The Dragon Knight's Curse (The Dragon Knight Series Book 2)

by D. C. Clemens

  When I opened them next, a sky of absolute darkness reigned unconditionally. Mercer was no longer above me and no battle was taking place. In fact, nothing was happening around me. The darkness simply continued for a long way. My natural reaction was to think myself blind, but when I turned my head far enough, a kind of horizon with a soft red glow eventually appeared. Despite it being too far away to provide any real illumination to my unnatural expanse, it still made me feel better.

  My teeth unconsciously chattered when my brain realized I was someplace very cold. I expected to see my breath in the arctic temperature, but no fog formed. I noticed two other conditions as I tentatively sat up. First, I laid in half an inch of water, water that perhaps should have been frozen in the glacial air. Second, a pinching pain ran up and down my left side from the still open wound the crazed Mercer gave me. I couldn’t tell whether I was bleeding or not.

  Fear ran amok in me. Was I dead? Or was I on my way to being corrupted?

  Startling me further was a deep, growling voice that asked, “Do you wish to save Mercer?”

  I didn’t know where to look. Each word, each letter seemed to come from a different direction. “Y-yes.”

  “Behind you, girl.”

  I looked to see an unconscious Mercer on his back, the real Mercer, except his body laid deeper in the water than mine had been. Only his face and chest remained clearly visible. The rest of his submerged body rippled with the water. I carefully walked up to him, hoping I too didn’t sink in the deeper water. When I didn’t plummet to his level, I kneeled beside him. He wasn’t breathing.

  “How?” I asked the invisible entity.

  “The holy prana you carry.”

  I took hold of the crystal and snapped it off the necklace. It was glowing with a soft blue light. “I-I can’t really control its power yet.”

  “I can aid you in that endeavor, but you must first release it.”

  “Who are you?”

  “There’s little time, girl. Release it and I can rein in his corruption enough to pull him out of this place. Place the crystal on his chest and begin channeling your prana into it. Do not react when the power is released, for I will manipulate it from there.”

  I laid the crystal down and placed my hands over it. It took a moment to calm my anxieties enough to connect to the holy power stored in the crystal, but once I did, I let every emotion in me fade. At that instant, the crystal blinded me with an outpouring of blue light. The voice growled to remind me to not lose my nerve. My eyes were shut, but a gasp of breath lifted my hands and rang my ears.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Mercer

  A watery hand was enveloping my limp body before it tossed me aside. I rolled over several times on the verdant ground. When my head stopped literally spinning, I rose to my hands and knees, trying to figure out what in Orda just happened. Flickers of memories danced in no real order as I tried extracting the last one. Grabbing my attention was a familiar woman yelling for someone named Clarissa to stop what she was about to do. I looked to see a white-haired young woman holding a ball of water a few yards away from me.

  Another young woman sluggishly sprinted up beside her. This second woman was bleeding from a wound on her upper shoulder. On the ground next to me was a longsword stained with blood at its point. The blonde woman—Odet! Her name just came to me—looked at me warily and asked, “Is that you, Mercer?”

  Many names entered my head, but I liked the sound of “Mercer” so I nodded. I also liked the look of the sword and went to pick it up. A relieved Odet fell on her knees, breathing hard from some great exhaustion. Gods, everything fell into place when my fingers grazed the hilt. I remembered there was no memory to recall before the fiend’s tail wrapped around my arm. I remembered the defiling pain from each inpouring of corruption, and I knew I would gladly take that pain for the rest of my life if it meant not seeing a terrified Odet as she resisted my attempts to kill her.

  When I grasped my sword, Aranath said, “I still carry some of the girl’s holy prana. Cut your hand against the edge of the steel and pour all the prana you can into the blade. Then, instead of focusing on the dragon stones, focus on summoning a dragon.”

  I ran the edge of the sword against my palm, the hot sensation of cutting myself a paradise compared to what I had experienced moments earlier. I then pressed this bloody hand into the ground and used the foreign power inside me to call upon an ally not witnessed in centuries. A great pulse of wind blew in front of me as something as large as a whale pushed away the air the freshly summoned dragon now occupied.

  For the first time since knowing him, the great beast growled outside of my head, vibrating the ground and my blood. The smooth, lustrous scales running down the serpentine creature were of a dark blue hue, dark enough that the dragon might look black from afar. Making Aranath appear many times larger was when he stretched his forelimbs, which spread his vast, bat-like wings. Three sharp claws stuck out from the wings’ central peak. The fleshy membranes looked large enough to lift a dragon thirty feet longer than his forty foot long frame, which didn’t include a tail that doubled the greater part of his length. This tail lashed the air like a whip and ended in a bony point shaped like a spearhead.

  On the other end was a fearsome head that hung from a uniformly long neck. Two curved horns of pearly white extended from behind the top of his swept-back skull. His eyes were of a burnt orange and had that black vertical slit slicing down their center. They looked as if they could see into souls as easily as I perceived flesh and flame. The tremendous roar he produced made me forget that he was my partner and quieted everyone else who heard it.

  Keeping his voice within my head, he said, “Keep sending your prana into the sword if you wish to keep me here. This will not last long, but it should be enough to give you an opening.”

  With a few powerful flaps of his great wings, the dragon took to his proper domain. I wasn’t the only one captivated by the awesome sight. Watching the nimble dragon treat the heavens like a dolphin whirling in water, I could see why he had been given the title “Sky Lord” in his younger days.

  His first targets were the comparatively ungraceful eidolons in the sky, who responded to his appearance with alarmed screeches. The bazeeba fired a blast of its green discharge, but Aranath evaded it by rolling out of the way. To my surprise, the dragon didn’t emit fire of his own. He instead slammed his body into the somewhat smaller beast. The dragon then used his teeth to bite down on one of the bazeeba’s wings and used that as leverage to fling it against a palace tower. As it wailed out with high-pitched squeals, the eidolon tried regaining the sky with three good wings left.

  With a dragon near the clouds, I refocused on the Advent, who was fighting evenly with Lorcan and Lucetta. Every step I took toward them had me better sensing just how much pure prana stirred inside me. I weighed nothing and the palpitating power made me feel as though I could thrust my feather-light sword through a slab of steel. More than that, I knew I had the capacity to kill the halberd-wielding cultist.

  “Dad! Lucetta! Get back!”

  The pirate captain uncrossed blades with the Advent. Following her husband’s lead, Lucetta jumped back from the Advent and asked, “What the fuck is going on?! First you go insane and now you can summon a bloody dragon?”

  “I’ll explain later.”

  My father slapped me hard in the back and said, “Yes, explanations for later. For now, let’s get a bit of revenge against this Advent fellow, eh?”

  “No, you and Lucetta help Odet and the others.”

  “You sure?”

  “For the next few minutes.”

  “All right, then. Let’s go help our men, darling!”

  As they turned their backs, the Advent fired an inferno he had been gathering at the head of his halberd. I felt it within my dominion. Raising my left arm, I evoked my meager training with dragon flame. However, with her hallowed power enhancing mine, this paltry control over dragon fire resulted in total dominatio
n over regular flames, no matter how brutally hot one made them. Before the enemy blaze made the surrounding air a degree warmer, it died in an explosion of a million embers that landed on the ground as harmlessly as snowflakes.

  The Advent didn’t look worried about his flame dying in front of him. He actually took a moment to look up as Aranath glided over the stone eidolon and released a shower of dragon fire upon it. The pungent burning produced a mad groan from the lumbering body as it backed away from the wall with a few earthshaking steps. The eidolon then attempted to shake off the fire, but it found no relief.

  Two other flying eidolons pursued Aranath. The first looked like a vulture with short yellow feathers, but it had four long legs curled beneath its belly. Except for the shaggy fur and the mammalian features outlining its form, I couldn’t take more than a rough glance at the second eidolon before I noticed the Advent staring back at me. After a deep inhale, he charged.

  He seemed to be half as slow as before, and that accounted for the fact that he abandoned his fire spells and sent all the spare prana he could into his body. Of course, I knew it was I who had sped up. I not only deflected his swings, but evaded them entirely. Small pieces of his halberd chipped away when we clashed weapons. To not have his speed and fire threaten me the way it once did and yet still not become overwhelmed was a testament to his high skill. Nevertheless, when I finally obtained a small measure of control over Odet’s waning power, it was over.

  I let his halberd glance off the fiend’s tail before sending a burst of prana to my feet, instantly closing the distance between my sword’s tip and the Advent’s upper stomach. We were eye to eye as his back gained a new hole. He was strangely serene as he coughed up blood and lost the color in his cheeks and eyes. I pulled the sword out of him and let him fall to his knees.

  “How many of you are there?” I asked him.

  He looked up at me and cocked his head. “Strange question. I’m one of a kind.”

  “How many Advent are here?” I asked more firmly.

  “My wound hurts. Are you going to end me, or shall I do it myself?”

  It was obvious he was not afraid of death, something I admired. With time being precious in an ongoing battlefield, I decided to end it myself. As fast as I could swing it, the blade slashed his throat open. Not two seconds after his body crumpled to the ground, the remaining lizard-fish and, more importantly, the mansion-sized eidolon were unsummoned back to their realms. The ground soldiers gave a quick cheer.

  Those with able bodies started moving toward the heavily dented metal gates to get some cover from the monstrous battle still happening above. They then surrounded Odet when she revealed herself to them. Exempting a couple of pirates getting viscous spit on them, my group came out intact.

  After some difficulty, one of the twenty foot tall gates was pushed open. Meeting Odet on the other side was a small group of steel plated knights, one of whom kept a thick ward above them. In response to Odet’s question, an older knight with a thin white beard told her, “The enemy has infiltrated the palace, your highness. I’m afraid the queen has met them in combat.”

  “What!? Then why are you not with her?!”

  “Every man we can spare is trying to reach her, but a powerful barrier blocks us.”

  “Take me to her!”

  I gave the situation in the sky another glance once we ran past the shorter but thicker inner wall guarding the true palace grounds. The glimpse I caught had me seeing the eidolons continue to be pestered by the dragon, enough so that they could no longer attack Odet’s home without exposing themselves to Aranath’s attacks. I sensed the dragon continuing to siphon huge chunks of prana from me, helping to give his sky-rendering roars their strength.

  The knights led us into the main edifice—a broad, tanned building with a curved wall making up its facade. Our full speed run did not allow me to catch much of what I otherwise expected to see in the grand halls, namely, too much grandness in what should have been modest things. After a few turns down passages and through lavish rooms full of either very hard or very cushy items, we entered a domed dance hall.

  Soldiers and casters filled our half of the enormous ballroom. They all faced an almost wholly black barrier that divided the room in two parts like a smooth curtain. Knights and casters hurled spells and arrows at this magical wall, but for all their trouble, only small ripples appeared on its peculiar surface. Once the throng made way for the princess and her group, I came close enough to see through the vaguely translucent barrier.

  At each end of the barrier stood an Advent. To my right was a blonde haired woman clad in the silver armor the royal knights wore, implying more treachery within Alslana. To my left stood another armor-wearing, blonde haired man who looked very much like the woman, each having small noses, slightly slanted blue eyes, and thin lips. The woman’s hair was significantly shorter than the man’s curly mane. If I had taken quicker glimpses, I would have mistaken each of them for the other gender. At their feet were seven dead soldiers, one of whom I recognized as Sir Stone. The possible sibling duo were the obvious casters of this singular barrier.

  Behind these Advent was another figure cloaked in bright red. With her hood down, I saw that she was an older woman without a strand of hair to speak of. Oddly, I only assumed her to be old. I couldn’t actually pick up all that many wrinkles and she might not have been that much older than my father. She was simply someone who commanded the respect a veteran of war and life demanded from those around her, all without her having to say anything of her past troubles. Both of her hands held lances made of lightning itself, which she was using to ceaselessly strike a half sphere of crystal.

  Standing on one knee within this crystal ward was Odet’s mother, Queen Leandra. Her quick, shallow breaths and clammy brow told of the heavy strain the other woman placed on her spirit. Her family shield flickered like a failing torch in a hurricane from the lightning it refracted and absorbed with diminishing effectiveness.

  As I charged a swing, the head knight said, “Wait! Hitting the barrier with physical attacks will cause your body to become numb. Those who have dared strike it half a dozen times either pass out or seize up. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

  Taking his word for it, I joined the casters in their fight. I summoned as many dragon stones as possible, teleporting them alongside the barrier. Their initial flare-ups rattled the black ward, giving it a lighter shade I used to see through it better. I noticed both siblings were giving their attention to me. The brother turned his head back and moved his mouth. The barrier prevented me from hearing what he told the old woman, but she responded by giving her lances more vigor. Her next lurch with them tore some of Leandra’s shield.

  I felt the gifted power within me sharply dwindle away as I attempted to give the dragon flame more prana to fuel its burn. The other casters fused their spells with my own to further weaken the wobbling ward, but still it would not fall. As I tried giving the melting stones another surge of prana, my link with Aranath abruptly ended. I had lost both the prana and focus to keep him in my realm. My inexperience also had me lose most of the hold I had over the flames.

  “Mother!”

  Passed the dying dragon flames and the splatter of spells happening over me, I saw the queen’s shield had been broken.

  Down to her final option, the staggered queen put her hands to the ground. Everyone turned away from the brightest light anyone could ever experience, not unless the sun replaced the moon. The brilliant intensity steadily condensed to form a snowy outline of a feminine figure of pure crystalline glass. The hard light hid any notable features, but one could see her head rose nine feet above the ground. It was the Astor family’s eidolon, a legendary being said to be a servant of Ylsuna, just as the dragon lord served Tahlous. She went by many names, but the one used by the royal family was Mytariss.

  The old woman leapt back and cast a ward spell. It might as well have been a piece of parchment. Without seemingly taking a step to app
ear before her enemy, Mytariss had used a spear of glass to impale the woman’s heart. As she turned her formidable attention to those at the barrier, she and her light vanished.

  With a splintered scream I wish I never heard, Odet shouted, “Noooo! Mother!”

  Piercing out through the queen’s chest was the point of a blackish blade. Its cloaked wielder gradually became visible as his invisibility spell ended. Leandra’s body and his brown hood prevented me from seeing most of his face, but the fairly robust figure told me this Advent was a man. The Advent’s corrupted blade began turning white as it absorbed the queen’s holy prana while she yet lived.

  Sharing Odet’s desperation, I plunged my sword into the barrier with everything I still carried within me. The steel cut through, but it became lodged between the Advent’s side and my own. The numbing sensation the knight spoke of coursed up my arms. I didn’t care. Neither did many shouting knights. Seeing my sword’s relative success had others do the same. A handful were able match my accomplishment. Meanwhile, their comrades put all they had left in their spells. And while it quivered and the blondes became restless, the fucking barrier still wouldn’t fall.

  The now pure white sword slipped out of the motionless queen, letting her body slump callously to the ground. The light from his glowing blade illuminated a surprisingly youthful face under his hood. A fringe of sweaty black hair could be detected, and stubble lined his cheeks and chin. The hooded Advent then walked up to his dead comrade and placed a hand upon her. She was gone in a blink. He used the same teleportation spell on his living allies before he placed a hand etched with a bloody rune on himself and let air take his place. Only then did the barrier fade away.

  Odet’s sprinting steps and those of some knights were all that echoed in the quiet chamber. When they stopped, it was Odet’s tears that rang loudly as they dripped onto her mother’s body. I hated it when my father placed a consoling hand on my shoulder, for it made me feel even more like a helpless child.