by Dante King
“There are a hundred dragonmancers?” I asked incredulously.
“More,” said Penelope. “There are always a contingent of riders out on missions. By the last count, I think there were close to one-hundred and twenty-five dragonmancers here at the Academy.”
“And each dragonmancer represents a different race,” I said, shaking my head. “How is that even possible?”
Penelope gave me a strange look then. “How is it possible that there are so many stars in the sky? How is it possible that we know more about the tops of the mountains than we do about the bottoms of the seas? How is it possible that some lizards can detach their tails and grow a new one, or squirt blood from their eyes? How is anything possible, Mike?
“Well, when you put it like that,” I said.
“You do not have so many races on your home world?” Penelope asked, her face shining with a sudden interest.
“Not one one-hundred and twenty-five of them, no,” I said. “Man, if we had that many, I don’t think we would ever stop fighting one another.”
A twin booming sound suddenly echoed overhead, and two dragons appeared. One was gold, and the other was silver, and they both swept low over the courtyard wall. Their great wings beat as they slowed their descent, producing a sound like the sails of some great ship snapping in a strong wind. The two metallic-looking dragons alighted at the end of the training ground at which Penelope and I stood watching the milling dragonmancers.
Sergeant Milena and Lieutenant Kaleen dismounted smoothly. They were elves of some kind or another with pale white skin, blood red eyes, and hair the color of daisy petals. They looked so alike because, as I’d been told, they were twins.
Milena’s hair was cut short—you might have described it as a pixie cut, if you fancied getting cracked in the side of the head—while Lieutenant Kaleen opted for dreadlocks tied behind her head.
Lieutenant Kaleen instantly started bawling out orders to the assembled dragonmancers. who started getting into neater rank and file. Meanwhile, Sergeant Milena glanced over and saw Penelope and I standing apart from the rest of the gang. Her face set into a mirthless smile. She began to march over to us, walking with the delighted and enthusiastic tread of a commanding officer who had spotted her first reason of the day to get all shouty. Her expression reminded me of T-rex from Jurassic Park when it knocks down the walls of that bamboo toilet and finds that poor bastard sitting on the shitter.
“Oh, no,” Penelope squeaked.
I hitched a smile onto my dial and, as the sergeant came to halt, said brightly, “Morning, Sergeant!”
“Dragonmancer Noctis,” Sergeant Milena said, “kindly shut the fuck up.”
“Yes, Sergeant,” I said, still smiling.
Sergeant Milena looked up at me with an expression that would have sent most folk’s knees to shaking. It was the sort of look that you could have beaten and sharpened a sword blade on. It was the sort of look to intimidate anyone who hadn’t been cornered by four crackheads in Downtown Los Angeles and had to fight their way out. She obviously knew how effective that stare was though because she decided to share it with Penelope. Sergeant Milena was just generous like that.
Despite her prickly exterior, I figured that Sergeant Milena was actually, deep down, a soft marshmallowy creature, who quite liked to see a bit of character in the warriors she trained.
Or so I hoped.
Unlike me, Penelope wilted under the sunny sergeant’s stare like a lettuce under a blowtorch.
“How’re things, Sergeant?” I asked, trying to take the heat from the Knowledge Sprite. “You caught us admiring the gang. They’re looking really—”
Sergeant Milena let out a long sigh and turned back to me. “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” she said in a grating voice.
“Ashamed, Sergeant?” I asked.
“Think of the sun, who tirelessly provides light for you to see by,” Sergeant Milena said “and here you two are fucking wasting it.”
I loved these sorts of insults, and I had difficulty keeping my face straight.
I had never had the inclination to join the military back on Earth, despite it being an intelligent option for someone with so few legitimate options. I possessed enough self-knowledge to know that there was only so long I could endure being yelled at. Here, in this world though, there were dragons. And dragons made up for a lot, and I’d endure all the yelling the officers could give if it meant I could play with the winged, scaled, magic-enabling creatures.
“Apologies, Sergeant,” Penelope said, cleverly taking the reins of the situation before I landed us in deeper trouble. “Permission to join the company?”
“Permission granted, Dragonmancer,” Sergeant Milena said grudgingly.
As Penelope hurried off, I went to follow her.
A hand shot out, however, and stopped my progress. It happened so fast that I walked right into Sergeant Milena’s arm and had to take a step back after I hit it. It was like walking into an iron bar.
“Dragonmancer Noctis,” the Sergeant said, pinning me with her blood red eyes.
“Yes, Sergeant?”
The Sergeant pointed at the onyx crystal hanging from my neck on its golden chain. It was secured by a golden cage that was fixed to the chain, and had been a gift from Elenari after I had successfully picked my coterie—the squad of three who acted as a dragonmancer’s personal guard.
“Where’s your dragon?” Sergeant Milena demanded.
I looked down at the crystal. It was dull, as it always was when Noctis wasn’t inside.
“Noctis is back in the middle bailey watching the regular troops drill, Sergeant Milena,” I said. “I thought it might be nice for him to have some non-crystal time, you know, what with it being a pleasant morning. I think he’s pretty pleased to be—”
Sergeant Milena cut me off by raising one hand and closing her eyes in a slightly aggrieved way.
“Dragonmancer Noctis,” she said in a pained tone, “if I wanted to hear from an asshole, I would have farted. Why the fuck is your dragon not with you?”
I frowned. “I told you. It’s a nice day. I thought he might like to get some fresh air and—”
“Dragonmancer Noctis, I’ll tell you this once,” Sergeant Milena said. “Whenever you set foot inside the Drako Academy castle for training, you can consider yourself on standby for battle. It’s part of the mentality we are trying to instill in you. What Lieutenant Kaleen and I are trying however ineffectually to do is sharpen you to a fine, cutting edge. Because if the dungheap hits the windmill, it’ll most likely hit it so fast that you’ll be called to arms in an instant. Not particularly easy to do when your dragon is off sunbathing or having a picnic or some shit, is it?”
I nodded. To be fair, the woman had a point.
“Are we clear, Dragonmancer Noctis?” the Sergeant said in a dangerous voice.
“Crystal, Sergeant,” I said.
“Good. Now, recall your dragon.”
“Hey, Noctis,” I thought, “I’m going to need you back here with me. Sergeant’s orders and all that.”
I was given the mental impression of the Onyx Dragon inclining his head, then I felt a thrum of heat against my chest. The onyx crystal in its cage glowed with a sudden orange flame that quickly faded.
“Splendid,” said Sergeant Milena, who had been watching. “Now, get the fuck into line and try not to spout anymore of your smartass comments, otherwise the next thing coming out of your mouth will be your teeth.”
And, because sometimes I just couldn’t resist, I gave the dear, sweet Sergeant a wink before striding off to find a spot behind a three-foot tall gnome and in front of a half-orc.
As I took my allotted place amongst the ranks of dragonmancers, I noticed that none of them had their dragons out in the open. The only two dragons in sight were those of the Sergeant and the Lieutenant, and I supposed this was a demonstration of power and authority by the two ranking officers.
I was spared no more time for observation o
r thought because we started our exercises. Almost immediately, a calm came over me, and I lost myself in the repetition of the exercises and the shouted commands yelled out by Lieutenant Kaleen.
Chapter Four
The only thing that made me sit up and take attention in those opening minutes of my first ever dragonmancer physical exercise class was when, after running on the spot for ten minutes, Lieutenant Kaleen roared, “All right, you slobs! Drop and give me four hundred pushups!”
Four hundred pushups! I thought.
I knew I was strong, but I also knew that four hundred pushups was a ridiculous ask of anyone.
Which just went to show that I wasn’t half as smart, or cognizant of my dragon bonded body’s abilities, as I thought I was.
By the time that I reached my own personal best—fifty-nine pushups—I was aware of just how dramatic a change my body had gone through, I wasn’t even puffed, wasn’t even close to being puffed. I couldn’t feel a drop of perspiration anywhere on my body. I blew past one hundred with consummate ease. It was only when i reached two hundred and fifty that I felt a slight burn in my biceps, triceps and shoulders that told me that the lactic acid was finally beginning to build up. As I finished my four hundred reps, a single drop of sweat crept down out of my hairline.
I stood up and looked around. I was glad to see that I wasn’t the last dragonmancer to finish, but I sure as hell hadn’t been the first. At least twenty or thirty dragonmancers were standing and waiting for the next instruction from Lieutenant Kaleen.
This ignited the old fire within my stomach. It was the flame that had driven me to push past pain and fear during my MMA training. It was the old competitive street that had got me into so much trouble in my youth but had, crucially, also brought me to where I was right now.
Lieutenant Kaleen’s next command was for five hundred squat jumps.
The next for three hundred burpees.
The next for one thousand jumping jacks.
With every new round of exercises I endeavored to beat those around me, to push myself further and find my new limit. I liked to think that I was getting fitter and better and faster even as the morning wore on, but, realistically, that isn’t how this sort of thing goes. You don’t just make gains over a two-hour period. Maybe, if you were a regular human, doing three hundred crunches in under five minutes might chisel your abs right there on the spot—if the effort didn’t give you a hernia. The thing was though, I wasn’t just your average human now, I was a dragonmancer.
I kept having to remind myself of that. In spite of the evidence of my newly tuned and heightened senses, sometimes I caught myself looking about as if I was in some sort of dreamland.
“All right, ladies!” Lieutenant Kaleen bellowed.
“And gentleman!” I added, just loud enough for those around me to hear. There were a few chuckles, and I caught the eye of a pretty slip of a warrior with shimmering aqua-colored skin and what looked like gills along the sides of her neck. She stuck a forked tongue out at me.
“And gentleman, thank you, Dragonmancer Noctis,” Lieutenant Kaleen said. “All of you, shake down and loosen up. Grab some water from the butts. You’ve got five minutes to ready yourselves and then we’ll be taking a nice little stroll up into the mountains.”
After the nuts amount of exercises that we had just been put through, I could only imagine what a ‘nice little stroll in the mountains’ was going to entail. Following the lead of the little gnome in front of me, I walked over to the water butts where there was a short line of warriors waiting for a drink.
“Dragonmancer Noctis,” Lieutenant Kaleen’s voice sounded in my ear. “A moment of your time, please.”
I followed the lieutenant a short way away.
Abruptly, Lieutenant Kaleen spun on her heel to face me. It was a close-run thing, but I just managed to take a step back and avoid being whipped in the face by a dread that had escaped the silver hairpin that held the rest of them in place at the back of her head.
“Just a quick question for you, Dragonmancer Noctis,” the lieutenant said. “And I’d appreciate an answer that is at least eighty percent free from horseshit.”
“I’ll do my best, Lieutenant Kaleen,” I said, adopting that special soldier’s stare and focusing on a point some three inches above my CO’s head.
Lieutenant Kaleen shook her head at me and rubbed her eyes. “The fact that you’re the only male dragonmancer we have, Michael,” she said, “you really are one of a kind, aren’t you?”
“You’ll never find another like me, Lieutenant Kaleen,” I replied in a friendly voice.
“We can only hope so, can’t we?” the lieutenant said. “Although I haven’t been that lucky of late.”
I decided to refrain from saying anything overly smart. It was a trial, but I remembered how goddamn boring polishing those shields with Elenari had been and wasn’t too keen on repeating the punishment.
“How can I help, Lieutenant Kaleen?” I asked.
Lieutenant Kaleen gathered herself and hitched that characteristic knowing, somewhat unsettling smile onto her face.
“Where in the blazing hellfire are the dragonmancers that you share a room with?” she asked.
“Saya and Elenari?” I said.
“Oh, yes, those are the ones,” Lieutenant Kaleen replied in a sardonic voice. “Where are they?”
“They were a little under the weather this morning, Lieutenant Kaleen,” I said.
Lieutenant Kaleen made a show of looking up at the corrugated clouds that were spread across the sky.
“Under the weather?” she said. “I’m under the weather, Dragonmancer Noctis. You’re under the weather. We’re all under the fucking weather.”
I bit back a retort.
“What do you mean they are under the weather?” the lieutenant asked.
“I mean that they’re suffering from a sickness, ma’am,” I said. “Both of them. Surely, it’s permitted for dragonmancers to sometimes take a day off if they’re feeling unwell or are injured?”
Lieutenant Kaleen regarded me for a long moment. She glanced to her right and motioned to where Sergeant Milena was standing watch over the other dragonmancers. The sergeant strolled over.
“I like you most of the time, Michael Noctis, truly I do,” Lieutenant Kaleen said as her twin approached. “You have… spunk.”
Yeah, I know, I thought, it’s that damned stuff that's got me lying to you right now.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” I said.
Lieutenant Kaleen’s eyes narrowed. “However, being as bloody unhelpful as you’re being right now, I feel like the only way I could like the look of you today was if we were both stranded on a desert island and there was nothing in the way of sustenance in sight.”
“What is it?” Milena said, coming to stand next to Lieutenant Kaleen and myself.
“Dragonmancer Noctis was telling me that Saya and Elenari are absent through sickness,” Lieutenant Kaleen said sweetly.
Sergeant Milena’s face didn’t move, but she somehow managed to imbue it with a frost. Her red eyes flashed dangerously.
“Is that right?” she said. “Must’ve been a hell of a sickness, seeing as dragonmancers usually only get struck down by the most virulent of viruses or the most pernicious of poisons.”
Bollocks. I’ve always been a crap liar.
“Well…” I said, but Sergeant Milena had turned to her twin and the two of them were conversing in low voices that only allowed me to catch the broken shards of sentences, even with my dragon-enhanced hearing.
“... was an excellent prospect,” the Sergeant said.
“... Elenari… corrupted the other… Wood Elves way…” muttered Lieutenant Kaleen.
Milena then snarled something in a tongue that must have been some sort of elvish because I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
“All right, look,” I said, feeling as if I should step in here before this pair of sibling superiors jumped to the wrong conclusion and my two frien
ds found themselves buried in shit right up to the tips of Elenari’s pointy ears. “Listen to me, officers. The two girls are with the Seer.”
“The Seer?” Sergeant Milena said.
Next to her, Lieutenant Kaleen snorted and said, “That Seer. I don’t see why she’s allowed her special dispensations as far as our soldiers and dragonmancers are concerned.”
Milena looked like she wouldn’t have minded spitting a bit of bile herself on that score, but professionalism got the better of her. She gave me one last vitriolic look and then told me to get back in formation.
Within ten minutes, we had commenced on our ‘nice little stroll’ into the mountains. We ran through the castle in two files of fifty. While Sergeant Milena glided overhead on the back of her golden dragon, Lieutenant Kaleen led the way at the head of the column. She took us out through the middle bailey, through the lower bailey and then past the twin gatehouses that guarded the enormous and impregnable-looking gates, which stood open.
Maybe it was being born and raised on the streets of a city as notoriously vapid and self-centered and fake as Los Angeles, but I couldn’t help but think that at least part of our run was a PR stunt of sorts.
Lieutenant Kaleen led our company down the road and into the town of Drakereach, running through the main streets on a circuit that she obviously knew every well. It looked to me as if this were all part of the Empress Cyrene not-so-subtly reminding the people of the town who it was that would protect them in the eventuality of an attack by a neighboring empire.
We ran down through the town, back up through it and into the foothills of the wooded mountains. For a while we jogged swiftly along the riverside. The gentle stream that flowed down and out from Augury Grove was a raging torrent down here. It cut and ground and chewed its way through the hard granite to form a wide canyon that was filled with the booming echo of whitewater and ponding stone.
We must have run twenty miles—most of it uphill—before my legs gave even the tiniest inkling that they might, at some point in the future, get tired. Maybe.
I enjoyed running in L.A, enjoyed seeing the city change and evolve around me as I jogged. Out here though, the sense of accomplishment that I felt about covering a certain amount of distance was eclipsed by the sheer majesty and beauty of the scenery. I knew that I had my dragon-enhanced senses to thank for a lot of it, but I was sure that even if I hadn’t passed through the Transfusion Ceremony, I wouldn’t have been able to stop gawking and smiling like a damned idiot tourist.
