The Summoned Dragon (Cycle of Dragons Book 4)

by Dan Michaelson

  “You have to go?” I couldn’t help but feel confusion. “But you brought me here. You brought me to one of your cities.”

  “To a place that was abandoned long ago.”

  She walked forward, making her way toward one of the nearest buildings.

  It was a simple structure—built out of earth and what appeared to be branches and stones, all woven together in a way that would blend into the forest from above, I suspected. The entire Djarn city was designed to conceal itself, as if the Djarn were afraid of the dragons.

  But it wasn’t the dragons—it was the kingdom and their dragons.

  She touched the building, barely resting her hand on it. I felt the heat and flame building from within her, but then the building crumbled.

  I took a step back, sucking in a sharp breath.

  “You’ve seen it,” I said. I looked over to her. “That is what the Vard showed me. This is what they have experienced.”

  Natalie frowned. “It was a danger that existed long ago. So long ago that my people believe it was expunged from the world. It was once the reason we stayed separated from others, but over time, as we stopped seeing the threat, we no longer felt that same need.” She looked up, holding her gaze on me. “And now there has been evidence of it returning.”

  I frowned. “This is far from the Vard lands.”

  Natalie nodded. “This is the land of my people, the Djarn.”

  That was what I was getting at, but I wasn’t sure how to put it. “The Vard attacked in those southern cities because they had detected this power. They call it murtar, and it’s some sort of corrupting force.”

  “Of course it is,” she said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She frowned at me, tilting her head to the side, and seemed irritated again. “You don’t even understand, do you?”

  “Understand what?”

  “This force. This energy. You went to the Vard to understand, but I’m showing you what you need to understand. I’m showing you the truth.” She waved her hands all around her and made her way over to another building. She cycled power through her again, creating a looping band of flames that arced from one hand to the next, and she pushed it at the nearest building. When she did, there came a faint trembling, then the building collapsed, falling into debris, leaving nothing standing. It reminded me all too much of what I had seen in the old fallen Vard city.

  It had been corrupted. It had been destroyed.

  And now very little of it remained.

  “All of this is because of the Vard,” she said. “All of this is because they fear the dragons.” She turned to me, heat radiating from her, and for a moment, it looked as if she were going to attack me. I could practically trace the way her energy cycled out of her, through her dragon, and off into some distant cycle, even if I couldn’t see that cycle. “You have to understand that. The Vard want to destroy the dragons. You saw that before.”

  Now Natalie had bought into that belief. I didn’t think it was true. I had seen otherwise. But more than that, I had seen the Vard.

  I didn’t really understand them. I wasn’t sure I could, as I wasn’t one of them, but I recognized what I was seeing now.

  “My father was called back to my people,” Natalie said. “We must protect ourselves. We must defend ourselves against this threat that has renewed its attack. And we must be prepared.”

  “For what?” I asked, looking around the city before turning my attention back to Natalie. “Are you going to attack the Vard?”

  She frowned at me. “Would that be so bad? Do you ally yourself with them so much now that you can’t understand?”

  I focused on the cycle within the green dragon, feeling that heat and energy calling to me. If nothing else, I was going to get stuck here in an argument with Natalie, with her attempting to do something, or say something, that would prove fruitless. At this point, I only wanted to understand what was going on here.

  But as I stood in the forest, looking around the Djarn city, I couldn’t help but feel something else. I had felt it before when I was in the Vard lands, and had felt it upon my return as well. There was the memory of that power, and the memory here was strong. Surrounded by it, I could practically feel it pushing against me, as if the memory wanted to contaminate me.

  “The Vard fight this same danger,” I said. “You can work together. You could—”

  “Now you would have us work together, after everything they have done to my people and to the dragons?”

  I looked over to her. “I don’t know what they have done to your people and to the dragons.”

  “This,” she said.

  “But they had nothing to do with this. They suffered the same way. I don’t know how to prove that to you in any other way, but they have experienced the same thing.”

  She stared at me. “This isn’t the only place,” she said. “And if they have their way, there will be others.” She took a step toward me, raising her hand, and I thought she might try to hold my hand or touch my arm—that she might remember the friendship and connection we had shared—but then heat began to build within her, and she took a step back, cycling fire through her.

  “You’re going to have to choose a side, Ashan. You’ve been looking for excuses every time you’ve seen the Vard attack, looking for other explanations, but you will have to choose because if you don’t . . .”

  She turned and strode over to another building, continuing to cycle power through her, which she then pressed outward. This building, too, collapsed, falling into a fine pile of debris.

  “I’m trying to understand what’s going on,” I said to her. “I’m trying to understand if there’s anything I can do here, but I don’t think you have all the facts.”

  “Neither do you.”

  I felt a surge of power and heat radiating from her, then her dragon burst out of the forest, striding toward her. She climbed onto his back, looking over to me. “Do not follow me unless you have decided to help stop them.”

  “I’m trying to help,” I said.

  “No. You aren’t.”

  With that, she took to the air and quickly disappeared.

  Chapter Eleven

  I made my way through the remains of the Djarn city. Without Natalie, it felt strange to be here, stranger still that I was aware of the presence of murtar here. I had felt it a few times, but it had supposedly been nothing more than a memory of what had once been there. That memory had been stronger when I had returned to the kingdom, had seen the places where the Vard had destroyed the murtar so they could overpower it.

  Here . . .

  Here that power was much more potent.

  It seemed to build around me, filling me with an understanding, and it pushed against me, as if trying to force its way into my cycle. It was insidious, a gentle but persistent wave trying to work its way through me.

  I latched on to the power within the dragon and cycled through it.

  The green dragon joined me, launching into the air as soon as he reached this city, and began to bank, turning, and surprised me when he shot flames from his mouth, burning through these buildings. The power he forced from himself was greater than I had ever seen from him before.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, looking over to him.

  The dragon didn’t respond, but simply streaked fire through the forest, ripping through the Djarn buildings and causing them to collapse. It took a little force for them to crumble into nothingness. Perhaps it was necessary, given how I’d seen Natalie touch the buildings before they had fallen over.

  But even though the buildings had collapsed, it wasn’t as if the dragon could remove the influence of murtar. I could still feel that faint tremulous energy, that power that lingered there, leaving me thinking there was still an edge of corruption working here.

  But the dragon ripped through the area with his massive flames, burning and streaking across it, until there was nothing but scorched ground remaining.

  Then he
settled to the ground near me, tucking his wings down at his sides, but not folding them completely. He looked outward, and I could feel the surge of heat from within him, the connection I shared with him, the way we cycled power together. I could feel the fire—and anger—burning within him.

  “Natalie thinks the Vard have attacked the Djarn,” I said, looking over to him. “The Vard don’t necessarily respect the dragons,” I went on, and felt a trickle of heat from the dragon, his way of showing his irritation with that statement, but then it faded. “But they don’t want to destroy them. At least, I don’t think so.” I frowned to myself. “I suppose I don’t know.”

  I breathed in and out, and though the dragon had burned through this space, there was still an edge of that insidious energy here that persisted. That energy was faint, and a controlled power began building from the dragon, radiating off him and pouring outward, flowing across the ground as if he wanted to overwhelm what we detected.

  I could feel the faintest trace of power trying to push against me and make its presence known. The murtar lingered.

  How many other places would there be like this?

  Perhaps that was the better question. And if there had been another place like this, perhaps I needed to return to the capital, to the Academy, and try to get help. Thomas would have to help me, wouldn’t he? If he learned the truth, if he understood what we were dealing with, the danger of the murtar, how could Thomas do anything but help?

  But I knew the answer to that. Thomas didn’t care for the Vard. For all I knew, he didn’t even care for the Djarn. Thomas wanted to protect the kingdom. I would have to find some way of compelling him, helping him to understand that whatever threat was out there—the same threat that had made it seem as if both the Djarn and the Vard had attacked—was probably linked to this murtar.

  And then . . .

  Then we would have to gather the dragons and find a way of overthrowing the murtar.

  I climbed onto the dragon’s back, and he took to the air, power burning through him, through me, leaving me feeling practically torn apart. I wasn’t sure what he was doing until I realized he wanted to make sure we were not contaminated with murtar.

  We circled above the ground, making our way above the canopy, and a presence continued to push upon us. I felt unsteady, uncertain, and knew that the dragon felt the same.

  From here, I let the dragon guide us, though it seemed he didn’t want to return to the capital yet. I wasn’t sure why, but perhaps he wanted to understand. Like I did.

  The dragon continued to circle, flying above the forest. I saw no sign of other dragons—and though that wasn’t uncommon, they were common enough that I would’ve expected to have felt their presence, the energy and heat and fire that burned within them, something that would help me understand where they were and help me feel their influence out here.

  But as I focused, I could not detect anything. The dragons were gone.

  There should be some distant sense of heat. When I was learning to detect the dragons while studying at the Academy, I had learned how to focus on that heat burning deep within me, and to call upon it. I tried to do that now, trying to focus on that energy to see if I could use it, but even as I focused on it, I could still find no way to link into that power, no way for me to find any other dragons. Not even Natalie’s dragon.

  I wasn’t going to track Natalie. She seemed irritated with me, at least irritated enough that I wasn’t sure she would even have any interest in seeing me now. I wondered if I might be able to feel the Djarn dragons, and figure out where they were. The cycle of the Djarn should be potent enough that I would be able to pick up on it, but so far, I couldn’t feel anything from it. There was an emptiness there, as if the Djarn—and their dragons—were somehow intentionally withheld from me.

  Either that, or they had retreated far enough away that I wouldn’t be aware of them.

  Where could they have gone? West of the forest, there was the plains, Berestal, and from there, the Wilds. Beyond that . . .

  I had no idea what was beyond that. I wasn’t sure if anybody did. I wondered if they could have gone north, past the mountains, but I doubted that they would have. As we flew, I thought about what Natalie had said to me, the irritation she had shared with me. She was frustrated with me, perhaps with the situation, and with what had happened to her people.

  But she had come looking for me.

  If only I could find her within the cycle, find out what happened to her, but the cycle had been severed, making it difficult for me to do so.

  We started to head toward the capital, still without any sense of the rest of the cycle, Thomas, or anything. This couldn’t all be related to me having gone to the Vard lands.

  We had circled wide, making our way toward the western edge of the forest, the plains abutting us, when I felt something strange beneath me.

  I frowned and looked down at the ground. I couldn’t see anything, but I could feel it. I motioned to the green dragon, and we started to descend quickly, but then he didn’t drop all the way to the ground, as if was afraid of doing so.

  We hovered in the air, looking down at the familiar patch of landscape.

  The plains had been my home for so long—it was where I had grown up, learned to farm, learned to deal with the drought and the rains, and it was where I had eventually learned I had a connection to something else. Here, I had come to understand the truth of the dragons and my connection to them.

  I knew it wouldn’t take but a few moments for me to fly to Joran and his family, to talk to him about what I had seen of the Vard. His mother and sister had been Vard sympathizers. And here I had accused him of something else, something worse, but was there any fault in sympathizing with the Vard and what they had gone through?

  How could there be? I had seen the way their villages had been destroyed, and the way their people suffered, trying to survive and subsist within conditions that our kingdom would never have dealt with.

  All while avoiding attacking us.

  Over the years, the Vard had made it clear that they had no interest in attacking. Even Natalie’s father had known that truth, despite what he might believe now.

  But that wasn’t what drew me here.

  I jumped from the dragon’s side and noticed a section of the forest near the edge of the King’s Road that had changed. The trees had lost their leaves.

  There were a dozen of them, all of them missing leaves, and all of them . . .

  It took me a moment to realize what it was, but as soon as I did, I could feel the pressure upon me the same way I had before. Murtar.

  Could it be that murtar had been unleashed here?

  The dragon darted toward the trees, and with a burst of flame, he burned through them. I knew he was unsure if it would be enough to undo what had happened here, to peel away the corruption, but I understood that he thought it was necessary to at least try to burn away the effect of the murtar. Some trees had crumbled, while others around them were charred but standing—only those contaminated by murtar fell, collapsing into nothingness.

  I approached and could still feel that hint of memory of murtar—it pushed against me, as if trying to influence me.

  I started to form a weave, drawing upon the power of the dragon, calling it through me, and felt a surge of a different kind of heat. I looked up at the sky, wondering if the sun had poked out from the clouds, but it looked no different than it had before. I worked to form a protective weave I had learned in the Academy, something like a barrier, and laid it across the ground, anchoring it to the surrounding trees before pressing it downward.

  I looked over to the dragon when done. “I don’t know if that even did anything.”

  The dragon rumbled, and I could tell he was still feeling uncertain, perhaps even irritated. All of this left the dragon unsure of what he needed to do.

  And I couldn’t blame him. We didn’t know what we needed to do.

  If the murtar had been here, in a place I had been, in
a place I had known those others who had attacked the kingdom had come through, I wondered if perhaps there was even more murtar than I had already known about. The dragon and I took to the air, flying and circling, heading over the old Djarn city that had long ago been abandoned. I focused, feeling for any evidence of murtar there, but there was nothing.

  But as we flew, I noticed other pockets within the forest where a few of the trees were corrupted. Each time we found them, the dragon landed, sending power burning away from him, ripping through the trees, then I layered the pattern over the ground. When I did, I tested whether there was still some influence of the murtar, and whether I could feel anything. I couldn’t help but question if that was enough. The dragon had the ability to burn away the effect of the murtar, but it hadn’t been nearly enough to fully remove it.

  We continued to circle, making our way around the forest, and noticed a pattern starting to emerge. The charred trees formed a circle, their own form of cycle, all around the kingdom. I hadn’t detected anything farther into the plains, but there wasn’t anything there we would’ve been able to detect.

  And if it had started to circle the kingdom . . .

  What would happen when it reached the capital?

  Maybe there were other ways of defeating it.

  I had to get back to the Academy, to Thomas, to others who might be able to do something. I wasn’t the only dragon mage, and I certainly wasn’t the one with the most experience. There were others who would know more, and would have to be able to do much more than I could do to help.

  As I started toward the capital, I looked down over the edge of the dragon and noticed something: the protective barriers I had placed had already sizzled away.

  I frowned, and the dragon descended, heading toward one of the places closest to Berestal, though not on the edge of the King’s Road. As we descended, I looked around, feeling for at least a residual effect of the weave I had placed upon the ground, but I didn’t feel anything. I stared until I realized the presence of murtar had begun to push outward again, working its way toward the nearby trees.