Mist Dragon, page 16
part #5 of Dragon Misfits Series
He searched the forest. Where was Lorren?
He wouldn’t be able to find him from the air. Which meant that he was going to have to climb back down and risk these earth dragons.
“Stay ready for us,” Jason said to the iron dragon.
The dragon roared, and as Jason climbed off, he blasted at the ground to ensure that the earth dragons didn’t harm them. Sarah followed, and Jason looked back at her.
“Maybe you should stay with the iron dragon,” he said.
“I’m not leaving you alone.” She held onto her dragon pearls. “Besides, now I think we know how to escape from them.”
“Only if we have a dragon that can reach us.”
The iron dragon rumbled.
They moved down the slope, and Jason focused on the energy in the air. He was going to have to hold onto as much power as possible. Thankfully, no pressure on him suggested Lorren attacked again.
In the distance, he could feel the Dragon Soul dragons. That was what Lorren would have to be after. Not necessarily Jason, but the Dragon Souls. And their dragons. He pressed outward, using the connection that had formed when healing them, and realized that connection was missing.
The dragons were still out there. He could feel them, but they were no longer freed, not the way that Jason had freed them.
They raced down the slope.
Energy filled him. It came from somewhere nearby, though he didn’t know if they were going to be able to get close enough to use it. The Dragon Soul dragons were down there, and all he had to do was descend far enough down the slope, and he could get to them.
He had to free them.
Energy built around them. For a moment, he didn’t know if it was real, but a rumbling built within that energy.
Beneath him.
That was the earth dragons.
Lorren had claimed they weren’t powerful. He had lied. They were incredibly powerful. Knowing they were there, he wondered if he might be able to counter what they were doing. It seemed to him there should be something he could do. He could feel energy and power, and he pushed down, trying to solidify the ground.
Could he freeze it?
In the upper reaches of the mountains, the ground was so hard and frozen that nothing could penetrate it. Given his connection to the ice dragon, he wondered if that would be enough. It would take more than just a connection to the ice dragon, though. It would take a burst of ice lightning.
He hadn’t attempted it before.
Rumbling came from deep beneath them, rolling toward them.
Jason nodded to Sarah, and then called to the ice dragon. A burst of ice lightning exploded, shooting toward the ground. The ice lightning held, rolling through the ground and freezing it. The rumbling eased.
Would that be enough?
Jason had no idea. It might be, but he didn’t know if there needed to be more power. When he had used the ice lightning against the mist dragons, he had required several strikes. He called the ice dragon again, letting another burst of ice lightning streak to the ground and surge. Power smoothed over the ground, flowing outward. Jason called another burst, then another. With each one, he froze deeper into the ground and farther away from him.
“Will it hold?” Sarah asked.
Jason shook his head. “I don’t know. It seems like it is.”
Distantly, he felt a rumbling, though not nearly as close as before.
They raced along the ground, hurrying toward what he detected of the Dragon Soul dragons. Something pressed outward, a strange sensation, though he didn’t know what it was.
“Why are you hurrying?” Sarah asked.
“It’s Lorren. And the dragons need our help.”
They reached a clearing along the mountainside where he had first met the iron dragon. He could feel some energy that suggested to him this was probably the exact same place. There was no sign of the tunnel he’d taken to find the dragon, though everything around here struck him as familiar.
“I’ve been here before. The trail led me here when I came searching with the ice dragon for hatch mates. It brought me to the mines here and the iron dragon.”
At the time, Jason had been mostly concerned about the Dragon Souls creating these misfits, but now…
Lorren had been the one. Lorren was responsible for the iron dragon.
How many other dragon misfits had Lorren been responsible for?
Could he have known about the forest dragon? Jason didn’t think so, especially considering how Therin had found him, but he didn’t even know. What about the storm dragon, the one dragon that Jason struggled to understand and to connect to?
Or the others. The jungle dragon. The missing river dragon. Any of the other powers that he had found.
Had he made a mistake in not trying to work with Lorren?
“I can feel something,” he said softly.
“When you see it, let me—”
Sarah didn’t have the chance to finish. Power exploded, catching her in the back. She had formed a bubble of energy around her using her dragon pearl, and thankfully it absorbed most of the impact, though not all of it. She was still tossed forward. Jason darted toward her as the ground started rumbling again.
Earth dragons. How many had Lorren said there were?
He called upon the power of the ice dragon. This was going to require more than just ice lightning. He would need the actual ice dragon to help him. “I need your help,” he said. There came a burst of energy as a response from the ice dragon. In the meantime, Jason used ice lightning, sending it streaking toward the ground, using his own connection to the ice dragon to freeze everything. If nothing else, he wanted to prevent the earth dragons from harming him. How long would he be able to maintain it?
“Sarah?”
She dusted herself off. “I’m going to be fine.” She grabbed for another dragon pearl, and everything about her started to take on heat and energy as she glowed softly. Her face twisted in a snarl, anger surging through her. “He has to be close. Which means that—”
She didn’t have the chance to finish. Lorren attacked again, using the earth dragons. The power wasn’t nearly as potent as before, but the ground rumbled, nearly throwing him off his feet.
Jason stepped away from Sarah. “Lorren!” Rage filled his voice.
He could feel energy around him, the rumbling of power, and he searched through the trees as he looked for the mist dragons, though there was no sign of them.
If Lorren was here, the mist dragons would be as well. He knew that they would.
Jason braced for another attack. He could feel energy crackling in the air.
“Lorren!” he cried out again.
There was no response.
Jason needed to find some way to meet with him.
“Lorren!”
The ground rumbled. A fog drifted toward him, and a figure stood just outside of the trees. “You shouldn’t have come here,” Lorren said. His voice was muted by the mist, leaving Jason wondering how much control he had over it.
“You’re the reason for the iron dragon.”
Lorren took a step toward him, and he glowered at Jason. “You claimed it as your own.”
“I didn’t claim him. He claimed me. We claimed each other.” As much as anyone could claim a dragon. Jason wanted nothing more than to protect the iron dragon, and he had always done so. He had not attempted to use the dragon, not the way that others had, but would Lorren even understand?
“You don’t even know what they have done, do you?” Lorren asked.
“Who? Lorach? I can help you. We can help each other.”
“Now. You think to use what I perfected.”
Jason just stared at him. He recognized the anger at Lorach. It was an anger he felt himself, especially having seen what they were willing to do, the way they were willing to fight. What he needed was some way to harness that anger and find a way to work with him. Perhaps they could even work together.
“You don’t have to do this. We can bring down Lorach together, but we can save the dragons.”
“They are already lost.”
“They aren’t.” Jason took a step toward him, but the ground began to rumble.
He hesitated. He didn’t know what the earth dragons might do but had to be careful here. “We can save the dragons. I know we can. I know you want to stop Lorach. It’s the same thing I want, but we have to work—”
“Do you think I don’t know about the others?” The question was low, dangerous. “I know about all of them. And I will have your so-called misfits.”
“They aren’t mine. None of the dragons are. And we don’t need to do this.”
Lorren hesitated. “So ignorant. That is your downfall. Had you only paid attention to what you were doing, what you have revealed them, but no. Now you are the reason I had to come back.”
“You said that before. What does that even mean?”
Lorren stared at him and then backed into the mist.
It swallowed him, and he disappeared altogether.
Jason attempt to step forward, but the ground rumbled again.
Where was he going?
“Let them go,” Sarah whispered.
“We can’t let him go. We need to work together. We need to find some way to fight on the same side. He wants the same thing as us.”
“Does he?” Sarah asked. “If he wanted the same thing, he wouldn’t have disappeared for as long as he did. When my family thought he was dead, I remember the relief my mother had. She hated him. And hated what he stood for. He doesn’t want to protect the dragons. He doesn’t want what you want, Jason.”
He sighed. Maybe that was true.
A surge of dragon energy came to him, and there was a strange panic in it.
It was nearby.
He looked over to Sarah, his heart hammering. Distantly, he detected a fluttering of power. It was almost too faint, as if it were muted, but he recognized it. It came from farther down the slope.
“I can feel them,” he said.
“Let’s get this over with as quickly as we can,” Sarah said.
As they started down the slope, Jason could feel something pressing on him. He used ice and iron, finally adding a hint of the forest dragon as well, trying to shift things, but something resisted.
Lorren battled him.
The mist dragons had to be nearby. Jason had to overwhelm them. The forest dragon was more potent. She was a master of camouflage and illusion. The only problem was that she wasn’t here like the mist dragons were. More than that, there were more mist dragons than there were forest dragons. That put the forest dragon at a disadvantage.
He knew that he could overwhelm it. He had to believe that. That was the key to illusions. Belief. It was all about believing in reality. Jason shifted everything again. The pressure around him faded.
In the distance, energy built in unison. It was a blast of power, heading up the slope.
“Dragon Souls,” he and Sarah said at the same time.
They had Lorren behind them and Dragon Souls in front of them.
What was Lorren thinking?
The ground started to rumble again. The earth dragons were moving, and moving quickly. They were heading toward the Dragon Souls.
Jason groaned. “I really wish they would stop.”
“Can you overpower them?”
“I don’t have a way of reaching that deep into the ground,” he said.
“Maybe it’s not so much a matter of penetrating the ground but using your connections differently.”
He had tried, but each of the misfits had a different type of power, and though one his misfits might counter one of Lorren’s, there were limits to how much it could do. The ice dragon could freeze the ground long enough to give them a chance to escape, but the earth dragon had proven that it was powerful enough that it could overwhelm what they would do.
He was going to have to find a new strength in his dragons to withstand whatever Lorren intended to throw at them.
The ground rumbled again. When it stopped, he looked around. Jason probed with the ice dragon’s power. The ice dragon was nearby, flying overhead, close enough that his connection could bond them. It allowed them to move as quickly as possible, and hopefully he could use that to escape if it came down to it.
Power built downslope.
The Dragon Souls.
The rumbling headed toward them. Not only to the Dragon Souls. To their dragons.
Jason should have sent those dragons away when he had freed them, and the fact that he hadn’t was his mistake. The Dragon Souls must have reconnected to them.
“Come on,” Jason said, urging Sarah to follow. They sprinted.
He needed to prevent Lorren from harming the dragons.
When he found them, he could feel the dragons first. There were five of them; at least there should be. The rumbling persisted, but within it came something else.
A shrieking sound. It was horrible and painful, and it tore through Jason.
It was the sound of a dragon dying.
Strangely, he didn’t hear it. He felt it. It came from all around him, an awareness of power that surged, exploding, and yet started to fade.
He had no idea what had happened to the Dragon Souls, but if their dragons were dying, then he suspected they were as well. He couldn’t summon the necessary sadness for them, but he could feel it for the dragons.
“What’s happening?” Sarah cried.
“The earth dragons are attacking the Dragon Soul dragons.”
There was no sign of them. Only the sense of them.
They were buried alive.
Jason cried out to the iron dragon and focused on him. He summoned him, and it took only a moment for the iron dragon to arrive, streaking through the sky as he raced toward him. Jason embraced the power of the iron dragon and jumped, grabbing for Sarah, and landed atop the iron dragon. As they swooped toward the sense of the fallen dragons, Jason probed at the earth. He had to rescue them, only he didn’t know what it was going to take.
“Can you get to them?” Jason asked the iron dragon.
“They repelled me,” the iron dragon said.
“Can you do anything?”
“Not against their power,” the iron dragon said.
He called upon ice lightning, shooting it from the distant ice dragon, and it exploded into the ground. It sent chunks flying into the sky. Jason summoned ice lightning again, using that but mixing with the power of the iron dragon. The combination was explosive and violent, and it tore the ground apart.
Sarah started to work with him, using her connection to the dragons as she called upon energy and pulled it to the ground the same way that Jason did. With each explosion, nothing changed. “It’s not working,” she cried out.
Jason could feel that it wasn’t. Everything they were doing would still fail.
The dragons stopped fighting. The earth dragons held them in place.
Jason threw every bit of power and energy he had at them, but even as he did, he realized he couldn’t do anything. The power beneath him, that of the earth dragons—and Lorren—was too much. He tried again and again, using ice and iron, mixing them, but it wasn’t enough. He wasn’t enough.
The energy of those dragons faded until there was no life left in them.
The rumbling within the ground finally ceased.
They circled overhead. There was no sign that Lorren remained.
15
J ason jumped from the iron dragon’s back. They were in a small clearing in the forest, though it looked as if it had been recently cleared. The charred remains of trees fell around them, and a rocky ground greeted him. He paced, probing with the various energies of the dragons he connected to, calling upon them as he searched for some way to reach the earth dragon energy they’d been following, but he could feel nothing other than the faded dragons.
The iron dragon landed in the clearing, and Sarah climbed off, hurrying over to him.
He stared at the ground. “They’re gone,” he whispered.
“There wasn’t anything you would be able to do,” Sarah said.
He had tried. He had failed. The dragons died because he hadn’t been able to counter Lorren and his power. He hadn’t been enough for them.
“He wasn’t even trying to stop the Dragon Souls.” Jason could feel how the ground had changed because of the earth dragons. There was something odd about it. Maybe it was only the power here. He looked over at the iron dragon. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save them.”
The iron dragon pressed his face forward. His entire body glowed with his agitation. “You did what you could.”
Jason squeezed his eyes closed, feeling for the trembling that had been here. He had come back to this place thinking he might find a way to better understand the iron dragon and the connection that existed between them so that he could figure out whether there was anything more he might learn about the misfits, and yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow he had led Lorren here. Which meant that he was responsible.
“It’s not your fault,” Sarah said.
He looked up at her. “I don’t know if he would have even come here were it not for us.”
“You don’t know that,” she said.
“I don’t, but…”
Jason couldn’t shake the feeling that these dragons—and perhaps even the Dragon Souls—had died because of him. Which meant that he had to be careful that Lorren wouldn’t keep following him.
“We can still see if there’s anything we can learn,” she said.
Jason’s gaze drifted toward the mountainside. Somewhere up there were the caves where he had found the iron dragon. Given how long it had been since they’d come here, this should be a homecoming, regardless of how bittersweet it might be for the iron dragon. Now there was nothing but pain and sadness, sorrow about what they had encountered. Now it was only devastation.
Jason stopped near one of the trees on the outskirts of the clearing. It hadn’t changed, despite how the ground had changed, something deep underground shifting. There was only the sign of the scorched ground where the dragons had tried to free themselves.
