Page 61 of Dreams and Dragon Wings
The Aether is there. I feel it. I sense it. But my God doesn’t answer me.
Or perhaps He does, and I simply can’t hear Him over the rattle of my own frantic thoughts. Over the shameful tang of my fear.
I am out of time.
“Oh, Benevolence!” Friedemar’s voice echoes off the walls, ringing out in a singsong tone. “See how he flees from me! Is thegreatKing of Drakara truly too afraid to fight back?”
Boots clatter behind me. Shouts. Friedemar is coming. I dare not look back.
I should leave now. I should get out while I still have my wits about me.
But I can’t leave just yet.
First, I must save Mira Weaver and…Reggie.
“Go!” I wrench open the door for Velda, revealing a narrow flight of steps leading downward, faintly illuminated by sputtering torches.
I let my auntie fly through first before I maneuver Aurelia’s limp form past the opening as well and dive through, slamming the door shut behind us.
A quick weave of Earth narrows the doorway, locking the door in place.
Perhaps that will slow Friedemar down.
Taking the steps two at a time, I send out twin threads of Mind toward Glorana and Brisa, hunting for them across the distance that separates us. When I find them, I breathe out a sigh of relief.
They live.
“I was delayed, but we are moving again,”I let them know. I do not expect an answer. Neither of them can wield Mind like Velda and I can.
But at least they will worry no longer.
I have never understood the human need for dungeons. When we finally make it to the bottom of the stairs and emerge into a dank room lined with small, iron-barred cells, I understand it even less.
A single guard stands watch over the two prisoners being held here—a guard who screams like a little boy when he seesme coming. Friedemar must have called away the rest when I arrived.
Or perhaps he always keeps his prisoners so poorly guarded.
“Go,” I snarl at the single guard left. “Run.”
There is nowhere to run, but he does not know that. On command, the man skitters off, falling all over himself in his haste to make for the staircase.
An older gentleman with a bruised countenance and a swollen left eye watches me through the bars of the cell. Casually, he observes, “That man you just chased off was holding the keys, you know.”
“You must beReggie,” I observe in kind before sending out a weave of Air to rip the cell door clean off its hinges. A horrific screech of metal later, it booms against the stone floor between us, the sound reverberating off the walls.
The man takes his sudden freedom in stride, choosing to study me with his one good eye rather than marvel at the fact that I just ripped his cell open. “Have we met?”
“Aurelia!” a woman who can be none other than her adoptive mother, Mira Weaver, cries out as she rushes from the dank cell, tears streaking her cheeks. She hovers over my Jewel’s levitating form, fretting for all of a moment, before she spears me with her sharp hazel gaze. “What have you done to her?”
Of course, Mira would think the worst of me. Rightfully so in this instance. Unfairly in all others. Though we have never met before this moment, it is no secret to me that she has never approved of our friendship.
“She seems to have finally mastered the art of swooning on command,” Reggie comments as he, too, steps in close to inspect Aurelia’s form. Reginald Lockhart, Aurelia’s intended, as I gleaned from her thoughts when she opened her mind to me.
My inner dragon snarls in protest, a wave of jealousy crashing over me.
Ridiculous. I silence the beast in the next moment.
“She is well,” Velda reassures, ever the diplomat. Only I see the web of soothing Mind she weaves over the pair of humans. “All of the excitement seems to have just gotten the better of her.”
