CHAPTER 5
Lost Hero
“George? George, please wake up,” insisted a very frightened female voice, speaking softly.
George hurt all over, especially his head, and it smelled like something awful was burning. He opened his eyes to find a very attractive but very worried looking girl bent over him. He struggled to remember her name. “Mary?” he finally asked, uncertainly.
“Thank God!” she said, almost whispering. “I thought you must be dead!”
Where were they? What was Mary talking about? It took a few seconds for him to start to put things together. When things finally began to register it must have shown on his face.
“Are you alright?” she asked, her voice again worried.
He slowly sat up and took inventory of himself and his surroundings. “I think so. Why are you whispering?”
“I think at least one of the dragons is alive but sleeping. I don’t know yet about the other two.” She pointed to somewhere behind him.
“Dragons?” he asked groggily, as he struggled slowly to his feet. It seemed to be very early morning. He and everything else in sight except Mary was soaking wet, apparently from rainfall that had now ceased, and his clothes were torn and covered in dark soot and ash. Smoke rose from the ravaged forest that was hard to distinguish from fog that had formed over the damp ground. In the air far above them the pink protective Elf ward was back in place, he noticed, but not at ground level. Barely visible through the surreal fog, smoke, and ward, three massive black hills poked high above the remnants of smoldering trees, hills with scales and jagged spikes and plates. The three gigantic dragons! They all lay still.
“One is alive, I know she is!” said Mary. “Maybe the others too.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” George stated. Mary looked like a tiny and delicate flower against the background of monstrous devastation and nightmarish giant creatures.
“I was worried after last night. By the look of things I was right to worry.”
“This is a very dangerous place.”
“Yah think? Where is your Uncle?”
“I have to look for him; but you have to go home.” He couldn’t imagine how she could confront this scene so calmly. Most people would have either fainted or ran away screaming; that had certainly been his own reaction last night. “Are you alone?”
“I’m the only one in my family that gets up this early. It's still summer vacation. Johnny will sleep until noon.”
“How could you, or anyone else for miles, sleep through last night’s ruckus?”
“You may not have noticed, but there’s some sort of barrier around this place, and another around our house. It’s been that way for years, since long before we moved in, I suspect. Through the barrier, we didn’t notice anything unusual. We didn’t even get any rain.”
So she knew about the ward barrier too. How? “Then why did you come here?”
“I felt anxious. I still do. I get feelings and ideas about things sometimes, and this was one of those times, in spades. So I got up early and came to help. Listen, I’m not going home now, so just deal with the fact that I’m here.”
“I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Or to learn any of your family secrets?"
“Sort of late to prevent much of that now," George admitted. "So OK, those are dragons and there are elves and magic involved and other weird things. Family secrets big time! And it has to do with saving the world from bad guys, and if you tell your brother or anyone else at all about this business, it could screw up everything really bad. Apocalypse bad, if it isn’t that bad already. So you have to promise to keep all of this stuff secret. Get it?”
“I get it, not that I’m surprised. I’ve kept stuff about this place and myself secret for years. Now let’s find Harry!”
“I saw him get blasted with green dragon fire, and the dragon that did it said he was destroyed. I think he’s dead.”
“No, I don’t think so,” said Mary.
“What?”
“I have a knack for knowing things, and I know he’s not dead. Besides, if anyone could survive dragon fire or whatever it would be your Great Uncle Harry.”
George hoped she was right, though he didn’t know what she knew about Harry to make her think the old man could survive dragon fire. He didn’t see how anything at all in the forest near the dragons could have survived the burning and smashing. Harry, Grog, and the egg were all gone, doubtlessly crushed and burned beyond recognition.
He scanned the area. He could pick out details of the destruction a thousand yards away, as though he had the eyes of an eagle. Nearby objects also appeared sharper. He picked up a broken twig and looked at it closely. In a few moments realized that he was looking at assemblage of cells, as though he were using a microscope.
In conjunction with his sight, his special senses were also enhanced. He could sense life all around him, and destruction. He was different from being a normal human, even more different than he had been yesterday. Some weird further transformation had happened to him again! What had happened?
“What’s wrong?” Mary asked.
“Nothing,” he said evasively.
They made their way towards the dragons. Most trees were smashed-to-bits flat or burned or both, and many were still smoldering, which didn’t make walking easy. Mary, at least, was wearing hiking boots, jeans, and a long sleeved flannel shirt. George, with his already devastated sneakers, shorts, and tea shirt, should have been at a disadvantage in negotiating forest remnants in the chill of the morning. He found however, that despite the strain of last night he had strength and agility to easily work his way through the tangle of decimated branches, trunks, and roots. Also despite everything he didn't seem to be injured at all, and today when he scraped against some of the sharp forest debris he wasn't scratched or pained. The wet ash wasn’t too bad, though in places it was runny enough to be messy, and they sank several inches into it. He moved fast. Mary impressed him greatly by keeping up with him.
The destroyed area had something nasty about it that didn’t impede them physically, but still annoyed George. He had been getting used to the ward, a soothing, mist-like, comforting presence. Within the most thoroughly destroyed area the ward had been completely pushed away and replaced by a palatable tinge of Evil.
After half an hour of searching George was already beginning to feel that it was hopeless. They found no sign of Harry. A hundred people with construction equipment and search dogs would require weeks to do a proper search, George estimated. In the central battle zone everything was burned to cinders and ash, meters deep heaps of it covering tens of acres, much of it soaked by the rain to form a thick paste. Around the periphery of the battle site were the remains of thousands of broken and singed trees, most of them weighing many tons. The remains of Harry, Grog or the egg could be buried underneath any of the mess.
In the wetter places he and Mary sank to their knees in it and had to help pull each other along. However they didn’t burn themselves. “Even with the rain, much of this stuff should be a lot hotter,” Mary remarked.
She was right, George reflected. Even several inches of rain shouldn’t have cooled everything so completely. This forest had been scorched by dragon fire! It had to be the work of the elf ward, he realized. Rain must have been only part of the cooling process; most of the cooling had to be by pure magic, like the magic that the elf table had used to cool his coke yesterday, but on a much, much greater scale.
The final and most formidable obstacles of all to their search for Harry lay stone-cold and motionless in the center of the burned-out zone: the titanic black bodies of three unconscious, reclining dragons. Each covered several acres. If Harry was underneath one of them he and Mary didn’t stand a chance of finding the body. By unspoken agreement the two teenagers stayed clear of the behemoths, but their awesome presence couldn’t be ignored.
“What are we going to do about them?” Mary asked George finally, in an excited whisper. “Now that
we’re closer, I know they are all alive. Resting and recovering, all three of them.”
George could sense the same thing. “I know,” he replied. It was crazy, but he could sense many things now. “When they wake up we’re toast.”
“Us and maybe a lot of folks. Don’t forget your neighbors.”
George nodded. The thought had been forming in his mind that all of this was totally beyond him, and that they should call the authorities and let the chips fall where they may. Maybe the Army could blow up the dragons before any of them woke up. Maybe rescue workers could find what remained of Harry. George figured that he was certainly going back to foster care anyway, whatever else happened.
“What’s that?” Mary asked, pointing. Close to one of the dragons, something was moving. Though concerned about the dragon, the pair made their way towards an object sticking out of the ash. Strangely enough, though now motionless, it seemed to be slowly changing color from brown to red and back again.
“My God, it’s Grog!” George exclaimed, when they were close enough to see that the object was a monstrous, human-like hand at the end of a singed, hairy forearm as big as a man. He got even more excited when he saw the troll’s fingers move!
Soon he and Mary were hurriedly digging around the arm. “Good friend of Harry’s, a forest troll, and a friend of the elves,” he explained to the inquisitive Mary, as they both scooped and kicked ashes away from the giant arm.
“Great!” she remarked. “Elves and now a troll too! That explains who the big and little folks in your yard have been. I’ve wondered about that for years.”
After digging through a meter of debris they uncovered the rest of Grog. Even though he was still totally coated in pasty ash and the singed remnants of long hair, it seemed obvious that he was horribly burned and broken. However, his huge chest rose and fell steadily, indicating that the sturdy troll was alive and breathing.
In answer to George calling his name Grog finally opened one swollen, blood soaked eye and focused it on his rescuers. “Save egg,” he muttered softly, before the eye again closed. Aside from making sure he could breathe freely there was little they could immediately do for the troll. They resolved to later get him water and blankets.
George began to again dig away through the ashes, this time several feet away from the troll. “Dragon egg,” he explained to Mary as she joined him. “The thing that the dragons were after.”
“There are acres of ash and wreckage. How do you know where to dig?” she asked him, after a few minutes.
“I don’t know how I know,” he replied. “I just know it’s here.”
She accepted his explanation as though it made all the sense in the world, though he himself was puzzled. How did he know?
Under a meter of ash they uncovered odd bits of rock, several pounds of it. Cleaning off the worst of the ash, they discovered that the bits of rock were actually half melted, green crystal. Most pieces were too melted to judge their original form, but with a few, a curved, flattened shape with thickness of about an inch could be distinguished. The bits had an unworldly green glow, though different from other Narma objects, but they were still relatively dull and lifeless.
“It’s the egg, and it’s destroyed,” George sadly concluded.
“But did it hatch first?” Mary asked. “This is just bits of shell. Where’s the baby dragon?”
“You’re right!" said George. "If it hadn’t hatched, we should be finding one big melted egg with a roasted baby dragon inside, not simply a bunch of shell pieces. It must have hatched first!”
“Or, the dragon fire could have caused it to burst into pieces," said Mary. "Maybe the dragon part vaporized inside the shell and blew the shell up. Maybe soft parts were completely incinerated to ash and vapor, and only some bits of hard shell remain.”
George shook his head. “No, it’s alive all right. I don’t know how I know that, but I do. Besides, I doubt that even baby dragons have all soft parts; we would have found something.”
“Great! Do we dig for the dragon too? Where is it?”
“I have no idea," admitted George. "Harry told me that if a dragon doesn’t want to be found, it is almost impossible to locate. Maybe he’s so spooked that he’s hiding. I don’t know where. Harry and Grog were taking the egg to Narma; maybe that’s where the baby dragon went. Maybe Harry and Grog stayed here to stop the big dragons from catching it before it could escape to Narma.”
“Narma?”
“A planet in another universe where the elves and dragons and so forth come from. There’s a Portal to Narma in these woods someplace, but I don’t have time to explain it all now. We have to focus on finding Harry.”
“Why not find him the way you found the egg?”
“What?”
“We’ve both been running around in this mess in a panic spinning our wheels as though we were ordinary human beings. I’ve been psychic practically all of my life, and evidently you are too. We should sit quietly for a few minutes and try to figure things out that way.” Mary sat down on a burned out stump, breathed deeply, and closed her eyes, leaving George a bit flabbergasted. She was psychic? He was too?
However, in balance what she said all made sense and he didn’t have any better ideas, so he also sat down, closed his eyes, and tried to relax, though he had no idea what to do next.
“EMPTY YOUR MIND FIRST, AND THEN FOCUS ON HARRY,” said a voice in his head.
“MARY?” he thought in reply, resisting the temptation to shout or open his eyes.
“OF COURSE IT’S MARY. SEE HOW EASY THAT WAS? I KNEW YOU WERE TELEPATHIC! IT WORKS BETTER HERE AT HARRY’S, BECAUSE OF THE ELF WARDS.”
“HOW DO YOU KNOW ALL THIS?”
“I’VE BEEN TRYING FIGURE OUT THIS STUFF FOR YEARS. WE HAVE TO FIND HARRY. FOCUS NOW.”
“RIGHT.” He let his mind go blank, tuning out everything in his surroundings-sight, sound, touch, feelings. He couldn’t not think, so he thought of himself- his inner core, who he was, within himself. Then he thought of Harry. He pictured him in his mind, thought of his voice and what he had told him. Most of all, there was a unique ‘feel’ to Harry, a texture that George’s new senses had already shown him.
At first George sensed nothing. Then instinctually he mentally reached out of himself, in this direction and that. To his surprise he clearly sensed Grog and the dragons, particularly the nearest one. There were other, lesser beings also, including of course Mary, but nothing that matched up with Harry. Finally, to his left and more distant, he barely sensed something that somehow ‘felt’ like Harry.
He opened his eyes, stood, and turned in the direction he had sensed Harry.
Mary was already doing the same. She smiled when she saw the look of surprise on his face. “You’re new at this whole thing,” she remarked, nodding, “but learning very fast. Let’s go.”
She slogged off through the ash, followed closely by George. The ash already seemed to be less wet and mushy than earlier, and the teenagers sank only a few inches into it, such that they were able to make rapid progress, away from the house and dragons and deeper into the forest, and out of the area of destruction.
The boundary between destruction and undamaged forest was unexpectedly abrupt. In the space of a single footstep they passed from shattered, singed trees and shrubs into undamaged, lush, old-growth forest, complete with pink ward, singing birds and chattering squirrels. Impossibly massive oak, poplar, and tulip trees towered to more than seventy meters overhead.
At the narrow boundary between the damaged and undamaged areas there was a flurry of activity. George could see thick pink tendrils of elf ward magic that swirled and shimmered around shoots of growth that erupted from a blanket of countless insects and worms that were helping magic till and transform burned and shattered forest remains into soil. New trees were growing before their eyes, with many green shoots already poking several inches above the ash. The Evil ‘taste’ that had accompanied the devastated area was also being cleansed by
the ward.
“Incredible!” said Mary, as she stopped to watch. “Instant forest! I have some tomatoes in my backyard I’d like this kind of help with!”
George continued on without a pause, for he could sense now that Harry was very near. When he saw a pair of legs slicking out from behind an enormous oak tree a short distance into the forest, he rushed ahead to confirm it was Harry. At first glance, he was enormously relieved to find that the old man’s clothing was dirty but not burned away, and it covered a body that appeared to be surprisingly whole and well, though strangely thinner. Some form of magic must have protected him from most of the dragon flame. He still wore the golden elf body armor and helmet, and the sword and shield lay across his chest, but there was no sign of the spear.
George gasped in dismay when he saw Harry’s face. The old man’s face was impossibly gaunt and wrinkled, aged beyond mere old age until it was almost skeletal. Harry’s body too had shrunk, leaving too-big cloths and armor that had at first given an impression of near-normal size, but now only served to measure how much he had shrunk.
“About time,” Harry said weakly, in almost a whisper. His eyes followed George. Otherwise, he remained motionless.
“My God, Harry, what can I do?” George managed, as he knelt over the old man.
“No way for you to help me now," whispered the old man. "My time is past, George. I’m all used up. It’s up to you and Mary now.”
“Me?” Mary asked, as knelt to the other side of Harry.
“Don’t even try to look surprised, girl,” Harry whispered before returning his eyes to George. “Nephew, I’m sorry, but it’s mostly up to you.”
“You’re him, aren’t you,” said Mary. “Mystery Man.”
“Years ago I was,” acknowledged Harry. The hint of a smile appeared for a moment.
George was stunned. There were still rumors of a superhero that decades ago fought against evil, and perhaps against true Evil. There was even an old Mystery Man comic book series and there were old movies. But nobody had seen the real Mystery Man for several decades. If he ever existed, he was dead now, most people assumed.
“You are the Chosen One, George, I can sense it," said Harry. "Your turn now.”
“What?” George stammered.
“You have to work out what the Evil is and fight it! Study hard using the elf books and statues! Take my helmet, sword, shield and armor. Promise to carry on.”
“That’s crazy,” George protested.
“Promise,” insisted Harry. With a Herculean effort his withered right hand reached out and grasped that of George. The grip was so weak George could barely feel it.
“I promise,” George answered, even as the old man’s limp hand fell away.
“Bury me here,” continued Harry. His words were slow and spoken so softly that he could barely be heard.
“But I need you,” complained George. “You’re all I’ve got! You can’t die!”
Harry’s eyes closed and he was still.
“No!” George cried out as tears streamed down his face. He was all alone in the world again after regaining a home and family only the day before! But he put that out of his mind for now. Harry was gone. He wiped his eyes. “He was a great man.”
“More important, he was a good man,” added Mary, as she wiped her own tears away. She stood up and moved behind George, to put a steadying hand on his shoulder. “And you aren’t alone. I’m mixed up in this too. Even Harry said so.”
George was too moved to reply, but he put his hand over hers and held it tightly. Although they had met only the day before, he felt incredibly close to her already, and he drew comfort and strength from her presence. “We have the living to look after,” he said, releasing her and standing up. “Let’s go to the house for troll supplies.”
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White Dragon's Chosen Page 6
