Dragon Bone

by J. D. Cavalida

  Elstrin rubbed his face tiredly. He sighed through his fingers and mumbled, "There is a sorcerer whose wife died and Gabriel has the skills to bring her back. Said sorcerer seems to carry an unreasonable hatred for black magic and is attempting to murder anyone who practices black magic or anyone who has a connection with Gabriel, hoping that he will one day resurrect someone and prove himself wrong. I managed to very indirectly fall into both categories. Therefore I was targeted. I am fine now, have been for a long time. I am also getting really fucking pissed by this whole situation."

  The fire popped loudly. "Wow. Some impressive words you used there."

  "That's all I know, mister talking fire. Now get me out of here."

  "Can't. It's called a safe room for a reason. Means it's unsafe outside."

  "Then tell me what's going on! Rem obviously isn't coming, so tell me what the hell he is, and what he's doing in a freaking army base! What's he got to do with Snow? How come something powerful enough to bend time is—"

  "Look. You seem like a brave kid. You'll grow up to be a good soldier. When everything is over, just concentrate on your training and forget all this, okay? I can't answer most of your questions. I'm bound by like a zillion rules; I don't mess with Rem's business. Unless he's on the verge of dying, then I'll lend a hand or two, but that hasn't happened in a while and it's unlikely to happen now. He's many things to me, but right now I'm just the guardian in his safe room. My job, right now, is to keep you safe. But if you really want out I can arrange that. Clearly staying in here isn't helping your stress levels."

  "But—"

  "It's pretty turbulent and it looks like it's only getting worse anyway. It might be best if you exit soon. I wish you well, kiddo, I really do. It's been a nice chat. Now, outside there's a bit of commotion, I think—can't see too well—but you should be fine. Oh, and. Don't touch Snow. And uh—if someone shoots at you, run in a zigzag line towards shelter. Okay. Hang on a sec—"

  "Wait—" Elstrin yelled, lunging for the fire, but it had already disappeared. He was being sucked backwards into blackness. Wind whistled shrilly in his ears, the sound of panic and confusion. Great spiky, tattered shapes loomed quickly past him—he thought he collided with objects, kept expecting to get smashed apart any second, but a thread of burning rope was wrapped tight around his being, almost too strong to bear. It separated him from the dry rushing cold and protected him from the things slamming into him. There was a familiar squeeze again, the weight of a glacier crushing against him. But it was weaker than he remembered, nearly half-hearted, and the fire brushed it aside easily. Then Elstrin was stumbling back into his body, losing his balance upon the training field.

  He looked up and lost his mind a little. The sun was strewn across the red sky in pieces, literally broken apart. Bright yellow-white chunks floated and drifted away from the ragged main mass. He felt the dirt under his boots churn and boil restlessly. It dawned on him that he was only in the antechamber—what was left of it anyway—not yet all the way back in the real field. He glanced around wildly for the main gate or anything that could get him out of this bizarre warzone. The grip of the fiery rope was loosening, but it pulled him this way and that like a puppet, straight to where the middle of the field was disintegrating into a dusty whirlpool. Elstrin tried to resist, but the fading line yanked him impatiently to the expanding edge. A final gust of warmth and it was gone.

  Elstrin squeezed his eyes shut, held his breath, and jumped.

  x

  He noticed four things at once.

  One: he had, for the umpteenth time, fallen over. His scraped palms and knees stung. His practice sword was twisted awkwardly under him. It hurt to breathe; he was out of air, lungs labouring to pump oxygen into his muscles, adrenalin sending his heart racing, his brain struggling to reconnect his idle mind to a body that was in the middle of a tiring spar.

  Two: the training field was in complete disarray. Cadets were fleeing one direction, soldiers were stepping up the opposite direction, everyone was shouting. Somewhere amongst the chaos, the deep roar of a rifle punched steadily through the air. Weird flashes of light kept zooming in and out of sight. People were screaming.

  Three: from his angle he saw others who were also on the ground. Two of them, faraway figures

  in uniform, were very still. The one closer to Elstrin seemed to be Kana, though his hair obscured his face and his teeth were bared in a silent snarl—he was trying to half-crawl, half-drag himself away. He had a hand to his shoulder, gleaming with blood. Hovering over his body was a thin sheet of pale light. And standing near Kana was Lieutenant Leopard, whose entire front was soaked in blood streaming from his nose. He held a gate guard's rifle, up and trained at the running figures. A messy nimbus of colourless energy churned around him.

  Elstrin rolled over slightly, still winded, and saw the fourth thing: Snow was curled up next to him, both hands up gripping his head so tightly his hair was already stained with thin red streaks, veins and tendons on his arms standing out. It looked like he was trying to tear his own skin off. But he was motionless. Just completely tense. A deep, inconstant force, almost a sound too low to hear, radiated out from him, distorting the air above him like a heat wave. From what little Elstrin could glimpse, Snow's eyes were open, pupils so wide the blue of his irises were nearly gone. Delicate trickles of blood ran from his ears and nose and mouth, painting his face with horizontal lines.

  Elstrin heard footsteps thump towards him. He struggled to sit up—get away. Instinct told him that this was not Snow anymore. And—what had the fire said? Run in a zigzag line. Lieutenant Leopard didn't seem to want to aim at him, but better safe than sorry. He managed to stand unsteadily. Someone skidded to a stop beside him; he saw worn sneakers kicking up the dirt.

  "Run," Gabriel panted, hands rough around his shoulders, shoving him a random direction away from Snow. His face looked blank, but his voice was urgent. "Run—hurry—"

  Elstrin took off towards the cafeteria at a shambling gait, his legs picking up the automatic rhythm of jogging without the need for a conscious command. Everything seemed to happen very slowly. Leopard couldn't have started shooting too long ago—close to fifty cadets were still trying to evacuate the field, and the main gate was just starting to open.

  The rifle was going off too quickly. Twice for every step Elstrin took, then three times as his pace slowed. Each time Leopard fired, a small disc of light would appear somewhere amongst the crowd of cadets—tiny temporary magical shields. The soldiers herding the boys indoors had their palms outstretched, frowning in concentration. Behind the trees, crouching amongst training equipment, individual lieutenants were returning fire, their pistols popping sharply, clamouring to be heard above the din of the assault rifle. Leopard didn't fall. The energy around him flared against the attacks and left him unharmed. The blood on his shirt spread; even from this distance, Elstrin could see how pale he was, how his eyelids were fluttering weakly even as his hands held the weapon stable. Kana was about three metres away from him.

  Four shots per step. Then five. Then Leopard simply held the trigger down.

  Without thinking, Elstrin changed direction and charged towards the mass of cadets. The air exploded with noise and light and he didn't care. He'd seen the shock of red hair milling about the blind panic trying to get to safety. He ran like his legs would carry him the impossible distance across the field, like he could outrun over twenty bullets whizzing to their target, like if he somehow got there he could make a difference. He needed to at least tell Vel that he'd just seen his dead brother. It would be horribly unfair if he never got to know.

  A pane of light materialised over the crowd, wavering precariously—it caught the first handful of bullets but shuddered violently, throwing sparks everywhere. The cadets all ducked, and all glanced back—it was instinct, really—and all but one renewed his efforts to reach safety. Elstrin ran. He watched Andrew dive the wrong way, hands reaching and grasping for Vel. The force field above him was wearin
g thin from the concentrated line of fire.

  Elstrin watched the glowing disc break around the edges. He watched it shatter completely a heartbeat later. He watched Andrew leap the rest of the way, throw himself at Vel. A true movie moment, only sickeningly real. It lasted a millisecond, maybe less. He watched the side of Andrew's head disappear in a puff of red spray. He watched, still running, small bits of the corpse's flesh fly into the air as the next bullet punched through its chest and throat. The third missed. They had fallen down.

  Elstrin thought perhaps time would keep doing this thing it was doing right now, dragging sluggishly along while he watched everything. So he could have a moment to fight away the blank white shock that clouded his vision and flooded his thoughts. So he could blink and realise that maybe he didn't just see Andrew die. But time didn't listen. It realigned itself when he wasn't ready, and the flash of white nothingness passed, and very suddenly he was hearing and feeling everything that was happening.

  He was running. Yes. He slammed one foot against the ground and turned sharply, and ran even faster, towards Lieutenant Leopard. He was approaching from a wide angle—by the time Leopard noticed him and started to swing his gun around, Elstrin was already halfway there. He saw the bright arc of bullets sling closer to his left side—and in that instant, he didn't care. Something dangerously simple had lodged itself in his ribcage: this person had killed his friend. He wanted to do something about that. Maybe he was feeling the beginning and end of vengeance crammed into a single second. But honestly—he did not care.

  What felt like a capsule of hot gas hit him in the left arm and abruptly he couldn't move it anymore. He barely registered it. The gun was almost directly pointed at him now, spitting out spinning balls of light too fast to follow. He ran.

  The shots stopped. The final bullet raced past Elstrin's shoulder harmlessly. Leopard snarled, teeth bloody, and shook his weapon fruitlessly. The chain of bullets slung around his neck had all disappeared; he was standing on an island of empty, smoking shells. Elstrin jumped, tackled him, wrenched the gun out of his hands and brought it back down with all the strength he could muster. A quiet, yielding crunch, and the aggressive energy around Leopard drew in as if scalded. Leopard's jaw was crooked at a strange angle. He seemed barely awake now, skin bloodless and clammy, but behind his eyes there was an inferno, a gnarled and demented awareness that wasn't his own.

  Elstrin growled and tried to extend bits of his consciousness out. He didn't know how to do it but he was still riding that red wave of pure hatred—he hooked himself under the barbed wires of the sorcerer's energy and began to pry them loose from Leopard's mind. The task was impossible. A sharp pain that came immediately with the attempt jolted him back into his own being. He did it again, but the thorns and spiny threads were tangled so thoroughly with Leopard that he couldn't even pick a place to begin. Once again, he was thrown back by some part of the sorcerer's iron-thick defences. Before he could dive in a third time, a weak hand landed on his shoulder.

  "It's me," Gabriel said quietly in Snow's voice, his bright driftwood-coloured eyes shot through with specks of sky-blue. His words were a little slurred; he sounded tired enough to sleep through a missile strike. "I've got this. Gabriel is lending me his body for a while. Go to the other lieutenants."

  Elstrin just sank down onto the dirt beside Leopard. He didn't know what to say or do. He looked back at where Snow's body was, relaxed now, lying alone in a small pool of red. He looked across the field, past the soldiers sprinting towards the outer gate, past the haze of heat and dust lit up by the afternoon sun, at Vel, who was kneeling there not moving, clutching Andrew so close it was hard to tell whose bloodstained limbs belonged to who. He looked to the side where Kana had collapsed upon the ground, hissing in quiet puffs of air waiting for a team of medics to come over. He looked up at Gabriel, who was really Snow, as he crouched wearily by Leopard's head and touched trembling fingers to the side of his pallid neck. The sorcerer's transparent energy began to unravel, small shreds being ripped and sloughed off steadily.

  "Is this why we're not allowed to leave the army?" Elstrin mumbled. It wasn't the question he wanted to ask, but at some point he had wondered it.

  Snow didn't immediately reply. He was swaying on the spot as if nodding off, his breaths heavy and slow, gaze absent from his task. Sweat dripped from Gabriel's brown hair. He inhaled, cleared his throat. "This?"

  "Rem," Elstrin clarified.

  "No… no. This doesn't—happen too often." Snow closed his eyes, head drooping, and the hand

  on Leopard's throat formed a gradual fist. The energy shuddered and speared angrily, but with each inward pull, twice as much jerked back out, unable to escape whatever hold Snow had upon it. Soon Leopard blinked feebly, scowled in discomfort, seemingly not feeling his broken jaw but aware of what was happening. He reached up and pressed his palm to Gabriel's wrist. There was a spark of yellow energy, and with a final pulse, the colourless veil of the sorcerer's influence was whisked away into nothing. Leopard thumped his head back. Elstrin caught Snow by the shoulders as he tipped forward. His skin was unnaturally hot, burning through the old shirt Gabriel wore.

  The medics arrived. Kana was scooped up onto a stretcher. He had been silent this whole time,

  just watching everything like Elstrin was, but now he spoke up, voice thin with pain. "Elstrin. You're shot."

  Elstrin glanced at his arm, the one not up supporting Gabriel's limp weight. It was curled close to his stomach, mostly useless. All he felt was a warm numb sensation all down his left bicep and forearm. His hand wouldn't flex. There wasn't much blood, just a big tear in his uniform and a mess of mangled flesh beyond it. How had he managed to grab that rifle and swing it hard enough to break a man's jaw?

  "Oh," he said. "I feel fine."

  "You're in shock," one of the medics said, unfolding a second stretcher as Kana was escorted away. They dragged Leopard onto it. Then a third stretcher. How many of those things did they bring? "Come on, kid. Hop on. We need…"

  He trailed off. A momentary lull fell upon the soldiers still scuttling about the field. Everyone resumed work a blink later, but heads kept turning, footsteps kept faltering then picking up pace again. Elstrin realised that so little actual time had passed that it was only now that the main gate had been opened wide enough to admit a new wave of armed soldiers, reinforcements that were no longer needed. And walking amongst them was a small teenage boy with white hair and blue eyes. He wore a simple white robe that flapped around his bare ankles and wrists. He looked fragile. The soldiers around him seemed reluctant to leave, but they headed to where Colonel Stag was barking orders anyway.

  The medics moved aside when Rem got closer. He stopped in front of Elstrin and gave him a small, strained smile, then turned to Snow. He reached out a pale hand and tucked a strand of damp hair back around Gabriel's ear. "You have to come back," Rem said softly.

  "No," Snow protested. He tried to twist away. Rem knelt before him and steadied him. Snow's feverish stare fluttered up, eyes half-blue and half-brown, filled with pain and conflict. "No, I'll—I can make do with Gabriel. I'll take him—"

  "You can't take him," Rem said, gentle and worried. "It's not polite. And you'll hurt Gabe. You'll hurt yourself. That was painful, wasn't it?"

  "Yeah. But—please, Rem. I don't want to go. Not like this. I like it here. It's—it's nice." "I know, I know." He smoothed his fingers through Snow's hair, brushed his thumbs over

  flickering lashes. "It won't be forever. I promise I'll let you back out when I feel better. Okay, Snow? I promise."

  "You never keep them," Snow whispered, shivering, leaning into Rem's embrace, hiding his face against his neck. He said something too quiet to hear. Rem nodded. Gradually, Snow's ragged breathing evened out; his shoulders sagged and his body went limp. Only then did Rem release him and press a small kiss to his forehead.

  "Go help the others," he said to the medics. They silently complied. Rem gazed at Gabriel's unconscious fo
rm. Eventually, he said, "Snow wanted you to know he won't be gone long. Apparently you start firearms next week."

  "Where's he going?" Elstrin asked.

  "Away. Here." Rem prodded the torn edge of Elstrin's sleeve. The stabs of heat that were starting to crawl over his skin disappeared, replaced by a brief burst of cold and then nothing.

  "Is he dead?" Elstrin asked next.

  "No. But he's very sick. I need some time with him alone." Rem sighed and stood up. "Wake up, Gabe."

  Gabriel blinked his eyes open as if he had been waiting for the command. No hint of blue in his irises. He pushed to his feet with a slight grunt, staring impassively at the chaos around him, his face expressionless. "I'll give you one day with Snow," he said calmly.

  "Thank you," Rem replied.

  "Things will get so messy. I hope you realise that."

  "I do. I'll help fix it afterwards."

  "Hm." Gabriel's gaze travelled across the field, resting on Vel and Andrew. "Easier said than done, Rem. You still make that mistake."

  Rem said nothing. His eyes were downcast, as if he were a small child being berated for a minor mishap. After a stretch of silence, he murmured, "I'll see you inside."