Diggs quickly followed up with a spell of binding as the wood struts from the floor burst up through the carpet and wrapped themselves around his legs.
She knew this wouldn’t hold him for long, even as she looked around and noticed for the first time how much her condo was made of plastic and other man-made materials.
She had to get outdoors where there were more earth elements to work with.
Diggs stepped on top of the man’s back and vaulted over him, running with the cube clutched to her chest as she zipped through her living room and past what was left of her front door.
Neighbors ran up and down the hallway, panicked into pre-dawn motion by her gunshot. Diggs bolted down the hall to the exit stairwell, flung the door open and raced down the six flights of stairs. She pushed open the heavy door at the bottom of the stairwell and raced into the early morning air.
She had never been so happy to see trees, rocks, and grass in her life.
Her joy was short lived, however, as she heard a crashing of glass from high above her head.
She pressed her back against the exterior wall of her condominium building as deadly shards showered the ground in front of her.
Following closely behind them was the man in white as he fell quickly but in a controlled way to the ground. It was hard to tell in the pre-dawn light, but this time she was sure that when he landed, his feet remained a full inch or so above the ground, as if he were walking on a bed of air.
The man faced her and continued his attack.
Diggs spoke another phrase in the Earth Dragon tongue that sounded like concrete grating together as she stepped back, and her body merged with the brick wall behind her.
From inside the brick wall, she could see the man in white, but it was clear that he could not see her.
She quietly but quickly made her way along the line of the wall and around the corner before coming out from the bricks and making a run for the tree line.
Diggs sensed that she could not win against this man in a head-to-head fight. She needed a plan, but all she could come up with was to make her way across town to the Rune Corp building and hope that someone there would come to her aid.
It was early morning on a weekday, so the traffic would be clogging up already, but as a pedestrian, she figured she could make pretty decent time on foot.
She clung to one of the trees in the narrow strip of nature the city designers had deigned to leave in place, but suddenly heard and felt a gust of wind that catapulted her back fifty feet and slammed her into an iron fence.
She could see the man in white literally flying at her as she struggled to clear her head. She had to figure out some way to buy enough time to make her way to Rune Corp.
Before she could push away from the fence, she felt a burning sensation in her shoulder, like someone had stabbed her muscle with a hot poker. She looked down and saw a throwing star sticking partially out of her shoulder. It was made of the same material as the cube but with white, glowing swirls instead of the familiar reds and greens with which she was familiar.
Less than a second later, she felt similar pain in both of her legs and then in her stomach.
The man’s attack was so fast that she hadn’t even seen him throw the stars.
Her face crumpled in confusion.
She searched frantically through the commands she had practiced the night before, but Chris’s cube was not created to be a weapon, and she was too new to everything to bend the power of the divinium completely to her will.
In desperation, she searched for pre-made commands and settled on a phrase of entrapment that she spoke to the nearby trees.
One of the pine trees seemed to turn almost to rubber as it wrapped its trunk around the torso of the man in white.
Diggs’s attacker opened his mouth, and a sound flew from it that reminded Diggs of what she imagined a banshee would sound like. The tree trunk bowed outward until its wood could take no more and it exploded, showering both Diggs and her attacker in wooden shards.
Diggs looked down at herself. A dozen or so sharp pieces of wood needled her already-punctured body. All of the razor-sharp stars hurt immensely, but the one in her gut was causing her the most problems. She knew that a gut wound could take hours to die from normally, but the amount of blood pouring from her midsection was so great that she doubted she had long to live.
This was not how things were supposed to work out. She had just discovered magic, and her life was supposed to change—not end.
She quietly laughed as she realized that, even as her blood soaked the ground beneath her, she was giving back to the very Earth of which she would soon be a part once again.
Even as Officer Diggs fell to her knees and felt the last of her life seep from her body, she dropped the cube onto the ground.
She heard a tremendous roar, like a freight train barreling down on her. She strained to raise her head enough to see the source of the noise.
She wasn’t able to fully understand what she saw as she tried to process the raw force of a tornado that was so close to her but which had no effect on her. The mighty winds were sending everything flying into the air around her, drawing them up into its funnel and spitting them out. Everything fell before the onslaught of the mighty winds except for her and the man in white.
The man carefully bent down and picked up the cube, smiling.
The trees around her were pulled up by their roots, and Officer Diggs was saddened, not by her own imminent death, but by the sounds of terror coming from the trees that she could now understand.
Tears ran down her cheeks—something that had not happened since her childhood—as she set her head down upon the ground, and she died.
CHAPTER 10
JOANNA HARDWICK was exhausted from working around the clock on her latest story about political corruption in the nation’s capitol. In the D.C. area, there was always another candidate or government official engaging in activities that were off-limits to leaders in the public eye. Many times, the acts Joanna uncovered were similar to things regular people did on a daily basis—taking a mistress, purchasing and using drugs, and even engaging in what some parts of society still liked to refer to as deviant sexual practices.
Often, she didn’t even have to investigate much on her own versus just verifying allegations made secretly by one party or the other. D.C. was a cutthroat town in more ways than one, but if you wanted to make it in the journalism business, it was the place to be.
During this early summer morning, just as the sun was thinking about coming up, Joanna was shopping for her weekly groceries. Even though she was an up-and-coming reporter and always on the job, she was also a single woman who was forced to make a meal at home every once in a while. Luckily for her, she lived next door to a local grocery store that was open around the clock and that specialized in organic, non-genetically modified produce.
As she stood in front of the grapefruit display, trying to decide which of the citrus fruits to squeeze first, the table full of yellow-orange produce started to vibrate and shake. A few grapefruits fell to the floor and rolled away.
At first, she thought that it was an earthquake. It wasn’t common for the area, but it did happen on occasion. Then she heard the roar from outside—like a giant freight train passing through the center of Tysons Corner. She set her basket down and ran out the front door with her cell phone set to video mode.
What she saw confused her.
A hundred yards to her left, a twister was setting down in the middle of the grocery store parking lot. The vortex of wind looked to be only twenty feet wide, but it stretched up as far as she could see into the early morning sky and was gathering in intensity even as she watched. Normally, this alone would qualify for the strangest thing she would see all day.
But to Joanna’s right she noticed something that drew her attention even more.
A man dressed in a skin-tight white body suit was throwing something at a woman who was backed up against an iron fence.
Her reporter’s instinct allowed her to film as much as she could of the man attacking the woman before she had to duck back inside the grocery store and could only watch in awe as the funnel of wind rumbled past her.
As soon as the doorway was clear again, Joanna ventured outside only to see the tornado tearing up trees and rocks where the man and the woman had been standing just moments ago.
Joanna started recording again and tried to narrate while the funnel was reaping its destruction, but the winds were so loud she doubted that her phone picked up her voice at all.
After only thirty seconds, the funnel dissipated as quickly as it had began, as trees and giant rocks fell to the earth all around her. She leapt back into the store to the shouts of the store manager telling her to move away from the glass and to please stay inside.
She wasn’t sure what she had just witnessed, but she knew that it was newsworthy.
Ignoring the incessant pleas from the store manager, Joanna sprinted out of the grocery store and made her way across the street to the entrance of her condo building’s underground parking garage where her car was parked. As she ran, she glanced at where the woman and man had been fighting.
Neither one was there now.
As she entered the stairwell, she saved the video to her phone’s memory card and dialed her producer. Just before her signal cut off from being too far underground, she was able to tell him that a tornado had set down in the middle of Tysons Corner, and that she had close-up footage of it she was bringing in. She wished she could have just sent it as an attachment, but the way the network had been acting up lately, she figured she could make it to the studio faster than she could successfully send such a gigantic file through e-mail.
This was true, but the real reason Joanna wanted to get into the studio as soon as possible was so that she could get a better look at what interested her even more.
Although a tornado causing destruction in the middle of Tysons Corner was more than newsworthy, her reporter’s nose told her that the man attacking the woman was the real story.
CHAPTER 11
MERRICK AND MONA sat in the same lab where Bradley had lost his leg the night before. It was early Tuesday morning, before the dawn, and neither of them had slept all night. They held hands loosely, but it was clear that romance was not their concern at the moment.
“Maybe Cara has a point,” Mona said, “about taking a break every once in a while.”
“I want to do that,” Merrick said, staring at the divinium cube pulsating with shades of green and red in front of him. “But there will be time to rest later. Right now, things out there are changing. I can feel it. The dragons are active, and I don’t want us to be caught with our guard down the next time one of them tries something. Resting now won’t help anything. We have to push forward, even when bad things happen, like with Bradley.”
“I’m not suggesting that you stop working hard,” Mona said, “but I don’t understand the rush. I know that each Drayoom is given a creation name by their patron dragon while they’re still in the womb. And that they forget this name the instant they’re born. As they grow and mature, and realize their true nature, they remember their name and come into their full power. But if each creation name is a single word in one of the dragon tongues, doesn’t it make sense that you won’t be able to collect all of the dragon words until the last Drayoom is born?”
“That’s right,” Merrick said.
“Then how can you be so obsessive about this if you have no hope of finishing the project in your lifetime?”
“Because, I’m not trying to collect the entire language. Not every word, at least. I can’t, just like you point out. But I can collect all the creation names we know so far. We already have the majority of the names from the Earth Clan, because Ohman used to be the Earth Clan’s Master Keeper before he was their king. And I’ve gathered a decent amount of names from my time with the Fire Tribe and from the cooperation of Swella, since she’s still their temporary leader over there. Ohman even figured a way to include some of the creation names from the Wind Family and from the Water People.
“But there are also a lot of words in the dragon lexicons that don’t come from the Drayoom. Most of our names stand for concepts or behaviors or verbs, like my name or Ohman’s. You know that mine signifies a concept in the Earth Dragon’s tongue—to find redemption after facing much loss. But there are creation names all around us that we need to collect as well. From what Balach’s father, Fenton, taught me, all living things were named by the dragons.”
“That’s why you send the Alphas out collecting sounds from nature,” Mona said.
“Yes—and they sift through whatever they record to see if any of the sounds can be added to our lexicons.”
Mona squeezed Merrick’s hand and looked into his eyes.
“Still, that’s so many words,” Mona said. “It seems like an undoable task.”
“Here’s the key. I think Ohman’s real quest wasn’t actually collecting the names into a single large database,” Merrick said. “I think the quest that Terrada gave him was to figure out how the unified language actually works.”
Mona let out an exasperated breath.
“Just when I thought I understood what you were talking about,” Mona said. “Now, you’re telling me that collecting the names isn’t important?”
“Having the names from all the dragon tongues is like having a dictionary for a language. It’s necessary if you want to communicate well, but the most important thing is not the vocabulary—it’s understanding how the language works—how it’s put together. And that’s what I’ve been working on while everyone else is either collecting new words, or like you and Bradley, figuring out how to use them.
“The more words I have from each of the languages, the more clues I have for figuring out how the unified language works. It’s not as easy as just slamming all of the words from the different dragons together. There’s an art and a science to this, and even though our cube interface certainly helps, I can already tell you that the dragon language doesn’t follow any thing that resembles any kind of syntax or rules as we know them.
“That makes this problem a very difficult one to solve, and I’ve been running myself ragged trying to figure out how it all fits together. Then last night, right before Bradley’s accident, I started wondering if I was searching in the wrong direction for an answer.
“I started thinking that maybe the real answer to how the language works might be found in the cubes themselves. Or rather the divinium that our cubes are made of.”
Merrick reached out and touched the block of divinium in front of them with his forefinger. His touch caused a series of green pulses that traveled across the face of the black cube.
“Watch the cube,” Merrick said before speaking a simple word that sounded like a dry leaf crackling. The cube pulsed in shades of green in reaction to his voice.
“That was an Earth word. Now watch what happens when I use a Fire word,” he said.
He intoned a noise that sounded like the popping of a spark from a bonfire, and the cube lit up in swirls of red hues. After that, he spoke a word from the Water Dragon and then one from the Wind Dragon. The cube lit up with shades of blue when Lagu’s word was used, and it glowed with misty swirls of white when he used one of Araki’s words.
Mona stared at the cube, her mouth slightly open.
“I’ve never seen those last two colors in a cube before,” she said.
“It reacts differently to each of the languages. Remember the divinium from the Fire Tribe that my brother, Eudroch, used?”
“It glowed red and looked like it was made of living lava,” Mona said.
“And the divinium from the Earth Clan only pulsed with greens,” Merrick said. “At first, I didn’t think there was anything strange about that, but I ran som
e further tests on a piece of divinium from the Earth Clan.”
Merrick pulled a small sliver of divinium from his pocket and set it down in front of them.
“Watch what happens when I use a word from Sigela, the Fire Dragon, on this piece,” he said.
When Merrick spoke a word from the Fire Dragon tongue, the divinium did nothing at all. In fact, it stopped pulsating at all for a moment before resuming its regular green pulsations.
“It didn’t even acknowledge the word you spoke,” Mona said.
“Turns out, the divinium that each of the families uses is different from the divinium that Ohman was somehow able to lay his hands on, and I think our unique divinium is the key to unlocking the inner workings of the dragon languages and how they all fit together.”
“What makes our divinium have that ability?” Mona said.
“I have no idea,” Merrick said. “I also don’t know where Ohman found our divinium, but we’re starting to run low on it. We’ve been using a lot of it for extra data cubes and to make new equipment and weapons for the Alphas, but we’re going to need even more to continue growing the lexicons. And a lot more to expand Rune Corp itself.”
“Cara doesn’t know?” Mona said.
“She said she asked him about it several times, but that he always told her that she’d find out when the time was right.”
Before Mona could respond, the cube in front of them flashed a green that was so bright it momentarily turned the black stone into what looked like a negative of itself.
Mona appeared confused, but Merrick knew exactly what the cube’s behavior meant and immediately got up from his chair and started walking to the elevators.
Someone had finally activated the lost Rune Corp cube. And given the brightness of the alarm, whoever had turned it on it was close by and using it for some pretty powerful magic.
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