Dragon Forged: Chronicles of Dragon Aerie Young Adult Fantasy Fiction (Plague Born Book 3)

by Travis Simmons

  She pressed on. As Leaghan merged with the magic once more, thoughts of Andraal and the slaying of ancient wizards fell away from her mind, and she was consumed with the magic. Stitches went by, and the final runes of the warding against magic attack were put in place.

  When the last stitch met with the very first she’d inlaid on the hem, the entire circle of thread flashed golden, and then faded back to the deeper than black that seemed to melt the runes into the robes.

  “You’re done for today,” Marcone said, a smile on his face. “Now, tell me what weighed so heavily on your mind.”

  Leaghan made an effort placing the remaining thread and the needle into her sewing box, and closed the wooden lid before looking up to the ghostly white eyes of her mentor.

  “Andraal,” she said. “How in the long desert did he get away with all of those murders?”

  “So you’ve found his manifest,” Marcone said. He didn’t wait for an answer before plunging on. “His diary was something the council long suspected to be real, but could never prove. If they’d known about it, they could have called action against Andraal.”

  “He wasn’t part of the council?” she wondered.

  “Not at first. Not until he was already well within his killing spree.”

  “So if they suspected him of the murders, why was he appointed?” Leaghan wondered.

  “Ah, politics,” was all Marcone said about that.

  Leaghan frowned. “So you were the first to go looking for it?”

  “How do you know I wasn’t the last?” Marcone wondered.

  “I’m assuming there were many who went looking for the blood journal,” Leaghan said.

  “Blood journal, I like that name.”

  “Thanks. So were you the only one to find it?”

  “I didn’t find it,” Marcone said. “I found the library, then I was killed. The fact that you found it either means he trusts you, or he doesn’t think of you as a threat.”

  Leaghan remembered the way he’d tossed her clear across the entrance hall of the keep, and she figured he didn’t see her as any kind of threat.

  “But there are others that have gone into their magic,” Leaghan said. “Either they’re very ancient, or he wasn’t alone.”

  “Some are so ancient as to be part of myth, rather than legend,” Marcone confirmed. “And they think of themselves as every bit as godly as humans think of them. Baba Yaga, for instance. Part of the reason you were able to put a brief end to her was because she didn’t think it was possible, and she got sloppy.”

  “And they didn’t try to stop Andraal?” Leaghan wondered.

  Marcone shook his head. “Who knows why they didn’t? Maybe they no longer concerned themselves with the mortal realm; maybe they’re only concerned with gaining more power; maybe he struck a deal with them?”

  “Maybe they were scared of him…” Leaghan pondered.

  Marcone snorted. “Unlikely.”

  “How’s that unlikely?” Leaghan asked. “He killed all of the wizards of his time.”

  “Because he hadn’t grown so powerful by that point to merge with his magic. They had. To merge with your magic makes you nearly impossible to kill.”

  “I killed Baba Yaga,” Leaghan pointed out.

  Marcone laughed at her, a bubbling, phlegmy laugh. “No.”

  “But I did. I shot magic right through her head.”

  “Maybe you missed the part where I said it’s nearly impossible to kill a wizard who’s joined with their magic?”

  “So how do you do it? Some spell?” Leaghan wondered.

  “Why, are you going to go hunting all the evil arch-mages?” Marcone asked, an edge of humor in his voice.

  Leaghan frowned.

  “Regular, mundane weapons. But good luck sneaking up on them to do it.”

  “That’s it? A weapon?”

  Marcone nodded.

  “That seems…rather simple.”

  This time Marcone did laugh, a roar as she’d never heard before. “If it seems simple,” he said, wiping away tears, “then you truly know nothing of arch-mages.”

  “Teach me.”

  Marcone shook his head. “That’s something you will learn on your own. You can’t be taught about the power of arch-mages; you can only understand it through learning of magic.”

  Leaghan shook her head, confused, but she didn’t press the issue. “So, this blood magic Andraal worked on the dragons. I’m assuming it’s not something that was needed.”

  “What do you mean?” Marcone asked.

  “Well, I’m sure if all the wizards worked together, they could have cast them out of the long desert themselves, right?”

  Marcone nodded. “It was already in the plans.”

  “Okay, so why did he kill off all the wizards?”

  “Because he was crazy as tellik shit?” Marcone said.

  “No, seriously.”

  “Yes, seriously. He hungered for power. He wanted recognition. He got both. The blood magic he worked was such a simple spell it’s likely you could do it, right now. But at the same time, the deed of killing so many wizards, casting their magic into one final spell, merged him with the magics.”

  “How in the long desert could I do that?”

  “Why, are you going to try it?” Marcone wondered.

  “NO!” Leaghan said, so shocked she nearly stood.

  Marcone chuckled. “Only joking. He didn’t cast the spell as much as he channeled the energy of their death. Wove it into runes, as you did with your robe, and cast the power about the mountains.”

  Leaghan nodded. She already understood about directing power through an imagined rune. It’s what she would do with her staff, imagine the rune, and the power would be released. It was a form of storing the magic for later use, so she wouldn’t have to exhaust her reserves of power to cast spells quickly, or go through the ritual of casting them.

  “Why did you want to know about Andraal?” Marcone wondered.

  Leaghan shrugged. “I’ve never really heard of him. Being an elf, we don’t learn much of the human legends. And his blood journal. It made me think. I couldn’t imagine he was the first to think of casting the dragons out of the long desert, or that it was a spell that required blood to work. Protection spells shouldn’t require death to work.”

  Marcone nodded. “Very astute. At any rate, Marcella is growing weary. She’s been getting stronger at housing me, but even the strongest medium has their limits. I must retire. Prepare yourself over the next few days. Recuperate, for when I come again, we will finish the neck of your robe.”

  Leaghan was thankful for the time off because it gave her time to study the journal, and reflect on what Andraal truly wanted from her. Correction—she needed to find out what he intended her to do in order to send the dragons back across the ward.

  One of the many issues was Leaghan knew, somehow, that Andraal had ulterior motives for sending the dragons away the first time. Of course, they were a menace, but they had tamers in those times, and maybe not all of the dragons were bad, as she saw evidence of every day she lived in Darubai. And it wasn’t like Andraal was the most wholesome person to begin with. He was a murderer, and an opportunist. Why had he really done it.

  Another issue she was running up against was what spell he used to do it? Studying the blood journal hadn’t turned anything up so far. The pages were filled with rows and columns of names, dates, and vague ways the wizard had been killed. She’d been studying all morning, and she was just now making it to the first of the wizards slain to cast the warding.

  Was it something as simple as a magic circle, like she’d cast on the robes she was wearing? Enough blood magic, harnessing enough magic from the wizards at the time of their death, into a protective circle…would that be enough to hold the dragons at bay?

  She ran a hand through her wavy blond hair, and leaned back in her chair. Her head was throbbing from hours spent, pouring over a centuries old book with faded names written in blood. There had
to be more to what Andraal had done than this. She needed to get back into the library. Thankfully, if anyone was in the laboratory, it was only Marcella. But Marcella rarely went to the laboratory unless Marcone was teaching Leaghan.

  Leaghan didn’t go anywhere now without her staff. She knew that it wasn’t much protection at the moment, but she wanted to get into the habit of taking it with her. Silly as it sounded to admit, she felt more like a wizard with her coal robes, and her white staff. Even if she looked too young and innocent to cut a striking figure, the costume felt like it gave her power beyond the simple spells transcribed on them.

  She tucked the blood journal under one arm, and headed out the door and into the gloomy hall. The light of her room weakened her eyes against the darkness of the hall. As an elf, the shift from day vision to night vision happened little faster than a human’s. But in a few short moments, she was able to see the entire hall as if it were twilight, instead of the flickering, unreliable light of the torches.

  She passed a couple wyverns on her way down the hall and up the twisting stairs to the laboratory. Outside of a curt nod, they didn’t say anything to her. Once inside the laboratory, she locked the door behind her, not wanting anyone to come in and find the entrance to the secret library.

  She lit a lamp, slipped open the secret passage, and made her way down the walkway. Leaghan stopped at the bottom of the stairs, as she always did, and gazed around her. It could have been her imagination, but she felt as though there was something different about the air here. Different than it had been before.

  It was energy, that much she knew, but if it was magic, or the press of so many wyverns now in the keep, she couldn’t be sure. Leaghan had only began to sense energy when she started working with magic, and she was surprised how many things had energy clinging to them. She still had to learn the differences between auras and magic.

  She brushed aside the feeling, and walked to the bookcase. Leaghan wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but she hoped something struck a chord while she looked. She went to slip the blood journal back on the shelf, and when she did, something fell loose from the back of the book. The square of parchment fluttered to the ground, and slipped under the bookcase.

  Quickly, she flipped through the pages, holding the book upside down, hoping something else might fall loose, but nothing did. She slipped the book on the shelf between two thicker tomes, and knelt to retrieve the paper.

  When she opened the paper, Leaghan expected to see more notes on the deaths of more wizards. What she found, however, startled her. It was a diagram. Or rather, schematics for a box. On the paper were four squares, and wizard script telling which boxes were the sides, and which one was top and bottom. Each square of the box was marked with a rune. The runes seemed simple enough to draw, though she hadn’t run across them yet in her training.

  At the top of the page were the words containment cube.

  That’s how he did it, Leaghan thought. Marcone had said it was a simple spell. The problem was, she knew nothing about containment cubes, and she was sure if she asked Marcone about it, he’d know what she was up to, or that she’d looked more into Andraal’s journals.

  But what could she do? She neatly folded the parchment, and slipped it into a pouch at her waist. She turned back to the bookshelf and read through the titles, trying to find one she thought might contain anything on a containment cube. First she looked at the books directly around where she found the blood journal, and then she let her search spread wider.

  She had an armload of books when she left the chamber, and sealed the secret entry behind her.

  A storm was blowing in when Leaghan made it back to her room. She let the door shut behind her, and deposited the books on her writing table before crossing to the only window in her small chamber. When she’d come to live at the keep, Leaghan didn’t feel as though she was worthy of one of the grander rooms that had belonged to an ancient wizard, and likely a teacher here at the keep. Instead, she chose a small room that belonged to the novice wizards when they came to train.

  Likewise, Marcella had chosen a room in the same hallway, and now the dorms in this wing of the keep were playing host to a number of the dragon guard that had come to make sure their only wizard in a hundred years was safe from attack.

  Leaghan still wasn’t sure what they hoped to protect her from. She’d been attacked by Andraal, and it wasn’t likely that they could protect her any more from an attack than she could protect herself.

  She peered out the window and to the silent streets below. It appeared people had already sought safety from the coming storm. Sandstorms were a terror that Leaghan was never prepared for. The wind would howl around the keep, and more than once she hadn’t gotten her window closed before sand had blanketed her room. It took her weeks to get all of the sand out of her bed, and even longer before she wasn’t stepping on stray grains when she walked barefoot through her room, as elves loved to do.

  To the west she could see the storm racing toward Darubai, like a great, seething black bank. Lightning flashed in the sky, the purple lightning that was often associated with storm dragons. She shivered at the thought. Though she’d been out of it, in the magical sense, when High Haven had been destroyed, she remembered the screams of the dying elves as if she’d lived through it. Some part of her mind had recorded those images, and they replayed before her very eyes when she came out of her magical coma.

  She bolted the window tight, and turned back to her stack of purloined books. She wished intuition would guide her to the right book, but if she had any kind of intuition, it wasn’t telling her what tome she might find information of a containment cube in.

  Leaghan had taken several books of magical theory, and she searched through those first, hoping that she could find anything on energy containment, if not anything of the cube specifically. She set the parchment on the desk beside her, and compared the runes to many she found scattered throughout the book.

  It was then that the vision hit her. She was riffling through the old tomes, when suddenly her head swam, as if a great gust of wind barreled into her, making her sway in her seat. Her mind was filled with the image of sand, swirling through the streets of Darubai, filling the alleys and the rooms of broken towers. Within the wall of sand devouring the city flashed streaks of purple lightning. When the eerie lightning lit the storm, causing the grains of sand to glow in dark gold and violet relief, she saw the giant forms of dragons.

  Buildings smashed before their might, fire bloomed around towers, cracking windows and setting the foundations aflame. Ice rained down in other areas, and people froze solid where they’d previously been running for safety, screams on their lips that would never reach the air, or human ears.

  She saw elves upon griffons, taking to the sky, the half cat, half eagle mounts clawing their way through the storm, even as their eagle wings beat at the onslaught of wind. She saw dwarves taking to their qilin. The beasts with the body of an ox, vibrant manes and beards floating on a mystical wind, their scaled bodies glimmering in the light of the storm. They took to the buildings, climbing straight up walls as if there were no such thing as gravity to bog them down.

  Wyverns and friendly dragons took to the skies, and they attacked. Darubai was a force to recon with now. They were prepared for a dragon attack, but in the midst of a storm?

  Leaghan shivered, and her mind jolted back to the present. She turned to the window, remembering the storm she’d seen with the purple lightning. There was no doubt in her mind that this was the very same storm. And there would be no warning, if she didn’t warn someone.

  “Marcella!” Leaghan yelled, charging for her door, the open tomes forgotten on her desk.

  She threw open the door, and pulled up short. There stood a wyvern she’d only seen in passing. His skin was sallow, his eyes slanted and distant, almost glazed with sleep. His hair was dark, and he was short and thin. Without warning or provocation, his hand gripped her neck in a crushing force, and he lifted her
off the ground with the strength only a wyvern could channel.

  Leaghan gagged, her feet kicking, her hands clawing at his grip, trying to break herself free of him. Her robes were supposed to protect her from physical attack, weren’t they? Maybe that was just weapons, and not touch?

  She landed a swift kick between his legs, and the wyvern crumpled to the ground, dropping Leaghan as he fell. She landed on her back, her elbow struck the hard stone floor, sending a shock up her arm. Her head banged into the bedframe, and for a moment, the room swam dizzyingly before her eyes.

  She fought through the surge of dizziness, and clambered for her staff. The wyvern was starting to stand once more, his hand bracing the door, his other hand pressed tight to his stomach.

  Leaghan gripped her staff, held it high in one hand, and envisioned the rune for light. She swung the top of the staff down at the wyvern, knocking him back to the floor. He grabbed his head, rolled on his back, and when he opened his eyes, Leaghan released the rune.

  Bright noontime light flared through the chamber, lighting the shadows and chasing back the darkness of the storm. The wyvern screamed out in pain, and it was almost as if there were two voices that echoed from his throat, tormented by the searing light.

  Leaghan didn’t wait for him to recover. She charged from her room, calling to Marcella.

  Boots sounded on the stairs at the end of the hall, and Leaghan stopped, her heart hammering in her chest. Was this going to be more possessed wyverns?

  “Leaghan?” she heard Marcella call from the stairs. “What happened?”

  Behind her was the tall blond wyvern, Josef. Leaghan had met him on several occasions, but hadn’t taken much time to talk to him. He was Marcella’s best friend, so he was used to the keep before he’d been sent to stay there.

  Leaghan pointed to her chamber. “Wyvern attacked me. And there are dragons coming.”

  Marcella and Josef stopped in their tracks.

  “You go tell Garrett, I will get Nevik under control,” Josef said.

  Marcella nodded, and rushed toward the stairs once more, heading up to the tower room, the laboratory, where she could shift to her wyvern form from the window, and warn Garrett.