by Brian Beam
My plan had originally been to jump Prexwin and break his concentration again, but I realized that with Sal’ at such a dangerous height, that was out of the question. I could assume that if Prexwin’s spell failed, Sal’ would be able to use magic of her own to stop her fall, but without knowing for sure, I’d be putting her life at risk. My planning didn’t really matter anyway since apparently, Prexwin knew exactly what I was doing as he slowly turned his head towards me with a grin.
“I will be back with you in just a moment,” he stated surely as I became trapped again in his accursed invisible bindings. Seriously, the whole trapping me with magic was getting old. He left me free to speak this time, though, so I took advantage of it.
“Let her down, you Utrien-blooded son of a goat.” I didn’t have much to lose at this point. I figured I may as well get an insult or two in. Plus, the god of dung seemed an appropriate god for this guy. “Why don’t you drop this magic thing and fight me like a man?” I taunted vituperatively.
“Where is the fun in that?” Prexwin asked acidly. “I will concede to your first request, though,” he hissed as Sal’ began to plummet to the ground.
Sal’ screamed as she fell and my heart seemed to stop as it dropped into my stomach. I tried to scream out to her to do something to stop her fall, but my lips literally wouldn’t move. This bastard was good. He was enjoying watching my fear as I wondered if Sal’ would be able to think clearly enough to use magic to stop her fall while plunging to the ground.
Sal’ seemed to fall in slow motion. In the back of my mind, I wondered if somehow Prexwin was making me see her drop in slow motion so I could see the look of terror on her face right before her life ended.
Prexwin continued to grin, watching my face as if Sal’ was of no concern. Sal’s terrified scream grew louder as she neared the ground. Her fear was probably keeping her from realizing she could draw the spell from herself even if she couldn’t maneuver the wicker case to where she could access the mice in it. I still hoped that she would realize it quickly enough that she could do so and somehow save herself. It wasn’t looking likely, though.
I didn’t want to watch Sal’ die. I didn’t think my heart could take it. For once I could fully admit to myself that I did feel something for her. Maybe not love, but something close to it.
However, even if I wanted to look away, my eyes were held open by Prexwin’s magic as Sal’ fell. Watching as Sal’ plummeted, I thought I could see a small, dark dot in the distance that was growing larger. That seemed a weird thing to notice, but for some reason my mind took it in.
Before I could dwell on what it was, my heart skipped a beat and my breathing stopped as Sal’ slammed into the ground. Only, Sal’ didn’t land with the sickening splat I expected. It was as if the dirt and grass were liquid and she plunged into it as though diving into a lake. Just like if she really had fallen into a lake, the ground around her rippled outwards.
Prexwin, confused on why he hadn’t heard her land, jerked his head away from me to see that there was no sign of Sal’. “What the…?” was all he had time to say before two slender hands thrust out from the ground with a rippling effect and grabbed his feet, yanking them forwards and sending him into a backwards fall.
Again, Prexwin’s spell was lifted from me and I sprang forward. My pain didn’t even register as my heart pounded fury through my veins. I swept up my shortsword and brought it down with my broken arm towards his neck. Prexwin’s arm shot up towards me, but his body convulsed again, stopping whatever spell he had been ready to use. The convulsion kept my attack from his neck, but the blade slid through his right shoulder. Prexwin’s smirk was replaced with a scream full of pain and rage.
I immediately withdrew my sword to go for a killing stroke, not wanting to even let him have a chance to retaliate. Before I could drive my blade back down, however, he was simply gone. Where I had been looking down on his prostrate form, I was now watching the tip of the curved orange-glowing blade exiting from below my rib cage with widened eyes. With the pain of my ruined hand, I could barely feel the sharp blade pass through me or withdraw as I fell to my knees. I could feel the blood pumping out of me with every beat of my speeding heart. With the blood went my pain. My body went numb.
“Oh, well. Guess I will just have to settle with having my fun with the others,” I heard Prexwin chuckle behind me. I thought I could hear a distant thunder boom as well. Actually it seemed like repetitive thunder. Through my dizzy thoughts, I faintly recalled that the sky had been clear, though. “I guess I can spare a moment to watch your life bleed out, though.”
Gusts of wind shook my body as I slumped sideways to the ground in my blood-loss induced dizziness. Would the Karells ever know how much they meant to me? Would my birth parents find out about my death after they had tried to save me from this fate so many years ago? Where was everyone else? Was Undula going to die because of me? Was Max okay? Why hadn’t he come to help me? Wasn’t the egg supposed to bring me good luck and fortune instead of a sword through my gut? Would Sal’ forgive me for leaving her like this? As if my last thought had been a summons, I heard Sal’ scream in anger followed by a feminine grunt and a dull thud.
I weakly rolled my head to blurrily look back at Prexwin as he watched me with a smile as I lay there dying. I could make out the red stain on his fancy blue coat and smeared on his bare chest. Blood stained the end of his sword, muting the glow on the sword’s tip. Sal’ was lying motionless beside him. Emotionally, I felt intense anger as well as remorse for what I had brought upon Sal’. Physically, I was numb.
“Well, maybe I should go ahead and end this,” his voice grated. “I don’t want the others to get away before I get back.” His hand lifted slowly, his fingers spread and palm facing me.
I only partially took this in as I saw a great, green shape sweeping down from behind him. My vision may have been blurred from my light grasp on consciousness as blood pumped out of me, but I could make out the wingspan of the dragon. It had finally found me. It seemed that Sal’s magic blob had lost its effect on the dragon’s ability to fly. It was actually funny that the dragon was sweeping down to kill me when, as close as the dragon was, it would be lucky to do the job before my sword-pierced artery or Prexwin beat it to the punch. I let out a small chuckle that sent a spray of blood from my mouth.
Prexwin hadn’t noticed the bursts of air from the dragon’s flapping wings or the whooshing sound of its current descent, but I hadn’t really either before I actually saw the thing. Given our distance from the Sanderon Mountains and the time of year, it just seemed like a windy day near the mountains. I had a feeling that once Prexwin did notice, he was going to take pleasure in watching the dragon’s work. I was wrong.
Wrong, that is, in a good way. One of the dragon’s hind feet snatched Prexwin from where he stood and started beating its wings again to rise into the air with Prexwin screaming several interesting obscenities as he was lifted away.
I weakly turned my head to watch as the dragon flew steeply into the air. Even with the speed of the dragon and the haziness of my vision, I could see Prexwin convulse. I guess he could have just been thrashing around to get loose, but considering that there was no visible indication he was using magic, I assumed otherwise. I almost thought I could see a dark shape at the base of the dragon’s neck as if someone was riding it.
If I could have shaken my head with the ridiculousness of that notion, I would have. For all I knew, I could have been hallucinating the whole event as my body desperately clung to life.
I shut my eyes for what I figured to be the last time as I held hope in my heart that the dragon was not a hallucination and would take care of Prexwin so that my friends would survive. I hoped that Sal’s still form was still alive, regretting that I would never know.
I felt blood trickling out of the side of my mouth and down my cheek. The darkness behind my eyelids became a vast white nothingness. I felt like I was floating upwards into the air. Before you get too worried, reme
mber that as long as there are more pages in my journal, odds are that I survived to keep writing.
“Korin!” The scream sounded something like Sal’ if she had been screaming at me underwater. My body shook violently. Still, I saw only whiteness and resumed my aimless floating. “Korin!” the muffled voice screamed again. “Max, I can’t heal him. He’s too far gone. Dammit, Korin, open your eyes. Hold on!” I felt pressure against my abdomen. I felt like there should be some pain involved in that pressure. There wasn’t. There was nothing but bright, pristine white.
I felt another shake and thought I heard crying. “Get back,” a voice rasped. Someone was asking questions. Til? I wondered if Til’s dragon carving would ever make it to Mathual. He would be so happy. In the back of my mind, I felt like there was something more important that I should be thinking about.
Remember our love for you, Ingran. That is one thing that can never be taken from us, or you.
Where was my mom’s voice coming from? Suddenly, I could see her. It was as if she was glowing as she smiled down at me. Her face was clearer than I had ever seen in my dreams. Her golden hair swept down in ringlets below a diademed forehead. She visibly trembled as if holding back tears behind her smile. Her emerald eyes, the exact shade as my own, glistened. My father’s arms were circled around her shoulders. He didn’t look like he was going to cry, but sadness clearly touched his eyes.
Two familiar voices—one raspy, one softly feminine—drifted to my ears from somewhere distant. They sounded more muffled than before as they spoke back and forth quickly and I couldn’t make out a word. I didn’t really care what those voices were saying. I was finally with my parents. I couldn’t speak, but I was there, staring up at them as I lay on the soft blankets of my bassinet. After all this time, I had finally found them. My own eyes started to fill with tears, giving the scene the blurriness that I was accustomed to in my dreams.
As I watched my parents from my bassinet, swaddled in a soft sheet, I felt a familiar warmth spread through my body. At least I thought it was familiar. I was having trouble grasping on to what my life had been before that moment with my parents lovingly watching over me.
My eyes shot open to see the bright afternoon sky as my upper body jerked up before falling back to the ground. The sunlight hurt my eyes at first. I was lying on soft grass. My vision was still fuzzy. I felt lightheaded and weak. The robe I was wearing was darkened with blood. Actually, it was darkened with a whole lot of my blood.
“Korin,” a soft, feminine voice exclaimed worriedly. I looked up to see a beautiful porcelain face with sandy hair spilling onto her shoulders. Sal’. It was Sal’. I was at the McAlwains’ farm. My mind still seemed to move at a snail’s pace, but the world was starting to make more sense. Sal’ wrapped an arm around my shoulders, lifting my back off the ground.
“I was stabbed,” I whispered as Sal’ lowered my head down onto her lap. She was sitting on the ground, tears falling down her cheeks. I felt like I had as much strength as a strand of yarn, but there was no pain. “You healed me?”
“We, lunkhead,” came a raspy voice from above me, speaking through a yawn. Through my slowly clarifying vision, I could make out a shape on Sal’s shoulder. It was a squirrel. It was a haggard, half-conscious squirrel. “Figures. One kiss and then it is all about her.” His squirrelly muzzle was smiling wearily. I remembered that the squirrel was Max and my mouth slowly curved into a half-smile of my own.
Sal’ either chose to ignore him or truly didn’t notice what he said. “I thought you were gone,” Sal’ sniffled, her tears dropping onto my face. I tried to lift an arm to wipe the tears from her face, but was too weak to even do that. What little energy I had was gone from my movement when I had first awoke. Considering I could literally feel the weight of my blood on the robe I was wearing, my weakness was no surprise. The only surprise was that I was still alive.
“Undula…Til’,” I breathed, just barely audible. Even talking was a task.
Sal’ sniffled again. “Max sent Til’ to look after the McAlwains. To be more specific, we just needed him out of our hair for us to heal you. Max had told him to stay inside from the beginning, but of course that didn’t work.” She gave me a half-hearted smile at that but it melted away quickly. “Undula will be okay after she’s had some rest. Her husband and son are still inside with her. I was able do a basic healing on her before I came after you.” Sal’s tears started to fall a little faster and she choked back a sob. “I’m so sorry. I should have come right out and this wouldn’t have happened. I couldn’t leave her like that, though. She would have died.”
Despite feeling like I was trying to lift a horse with my pinky, I forced my newly healed left hand up to Sal’s that was lying on my chest and gave her as much of a smile as my mouth would let me make. “You did the right thing.” I meant it. I would have rather lost my own life than let an innocent person die because of me. Sal’ smiled back at me through her tears, gripping my hand firmly. I wanted to sit up and hold her. Given how impossible that would have been at that moment, I settled for enjoying staring up at her beautiful face. “How long have I been out?”
Instead of a verbal answer, Sal’ tilted her head up to the sky. My eyes followed in that direction since moving my head would have been too much of a chore. There was a large green shape in the sky, tumbling around with an indistinct, smaller dark shape on its back and another in a clawed hand.
I mentally slapped myself on the forehead. How could I have forgotten about Prexwin and a house-sized dragon? Massive blood loss was not a good enough excuse. I must have been out only a few minutes at most, even if I felt like I had stared at my parents for days.
The dragon and Prexwin were far enough away to mute the ruckus they had to be making, but now that I had seen them, I could make out the distant beating of dragon wings. If Prexwin was making any noise, I couldn’t hear it.
What looked like lightning bolts—if lightning were made from blue flame—were shooting from Prexwin’s shape, but seemed to be deflecting off the sides of the dragon. Some of that fire-lightning was snaking around to hit whatever, or whoever, was sitting at the base of the dragon’s neck. It looked as if the dragon was trying to drop Prexwin to the ground, but Prexwin was holding on for dear life, impotently shooting spells at the dragon. If Prexwin couldn’t hurt the dragon, how did the wizards of old manage to banish them to the Snowy Waste?
For the life of me, I couldn’t make sense of the situation. Why would the dragon attack Prexwin and not me?
“Can’t we do something?” I choked, bursting into a fit of violent, dry coughing. The coughing left me feeling even weaker.
Sal’ looked down to Max and Max just shook his head. “Not from here,” he stated simply before looking back to the spectacle above us.
Considering the distance and my still hazy vision, I couldn’t make out exactly what was going on up in the air. It seemed, though, that Prexwin had another of his convulsions, the fire-lightning magic shooting from his form suddenly stopping and his body dropping from the dragon’s massive hand. His body seemed nothing more than a dark dot from the height it had been at as it plummeted towards the ground, the orange glowing sword glowing like a beacon from his hand. I hoped he was unable to recover from whatever had happened so that he would fall to his death. It felt quite weird to wish for someone to die and mean it, but with what this man had done and had planned to do, I didn’t feel all that bad about it. In fact, I didn’t feel bad at all.
Sal’, Max, and I just watched in silence as the shape grew larger and larger until…
There was a sudden, blindingly-bright flash of silver light and Prexwin, with his sword, was simply gone.
I was slowly drifting away, screaming and crying into a blindingly bright silver light as my parents watched with tears in their eyes.
“Korin?” Sal’ asked worriedly. I realized that I was staring off into space. I somehow knew that the silver light Prexwin had disappeared into was the same light from my memory.
There was no question.
“I’m okay,” I replied softly.
Sal’ turned her head towards Max. “Max, we have to be ready for Prexwin. He’s still out there.”
I forced my head to shake and Sal looked down at me. “He’s gone,” I rasped. “Not dead, but gone.” I just knew somehow. He could have simply stopped his fall with his magic, but he didn’t. He used whatever had taken me from my parents to escape. He must have realized that he was outmatched with the dragon involved. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t be back, but it did mean that we were safe for the moment. Well, everyone but me, anyway. I still had an angry dragon whose unborn child was in my coin purse to worry about.
Weakly tilting my head against Sal’s lap, I looked back up at the dragon. As it righted itself in flight, it began its descent, eventually landing by the McAlwains’ barn which was a few paces further from us than the McAlwains’ cottage. Not that the distance mattered. I wasn’t going anywhere in my condition. I could be a mile or inches from the dragon and still not be able to do a thing to keep safe from it.
Squinting my eyes, I figured my mind must still be playing tricks on me. It looked like a person had been on its back. At least, it looked like a charred version of a person for a split-second after the dragon’s landing before it slumped to the side and fell a good ten feet to the ground. The dragon paid the body no mind. It just stared at me with burning red eyes that stood out starkly through my clearing vision even with the distance. Though not an expert in dragon expressions, I was pretty sure it was glaring angrily.
“Stay here,” Max rasped, jumping from Sal’s shoulder and running off towards the dragon.
