“Open,” Sashaak said. “Then I go first.”
“If you say so,” Laric said, stepping over to the portal. Rowan took his arm and tried to pull on it, but he glanced over to her and said, “If the dragon wants to go—”
“What do you think the dragon is going to do to Talia?” Joselle asked, glancing to Iveris.
Laric shrugged. “I don’t know. Whatever happens to Talia might just be something she deserves.”
With the potential inside of him, he triggered the glyphs using the same technique he had used before. There was a stirring and a swirling, and the glyphs slowly started to spiral, taking on a shape.
The door opened. As soon as it did, a blast of power streaked toward them.
Laric braced, but he need not have bothered. Sashaak was already there, filling the space and protecting them from whatever it was that Talia attempted to do. He could feel that burst of energy from her and the way it flooded out, and then Sashaak slipped forward. It was strange to watch, as it seemed as if Sashaak somehow compressed downward, shrinking in some almost impossible fashion. Laric would not have believed it had he not seen it. More and more of Sashaak squeezed inward. Then the dragon was gone.
Laric stood in front of the open portal for just a moment. Then he stepped forward. There was a vague sense of movement, and then it stopped.
Once inside the glyph chamber, he saw that Sashaak had chased Talia back to the far side of the room. The glyphs in the room were once again glowing and active, seemingly pushing out a bit of pressure and power that Laric was aware of. There was a little energy here that Laric thought Sashaak had activated, though he hadn’t even realized it had happened. He could feel it, though he had no idea why he could, nor did he have any idea what he was picking up on.
“Was it always like this?” Rowan asked as she and the others stepped inside.
Laric shook his head. “Not that I remember,” he said. “This is… different.”
“The dragon, or is it you?”
“I don’t know. I would think I should have felt something if it came from the dragon.”
“Can you control it?” she asked.
That was the real question, wasn’t it? Given everything that they were dealing with, and everything he knew about this power, what Laric had to understand, and what he was going to have to decide, was whether or not he had any way to control any of it.
“The control is going to be a challenge,” he said.
“That’s what I figured,” she said. “You need knowledge.”
“I do.”
“And the dragon?”
“I don’t know if the dragon is going to offer me what I need. Maybe?” Laric said, shrugging. “I can tell something from the dragon.”
Now that he was inside this chamber, it did seem as if he had a measure of understanding that had not been there before. That surprised him.
Maybe Sashaak was giving him something, but the way Sashaak was doing so and the energy that Sashaak was granting him were controlled in some way. The challenge that he had was trying to make sense of just what it was, and just how Sashaak was attempting to control that. So far, Laric simply did not know. He began to question if there was going to be any way to understand what the dragon was doing, and whether he would be able to understand how to control such a thing.
Talia turned, and she faced them.
Within this chamber, Talia seemed small—much smaller than she had before. Her black hair was tousled, but she had a defiant glare in her dark eyes and seemed as if she was ready to fight, though Laric didn’t know if there was going to be any way that she would even be able to.
“Well,” she said, standing tall and looking from Sashaak to the rest of them. “You’ve decided to pay me a visit. Let me guess. This isn’t you coming in here to release me.”
Laric shook his head. He moved to stand alongside Sashaak, which gave him a strange sensation. Heat came from the dragon, but there was something else to it as well. The potential was there.
Inside the room, Sashaak didn’t look any smaller than he had before. Laric still didn’t know how Sashaak had managed to shrink down as much as he had in order to come into the glyph chamber. That shouldn’t have been possible, but the power had constricted. That was how Laric would describe it. And there was a part of Sashaak that had squeezed, as if the dragon were able to compress himself down to the point where he was nothing.
“We want to know what you plan,” Laric said to Talia.
“Oh?”
“Not just you. The mages. All of you.”
She smirked. “And you think I’m just going to give that up to you? You’re children, playing at something you can’t understand.”
She wasn’t completely wrong. There was much that he still didn’t understand. He remembered the very first time that they had come across Talia. They had thought that she was under attack from Sashaak, so they had helped. At the time, that was what Laric thought they needed to do, but now he couldn’t help but feel as if they had been used. Used to take advantage of the dragons. Used to control something that should not have been controlled. Used by the mages. But why?
The better question was what the mages had been doing when they had come here in the first place. They had attacked the town—well, they had made it seem like the dragons and Korthal had attacked the town. Laric didn’t know how that was even possible, though there did seem to be something in the way they had attacked that should have provided them with answers.
He wanted to know why the mages had done all this. That was what he thought they needed to know. The problem was that he didn’t think Talia was going to share.
“We are children,” Laric conceded. “And yet, we’re children who managed to stop what you were doing. How does that feel?”
A burst of pain behind his ears was the only answer he got from her. She was using spellcrafting, but the way she was using it was tightly controlled, and Laric didn’t know if there was anything he would be able to do to counter and stop it. With the amount of power that he felt from her, he didn’t think he could do anything.
A blast of dangerous energy shot toward Laric.
Sashaak swept forward, once again simply absorbing the spellcraft form that Talia generated.
That was something that Laric would have to ask Sashaak about later, if Sashaak would be willing to talk about what he was able to do and how he could do it. But for now, he wanted the kind of answers that he would only get from Talia, assuming that she would even talk to them.
“You won’t be able to stop what is coming,” Talia said, her voice little more than a whisper. “Do you really think that a single dragon is a challenge for us?”
