Dragon Magus 1: A Progression Fantasy Saga Read online

  “So it’s trying to keep us away from the river?” Eliza asked. “Why?”

  “I’m not sure,” Raphael replied, “but if we know that it’s been tampered with and that the woods doesn’t want us to see it, then it’s all the more important for us to follow the river and find out just how or why it isn’t flowing into town anymore.”

  “Nice thinking, Raphael,” Sylvia said. “Let’s go, then. Lead the way. And yeah, the two of you can stop holding hands now.”

  Which was precisely what Raphael and Eliza had been doing, since she’d lowered her hand a while ago, but Raphael hadn’t let it go.

  Blushing furiously, Eliza pulled her hand away. Raphael scratched the back of his head and exchanged a sheepish smile with her.

  He turned and strode into the woods, the others following closely behind.

  Chapter 19

  The woods shifted its terrain in full view several times, and on more than one occasion, a brace of trees popped into existence directly in their path. Fenix blew their way through with his Explosive Orbs each time, allowing Raphael to keep the war party moving in a straight line toward the river.

  The Dragon Meridian’s light blazed, and Raphael soon realized it was keeping some kind of malicious energy at bay and preventing it from clouding his mind.

  “The precursor of a geomantic loci’s full powers,” Sylvia explained, when he’d consulted her. “All three of us have undergone mage training, so we know how to rebuff attempts to interfere with our thoughts. Eliza’s doing much better than Fenix, by the way, even though she doesn’t use magic anymore, but you seem to be utterly immune to any mind-altering effects.”

  “She’s always excelled at the mental exercises in the Academy,” Fenix acknowledged, giving Eliza a slight nod. “That, and lore-schooling.”

  Eliza returned his nod gracefully, though it was clear to Raphael that her lack of magical aptitude still bothered her, at least a little bit.

  The banks of the dried river came into view, and Raphael set their course northward, deeper into the woods instead of back to town. It was close to noon, by then, and after another hour of walking, Sylvia decided to call a halt for them to eat a midday meal, where they washed down tabs of hardtack with mouthfuls of water from their skins.

  “It’s an adventurer’s life and all, but I will never develop a taste for this stuff,” Fenix complained, brushing off crumbs from his meal.

  “I’ll cook everyone something when we get back,” Eliza declared. Raphael and Sylvia threw their hands in the air and whooped with glee.

  The woods seemed to shift more rapidly as they made their way upstream. Mossy mounds hurtled into view at bends in the river. Dead foliage clustered at their feet. Trees surged into their path. The confusing landscape slowed their progress, and if it weren’t for the Dragon Meridian’s light, the war party would have gotten lost.

  “The river hasn’t changed in all the time we’ve been following it,” Eliza observed, after clambering down a particularly steep moss-covered earthen mound. “Can the semi-awakened loci not affect it?”

  Raphael looked up. The river’s banks were far less dimmer than anywhere else in the woods, because no trees grew there. Their canopies could also only stretch so far, becoming sparser over the exposed mud of the river bed and letting more sunlight through.

  Sylvia seemed to arrive at the same conclusion he did. “Sunlight is anathema to most forms of dark magic, Necromancy included. Since loci are always products of dark magic, they share the same weaknesses. So it would make sense that this one’s reach is much weaker under sunlight.”

  “Wouldn’t they be utterly helpless in the day, then?” Raphael asked.

  “A fully awakened geomantic loci has full control over the weather within its domain,” Eliza explained. “It can fill the sky with storm clouds, fog, or anything else that can block out the sun. Sunlight might weaken it, but not by much.”

  The full gravity of what they faced began to sink in for Raphael. This wasn’t some brawl against a pack of belligerent night-fiends or howlers. A geomantic loci sounded like something that could devastate entire towns, cities, or even kingdoms.

  It was then that the first sanguine treant attacked. The war party had just turned the corner on yet another river bend, when something lurched out from among the trees and took a swipe at Sylvia.

  His senses and reflexes heightened by the Dragon Meridian and the Second Brazier, Raphael was able to get a good look at the monster. It was taller than even the elf, towering over her by a full stride, and its torso was a single cylindrical trunk of black rotting wood, propelled upon two diseased stumps that served as its legs. Four limbs of dark, pestilent wood jutted awkwardly from its torso, each terminating in a cluster of claws.

  The sanguine treant didn’t have a head. Instead, a malevolent mockery of a face leered from the center of its torso. Blood-red eyes burned where eyes were supposed to be, and fangs of splintered wood gnashed against each other within a ghastly maw.

  The elf danced away from its claw. At the same time, her sword flashed through the outstretched limb, before pivoting on its pommel and cleaving through the monster’s torso.

  Laughing, Sylvia threw herself into a backflip and landed gracefully beside Fenix. She seized him by the scruff of his neck and pulled the battlemage in front of her, so that the deluge of foul, stinking ichor bursting from the bisected monster several paces away splattered his boots.

  Fenix cried out disgust, but Sylvia cuffed him over the head and pointed over his shoulder. “Save your whining for later! There’s another sanguine treant charging at you. Do something!”

  And there was. Another hulking monster burst from the depths of the woods, its claws raised high, and a manic shriek tearing from its maw.

  The battlemage hit it with a whirlwind of Explosive Orbs, blowing the monster apart.

  Hearing movement behind him, Raphael spun on his heel and raised his glaive. Another pair of treants burst from the shadowy depths of the woods and charged toward him. They tried to skirt the edges of the sun’s light, the diseased bark encasing their bodies sizzling when they failed to do so.

  The heat of the Draconic Braziers burned in his veins. His body felt swift and powerful. The light of the Dragon Meridian kept him calm and focused. As the first treant approached, he cleaved it down the middle with his glaive. The rotting wood parted beneath his strength.

  As his glaive broke free of the first monster’s body, he pivoted on the ball of his lead foot and brought his weapon up and across in a diagonal arc across the second’s torso. The curved steel cut it apart from hip to shoulder.

  Raphael leaped back to Eliza, caught her by the waist, and threw the both of them into a sidelong jump. A sanguine treant pounced on the mossy spot where she’d been a heartbeat ago, its maw chomping furiously. Eliza gasped in horrified surprise, but Raphael set her behind him, beyond the monster’s reach.

  Charging back into the fray, he slammed the butt of his glaive into the sanguine treant’s back, driving the steel cap several inches into its torso. Raphael flared the draconic armor he’d wrapped around the weapon. The monster burst apart from within, showering the ground with shards of wood and torrents of ichor.

  Huh. That’s a new way to use my draconic armor, he thought. I can attack and defend with it. It’s also keeping whatever passes for the monster’s blood from my skin, which is nice.

  “Raphael!” Eliza cried, pointing past him with her sword. “Watch out!”

  He snapped his gaze up. Half a dozen treants were barreling toward him, howling their bloodlust. Raphael gritted his teeth and charged in to meet them. He struck down one with an overhead blow, cleaved another apart, and then a claw raked across his chest.

  The draconic armor flexed beneath the blow, but it didn’t break. Raphael kicked the monster that had clawed him between the eyes, feeling wood splinter beneath his heel. A sanguine treant loomed over him on his right flank. Its maw slammed shut on his shoulder.

  Once mo
re, the draconic armor persevered, bowing and bending without breaking, but the monster reared upward, tearing Raphael from his feet. Another treant fastened its jaws around his shin. This time, Raphael felt agony shoot up his leg, but the Dragon Meridian told him that his armor remained unbreached, though it could not take much more of such abuse.

  Something vast and alien within him roared, then, as it did during his fight with Fenix. Without knowing how he knew to do it, Raphael took the force absorbed by the draconic armor and channeled it outward, forcing it into the two treants that had their maws locked around him.

  There was a loud boom. The monsters were reeling back, smoking holes in their torsos where their faces used to be. Dropping his glaive, he caught the last treant’s jaws before they could snap shut on his head and held them apart.

  “Raphael!” he heard Eliza cry from somewhere behind him, but her voice was faint and tinny against the pounding rush of blood in his ears. Raphael forced the monster’s jaws open, pushed them further than they were supposed to hinge, then tore the creature apart at the maw.

  He tossed the stinking halves of the treant aside as its ichor rained down, sizzling into nothingness against the golden scales of his draconic armor. He threw his head back and roared.

  It felt good, and it felt right. His voice rolled from his throat, sounding like nothing he’d ever heard before. It was loud, louder than any noise he’d ever made, and it shook the trees and sent treant body parts scattering.

  Heartbeats went by as he gave voice to this alien sense of elation welling within him. There were more treants lurking in the shadowy depths of the woods, just beyond the reach of the sun. He saw fear taint the burning madness in their crimson eyes.

  One turned and fled. Then another. Before long, the horde of treants were little more than a mass of frenzied, flailing limbs disappearing into the woods.

  “Raphael!” he heard someone say. “Raphael! What are you doing? Raphael!”

  An arm around his neck held him back. It was strong, perhaps even stronger than him. The thought was like a dash of cold water thrown into his face.

  Raphael blinked, slowly registering where he was and what he’d been doing. He was many strides from the river bank, and he already had one foot within the shadows of the woods. Had he been about to chase the treants?

  The arm around his neck was Sylvia’s. The elf was behind him, and she’d placed him in a chokehold that would render Raphael unconscious in moments if she applied a tad more pressure.

  In his peripheral vision, he saw Eliza running up to him.

  “Are you alright?” she asked. “Are you hurt? Those things clawed and bit you, right?”

  “He’s uninjured,” Sylvia said, releasing him and giving him a hearty clap on the back. “He might have a bit of bruising here and there, but at no point did the treants even manage to scratch him.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like that before.” Fenix walked into view. The battlemage’s eyes were wide with awe. “You tore through those monsters and then drove the others off! That was amazing!”

  “To be fair, Fenix did put down ten of the treants himself,” Sylvia pointed out, “so with you having slain nine, this puts him currently in the lead. Let’s see what the final score is when all is said and done.”

  “This isn’t a game!” Eliza snapped.

  “Everything is.” The elf winked at Raphael. “If you’re brave enough. Did I ever tell you about what I did with that gigantic cucumber I found in the marketplace?”

  “Sylvia, no,” Fenix said, sighing.

  Raphael looked at the amused disgust on Fenix’s and Eliza’s face as Sylvia rattled off a story about her misuse of vegetables and strawberry jam, which made her earlier comments about the recall charm sound much, much worse.

  The final punchline of the elf’s tale had Fenix bending over to dry heave into the mossy river bank and Eliza rolling her eyes.

  “Are you feeling alright, Raphael?” she asked, turning to him. “You haven’t said anything since the monsters fled.”

  “I…” Raphael began, but there was a lump in his throat that seemed to hold his words back. Back in the junkyard, every time he did something the other children couldn’t do and showed them how different he was, they drew back from him a bit more. But during the fight against the treants, he’d roared, making a sound that no human being should make, yet Eliza, Fenix, and Sylvia remained unshaken, their regard for him unchanged.

  He’d never realized how much something like that meant to him.

  “I’m fine,” he finally managed to say and returned her smile with a shaky one of his own.

  Sylvia clasped him on the shoulder. “You felt it, right? The heat of battle overtaking you, the euphoria of victory, and the need to surge forward and crush your foes. Embrace it, kid, and enjoy it, but don’t let it master you. And yeah, excellent job back there.”

  Raphael wanted to tell her that what he felt was different, but as he began to speak, the words failed to emerge, because was it, really? He nodded instead. “Thanks, Sylvia. I will.”

  Fenix crouched over the eviscerated remains of a treant and chanted a few arcane syllables. A small purple sphere emerged and hung in the air. He caught it and tucked it away into his belt pouch.

  “Just as I’d thought,” he said, “these things have Spell Cores. We can’t let them go unharvested.”

  “Exactly,” Sylvia replied, “so get to work, and make it snappy! I want to cover more ground today!”

  “Eliza and Raphael don’t know how to cast the Collect cantrip, and we all know how the latter feels about Spell Cores, so a little help would be nice, you know?” the battlemage grumbled.

  “So would a foot massage and a nice jar of strawberry jam to go along with a cucumber salad,” the elf shot back, “but we don’t always get what we want, so quit your whining and get to it!”

  Rayne popped its head out again. The faerie dragon looked at Raphael. “Magus,” it thought to him. “Purify the twisted. Let them go to true rest.”

  Not knowing why he did so, Raphael walked to the carcasses of the treants he’d slain. He spread his palms over their remains and reached out with the light of the Dragon Meridian. It illuminated the fear, pain, and hunger that had dominated the last moments of these monsters.

  All they’d wanted was for their maddening hunger to go away, and all they’d desired was the sated sleep that would only come after a meal of blood and flesh.

  He felt sad for the treants, then, and angry at their creator. Whether he was human or not, the true monster here was the Death Druid.

  The thoughts of the slain treants pulled at him, and he pulled back, feeling the same thing he did when he’d held Wormy’s Spell Core in his hands. A golden radiance emanated from his palms and fell over the broken bodies of the creatures.

  A purple sphere emerged from each carcass. They spun in the air once, then shattered into slivers of golden light. Rayne swooped from Raphael’s pocket and into their midst. The slivers seemed to gather around the faerie dragon’s wings.

  “Magus.” Rayne met his gaze. “Deliver them.”

  Raphael clenched his fists. The slivers of light faded into nothingness, and as they did so, a sense of overwhelming relief and calmness filled his heart. He knew, somehow, that it belonged to the treants, going on to their desired rest at long last.

  Rayne alighted on his shoulder and nuzzled its cheek against his.

  “Magus. Well done,” it thought.

  “Raphael…” Eliza breathed. “I don’t know what you just did, but that… that was beautiful.”

  “I… I’m not sure either,” he replied, “but it felt like something that had to be done, that it was right to do so.”

  Fenix was wide-eyed with shock. “What was that? What did you do with the Spell Cores? Did you destroy them? Do you know how much Spell Dust those would have yielded?”

  “All in all, probably only a modest amount, to be honest,” Sylvia chimed in. The elf had a radiant, joyous smi
le on her face that was at odds with the flippant tone in her voice. “You did it again, kid. There’s no doubt now. You somehow have access to True Magic. The spell you just cast was Deliverance, a Holy spell of the Highest Order. I don’t think anyone has actually cast it in more than a thousand years.”

  “He used Spontaneous Transmigration in the junkyard, which is another Holy spell of the Highest Order,” Eliza recalled. “That’s why Rayne is with us now. According to the third volume of Mithra’s The Demise of Mana, dragons were unaffected by the disappearance of True Magic. They could still cast spells, and in fact, they were the only ones capable of doing so for a period of time, until the man who would found the Chimeric Empire taught the world to use Spell Dust.”

  “That’s because dragons are inherently magical entities,” she continued. “They hold mana in their souls, whereas every other living thing had to draw it from their surroundings and shape it into the spells they wanted to cast. That’s why they could still cast spells when mana disappeared and took True Magic with it.”

  “If Raphael is a Dragon Knight, does that mean he has mana in his soul, too?” Fenix asked, his voice breathless with awe and excitement. “That means he can cast spells without using Spell Dust!”

  “Is that true, Raphael?” Sylvia asked. “Can you sense mana within you?”

  Raphael cast the light of the Dragon Meridian deep inside himself. To his surprise, he found another source of energy brimming inside his soul alongside his reservoir of Ryu-To-Ki. It was somewhat depleted at the moment, and its reserves were diminutive in comparison, but there was no doubt about what it was.

  He had mana, and he’d unlocked this power within himself by sending the treants on to their true rest. Did that mean that his mana capacity would increase with every monster he cast Deliverance on?

  Rayne answered that question for him, responding to his thoughts as it always did. “Delivering the twisted will expand your soul, Magus.”

  So that was that, then. Raphael couldn’t just go around slaughtering beasts like Wormy to strengthen his mana. He could only achieve that by putting creatures created or warped by dark magic to rest.