Dragon Magus 1: A Progression Fantasy Saga

by DB King

  He turned to Sylvia. “Yes, I can feel mana in my soul. There’s not a lot of it, but it’s there.”

  The elf strode to his side eagerly. “Alright. I’ll teach you a spell right now. Follow my motions and repeat my words.”

  Sylvia waved her fingers in the air and began a slow chant. Raphael caught every detail within the light of the Dragon Meridian and locked it in his memory. He mirrored her movements and said the same arcane words with perfect precision.

  The elf thrust her hand out and uttered one final syllable. A gentle white light enveloped Raphael. He felt the pain from the bruises forming on his shoulder and shin ease. A heartbeat later, he completed the spell too, and he let its effects fall on himself. This time, the pain disappeared entirely, and Raphael knew that if he checked beneath the shoulder and shin guards of his leather armor, he would find no bruises there.

  “That’s Lesser Heal,” Sylvia explained. “As an armsman, having the ability to patch your companions up would be extremely helpful. When we get back to the Guild, I’ll teach you more spells.”

  “Thanks, Sylvia,” Raphael said, meeting her gaze. To his surprise, the elf’s cheeks were wet with tears. “Are… are you alright?”

  Sylvia sniffed and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m fine. I’m fine. It’s just that… True Magic! It’s been so long. And I’d thought it was gone, forever, but here you are, a living miracle.”

  She caught him in a hug, then, squeezing him tightly against herself. For some reason, Raphael cast a nervous glance in Eliza’s direction, but she had a smile on her face and was obviously sharing in the elf’s joy.

  “This is very touching and all, but I’m taking the rest of the Spell Cores,” Fenix said, rushing to another slain treant and beginning his chant. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m only human, and I don’t have any mana in my soul, so I’ll have to take what I can get.”

  Fenix’s words rocked Raphael. If humans didn’t have mana, but Raphael did, then it logically followed that he wasn’t human.

  The battlemage preempted his thoughts. “For what it’s worth, Raphael, as far as I’m concerned, you’re my comrade-in-arms, and you’ve more than proven your worth. I couldn’t care less whether you’re a human, elf, or dragon. It doesn’t matter to me. I trust you, and I’m proud to fight alongside you.”

  Eliza put her hand on his shoulder. “It doesn’t matter to me either. Whatever you might be, at the end of the day, you’re still Raphael, and that’s all I care about.”

  “Thanks, Eliza,” Raphael said, feeling as if a huge weight had been lifted off his heart. Sylvia was still hugging him and sniffling. “And Sylvia… are you… wiping your snot on my collar?”

  She was.

  Chapter 20

  “It’s odd that the sanguine treants attacked us in broad daylight,” Eliza said as they continued their trek upstream. She gestured at the sparse sunlight streaming in through the thin canopy over the river bed. “Well, relatively speaking, anyway.”

  “That’s because we’re headed somewhere important, and we’ll arrive there soon,” Fenix replied. “So they’ve got no choice but to try and stop us before we do.”

  The battlemage’s words were soon proven right. After several more minutes of walking, Raphael smelled something foul in the air, something worse than a dead howler or night-fiend boiling and bursting underneath the junkyard sun.

  The others soon smelled it, too. Sylvia wrinkled her nose while Fenix and Eliza recoiled from the stench.

  “Phew. That’s Necromancy for you. Looks like our Death Druid isn’t too far away,” the elf said.

  “The ground is changing.” Raphael pointed down. The mossy mud of the riverbanks were gone, replaced by dark, barren dirt. With every step they took, the air grew fouler. Eerie green light rose from cracks in the ground.

  Sylvia kicked up a half-buried object and sent it rolling backward with her heel. It came to a halt at Fenix’s feet. The battlemage jumped. Eliza muffled a yelp, and even Raphael had to steel himself from flinching.

  It was a human skull, missing its jawbone and huge segments of its crown. Rotting sinew still clung to its gnawed cheeks.

  “Treants cracked his head open, ate his brains, and hooked his eyes right out of their sockets,” the elf said, obviously relishing how every word made Fenix and Eliza grow paler and paler.

  “You’re enjoying this too much,” the battlemage complained.

  “Yeah well, deal with it!” Sylvia snapped. She toed up something else from the ground. It was the putrefying wreckage of a mangled human torso. Its ribs had been pried open, and its contents had been excavated by what could only be a huge claw.

  “Adventuring isn’t all glory and games,” she continued. “At the end of the day, we deal in death. Either we bring it to our foes, or they inflict it on us, with plenty of horror and suffering in between. Fall to the treants here, and they’ll eat you alive. Get taken alive by ogres or dark goblins, and you’ll wish they’d killed you instead. If you can’t handle the reality of what it means to be a Hell Drake, then perhaps this isn’t the life for you!”

  Fenix gulped, but he clenched his fists and thumped one against his chest. “I kill for wealth! I slay for glory! I am a Hell Drake, and I will vanquish all horrors that come my way.”

  “That’s the spirit! Keep it up and you’ll go far.” Sylvia nodded, then turned her gaze to Eliza and Raphael. “What about the two of you?”

  “I won’t back down,” Eliza replied, her voice steady and unwavering. “I, too, am a Hell Drake, and I will seize my share of wealth and glory.”

  “Neither will I,” Raphael said. “I won’t let this Death Druid hurt any more people.”

  The elf smiled. Without another word, she turned and continued walking. Raphael and the others followed. Despite Sylvia’s grim words, Raphael could feel that a steely resolution had fallen over Fenix and Eliza. He realized that her comments had been for their benefit, preparing the inexperienced war party for the horrors to come.

  And there would be horrors to come. They came across more gnawed body parts, more heartless torsos.

  Right, he thought. Sanguine treants make more of themselves by stuffing human hearts into dead trees.

  Raphael tightened his grip on his glaive. He’d spent most of his childhood tussling with howlers and night-fiends, and they weren’t much weaker or deadlier than the treants, at least to him, but the same couldn’t be said of others. How many adventurers had he seen walk by his house and into the junkyard, never to emerge again? Raphael was sure that a fair number of them had fallen to the monsters he regularly used as sparring partners and test subjects for fighting techniques he’d thought of or picked up from Koshi.

  When the fighting begins, I’ll have to stay focused and protect Eliza and Fenix, he thought. They’re not like me or Sylvia.

  Sylvia held up her right hand. Fenix and Eliza froze in their tracks, and Raphael realized that it was a signal for them to halt. He looked past the elf’s shoulder and saw why.

  As he’d thought, a massive dam had been constructed upstream, causing the river to dry up. He’d never expected it to be made of dozens, if not more than a hundred, treant bodies, all twisted and warped by dark magic into a single seamless barrier of rotting wood nearly twenty feet high. Raphael tried not to think about how many human hearts had gone into making all these treants.

  Some of the monsters fused into the dam had their faces turned outward. They caught sight of the war party and began screeching and gnashing their teeth. More treants emerged from the woods on both river banks, flexing their claws as they clustered into an approaching horde. It was an unnerving sight, but Raphael found his gaze drawn to what stood above them, atop the screaming wall of undead trees.

  His back half-turned to the war party, a man clad in a dark robe gestured and chanted over the water trapped behind the dam. Long, straggly white hair fell from his skull, failing to hide the long, pointed ears protruding from their midst.
<
br />   An elf! Raphael glanced at Sylvia, but the grim cast of her features told him she’d already noticed.

  “He’s infused the water behind the dam with dark magic. Anything it touches will die in horrific agony,” Sylvia growled.

  “The river banks won’t be able to hold back the sudden torrent of water if the dam breaks. He wants to flood Vitoria and kill everyone there!” Eliza cried.

  “Death and destruction on such a scale would definitely serve as the final spell component needed to awaken the geomantic loci,” Fenix said. “We can’t let him succeed.”

  Raphael raced his thoughts through the light of the Dragon Meridian. He strode to the forefront of their formation and turned to Sylvia. “Fly overhead and freeze the water with your ice magic. That should stop it from flowing and buy us some time.”

  The elf grinned. “Telling me what to do, eh? Can’t say I don’t like that.”

  Raphael returned her grin and nodded to Fenix and Eliza. “We’ll need to take the fight to the Death Druid. Eliza, stay behind me. Fenix, let’s do what we did against those ice wolves.”

  “Agreed. If you get me close enough, I can use Banish on the dam. That should turn it into a solid chunk of wood that the Death Druid has no control over,” Fenix replied.

  Eliza drew her sword and took up a position behind Raphael’s left shoulder. “You can count on me, Raphael.”

  “Sylvia, go! If the Death Druid tries to keep you from using your ice magic, then at least he’ll be too busy to break the damn open!” Raphael said.

  The elf hopped onto her sword and zipped ahead, streaking over the reaching claws of the sanguine treants.

  “How many do you think there are?” Fenix asked, a wavering note in his voice. He clenched and unclenched his fists. Chain Lightning crackled into existence over his palms.

  “Nothing we can’t handle!” Raphael declared, stepping toward the horde of treants, which had now broken out into a shrieking, frenzied charge.

  He took another step toward the monsters, then another. Then he was running. Several loping strides turned into a thunderous counter-charge. The same alien sense of euphoria filled his senses, but the light of the Dragon Meridian tempered its zeal and focused its strength to his purpose.

  With the Draconic Braziers blazing at their hottest, Raphael’s body felt like it was on fire, but his thoughts ran ice-cold, sharper than the bite of the coldest winter morning and clearer than the emptiest of skies.

  Before his heightened senses, the tide of treants seemed to be moving in slow-motion. Raphael dove into their midst, cleaving his glaive across the first five monsters that came within reach. He struck down another four with his backswing. He’d wreathed the blade of his weapon in his draconic armor, and its might tore the treants asunder. Spinning his glaive around and across in a hand-over-hand grip, he swept its curved blade from his left flank to his right, its figure-eight arc carving claws and stumps from torsos.

  Predictably, the treant horde folded over Raphael, shrieking with bloodlust. Rotting wood enveloped him. His draconic armor hummed and flexed under dozens of claws and bites. He fought back, smashing wooden faces and breaking limbs with his fists, heels, and the butt of his glaive.

  A sphere of white light encased Raphael. A heartbeat later, the stinking, putrescent monsters burned away beneath arcs of crackling yellow lightning. Coruscating electrical energy washed harmlessly over the Spirit Shield that Fenix had placed over Raphael.

  Glancing over his shoulder, Raphael saw the battlemage sweep twin streams of lightning, one from each of his fists, across the outer edges of the treant horde, crisping and charring any of the monsters caught in his spells. The treants reared away from Fenix’s Chain Lightning, clumping their bodies into a narrower cluster right in front of Raphael.

  Raphael took a step forward and rammed his glaive into the closest treant. Lifting it off his feet, he thrust the monster amongst its fellows and unleashed the impacts absorbed by his draconic armor in a single, titanic burst.

  The treant impaled upon his glaive exploded. Its scattering body parts tore every other monster within five feet asunder. Shards of rotting wood struck Raphael’s draconic armor. Some bounced off. Others fell limply to his feet, the bite of their sharpened flight blunted and absorbed by his scales of golden light.

  “Following through!” Fenix called from behind. His approaching footsteps, along with Eliza’s, told Raphael that the two were advancing into the space cleared amidst their foes.

  As Fenix and Eliza joined him, Raphael swung his glaive in a backhanded swing toward his right, cutting down another two treants. In the corner of his eye, he saw Fenix blow apart another cluster of monsters on their left flank with Explosive Orbs. Eliza flashed her sword into a treant’s face, distracting it long enough for Raphael to pivot on his heel and bisect it down its length.

  The monsters encircled them, cutting off their retreat, but Raphael had no intention of withdrawing. He cleaved apart a treant and kicked the halves of its torso into the horde, knocking down its fellows and splintering their limbs.

  “Advance!” he cried, wading into the downed treants and lashing out with his glaive. Fenix and Eliza shouted their assent and followed in his wake.

  Chain Lightning and Explosive Orbs streamed from Fenix’s fists, incinerating or tearing apart clumps of monsters. Pirouetting and cross-stepping around the battlemage and Eliza, Raphael swung his glaive in continuous, sweeping arcs that kept the treants at bay.

  And so they advanced, step by arduous step, leaving a carpet of slain monsters behind them. Raphael glanced upward, seeking to check on Sylvia’s progress. The elf had invoked the formidable Shadow Magic spell she’d used against Koshi, and she was raining inky copies of her sword down on the Death Druid, seeking to penetrate the bubble of sickly-green energy encasing his robed form. The Death Druid had his hands thrust into the air. Tendrils of diseased vines snaked upward from his feet, reaching for Sylvia, but astride her sword, she was too swift and elusive to be caught.

  “Great. She’s keeping him occupied,” Fenix said, breathing harshly from exertion. “Get me another ten feet closer. I can use Banish from there.”

  Raphael cut down a treant and back-stepped to Eliza’s side. Letting go of his glaive with one hand, he wrapped the arm still holding the weapon around her waist, then reached out and clasped his free palm on Fenix’s shoulder.

  “Rayne! Help me!” he thought to Rayne.

  “Your will, Magus,” the faerie dragon replied, poking its head out of his pocket.

  The world took on a purplish tint, then, and Raphael knew Rayne had made all three of them incorporeal. Tightening his grip on Fenix’s shoulder, Raphael dove into the midst of the treants, pulling the battlemage and Eliza with him.

  They slipped through the closest monsters. With each stride, Raphael felt Rayne’s strength waning, and when he knew the faerie dragon could keep them incorporeal no longer, he wrapped his draconic armor around Fenix and Eliza.

  “Let go, Rayne,” he said.

  “Your will, Magus.” The faerie dragon’s mental voice was laden with exhaustion. It withdrew its power, and they returned to corporeality amidst a densely packed group of treants.

  Raphael unleashed the impacts absorbed by his draconic armor once more, this time in a circular arc around him. The monsters within a hand’s breadth of him were hurled back. Their putrefying bodies smashed against their fellows and caused a cascading ring of collapsing treants.

  “We’re right in front of the dam!” Eliza called. She was pale and her posture was unsteady, a likely effect of her jaunt through incorporeality.

  Swaying on his feet, Fenix was similarly affected, but he gritted his teeth and slammed his palms together. White-gold light began to gather around his hands.

  He’s casting his Banish spell. Raphael looked up at the dam. Eliza was right. They’d made it to within five feet of the structure. Dozens of glowing eyes glared down at them. Maws filled with splintered wooden teeth gnashed, dem
anding their flesh.

  A beam of white light washed over the dam. The eyes of the fused treants lost their luster. The monsters’ gnashing maws slowed and then froze into rigidity. Raphael blinked, and when he opened his eyes, he found himself standing before a rotting heap of grotesquely shaped wood where an unliving abomination of hate and pain had been.

  The effects of Fenix’s spell had fallen over the toppled treants around them too, turning their torsos into inanimate decaying logs and their claws into brittle, ashen branches. The battlemage fell to his knees, gasping for breath. Raphael stood between him and the remaining monsters, who were now turning around to face them. Eliza resumed her position behind his left shoulder, sword at the ready.

  Fenix produced a small vial from his leathers and crushed it in his fist. A glittering, multi-colored cloud of powder enveloped the battlemage, before spiraling into his Spell Vectors at his forehead, heart, and abdomen. Fenix grunted and climbed to his feet. Chain Lightning crackled into life across his fingertips.

  “Alright. I’m replenished,” Fenix said. “Let’s kill all these monsters and put an end to this.”

  The entire spectacle filled Raphael with unease. Koshi had completely condemned the use of Spell Dust, but unlike him and Raphael, Fenix didn’t have any Draconic Braziers to draw strength from. The battlemage had also fought valiantly alongside Raphael.

  It’s not my place to say anything, Raphael thought. He gave the battlemage a grim nod and adjusted his grip on his glaive.

  “No! What have you done?” a high, scratchy voice shrieked. Raphael glanced to his right. The Death Druid was glaring down at them from atop the dam. He was definitely an elf, with a face bearing similarly delicate arches and angles as Sylvia’s. Black veins lined his cheeks, and a desperate mania burned in his dark eyes.

  Up close, Raphael immediately noticed that the Death Druid didn’t have his Spell Vectors open. That could only mean one thing: he was using True Magic.