Similar Series by D.K. Holmberg
Chapter One
The doorway remained locked, though the glyph over it seemed as if it swirled, moving in a way that Laric knew was mostly his imagination. He could sense that energy radiating when he focused on some deep part of himself, feeling for the potential he knew he needed to find inside him.
“Are you just going to stand there in front of it?” Malcolm asked.
“I’m debating,” Laric said.
“What’s to debate? You either need to open it and see what’s inside, or you don’t.”
“I’m just trying to decide if there’s anything I need to do in there.”
He didn’t say it, but his concern was whether there would be anything he would be able to do. As far as he knew, Talia had returned through the portal after escaping, but she was now trapped. If it worked, she wouldn’t be able to escape from this makeshift prison, though he didn’t know if it would be enough to hold her. After all, she was a mage gifted in ways he was not.
She’d taught him some of the spellcraft forms that he knew. Well, she’d taught him all the forms that he knew. Without her, Laric wouldn’t have been able to create nearly as much power—and he might not have discovered the truth about his potential.
“Think about what your grandmother would have done here,” Malcolm said.
Laric glanced at him, a smile coming to his face. “My grandmother might not have been a part of any of this. I’m still trying to understand what she had done with it.” Had the dragon rider survived, Laric might have gotten those answers, but Malinar had sacrificed himself so that Laric and his friends could defeat the mages—and so that the dragon would survive.
He turned his attention to the glyphs on the door. After Talia had disappeared, they hesitated to go through the portal, partly because he didn’t know if there would be a way for Talia to overwhelm them. He didn’t think she would have been able to move past the glyphs—those glyphs were a type of power that even the mages didn’t know—but he worried that she might have tried to overpower them nonetheless.
“The key seems intact,” he said, though it was mostly to himself. “That was the first thing I tried to detect. If she did something here, it would show up that way. But it doesn’t seem like she did.”
“Then let’s make a point of ensuring that she won’t get out of this,” Malcolm said.
That was the first thing Laric wanted to do too, but there was a concern that even if he were to do that, he might run into a different type of danger. What if she were to figure out a way to overpower them? What would they be able to do, anyway?
The glyph-marked entrance to the cave seemed to be secured and fully locked, at least as far as he could tell. He couldn’t identify any weakness, but then again, Laric didn’t have enough experience with such things to know whether or not he was even testing it correctly. He had been trying to learn as much as possible about the glyphs, but they were still too foreign. They would need time to attempt to understand them, but given what he now knew about his grandmother and her role in everything, he was optimistic that he would be able to do so. He couldn’t help but feel like they needed to continue to test and explore and see if there was anything in the books she had left behind. Books that he suspected she had intended for him.
Finally, he pressed his hand down, using the potential to try to push that power out of him. It was the same sort of potential that he had used when he had been trying to create fire. That potential granted him the ability to test for anything more that he would be able to do with that power. He felt pressure against him, but even as he did, he wasn’t sure if the pressure that he was detecting was the kind that was going to cause a problem for him, or going to cause a problem for Talia.
“She’s still down there,” Laric said.
“Are you sure?” Malcolm asked.
He nodded. “She’s unable to get out of this. I don’t know if she might be able to figure out something, but so far, it doesn’t seem she will be able to escape.”
Malcolm let out a relieved sigh.
Laric studied him and frowned. “I didn’t realize you were so worried about all this.”
“Why wouldn’t I be worried about it? We’re talking about a powerful mage who can bring down dragons. And I don’t know that I need to remind you, but we have a dragon working with us now.”
Laric snorted. “Well, the dragon is working more with me than you.”
“That’s not funny, Laric.”
“It’s a little funny.”
Malcolm focused on the doorway. “What are we going to do with Talia, anyway? I mean, we will have to feed her at some point. How are we going to get in there and do that?”
That was a thought Laric hadn’t even considered. He suspected there would be some way that the glyphs inside the chamber would hold her, but so far, he wasn’t exactly sure what that would entail, nor did he know if he knew a technique that would work for such a thing.
“We will deal with that later.”
“Later?”
“Once we work with the dragon.”
Malcolm let out a groan, and then he nodded. “If you think so. I’m not so sure that this is the right way to go about all of this, Laric, but I’m going to trust you, and I’m going to trust that you know what you’re doing.”
“That might be a mistake,” Laric said.
“Oh, I’m quite certain of that,” Malcolm said.
They turned away from the portal entrance, and from there, he headed over to where the others were waiting. Rowan continued to lean over Malinar’s fallen form, though there wasn’t anything she was going to be able to do to him. Joselle and Iveris were off to the side of the cavern, whispering to each other, and then there were the ashy remains of Daelon. Laric had difficulty mustering any feeling for him, though the man had been responsible for what had happened here. Daelon, while powerful, had attempted to destroy the town and its people. All because he and his allies wanted to take the power of the glyphs and the dragon.
Laric would have to figure out more about that and learn what his grandmother had been hiding. And if he wasn’t mistaken, his grandmother had been hiding something, though he wasn’t sure what. She had come to this town for a reason, and at this point, Laric simply didn’t know why.
He turned and watched Sashaak, who was still curled up in the back of the room.
“Are you sure that it’s going to hold?” Laric asked, approaching the dragon. “Because we don’t need her to escape. If she truly is working against us”—and it was strange that he still had his reservations about that, despite everything he had seen—“then we don’t want to run the risk of her getting out and attacking the town.”
Sashaak stretched his wings and shook out his body. It seemed as if he was waking from some slumber, but there was almost a sense of sadness and sorrow that radiated from him. Knowing what Laric did now, that the dragons were intelligent creatures that had to grant permission to somebody to use that power, he felt as if they had a connection that he should better understand.
“The power will hold,” Sashaak finally said. “You feel it.”
