Rising Scorn: A Nature Wizard Adventure (Magic of Nasci Book 6)

by DM Fike

  “And that’s exactly my point,” Darby cried. “There is not a single other dryant in all of the Talol Wilds that we could not locate within a day or two. For anyone else, it would be a simple matter of the Oracle verifying the dryant’s true status. But for you, we make an exception.”

  Finally, Darby revealed her true play. She knew the fox dryant only made occasional appearances. I myself had only seen her a handful of times. If I’d been able to call for her whenever I wanted, I wouldn’t have been ridiculed for years for claiming to have seen her.

  She’d backed me into an impossible corner.

  The Oracle continued to gaze at me, her mouth curved in a sympathetic frown. “Darby’s petition is a reasonable one. I should be able to examine the fox dryant and support your claim to shepherdom.”

  I tried to keep the panic out of my voice. “I don’t even know where to begin to look for her. She only shows up when she wants to.”

  Darby smirked. “That’s your problem.”

  “I’m afraid I must follow through with this,” the Oracle said. “Ina, you must provide me a way to meet the fox dryant so that both Darby and I can examine her and put the matter to rest. I will give you a week to accomplish this task.”

  The question flew out of my mouth before I could stop myself. “And if I don’t?”

  “Then I am afraid I must concede to deception on your part and bind your pithways for good.”

  CHAPTER 8

  THE ORACLE AND Darby kept up the conversation, but I blocked most of it out. I couldn’t get past the part where I could have my pithways bound. It didn’t matter that I’d gotten rid of Rafe before he could do more harm. It didn’t matter that Nasci had saved me from being vaporized in magma. It didn’t even matter that a literal dryant could show up in a crowd and hand me my Shepherd Trial. None of it was enough.

  I still might not be a shepherd in a week.

  I numbly stood when the Oracle beckoned me to. She moved the door boulder aside with a sigil to herd us outside. Darby practically skipped out the door ahead of me, a victory smile plastered on her face. She knew I couldn’t produce the fox dryant in such a short time frame. She figured she’d already won.

  I meant to follow her, but the Oracle pierced me with her ancient eyes and said quietly, “I did not wish for Darby’s petition to be successful.”

  If I tensed any further, my back would start cramping. “Could have fooled me.”

  “I accept your anger. I would feel the same. But as Oracle, I must follow a code. It is reasonable to ask that any Shepherd Trial be verified by the dryant who heralded it. This is a very difficult situation.”

  “You’re not sure Nasci sent the fox dryant.” The thought came out as an accusation rather than a question.

  She shook her head. “Quite the opposite. I know for a fact that Nasci chose you, in a much more personal way than she does for most other shepherds.”

  I lost my composure. My hands shot out toward the open door, pointing toward the homestead on the other side of the hill. “Then why don’t you just tell the others that. You’re the Oracle. You set the rules.”

  “But I cannot force faith. Darby’s petition proves how necessary that is to keeping the Talol Wilds running. If I just ‘set the rules,’ as you say, it would undermine my credibility as a herald of Nasci and ultimately cause more damage than good.”

  “So, I’m just the sacrificial lamb to ease everyone’s spiritual minds?”

  The Oracle actually winked, throwing me completely off guard. “Faith works for everybody, Ina. I’m praying you retain yours. I shall see you in exactly one week.”

  Then she ushered me out the door and slid the boulder in place behind me.

  “Perfect,” I muttered under my breath. “I just need to believe, and this will all just work out.”

  “Went well, did it?” Guntram pulled himself up from where he’d been leaning against the longhouse.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Is that sarcasm I detect?”

  “Augurs can learn from eyases, too.” All humor fled from his expression as he ushered me to walk beside him down the path. “What happened?”

  “Darby called into question my Shepherd Trial because she’s not 100% sure the fox is an actual dryant. I have one week to present the fox dryant to both the Oracle and Darby to verify her authenticity. Otherwise, I deceived everyone and need to be bound.”

  Guntram opened his mouth as if to argue, but then paused. He closed his mouth, frowned, and then finally stroked his beard. “It is a genius strategy.”

  I glared at him. “Thanks for admiring Darby’s handiwork.”

  “This reeks of Sertalis, not Darby.”

  “Then why didn’t he bring this up to the Oracle himself?”

  “Because if you do end up producing the fox dryant, only Darby looks foolish. No one really knows what’s going on with this fox dryant of yours, not even Sertalis. I’m sure he’s researched the likelihood of her existence and found nothing, as I did several years ago.”

  “You looked into the fox dryant? I thought you said you didn’t believe in her.”

  Guntram gave me the side eye. “I didn’t. Still wouldn’t if I hadn’t seen her with my own eyes. There’s absolutely nothing in either the library here or at Sipho’s that provides any details about her existence.”

  “So where do we go from here?”

  “I don’t know, Ina. I will have to give it some thought while I travel.”

  I stopped in my tracks. “Wait, you’re going somewhere?”

  Guntram frowned at my indignation. “I have problems of my own that require attention.”

  “I just thought…” I started to argue, but then trailed off. He’d just told me he’d exhausted all his known resources to research the fox dryant. He couldn’t just drop everything to help me chase phantoms. “I’m sorry, Guntram. I’m just feeling a little lost right now.”

  Guntram surprised me by placing a heavy hand on my shoulder. “I’m not abandoning you. I will meet you at Sipho’s homestead as soon as I can. Until then, though, you’d best start looking for your lightning-based friend.”

  I threw my hands up in the air. “And where would I even start doing that?”

  “Perhaps where you encountered her before. If she appeared there once, she could do so again.”

  CHAPTER 9

  AND THAT’S HOW I ended up at my parents’ house on a random Thursday morning.

  No matter how hard I tried to escape the banality of my upbringing, it always sucked me back in. I’d headed to Lynnwood not to go home, but to check out Scriber Lake Park, a small natural refuge in the middle of concrete Seattle suburbia. From the northern homestead, Scriber Lake was the nearest place I’d ever seen the fox dryant. She had saved me in the dead of night from someone trying to assault me.

  I spent a good hour wandering around trails and boardwalks of the wetland, feeling like an idiot looking for a two-tailed red fox with a penchant for tossing lightning. Not a cloud dotted the blue sky. People stared at me for walking around in the heat with a hoodie. I couldn’t exactly tell them I could regulate my temperature with pith.

  Realizing I was getting nowhere, I decided I should at least see if my parents were around. They both worked odd hours—my mother as a retail store manager and my father as an economics professor at a community college—so I never knew when they’d be home. Rather than call ahead, I just stopped by the house. That way, if no one was there, I could leave with a clear conscious that I’d done my daughterly duty.

  I knocked on the door of the split-level house, the sharp scent of fresh mulch assaulting my nostrils. The landscapers must have just come by to spruce up the front yard. After waiting a minute, no one rustled the front curtains and I could hear no one inside.

  Jackpot. I scooted around to the side wooden fence and let myself into the backyard. Once there, I retrieved a house key underneath a terra cotta flowerpot with bright marigolds and used it to unlock the front door.

  The scen
t of strong black coffee, my parents’ main source of energy, assaulted me as I waltzed into the kitchen. They must have left recently. I grabbed a notepad by the ancient answering machine and wrote a quick note saying ‘hi’ so they wouldn’t freak out. I’d dropped by once before when no one was home and left the oven on. My mom had been paranoid for a month that she’d almost burned the house down until I admitted it was me.

  I didn’t want to linger in case someone came home, so I poured a big bowl of sugary cereal (one of my mom’s weaknesses) and a glass of orange juice. While I ate, I decided to surf the internet on Dad’s computer for mysterious foxes. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Maybe clues on where I might find my own fox dryant? Instead, I found a website on kitsune, Japanese demon foxes. The article talked at length about how foxes and humans lived in harmony in ancient Japan, that the number of tails the fox had hinted at their strength, and their various abilities ranged from fire generation to human possession and invisibility. It all sounded too fantastical, even for me.

  Having finished my late breakfast, I closed the browser with a sigh. I wasn’t going to uncover anything useful online. Even doing a search on “dryant” produced zero results. That revealed how much people knew about this stuff. I needed to follow real leads, so I made myself a turkey sandwich to go and headed for my next destination.

  * * *

  Silver Falls ended up being a bust like Scriber Lake. Located just a couple dozen miles east of Oregon’s capital, the state park boasted a trail that wound around ten waterfalls, sometimes even weaving in behind them. I’d camped here the summer before my sophomore year with some dormies and ran into the fox dryant on a midnight run to the bathroom. It had been my first ken experience ever.

  But nostalgia didn’t magically make the fox dryant appear. I loitered around the campground as long as I dared, not wanting to give the impression that I wanted to steal anyone’s meager belongings. I then popped around various sections of the hiking trail, but I knew I wouldn’t find her. The sky remained a brilliant blue, not a speck of lightning pith sparking the atmosphere.

  I ate the sandwich from my parents’ for dinner and kept searching. Exhausted as night fell, I found a secluded spot in the park to sleep. I spread myself over the hard ground, weeds and stone making any position uncomfortable. Normally I would have traveled the extra hour back to Sipho’s homestead, but the events of the day had worn me down. At least I had a blanket of open stars, their brilliance sharp against a stark black background. You couldn’t help but be humbled, staring up at a sky viewed by almost every human being that ever lived. Even if we didn’t always appreciate it, the night sky would always dwarf us, reminding us of our tiny space in this great wide universe. I dozed off with an odd sense of wonder and peace.

  That vanished when I woke up the next morning, still intent on my impossible mission. I searched the rest of the hiking trails I hadn’t covered the day before but finally gave up at midday. The fox dryant wasn’t showing her pointy face here. With nowhere else to go, I wisp channeled to the final spot on my limited search list.

  Derrick Cave is a lava tube on the edge of the Oregon high desert, east of the Cascade Mountains. I wasn’t specifically going into the cave itself, but into the dry brush that stretched out for hundreds of flat miles around it. It was out there, in the middle of a thunderstorm, that the fox dryant had placed lightning in my hand, allowing me the first bit of control over its erratic pith.

  The gathering clouds gave me hope I might actually find my target. Darkening purple wisps rolled in toward me, coupled by short wind bursts. A storm brewed, and although I still didn’t feel any lightning, the clouds hinted the worst was yet to come.

  Excitement mingled with a tinge of fear. Leaving the heavily wooded forests meant also leaving the Talol Wilds, my shepherd territory. Before me stretched the Bitai Wilds, the desert biome that ran from here through the southwestern United States and down into Mexico. Shepherds weren’t supposed to leave their designated boundaries, partly out of survival since we’d adapted to our particular environments, and partly out of respect for the other regions who practiced different traditions.

  Still, I’d snuck into the Bitai Wilds many times before to practice absorbing lightning pith and had never run into another shepherd. I only had a week to find the fox dryant, after all. No time to ask any permission even if I wanted to.

  I aimed for the general direction of the gathering storm, pulling my hoodie up over my hair in an attempt to keep the dust out of my eyes. Sagebrush rustled in their bases, tumbleweeds streaming by as the wind picked up speed. I felt more exposed the farther I walked, the only mammal in a wide, isolated expanse.

  The rain began as a few fat drips, creating dark splotches in the dirt around me. They hit my head with surprising force, not the gentle drops of a forest shower. Their icy coldness contrasted with the August heat. I thought I detected movement in the brush, but when I turned to view it, I only saw a gathering deluge on the horizon, dark lines streaking toward the ground as if the clouds raked it with their fingers. I drew a dryness sigil just before the sporadic drops increased to a steady drizzle. A hissing noise rose as the rain really began to pour. Water bounced off me as if I’d become magnetized against it.

  I raised a hopeful hand up in the air, searching for that familiar sizzle. My eyes scanned for a quick flash. My ears strained for a rumbling sonic boom.

  But nothing. The storm didn’t appear to hold any lightning.

  “Of course not,” I muttered under my breath. It’d be too convenient for me to find the fox dryant so easily. Fate seemed determined to throw every possible obstacle in my path. Sighing, I knew I’d have to give up for the day. Maybe tomorrow I’d come up with a better plan to find the stupid fox. I turned on my heels, heading back the way I came.

  That’s when a rough hand burst out of the desert floor and grabbed me by the ankle.

  I screamed like a teenager in a slasher film at this apparent zombie attack. I gathered fire into my palms and launched it downward in a quick stream, hoping to burn my assailant. To my horror, the fire only made the hand clench tighter as the rest of the body pulled itself up from its desert grave. Sandy hair full of dust emerged, followed by a slender face with a pointed chin. The hand released me as the entire man shot upward in a torrent of wind and dust that obscured my vision.

  Coughing and waving my hands to clear the air, I grabbed my lightning charm and prepared for another attack. “Stay back!” I managed around a series of hacks.

  An amused voice answered. “You’re the one outside of your borders, not me.”

  The rain pounded the man who had jumped out of the ground. He stood half a foot taller than me, wearing a thick kimono-like robe complete with wide belt securing it in place. Glass bottles dangled from twine at his side. As he swayed, bits of dust continued to fall out of his hair like dandruff onto his tanned skin. It was only then that I realized that he remained as dry as me despite standing in the middle of a downpour. Despite his commanding presence, he cocked his head to the side in a goofy grin.

  “You’re a shepherd,” I said dumbly.

  “Figured that all out by yourself, did you?” He scrutinized me from head to toe, as if memorizing every detail of my body.

  I belatedly realized I still held the lightning charm in my fist, sparks flying between my fingers. I let it go and took a step backward. “Who are you?”

  The desert shepherd held up a finger. “Hold that thought. I’ve got work to do first.” He flipped around to face the heart of the storm. He spread his arms out wide, but before he wrote any sigils, he glanced back at me.

  “You may want to step back.”

  I didn’t have a lot of time to obey his command as he scribbled an unfamiliar sigil with both hands. It contained a lot of Vs, so I knew it had to be water-based, but that still did not prepare me for the water tornado.

  The desert shepherd drew the storm toward him in a whipping funnel of rain. The winds howled as the storm shifted
toward the shepherd’s palms. The already heavy rain pounded against me as it changed direction. I grabbed onto my defensive charm to protect me and scrambled backwards as his fingers continued to fly in a crazy combination of patterns.

  I know a very talented water shepherd who literally lives in the ocean, but I’d never seen anyone suck up a storm. And yet, that’s what this Bitai shepherd did, absorbing the downpour into one of the bottles at his waist. He pulled down so hard I could actually see streaks of bright blue sky where he punched a hole in the clouds. I didn’t see anything tangible actually fill the bottles, but something must have entered them because a warm glow appeared in the center. Once it shone with a soft blue light, the desert shepherd seemed satisfied with his work. His hands fell to his sides, and the rain fell down once again, although more muted now with part of its energy stolen.

  He flashed me a wide grin. “How’d I do, Talol shepherd?”

  I didn’t realize until he asked that my mouth was wide open. I closed it. “Not bad,” I said, trying to act casual by folding my arms over my chest. It took me two awkward tries to get it right.

  He chuckled. “I admit it’s nothing compared to flinging around lightning, but I’m sure you’ve heard that before.”

  My cheeks flushed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Is lying any way to behave as a guest?” He shook his head, more amused than angry.

  I straightened to my full height, as if that would give me added authority. “I’m not sure what you think you saw, but I certainly didn’t cast any lightning.”

  “Not this time. But then again, you don’t have your little fox friend with you either.”

  He couldn’t have shocked me more if he’d doused me with all the rainwater he’d absorbed into his glass bottle. “You’ve seen the fox dryant?”

  The desert shepherd grinned. “Now suddenly we’re being truthful.”

  He didn’t expect me to grab him by the robe lapels and yank him down toward me. I was done playing games. I nearly knocked him off balance as our faces came within inches of each other. His brows arched in shock.