“The Queen’s orders were to kill him after we obtained his name. I cannot disobey her…”
“You follow Terrada, Keeper! The Queen is fallible, an important vessel, but not a dragon herself. I will explain to the Queen why he still lives. For now, I suggest you prevent him from using his magic again while I look into the future for more information on what our next step should be.”
Merrick didn’t know what good it would do. All he knew was that his captors didn’t want him saying his name again. He opened his mouth, preparing to speak. From behind him, one of the Keepers stuffed a piece of heavy cloth in his mouth while two other Keepers pulled him to the floor. They acted without orders from their Master or the Queen’s Seer. They acted out of self-preservation, and their actions were effective. He could not speak—only muffled sounds coming from his lips as he desperately tried to say his name aloud.
The rags in his mouth were quickly replaced with a ball gag that was tightly secured with a wet leather tong. Two of the Keepers escorted Merrick back to his cage, his hands tied behind his back. His guards had orders to not let anyone speak to him, and under no circumstances was his gag to be removed.
As Merrick settled down in the direct center of his familiar cell, he struggled to breath deeply through his nose. As his regular breathing calmed him down, he stared into the darkness surrounding his cell. He didn’t know what the Seer had meant about the other part of his name. As far as Merrick was concerned, loss summed him up perfectly and completely. Maybe they would leave him here forever. He would easily die in a few days if unable to drink or eat. Then, his life would be complete and his name would definitely be accurate. He would suffer his final loss, that of his own life. With that thought clearly in his head, he closed his eyes and tried to manage a smile despite his gag. He pictured his own death in a dozen different ways. Each brought a deeper calm—one that he had never known before. The Keepers had confirmed how awful his true nature was. He could no longer hide from what he was. He was what Terrada had made him, nothing more—the living embodiment of loss. His breathing continued to slow, as he drifted into a sweet slumber, the burdens and responsibilities of the world around him floating away like ripples in a pond.
#
Balach was sure that he had heard Merrick’s voice passing outside of his room earlier. When he had gone to the door to look, all he had seen was a group of Fianna and Keepers walking hurriedly. Had Merrick discovered his name so quickly? Sudden hope filled him.
If Merrick had remembered his name, then he must be close to being ready to stand against his brother, Eudroch. Perhaps with Eudroch vanquished and the prophecy annulled, the two families of Earth and Fire might end their centuries-old feud. Balach and Firefly could be together and live with the Earth Clan, or maybe even settle in a community founded by both of their peoples.
Now he understood why he had not yet been given any of the tests the Master Keeper promised him. The Keepers were too busy with something more important than Balach—the name that would save the world. Balach was happy to take second priority to such a pursuit. He only wished that the Keepers would verify his name and that he would be free to join in the battle. Balach’s name may have stood for true love, but he was still willing to fight fiercely for his clan, his family, and the safety of the woman he loved.
Resigning himself to wait, Balach sat down on the stone bench in his room, joyful at the thought of Merrick, his honorary brother, discovering his true identity. Balach lay down on his side, curling his knees up to his stomach. As he fell asleep, he thought of how wonderful life would be when he and his bride could sit with his father and Merrick and talk about life over piping hot bowls of his mother’s aromatic soup. Soon, Merrick and he would both be full members of the clan, and together they would grow old, as brothers. Balach’s father would be proud of both his sons.
As Balach was almost fully asleep, he sat up with a start. He felt sick, like he had suddenly lost everything of value to him in one wrenching moment. Balach thought that he heard the echoes of an unknown word floating through the hallway outside his room—a word of desperation and hopelessness. Unable to sleep, Balach stared at the empty wall of his cell, trying to regain his lost joy.
Shortly, Balach heard shuffling footsteps outside his door, moving toward the exit to the Keepers’ Chambers. He wondered for a brief moment about who was passing, but for some reason, he could not muster the motivation to stand up and look.
CHAPTER 34
MERRICK DREAMT of Mona back home in Virginia. The two of them were on a date—a real date, at the end of which, they shared a kiss. But, even in his sleep, he knew that the kiss wasn’t real, that Mona was lost to him, far away from his current situation. He desperately hoped that if he kept the dream going, he could somehow magically tell her all the things that he wished they had done together.
Merrick and Mona’s embrace suddenly dissolved in the wake of Cara’s sweet voice. Cara was forbidden, but since it was only a dream, he let Mona fade as he turned to face his beautiful half sister.
When he looked for Cara, she was not there. Only her voice remained. It grew louder and louder, until he felt himself coming out of his murky dream state and back into the cold reality of his suspended stone cage. When he opened his eyes, Cara was standing on the other side of the stone bars of his cage. Merrick instinctively tried to speak, but his voice came out muffled, his mouth still filled with the Keepers’ gag.
“Just stay where you are, Merrick. Turn away and cover your eyes. I’m going to get you out of there.”
He tried to do as he was told but could not because his hands were still tied behind his back. He shook his head as if to apologize to Cara and then simply turned his head away as far as it would go and closed his eyes.
After waiting a couple of seconds, he cautiously snuck a peek at Cara. Her own eyes were closed as she held the bars of his cage with clenched fists. Her brow was set in furious concentration as she softly repeated a phrase from the Earth Dragon’s tongue over and over again.
Finally, she opened her eyes, looking exhausted, and turned away.
“I can’t get these opened. I don’t know what kind of magic is holding all of this in place, but it must be using more than one dragon tongue, which makes no sense. We’re in the clan of the Earth Dragon. There shouldn’t be any other dragon magic allowed here.”
He nodded his head in understanding. He wanted to explain that he had come to the same conclusion earlier when his massive lightning storm did nothing to weaken his prison. He wanted to tell Cara that the only person he had seen open it was the Queen.
Merrick stretched his bound body and recoiled it until he was right up against the set of bars where Cara stood. He motioned with his head for her to take the ball gag out of his mouth. She knelt down beside him and carefully spoke more words of the Earth Dragon until she was able to work the ball gag out of his mouth. Merrick stretched his mouth open and closed again, trying to moisten the inside of his mouth as he turned around so that Cara could get at his bound hands.
Within a few minutes, he was at least free of his restraints. It took several more minutes for him to be able to stand on his own without relying on the bars for support. As he worked blood back into his limbs, he recounted to Cara all that had happened to him since she had left.
Cara sat back, mouth agape at all that he had been through. When he came to the part about Fenton’s death, her eyes welled up with tears that would not quite fall.
When he had asked her how she had gotten in this close to him, she told him that a sympathetic guard had shown her a back way into the dungeon. Without even asking, he knew that the guard must have been the same one who had first visited him in his cell—Gerald—the one Drayoom he had met who was still loyal to his father, Ohman.
Cara reached through the bars and held him gently by his arm. She looked him in the eyes.
“I don’t know if I can get you out of here, but there’s something that you need to know before we try—about
Ohman.”
“We can talk about it later,” he said. “I’ve had some time to accept that we have the same father, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to calling you sister.”
Cara smiled sadly. Despite their relations, Merrick couldn’t help but marvel at how wonderful she looked, kneeling there in front of him. It was all for the better, he thought, because he could never hope to have someone that beautiful.
Cara took a deep breath.
“Ohman is…dead, Merrick. And, I know he cared for you very much, but…he wasn’t your father.”
Merrick was not sure what he had just heard. He looked at her, questioningly.
“How…”
“It was Eudroch, back at Rune Corp.”
“And he told you that he wasn’t my father?”
“He left me a message in a piece of divinium. It gave me his creation name and showed me images from his life, including the day he found you and Eudroch—the day he…rescued you from your mother.”
“You don’t rescue a baby from its mother,” Merrick said, his face turning slightly red as he tried to digest everything he was hearing.
“You do when the mother was his wife, the Earth Queen.”
Merrick could barely speak.
He slumped down to a sitting position on the stone floor. He felt sick to his stomach. How could it be true that the Queen was his mother? He wanted it to be a lie, but even as he pondered it, he knew that somehow it was true.
He was the son of the treasonous Queen, not the son of the noble and wise Ohman. And his true father? Had he been some warrior of lower rank or maybe the King of the Fire Tribe himself? He might not ever know for sure. The Queen had lied about catching Ohman with a woman from the Fire Tribe. It had been she who had struck a bargain with Sigela, not Ohman. No one in the clan knew about it, because if anyone found out, she’d be dethroned or killed—and lying about Ohman gave her an ironclad excuse to turn the Earth Clan against their former Ard Righ. It all made sense.
Merrick wondered what else she had been lying about.
“Even if he wasn’t my real father, I still I wish I had been able to spend more time with him. I’ve been afraid of Eudroch, but now I hate him and want to see him dead.”
Cara looked at Merrick and motioned him to her. She examined him through the bars closely in the dim light she had conjured.
“You look so old,” she said softly, still looking at his face. “Didn’t they teach you that every time you use your internal magic without using your craft that you lose a little bit of your life force—that you have to master your craft and either use the power of your name or take a little bit from everything around you instead of draining everything from yourself?”
“Fenton taught me how to ask the earth around me for power. But, the Keepers only confirmed my name yesterday, or at least part of it. Besides, I don’t feel any older,” he said, as he touched the ridges of his face with his slightly shaking hands.
“Stop using your name until we can verify it back at Rune. Something’s wrong if your creation name is having this effect on you. If you don’t stop using so much of your internal magic, you won’t live long enough to meet, much less fight Eudroch.”
“You don’t need to verify anything,” he said, pulling away from her slightly. “My name means eternal loss. I know it does. It explains everything in my life up to this point. You’re all that I have left that I would even care about losing—you and Balach. You have to leave me here to my own fate. You can’t get me out, and you can’t do anything against all of the Queen’s Fianna and the Keepers. You have to get Balach and leave while you still can.”
“First, I’m not alone,” she said, nodding to the cavern walls that suddenly seemed to have human shapes moving within them. “Second, we’re here to take you back to Rune Corp. My people are reinforcing the wards back there so it will be safe. When they’re through, only a dragon will be able to enter without the key.”
“What key are you talking about?” Merrick asked.
“My father’s creation name. Eudroch will never get through. We’ll have plenty of time back at Rune for you to learn more of your craft and to prepare for him. I should never have let father send you here. We should have trained you at Rune right from the start. None of this would have happened.”
“Cara, if I had stayed at Rune, who knows what might have happened. Maybe we would have been safe from Eudroch, but that doesn’t mean that you would have been safe from me. I’m telling you that my name scares me with the power it calls on. I don’t even know how it works, but it’s enough to make the Keepers here shake with fright.”
Merrick and Cara both turned from their conversation as the roar of distant cracks of thunder filled the cave. The sounds were muffled, but Merrick could tell that they came from inside the mountain. Before the sounds of thunder could die down, the ground around them began to shake, and boulders and stone fragments began falling from higher up in the cavern. He could see the shapes of Cara’s team, scrambling around inside the rock walls, trying to avoid being shaken loose from the stone in which they were hidden.
“I have to get you out of here, Merrick.”
“You said the cage was protected by the magic from two dragons, right? Well, I have the magic of two dragons inside me, and I’m about to release them both. Get your people out of here right now, and I’ll catch up with you. Trust me.”
Whether it was the force of his command or her acknowledgement of the futility of her endeavor, Cara ran to the door, her team stepping out from within the walls to join her. As they filed out of the cavern, she turned back to look at him once more before closing the door.
Merrick was alone, where no one could get hurt except himself. His name meant loss, and he was about to inflict his personal curse on the Queen, his mother, with all of his heart. Nothing was going to stop him from escaping, even if he had to use every bit of his internal power to do so.
He closed his eyes, and firmed his stance, getting ready to release his magic. The rage of the lightning storm easily gathered inside and around him, straining to be unleashed. He held back his fury with all of his will, while he searched deeper than ever before, looking for Terrada’s magic that slumbered within him as well. It was there, an immovable object, rooted down at his feet, solid, but not offering up any of its energy to join with that of Sigela’s.
He silently asked once more for Terrada’s help.
None came.
Then he remembered that the two dragons were opposites and so probably was their power. The energy from the lightning was easy to understand, but the magic from the earth was different, subtler, yet just as strong. Instead of trying to hurl his Earth Magic, Merrick relaxed and divided his mind into two parts—one for Sigela and one for Terrada.
In his mind, he touched and greeted the earth inside his own being much like he had introduced himself to the mountain wall that had become his home. Gradually, a tiny part and then a full half of him was immersed in his Earth Magic. He felt the mighty potential for energy that rested in the ground—the opposite of the kinetic energy of lightning—but waiting to be released—building up electron by electron, waiting, poised for release. Just as he could hold back his lightning no longer, he felt the awesome buildup from his Earth Magic rise to equal that of the electrical discharge that he barely contained.
His teeth were barred—all his muscles tense—as he finally opened his mouth and quietly spoke his creation name.
There was a split second pause where all was silent, and then the world erupted around him. Lightning arced through the cavern, and the walls quaked, joining in the cacophony of the thunder.
Merrick watched as the bars of his cell crumbled to dust. He had been right—the prison was constructed using both Fire and Earth Magic, but had not been designed to hold someone who wielded both. Finally, he was free.
The land bridge was almost completely in ruins as he leapt onto it. He ran as lightly as possible, dodging falling rock. With each step, t
he surface collapsed behind him. He knew he could not slow down or he would fall into the depths of the cave. With a final jump, he landed safely on the walkway by the door to the cave.
He motioned with his hand, and a bolt of lightning incinerated the door. He passed through the cloud of wood dust and into the hallway outside.
Although there was no one there to meet him, he could hear loud shouts down the hall. He ran toward the noise and was soon standing outside in the familiar area surrounding the royal section of the city.
Nothing made sense at first.
He saw Fianna and Keepers running about while dark-skinned men ran at them with their hands in the air. Lightning and thunder filled the space, as did giant waves of land rising up and then collapsing on top of intruder after intruder. Merrick noticed that the interlopers looked to be of the same race as Firefly.
He ducked behind a large boulder, trying to figure out how he could help the members of the clan. He briefly thought of Cara, but didn’t see her or her team anywhere. He started to call forth his Fire Magic, but then stopped. He had learned how to tap his substantial reserves, but he still didn’t know how to control his power well enough to not harm those around him who were his allies.
He had to fight, but for now he would have to do so the old fashioned way, without magic.
Spotting a fallen Fianna, Merrick rolled across the ground, landing close enough to pry the man’s sword from his death grip. He had to hold the sword in both hands because it was so heavy. As he turned, he saw one of the attackers running up to him. When the man saw Merrick, he stopped abruptly, screaming something to his tribesmen close enough to hear. Merrick lifted his sword and let the edge of it come down hard on top of the man’s skull. His weapon cut clean through him, silencing his yells, and bit into the ground at his feet. Merrick was off balance from the strike, but quickly regained a fighting stance, although no new attackers approached.
The Conservation of Magic Page 30
