by Mike Shelton
“Missing clothes, food, and now horses,” stated Roland. “Are you trying to undermine my authority here?” Roland asked, raising his voice at the level three wizard. His patience was being stretched thin. “And is the apprentice Celia part of your plans?”
The old man seemed affronted by Roland’s attitude. “No one is doing anything to usurp your authority, young man, whatever authority that is. You do know you have no formal title here, don’t you? You rule this place under the guise of being the most powerful. That is not anything official, and I’m sure this will be rectified when Kanzar and his council return.”
Roland was genuinely surprised at the backbone the old man had. It caught Roland off guard, and he believed the man. “Nice to see the bookworm wizard has some mettle.”
Titus glared at Roland, but Roland waved his hand in the air, the accusation already forgotten. He sighed a bit and then admitted, “Sorry, Titus. These things worry me, that’s all. I meant no direct offense to you.”
“None taken, sir,” Titus said, backing down a bit. “In fact, to be honest, you are not doing a half bad job here.”
“Not half bad, huh?” Roland laughed.
Before anything else could be said, a scream echoed down the hallway. Both men sprinted to the door. Not seeing it clearly or for sure, Roland thought he saw a hooded figure jump off the stairwell below. He stared in that direction, but his attention was then pulled back down the hallway by another scream.
Instead of following the figure, Roland raced back down the hallway, Titus on his heels. Entering Eryck’s room, they saw that a servant was kneeling down next to the old counselor wizard. The man was still conscious but looked pale, and he tried to push away the servant.
Roland leaned down and ran his hands over Eryck’s body. Then he closed his eyes and delved deep inside. It was a poison, but it hadn’t gone through the man’s body too far yet. Concentrating hard, Roland reached his powers inside the old wizard. He felt after the poison and began pushing it outward, through the man’s pores. It was thick and moved slowly. But, eventually, this worked and Roland opened up his eyes.
Eryck’s face cleared, and he took a deep breath. Roland and Titus helped him sit up. Then he pointed a bony finger at his servant.
“She poisoned me.”
The girl’s eyes grew wide. “I did no such thing, sir. What are you talking about?”
“I saw you,” Eryck said. “I came back into the room early, and you were putting something in my drink. I didn’t think anything of it at the time; I assumed that maybe you were just fixing me something. But now I know.”
“I didn’t even come in until you were already in the room, sir. I swear.” The servant wrung her hands tightly.
“But, I saw you,” Eryck said, his voice softening. “It was you.”
“I was with my sister, sir,” the servant said, turning to Roland. “Ask her.”
Roland summoned a guard to take the servant away. Then, turning to the others, he said, “We will get to the bottom of this. I saw a shadowy figure running down the stairwell when I heard your servant scream from the hallway. With everything else going on in the Citadel lately, I think we may have an intruder.”
The two elder wizards seemed worried but didn’t say anything.
“I will bring in additional guards from Whalen for a few days,” Roland offered. “We need to figure out what the intruder is after.”
Titus paled a bit before speaking. “The room below, sir, the one that was broken into…Someone may be looking for something or have taken something dangerous.”
Roland jumped up. “I will go down there right now and ensure that there are enough guards. Titus, get Eryck taken care of, and then make sure the guards are on high alert.”
Both wizards nodded, and Roland ran off, heading down toward the stairs to the basement. Opening the basement door, he noticed few lamps burning in the hallways. So he summoned a small flame to his hand to see the way better. Up ahead, he saw a shadowy figure move around a corner.
“Not again!” he whispered out loud and picked up his pace. He would catch the intruder this time.
Coming around the corner, all he saw was a guard, stationed in front of the room he was looking for. Confused, Roland glanced up and down the hall.
“Sir, can I help you?” the guard asked.
“Did you see someone come this way?”
The guard shook his head. “No one here. In fact, hardly anyone ever comes down here, my lord. You are the first in days.”
Roland felt a slight breeze move his cloak and spun around, but nothing was there.
“Would you like to see the room, sir?” the guard asked with a smile.
Roland knew that he shouldn’t look inside there—it was full of dangerous magic—but he needed to make sure things were all right. He took seriously his position of assumed authority over the safety of the Citadel.
The guard took out a set of keys and placed a key in the keyhole. Then he turned to Roland. “It takes this key and the touch of a wizard, sir.”
Roland placed his hand over the man’s hand. All at once, multiple things happened: he felt—or, rather, knew—that the guard possessed magical powers; the door opened; and the guard shoved him inside.
Roland stumbled to the ground. Turning back around, he saw the face of the guard waver in front of his eyes. Then, in the blink of an eye, the apprentice Celia stood in front of him instead.
“Would you rather I use this face?” she asked.
“What?” Roland didn’t understand what was happening, “Who are you, Celia?”
“I am not Celia just as I am not the guard.”
Roland tried to concentrate but, somehow, couldn’t stop thinking about how he had kissed Celia. Who was she really? Was she a man?
He held his head in his hands and groaned. “What do you want?”
“I am a chameleon and take what I want,” Celia said. This time, her full lips and green eyes seemed more like a sneer and a glare. “I will control it all.”
“All?” Roland stood up. He needed to get out of here. He tried to bring up the power within him, but nothing happened. He tried harder. What was wrong?
The being that looked like Celia laughed. “You can’t use magic in this room, Roland. That is how you wizards made it, to keep all these secrets intact,” she said as she spread her arms toward the room that Roland stood in.
Roland considered the artifacts and wondered if there was anything here that would help him. But he couldn’t take the chance. He would just need to use his normal strength. It shouldn’t be too hard to overpower the young woman. So he charged at her only to find that she had changed once again. Now she appeared as a broad-shouldered, sturdy man, more than a foot taller than Roland. The man brought up a fist and slammed it in Roland’s gut, sending him flying backward, onto the floor of the room.
“You can’t get away with this,” Roland warned. “They will come looking for me. Wizard Titus and Eryck know I came down here.”
“Eryck is dead,” the man said.
Then Roland understood what had happened. “You were the servant that left the poison. But, you don’t know that I healed Eryck.”
That made the man stop for a moment. “You are very powerful, Roland Tyre, more than I thought. But it won’t matter. They will never find you.”
“And, why is that?” Roland asked, raising his eyebrows.
“Because they will never know you are missing.” And, with that, the man switched again, this time into an exact duplicate of Roland.
Roland screamed and leaped toward the doorway again. But, before he could get there, the chameleon impostor’s Roland shut the door and turned the key in the lock. Roland roared as loudly as he could, but the room was soundproof, magicproof, and dark. And no one heard his yells.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Bakari still couldn’t get over this feeling: of flying over the land, sitting on top of a dragon.
It’s so wonderful Hold on! Abylar agreed in Baka
ri’s mind. The young dragon found it as invigorating as his rider did, and he flew straight up in the air, turning a quick flip, head over tail, and then came back down.
Abylar, I’m going to get sick if you keep this up!
Sorry, Abylar said, but he made one last swoop before settling down with a loud exhale of fire.
“Young pup,” Bakari mumbled under his breath as he shook his head with a broad smile on his face.
Abylar continued flying over the seemingly endless Elvyn Forest, but he kept his acrobatics to a minimum, for the time being.
Bakari watched the overgrown trees race by below them. The Elvyn Forest was the oldest known forest in all of the western lands. Its trees’ limbs intertwined with each other, making it very difficult to see anything below them, on the ground. Some of the trees grew hundreds of feet high and just as wide. Villages of elves sat scattered throughout, many of them opting to stay away from the busier city of Lor’l and the border city of Silla.
Bakari searched in his mind for all he knew about the elves. They were usually a quiet kingdom, keeping mostly to themselves. Many of them practiced magic as part of their everyday lives—an outcome of living so long and of being so close to nature—but only a few were equivalent to the wizards of Alaris. These were usually named as protectors and guardians of the land.
The elves had lived in Elvyn for as long as anyone could remember. And it was rare to find one living outside of their kingdom. Though they did trade with others, it was mostly the others who had to do the traveling. In a small book that Bakari had read years ago, he remembered reading something about the elves coming from a faraway land, to escape a horrible war. He would need to ask the king about it when he returned.
Flying northwest from Lor’l, they soon found themselves close to what used to be called the barrier. From their height, Bakari could see the Dunn River, a sparkling ribbon winding its way from north to south. The afternoon sun had moved three-fourths of the way across the autumn sky when they found a patch of land big enough to land on, next to the river.
“River Bend will be just south of here,” Bakari said. “A few turns down the river.”
This thought made Bakari think of Kharlia again. They had escaped from River Bend about six weeks earlier to make their way to Celestar. The pain of losing her was still present, but the tasks at hand would distract him enough so that he didn’t dwell on it too much
“I think we should stay here tonight.” Bakari pointed downstream. “I don’t think the people of River Bend are ready to see a dragon yet.”
Abylar snorted in agreement.
The dragon had informed Bakari that a dragon egg was near here, but there was no sign of Breelyn yet. She had left Celestar a few days before Bakari and Kharlia had last visited. The king said she had escaped from Silla only two days ago.
The sun had set earlier tonight, and Bakari wanted to get to sleep early and then get a fresh start in the morning, so he started setting up camp. He was feeling anxious about what was happening in Alaris. And they would need his help soon.
While Bakari set up a small fire and fished for some dinner, Abylar took off to find bigger game to fill his growing appetite.
After a nice meal, Bakari settled down on a blanket for the night. It still felt strange to be alone. Over the river, he glimpsed stars in the clear night, but the forest took up most of his vision.
Barely an hour into the night, the howl of a strange beast pierced the darkness. He stood up and threw some more wood on the fire and then grabbed a knife. He was trying to listen again, to figure out what direction the sound had come from, when another, deeper growl sounded directly behind him, just a few feet from the river’s edge.
Bringing forth a bright mage light in the air in front of him, Bakari gasped.
An animal—more like a misshapen beast—stood facing him. It was the size of a large wild boar, and, at its core, it resembled one somewhat. But the magic of the barrier must have reformed it, giving it two enormous tusks; a longer snout, full of razor-sharp teeth; and a body and tail covered in spikes.
Before the beast moved any farther, the howl Bakari had heard earlier in the night sounded again now on his other side, somewhere inside the dark trees. Walking out from the forest came a hideous creature on two legs. His head was too big for a man, and his torso was hairy. He walked forward, hunched over.
Bakari thought he remembered reading something about apes living in the Elvyn Forest, but this creature was much more dreadful than an ape. Upon a closer look, the creature’s hair appeared more like small, spiked needles and its hands ended in giant claws.
Bakari’s first reaction was to fling magic at the beasts. Battle was not his expertise, but he knew how to draw fire and then throw it. He threw fire first at the apelike creature, then at the boar beast. But nothing happened other than him making both of them angrier.
So Bakari moved closer to the river. Maybe they were afraid of the water. He stepped forward carefully holding the knife out in front of him. The two beasts watched him, low growls and groans escaping their jaws.
As Bakari’s left foot touched the water’s edge, the boar beast let out a ferocious scream and ran at him. That spurred the apelike beast, and it dropped to the ground and ran forward, using all four legs.
Bakari jumped into the water and tripped on a rock. The water was cold, originating in the peaks of the Mahli Mountains. The water was not too deep yet, so he pulled himself up and pulled out his sword. The beasts slowed and paced at the edge of the river. They indeed seemed afraid of the water.
Things had happened so fast that Bakari had forgotten all about Abylar. Calling to him now, in his mind, Bakari summoned him to come quickly.
The apelike creature took a careful step into the water. Bakari thrust his sword at it, but the apelike creature moved more quickly than Bakari had thought possible. It grabbed the knife out of Bakari’s hand, slicing its own beastly claws in the process. That seemed to embolden the boar beast, and it crashed into the water after the young wizard, its hard muscles pushing its bulk through the water.
Bakari waded out farther into the river. His clothes made his movements slow and sluggish. Taking two more steps out, he now stood in waist-high water. The farther out he got, the harder the rushing water began to pull him south.
Then a knotted log came hurtling down the river at him. Bakari tried to move around it, but it hit into him and knocked him down into the water, his hands scraping the bottom. Losing his balance, he was swept along in the current of the fast-moving river.
Overhead, Bakari heard a loud roar and, out of the corner of his eye, saw Abylar swoop down toward the two creatures. Picking each one up separately, he flung them hard, off into the forest.
By now, Bakari had been swept around a bend and farther out into the river. After some minutes of struggling, he finally righted himself. Floating on his back, he let the current carry him along. Abylar flew overhead, trying to figure out how to save Bakari. The river moved too fast for Bakari to stand up in, and he was too small for Abylar to get close enough to lift him directly out of the water.
Bakari sifted back through his mind for an answer. And, once again, his natural instinct was to reach out to an animal. He extended his mind out to call nearby fish to swim under him, buoying him up in the water.
Once the fish were in place, Bakari reached deep down inside himself and tried to get the fish to lift him up. He tried twice but couldn’t draw enough power to rise up out of the water—he was only a level two wizard.
Draw on my magic, Dragon Rider, Abylar said to his mind. I have strength for you.
Bakari opened his mind more fully to Abylar, delving deep inside his dragon’s mind while still keeping a hold on his own, and drew forth additional power. He didn’t know how he could do it, but he did. He felt the extra power. It was the power from the guardians, which Abylar had stored away as he had grown and developed.
Water splashed over him, and he lost his concentration for a minute.
Then Abylar pushed the magic into him, and it was enough. Bakari began to rise out of the fast-moving water, but his momentum and connection to his magic enabled his body to still rush along at the same speed as if it were on the surface of water.
Abylar flew lower and brought down his two front legs and grabbed Bakari with his claws. The dragon swayed for a moment and almost dropped him, but Bakari steadied himself with the magic. Once Bakari was free of the water, Abylar took him to the nearest bank.
The young dragon rider stayed still and only breathed, trying to recover from the strenuous ordeal, both physically and magically. He was weak and tired and hardly able to concentrate.
Abylar! he called out in fear as he was about to black out. He felt himself sliding into the darkness, clutching onto the grass at the edge of the river. Then drops of rain, from an incoming storm, started to pelt his tired body. He tried to crawl up the bank farther but just couldn’t do it. Finally, it was too much, and he passed out.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A short time later, Bakari opened his eyes and looked around. He was still on the bank of the river but had been pulled up a bit farther from the water. Abylar stood over him. Bakari sat up too quickly and had to wait a moment before his vision cleared all the way. Shaking his head to get himself thinking again, he scooted closer to Abylar.
Thank you, Abylar. Bakari touched the side of the growing dragon, and the bond flared up brightly in his mind.
You are my dragon rider. I told you I would protect you.
Where can we go? Bakari asked. The storm is getting worse, and I’m still weak and cold.
Abylar gazed across the river toward River Bend.
No. Kanzar may still have men there, and I can’t risk them knowing about you yet, Bakari said with a groan. I drained us of too much energy, so we can’t get caught unawares right now.
I saw an overhang of rock, north of here, when I flew back to you, Abylar offered. It is high enough to keep the beasts away and should be dry.
So Bakari climbed up onto the dragon and flew the short distance back to their camping spot. Bakari gathered up what the beasts hadn’t destroyed, and then they continued back north, flying low over the river. Soon they came to the high rock overhang Abylar had mentioned.
