They kept practicing a series of different spellcraft forms that he hoped she would be able to master, but the longer they worked on them, the more those forms proved to be a challenge.
After a while, Rowan grew tired, much like Iveris had, and she curled up along the edge of the cave to rest with her sister. Malcolm smiled and went over to them, leaning his back up against the stone. He claimed that he was going over there to watch over them, to make sure that nothing happened to them, but Laric knew better. Malcolm was just going over there to sleep, but then again, he couldn’t blame him. Malcolm needed rest, the same way that all of them did.
Laric focused on mastering the smoke spellcraft form. Sashaak constantly corrected him and made a point of telling him just how poorly he was making the spellcraft form, but then the dragon guided him on what he needed to alter in order to use that spellcraft form in the way Sashaak thought he needed.
Joselle shuffled closer to Laric and sat next to him. “I never would’ve imagined that we would be in a cave with a dragon, learning mage magic,” she said, smiling slightly as she did.
“It’s a little ridiculous, isn’t it?”
“Ridiculous?” She shook her head, her gaze lingering on Sashaak. “It’s amazing.”
“I think there is still quite a bit that we need to understand about the dragons, like what connection we have with them and what connection our grandmother did. I’m not sure what we’re going to be able to learn, if anything, and I can’t help but feel as if there has to be some other aspect to it that we can learn.”
“Well, if our grandmother knew anything about the dragons, then maybe there are other places around the town we can hunt down.”
“We’ve been doing that,” Laric said.
“I know that you and Rowan have been, but I haven’t been a part of it,” Joselle said.
Laric sensed her disappointment in that and realized that maybe he had been making a mistake. He had not been including his sister the way she deserved. And he had not been including her the way that she needed to be. That was a problem.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. I need to include you more.”
“Do you really think…” She went quiet for a moment. “Do you really think that I could learn this same magic?”
Laric breathed out heavily. “I have no idea,” he said. “Probably. Had our grandmother still been around as you’d gotten older, she probably would have taught you. I think that what we can do is unique to who we are.”
“From Korthal,” she said.
Laric nodded. “I think so. I’m happy to keep working with you. I’m happy to keep trying to teach what I can, and to see if there’s going to be any way that we might be able to master some aspect of what the dragon is teaching me. You need to understand this, so that we can be…”
“Like our grandmother.”
“I don’t even know,” Laric said. Did he want to be like her?
For so long, that would’ve been an easy question to answer, but now he wasn’t sure. He didn’t know how he felt about his grandmother, about what she was able to do and what she had and had not taught him. He wanted to know, though. He wanted to know more about her and why she had not shared what she was.
“It’s about the glyphs,” Joselle said.
“You really aren’t missing anything, are you?”
“You really aren’t all that good at hiding what you’re after,” she said.
Laric chuckled. “I haven’t been intending to hide anything.”
“Like I said, you’re not doing a very good job at it either way.”
“The glyphs will help us understand her. It’s all about the dragon. About dragon memories. About the dragon-bonded and the connection that they have. There is a blurring between the two. Those glyphs represent the dying dragon’s memories, at least from what my dragon says. But if our grandmother was connected to a dragon, those glyphs will also create some sort of connection to her, and to what she knows.
“And you think we might be able to use that?”
“I think that I might be able to learn more about her and why it brought her out to our town.”
She had been hiding from something. Laric was certain of it. Maybe it was about storing artifacts, but there might’ve been something else to it.
“We could make Talia help us,” she said. “The dragon holds her just fine. Or maybe we just let the dragon have her.”
“I wouldn’t be opposed to that,” Laric said. When her eyes widened, he went on. “I was there. I saw what happened to our town. I saw what the mages were willing to do—and now that I know it was the mages, I can’t imagine doing nothing. I saw, and I can’t forget.”
There were times when those memories came back to him and drifted into the forefront of his mind. They made it difficult for him to think about anything else. He wasn’t going to tell his sister that, though. She didn’t deserve to have all of that horror revisited, so he said nothing.
They sat quietly inside the cavern. A soft and steady buildup of wind came through, and though it wasn’t much, there was something soothing to it. As the silence between him and his sister stretched, he looked over to see that she’d fallen asleep. Laric smiled at that. She needed her rest the same as everyone else did.
He moved away, taking a seat across from Sashaak. “I am not Malinar.”
“No.”
“And I don’t think that I can be, but I do think that Malinar wanted you to work with me. That was what he had seemingly implied before he… did whatever it was that he did.”
“He inverted his potential,” Sashaak said.
“He did what?”
“That is what it is called. If you focus on the potential inside yourself, you can feel how it sits there. It can be inverted, but the effect of it is to create a significant blaze of power, and the dragonborn are not able to withstand it. And they cannot survive.”
“So you knew what he was going to do,” Laric said.
“I knew.”
