Draka

“So, how do you want to do this?”

I walked into the middle of the room and sat down under the lantern hanging from the thick boards that made up the ceiling. “I tried to do the dream thing but it did not work. Is there a way that people usually figure out what their new advancements let them do?”

Herald stepped over to the stack of barrels that divided the room, climbing up and turning around so that she sat looking down on me, her head nearly touching the ceiling. “Instinct, mostly. We get visions or strong impressions when we choose, and then we can usually let instinct guide us. Thought it might take some triggering event. Mak knew immediately that she could heal, but it took until she was in the dark before she found that she could give herself and others darkvision. I knew immediately when I woke up that I could change my sight and Shift into the shadows, and that I could move them and make them darker… though knowing you really helped with figuring out the second part. I still had to figure out myself how to actually push magic into the shadows or the lightstone.

“You told me once that you have an actual voice telling you your options. The, uh… Well, you. Your dragon side. Is that still true?”

“Not with my last two minors. I got some very strong impressions about what my options would do, but no voice. But then I got my major right after the second one, and the voices were back. I… am not sure what to make of it.”

Herald looked up in surprise. “Voices? More than one?”

“Yeah. Have I not…? I have been hearing the other voice, the human, I think, ever since I woke up in that prison. It has been acting as my conscience, sometimes, keeping me from going too far. Have I not told you about this?”

“No!” Herald said indignantly. “I cannot believe that you would keep something like that from me! I thought you were two minds sharing a body! What does that mean about you if you hear both sides of yourself talking at once?”

Yeah. That was something that had been worrying me, too. But it felt like way too heavy of a subject to talk about just then, and we had things to do. “We can talk about whatever is going on in my head once the Blossom is dealt with, yeah? I was not done. Before, I had the dragon guiding me, helping me figure out how to do things with my magic. She could be snarky about it, but she was generally helpful. Now she barely speaks, and has not said anything since describing my second major.”

Herald didn’t look at all happy about me refusing to talk about the voices in my head, and that was fair. She was worried about me. But when I made it clear that I didn’t want to talk about it she only sighed and nodded, relaxing a little. “Alright. Some other time. What did she say about your new major, then? How did she describe it?”

“Ah… I don’t remember her exact words, but it was something like fear is our tool, the shadows are ours, no matter where they are, and our enemies cannot hide, even in their dreams.”

Herald rested her chin on her hands where she sat, looking at me thoughtfully. “Well… you could already make people afraid. So it seems to me that something should have changed with that. You know that you can… I do not even know what to call it. Dreamwalk? See the dreams of others, interact with them somehow? But you have not figured out how yet?”

“Right.”

“So you need to do that, preferably tonight. The part about the shadows, though. Being yours, wherever they are. That definitely sounds like a change. You have only been able to affect shadows that you are in, right? Like me?”

“Right again.”

“So, have you tried to command a shadow far away from you?”

I thought about it, and stared at her in utter disbelief. Some old human impulse made me want to bury my face in my hands out of sheer embarrassment, and only the length of my neck stopped me from doing just that. “Damn it, Herald! How could I not think of that?”

“It has only been a few days, big sister.” Her voice was kind and soothing, but I was having none of it.

“It is right there in the description! ‘No matter where they are!’ It is so obvious, now that you have pointed it out! I cannot believe—”

“Draka!” Herald’s tone was sharp, but not unkind. “If talking about your mind can wait, then so can self-recrimination, hmm?”

I snorted. “I suppose.”

We spent the next hour confirming that, yes, I could indeed affect shadows that I was not directly touching. Starting slowly, I focused on the shadow of one of the pillars close to me, and just like I would with my own shadow or one that I was touching, I commanded it to deepen. It took a bit more effort than normal, but dark tendrils limned in gold quested out from me, pushed through the light separating me from the shadow, and burrowed into it. It responded, growing darker and deeper. At my will it shifted to the left, then to the right, then grew wider, pushing out the light and plunging that part of the cellar into complete darkness.

“Interesting,” Herald said. “When I look normally all I see is the shadow changing, but with my shadowsight I can see the tendrils connecting it to you.” She stopped and thought for a while. “Can you control the shadows that it touches?”

I tried, bending the shadow of the pillar into that of a shelf, and yeah! I could now control that shadow as well, separate from that of the pillar. It took noticeably more effort, though, far more than double as much as controlling the pillar from a distance. As I was messing around with that I discovered two things. The first was that if I moved the shadow of the pillar so it was no longer touching that of the shelf, then I lost control of the latter. If I drew back my tendrils, of course, I lost control of both, each shadow snapping back to its natural state. But when I was testing the limits of that I made my second discovery.

I was trying to find if concentrating extra hard on the second shadow might let me keep a tendril in place from the first. I put nearly all of my focus into keeping the shadow of the shelf extra deep. Nothing fancy. I focused so hard on that, poured so much of my magical energy into it, that it came as a sharp shock when the first shadow lost contact. I instantly lost the ability to sense and control the second shadow — but it remained as it was. I felt suddenly exhausted, but I heard a sharp intake of breath from Herald, and knew that I wasn’t just imagining it.

The need I’d been feeling became stronger. It wasn’t bad, but definitely noticeable.

Herald walked over with long, purposeful strides, looking closer. “The shadow. It did not change back!” She hurried over to one of the lanterns placed on the floor and brought it over to the shelf.

The shadow moved and grew more shallow, but that was all. It didn’t vanish. It resisted the light, drinking it in and leaving the items on the shelves in an unnatural darkness no matter how close Herald brough the lantern. “Draka,” she said, a note of awe in her voice. “This is — did you enchant the shadow?”

“Touch it.” I had a sudden urge to see what would happen if Herald tried to manipulate the shadow that I had set in place. “Try to move it, deepen it, anything.”

Herald reached out with her hand, physically touching the shadow, and when she commanded it responded, but sluggishly. “Oh, this is hard! So much harder than anything else I have tried. Like it is fighting me!”

She laughed and moved the shadow a little to the left, then right, and when she let go it snapped right back to the same place and the same depth that I had left it.

A simple test showed that I could remove the effect. And we discovered just as easily that I didn’t need to go through an intermediate shadow to do it. It took a little trial and error to figure out just what I had done, but once I had that down it was simply a matter of commanding the shadow to do what I wanted, focusing on keeping it there, and then withdrawing. It was exhausting, and the unnamed need I felt increased slightly each time, but the shadow would remain fixed just as I had left it. I was about to end the effect again when there was a knock on the upstairs door, making us both jump.

“Missus Herald?” a boyish voice called. “I’m sorry, missus Herald, only the kitchen is out of cloves!”

“Oh, dammit!” Herald hissed, looking around. “I have no idea… Hide for a moment, will you? I will have to let him come down.” As I shifted she turned to the stairs and called up. “Come on down, Rel!”

The door opened and a stampede rolled down the steps. I hadn’t known that it was possible to make so much noise walking on stairs, but the teenage boy — whom I recognised as Relki, one of the two street kids I’d terrorized — coming down managed it.

“Sorry, Missus Herald, won’t be a minute,” the kid said, picking up a lantern and going for some of the back shelves. I drifted out of his way as he looked around. “Sorry, coulda sworn… fuckin’...”

I looked on in confusion and saw Herald do the same. Then realization dawned on both of us as he kept looking, his obvious embarrassment growing as his eyes just slid past the shelf with my frozen shadow on it.

After a moment’s amusement Herald went over and started rummaging through the shelf, and that seemed to break the spell. When she bent to check one of the lower shelves I wished I had eyes to roll, as I caught him staring at her for a few seconds before he nervously stepped up next to her, reaching in to grab a lidded clay jar. “Sorry, Missus Herald,” he squeaked, his voice breaking as he blushed.

“Do not worry.” Herald backed up and gave him a smile. “I have only been here a few days longer than you, and I cannot find everything down here either.”

“Yeah, but…” he looked at the shelf, then shook his head. “Right, Missus Herald. Thanks. Sorry.”

He fled up the stairs, as noisily as he had come, and I couldn’t help but laugh once I’d shifted back. “So you all decided to start a collection of your own?”

“A collection…? Oh, Relki and Sana! Yes, well… some of the staff were unhappy with the new ownership, and left. And we thought the kids could do better with a roof over their heads and some food in their bellies. So. But this!” She went back to the shelf. “You saw the same thing I did, did you not? How he just could not seem to see the shelf?

I grinned. “I have a lovely new toy to play with.”

We did some more experimenting, finding that as long as Herald saw me set a shadow she had no trouble finding whatever it was I’d been trying to hide, but if she looked away when I did it she had much the same experience as Relki. Unless she used her shadowsight, in which case whatever it was stood out thanks to how much brighter tended to be.

There was a final, tiny bit of drama when I decided to mess with Herald, stretching and kind of bending her shadow, then setting it in place when she was still lost in fascination with what I’d done with the shelves. When she walked into the light of the lanterns and realized what I’d done, she yelped!

“Draka! Not funny! Please, this is… I hate it! It is like the whole world is wrong. Draka, please!”

It took a minute of me laughing and her pleading before I undid my work, with a dear and holy promise on our friendship that I would never do it again. It did, however, show that the effect remained when the object casting the shadow moved, adapting to the lights around it. In the case of Herald, it was as though she herself had been stretched and bent, with the shadows cast by the multiple light sources reflecting that.

It was an amazing thing to be able to do, and I laughed with undiluted delight as I reversed what I’d done to Herald. “Thank you, little sister. If not for you I might not have discovered this for months, if at all.”

“Thank me by keeping your promise and never doing that to me again.” She laughed with relief as her shadow snapped back, then immediately started shaping and shifting it. “It was a horrible feeling, when my own shadow resisted me. Like a limb going numb. Perhaps we should be satisfied there?”

“Yeah. I am exhausted. Setting shadows like that really takes it out of me. A break, and then we continue later?”

Herald looked at me, then turned her face away, embarrassed. “What?” I asked.

“I have promised some friends to meet them this afternoon. At the Guild.”

At those few words jealousy raged through me, quick and hot, like fire on the wind. With it came the urge to find these others, and to show them beyond a shadow of a doubt that Herald was mine. But she would never forgive that. No, better to just grab her, to fly her to my nest and leave her with my hoard, where she belonged. She’d understand. It was better that way. She’d be safe there, and no one could—

No!

The single word snapped me out, like I’d been dunked in a pool of freezing water. One word that carried all the context and guilt and shame that I needed to fully realize where my mind had been going. A place that would have been very hard to come back from, no matter how much my little sister loved me.

Herald must have seen something in that split second, because she continued, almost without pausing, “...but I can send someone to tell them that I cannot make it! Really, I—”

“Nah, you go.” I turned away from her, trying without success to sound relaxed. The warring feelings of jealousy and guilt were so strong that I couldn’t even look at her, and the need nagged at me. “I should check on Jekrie and Tinir and the rest of them. Maybe have a look farther north and see if those trolls they talked about are coming south. But you’ll be safe, right?”

She looked at me with concern, but nodded. “I will be at the Adventurers’ Guild. Safest place for me in the city. And Tam will be with me. And I thought I might take Kira…?”

“Good idea. It’ll probably be good for her. See if you can get her a license to use magic in the city, too. Just don’t let anyone know too much about her. Make something up, I don’t know.”

“I will.”

“Could you…?” I gestured at the cellar doors with my head. “I may as well head out.”

“Draka? Are you sure? Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” I almost snapped at her, then sighed. “I had some bad thoughts that I need to deal with. And I’ve had this feeling that I need something ever since my advancement and I need to figure that out, and I really do need to see if I can find whatever drove Jekrie and his people south. Go. Have fun with your friends! Just… stay safe.”

She looked like she wanted to argue, but like so often she decided to let me have my way. She opened the doors, looking outside to make sure that the yard was clear. “You be safe, too. And that need you mentioned? We will talk about that when you are back. Fly high!”

“I will,” I promised. Then I Shifted, wrapped myself in shadow, and left as fast as I could.

What the fuck was wrong with me?

I got into the drains, then left the city through the sewers. Shifted, I made my way two miles or so up the coast before I took to the air, so that it wouldn’t be obvious where I’d come from if anyone saw me. Then I just kept going. I climbed, but I didn’t turn inland. I just kept following the coast north, with no goal in mind.

I’d been getting more and more possessive, and I didn’t like it. That was the long and the short of it. Whenever the prospect of being separated from Herald came up my fear and jealousy both reared their ugly heads, and I needed to be talked down or shamed into relenting. And it had been getting worse in the days since I got my new major. The need drew me north, but even then I had a constant urge to just turn back around and follow my sense of where Herald was. Grab her and stick her somewhere safe. The strongroom, maybe. I could have Mak and Ardek and Barro look after her, and Kira on hand in case anything happened and… God damnit, my thoughts were going there again!

She’s a person, not a thing, I reminded myself. I’m not some storybook dragon stealing away princesses. It’s not Instinct taking over. I’m worried about my friend. That’s all.

I reassured myself with the fact that I’d let her leave my hoard twice, now. I’d let her leave me in the forest to make her way into the city with Kira, and I’d left her so that she could go spend time with her other friends. I could handle the separation. I just didn’t like that I kept feeling this possessiveness.

I kept going north for an hour, then two, going farther north than I ever had, even on my expedition with the others. With my family. As high up as I was, almost kissing the lowest clouds, the few ships that I saw were only little specks on the water. Even sailors avoided the north, I’d been told, afraid of coming close to the unreclaimed and reputedly cursed ruins of the capital city of the Old Mallineans. Anyone I saw up here would be someone who’d crossed the Sareyan Sea and ended up slightly off course, and now they’d be trying to make their way south as quickly as they could, sails full or oars creaking.

I wasn’t sure if the ruins being “cursed” meant anything beyond just having a bunch of monsters around them, but I had seen myself that there were plenty of monsters around in the north, and as I understood it they would only get more common the farther I went.

And now those monsters were coming south in greater numbers. Rallon had made it sound like a general problem, driving people from their homes and forcing them to flee south, just like Jekrie and his people. And it didn’t exactly seem like Karakan had the resources to deal with them, if they were relying on mercenaries to patrol their roads. I had no idea how many people there may be coming south, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there would be more bandit problems in the future. Desperate people do desperate things.

And God, I almost hoped for it. It would feel good to get my claws in someone or something that deserved it! I’d been forced to flee from the archer, and I was still pissed about it. When I’d helped the Barleans I’d held myself back from getting violent, so that the damned judge or Lady Justice or whatever they’d called her wouldn’t get pissy if she heard about a dragon stalking the alleys.

When I slaughtered the Blossom’s pirates, though, oh, how glorious that had been! I’d been able to truly just cut loose and let myself be a dragon. It had been so simple. Bad people trying to hurt good people that I liked. Not a peep from my conscience. Just claws and teeth and venom, screams and hot, sweet blood in my mouth and—

And I really needed some kind of outlet for Instinct, for my draconic side, that didn’t involve slaughtering people every few days. I needed to hunt, and fight, and kill something terrible.

Maybe that was what the need I’d been feeling was? A need to just be a dragon? Perhaps just letting loose for a while would fix me? It was worth a shot. And whether it worked or not, I knew that I’d enjoy it. But first, I needed something to let loose on. I needed gremlins. Valkin. Trolls.

I needed monsters.