Origin (Scales N' Spells #1) - A.J. Sherwood Page 0,13
every word. As an adult, he’d shuffled them off as stories of another time, something that he hadn’t seen. They could be true, they could be exaggerations from a child who hadn’t understood what she saw. Either way, it didn’t impact his life, so why think about it? But if Alric was correct, well, it still wouldn’t change much, but wouldn’t it be cool? To know that his family once were that close to dragons.
A smile lit his face, and he half-laughed. “Wow. You know what? I think I do. If nothing else, I need to tell Halmeoni about this. She’ll flip.”
“It will be my pleasure to show you.” Alric hesitated a moment, eyeing him sideways before asking carefully, “Knowing that your family is magical, have you never wondered if you or your sister have magic yourselves?”
Snorting, Cameron shook his head no. “Wouldn’t I have had a moment where my magic went crazy, like it always does in the stories? Nothing like that ever happened to me.”
“No, magic doesn’t work like that. First of all, you must have power to draw from. A mage doesn’t carry much magical power in and of themselves. It was part of the reason why they were always willing to marry dragons. The bond between dragon and mage allowed them to have the resource of a dragon’s power. It made their magical core very strong.”
Cameron blinked at him, taking this in. “So…a bond between dragon and mage was something like hooking a mage up to a battery for life?”
Alric snorted, his smile becoming a little crooked. “Something like that, yes. And mages are able to work great magic, but they have to use the right components to do so. They have to direct their magic or link up with other mages to do the greater magics.” Alric’s enigmatic smile was back in full force. “To carry on your metaphor, it’s rather like the ability to design an engine. If you know nothing about engines, and never try to work on them, how do you know if you have the talent or not? But if you do learn properly about them, and use the correct power and resources, the engine will run.”
“Huh. No one ever mentioned any of that to me. Halmeoni seemed to think that magic just happened. But she also said her mother was paranoid about working magic, that she barely let anyone see her do it. She certainly wasn’t going to teach anyone else how. I think a lot of information got lost because of her attitude.”
“It only takes three generations for information to be lost.” Alric sighed, and with that sigh sounded a mountain’s worth of regret. “After so many mage clans were lost in the Dragon War, we believe the mages who survived went into hiding, possibly fearful of being hunted down. Even generations later, I cannot say your great-grandmother’s attitude was unreasonable.”
And that put it into perspective, didn’t it? Cameron couldn’t remember what set the Dragon War off to begin with. He wasn’t sure if his history class in high school ever covered the why. Just the destruction it’d brought about to the world, and how they’d lost both dragons and mages because of it. All he remembered was that when dragons and mages duked it out, things like the Sahara happened. Magic could be pretty destructive.
The rest of the conversation abruptly derailed as they ascended into the mountains. The Cooper climbed steadily, winding around the mountain road, and in between the evergreens, snatches of the castle revealed itself. Cameron almost put his nose to the glass trying to get a better look.
It stood like a fairytale, all white and pristine as it soared into the sky, the round towers at the top ending in conical tin roofs. It looked like something out of a child’s storybook, and Cameron had to blink several times to convince himself his eyes weren’t playing tricks. “Holy shit, Alric! That’s a stunning castle. And you live in it?”
“I do indeed, along with the rest of my family. It’s a very large building so it can accommodate all of us with ease.” His expression turned sad for a moment. “More than we currently have, in fact.”
Cameron sensed some tragic history behind that statement. He didn’t want to pry and reopen old wounds. So, he changed the topic a little to something else. “How long has the castle been standing? You said it was to replace the other one that burned down in 1300-something.”