damage looked expensive, and we were her characters. So, the management association might just hand her a bill unless Papa could fix this.
I’d ask him later when he wasn’t holding back an avalanche of cement chunks, bricks, glass shards, and several prickly green plants rushing toward us. All that debris was trying to bury us alive as a giant book pushed deeper into the laundry room through the hole in its rear wall, sending a wave of debris cascading over the groggy dragon.
She was just starting to come around. The dragon must have been temporarily knocked out by her crash-landing. Only a thin sphere of luminous green kept that same debris from falling on us. Good thing shields were Papa’s specialty. With the orbs gone, he could work magic again.
When the dust settled, the spine of a giant book protruded from the rubble. I patted my uncle’s leg since he was literate and no one else present was except my Scribe, but she was busy writing again. “What do the letters on the spine say?”
“Dragon Spells,” Uncle Miren replied instantly.
“Hmmm, good title. I’ll make a note of that.” Melinda typed on her phone some more.
I looked for her, but my eyes slipped away from my Scribe every time I tried to look directly at her. Melinda was using her scribal powers again. They must have been restored too. What else could she do? I’d have to find out someday, just not today.
“What’s that book about?” I asked even though I already had an inkling about its contents.
“This.” Auntie Sovvan gestured with her free hand then helped my uncle to rise.
“We’re in a story right now?” I guessed that made sense since Melinda had been recording events as this very strange adventure had unfolded.
That giant book suddenly flipped open and took out part of another wall in the process, further destabilizing the building. Uh-oh. That was more damage we’d have to fix later.
Papa’s shield flared as more debris pushed against it, and it shoved the cement chunks, shattered tiles, and even a wooden door or two back to create a clear space in front of us. I looked for signs of strain but didn’t find any. Papa’s magic liked to shield people. The only time I’d seen him struggle to hold a shield was back in Curse Breaker: Faceted when we faced that many-armed monster.
At the time, Bear had done something to Papa’s magic, so he could render us all incorporeal. But Bear wasn’t here to do that this time. I wondered where he was now, and what he was doing. I couldn’t find out until the portal reappeared in Melinda’s apartment.
Had it also returned now that there was magic in this corner of our Scribe’s world again? I stared at the door to her apartment. It was only about ten feet away. Melinda had closed it at some point, but had she locked it? I couldn’t remember if she had.
Before I could ask Papa if I could go check for the portal, pages flipped of their own accord as an invisible hand thumbed through the giant book to page 49. I craned my neck to see what was so special about that particular page. But nothing stood out from my limited vantage, so I elbowed my uncle. He’d moved closer to us to reduce the area Papa had to shield, but that wasn’t necessary.
In Curse Breaker: Faceted, Papa had shielded a tiny island and many more people than he was shielding now. And, there were no magic-draining orbs here anymore, so I knew he could hold that shield for as long as we needed it. There were also plenty of rocks exposed by that beam, and Papa could draw on their strength too.
“What’s it say?” I tapped Uncle Miren’s thigh to get his attention, but he just shook his head. Either he couldn’t read it, or he was being evasive to annoy me. Either was possible.
The book shuddered as the dragon crawled out from under it. Most of her metal armor was gone, and she looked dazed and defeated. “I just wanted some page time, not to destroy this place. How did it come to this?” She opened and closed her claws as she stared blindly at them.
“Well, there are easier ways of getting the page time you so desire.” Auntie Sovvan climbed onto the mountain of debris, and Papa let her. He didn’t use his shield to push her back to his side. No fair.
“I see that now.” The dragon hung her head, and more of her armor fell off, revealing the underlying code of our Newsletter-Dragon. She was reverting to her true form and perhaps, her true self.
“Let this be a lesson to you. You can’t control the narrative because you can’t control people. We’re unpredictable like that.” Auntie Sovvan frowned down at Melinda. “Are you putting words in my mouth?”
“Maybe. It’s a good lesson.” Melinda tapped something into the phone in her hands.
“Wait. Why don’t I get the last word? She’s my nemesis, and she chased me all over Mount Eredren, not them.” I folded my arms over my chest and tried not to pout. But I was feeling a little put out that Melinda had given my aunt that line. It was a good one too.
“Who says you won’t?” Melinda grinned at what she was writing.
“Oh no, not again,” my aunt muttered as she backed away from the giant book and the inky lines sketching a picture of a woman who looked just like our Scribe.
“Um, Melinda, do you have a sister?” I tugged on her pants. They were almost dry now.
“Yes, a younger one. Her name is Carolyn, but she died years ago. I have a brother too. He’s also younger than me but not by as much. Why do you ask?” Of course, Melinda didn’t look up from her phone. How she saw any of the things she chronicled was a mystery.
“Did your sister look like you?” I pointed at the sketch, which looked exactly like our Scribe, but Melinda still didn’t look up.
Melinda shook her head. “No, we looked nothing alike. She took after our dad, and I look just like our mother. Why?” Melinda still only had eyes for the phone in her hand.
“Just let her write,” the drawing of our Scribe said.
“Okay.” I shrugged. Maybe the sketch knew what was best. After all, she was a representation of our Scribe, right? This was all very confusing.
The drawing of our Scribe peeled itself off the page and extended a hand to the dragon. “You wanted page time, right. Well, here’s your chance.”
“Who are you?” the dragon stared at the drawing.
“I’m the piece of her she put in this story.” The drawing pointed to my slack-jawed Scribe. Melinda had finally looked up from the phone in her suddenly nerveless hands.
I bumped my shoulder into her hip. “You might want to write that down. It’s good material. It tugs at the heartstrings.
” I hid a grin as I repeated her own words from earlier back to her.
“Oh really?” Melinda gave me a skeptical glance, mirroring mine from before.
“Really.” I nodded and tried hard to keep a straight face. After all, turnabout was fair play.
A soft purple light suffused the book. “Come into the story. There’s something you can do to make amends if that’s truly what you want.” The drawing of our Scribe beckoned to the dragon, and she rose onto her hind legs, facing us.
“I never meant to hurt you, not even at the outset, but I got caught up in all that power, and I’m sorry for my part in this. But if there’s something I can do to fix it, then I’ll do it.” The dragon stood tall, and the rest of her armor fell away revealing our blue-glowing, code-based Newsletter-Dragon in all her splendor. She stepped onto the book and accepted the drawing’s hand.
“Wait!” Uncle Miren stepped forward, and again, Papa let him. His magic didn’t push my uncle back. That was seriously not fair, and it gave him an advantage over me. “Before you go, tell us one thing.”
Our Newsletter-Dragon turned her head to regard us. “What do you want to know?”
“How did you keep the black orb from draining you?”
“With this.” The Newsletter-Dragon reached into her blue-glowing belly and removed something.
“What is that?” I padded forward to get a better look and crashed into Papa’s shield again. It pushed me back to his side. So not fair. The dragon wasn’t trying to hurt us anymore. But we weren’t friends either.
The dragon shrugged. “I don’t know. It came with the orb. I guess I don’t need it anymore since the orb’s gone.” She dropped the coin-sized silver disc onto the rubble piled up in front of the book.
“It’s time to go,” the drawing of our Scribe said. She was glowing a fierce purple.
The Newsletter-Dragon nodded, and a purple light consumed them. When it faded, the book flipped closed and reversed through the laundry/boiler room through the hole in the back wall.
“I didn’t know books ate dragons,” I said because someone had to. I shuddered at the thought because I was snack-sized and a sweet child according to the people who knew me. Thankfully, the giant book was gone, so I didn’t have to worry about it eating me next.
Papa shook his head. He had no words for this. No one else did either, not even the gawkers. They were as wide-eyed as the rest of us. Even Uncle Miren was too shocked to speak, and he always had something to say.
I waited for a scream or a snarky rejoinder, but none came. Maybe the dragon was gone. The Newsletter-Dragon had caused a lot of problems, and I was glad something had caged her because she needed a time-out. But it had taken a lot of destruction to put her there.
Papa rested his hand on top of my head, and his touch comforted me. Since the book was gone, it couldn’t eat anyone else. “Where’s that book going?”
“To the great bookstore in the sky? But that’s just a guess.” Melinda shrugged.
The green-glowing shield around us flickered, and a wall of debris as tall as me pressed in on us. “Why’d it flicker? Look, it did it again. Why’s that happening?” I squeezed Papa’s leg. Now, would be a really bad time for his magic to cut out again. “Papa? What’s wrong?”
Papa sank to one knee and rubbed his forehead as the shield guttered. “Something’s interfering with my magic again.”
“How can that be? The bad orb is gone.” I crowded in close to his chest for reassurance, and he hugged me, as a laugh rang out, startling us both.
“You fools, you utter fools, don’t you know what that dragon left behind?” Metalara asked as something moved in the rubble.
Very Mysterious
[Earlier Under Mount Eredren, Shayari]
How did you get under Mount Eredren, my digital nemesis? Bear walked through a wall and thought nothing of it. He was a ghost after all.
Only his physical focus, a stuffed bear Ran owned, was corporeal, which was why he was carrying it around. Bear never knew when he might need to use its body for something. Since he was pure spirit, Bear couldn’t move anything that had matter without a physical body. Hopefully, Ran wasn’t missing his stuffed toy right now.
Bear bent and examined the ground. This symbol pointed in the opposite direction from the previous one. Interesting, but not conclusive. Bear scratched his head and stared off into the shadows. He still hadn’t deduced the pattern they made. If they made one at all.
True randomness was difficult to achieve. Even the Agents of Chaos themselves weren’t perfectly chaotic. There was some order to them, more than their opponents wanted to admit, and the reverse was true as well. The so-called Agents of Order had had their fair share of chaos in the ranks. They’d just pretended it wasn’t there, and that willful ignorance had led to their downfall long ago.
If only I knew what I was looking for. Bear shook his head and regarded those triangular marks again. They must hold the answer to the riddle of how that dragon had gotten here. How did she do it?
Bear walked through a wall. What was causing that energy spike in the next tunnel? It wasn’t Sarn because he’d disappeared through that portal earlier and hadn’t returned. So who or what had arrived?
Bear stepped into another tunnel and didn’t see anything to explain that energy he sensed. But he hadn’t examined the marks of change here yet, so he moved from one glowing triangular mark on the stone ground to another. But they weren’t any more informative than the last dozen he’d looked at. Or maybe they were.
Bear watched as the marks rotated, so they all pointed in the same direction now. They also resized and shifted to a more orderly arrangement than the haphazard way they’d been left. How odd that marks created by harbingers of chaos should suddenly be so uniform. Why did all the marks now point in the same direction? What had changed down here?
Bear floated into an intersection, following those marks until he heard the clanking of metal on the stone stairs. He walked through the walls between him and that sound into a tunnel with more marks all pointing the same way.
A clockwork woman stood there, staring at the marks of change. Her skin was rose gold metal, and her folded wings glowed a soft orangey-pink where they were folded on her back, but they were bright enough to light her way despite that. Her rose crystal eyes also glowed, so they must be lumir crystals. There were probably several lumir crystals powering her.
“You see it too.” Bear glanced at the marks here. There were more than in the previous tunnels. Very interesting. “If you were wondering, the trail goes that way.” He pointed a transparent paw toward an intersection. “But one of them stood right here.” Bear stamped his foot. “That’s my guess, and you must be hunting it.”
‘The Agents of Order’ was a dumb name for a group of fanatics dedicated to stamping out chaos, but whatever, no one had asked his opinion, and Bear wasn’t going to give it now when he was faced with one. He’d thought their order was extinct, but apparently, there was one still knocking around the universe.
She cocked her head to one side and studied him briefly. But he wasn’t her prey, and she only had eyes for her mission. “Whose side are you on?”
“The right side. Are you?” Bear couldn’t resist an opportunity to mess with her since her presence had rearranged the marks, thus making it harder to track them back to their source.
Bear pulled on his anchor, the stuffed bear cradled in the crook of his arm, and his eyes changed from a bear’s to twin buttons that glowed, and stitches appeared along his furry muzzle, changing his frown to the silly smile Ran so adored. “I think that decision is yet before you. Choose carefully. You might not get a second chance.”
Bear strode past her and disappeared into a wall, certain she didn’t know anything more than he did. When Bear passed through the other side of that wall, he stopped once again to examine the marks he found then moved on, searching for where that dragon had first appeared.
Her tracks had doubled back on themselves so many
times, it was hard to separate which were the original ones since stone didn’t take imprints at all. But that dragon had been carrying something that did leave behind a trace he could track, and Bear followed it to a blank wall.
Well, this is just great. He’d found where she’d first appeared, but it didn’t hold the answer he’d been looking for. There was nothing different about that spot than any other. It was just one dead-end among many down here.
I must have missed something. But what could he have missed? Bear stared at the marks. Every single one pointed to the tunnel leading away from here. Where did they lead now after the essential nature of that metal creature had changed them?
Bear spun and this time, he let them lead him. But those triangular glowing marks were fading fast. Bear bounded after them, jumping larger and larger distances because it was faster then flying. As the tunnels flashed past, they grew more familiar. He practically flew around the bend to the cave he shared with Sarn, Miren, and little Ran.
The door to their cave was wide open, but Bear had closed it because Sarn preferred it that way. He and his son were still gone, but where was Miren? And where was the portal? Why had it disappeared?
Bear stared at that spot in perplexity for a long moment then he noticed marks that hadn’t been there before. There was the sideways figure eight, or the infinity sign, which the Agents of Order had appropriated for their fellowship. So, that clockwork woman had been here. But so had Miren and someone else. Where had they all gone?
Even though Bear knew Miren and that Agent of the Order wasn’t under there, he lifted the edge of the mattress anyway and checked. He almost dropped the mattress when a clockwork roach scuttled out of a crack in the wall. The Agent of Chaos eyed him with its ticking, clock-face eyes. “What do you want?”
Dragon Spells Page 21