Night Dragon An Epic Fantasy Adventure - D.K. Holmberg Page 0,38
have brought you here,” the dragon queen said.
“He would and he did. Why?”
She continued to use the mist, trying to turn it into an illusion.
It now took little thought on Jason’s behalf to shatter her illusion. He recognized what she did and the way she turned it. As he looked around, he realized something.
The dragons were in this strange and desolate land. Isolated.
When he had seen Lorren, there hadn’t been the impression that he’d been cut off from the other dragons, only that he had chosen to avoid Lorach. He wondered if all of the dragons would have been capable of traveling to Lorach.
As he focused on the power he detected from not only the earth dragon but the smoke and mist dragons, he couldn’t help but wonder whether or not there was something to that connection, and to the mountains themselves, that created a barrier.
Not just to the smoke dragons.
To the dragon queen.
“Where is your home?” Of all the places he’d seen, this one was different. More isolated. Desolate.
“Why? So you can go there and destroy it as well?”
“So that we can understand each other.”
She attempted to pull power again, but now that he was aware of what she did, Jason knew how to counter it fairly easily. In fact, he found it far more effective to ignore the nature of the energy she pulled upon and the way that she summoned that power through the ground and from the other dragons.
It was energy he could use, energy he could counter.
“What are you—”
He didn’t get the opportunity to finish. The earth dragon started to rumble again, and he listened. This time, there was something within the rumbling that he understood. He could feel the energy within that rumbling, but there was more than that.
Words.
He turned to the earth dragon, focusing on it, feeling the connection between them, and trying to gain an understanding of what the earth dragon was trying to say.
The rumbling began to make sense. There was a communication. A conversation.
He heard the earth dragon and the dragon queen speaking.
He hadn’t even been aware she was saying anything.
Could she have been talking this whole time? If she had, then she was doing so by the earth, communicating through something different. As he listened, Jason began to recognize the argument between them.
“He can help,” the earth dragon said.
It seemed to Jason that there was a sense of irritation within the dragon, a sense of exacerbation, as if they’d had this argument before.
“He’s the one responsible for what happened to Father.”
“Father?”
Jason couldn’t help himself and realized he revealed his awareness of their conversation. He knew he shouldn’t have said anything, but couldn’t help it.
She turned to him, crossing her arms over her chest. “You shouldn’t be able to listen.”
“Because I’m not connected to an earth dragon?”
“Yes.”
He shrugged. “I can’t tell you anything about that, only that it seems like the dragon wants me to listen.”
As he said it, he realized it was the truth. The connection that he had, the understanding that he now possessed, seemed to come as much from the dragon as from anything else. By holding onto that connection and understanding, he recognized just what the dragon did, the way that he connected to Jason.
He remembered the time when he had first felt this dragon. Jason didn’t even know if it was the very same dragon or if this was a different one. The only thing that he did know was that he had felt something coming from the dragon that reminded him of this. Perhaps he had connected in some way to the earth dragon.
He nodded to the earth dragon. “You wanted me to come because you were worried about her.”
The earth dragon rumbled.
“Why are you worried about her? She seems quite capable.”
Unless the Dragon Souls had made it this far.
He didn’t think so, though. The mountains served as a natural defense, preventing almost anyone from heading beyond them. He had no idea whether or not dragons would even want to come this way or if the Dragon Souls would be willing to accept that hesitation on the dragons’ part.
Only, they had been after dragon misfits. There had been what Jessica had done, how she had created a misfit. And even if it hadn’t survived, they had wanted more.
As he looked around, noticing the landscape, the bleakness out here, he had to wonder: Was this why Therin had wanted to find different dragons?
He wouldn’t have been able to reach here by traveling with one of