It was slow, but the longer I sat atop the dragon, circling above it, the more certain I was of what I detected. We were under attack. The murtar was coming.
And we did not know how to stop it.
I sat up, looking at the dragon, my mind racing, trying to come up with an answer as to what I needed to do. I could go back to the kingdom, but then I would have to argue with Thomas, other dragon mages, and perhaps even the king to try to convince him of this truth. And during that time, the murtar might continue to spread.
If Natalie had only understood, she might have been able to help, but I had a feeling she wouldn’t. The Djarn were not interested in helping the kingdom with this. They wanted only to protect themselves.
That left one option.
Was I willing to go back?
I remembered what the Servant had said to me when I had left. I was welcome to return, but doing so would not guarantee any answers.
The Djarn had not known how to defeat the murtar. They had left it. The kingdom may not even believe in it.
But the Vard . . .
The Vard not only believed in it, they had a way of halting its spread.
We veered toward the Vard lands, circling over the Southern Reach. I continued looking down, feeling as if answers were there, though not to questions that I had. There had to be some key to all of this, but I didn’t know what it was. After having been back in the kingdom, seeing people I cared about and wanted to protect, I felt I was betraying them by choosing to leave.
The dragon flew quickly, and I felt a presence of power at the edge of the Southern Reach.
I had proof the murtar had reached the kingdom, though it had been there before, so I shouldn’t have needed proof. The Servant had made it clear why they had attacked the kingdom, but I had questioned. Then again, had I not gone back to the kingdom, I wouldn’t have learned something more. Something worse. It was continuing to move.
How was I going to find the Servant?
I wasn’t going to be able to do this on my own. As much as it pained Natalie that I chose to depart, I didn’t feel I had much choice in the matter. I needed answers, and I needed to stop the spread of murtar. The Djarn were unwilling, and the Academy was unable. The only way to protect the kingdom was to go to its enemy and ask for help.
Would the Servant provide it?
If so, why?
I had to think that perhaps I could coax him into helping, convince him there was a reason for him to do so. I had helped him with the murtar—or, at least, the memory of it. Perhaps there was some way for me to use that to my advantage.
As we circled, moving ever closer to Affellah, I grew aware of a sense of heat down near the base of the volcano.
We headed toward it. I had felt that energy before and recognized it. The Servant. It had to be. But now, I came for a different reason. I wanted to understand, but I also wanted to be able to do what was needed to protect my people from the danger that the Servant had shown me.
When we landed, I waited. The Servant was there. I could feel his presence, even if I was not fully aware of him otherwise. He approached, and had something of a slithering, glowing appearance. I did not know if the energy he emanated came from something he possessed, or if it really was tied to Affellah.
“You returned,” he said. His voice was hoarse, almost burned, but not surprised.
I looked around before settling my gaze back on him. “I returned because I need your help. I need somebody who understands murtar.” He frowned. “I found it in the kingdom.” As he looked at him, I wondered if he was going to acknowledge what the Vard had done within the kingdom before, how they had destroyed those cities. “There are places in the kingdom where murtar has been active. I’m worried about the dragons. If something happens to them—”
“You cannot help them.”
I couldn’t believe that. We had time. I believed we had time.
“We need your help.” When I saw the Servant watching me, I breathed out heavily. “I need your help.”
“I cannot,” he said.
“Even if it remains active? I don’t know who else to go to. If my land has been tainted by murtar, then—”
“Your land has been tainted. My land has been cleansed.”
I had departed the kingdom, leaving my people and what I believed to be my obligations, to come here for help, but what if I couldn’t get it? What if the Servant wouldn’t offer me any assistance?
“How do I help?” I asked. There had to be some way. There had to be something I could do, something he could tell me, but perhaps he would not. “That’s why you brought me here, isn’t it?” I looked over to the volcano. We were near enough that I could still feel the heat radiating off it and radiating off the lands around me. I could feel the influence of the volcano here. There was something to that, something I thought he wanted me to know. “You wanted me to know what had happened to your land so that it wouldn’t happen to mine. You welcomed me to your land. You didn’t need to.”
“I am a Servant of this land,” he said.
For the first time, I thought I understood it.
For him to be a Servant of this land, he had to ensure he served its people, but he also had to ensure he was a Servant to the land and protect it from those who might do harm to it.
“If murtar continues to spread through my people, it will return here,” I said, looking over to him. “I know you managed to push it back once before, but you barely survived the memory of it,” I said. “You don’t have the strength necessary to push it back again.”
I had seen how he had very nearly succumbed to the memory. If it returned with full force, what would happen to him then?
“Affellah will guide us,” he said.
It felt like a typical priest response, and it angered me.
“And how many will be lost? How many of your people will suffer because you refused to help me? I’m asking you to help me understand. If I can push back murtar in my land, then I can keep it from spreading here.”
“Affellah will provide for us,” he said.
“But what if it doesn’t?”
He smiled at me. “Affellah has always provided,” he said.
I had seen the power of Affellah, hadn’t I?
“Are you trying to tell me again that I need to understand Affellah?”
The Servant cocked his head to the side. “Do you want to?”
“Will it help me save my land?”
“Affellah can provide.”
I looked off into the distance. I could feel the green dragon, his frustration, but there was something else mixed within it. Was it fear? I wasn’t exactly sure. The dragon understood there was something more taking place, something we weren’t going to be able to stop on our own. We had tried, and we had failed.
“Help me understand Affellah,” I said.
“As I have told you before, you must first open yourself to Affellah.”
“What’s involved in that?”
“Change.”
Chapter Twelve
I sat inside of a temple on the side of Affellah, feeling the sense of pressure and heat, along with an energy that was almost physical. The power I detected around it was unlike anything I had known before, but I was certain it came from the volcano itself. The temple was sparse inside, befitting these lands—at least, what I had seen of them. The walls were bare stone with only a few decorations, as if celebrating the volcano and nothing else.
I had been waiting for the Servant to return. He had left me here once we had come to Affellah. The heat that radiated around me felt more like fire; they used it in an almost celebratory way, which was so different from what I was accustomed to within the kingdom.
The connection to the green dragon was there, though faint, as it had been since I returned here. I suspected that had to do with the way the Vard tried to separate me from the dragon so that I could find Affellah, though I no longer knew if that separation was intentional or simply tied to the power of thei
r land.
I stepped outside of the temple. The building was enormous, hewn from the stone of the mountainside itself, and flowed along the side of the mountain. From above, it looked like a jagged rock, but from down here, I could see the tall fingers of rock formed into spires of power that stretched around it. They all reached toward the sky.
Toward Affellah. Toward power.
I found the green dragon watching the peak of the mountain.
“Have they bothered you?” I asked the dragon.
He swung his massive head toward me. I didn’t expect an answer. Not really. Only, as he looked at me, there was a sense of understanding in his eyes, something that suggested he was all too aware of what was taking place around him, and that perhaps he might provide some answer to me.
There came a momentary surge between us, a burst of power through which the dragon attempted to push a communication, though it didn’t provide any answers. It went through the connection between us, toward the cycle, then it faded, dwindling away again.
The Servant hadn’t said much to me other than that I needed to open myself to Affellah. He had brought me to the temple, but there hadn’t been anything within it that I thought I would be able to understand—at least, not without the Servant offering me his assistance. As I looked up the side of Affellah, I questioned whether answers might be found above. Perhaps I needed to visit the volcano in order to open myself up to Affellah.
I climbed onto the dragon’s back, getting into place, then he lurched forward. We circled around the stone mountainside of Affellah, moving quickly, the power of the dragon carrying us quickly into the air, his massive leathery wings beating at the sky. The faint sunlight drifted through the clouds, reflecting off his scaled sides. In the time we had been here, not only had our connection changed, but so had the way he accessed power within him.
There was only barren rock until we got farther down the slope, then we saw signs of life in the form of the temple and a smattering of homes that existed along the mountainside. Some of the people of Vard made this place their home, though it was so barren, so lifeless, that it left me wondering why. But I knew they wanted to be closer to Affellah. They all wanted the same thing. And the priests, the Servants of Affellah, had made it clear there was something special about those who were able to live near the volcano.
It was safer than many places farther away from Affellah. Those villages were more likely to be attacked by the kingdom’s dragon mages, and were unlikely to have any role in leading the Vard.
Steam rose from the peak of Affellah and lava bubbled deep within it. I could only make out a little bit of it in the daylight. At night, Affellah glowed, the power and energy within the volcano filling the sky. I had seen it from a distance, but had never really spent any time close up. I suspected I would need to stay near the volcano if I wanted to understand it.
The dragon circled for a little while, then we started to descend. I could feel tension within him as he positioned himself at an angle to the sky, as if he was trying to get higher, though he could not.
He roared softly, straining. But what was he straining against?
“We should land,” I said.
I wasn’t going to be able to find the answers I wanted by circling like this. We gradually descended, coming to land next to the temple again, and once I climbed off the dragon’s back, he took flight once more. He wasn’t a captive any more than I was, but it still felt like the two of us were trapped. Perhaps it was because of what we had been through, what we had seen, and my fear for what else might be out there.
“Are you ready?”
I turned and saw the scarred Servant of Affellah. His grizzled face looked like it was dipped in hot fire, burning away, leaving a melting molten flow of flesh. It was unpleasant to look at up close, but standing this close to Affellah, when I could feel some sense of power that seemed to cycle from him to the volcano, and to something else, it was not nearly as unpleasant.
“You told me to open myself to Affellah. I was trying to understand it.”
“You will not understand Affellah by looking down upon fire. You must open yourself to it.”
“You keep saying that. I don’t know what it means.”
“Then perhaps it is time you find out.”
He motioned for me to follow, and though I wasn’t sure where he was going, I knew this was the way I would find some understanding about how to defeat the murtar. When I had faced it in the kingdom, I had not managed to overwhelm it. Only here, where I had somehow tapped into something else, where I had been somehow still connected to the Servant, I had overwhelmed the remnants of murtar.
The Servant started away. I chased him, back into the temple, curious.
“What are we going to do?”
“Not ‘we.’ You.”
“What am I going to do?”
“It is time for your transformation.”
I frowned at him, wondering what he was going to ask of me, but followed him anyway. I didn’t think he truly meant I would have a transformation like he did, but what if that was what he wanted?
I had come here for a reason though. I had come here needing to understand Affellah so I could help the kingdom.
So I could stop the murtar.
I had never been to this part of the temple before. The walls were blackened, as if some enormous furnace had surged here, scorching the walls, leaving them charred and changed. The Servant, too, looked as if he had been charred and changed. There was nothing else in the room with us.
I stood dressed in a strange black fabric of a robe that the Servant had given me, something that he seemed to feel necessary for what I was about to do, feeling it scratching against my skin. I suddenly felt so far removed from where I had been when I had first started to chase an understanding.
How had I ended up here?
This was the land of the Vard, my supposed enemy.
Why did I have such trouble feeling that way about them?
Natalie’s words came back to me, her accusations. She had looked at me as if I were some stranger. I suppose I had become something of a stranger. I had become something different, had embraced something more.
And now I was heading for a deeper understanding of the Vard and their god.
What would that mean for me?
I looked over to the Servant. He stared straight ahead, looking at the wall, his gaze practically burning upon it.
“You wanted me here. You wanted me dressed like this,” I said, sweeping my arms down.
“It is time,” he said.
“You keep saying that, but you haven’t told me what it’s time for,” I said.
The Servant was dressed similarly to me, though he seemed far more comfortable in the clothing than I did, as if he knew this was expected, though when I had seen the Servants before, they were not dressed in robes like this.
It had been an hour since the dragon had gone. An hour since my connection to him had shifted. An hour since I could no longer feel any surge tied to my cycle.
“Why do I have to be dressed like this?”
“For you to find Affellah,” he said.
That made no sense, but perhaps this was what I needed to do.
The Servant stared straight ahead, his hands clasped behind him. I was fully aware of the heat coming off him. I still didn’t know if the Servants had some way of cycling into the dragons, but I had the sense they had their own sort of power, whether or not it was the same or something unrelated.
“What now?” I asked, glancing over to the Servant before turning my attention to the wall again. He seemed fascinated by the wall, as if there was something within it he might be able to understand.
“Can you feel the connection to Affellah?”
“I can’t feel anything,” I said.
The Servant held his hand out. “Close your eyes.”
At this point, I decided it made no sense to argue with him. He had agreed to help, as much as help could be offered. A part of me
remained concerned about what the Vard might do to me, and a part remained concerned about what would happen when I returned to the kingdom.
If I could.
I had to push that doubt aside. I would be able to return. I had done nothing to violate my commitment to the kingdom or to my cycle. I had come here to understand how to defeat the murtar so that I could protect the kingdom. I closed my eyes, as he instructed, and waited.
“What do you feel?”
I knew the answer wasn’t to tell him that I felt nothing. I wondered, though, what I was supposed to feel. Heat, perhaps. I did feel the faint flutter of the connection I shared to the dragon.
The cycle was gone though.
I had to hope it wasn’t gone indefinitely, that I could regain my connection and eventually find a way to capture that power again. I had to hope that, eventually, I could sway Thomas to release that power back to me. But that was all it was: hope.
But here I was, trying to find a connection to Affellah. How was that to happen? What would that involve?
“I’ve been trying to feel what you want me to feel, but I don’t detect anything.” I opened my eyes, looking over to him. The Servant did not turn toward me.
“Feel,” the Servant said.
Ever since I had been brought here, I had been trying to feel, though never for what he wanted. Maybe that was the issue. The only thing I’d been trying to feel was my cycle—to understand my dragons, to find them again, to ensure I had that connection to their power.
“Focus,” the Servant said.
“On what?” I asked, exasperation filling me. I knew I should be more careful with him, but I was irritated.
“Open yourself to Affellah.”
I opened my eyes and looked over to him again, then squeezed my eyes shut for a moment and started to turn away, when something twinged within me—a distinct, though faint, sensation.
This was the reason I had come. I needed to connect to Affellah so I could understand how to help the kingdom. If I could grasp that connection, if I could learn what I needed to know about Affellah, I could destroy the murtar influence within the kingdom.
The Summoned Dragon (Cycle of Dragons Book 4) Page 12