by Dante King
The smell of sap was strong in the air. The wind blew keenly enough to wick away the little sweat gathered on my forehead. The road that we were running along wound this way and that through the stunning mixed woodland. Some of the trees looked familiar, but most were totally alien to me. Mostly, they were evergreens—pines and firs and whatnot—but there was a smattering of huge broadleaf things, beautiful bedecked in leaves of red, gold, amber, mustard, ocher, and currant.
The tramp of one hundred pairs of feet beat like the rhythm of a marching drum against the rough gravel under our boots. All around us, in an accompanying melody, myriad birds warbled and tootled.
My blood pounded through my veins. My breath whooshed in and out of my lungs. Occasionally, when it was able to find a gap in the clouds overhead, the sun poked a gilt finger down and illuminated the river, turning it into a flood of milky, sparkling diamonds.
I had never, in all my life, felt so alive. Not even when I’d been chased down Hope Street at four in the morning by a guy dressed only in a bathrobe and so high off his ass on bath salts that he’d thought I was a giant hummingbird that he hoped to swat with a shovel and present to the California Science Museum.
As we ran, I found myself jogging along next to none other than my old pal, Penelope.
“Hey,” I said, in a voice that was far too steady for someone who had run a little over the equivalent of Torrance Beach to Topanga Beach, “so I guess you forgot to mention about how we have to have our dragons on us at all times whilst training?”
Penelope, who was looking as relaxed at just having covered twenty miles on foot as I felt, opened her mouth in horror.
“Oh my goodness, Mike,” she said, I’m sorry! I completely forgot! Did Lieutenant Kaleen chastise you?”
I shrugged and squinted as we rounded a fall of scree and came out into sudden sunshine. “Nah, I’m just teasing you. It wasn’t so bad. You know the old saying; ‘the burned hand teaches best’? Well, I consider that as my burned hand. I won’t forget next time.”
Penelope and I followed the lead of those in front of us and leaped like a couple of gazelles over an enormous fallen tree, its trunk about five yards in diameter. After I’d cleared it, I once more realized that I was something more than human. It was a jump I could never have hoped to make before my Transfusion Ceremony.
Penelope had her blue robe hiked up around her thighs and looped into her sword belt to keep it out of her away as she ran. It looked so secure that I guessed she must have utilized the method many times before.
“Penelope,” I said as we cut down a track to the left and started up an incline that would had me puffing in a matter of seconds in my pre-Transfusion days, “why is it that you get to carry on wearing your blue robe, even though the rest of us have to wear our matching uniforms?”
Penelope grinned, blushed prettily, and shot me a sideways look.
“It’s because my purpose at the Draco Academy is a twofold one,” she said, a modicum of pride entering her voice. “I am a qualified Librarian—a position that is not to be taken lightly at the Academy. I agreed to my indenture. After five years of study, toil, and late nights, I was awarded my blue robe.”
She paused then, as we were required to scramble our way under a patch of bushes armed with yard long thorns.
“About a week after I received my robes, the Knowledge Sprite who had been representing our people at the Drako Academy was killed while on patrol in the northern Dimway Mires,” Penelope continued, plucking a stray strand of her blue hair out of her mouth. “To my complete surprise it was me who was chosen as a replacement for poor Oronia.”
“And because you were already a pro Librarian, it meant that you got to keep your robe and train as a dragonmancer?” I asked, wiping away a bead of sweat that had trickled down the side of my face.
Penelope nodded bashfully. I liked that about her; her humbleness, the way that her accomplishments embarrassed her. Humility had been a rare commodity among my friends back on Earth.
We had to stop our talk just then, though we continued to run side by side, because Lieutenant Kaleen picked up the pace. All of a sudden, I found that we were really running—sprinting, even.
Penelope and I were about a third of the way up the line. Ahead of us, I could hear the sound of boots crashing through the undergrowth as those following directly behind Lieutenant Kaleen began to charge along the broken track.
In no time at all, the pace had been turned up to eleven. I ripped along the path as quickly as I possibly could. Trees and bushes and boulders flashed by. On more than one occasion, my superhuman reflexes were all that saved me from getting struck in the face by a branch that whipped back toward me after being pushed aside by the dragonmancer in front.
My pulse had picked up considerably, and my breath was coming a little heavier in my chest, but it still amazed me how fresh I felt. I was boosting along, mile after mile, with the speed of an Olympic sprinter and still felt no more tired than I might after going one round in the arena.
Suddenly, we burst out of the forest and into a clearing. The sound of churning water coming from a great depth filled my ears. Ahead of me, the ground dropped gradually in a long, rocky slope. At the end of this slope was…
“Is that a cliff?” I asked Penelope as we ran.
“Yes, it is.”
The chasm beyond yawned. It seemed to suck the one hundred running dragonmancers toward it like a snaking, forty feet wide plughole. At the bottom of the chasm, the river roared, a ceaseless mincing machine utilizing boulders as grinding stones and powered by glacial runoff.
“Do we need to summon our dragons to get over?” I asked.
Penelope gave me a shy smile.
“Keep your eye on the lieutenant,” she said.
Due to the sloping ground, I could see all the dragonmancers in front of me, including Lieutenant Kaleen.
The lieutenant moved toward the edge of the canyon on blurred legs. When she reached the edge of the giant gap, she launched herself without hesitation into the void.
It was like something out of The Matrix or that Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice game. Lieutenant Kaleen flew into the air, traveling up and up, as if she had suddenly turned herself to paper. She floated with incredible grace across the void, her arms and legs pumping slowly. Then, with an audible crack of breaking stone, she landed, rolled, and was on her feet and on her way once again.
The dragonmancers following her threw themselves into the air, using muscles that had, apparently, changed from flesh to metal and rubber.
“Hooooly shit, we’re going to do this aren’t we?” I yelled as the chasm rushed up to meet us.
In reply, Penelope let out a little wild yowl of affirmation.
Time slowed.
I felt every nuance of my surrounding environment.
The tilt of the earth beneath my feet, the stones and twigs and slight unevenness of the surface beneath my boots. Somehow, I became aware of the humidity in the air and factored this into the jump that I was about to make. The wind kissed my face—at a mere five miles per hour or so.
And, with no further ado and with Penelope at my side, I bounded out into space. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sergeant Milena on her golden dragon, gliding along about fifty feet above me.
I soared across the forty-foot gap with laughable ease. In fact, I somewhat overshot it in my eagerness not to drop short into a watery grave. I landed hard, about five feet forward from the far edge, and my knees buckled. I turned the fall into a passable roll, got to my feet, and continued on down the path.
My eyes were wide with exhilaration and disbelief at what I had just done.
“Chen Zhen eat your fucking heart out!” I gasped, and ran on.
Eventually, we were called to a halt in a wide open glade in the middle of a pine forest, some thirty miles from the Crystal Spire. The glade was filled with an assortment of huge metal and stone weights and targets.
Off to one side, I saw a row of ten-foot-tall bl
ocks of stone. I recognized them as the same sort of blocks the dragonmancers had been breaking apart in the garden at the very top of the Crystal Spire. It looked like an al fresco gym that Hercules might have put together if he’d been a bit low on cash and had to employ the Flintstones to build it for him.
Sergeant Milena had landed her dragon on the massive, thick limb of a monstrous pine that towered above the forest training glade. From this perch, some twenty feet above the basic training ground, the sergeant called down from the back of her golden mount.
“I have to say that Fennu and I were almost proud to call ourselves the leaders of you lot today, after watching you run through the woods from the air!” she said, patting her gleaming golden dragon on its short neck.
There were a few half-hearted cheers at that half-assed bit of praise.
“All right, let’s not get carried away,” the sergeant said, “you’re only half done. Now, as far as I can tell, most of you are adults. I want you to use the next hour or so to work on your strength and stamina as you see fit. Lieutenant Kaleen will walk among you and suggest how you might improve techniques and so on. I shall watch with a keen and kindly eye from up here. Carry on.”
Instantly, my gaze fell upon the row of stone blocks.
I had wanted to smash one of those fuckers ever since I had seen Saya pounding one of them to rubble with her bare fists on the day that I had arrived at the Crystal Spire.
The idea of breaking apart stone with nothing but my hands spoke to the caveman in me, as well as the little boy who used to read about the adventures of Marvel’s Thor in comic books.
I clapped my hands and stretched my fingers. “Let’s break some stones.”
Chapter Five
I touched Penelope on the shoulder and motioned toward the row of blocks.
“Fancy giving me some advice or being my spotter?” I asked.
Penelope smiled. “Ah, as I understand it, you are yet to break the mountain stone with your flesh yet? Is that right?”
I shook my head. “Nope. Can I do it though, like I leapt that canyon back there?”
Penelope considered this, running her all-blue eyes over my face.
“I believe that you, Mike, are capable of a whole lot more than just breaking apart a one-ton block of stone,” the Knowledge Sprite said.
I grinned. “Shit, that’s all right then! So long as you’ve got my back, eh?”
Penelope blushed navy again.
I walked over to the row of stone blocks and was joined by a handful of other dragonmancers who had the same idea. Around the glade, other dragonmancers were lifting enormous iron weights that must have weighed as much as your average family hatchback.
Others, I noticed, were gathered on the very edge of the glade. They were taking it in turns to sprint at the boles of the more enormous trees and seeing how far they could sprint up them before they ran out of momentum. When each of the dragonmancers reached the zenith of their battle against gravity, they would slap their hand against the tree trunk, stabbing their fingers into the solid bark of the tree as easily as if it was styrofoam and marking their place. In the little time that I watched this, the woman who reached the highest was none other than the red-skinned hobgoblin I fought briefly in the Training Halls back at the castle: Tamsin.
Goddamn, but she is beautiful, I thought distractedly, before turning back to the task at hand.
I stepped toward the block of stone. It looked, up close, extremely solid.
“The only bit of advice I can give you,” Penelope said softly by my side as I studied the innocuous block of granite, “is to forget everything you think you know about how this should turn out.”
“So discard all mental images of shattered fingers, bones poking through flesh, and pulped tendons?” I said, trying to keep my voice light.
“Yes,” Penelope said in a serious voice. “Yes, that will most definitely be beneficial to you.”
It was one of those scenarios where you either put your big boy pants on and threw out all caution, or gave it a miss entirely. If I was going to half-ass this, I may as well no-ass it. It was the same thing.
I pressed my fist to the cool stone.
I drew it back.
I planted my feet.
I took a breath.
And threw my weight forward.
I don’t know what I had been expecting. Pain, maybe?
What I experienced was something akin to punching a punch bag, or maybe a giant bag of flour. There was no pain, there was simply… resistance.
The solid rock cracked with the sound of a forty-five going off in a confined space. Jagged fractures spread from where my fist hit the block, like ice breaking under foot.
I pulled my hand away and stared at my fist in amazement. There wasn’t so much as a graze.
“Holy shit,” I breathed, “now that is a gamechanger!”
“Good,” Penelope said by my side, “but, clearly, your mind was not totally convinced of what it was able to do.”
I looked back at the block of stone, staring intently at the slight crater I had made on its surface and the fractured lines running out from the point I had struck it. It looked like something towed out of Stonehenge. I should definitely not have been able to take even a chip out of it.
But I had.
“Forget everything you know,” the Knowledge Sprite murmured softly, for my ears only. “You’re a dragonmancer now. This is where you redefine your limitations.”
Forget everything you know. Redefine your limitations…
I drew my fist back, already envisioning it smashing through the stone in front of me.
It came forward like a piston, like a piece of machinery that cannot be hurt and cannot tire.
The stone block exploded outward. The edge that I had struck sheared away. Fragments of rock as big as my fist fizzed into the bushes behind. Dust billowed into the still air of the glade, and I could hear the soft patter of gravel as smaller stones rained down.
I threw a follow-up left and then another right and more rock splintered under my pulverizing fists. I tried not to dwell too much on the ridiculousness of what I was doing, but I couldn’t help but marvel at how unresisting I was finding the rock. There was less resistance to it than even the most basic, homemade punching bag.
After I had smashed a few more chunks out of the block of stone, I settled back on my left foot and struck out with a Spartan kick that Gerard Butler would have approved of. I hit the giant slab of granite in the middle, and with an almighty bang, it cracked perfectly down the center. Then, with both hands and a snarl of determination, I lashed out with a double palm strike—hitting the separate pieces of rock with the heels of my hands—and sent them crashing over.
I stood there, breathing hard—more out of excitement than exertion.
“I would say that you have managed to conquer that piece of matter with your mind,” Penelope said approvingly.
“I think I might have a boner,” I said, my mouth running on autopilot while my brain tried to catch up with what I had just done. “Is that normal?”
I was still looking at the destroyed block of granite lying in front of me, but I could hear the navy blush in Penelope’s voice.
“Ah, as far as that goes, I’m afraid that I wouldn’t know, Mike,” she said.
I shook my head. My smile was so wide that I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had reached around the back of my head and met in the middle.
“Right,” I said, eyeing the enormous, crudely constructed metal weights over on the other side of the clearing. “Let’s continue on, shall we?”
I spent the next twenty minutes or so going from one station to the next. I pitted myself against the one-ton weights and lifted them with surprising ease, carrying them from one side of the dell to the other. Next, feeling that I had proved myself strength-wise, I wandered over to the dragonmancers lining up to attempt to beat Tamsin’s vertical running record. Many were coming close, but none had succeeded.
When my turn came, I naturally attracted a bit of an audience, being the only person in that glade carrying some meat and potatoes in his trousers. The ladies stood back. There were, as was to be expected, a few smartass commments as well as general banter.
I sprinted at the tree. My confidence was high now, what with having pulverized that chunk of quarried rock and lifted weights that, back on Earth, would have slipped every disk in my back and had me shitting out my own colon at the mere effort.
I was determined to get one over on Tamsin—not just for pride and the fact that there were a dozen other very attractive dragonmancers looking on, but because of how she had almost smoked my ass in the Training Halls.
I hit the tree at a dead sprint and boosted up it. The first ten steps or so were a breeze, but after that, my Earth logic started trying to reassert itself. It was one thing to lift something that should have been too heavy but, somehow, running up a vertical surface and defying gravity required a far greater suspension of belief.
“C’mon…” I growled as my footsteps began to drag when I was twenty feet up.
I could see the mark that Tamsin had gouged into the trunk, still a good fifteen feet above me. In desperation, I rammed the toes of my boots into the solid wood of the enormous pine tree, and they crunched into it as easily as if it had been a giant wafer.
A chorus of jeers and some laughter floated up. I realized then that I had inadvertently broken an unspoken rule.
“Fuck,” I said, and gave it up.
And began to fall.
Funny how being twenty-five or thirty feet up in the air and defying one of the laws of physics can slip your mind in the heat of competition.
I plummeted backward.
