Night Dragon An Epic Fantasy Adventure - D.K. Holmberg Page 0,24
every so often, a hint of wind swirled up, kicking around and raising the snow, making it difficult for him to see anything. It was as if the snow and ice all swirled around in a powerful pattern, and there was something about it that reminded him very much of his home.
It had been a long time since he had been back to the village. They had placed ballista at the top of the mountain, prepared for the possibility of a dragon attack, but the dragons wouldn’t have traveled that far.
At least, not most dragons.
Of course, the mountain village was on the very southern edge of where Lorach might be able to reach. His village had been isolated by the way they had been situated.
He sat up.
“What is it?” the ice dragon asked.
“What if my village never hunted dragons?”
That had been the traditional belief, and it was what Jason had believed growing up, but as he thought about it, and as he thought about the purpose of the ballista, he wondered if that were it at all.
“I thought your village had those weapons in place so they could shoot dragons out of the sky.”
“That’s what I had always been taught,” Jason said.
If only there were some record of the people of his village. He could remember the stories that he’d been told as a child, stories that all depicted the danger of the dragons, stories that affected the fear of his people. Having experienced dragons as he had, Jason understood that fear and understood there wasn’t anything his people would be able to do against the might of dragons. Their ballista would have been useless against a dragon.
As Jason stared into the distance, he wondered if perhaps there might be a different reason for the ballista and the protections that the village had around it. What if there was a possibility the village had been designed to prevent the dragons from going any farther rather than hunting them?
It seemed unlikely, especially given what he had seen, but there were so many things when it came to the dragons that were unlikely that Jason longer knew if this was just one of them or whether it was simply his imagination.
He continued searching for anything that might suggest the power of the other misfit dragons. A distant rumbling came, and for a moment, Jason wondered if that rumbling represented one of the earth dragons, but as he listened to it more closely, focusing on that energy, he realized it was the storm dragon. Thunder rumbled, but nothing more.
“Has he been following us?”
The ice dragon shook and shards of ice streaked away from him. “He has been there,” the ice dragon said.
“Why?”
“He questions,” the ice dragon said.
“And what does he question?”
“His place,” the ice dragon said.
The words struck home. It was the same thing Jason had started to question.
Jason held onto his sense of the storm dragon, feeling that energy between them and wondering if there might be something that he could offer, some explanation that might be able to help the storm dragon.
When it came to working with the dragons, trying to help them, he had continued to believe there was something that he might be able to do, but perhaps he should stop thinking in that way. The dragons needed to find their own way, needed to find something of themselves in order to be truly free.
The sense that he had from the iron dragon was that the dragons wanted to be free, that they wanted to be separated from the people who had worked with them, and they no longer wanted to fear the dangers of men—and in particular, Dragon Souls—controlling them.
Jason wasn’t going to be able to find that for them. He was only going to be able to work on their behalf, not work for them.
They turned, heading farther north.
A rumbling came again and he turned, thinking that it was nothing more than the storm dragon again, but there was some aspect to it that was different than what he had detected from the storm dragon.
Earth dragon.
Jason smiled to himself and tapped on the ice dragon’s side.
They veered toward the distant rumbling.
That power built within Jason, calling to him.
Surprisingly, the earth dragon seemed to be deep below them.
Perhaps not surprisingly. Jason understood the dragon had the ability to slither beneath the ground, hiding from anyone searching for him.