Dragon Emperor 18, page 9
Soon, everyone had added the bones, shredded fur, or whatever remained of a few corrupted animals into the water, and we stared down at the depressing memorial for a few moments before Alyona wiped a stray tear from her cheek.
“Why would anyone want this for these creatures?” she asked. “They didn’t deserve such an end.”
“Only someone who has no heart,” I said as I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and leaned in close. “I’m going to take them on another round to check for more. Can you freeze this thing over? I’ll distract the snow leopards while you do. I didn’t see any other sirens in there, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.”
“Yeah,” she whispered. “We don’t want any sirens to get to anyone else, and these poor creatures can rest in peace.”
“Exactly.” I nodded and planted a kiss on top of her head before I turned back to the others. “Let’s all check one more time. We can’t be too careful.”
I ushered everyone away from the water’s edge and back into the trees so Alyona could get to work. A few minutes later, we all traipsed back over to the lake, and Tawa was suspiciously surprised to see the lake had frozen solid.
“What happened?” he demanded. “Water doesn’t freeze that quickly.”
“Guess any other corrupted creatures are stuck in there now,” I said with a shrug as I tried to evade his question. “Come on--”
“No, lakes don’t just freeze over in a matter of minutes,” he insisted. “What do you know about sirens?”
“It doesn’t really matter what we know about regular ones,” I pointed out. “That one was corrupted by miasma, and I killed it, but there could have been others.”
“You think they would freeze themselves?” Tawa narrowed his eyes on me. “How would that lure in more of their prey?”
“Or the ice refroze when I killed the siren,” I said. “It’s cold as balls out here. Maybe the siren melted some of the ice to lure people in, and now, it can’t do it anymore since she’s dead and not eating Nike. Or whatever sirens do with their victims.”
“Victims.” Nike shuddered and pulled his fur coat tighter around his chest. “I don’t really care what else is under there or why it froze. There’s no way they could get out from under all that ice, and I can’t hear any singing anymore. That’s good enough for me.”
“I agree,” I said with a nod. “We need to keep moving and find the rift, or the siren isn’t going to be the only thing we have to worry about.”
Tawa pressed his mouth into a thin line but didn’t argue any further. I knew I’d made a good point about pushing to find the rift, and he wanted to get rid of it just as much as I did. He was still suspicious about the sudden freezing of the lake, but it didn’t matter as much as the rift. I also didn’t care if they knew I’d used magic, but I didn’t want anything to happen to Alyona if they found out she had it, too.
For some reason, Tawa didn’t question the magic he’d seen me use, and until I knew why, I needed to keep Alyona out of the spotlight.
We continued to walk past the singing lake, and we were careful to avoid the other two smaller lakes. The mage had said “singing lakes,” which meant each of them could hold a siren for all we knew, but I was glad to see Alyona stay toward the back of the group, so she could freeze over the other two lakes once the snow leopards were past the water.
We had to do everything we could to keep the corrupted creatures away from unsuspecting victims in Narsglow, and it was becoming apparent that magic was the only way to keep them safe, even if they didn’t know it yet.
As we pushed through the evergreens, the too-familiar stench of death and decay began to fill my nose, and I knew we were getting closer. The smell of miasma was unforgettable, and I strode forward to catch up with Tawa at the front of the pack.
“You smell the miasma, right?” I asked him.
“How could I not?” Tawa wrinkled his nose in disgust.
“That’s the stuff that comes out of the rifts,” I explained. “It poisons everything it can, and then they die if we can’t heal them. We’ve got to be getting close, but we need to be careful. Don’t let the miasma touch you.”
“What does it look like?” Nokomis asked.
“Purple death,” Rebecca muttered. “Like fingers made of smoke that twist your insides until you’re willing to kill anything and everything you love.”
I assumed the bear Demi-Human was picturing the streets of her old city when they’d been littered with the dead bodies of miasma poisoning victims. It had been a disturbing sight, and I’d wanted nothing more than to burn the whole place to the ground to get rid of it all.
“Then we should avoid the purple death,” Nokomis said with a grimace.
We crept through the trees until I saw a clearing ahead of us, and I knew we’d found the rift. The snow on the ground glowed a hazy violet color, and the evergreens had already begun to rot and decay from the miasma’s touch.
A family of foxes were gathered under one of the trees, and they hissed and clawed at each other with the rage brought on by the poisoning. It was only a matter of time before they tore each other to shreds, and I pointed them out to the rest of my people.
“See those foxes?” I whispered. “I can heal them, but we’ll have to trap them first. If we don’t, they’ll go after us next, and they won’t stop until we’re dead or they are.”
“I’ve trapped plenty of animals,” Nokomis murmured. “I can set something up. Just give me a few minutes.”
“We may not have that long,” I said softly. “Hurry as much as you can.”
The snow leopard Demi-Human nodded, and her furry white ears twitched with anxiety before she darted into the snowy forest next to the clearing. As she prepared a trap, I looked for the rift, but it didn’t take long to find it.
The tear was already nearly ten feet long and a foot wide. It was the biggest one we’d seen outside of the Breach, and tendrils of black and purple smoke eked out into the air around it. The ground was clearly tainted by the miasma, and I began to notice a number of other animals and plants that had also suffered from the poisoning.
The snow around the rift had melted and left behind only the glowing, toxic ground poisoned by miasma, and the branches of the trees around the clearing looked rotted and flimsy. A pair of black birds watched the clearing with angry, violet eyes, and a large cat crouched on a low-hanging branch with its claws extended as its tail swayed in the air below it.
It seemed we had more than a couple foxes to catch.
After a minute, Nokomis waved from across the clearing, and I glanced at Tawa, who nodded.
“We run in, they run toward her,” he explained.
“Uh, okay, we’ll see,” I murmured.
With the average animal, that plan might work, but I wasn’t so convinced it would work with the poisoned creatures we faced now.
I followed Tawa’s lead, and we all sprinted into the clearing with our swords held high. The foxes turned and bolted directly into Nokomis’ trap, which was a box made from branches and rope that snapped shut as soon as the foxes stepped inside. Nokomis wrapped another piece of rope around the door of the cage and pulled it tight, but the cat leaped from its post and paced back and forth on the other side of the rift, while the birds cawed and screeched their annoyance.
“I’ve got the foxes!” Nokomis called out. “We’ll have to find another way for the others!”
“Yeah, I figured as much,” I grunted as I met the cat’s stare. “Come here, kitty, kitty.”
The wildcat let out a fierce cry before it leapt across the rift and stretched its claws toward me. I didn’t have much time to think, but I dodged its sharp claws with a side-step before I activated my web magic. I shot out a thick layer of the sticky webbing at the cat’s paws, and the binding wrapped around its claws and sent it tumbling into the snow.
Before it could fight me anymore, I ran over and sent a wave of healing magic over its body. The glittering power settled on its fur like a blanket, and a few seconds later, the wildcat blinked a few times and hissed in confusion.
I carefully sliced through the webbing with my sword, and the cat sprinted off into the forest.
“One down,” I said as I turned to see Ravi had taken her phoenix form.
She flew up into the tree with the birds, and they screeched with terror before they fluttered down to the ground, so I took advantage of Ravi’s distraction and blew another layer of healing magic onto the black birds.
Within seconds, their screeches had returned to normal chirps, and the birds hopped around the snowy ground for a moment before they took off into the sky.
Then I focused on the foxes.
They were clearly pissed at being trapped, but their rage was focused on Nokomis, who stood over the trap with her hand on the lid to keep them contained.
I trotted over and healed the foxes with more of my magic, and a few seconds later, the furry red creatures were back to their normal playful selves. I motioned for Nokomis to release them from the trap, and she sent them into the forest.
“Okay, what about the trees and the plants?” Tawa asked with a smirk. “Can you heal all those, too?”
“Sure can,” I shot back and grinned, but internally I was still puzzled as to why the male snow leopard was so nonchalant when discussing my supposedly “forbidden” magic.
A problem for another time.
For right now, I focused on combining my healing power with my nature magic, a skill I’d only recently figured out how to do. Moments later, I could feel the crunch of the snow beneath my boots, the twisting web of roots under the forest floor, and the pain and sorrow of the plants that suffered from the miasma’s poisoning.
Then I reached out with my healing magic and sent a surge of my power through the landscape around me. I felt the power race through the roots of every plant until it burst into their leaves and branches with a renewed sense of life. The miasma trickled away like the last droplets of rain, and then I turned my attention to the rift.
“What do we do with that?” Tawa pointed to the rift, which seemed to throb with frustration as I healed everything of its poison.
“We have to seal it,” I said. “Just stay over there.”
I pointed to the trees outside the clearing, and Skye ushered everyone out of the area while Alyona got to work. There was no way we could fully hide what my wife was about to do, but sealing the rift took precedence over everything else, even discretion.
“This one is rather large, my lord,” she murmured. “I may need some extra power.”
“Can you do that siphoning thing with me?” I asked.
“I think so,” she agreed. “Just stand still.”
Alyona put her hand on my shoulder and began to chant the words that would seal the rift. The ground beneath our feet started to rumble and shake, and soon, large rings appeared in the air above the rift.
A glowing ring the color of the moon slammed into the ground around the rift, and it was quickly followed by a flat black ring. Then the final golden ring crashed into the snow, and a faint white sheen hovered over the rift before the purple glow faded and disappeared.
When we stepped back, it looked as though the rift had never existed, but I worried we hadn’t healed everything it had touched. The miasma had a tendency to spread far and wide, and there was no way of knowing how far it went, especially since we already knew it had at least reached the siren’s lake.
“How did you do that?” Tawa asked as he approached us, but then he shook his head. “Never mind, don’t tell me. What do we do now?”
On one hand, I was glad the snow leopard prince was more concerned with moving forward than what just happened, but his avoidance of the magical topic at hand was becoming more and more obvious. I glanced over at Nokomis to gauge her reaction, but the princess pretended to intently observe a freshly healed flower at her feet, so I just narrowed my eyes as I turned back to Tawa.
“We should probably get back and tell your parents what we found,” I said. “But we need to watch out for more poisoned animals. They could be anywhere in the forest at this point.”
“What if we can’t find all of them?” Isabella asked with a tear in her eye.
“Then we still have to try our best,” I replied. “The more lives we can save, the better for everyone.”
“Is the miasma contagious?” Tawa wondered.
“Uh…” I trailed off as I looked at Alyona. “I’m really not sure.”
“I wouldn’t say contagious so much as it can move easily,” she explained. “The miasma is like a smoke that resides within the victim’s body, so if the creature comes into contact with another creature, some of the miasma can travel over to the next body and poison it, too.”
“Then we definitely need to heal what we can,” I said. “Let’s go.”
As we turned in the direction of the edge of the forest, we spread out to try and find more of the corrupted and poisoned creatures. I spent most of the walk back to the sleds running back and forth along our line, and I healed every poisoned animal and plant we came across. From badgers to owls to a few things I’d never seen before, I healed them all, so I was nearly exhausted by the time we hit the end of the tree line.
“Are you sure you can fly back?” Nokomis asked with a grimace. “You look as though you’ve used every last ounce of your energy.”
“I heal quickly,” I replied and smiled. “I just need a second to replenish.”
“I’ve never known a dragon to be so kind,” she murmured. “Especially to other creatures. It doesn’t benefit you to heal them.”
“But it does,” I said. “I don’t want anything to happen to the people here in Odrein. I know this isn’t my country, but it shouldn’t matter. Everyone is important, and no one deserves the death that miasma brings.”
“You are a more merciful man than you let on,” Nokomis chuckled. “I’m impressed with your efforts.”
“Lord Evan is much more than your typical dragon,” Ravi pointed out with a grin. “You can’t help but love him.”
“Well, I think it’s a waste of time,” Tawa retorted. “I mean, if we go fight that Demon King guy, we can close all the rifts and the Breach. Then we don’t have to worry about all this miasma nonsense.”
“That’s not the point, Tawa,” his sister sighed. “Lord Evan is showing great kindness to our people by making sure the miasma poisoning doesn’t spread. It’s not like you’re going into battle with the Demon King by dinner time.”
“We should,” Tawa grunted. “It would be better than waiting for a few blood ceremonies to finish him off.”
“I thought the same thing,” I said. “I was wrong. We have to do this the right way, and that means taking care of everything we can along the way.”
“I’ve always preferred the method of getting rid of anything that stands in my way,” he shot back.
“Sometimes, I like that way, too,” I laughed. “But it’s not always the best method.”
Tawa grumbled to himself under his breath as he began to arrange the reins on his arctic hare, and Nokomis shook her head and took my hand in hers.
“I know you mean well,” she said. “My brother is just stubborn. When we were little, I didn’t understand how twins could be so different, but I’ve come to realize our roles.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, I was chosen for the Sword of Mercy,” she explained. “I tend to think about how to save the most lives. My brother, on the other hand, was chosen for the Sword of Strength. I’m sure you can guess what that means.”
“He’s super strong?” I smirked.
“Yes,” Nokomis said and looked down at our hands. “But it also means he has the strength to do things others can’t. When we face a difficult enemy, my first thought is how to save the people, while his is how to kill the beast.”
“It seems like both of those are important parts of any mission,” I replied.
“They are,” she agreed. “Without me, he would likely become a killing machine, but without him… well, let’s just say we can’t solve our problems the same way.”
“Do you ever go on missions with him?” I wondered.
“Yeah, we’ve done a few together.” Nokomis glanced over at her brother and lowered her voice. “He doesn’t always like when I go, but it’s important to have both of us there. Our last one together was up north in Kambe, where a beast had been attacking hunters. I wanted to capture the beast, but Tawa was determined to kill it before it killed anyone else. He was right, of course, but I still set a trap.”
“Did you catch it?” I asked.
“I did,” she said with a nod. “And then it nearly killed me when it broke free, but Tawa was there to finish the job. It turned out to be a good thing we had it trapped, though, since it still had a few of the villagers in its belly.”
“Alive?” I felt my eyes widen with both surprise and horror.
“Yes,” Nokomis confirmed and shivered. “It was unlike anything I’d ever seen. When Tawa chopped off the beast’s head, the villagers screamed from inside it, and we set them free. If he’d killed it in the forest or somewhere, we may not have been able to cut its head off and free them.”
“So, your trap helped, even though he ended up killing the creature,” I mused. “You two seem to have it worked out pretty well.”
“I like to think so,” she said and smiled up at me. “He hasn’t needed me for many missions lately. I get the feeling my parents are more worried about who is going to produce the right children for the Noble Sword bloodline.”
“I thought Tawa had twins already,” I replied with my brow furrowed in confusion.
“He does.” Nokomis tossed the reins over her hare and turned back toward me. “But we have no way of knowing if they’ll succeed as the Nobles of the Sword until they reach the age to take over our duties. If they don’t do well, my children would be next in line.”
