The Servant wanted me to understand, but he also wanted me to open myself to Affellah in order to do so. He had a way of touching upon my cycle, so could I touch upon his?
Maybe if I did, I might learn something.
I focused on the power within me, letting the heat flow and build. Then I steadied my breathing. Those were some of the earliest strategies I learned.
I then focused on trying to connect to him and felt a surge. It was faint at first, but I soon began to feel the heat coming from him, the way he was pushing that power out, and how I might be able to connect to it.
I wanted to understand, didn’t I?
It seemed as if he was helping me, as if he wanted me to know.
Then there came a bridging.
It wasn’t as if he were a part of the cycle, just that I could feel heat.
Then he pushed it down into the stone.
As he did, I began to feel resistance, then something else—something almost rotten.
“What do you feel?” He didn’t look over to me.
“I feel darkness,” I whispered.
The Servant looked then. “Darkness would be one way to put it, especially as you are connected to Affellah.”
I looked up. “Am I connected to Affellah?” I could feel a connection through him, the building energy, but I didn’t know if that had somehow connected me to this godlike power he wanted me to understand.
“Can you feel it?”
“The darkness. What is it?” I asked.
As his connection pressed out from him and bridged to me, I could feel the darkness as it spread through all of the stone. It was like an infection that had burned through it, infesting it.
“We call this murtar.”
Then he withdrew, the heat coming away, the bridge fading.
I had heard that word—murtar—from him before. I hadn’t understood what he had said, but I had heard it.
“This is why you wanted me to come here,” I said, looking around and noticing the rock, feeling the energy. Now that I knew what it was, I recognized it—that power, the danger, and the way it infested these stones. “You wanted me to know about this, to understand this was not Affellah so I could bring it back to the kingdom.”
He looked up, holding my gaze. “Your kingdom would not understand. They have ignored the threat.”
“But you have not.” Another thought came to me. “The Vard have attacked the kingdom before, destroying entire cities.”
The Servant was quiet for a moment, then he looked back. “Because of the murtar. It seeks to destroy. And only Affellah can prevent it from spreading.”
I looked over to the stone, feeling the energy within it, and realized something. There was the power of the decay, but it wouldn’t have been enough by itself to cause the level of destruction that I saw here—and had heard of elsewhere.
“This was you,” I whispered. “You destroyed your own cities?”
I couldn’t even imagine something like that, but I had heard stories. I hadn’t seen the Vard attack, but others in the kingdom had—instructors I had worked with. They had seen the power of Affellah and the way they had used it.
What if they had a reason?
“We have no choice,” he said. “Had we done nothing, this would have continued to spread, and the people would have suffered.”
“Why?”
“Because that is the way of the murtar.”
“Who controls it?”
He shook his head, looking off to the river, then to the city’s remains, before turning his attention back to me. “We do not know.”
“Somebody has to control it though,” I said.
“Yes, somebody must,” he said.
“That’s what you’re afraid of.”
“We are afraid of nothing. Affellah protects.”
“If Affellah can save your people, why can’t the dragons protect against the murtar?” That power was similar enough that it should work together.
“The dragons cannot save this.”
“How do you know?”
He smiled tightly, but there was a hint of sadness in his eyes. “Come,” he said.
He picked across the stone, making his way through the city, and I followed him.
It was getting late, darker, and the longer we went, the more the sun continued to fall, and eventually, we would be cast into the darkness of night. He moved quickly, his practiced step over the stone making it easy for him, but it wasn’t quite as easy for me. I slipped, sliding down the stone and coming to rest next to him. He offered me his hand, but I picked myself up. We passed beyond the remains of the city.
“I thought we were going to stay here for the night.”
“You wanted to know about the dragons,” he said.
“I wanted to understand, but if you need to take me somewhere . . .”
“It is not far from here,” he said.
There was a faint sense of him that filled me as we walked, and it left me wondering if perhaps we remained bridged in some way. Did he want me to still feel his connection to Affellah? It was strange, if so, but it was a distinct heat that was different from that of the dragons I had connected to.
The Servant looked over to me as if recognizing that I was aware of something, but he didn’t say anything. We hadn’t gone far when I started to see strange shapes rising from the horizon.
At first, I wasn’t sure what they were—perhaps more stone or remains of buildings—but as we approached, I realized they were blackened forms of curving archways.
Not archways. Bones. Blackened bones.
The outline was unmistakable: a dragon.
“What is this?” I whispered.
“This is what you wanted to see.”
I approached the bones, a rising fear filling me. If these were dragon bones, and if they had somehow been harmed by this dark power, then that would explain why he claimed the dragons could not stop the murtar.
Deep within me, I could feel the green dragon and our connection, the energy shared between us, and I could feel him spreading that power out to me, as if he were trying to bolster me, a warning of sorts.
I had to know. I got closer, but as I did, I felt the same sort of strange energy I had felt near the city, though it was stronger—a residual energy that seemed to buzz within me.
“I feel . . .”
The Servant looked over to me. “Affellah,” he said.
“Not Affellah. I feel the dragon, and I feel the heat that’s there, but not Affellah.”
The Servant held his hand near one of the blackened bones, and I joined him, doing the same. I could feel that strange resistance filling me. As the Servant headed through the bones, another surge of power came from the green dragon. What worried him?
“Are you sure that’s safe?” I asked, calling out to the Servant.
“Murtar was suppressed here long ago,” he said.
He stood by the bones, holding his hands up, and fire began to radiate from them, as if to control fire and send it out swirling away.
As it did, I began to feel pressure persistently pushing upon the dragon. And the green dragon resisted. There was a significant draw of power, a significant calling through the cycle, as if the green dragon were somehow suddenly panicked by what was taking place.
“You need to stop,” I said. “I don’t know what this is, but I can feel power here. I don’t know why, but . . .”
“The murtar is gone,” he said.
He held his hands up, as if to prove it, but something was wrong.
For some reason, I could feel the change in the way he called upon Affellah. The connection was different. Maybe it was because he had connected to me, bridging briefly so I could feel the effect of the murtar on the stone, or perhaps there was some other reason. Whatever it was, I knew something had changed.
When he looked up at me, the bright firelight I normally saw in his eyes had faded, becoming darker.
And I realized what it was.
Des
pite what he believed, the murtar remained.
Chapter Six
I moved carefully away from him, not wanting to get too close. I wasn’t sure what was going on here, but I could feel that strange dark energy filling the Servant, flowing from him.
I needed to get him away from the bones. The blackened structures were enormous, the remnants of some massive dragon that had fallen long ago. I couldn’t help but feel a bit of sorrow at that loss, knowing the dragon had been destroyed here, taken by Affellah, by the Vard, because of this murtar’s influence.
Distantly, I could feel the green dragon pushing through me, trying to warn me, a steady building energy that seemed to linger within me. The dragon wanted me to be aware of that pressure, that power, and wanted to protect me from this.
“You should move away from the bones,” I suggested. I made a point of holding on to the connected energy that flowed through me, the cycle that was still burning, though not with the same ferocity I knew it could.
“I will not,” he said, turning toward me. He held his hands out, and fire flooded off him.
There was something within that flood of power and I reacted, starting to reach for the Servant, when pressure pushed me back. The green dragon resisted me, keeping me from using that energy.
I stepped back and let the flow of power that built within me continue to work throughout me. The dragon was trying to protect me.
“You need to step out of the bones,” I repeated. “Murtar is still there.”
The servant ignored me. He had his hands held upward, and power was flowing through him, through the bones, then back.
A cycle.
I knew I wasn’t going to be strong enough to resist this, not as distant as I was from the green dragon. I had been separated for so long that the cycle I needed to connect to remained in some hidden part of my mind, making it so I couldn’t reach for its true power.
And maybe I had been somehow influenced by murtar as well, and that might be why I couldn’t touch that power as easily as I needed to. I closed my eyes, focusing on the connection I had to the dragon, on the energy there, though I was aware of the Servant, his heat and strange energy—what I suspected was the murtar.
“I need you,” I whispered to the dragon.
I felt his power surge as he took to the air. Despite the separation, I could feel him, and wondered if I could even see through his eyes, see what he saw.
Then he hit a barrier.
The dragon had felt helpless during the other attacks. I knew he had wanted to offer a measure of protection, but didn’t feel as if such a thing were possible in these lands, a place where dragons were despised.
I opened my eyes and saw the Servant looking at me, then he turned his cycle toward me. I resisted, trying again to cycle my power.
The dragon roared. There was a distant rumbling, more of the trembling that had been coming through the ground. I needed to push the power of my cycle through to the dragon so he could break free of this barrier, and tried to call that power to me. The dragon continued battering at it, and the cycle surged with a hint of power that came through the dragon.
I hadn’t drawn upon it. The dragon had.
And then he burst through the barrier. A surge of his power exploded. As soon as it did, I could feel that energy building within me, the power of the dragon once again a part of me.
There came a sense of heat building off the Servant, and I grew increasingly concerned about what he might do. Something had changed for him, something more than what I had seen from him before.
He turned, heat flaring from him with a vibrant intensity that I could scarcely withstand.
The green dragon was the only one nearby, but I was aware of the other dragons, and though they were still muted, I could borrow their energy.
I pushed outward with my connection, thinking that I could use it to oppose any threat. When I did, I felt something: resistance against the dragon power.
The Servant took a step toward me. He was glowing. “I wanted you to find Affellah, and you attack me? I showed you my lands, my people, and this is what you do?”
I pushed out again with the connection of heat and fire, feeling a flare within me. There was an undercurrent of something within the Servant, and it flowed out of the dragon bones.
Murtar.
I knew it, and for whatever reason, he couldn’t see it. He couldn’t feel it.
But I was acutely aware of it. A dark shape circled above us. The green dragon was coming. I reached for the dragon’s power, letting it cycle through me and connect me to the dragon as it should. I held out my hands, forming the complicated weave of power that flowed from one hand to the next.
As I did, the pressure I had been feeling began to build. It radiated out from the Servant and the blackened bones, pushing up against me and the dragon.
I had to fight.
I turned my attention away from the Servant, not wanting to target him. But I could target the bones.
There was something powerful within them, though I had no idea what it was. The murtar had lingered, even with the dragon gone.
I wondered why that should be, but would think about it later.
I let the energy from my connection I had with the cycle of dragons pour out of me—heat flowed out of my hands through the pattern spun between my fingers and toward the dragon bones. I pushed against that resistance.
I tried to call upon more power, but it wasn’t there. The cycle was there, but it didn’t respond. The dragon was there, too, and he gave me as much as he could, but it might not be enough.
The dark shadow started to descend, swirling toward me.
“No,” I said, just as I pushed through the cycle between us, knowing that if I were to allow him to descend, we would run the risk of him getting caught by the power of the Servant’s cycle.
The dragon. I had the power. And in this land, I couldn’t deny that there was another power—the very power the Servant had been telling me about ever since I had come with him. How could I when I could feel it? It was that something else I needed to latch on to.
Maybe it was Affellah, or maybe it was a cycle that flowed through this land.
The Servant had told me to open myself to it.
If there were some way to use that heat and energy, shouldn’t I? Especially if it meant I could help save the Servant from this influence?
I was aware of the heat I had been feeling ever since coming here. Aware of the dry air, the painfully hot stone, and the sun burning down on me. I was aware of it all. And I wondered if I might be able to use it. I took a deep breath and tried to let myself open up to it. It was there, distant. I thought about the volcano, the energy there, that which the dragon had felt. All of that was a part of it.
Affellah.
The dragon guided me toward it. I could feel the influence, but I didn’t even need the dragon to know it. I had already begun to feel it here.
Then it was there—available to me, flowing into the cycle I shared with the dragon.
It was different, distinct from the dragon’s energy.
I borrowed it, pushing and letting it flow, then the bones began to glow.
The Servant turned toward me, but I ignored him. A blackened halo formed around the bones and a glowing energy surrounded them, but I didn’t pay any attention to that either. I focused only on the power I was pulling, on the strange cycle that was both the dragons and something else, something that seemed to come from this land, from the volcano that was distantly drawing upon power, and from myself.
I burned.
There was no other way to describe it, nor was there a way to describe the power that flowed out of me toward the bones. It felt like a hot wind whipped around my head, blazing and crackling—that energy poured over those bones, burning them to ash.
I didn’t know what to make of the strange power still there within me, but it was fading. I didn’t have any control over it. It was almost as if it had latched on to me to help me, as
if it had known I needed its assistance.
The Servant watched me.
He didn’t attack, but I didn’t know if he was still under some influence.
“I felt it,” he said softly, his voice having shifted back to the way it had been before. “I felt murtar. It felt like decay. Death.” He looked at the ash pile where the bones had been and reached down, holding his hand above it. His hand glowed softly, radiating a bit of light, then he withdrew it. I hadn’t been sure if he was going to touch the residue of the bones, but he did not.
“I’ve never felt anything quite like that before. We have dealt with murtar for many years. It has existed in my land for as long as we have kept records. For a long time, it was kept at bay, but then it began to spread, moving beyond what we could withstand. It took many of my people. It took much from my people.”
I studied the Servant, unsure of what to say to him.
“You were different just then,” I said.
“I suppose I was. How did you stop it? The dragon?”
I looked up. The dragon circled, glowing brightly. He was filled with power in a way I hadn’t felt from him in quite some time, and it seemed to me that he had been the reason I had managed to connect to even greater power, not Affellah—then again, maybe I somehow had managed to bridge to the power of this place, to that of the volcano, to the same power the Servant had wanted me to find.
“I don’t know what happened to him,” I said.
“He is connected to Affellah,” he said, holding his hands up as they glowed softly. For a moment, I could feel the Servant and his touch upon my cycle with the dragon, but then it withdrew.
I remained connected to the dragon, worried that if I were to release that connection, the Servant would somehow use whatever he had done and harm the dragon, but there was no evidence of that being an issue.
“I had not known that the dragons could connect to Affellah in such a way.”
“You’re concerned about them,” I said. I looked down at the bone residue that remained around us, and that was all I could see.
“We knew they could be influenced by murtar.”
The Summoned Dragon (Cycle of Dragons Book 4) Page 6