Night Dragon An Epic Fantasy Adventure - D.K. Holmberg Page 0,74

had been more than he had cared for.

Now that he had been to the boneyard, Jason wondered if death really was an endpoint. If the dragons cycled the way it seemed, then perhaps losing one dragon wasn’t really a loss.

Jason focused on the power within him and pushed outward, focusing on the smoke dragons, the mist dragons, even the earth dragons. They were there, powerfully connected to him.

“We are the bridge between them,” he said.

Janeya looked troubled, but didn’t say anything about that bridge. “What are we waiting for?”

“I’m waiting for the rest of the dragons to arrive. Including the night dragon.”

Gradually, he saw the night dragon.

He was a swirl of darkness, a massive cloud that constricted as he descended.

As the darkness abated, Jason looked over to the night dragon. “All of this was you?”

“Something happened,” the night dragon said. Jason sense to struggle within the night dragon, and he realized where it came from. The night dragon tried to explain what happened but could not. “I did what I could. There is nothing more that could be done.”

“You placed this illusion.”

“There is something more. I had to protect the others.”

“What others?”

“Others.”

An image formed in Jason’s mind, and he saw the dragons that had been in Dragon Haven flicker through his mind; he thought that perhaps they were still here, but then the image faded. The dragons were gone.

“It’s not your fault,” Jason said.

“I did what I could,” the night dragon said.

Jason should have been here. Had he been, he could have offered protection, and Lorach wouldn’t have been able to claim the dragons or the people of Dragon Haven.

“We will take the fight to them.”

The night dragon roared and darkness swirled around him, and suddenly Jason felt it fill him. It was enormous. The power of the night dragon raged within him, something more than he had ever experienced before.

It called from all of the other dragons he had connected to.

Only, there were some he had not yet added.

Jason could feel them.

There were other misfits. Jason had suspected they were out there but had never known with any certainty.

Now he could feel them.

It seemed as if the night dragon summoned them.

He pushed that aspect into the connection with the night dragon. Water and sun and grass and wind and a few of the others he could feel coming toward him. They were drifting slowly, almost as if they fought the desire to join them, but at the same time, they seemed to know the need to.

Suddenly the night dragon swelled with even more power and darkness became absolute around him. It was a pocket of darkness, but that was it.

The night dragon roared.

The other dragons roared in response.

It was more than just reaching them, though. Jason understood that, but he suspected the night dragon did as well. Jason had been bringing the dragons together. But once they were together, he had a vision of what they could be. How they could fly freely.

To do that, he would have to fight Lorach.

Strangely, he wasn’t afraid of something happening to the dragons the way that he had before. Knowing the dragons would cycle, they could be reborn, leaving him feeling something more for them.

Hope.

Streamers of shadows swirled toward him, and he had a feeling of the night dragon that fluttered in the back of his mind.

The night dragon had wanted him to know this.

The night dragon came toward him. Darkness swirled around, the energy of the night filling Jason, giving him a strange and powerful sensation, something he had never detected before. The dragon roared. His roar was far deeper than Jason would’ve expected for a dragon as small as he was. It filled the night around him.

Only, it wasn’t night around him.

It had been daylight before they had started all of this, and yet, it seemed as if the night dragon had changed everything.

The other dragons waited for Jason.

They watched Jason, and at first, he didn’t know why. He looked over to the night dragon, waiting for some understanding, but none came to him.

He could feel these dragons, though.

All of them.

They were misfits. Like him.

As Jason glanced over to Janeya, he wondered if she were a misfit like him.

She certainly had a connection to the misfits in the same way that he did.

The dragons waited on him.

“We will stop Lorach. And the dragons will fly freely once again.”

18

Jason rode atop the ice dragon, feeling the familiar cold radiating beneath him, the energy that wafted off him, and he stared down