The Dragon Gem (Korin's Journal)

by Brian Beam

  Visibility was limited to mere steps before me, but it was enough to avoid slamming into a tree. Heavy footfalls and vile screeching behind me announced the eldrhim’s chase. On the bright side, I couldn’t hear any other eldrhim screeches in the distance. The thought of Telis’ sacrifice was painful, but it was better than the sound of his terrified and pain-filled screams from earlier.

  I turned my path downhill to fruitlessly increase my speed; if I could move faster downhill, the eldrhim could too. As I passed a large tree that may have been an oak, I noted a thick branch just higher than my head jutting from it. I grabbed it with my free hand and nimbly swung my feet into the trunk, going into a stepping climb and heaving my body onto the branch. I resumed my one-handed climb from there. I couldn’t outrun the eldrhim, but maybe I could out-climb it.

  The tree violently shook as the eldrhim crashed into it. One quick glance down revealed a darkened shape climbing up after me without using the branches. To put it simply, I was a pig just waiting for slaughter.

  Options ran through my mind. I could have jumped from my higher vantage onto the eldrhim, taking it to the ground in hopes of injuring or killing it. Its body could have softened my landing enough for me to live. Well, if I could live after being splattered with its black, grass-killing blood. I could have leapt to another tree, but I couldn’t see far enough ahead of me to have made a trustworthy jump. Then again, I could have just jumped headfirst and take the easy way out.

  My hopeless considerations came to a close as the tree shook even more violently than before with a sudden, cracking boom. My feet slipped forward and I barely caught on to the rough branch with my free hand as the tree started tipping with a sharp crack. My shoulder felt as if it would rip from the socket, but I held on with all I had as I pressed Max against my chest and fell with the tree. As the tree became more horizontal, my body pressed against the trunk relieving the strain from my shoulder. I still held on for dear life.

  The angle of the tree was apparently just right to fall between other trees and it fell straight to the ground with a bone-jarring crash, my body slamming violently into the trunk and my grip forced from the branch. I slid off the tree onto soft forest floor beside it. I felt like I had probably cracked some of those bruised ribs from before if the sharp pains that flared in my chest with each breath were any indication. If nothing else, a hand to my left leg felt my thigh bone cutting through my pants which was a little more obvious. At least Max’s breathing remained steady against my body.

  I tried to force myself up onto my good leg, but my body had gone through too much abuse to do what I wanted it to. Even if fear kept the pain reasonably numbed, my body knew when it was beat. I collapsed back to the ground, closed my eyes, and waited for the eldrhim to finish the job. “I’m sorry Max,” I whispered. I felt like I was going to pass out from exhaustion and the damage to my body.

  I could hear slow footsteps crunching fallen leaves as they approached where I lay and I could see the redness of the inside of my eyelids as if there weas a bright light outside of them. The soft and delicate nature of the footsteps gave me pause and I slowly opened my eyes to see a slender figure in a tight-fitting dark blue garment with a ball of light above their head with their face hidden inside a large, raised hood. A fairly large wicker case hung from a leather strap that ran from one shoulder to the opposite hip, accentuating breasts to either side of the strap, indicating them to be a female.

  “Are you okay?” a soft, femanine voice asked from inside the hood.

  The figure before me must have thought I was crazy as I started laughing and then passed out.

  Chapter 8

  Are You Crazy?

  The whole passing out or getting knocked out as my primary source of rest over the past couple days was starting to get old and hard on the joints. At least this time, passing out had given me a dreamless sleep that lasted until morning sunlight shone through the treetops above me.

  The night came back to me in a rush and I bolted upright from the ground. A gray wool blanket that had been covering me dropped to my waist. My heart started racing as I looked all around me and then slowed again when I saw Max wrapped in a blanket that rose and fell with his breathing beside me.

  I drew my arms to my chest as a cold fall breeze hit me and sent dead leaves eddying all around where I sat. My face still burned from the five slashes across it, but when I brought a hand up to feel them, I only felt intact skin. The pain from my thigh made me want to pass out, but no bone was sticking out. A ragged hole in my pants and some dried blood were the only indicators that the bone had poked through it just the night before. My ribs still ached when I breathed. I highly doubted Max had healed me, and if he had, why was I still hurting as if the wounds were still there?

  That’s when I remembered what had happened right before I had passed out from excruciating pain and exhaustion. There had been that female in the blue clothing. I twisted my head around in all directions but saw nothing but empty woods around me and the fallen tree from the night before to my left. The only signs that anyone had been there were the blankets covering me and Max.

  With a startled gasp, I reached down to my belt and practically ripped open my coin pouch and relaxed again once I had seen that the Contract and coin purse lay untouched. Whoever had saved us the night before hadn’t been a thief. But who had she been?

  Standing up was a struggle against the pain of a broken leg that wasn’t actually broken. I took my cloak off and shook off the dead leaves and burrs from it. As I started brushing off my clothes, I noticed my empty scabbard. I had left my sword embedded in the undeadish eldrhim that had scaled the tree after me. Now I had no sword, no dagger, and no wizard cat conscious enough to help me. The only thing I needed to complete my lucky streak was for Menar to show up to take advantage of my lack of defense.

  I threw my cloak back around my shoulders, clasping it around my neck. My stomach rumbled in its emptiness. My only food had been with with Telis.

  Telis. My appetite was quickly forgotten as the memory of the loss of Telis made the pains in my leg, chest, and face pale in comparison. I wouldn’t have been alive without his sacrifice, but knowing that didn’t lessen the feeling of loss.

  I folded up the thick wool blanket and shoved half behind my belt and draped the other half down over my leg. Gently, I picked up Max who, by the lack of reaction to being picked up, wouldn’t be awake anytime soon. Although I didn’t know where I was in regards to where we had first started up the mountain, I knew that if we hiked up to the peak, I could get my bearings straight in order to continue in the direction the dragon had flown.

  Before I started my upwards climb, a flicker of bright light hit my eyes from the periphery of my vision. Looking down, I saw my sword poking out hilt-first from under the felled tree. My spirit lifted some at this little bit of luck. The eldrhim’s body was nowhere to be found. Only a large section of brown, dead plants marked where its body had been. Apparently Max had been right about sunlight banishing the eldrhims.

  Placing Max back to the ground, I placed my non-painful leg against the tree and with both hands wrenched the sword out from under it. The blade was barely even scratched. Chasus had definitely given me a quality sword. There was no black eldrhim blood on it. I guess that sunrise banishes not only the eldrhims, but any part of them as well. Sheathing the sword, I scooped Max back into my arms and started up the mountain.

  As I trudged up the slope through the undergrowth of the forest, I worried about who would have sent eldrhims to kill me. I did not doubt that killing me had been their purpose. There was no way that the ordeal had been a coincidence. Those eldrhims were out to kill me and someone had ordered them to do it. I assumed that eldrhims did not have the intellect to structure an organized attack on their own.

  I wondered if Menar had been behind the attack. Part of me wanted that to be the case. At least in that scenario I still only had one person out to kill me. However, Menar didn’t seem to be a wizard since he
hadn’t used magic when I had run into him and Max had said that eldrhims were summoned with magic. Maybe the stories were true and they had been sent by Rizear. That would just be my luck to have the god of death out to get me. I’d have to ask Max about the eldrhim thing when he woke up. As for the present, I had to assume that there were two separate people out to kill me.

  Every few minutes I had to stop and rest my leg. If it weren’t for the visibly intact skin through the hole in my pants, I would have sworn that the bone was still jutting out of my leg. My face continued to burn with invisible wounds and breathing made me feel like getting punched in the chest. I would almost have rather had the wounds be visible and bleeding to make me feel like my frequent rests were justified. Instead, I had to fight my body’s urge to collapse from the weight I put onto the leg that my body and mind believed was still broken.

  The cool morning started to warm, and the height of the sun signified the approaching of midday. Even though the weather still had a seasonal chill to it, I started to sweat from the effort of hiking up the mountain through my pain. I wanted to take my cloak off, but had no good way to tote it otherwise. I did unwrap the blanket from Max and let it fall to the ground, cradling him still in my arms. At least without the blanket, his body heat was a little more bearable.

  “Hmpf,” came a decidedly annoyed, soft feminine voice from behind us. I turned to see the blue-garbed figure from the previous night leaning over to pick up the discarded blanket. “I save you and your cat, heal your wounds, and all you do is run off and throw my blankets on the ground.” As she stood back up, my breath caught. She was beautiful.

  Her hood down, long sandy hair spilled out in waves over her shoulders. Her thin, feminine eyebrows were drawn down in anger over bright blue eyes, light enough to almost blend in with the whites of her eyes. A narrow, slightly upturned nose rested above full, pouty pink lips on her slender face. Her fair porcelain skin made those lips really stand out. I was pretty sure she had to be used to getting whatever she wanted with a face like that. She couldn’t have been any older than I was, though maybe younger.

  Now that I could really see what she wore, her clothing looked like the closed-front, hooded robes typically worn by wizards. I had seen several wizards in my travels with Max claiming that they chose to wear such garments to be identified for what they were.

  This girl’s robe was much more form-fitting than you’d typically picture on a wizard, though, with a wide, brown, silver-buckled belt around her narrow waist. The sleeves were voluminous, however, and revealed only the tips of her slender fingers. The strap of her wicker case was still slung between her ample breasts—I was just being observant—and she had a backpack slung over her shoulders as well. If she was a wizard, I assumed that the wicker case contained whatever she used to cast her spells.

  As I stared at her with widened eyes, she stormed towards me. Her perfect straight-backed posture and long robe made her appear tall until the illusion shattered to reveal her being almost a head shorter than I was as she stopped inches from where I stood. She stabbed a slender, silver-ringed finger—in fact, she wore one ring on each finger—into my chest as she tilted her head up to look me in the eye. She must have been pretty serious; her poking hurt.

  “Who do you think you are just running off like that, huh?” Her soft voice was almost too cute to sound angry, but her eyes, clenched jaw, and finger poking my chest with each syllable proved otherwise.

  I backed away from her stabbing finger. “Um, sorry?”

  “Sorry? Sorry! What about a ‘thank you Salmaea for saving me’ or a ‘thank you Salmaea for healing me’?” she shouted almost hysterically. This girl was crazy.

  “Okay,” I slowly responded, drawing the word out almost into a question. “Thank you, Salmaea, right? My name’s Korinalis Karell. Thank you for saving us, thank you for healing me, and thank you for the blankets.” I wished that Max were awake. This Salmaea made me nervous, even after fighting men and eldrhims trying to kill me. She had apparently saved me, though. She must have brought the tree down onto the eldrhim, bringing me down with it. “Just take a deep breath and calm down. I didn’t mean to make you angry.”

  Salmaea’s pretty little face started reddening, her lips pressing tightly, but she held in whatever anger was trying to force its way out with a slowly exhaled breath. Her voice sounded like she was straining to not sound angry. “I’m Salmaea Fellway. Look, I’ve had a rough few days and I’m tired of not being appreciated.” Yeah, she was definitely crazy.

  Standing a couple paces from her and holding Max almost as a shield between us, I tried to give her a smile that didn’t give away how nervous I felt about the emotionally unstable sorceress, or female wizard. Anyone who can use magic is considered a wizard, but the whole sorceress and sorcerer thing specifies gender.

  “Well, I appreciate all you did for us. I feel much better than I would dead.” She didn’t even smile in return for my joke. She just continued to glare at me poutily. She wasn’t necessarily pouting, but her lips naturally gave her that look. “When I woke up, I was alone. Sorry if I offended you, but I’m in a little of a time crunch and had to get going.”

  Her sky-blue eyes seemed to relax and her shoulders lost some of their tension. But then she then raised her nose into the air with an exasperated breath and said, “Well, this morning when I saw that the zombie I killed last night had somehow survived a tree falling on it and got away, I tried to track it down.” She turned a head over her shoulder as if she were still looking for the creature. “Couldn’t even find its tracks.”

  I raised a questioning eyebrow. “Zombie?”

  She turned back to look at me with a haughty stare. “Yeah, you know, the thing I saved you from?”

  I almost laughed. The sudden narrowing of her eyes showed that she had noticed. “That was an eldrhim, Sal’.”

  Her eyes narrowed further, the sharpness of her gaze almost palpable. “First of all, call me Sal’ again and you may not have a tongue left to do so next time.” That wiped the smile from my face. She continued in a condescending tone. “Second, there’s no such thing as eldrhims. They’re made up creatures to scare children.”

  Who did this girl think she was? What was with threatening me for trying to give her an affectionate nickname and then treating me like an idiot? This Salmaea was definitely unstable. Then again, she probably could have ripped my tongue out with magic without me being able to do a thing about it.

  As much as I knew that I should have treaded lightly around her, my mouth, with a mind of its own, struck again. “A four-armed zombie? Explain that to me, Sal’. While you’re at it, explain the other two that were definitely not creatures raised from the dead.”

  Salmaea’s icicle eyes hardened and her hand shot to the wicker case at her side. The ground in front of me ripped open in a shower of plant pieces and chunks of dirt that flew into my face. For some reason, she looked even angrier after she had cast the spell than before.

  “Look, Korinalis, I know what I saw.” I couldn’t get over how her face and voice didn’t seem to match the same level of anger. “Eldrhims are a myth, but I know necromancy to be a real magic that can raise the dead. As for your claim that you saw two others, I don’t know that I believe you. I just know that I sensed magic that just felt wrong outside my camp. I’ve never felt such a feeling with magic before.” She gave a shudder. “Anyway, I went to investigate, and found you being chased up a tree by a zombie.” She carefully accentuated the last word to drive it home. I just sighed as I shook dirt off of Max and myself.

  “Okay, thank you for saving me from the zombie that most definitely wasn’t an eldrhim, Salmaea.” I couldn’t help but give her a little attitude, but I tried to be nicer with the name thing. I didn’t have time for dealing with her. I had to keep moving, and to do so, I needed to try and calm her down. I figured the truth would be a simple enough way to get away from her. “I’m after a thief to fulfill an Activated Contract and really need to get going.
”

  Her anger disappeared in a heartbeat and her eyes widened in wonder. “Contract? Ooh, can I see it?” She dropped the blanket from under her arm and stepped forward. And she had gotten angry at me for dropping the thing. Her labile mood made me even more nervous.

  “Um, sure,” I answered, shifting Max to one arm and pulling the magic cloth from my coin purse. I wasn’t completely sure I could trust her not to steal it, but didn’t want to risk more magic being flung my way.

  Salmaea stepped forward and snatched the Contract from my hand, staring at it with wide eyes. “I’ve only seen one other of these and that was behind glass,” she explained. “Korinalis, if only you could understand how much knowledge has been lost over the last few hundred years. Not a wizard alive could make anything like this today.” She didn’t look up at me, she just stared at the Contract, flipping it over in her hands. I hoped with all my heart that I hadn’t made a mistake in handing it to her.

  I held out my hand, hoping she’d take the hint to give the Contract back to me. With a little reluctance, she looked back up at me and placed the Contract in my hand with a jerky motion of her arm.

  “Call me Korin,” I told her with another smile, just wanting to keep her content so I could leave. Her anger was definitely gone, and now she just stared at me curiously.

  “What do you have to do to fulfill the Contract?” By the look on her face, I had just turned into a research subject for her curiosity.

  I looked into her eyes. It was much harder to view her as attractive given her neurotic behavior. Still, those eyes and lips—among other things—were hard to not stare at. “I have to catch a thief and take back something he stole from the Contract Setter.”