at the ground. He borrowed from the power of the iron dragon, mixing his eyesight with that of the ice dragon, mingling them together for their search in the lands surrounding Dragon Haven.
Dragons spread on either side of him, a small fleet of them. Seeing them spread out in this way, it was not nearly the numbers he knew he needed to rival Lorach, but they were all he had. His misfits.
Somehow, it felt like there were so many—and not enough.
The misfits helped him search, looking for what happened to Dragon Haven.
In the distance, Jason thought that he could feel something, though it was vague. He had no idea what it was, but it was all they had. They followed the strange sensation, following Jason’s direction.
They followed and allowed him to lead.
Perhaps that was what he needed to do.
Janeya sat on the ice dragon front of him.
It was strange that she needed his help to fly, but the other dragons she had connected to didn’t give her the gift of flight. The earth dragons tunneled under the ground and the mist dragons didn’t have the ability to carry her. They were almost too insubstantial, too wispy and light to carry anyone. The smoke dragons were something else altogether, and Jason had a growing understanding as to why Janeya hadn’t crossed the mountains herself.
Somehow, Lorren had managed to do so, though he had used a different technique. By leaving her behind, he had trapped her. Had he known that?
Jason suspected he had. Knowing Lorren as he did, which wasn’t all that well, he suspected Lorren hadn’t done anything without knowing all of the consequences.
Jason looked down, searching for any sign of the others.
“How are you looking?” she asked.
“By connecting to the dragons, I can look out through their eyesight. It’s a strange thing to be able to do, but with the ice dragon and the iron dragon, I’m able to mingle the two ways they’re able to see, though…”
He hadn’t even tried adding the other dragons to it. Jason thought perhaps he should. The more that he focused on the energy down there, the more he thought that he could use the other dragons to add something more.
The mist dragons flew along with them as well. Jason reached through Janeya and borrowed their power. They saw things in a crystalline fashion, almost as if they saw things within the mist. Of course they did. Still, in doing so, there was a heat to the way that they looked at the world.
He mixed what they saw with that of the other dragons.
It mingled, creating something greater than it had been.
Could he borrow from the smoke dragons?
As he added the vision of the smoke dragons, Jason couldn’t make anything else out. There was power, but in looking outward, he didn’t see anything more than what he’d already seen. He removed the smoke dragons, trying not to use their power.
The earth dragons would have exquisite eyesight in the dark, or perhaps some other way of navigating. Jason didn’t really know. He would have to wait till they came up.
He turned his attention back to Janeya. “Do you see anything?”
She turned and looked out into the distance. “What are you doing to see through the dragons?”
“I am borrowing from the dragons. I don’t really know how to describe it any other differently than that.”
“How do you borrow from them?”
Jason focused, thinking about what he did, the specific way he connected to the dragons for this purpose. The dragons themselves seemed to give him an ability to look into the distance. He thought about how he had connected to the dragon. Strangely, he was able to detect something about that power.
“I borrow from them the same way I borrow their power,” he said.
“If that’s the case, then you should be able to borrow every aspect of what they can do.”
He’d already seen that he could reach for the power of the dragons in a different way, that he could connect to them more directly so that he could call upon their power. Even if he could reach just a little bit of what the ice dragon or the iron dragon or the forest dragon possessed, it would grant him a more direct connection than needing to reach through the dragons. It would remove the possibility that he would overwhelm them as he called on their magic.
By focusing on their energy, he realized what he detected was tied not only to them, but it was tied to