“I just mean that you could show me. You don’t have to explain it, and you don’t have to walk me through it. You could just show me, couldn’t you?”
He was walking a fine line here, because there was a very real possibility that what the dragon had done was not something that was often done. Perhaps it was not even something that was formidable. Laric did not know what sort of things were allowed, and what sort of things were not.
“And what have you seen?” Dizarn asked.
“I’ve seen…” Laric hesitated, and then he shook his head. “I suppose it doesn’t even matter. I have seen what I have seen.”
Dizarn snorted. “You have seen. Yes. You have seen.” His gaze flicked past Laric to the dragon. “Show him, old friend.”
“Father,” Janear said with a bit of harshness.
The dragon was enormous, not only in physical presence but also in the way it pressed on him mentally. And in its magical potential.
A burning cold worked through Laric as that dragon energy overwhelmed him.
Then the cold turned to warmth. It started in the pit of his stomach, and then it began to wash out, working its way down his legs, up his arms, and finally into his head. It was the same sort of feeling that he had when he had been working with Sashaak in the cave. There was more to that connection, and that image, than what he had grasped in the past.
Then the first vision came.
It was a vision of the doorway leading into this cave. Laric was certain of it. He saw the potential. What was more, he saw the pattern of glyphs. He wouldn’t have known them had it not been for the fact that he had seen them before, and he recognized them now.
A series of marks had shifted, then the door opened.
Inside of the vision, the dragon went first. Of course the dragon would go first, as it had been Laric’s experience that the dragon had some natural resistance to magic that would prevent anything from happening to it, and he could feel the dragon swelling with power. The dragon also wanted to see what was on the other side so it could know if there was any sort of danger here. The dragon had feared that there would be another one of its kind, and that it would be…
Was that correct?
The dragon feared that his grandmother’s dragon had been chained and tormented. It feared for the safety of the other dragon. It feared for the safety of all dragons.
Then the vision changed again to a battered, scarred landscape. That was odd.
This vision stretched, as if he were flying alongside the dragon. And in that vision, Laric could hold on to the creature, and he could see the broken ruins of buildings. He could smell something odd in the air.
Some part of it felt unnatural, and left him thinking that this was not tied to the dragons. He wasn’t quite sure what he was feeling, only that it seemed to be building within him.
Then the vision shifted again.
He saw a stream, along with the dragon and a rider sitting on top—probably Dizarn—near it. They were waiting. He recognized the potential stretching from the dragon to Dizarn, or perhaps the other way around.
What were they doing?
Visions swirled through his mind, hazier now. It seemed as if a layer hovered over the dragon. Something like smoke, fog, some sort of shroud that concealed anything that Laric might pick up from the dragon itself.
He pulled on it, and he drew it inside of himself.
Then, as that shroud began to dissipate, a sequence of images formed in his mind. They happened too rapidly for him to process. There were spellslips. There were spellcraft forms. A linking of both.
He remained transfixed. It was like the dragon was gifting knowledge to him.
Then the images stopped.
He felt potential building within him until he was standing inside the chamber with Dizarn across from him. He was just watching Laric.
“What did you see?” Dizarn asked.
“I saw you coming to the door.”
“Did you?”
“But you wanted me to see that. I saw you flying. Or the dragon flying. I’m not exactly sure if it was you or just the dragon.” Laric frowned. “And I saw you waiting by a stream. I felt the detection spellslip, or whatever it is that you call it. I saw, and I felt, what you were doing and the way you were using it. You were hoping to pick up on something. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know what you were after. All I know is that I felt something based on what my grandmother taught me.” He hesitated. “And I think you were looking for her.”
Dizarn was quiet for a few moments, and when he spoke, his voice was soft. “I went there regularly looking for her. It was a place that she would often go when she would return. There would be a trail that I could find, if I used the right detection.” He was quiet for a few more moments.
“She taught me the same spellslip,” Laric said.
He had been using it when trying to find his way around the cavern, but then once he got down into it, Laric realized that he had not been holding on to the spellslip as much as before, so it wasn’t as potent. He shifted to it now. It had always been an unusual detection spellslip. Effective, yes, but one that was not typical for most people to use when it came to detecting.
He tethered a bit of power to it, forming something more than just the detection spellslip that his grandmother had shown him. Because he had seen it in the vision, Laric understood that his way of tethering the spellcraft form to it wasn’t quite right. There was another way.
“She did teach you, didn’t she?” Dizarn whispered.
“She did,” Laric said. “And your dragon. When I pulled away the haze, I was able to see different forms.”
“What do you mean that you pulled away the haze?”
“When I was in the vision. that’s what I did. I felt it, and I could strip it free.”
Dizarn stepped forward and clasped Laric on the shoulder. “It is nice to meet you, nephew.”
