The D'Karon Apprentice

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “No. … She’s not the reason I won’t be lonely, is she?”

  Myranda smiled. “No. But we do need to contact her. This involves her as well.”

  Ivy looked to Myn. “I don’t know if I’m going to like this…”

  Myn lowered her head down beside Ivy and huffed a contented breath, smacking her tongue a bit. Ivy gave her a scratch.

  “I guess we’ll see. Oh!” Ivy said, suddenly realizing something she’d forgotten. “Come on, Myn. Follow me. We finished your stable!”

  Ivy rushed past Myranda and Deacon, the long easy strides of the dragon easily keeping pace with her. “You too, Myranda. And you, Deacon. It’ll only take a minute.”

  She hurried along, Myranda and Deacon in tow. Myranda smiled as Ivy waved a cheerful hello to a pair of carpenters hauling some long planks.

  “Look at her,” Myranda said. “A dragon and a malthrope on the streets of a city in broad daylight. I was worried the day would never come, that Ivy would always have to disguise herself.”

  “It would appear that a hero is a hero, regardless of race,” Deacon said. “Though I understand she didn’t fare so well in her visit to Bydell a few weeks ago.”

  Myranda’s expression hardened a bit. “What happened?”

  “She didn’t tell you?”

  “She said she enjoyed herself.”

  “I’m sure she did, but she did it at night, and behind closed doors. There was an… incident.”

  “I asked you not to tell her,” Ivy called back sternly.

  “What happened? And why didn’t you want me to know?”

  “It was nothing. Some people yelled some things. Some people threw some things. Most of them were children. They didn’t know any better. Or old folks, and they’re too stubborn to change. But never mind that. Look! We just finished this morning!”

  Ivy was standing beside Myranda and Deacon’s home. Before the massacre, it belonged to a carriage driver who delivered mail and supplies from Kenvard to the surrounding cities. As such, attached to it was a rather large coach house. When Myranda had left not three days ago, the front wall was still missing and they had only just raised the struts to repair the roof. Now it was complete, the air still strong with the smell of fresh thatch and wet paint. The door was a bright, cheery red and the walls were gray stone.

  “It’s just the way I remember it,” Myranda said, her eyes getting misty at the sight of an image from her youth. “We would pass this coach house every time we entered the city.”

  “Look inside,” Ivy said, grasping the latch and pulling it aside.

  The inside of the coach house had never been much to look at. It kept the carriage from the weather, sheltered the horses, and gave the coachman a place to store his tools and tack. The walls had been unpainted wood and stone, hung with equipment or left to gather dust and flies. Such was no longer the case. Much of the interior had been cleared. There was no longer any sign of the stables or the workshop for fixing the carriage. Now it was open and clear. Ivy had clearly been busy in their absence, as a magnificent mural was painted on the rear wall depicting Myn herself in various poses. The artwork was gorgeous and stylized, like something from a storybook. Indeed it told a story, showing her first as a hatchling curled in Myranda’s lap, then standing bravely with her wings outstretched, much as she appeared today, and finally asleep atop a pile of gold eggs nestled beneath her.

  “What was, what is, and what will be,” Ivy said proudly. “What do you think?”

  Myn stepped inside, finding she barely had to duck to get through the large doorway, and looked over the mural. Almost immediately she became more interested in the loft directly above it, craning her neck to peek at the dusty cloth sacks piled there. She sniffed at one and licked it.

  “Oh no you don’t,” Ivy said with a giggle. She climbed onto Myn’s back and scrambled up her neck to reach the loft, hopping off to push the dragon’s head away. “Yes they are potatoes, and yes they are for you, but not now. You already had some.”

  “They did fine work, didn’t they?” came a voice from the door.

  Myranda turned quickly to the source, a thin, tall man, his hair nearly white and a beard to match. He wore a fur-lined coat of rough but sturdy tailoring. There was something about his stance that suggested, despite his slight build, he was tough as oak, and something about his eyes that suggested he’d seen far more than anyone would ever wish to see.

  “Father,” Myranda said happily, hugging him.

  “My little girl,” he said, squeezing her tightly.

  Myranda held him for a long time. Each time she saw him, the gratitude and relief in having reunited with him washed over her as if for the first time. She hoped it always would. She had spent far too much of her life wondering if her father was still alive to ever take him for granted again.

  Her father was only in his late forties, but to look at him, you might think him to be twenty years older. A short but remarkable military career, followed by a tour in the legendary Elites, and then more than a decade in the dungeon beneath Castle Verril had taken its toll. Nevertheless, his mind was as sharp now as it had ever been, and once his feet touched the ruined soil of his former home, his drive to resurrect the place had been relentless. In all of the Northern Alliance, none wished to see Kenvard live again more than Greydon Celeste. It was a blessing, in that the city badly needed him, but a curse in that it as often as not kept him and Myranda from one another.

  “I didn’t expect you back so soon. The men nearly didn’t finish.”

  “I thought you were focusing on clearing the road to the palace,” Myranda said.

  “That is the focus, but with the workers we’ve got and the state it’s in, it’ll be months before that happens. Before it can be a city again, it should be a home again. And any good soldier takes the time to care for his steed.” He turned to Myn, who had stepped up and was now making her presence known with an ominous rumble in her throat. “No matter how large that steed might be.”

  Myn settled down comfortably and rested her chin on the ground, subtly sliding it forward until Myranda and her father had to step apart to allow it between them.

  “Curious creature,” he said. There was a rigidity to his posture and expression.

  It was clear he had not yet become comfortable being so near a dragon. Myn angled her head slightly toward Myranda and slid open an eye to look over Greydon, causing him to tense a bit further. When she released a sigh that was near enough to a hiss, Greydon reflexively took another step back. The look of satisfaction on Myn’s face made it clear what she was up to.

  “This is my father, Myn. If you can learn to tolerate Deacon, you can learn to tolerate him.”

  It took a trained eye to read the expressions of a dragon, but once one had the knack, one could read volumes into their feelings by a twist of a lip or a shift of a brow. At the moment, Myn may as well have been muttering under her breath about how crowded her little circle had gotten and how much better she’d liked it when it was just herself and Myranda. She relented, though, curling her head aside to yawn and then tucking it under her wing for a nap.

  Greydon cast a wary eye at the dragon. “I trust your meeting with the queen went well?”

  She looked to him doubtfully. “Come with me, Father. There is much that needs to be discussed.”

  #

  At the edge of a yawning chasm stood a figure of unnatural beauty. It looked to be the form of a woman shaped from the stone of the mountain itself, and her unblinking eyes gazed down into the blackness of the abyss below. The place was known as Lain’s End, and the figure was Ether. She was a guardian of her world, crafted by the gods themselves for the sole purpose of turning back the dark menace of the D’Karon. Now that task was complete, and she was faced, for the first time in eternity, with a future without purpose. Her path from this point was hers to choose, but freedom was uncomfortable to her. So she chose not to look forward. Instead, she looked back, lingering here at the site of her fina
l meaningful act, and her greatest failure.

  For those lucky enough to have seen it, Lain’s End was a wonder to behold. It was a gouge in the earth, many miles across and with sides perfectly straight and extending farther down than the eye could see. The pit was circular, save where it curved in upon itself to a narrow point sticking up from the southern side. It was at this point that the Chosen had taken their stand, joining their strength to push back the cataclysm that had swallowed nearly all in its path. What it spared from destruction was perhaps even more awe-inspiring than the pit. Great sections of land remained suspended in the air, some shifting and spinning, others stationary. No two of these floating bits of debris seemed to be the same. Some were lush and green, sprouting with junglelike plants despite the icy cold. Others looked to have been formed entirely from precious metals. It was a spectacle unmatched anywhere in Ether’s world, but it did not interest her. All she saw when she came to this place was one simple bit of stone, just beyond the edge of the outcropping. The patch of rock was stained black with the shadowy remains of a terrible being known as Bagu. From the center of the silhouette stood a masterfully crafted sword. And on either side of the remains was a pair of footprints, etched into the stone itself. It was all that remained of the mighty warrior known as Lain. He had given his name to this tragic place, and his life to protect this world.

  Ether would linger here for days at a time, gazing down into the darkness or staring at the sword. Her mind fixated on what she saw. None of it made sense to her. She was Chosen. A product of the gods. Unlike Myranda, Myn, or Ivy, she had taken her place in history as she was intended to. She had not been changed, and she was no replacement. The only one who could say the same was Lain. The two of them were unequaled in their world. They belonged together, even if Lain hadn’t yet realized it. She had allowed him time to come to the proper conclusion. Both were immortal, after all. They had the luxury of time… but then he had fallen. He who should have lasted until the end of time by her side had been taken. There was no sense to it. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. And if he could fall, then what of her? What did her future hold? Until now she had been an immortal protector of her world, but if she was not immortal, and her world no longer required her protection… then what was she?

  As the sun circled the sky again and her mind spiraled ever deeper into this confounding riddle, she felt a flutter in the back of her consciousness. It was difficult to know how long it had been there. She struggled a bit to identify it. Lately pulling her mind to order was more difficult than it had been. After a few moments she heard the flutter become a voice. It was one of the others… Myranda. The human was calling out to her, requesting her presence. Ether’s stony eyes narrowed. It was likely nothing, a ceremony or a celebration or some other mortal foolishness. Myranda seemed to feel some obligation to involve Ether in such trivialities. Twice she had been summoned for no reason other than to be present at a meal shared between Deacon, Myranda, Ivy, and Myn. Still, this beckoning was rather insistent, and the interruptions thus far had been mercifully brief. The sooner she addressed whatever simple task the human had for her, the sooner she could return to her pondering.

  She shut her eyes and allowed her substance to shift, forgoing the solidity of stone for the fluidity of air. Her consciousness bound together a loose form of churning winds and allowed the rest of the mass that had been her body to whisk away as a powerful gust. Now mixing with the frigid breeze around her, she drifted skyward and set off to the lands to the south. It was perhaps not accurate that she enjoyed traveling as wind, as for her it was simply one of her many states of being, but after spending any reasonable amount of time solid, there was a feeling of connection to immersing herself in an element that cloaked the whole of her world. She was completely unrestrained, her body merely a point of focus, a small part of something that reached the ends of the globe. If she allowed her focus to slip enough, she could feel the coolness of the clouds and the prickle of the dry grass, the solid mountains and the lapping ocean all at once. She was one, she was all. It was the very definition of freedom, and it at times was a difficult temptation to resist.

  The land rushed by beneath her, cities coming and going in the time it would have taken to blink an eye. First was the bustling capital of Verril, nearly recovered from the damage done during its liberation. Then came the Rachis Mountains. She swept over fields and tundra, roads and lakes. In the time it took the sun to cross half the sky, she left most of the Northern Alliance behind her and approached the broken city of New Kenvard, where she could feel what remained of her fellow Chosen awaiting her. Her windy form touched down, scattering the dusting of snow on the city streets, and began to draw in sufficient substance to craft something more suitable for interacting with mortals. Bit by bit she tightened her focus on the air that made up her body, and it shifted to bone and tissue, each tiny component held in form through sheer will. Though this too was more of a struggle than it had been, it was still the work of moments to slip into the shape that had become almost second nature to her: that of a beautiful woman. To finish her transition, she conjured a few layers of fine garments and topped them with a thick robe.

  Ether glanced around the streets to see a handful of people staring in awe at the woman who had appeared from thin air. She gave them a nod of acknowledgment and stepped up to the door of a building she felt certain contained her associates.

  “Are you Ether?” asked a tiny voice beside her.

  The shapeshifter looked down to a young boy, his face positively aglow with excitement.

  “Obviously,” Ether said wearily.

  “Dana, come here,” warned a young woman, no doubt the boy’s mother, as she rushed to his side. “Leave Guardian Ether be.” She looked at Ether. “He’s heard the stories about you.”

  “Can you really turn into anything?” he asked, bopping up and down and trying to squirm away from his mother’s grip.

  “Given the time and the strength, most things are within my power,” Ether said.

  “Can you turn into a griffin?” he asked.

  “If I can turn into nearly anything, then it should be clear that I can turn into a griffin. I have been one on more than one occasion.” She looked at the boy’s mother. “Is there a reason for these questions?”

  “He’s curious. When I told him we would be coming to help rebuild New Kenvard, he said he wanted to meet all of the Guardians of the Realm. He’s spoken to Myranda and Ivy many times, and Myranda even let him scratch Myn. But he’s been hoping to see you most of all.” She looked at her son. “You’ve seen her now. Leave the Guardian to her work. I’m sure she is very busy.”

  “Can I see you turn into something?” the boy asked.

  Ether looked from the boy to his mother and back again. “You’ve seen me take form. I’ve shifted from wind to flesh. Is that not sufficient?”

  “But I’ve seen humans. Can’t you be something else?”

  “I do not exist to entertain children. Now this is Myranda’s home, correct? She is expecting me,” Ether said.

  “Yes,” said Dana, disappointed.

  “Very well,” Ether said, making ready once again to push open the door.

  “Will you be coming here often?” Dana asked.

  Ether shut her eyes in frustration. “It is my sincere hope that I will not…”

  #

  Inside her home, Myranda was seated at the dinner table with Deacon, Ivy, and her father. Through the wall shared with the coach house, the distinctive steady breathing of a slumbering dragon could be heard. Myn, weary from her journey, had eaten a heavy meal and slipped quickly off to sleep. Now the others were preparing for their own meal.

  Myranda’s present home was not the sort of thing one might envision as the estate of a duke and duchess. It was warm, clean, and sturdy, but it was hardly the lap of luxury. The dining room shared a wall—and thus the heat of the fireplace—with the kitchen. There were six seats at the table, and when fully occupied, there was li
ttle room for much else. To one side a staircase led to a second floor, which boasted four rooms. In the days before its fall, three of these rooms were provided for coach drivers staying the night during longer journeys, with the largest for the owner of the home. Now Myranda and Deacon had claimed the largest of them. Greydon Celeste slept in another. The third was for the servants that the queen had quite firmly insisted they take on, and the final room was intended for guests. As often as not, that room belonged to Ivy, who had a home of her own elsewhere in the city but had been reluctant to embrace the idea of living alone.

  The first plates of their meal, prepared by a plump and motherly servant named Eliza, were being set on the table when the door pushed open and Ether entered.

  “Ether,” Myranda said, rising to greet her. “I’m glad to see you. Thank you for coming so quickly.”

  “Hi, Ether!” Ivy said, excited in spite of herself to see her fellow Chosen. She pushed out her chair and bounded over to the shapeshifter, pulling her into a tight and thoroughly unwanted embrace. When she was through, she stepped back and gestured around her. “What do you think of Myranda’s home? Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “I assume I was summoned for a reason?” Ether said, ignoring the pleasantries.

  “You could visit first,” Ivy reprimanded, hands on her hips. She paced back to her seat.

  “I’m afraid there is a problem that concerns you,” Myranda said, motioning to a chair. “Please, have a seat.”

  “I would prefer to stand,” Ether said.

  “Don’t be rude,” Ivy scolded. A plate was set down before her. “Thank you, Eliza.” Ivy eagerly picked up the sumptuous mutton chop from her dish and tore away a mouthful. She continued to speak while chewing. “Eliza is the best cook. I hope you stay for dessert. She’s making a peach cake.”

  “Now Guardian Ivy, that was to be a surprise,” Eliza mock scolded.

  “You can’t surprise this nose,” Ivy said. “I just hope—”