Page 105 of Catastrophe

Charlie exchanged a look with Baelen and then nodded. “I think that’s the best. We need a plan to shut down the compound and the hunters before they can recover. And find out what’s going on with the other dragon.”

“Thank you for giving me, us, this time.” Clawdia said softly. “I really needed it to just be us.”

“I think you should thank Dralie for that,” Baelen replied dryly, as he stood up from his place on the floor with athletic ease.

She giggled sleepily and whispered, “thank you, Dralie.”

She needn’t have thanked us since we also appreciated the time away and time together but her sweet nature only made us love her more and we all stared at her for a moment, full of admiration and love, as her eyelids blinked heavily and sleep called to her.

I carried her up to bed, and she was snoring softly before I covered her in the blanket. I snuggled in next to her, breathing in her scent and thanking my gods once again as Baelen and Charlie also joined us. Despite my exhaustion, I watched her, and when her eyes flickered beneath her lids and her breathing increased, I stroked her arm to reassure her, even in her nightmares, that I was with her, and I wouldn’t let us be parted again.

CHAPTER 26

CLAWDIA

Nisha greeted me again as I opened my eyes in the dreamscape, but she wasn’t in her home. Instead, we stood outside, and sunlight gleamed on the roof of a viking farm house.

“Something else I need to see?” I asked, and her eyes were full of sorrow as she looked at me. It unnerved me, but I concentrated on the area around me.

The farmhouse was long and shaped like a ship, and a man, wearing a long tunic and trousers tied with a rope belt around his waist, paced and scrubbed at his head. He yelled something, but the words weren’t clear. Like listening to something said underwater, I could gauge the gist but not hear the voices or words.

“Hreithmar,” Nisha informed me.

I vaguely recognized him but couldn’t understand how or where I might have seen him.

“I feel like I’ve seen this. Before.” I muttered and tilted my head as I watched a little boy heave open the huge front door and hurry out into the farmland. The wind blew his long and untamed hair, and his threadbare clothes pulled up mid-thigh as he walked. He patted a sheep that lingered near the wooden fence by a dirt road, but his expression didn’t brighten and his pace was slow and labored as he headed past us.

My eyes widened and my breath caught as I realized I’d seen this boy and man. But it had only been a flash. It didn’t feel like a vision. Like this. But as Sigurd spoke of Fafnir’s past on the island, I saw them in my mind’s eye. Reeling, I whispered, “I thought it was my imagination.”

Nisha didn’t ask what I meant. She seemed to understand and closed her eyes briefly. “I’m sorry, my child. I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry?” I didn’t understand her reaction and frowned.

She ignored my question and pointed back to the boy, Fafnir, who was now in the distance and continuing to hobble down the dirt path. “Pay attention now. You need to know this.”

My mind couldn’t align the man I knew as Fafnir with this sad young boy, but if the secret to his defeat was in his past, then I would watch and use the knowledge to bring him down.

Nisha and I followed wordlessly as Fafnir came to a village. I gawked. It wasn’t like anything I had seen before. I felt like I was walking through the set of a film. The large wooden buildings were spaced far apart, and people shouted to each other over a fire in the center, which seemed to be a hub for the community.

When I refocused on the child, I noticed the effect he had on others. People stopped talking when they saw him. They stared and glared. Children jeered and threw rocks at him. My heart hurt for the child who was the outcast of a community and treated so poorly.

But the little boy-because I couldn’t think of him as Fafnir at this point— said nothing. He acknowledged nothing and no one, he just continued walking as though he was a ghost. We followed him to a building, and he sat underneath with his back to a slightly ajar door. It wasn’t until I looked inside that I could understand what he was doing.

Children sat in a circle and an adult waved his hands in the center as he instructed them on how to cast spells. One child, blond and blue eyed with a kind of smug expression, seemed familiar. Sigurd. Only adult Sigurd, who’d died and been reborn three times, had far more fragility and less confidence than the child version.

At my aghast expression, Nisha explained, “They didn’t allow him to learn magic, and his father also didn’t teach him about his drakorian heritage. He was a ship adrift. A lone island. Between two worlds. Part of neither.”

The scene changed in a dizzying swirl, and suddenly we were in a shed with cows. Fafnir sat cross-legged in the hay as he held his hands out toward a calf that stumbled around in its small pen. He wasn’t much older than we’d just seen, but his clothes were even more threadbare and his breath was visible as he huffed his frustration.

He muttered, and I recognized the spell he was trying to cast. He was intending to move magic from himself to another being. To the cow. For what purpose, I wasn’t sure. The calf seemed well enough. Maybe he was just experimenting.

But it wasn’t working.

With a frustrated huff, he shook out his hands and offhandedly said the spell the wrong way. My eyes widened as sparks flew from his hands. The calf stilled and, like spilled blood, magic poured from an invisible wound. It was horrifying to watch, and Fafnir seemed to agree. He made a guttural noise and jumped to his knees. His hands shook as they hovered over the animal. The magic that pooled underneath him climbed without him noticing. It slipped into the holes in his trousers and his eyes widened as it seeped into his skin.

“He took magic from a calf?” I asked, aghast. “How does a cow have magic?”

“There is magic in everything. It’s minimal, but there. Enough that without it, it would die. What is magic if not an energy source that can be wielded?”

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