Dragonmancer

by Simon Archer

  “Blake!” Gale yelled. I could hear her footsteps quickly approaching and spun around. That is when I realized I was clutching the Living History Journal to my chest with an iron grip. “Are you okay?”

  She rushed to my side, reaching out as if to help hold me up. I jerked away from her almost-touch and glared at her.

  “Why?” I screamed. “Why did you let them do that to her!” I wasn’t screaming at Gale, though. I was screaming at myself.

  “Do what?” she said, worry dripping off every word. “Blake, come sit down.” I caught her look and saw how scared she was, and it calmed me somehow.

  “I have to go help her,” I yelled. I began frantically looking for the door. Everything in me needed to leave and go find the dragon being attacked.

  “Blake!” Gale finally screamed back at me. “She’s not there!” Her words stopped me in my tracks, and a new kind of anger coursed through me.

  “How do you know?” I yelled back, my fury directed at her for halting my mission.

  “Because everything that is in that book has already happened!” she replied, trying to explain without being combative. I could tell she saw the rage bubbling under my skin.

  “You said the book could indicate what was to come!” I wasn’t giving in to her attempts to stop me from saving the dragon.

  “It can provide glimpses of possible events, but only in written form. It writes them out. If you physically saw something, it has already happened.” She pulled out a chair at the nearest table and stood behind it, waiting for me to sit down.

  “There’s no way what I saw was some sort of memory! I felt her!” My heart rate was calming, but I was still panicked at my inability to help.

  “I can help you sort things out, but you need to sit down and tell me what you saw,” she said, lowering her voice considerably.

  There was something in her tone that caught my attention. She almost sounded jealous. I looked down at the book clutched to my chest and took a deep breath. The reality that I was in the Reflection Room, and even if I got out, would have no idea where to go, sank in. I didn’t know where the cliff was, or where the cave was.

  I pulled the book out to look at the pages. They had writing on them then, where there was none before. I stared at the dark black ink and realized it appeared more and more as I stared at it. I couldn’t read the words, however. They looked like they were in a different language. I looked back to Gale and the chair she had pulled out for me, and suddenly I was exhausted.

  Slowly, I went to Gale and sat down, laying the book on the table in front of me, still not taking my hands off it.

  12

  “I was there, Gale,” I finally spoke after a long silence. “I saw them hurting her.” It took everything I had not to give in to the despair that was quickly replacing my anger.

  “Who did you see?” Gale asked gently. I opened my mouth to tell her, but realized I didn’t know the dragon.

  “She was an absolutely breathtaking creature,” I said softly, remembering the way she shone in the light.

  “A dragon?” Gale asked, surprised. It dawned on me she thought I was talking about saving a woman.

  “Yes, a dragon. She was bluish-silver and white and tinted purple and was so much larger than any of the other dragons I’ve seen so far. And, she was so powerful, and gentle at the same time,” I tried to explain her to Gale. The more I said, the whiter Gale’s face turned.

  “Airmed,” she whispered, more to herself than me.

  “What?” I spat out.

  “The dragon you described sounds like Airmed,” she answered quickly. “She is indeed a special beast.”

  “Why were they doing that to her?” I asked, searching Gale’s face for answers.

  “What were they doing?” I had again forgotten she had no idea what I’d seen.

  “The men. They were binding her. They had to cut her and pummel her with boulders to subdue her. She fought as best she could, but there were too many of them,” I summed it up for her. Gale’s eyes teared up instantly, but there were conflicting emotions on her face. She seemed happy and desperately sad at the same time. “What is going on, Gale?”

  “We didn’t know what happened to her,” Gale whispered. She stared back into my eyes. “She just disappeared suddenly. One year she was here, the next she wasn’t, and she’s never appeared since then.”

  “What do you mean, ‘appeared’?” I asked, craving information.

  “Airmed is our Healing Dragon,” Gale started. “She’s an elusive dragon, and we’d only see her once per year. Our realm celebrates its good fortune, strength, and health with a three-day festival in her honor. We take offerings of raw meat, vegetables, and fruits to the mouth of her cave and lay them out over rock piles. Then, she would emerge and bless them with fire, cooking the food. The entire realm would feast, and good health would be bestowed upon us for the next year. The attack on the realm, ninety years ago, was when she disappeared. None of us ever considered she might have been under attack as well, being as powerful as she was. Most simply thought she’d revoked her willingness to heal and provide ongoing health.”

  “There was nothing willing about where she went, or what happened to her,” I replied. “Did you look for her?”

  “For decades, we searched. We had zero clues as to where she went. We swept the mountain top where her cave is located clean. We could tell that she had been out of her cave, but it simply appeared that she brushed the dirt behind her as she retreated inside. When we tried to enter the cave, a magical fire blocked the entrance, every time.” Gale’s eyes glazed over, and I could see that she remembered, not just retold what others had seen.

  “If she was breathing fire out of the cave, why did you think she left?” I wasn’t clear on what she was getting at just yet.

  “She wasn’t breathing fire. The flames at the cave opening are enchanted to keep everybody out. We had sentries posted there for years, to make certain she wasn’t inside. She never appeared, and eventually, so much time passed that she would’ve had to emerge to hunt just for her own survival. She never did, and we determined that whatever was in the cave wasn’t her.” Emotion laced Gale’s words, mostly sadness.

  “Is there something specific about her lair that would make somebody want to keep everybody else out?” I wanted to know. There was no reason to spell the cave with fire if there wasn’t something valuable inside.

  “The only thing of value inside would be her, of course, and any scales she shed,” Gale started. “Her scales, if prepared properly in a specific potion, extend life.” Realization flowed over me.

  “That explains how you are talking about something that happened ninety years ago, as though you were there. You were there, even though you look barely old enough to have had grandparents through that time.” I wondered how old everybody I’d met since falling through the portal was.

  “I was there, yes,” Gale answered. “That won’t be the case with the next generation of Warriors and Witnesses, however. The realm is dangerously low on our supply of Airmed’s scales. Soon, we will all begin to age normally, as you do.” She didn’t sound afraid of aging, just disappointed.

  “The only way to replenish is to check Airmed’s cave, which you can’t get into because of the magic fire,” I recapped to make certain I was absorbing the information correctly.

  “Exactly,” Gale replied. At that moment, the strength and resolve I’d felt from Airmed bubbled up throughout me.

  “I’m going to get through that fire,” I said, not realizing I had spoken at first.

  “How are you going to do that? You’ve barely just found out who you are. Dragonmancers go through years of training before having full command over their powers. Plus, you have powers we’ve never seen before, so we don’t know how to teach you how to control them, or even use them for that matter.”

  She seemed flustered and hopeful at the same time. I was about to argue with her when my right arm flipped over in front of me. It was resting
on the journal, but now it was underside-up. In the lightly filled-in second circle, two small figures appeared.

  “What are those?” Gale sat up at attention when it happened. One image was very clearly a flame. The other was the silhouette of a person on a flying dragon.

  “I think they are my choices for my skill enhancement,” I replied, excitedly. “I am leveling up for some reason.”

  “Of course you are.” Gale smiled and nodded her head. “You’ve accepted, into your heart, a mission of massive importance, that comes with a huge amount of danger. I heard it in your voice.”

  I stared at the images on my arm, pondering what to choose.

  “If I’m going to need to get past magical flames, I think it’s best to upgrade my knowledge of fire first,” I said, knowing I needed to choose between the figures.

  “That is a perfectly logical thought process,” Gale agreed, smiling a little. I touched the fire figure on my arm then, and the dragon image disappeared immediately. The flame image started to grow and was soon touching the edges of the circle. Instead of crossing over it, however, the image squeezed in on itself, slowly blackening in the circle. As the circle filled, my arm grew hotter until it seemed I was holding a flame directly to the circle. Just before I felt the desire to call out in pain, the circle completed the darkening, and the heat faded.

  I thought the process to be complete, but I was wrong. My neck stiffened, my eyes flew open, and I began to absorb information from an unknown source, directly into my mind. In a split second, I learned everything there was to know about fire magic.

  “Whoa!” I hollered after the knowledge dump was complete. “That was intense!” My mind was reeling with the spells, incantations, scientific facts, and observations collected over the span of centuries in Blenwise.

  “It looked like it from the expressions on your face!” Gale said, laughing slightly. “I can’t imagine to the extent, though!” Her words made me pause as an idea formed.

  “Gale, you seem to be the most highly educated person in Blenwise, am I right?”

  “Yes, that’s true. I have a wide range of knowledge, whereas most specialize,” she answered matter-of-factly.

  “You should have the ability to level up as well,” I stated flatly. I was almost disappointed in myself for not offering to grant her the ability to do so earlier.

  “Yes, I think I should. Especially since I’m tasked with having to teach you!” She was partially joking, but I was happy she hadn’t tried to act all shy about it. Without another word, and finally lifting my arm from the book, I took her hand in mine.

  “You can now receive increased levels of knowledge, talent, and abilities as you advance through your life,” I said, stumbling over my words a little. I decided to try something a little closer to what had worked on Fitz and Ben. “You can level up.” I let go of Gale’s hand and sat back. She immediately turned her arm over just in time to see her own circle appear, but just one.

  “That’s a little warm, isn’t it?” she said, fascinated. “What do I do now?” I shrugged my shoulders and chuckled.

  “I barely have any more experience with this than you do!” I told her. “It seems to happen when we accomplish something. I don’t know how this power determines what a success is exactly, though.” Rubbing her new circle, she smiled.

  “I’m looking forward to finding out!” She shrugged her shoulders and looked around the room. “Now I just want to learn something new to see if obtaining knowledge is a bonus-maker.”

  “It may be! We’ll find out!” I laughed. “But, before we do that, what else do I need to see in this book? To be honest, I’m not sure why I was shown Airmed’s turmoil, to begin with.”

  “I don’t think it was a mere show and tell. I think the book wanted you to know about your connection with her,” Gale said softly.

  When I cocked my head at her, unsure what she meant, she tried to explain further. “The way you were immersed completely in that experience, plus the other emotions that you came out of it with… There’s no way that you could have felt all that unless you had some sort of bond with her. I saw it on your face and could hear it through your screams. It gives me hope that she is still alive.”

  My admiration for Gale grew just then. She was smart, but she also possessed a kind of intuition that not everybody had.

  “Yes, we do share some sort of crazy bond. I have no idea why, however,” I replied, shrugging my shoulders.

  “These things tend to reveal themselves eventually,” she commented, standing up from her chair. “I think this is probably enough for the day.” I noticed the fatigue she felt just then.

  “Can I come back to look at the book?” I didn’t want it out of my sight.

  “Of course, but right now, it is probably a good idea to eat. We’ve skipped lunch and headed straight into after-dinner hours. I’ll have some food sent to your room again. Tomorrow, we will try to get you a meal in the actual meal hall.” She smiled at me.

  I stood, picked up the book, and followed Gale as she walked to the podium. I set the book down and took a step back. Gale flicked her fingers at the book as though she was sprinkling water on it. Immediately, the purple smoke began to filter out of the pages of the book and engulf the top of the podium. The smoke faded into a glowing light and then disappeared, taking the book with it. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I noticed how drained I was, and how hungry.

  “That food is sounding like a better idea with each passing second,” I said just as my stomach rumbled loudly. Gale giggled and looped her arm through mine.

  “How about steak? Do you like steak?” She guided me back to the door we’d entered the room through and opened it.

  “Steak is perfect,” I answered as we left.

  13

  As I’d expected, the steak Gale had sent up was excellent, but the nightmare quickly overshadowed the joy I’d had eating it. It came back every time I tried to close my eyes and go to sleep. It was a replay of my vision of Airmed. Each time it came to me, the focus was on a different area. Once it was under her legs, another was near the mouth of the cave. I relived the vision but kept putting the magnifying glass on certain parts of it. By the time morning rolled around, the only thing I had figured out was that I must’ve missed something important when watching her being attacked. I kept replaying the vision, and the dreams over in my mind until I heard a knock at my door.

  “Hey! It’s Fitz!” he said before I had a chance to get to the door.

  “Coming,” I hollered as I slipped my last boot on. I tied the laces and went to open the door. Fitz was leaning against the wall on the other side of the hallway, dramatically pretending to be inpatient.

  “You take longer to get ready than a Witness!” he joked.

  “I’ve only been awake for ten minutes,” I objected, laughing with him. I glanced up and down the hallway. “No Gale this morning?”

  “I haven’t seen her,” Fitz replied. “Now, let’s get some damn food before I waste away to nothing!”

  I nodded, closed the door to my room, and we headed off to the meal hall.

  When we got there, we made it all the way through the buffet line, and to our seats, before Gale appeared. She got herself some food and joined us.

  “Good morning, Blake, Fitz,” she said as she took her seat.

  “Oh, Gale! I see you have a circle on your wrist too!” Fitz called out excitedly.

  “Shhh!” Gale hushed him immediately.

  “Oh, sorry,” Fitz immediately whispered. “Is it a secret?”

  “Until I presented him officially to the Academy and town leaders, yes,” Gale replied without sounding upset.

  “When is that going to be?” I asked her. “And, what does it involve?”

  “Tomorrow, and every Dragonmancer’s presentation is different. You won’t know until it happens,” she answered.

  Fitz chuckled and put down the bacon he’d just taken a bite out of.

  “That sounds like somet
hing you should worry about,” he told me, reaching over to slap me on the shoulder.

  “I don’t know if there’s anything I shouldn’t be worried about right now,” I laughed. Gale took a sip of her coffee and set the cup gently on the table, then looked at me intently.

  “You didn’t sleep well, did you?” Her brow went up as a warning not to glaze over the truth.

  “No, not at all, but I’m alright. I’ll catch up tonight,” I told her. It wasn’t as though I hadn’t ever had a sleepless night before.

  “Here,” she started, holding her hand, palm-up, to me. She closed her hand into a fist and opened it up again. There was a small vial of liquid lying on her palm. “Drink this. It will help you be a little more alert today.”

  “What is it?” I wasn’t comfortable drinking some magic potion I knew nothing about.

  “Oh, that’s wreathweed juice, isn’t it?” Fitz said, looking to Gale to see if he had identified the elixir correctly.

  “Yes, it is. Very good, Fitz,” Gale answered.

  “Yeah, take it, buddy. There’s nothing weird about it. It just peps you up,” Fitz told me. I took the vial from Gale’s hand and popped open the tiny cork on top.

  “If this makes me start bouncing off the walls like a crackhead, it’s your fault,” I said to the two of them, and poured the liquid in my mouth. It was mildly bitter, but not too bad. “There. Done.”

  “Good, now you will have the energy for today,” Gale said, looking satisfied.

  “What is today?” I was already feeling the effects of the strange liquid. I was suddenly way more alert and focused.

  “You will be choosing your dragon today,” she replied, smiling slyly. Fitz smacked his hand down on the table.

  “Woohoo! You are going to love that!” he cried out enthusiastically. “I remember when I chose my dragon.”

  “We choose them?” I chuckled at Fitz's excitement and wondered if the guy ever got upset about anything.