Forest of Kings

by Jack Knight

  “Can people please stop popping up out of nowhere?” Xion asked as he stood up to face Vairiel. “It’s getting really annoying.”

  Sapphire stood as well. Ferion and Aurum scrambled across the forest floor to stand between them and Vairiel.

  “Shut up,” Vairiel spat.

  “What are you doing here?” Sapphire demanded. Her voice was fierce, reminding Xion briefly of Ava.

  “I can do what I want, Qua’ke is mine,” Vairiel told her.

  Xion sighed and his shoulders sagged. “Look, I’m getting really tired, can you just tell me what you want?” he said in exasperation.

  “Fine, where is the traitor?” Vairiel asked coldly.

  Xion threw his hands in the air. “Who?” Xion demanded.

  “He means Ava,” Sapphire explained.

  “Oh, right, well, she’s not here,” Xion told Vairiel.

  Vairiel snorted in derision. “I can see that, halfborn. I guess I’m just going to have to settle for bringing the chosen one to Draxis myself.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Sapphire insisted.

  “Vairiel, my love, please reconsider,” the nymph said from behind Xion.

  Xion had difficulty processing what he had heard. Vairiel was so rude, callous, and downright evil, he could not imagine anyone loving him.

  Vairiel pulled a sword from the sheath at his hip. The sword was one handed, like all the others in The Hand of Dreskar, but it was not gleaming grey steel. The blade had a tinge of red and gave Xion a bad feeling.

  Xion reached behind his back for his bow, but found nothing there. He had not bothered to bring it with him that morning, because he thought he was just going to be training with Kronos. He was undefended and Vairiel was slowly walking toward him with a sword in hand.

  “The interesting thing is the dragon king has not insisted on you being brought back alive,” Vairiel said with a dark smirk on his face.

  Xion summoned the fire inside him, and felt magic pulse through him, ready to defend himself if he had to.

  “You won’t hurt him!” Xara shouted as she burst out of the trees.

  She ran at Vairiel’s side and brought down a thin black blade, Vairiel blocked it easily, but Xion could not focus on the fight. The blade looked too familiar, Xion was sure that he had seen it somewhere before, but he could not place it.

  “Where do all these people keep coming from?” Sapphire asked out loud in surprise.

  Vairiel swiped at Xara with such speed, Xion was sure that she would be sliced in half, but Xara ducked with alarming agility and spun on the ground with her leg extended, knocking Vairiel off his feet and he hit the ground hard.

  Vairiel pointed his sword at Xara and shouted “Dragontooth!”

  A line of fire blasted from the sword’s tip and hit Xara in the chest, tossing her backwards. She landed hard on her back. She rolled over and brought herself to her feet in under a second, the fire did not seem to faze her in the slightest.

  Vairiel stood quickly and charged at Xara. He seemed to have completely forgotten about Xion once Xara had appeared. He brought his sword down toward Xara, and she threw up her arm up as if she had a shield. The sword hit her unprotected arm with a clang, fire erupted around the blade, but left no mark on Xara.

  Vairiel brought his sword around and stabbed at Xara’s chest, she deflected the blade so quickly Xion could barely believe it. Elves were naturally better sword fighters than humans, with their increased agility. In Aur’in, they had been trained in sword fighting, and the elves all outclassed humans by a wide margin. Xion could barely comprehend how Xara was able to fight Vairiel off so well.

  Still, he was not about to let Xara fight Vairiel on her own. He charged at Vairiel’s back, as he was facing the other direction, and channeled his magic. He felt a bubble form in his stomach, and just as he was close enough to Vairiel to strike, the bubble rocketed toward his mouth.

  Xion was sure he was about to be sick, he suddenly stopped and opened his mouth, and his eyes widened in surprise. He did not get sick, instead flames erupted out of him. The fire started as a small stream and quickly spread outward, creating a large cloud of flames that completely engulfed Vairiel’s body.

  Xara jumped backward out of the way as Vairiel dropped his sword and started to scream. The fire clung to Vairiel’s armor and kept burning long after Xion closed his mouth and the stream of fire stopped.

  “Vairiel, this way, toward the water!” the nymph screamed in terror.

  Vairiel stumbled and screamed as he tried to reach the water. Xion, Xara, and Sapphire all stared in shock. None of them had expected Xion to breathe fire, especially not Xion. The situation only got worse from there.

  Vairiel finally fell into the pool of water, and the nymph kept screaming. The water did not extinguish the flames, they kept burning even after Vairiel was submerged.

  “What’s going on?” the nymph screamed. “What did you do?” she demanded.

  Sapphire looked at Xion like she was expecting him to answer, but he was more shocked than anyone. He tried to take a step toward Vairiel, and his knees buckled, forcing him down to the ground on all fours. The fire had drained him much more than he had expected, even with a familiar, the magic was too much for him.

  Ice.

  The word resounded inside his head, and Xion knew that it was supposed to be a yell, but there was no volume inside his own mind. He looked to Aurum, who was staring at him intently. It took him a few seconds to realize what she was trying to get him to do.

  “Sapphire!” Xion tried to yell, but his voice came out weak and tired, “Use ice.”

  Xion collapsed onto the ground. Slowly, his vision went dark, and Xion faded into sleep.

  Chapter 11: Surprised

  Xion drifted between sleep and the nature trance. He was briefly aware of every living thing around him, and then in total darkness, repeating the cycle so many times, Xion could not even guess at how long he was actually asleep.

  The vision broke through the cycle, and Xion was glad he could see something again. He was just disappointed by what he saw.

  He had been hoping for a hint at what Draxis was planning, instead he saw Paarathax and Xorn again. Xorn was lying in a small clearing, with Paarathax sitting on the ground, reclined against one of the trees on the clearing’s edge.

  “... wasn’t her,” Paarathax finished part of his sentence just after Xion became aware of the two of them.

  Xorn blew a stream of black smoke out of his nostrils, they shot forward several inches and then trailed toward the sky, growing less opaque until they disappeared several feet from where they started.

  “You wasted all of that time,” Xorn growled. “You could have been using that time to stop the king.”

  “No,” Paarathax said calmly, “the chosen one will stop Draxis. And, if I hadn’t gone, I would have regretted it my entire life.”

  “Your life ends when the king finds out you are still alive,” Xorn pointed out.

  Paarathax shook his head. “He knows what I’ve been doing,” he argued. “He will keep me alive to torture me for information.”

  “Is that what you want?” Xorn asked.

  “Of course not. I just need to not get captured,” Paarathax answered.

  “You said the king is close to his goal, how is the chosen one going to stop him?” Xorn demanded.

  “Obviously,” Paarathax said simply, “one of us needs to help him.”

  “I will not be seen in the company of the king’s greatest enemy,” Xorn growled.

  Paarathax laughed. “A boy, not even of age, is Draxis’ greatest enemy?”

  “You know the prophecy, Draxis was there when it was first spoken, he knows the boy is destined to be his downfall,” Xorn said.

  “That’s not exactly what the prophecy says,” Paarathax pointed out.

  Xion would have gasped if he had been in his own body. Paarathax knew the words of the prophecy, too? Why was everyone so opposed to telling him the truth?
It was about him, he had a right to know.

  “I think the word ‘replaced’ is what frightens the king most,” Xorn mused.

  “Maybe,” Paarathax sighed, “but the point is, the chosen one needs help.”

  “Then help him yourself,” Xorn insisted.

  “It should be you. Just go and tell him where the tomb is,” Paarathax argued.

  “How do you think it will look for a dragon to enter Evergreen? Especially when Draxis’ little helpers have just discovered their general was almost killed,” Xorn asked.

  “Don’t go as a dragon,” Paarathax suggested.

  Xorn roared and unfurled his wings. “I will never lower myself to the form of a human!”

  “I think you might want to reconsider when you realize what’s in the dragon’s tomb,” Paarathax said with a mischievous grin.

  Xorn slowly folded his wings against his back and growled.

  “Are you old enough to remember Xeraxia?” Paarathax asked, chuckling.

  “Of course not,” Xorn scoffed.

  “You understand that the ‘tomb’ isn’t actually a tomb. It’s a prison,” Paarathax told him.

  “You don’t mean…?”

  Paarathax nodded. “Xeraxia is still there.”

  Xion sat straight up. Sapphire gasped and started shaking the person next to her awake. Xion was in a bed in the room they had been given in Evergreen. The torches had all been extinguished so the room was dark. It was hard to tell, but Xion guessed that it was either late at night, or very early in the morning.

  “I’mmawake,” Warren mumbled, he was the sleeping figure Sapphire was shaking.

  “Finally,” Ava complained, “Another week of the chosen one sleeping it off.”

  “What?” Xion exclaimed. “I’ve been asleep for a week?”

  At the sound of his voice, Xara, who was asleep in the bed next to him sat up like she had been shocked. Her head whipped toward him and she screamed.

  In a flash, she had tackled Xion from the side and nearly knocked him off the bed.

  “I’m so glad you woke up,” she pulled away so that she could look him in the eye when she said, “Your friends are making me read books.” She said it as if it were some sort of horrible punishment. Xion thought back to his time studying with them in the library of Aur’in, and realized it was not that much of a stretch.

  “Oh, calm down,” Ava sneered, “you barely read, anyway.”

  Xara sat down heavily next to Xion, he wondered if she had forgiven him for what he had said. She was not acting like it bothered her.

  “Hey, I read a lot. It’s just so boring,” Xara whined.

  “Reading what?” Xion asked.

  “I told them about your dream, and we’ve been trying to find the tomb,” Sapphire answered.

  “It’s not a fun time. Elves write down everything,” Warren said as he pulled himself into a sitting position, with his legs hanging off the bed.

  “Literally everything. I read a book for like two hours and the guy wrote down what he ate every day,” Xara whined.

  “Why would you read books like that?” Xion asked.

  “All the elves books are like that. They live for so long, they can write about everything from a first person point of view,” Warren explained.

  “It’s annoying,” Ava added.

  A rumbling growl came from the other side of the room, and then the soft clack of something hard repeatedly hitting the floor before something heavy landed on the bed in front of Xion. It was too dark to see, but Xion could feel that Aurum had come over to him. A feeling of contentment drifted across their bond.

  “Tenebris doesn’t like your lizard,” Ava informed him.

  “Who?” Xion asked as he started softly petting Aurum.

  “The wolf the size of a house,” Xara whispered. She must have meant Ava’s familiar, Xion guessed.

  “Okay, so what else have I missed,” Xion asked.

  “Kronos is lazy,” Ava said immediately.

  “He doesn’t really teach us much,” Sapphire corrected. “He tells us to use as much magic as possible without spells, but he doesn’t really give us any more information than that. So, we’ve been trying to recreate spells without the words.”

  “I’m jealous,” Warren told him. “Everyone can use chaos magic, and everyone gets a familiar, and I’m left with just my spells.”

  “At least you have spells,” Laira said from the bed beside Ava.

  “It’s not that big a deal,” Sapphire said reassuringly.

  Warren groaned. “Even so, I’m jealous.”

  “He’s also the only one without a bloodline,” Xara said.

  “Hey, that’s not friendship,” Warren sighed. “Very true, but not nice.”

  “Hey, what about me?” Laira demanded, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

  “Anyway,” Xion changed the subject as quickly as he could, “I had another dream.” He explained what he had overheard from Paarathax and Xorn.

  “I’ve read about Xeraxia,” Warren said as he laid back down on the bed. “First dragon, as far as anyone knows. Nobody knows how, but all dragons are descended from that one.”

  “Anything else?” Xara asked. “That’s not really a lot.”

  “It’s all I’ve got,” Warren said.

  “Okay, well, I’ve been in bed long enough, I guess,” Xion said and made to stand up. As soon as he put weight on his feet, his legs gave out, and he collapsed back onto the bed.

  Xara laughed and helped him to standing. Laira hopped out of her bed and hurried over to Xion’s side, she put his arm over her shoulder and said, “Come on, let’s go for a walk.”

  Sapphire looked like she was angry, or maybe surprised? She watched as Laira helped him limp out of the building. Laira led him across one rope bridge, and then another. Xion had not had much of a chance to wander around Evergreen and did not know where they were going.

  Laira pointed out the library as they crossed the bridge to get to it. Xion remembered the library in Aur’in, where he and his friends had studied before. He remembered how Warren had taught him to read every night, after they had finished their training for the day. He had always wanted to learn to read, but doing it because he had to, to fight off the impending doom looming over them all, was not as much fun as he had imagined.

  Laira also pointed out the palace. Xion glanced at it and saw a grand building made entirely out of leaves in the center of the city. He was still too exhausted to really take it in, or to care much for the tour he was being provided.

  Laira continued, despite his lack of enthusiasm. She pointed out a few more buildings before eventually pointing out the smithy. Xion asked how a smithy could possibly exist inside a tree, surely one rogue ember would burn the entire city down. Laira laughed and told him that she had asked the exact same question and had not gotten an answer.

  Unlike when they had first arrived, when the city had been quiet and mostly empty, the early morning hours were bustling and full of people. Ava had been telling the truth, there were only elves in Evergreen, but not all of them looked like what Xion expected.

  Some of them had red skin, and golden brown eyes. Some looked like they were made of snow, with white skin, even paler than Sapphires, they also had white hair, and irises so light grey it was difficult to tell where they stopped and the whites of their eyes began. A lot of them were the high elves, with dark hair and grey skin, while the rest were the type that Xion was used to seeing, wood elves.

  When Xion had been in Aur’in, he had discovered that humans hated elves, but he wondered if they only hated the ones that they knew about. He had never actually understood how you could hate someone you had never met, it never made any sense to him. He never really wanted to understand, afraid that if he ever did, he would start to hate people for no reason as well.

  With Laira supporting him, they walked across almost the entire city to a small store. From the outside, it looked like every other building in Evergreen. When Laira opened the
door, he saw that it had only enough room for three or four people at a time. Laira purchased something quickly, which she kept hidden in a small sack, and returned to lead him even farther into the city.

  They finally stopped, to Xion’s relief, in a small area where the trees were close together, and the branches had all expanded and grown to form a small patio where benches had been set up, overlooking the forest outside the city.

  Xion and Laira sat, and Laira revealed what she had bought in the shop: two small round spheres covered in a white powder.

  “You eat it,” Laira laughed at the confusion on Xion’s face.

  Xion was unsure if he wanted to try a mysterious new food right at that moment, but he picked up one of the spheres. It was very soft, and the powder fell off with the slightest movement. He eyed it warily for a second, and then popped the entire thing into his mouth. It was pillowy and nearly melted in his mouth, it tasted sweeter than anything he had ever eaten before. The powder on the outside was pure sweetness and clung to his teeth as he chewed.

  Xion swallowed it quickly, his eyes wide with surprise. He was used to stews and bread, sweet foods were reserved for people with extra money. He had heard of cake, even seen it before, but he had never tasted it. He assumed that was what he must have eaten.

  “The elves call it a ‘donut hole’,” Laira laughed and nudged him with her elbow. “Don’t look so surprised.”

  “A what? That didn’t have any holes in it?” Xion said in utter confusion. He tried licking the remainder of the powder from his teeth, but it seemed to stick to everything it could inside his mouth.

  “I tried asking, but it’s some weird treat the humans had before the Great Shift. I don’t know, really. But, the ones with the powder on the outside are my favorite.” Laira lightly placed the other into her mouth, and her eyes rolled back in her head as she slowly chewed it.

  Xion laughed, she looked like she was pretending to like it more than she actually did.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked, after she swallowed.

  “Nothing,” Xion assured her.

  “So, what’s going on with you and Sapphire?” she asked suddenly.

  Xion furrowed his brow in confusion when he asked, “What do you mean?”