Smoke and Shadow: An Epic Fantasy Progression Series (The Dragon Thief Book 3)

by D. K. Holmberg

  “It’s because the dragon needs something from you. You’re a part of it, much like it will become a part of you. Once you master that connection, you will come to understand that is the key.”

  “And what if I can’t master it?”

  “Eventually, you will gain control, but the challenge is whether or not you will do so in the time necessary to fully understand how to use that power. I’m afraid that given the threat of the imposter Order of the Flame, you don’t have the time that you want, nor do you have the time that you need.”

  He closed his eyes and thought for a moment, focusing on the power within him. That energy of the smoke was there, and it was real. It was just a matter of finding it, as it was deep within him. He tried to hold onto that connection, trying to find some piece of that power that might provide him with an answer.

  “I can’t find anything,” he said at last. “The dragon only seems to react when I’m under duress. When I’m threatened.” Even that wasn’t entirely true. The dragon hadn’t offered his protection all the time, only a little bit of the time. Not enough to be able to depend on it, and certainly not enough to have any real control over it. “What is it you do to gain control over your dragon?”

  “My connection to the dragon came a long time ago,” Gayal said. “I told you I was young. It came differently than yours did. I didn’t even know that I had connected to the dragon, only that there was something there, some sort of power that bridged within me.” She closed her eyes, turning her head away from him, and he had a feeling that she was either looking away from him or she was lost in thought. “I didn’t know what it was. For a long time, I didn’t. I simply thought that there was something off with me.”

  “Why would you have thought that?”

  “Simply because I didn’t understand.” She took a deep breath, letting it out, and the dark shadows swirled around her for a moment. “There was a time when I believed I would be able to use the shadows in order to hide myself. I didn’t want anyone to know what I could do, and I feared what it meant for me. I thought I was the only one in my homeland to have this kind of connection. It was difficult for me to be there, difficult for me to have that connection, and difficult for me to know just what I was supposed to do with it.” She shrugged and went on.

  “Even now, I have times when I’m not entirely sure what I am supposed to do with this connection. I’m serving the king, but what happens when I’m gone?” The dragon floated around her, moving for a moment before settling again. “Dragons live longer than humans. Dorian tells me not to worry, though I still do. I still question what will happen to the dragon once I’m dead.”

  Ty hadn’t given any thought to that, though at the same time, he hadn’t known that he had any real connection to dragons before. “What if the dragon decides it can’t work with me?”

  “I don’t think that will be the case. Eventually, the dragon will find a way to work with you, though it may be a bit different than what you would prefer.” Gayal smiled at him. “And eventually, I suspect you and the dragon will come to terms with what that power means for you and how you use it. My fear is that it won’t happen nearly as quickly as what we need. You and the dragon need to connect to each other. It’s a shared connection, a shared sort of power, and when the two of you can work together, that is when you are more powerful. One does not serve the other, regardless of what Dorian may have told you.”

  “And so if I can convince the dragon to work with me?”

  She chuckled. “Again, it’s not so much a matter of convincing the dragon to work with you as it is a matter of trying to find the connection that the two of you share so that the dragon gets what it needs and you get what you need.”

  He sat in place, eyes closed, focusing on that strange sort of energy. There was something there, he was certain of it, only he had no idea what it was or how to reach for it. If he could find it, then he wouldn’t have to worry about what would happen with this dragon. He wouldn’t have to worry about how the power worked. He wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not he would be enough for the dragon.

  Ty continued to focus.

  It was the fluttering within him. It was that energy that he knew existed, a sort of energy that was there that told him the dragon tried to reach out to him, to connect to him, and he had felt it.

  Only, he couldn’t move past the idea that the dragon had let him down.

  That was the part that troubled him the most. If the dragon would react to him and provide him with some information as to why it hadn’t helped him when he’d been attacked by the false Order of the Flame, then maybe he could move beyond that, but for now he struggled knowing that the dragon hadn’t been willing to help.

  He lost track of how long he sat there, focusing on that energy, trying to come up with an answer as to how to connect to the dragon. After a while, he opened his eyes, looking over at Gayal.

  The shadows swirled around her, obscuring everything but her face. Even that looked to be cast a little bit in the darkness and the shadows.

  “Do we need to worry about the Order and Dorian, and even Albion—if he’s going in the same direction—outrunning us?”

  “They may stay ahead of us, but we will follow the dragons.”

  If Dorian had gone after them, and knowing the connection that he had to the dragons, he suspected she was right. They wouldn’t have to worry.

  What about his brother?

  Zara had given him the strange dragon relic that would supposedly offer him the ability to track his brother, though as he felt for it, he didn’t detect anything within the relic.

  It should vibrate, only it didn’t.

  He finished the meat that Gayal had given him, and after a while he got to his feet and headed over to look at the tree. It was strange and unusual, twisted, much like the dragons that he connected to. Much like the dragons within the kingdom.

  It was strange.

  He turned to Gayal. “Why are the kingdom’s dragons so different?”

  She opened her eyes, looking over to him. “As far as I know, the king has searched for those answers for many years. It has been difficult for him to understand. It doesn’t make sense that we would not be able to find dragons like those of old. It makes little sense that there are only these stunted dragons, but unfortunately this is all we have found. There is something missing. Some aspect. Perhaps even some part of the Flame.”

  Ty frowned. “What do you mean some aspect of the Flame?”

  “The priests believe that there is one destined to understand the Flame in ways that others do not. A connection. Perhaps it is tied to this.”

  “The Manifestation of the Flame,” Ty said softly.

  Gayal looked over to him, frowning. “You know of it.”

  “My brother has mentioned it. You think this is what’s needed for the dragons to return?”

  “I’m just saying what some have speculated,” she said.

  “And then there are others who think that we simply haven’t found the right connection to the dragons and haven’t found any way to help them hatch the way that they need.” She shrugged. “Not all dragons are like that, though. Some are more traditional.”

  “Not that we’ve seen,” he said.

  “Not that we’ve seen, though we have evidence of them, don’t we? There have been plenty of dragons depicted in the ancient relics that show us that the people who came before us had access to dragons that are more like that. If we could better understand it, and if we could better understand those dragons, we might know what we are missing.”

  “The king has scholars studying that,” Ty said.

  Gayal nodded. “He does. And none have uncovered anything, which is why the Hatchery has not attempted to hatch any additional eggs.”

  “That’s the only reason?” Ty asked, arching a brow at her. He touched the bark of the tree and found that it was strangely warm. It felt something like the dragon bone, as if the tree had been carved out of dragon bone, burned,
and left behind.

  “We don’t know.”

  “And by we, you mean the Tecal.”

  She nodded. “The dragons we find are incidental, different than those that the kingdom would hatch. The dragons we have are unique in their own sort of way, and none are like the ones that the king has within his Hatchery.”

  “And you haven’t given much thought to why that would be, in order to better understand the dragons. Don’t you want to know them?”

  “Of course we want to know them. The difference is that those dragons are not the kind of dragons we have. Those dragons are not the kind of dragons that we can connect to. They won’t provide us with any sort of useful powers.”

  “Useful?” It seemed an odd way to describe the connection to the dragons. Why would they describe it as something useful or not useful?

  “Those dragons have not been able to bond to any of the Tecal, Ty. Because of that, there is nothing useful to them, at least not for us.”

  “The Dragon Touched can use them, though.”

  “No,” Gayal said. “The Dragon Touched use the remnants, nothing more than that. They don’t have access to that kind of power, and until those dragons can be accessed, and until that power can be harnessed, they aren’t able to assist the king.”

  He stared at the tree, troubled thoughts filling him. There was something more to it that he didn’t fully understand, though perhaps he wasn’t meant to.

  Maybe he shouldn’t worry. Gayal seemed to have a good handle on what was taking place, though now that he was better connected and started to feel as if he had something that he needed from them—and that they needed from him—he wondered whether or not he should be more concerned.

  She got to her feet, holding out her arm, waiting for him.

  The shadows swirled around her and then wrapped around him, enveloping them. For a moment, he worried about those shadows and how they might pull upon him, but then they looped all the way around him and moved, shifting the same way as they had shifted before. There was a strange energy to it, no different than it had been when they had done it the last time, the odd shifting quality of the way that they traveled carrying him up and then farther from here.

  As they were moving, he felt something strange. He wasn’t sure what it was, only that he was aware of it. It felt as if some part deep inside of him were guiding them.

  He found Gayal watching him.

  “It’s the dragon,” he said softly.

  “It is. Your dragon has guided us.”

  Gayal looked at him. In this form, traveling as they did, the effect was odd. It was almost as if she were looking at him through shadows that swept around her face, making her features difficult to fully make out, but at the same time he could feel something was off. That was what bothered him.

  “They aren’t in the south.”

  They stopped moving.

  The shadows swirled away and great plumes of smoke and fog drifted onto the horizon. They hadn’t been traveling very long. He’d never been this far south. Gayal would keep him safe navigating through the steam swamp, but Ty had a feeling that even if she didn’t do so entirely, he could use the connection to his dragon in order to guide them.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I…” He shook his head. “I’m not entirely sure. I can feel something…” Ty shook his head again. “I don’t know what it is. All I know is I feel it.”

  And feeling it left him worried that there was something he had overlooked.

  He turned out toward the steam swamp.

  “Do they always look like this?”

  “Not always,” Gayal said. “The last time I was here, they were clearer. You would get plumes of steam, and then they would erupt, geysers of hot water and steam and occasionally ash, as if it were a volcano erupting.”

  “This just looks like a fog that hovers over it.”

  Gayal frowned. “It does. And something isn’t quite right.”

  She started away from him, and somehow the shadows swept around her feet, almost as if providing a buffer underneath her.

  Ty looked down to see that she was standing on a roadway of hard-packed earth, but he worried that if he were to take a step in either direction he would get too close to one of the steam swamp’s vents. The air stunk, a strange odor that he had never experienced. In the upper reaches of Ishantil, near the lava lake, there was a distinct sulfuric smell to the air there, but this was something else.

  He followed Gayal a few steps before he couldn’t go any farther.

  The road simply ended.

  “I can’t go after you,” he said.

  “Wait there,” she said without looking back.

  Gayal drifted farther from him, going deeper into the steam swamp, until both the steam and the shadow surrounding him prevented him from seeing anything more.

  Ty waited.

  While he did, he tried to understand what had troubled him. He had felt something while they were traveling. Maybe it was the smoke dragon. Could the smoke dragon have some way of connecting to him and sharing with him what it detected?

  Probably, but it involved the dragon having a willingness to share, and he didn’t have the feeling from the dragon that it did. Whatever he had detected was something else. Ty closed his eyes, focusing on the smoke dragon.

  There was a fluttering, little more than that, but then nothing. It was almost as if the dragon didn’t want him to know that he was there—or he was afraid.

  That was possible. Given what they had gone through already, and what they were doing now, maybe the dragon feared facing the fake Order of the Flame.

  Why would it, though? Did the dragon think that the fake Order of the Flame would be able to extinguish its power?

  They had the dauvern, so that was certainly a possibility, and given that they had already captured the other dragons, maybe that was what had happened. The fog parted and Gayal came back, carrying something long, slender, and blackened.

  “What is that? A branch?”

  Her eyes were drawn and there was a haunted look buried within them. “Not a branch,” she said.

  She offered it to him, and Ty took it. It was hot, almost unpleasantly so, though not so hot that he couldn’t hold onto it. He felt along its length, and it reminded him a little bit of the shadow orb that the fake Order of the Flame had used, as if there was a layer of something slick over the surface of…

  “Dragon bone,” he whispered.

  “I think so.”

  “You found it?”

  “When you said it didn’t look right, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. But you’re right. I hadn’t thought enough about it, though I should have. This place has been different in the past.” She looked around for a moment before turning her gaze back to him. “When I was here before, there had been the smoke, but nothing quite like this.” She frowned. “And certainly not anything that spread around like this.” She shook her head, sweeping a hand around her. “And then I found this. There were others like it, all spread around in a small location. It is the remains of a dragon,” she said softly.

  He frowned at her. “Dragon?” He held onto the bone, testing the size, and his breath caught. It was small—much smaller than the dragon bones he’d seen before, and more similar in size to—

  “They wouldn’t have sacrificed one of those dragons,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper.

  “I fear they did.”

  Ty looked up, gazing out over the steam field. “For what reason? What did they think they were doing?”

  Gayal stared at the dragon bone, rolling it in her hand.

  Why?

  “I don’t know. And that worries me.” She frowned. “I don’t think they’re here any longer, either.”

  “That was what I was trying to tell you. I didn’t think that they were here, either, though I didn’t know where they had gone. I had felt that something had shifted, some aspect of energy had changed, and it seemed as if we were heading in the wrong
direction.”

  Unless that wasn’t at all what he had felt. Maybe what he had felt was the change in the steam field, something that had suggested that the energy here was off, some power that would leave him troubled.

  He looked down at the bone. “If the false Order of the Flame was here, then we need to figure out where they’ve gone and keep them from harming any more of the dragons.”

  “We do,” she said softly.

  “Where would they have gone?”

  “I don’t know.” She clenched her jaw and the shadow cloak fluttered around her. “When I got word from Dorian, I knew generally which direction he was going, but I didn’t know how to find him, and now…”

  “We need to use this,” he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out the item that Zara had given him.

  Only, when he did, he realized it was vibrating. That was what he had felt. It wasn’t anything in particular with the steam field or anything that had to do with his connection to the smoke dragon, and everything to do with the artifact that Zara had given him to help find his brother.

  Gayal frowned at it. “What is it?”

  “It’s changing.” He handed it to her “Maybe you can do something with this. I wasn’t able to. It is supposed to help me figure out where my brother has gone, but I can’t feel anything in it other than that there is some sort of energy within it that I need to find. If we can use this…” He had no idea how they were going to use it, no idea how it would even make a difference in finding his brother, only that there was something within it that he thought he should’ve been able to uncover. That was what Zara had expected out of him, but Ty didn’t know what it was or how he was going to be able to find him. The item that Zara had given him was vibrating, which left him thinking that Albion had to be close.

  Either that, or Albion had come through here.

  Gayal took the dragon-bone relic and closed her eyes. The shadows swirled out from her and dove toward the dragon bone before suddenly retreating. She frowned. “I feel it, but I don’t know what it is.” She offered it back to him. “I wonder if maybe you’re the only one who will be able to use it.”