Page 5 of The Dragonrider and the Void
“There are symbols in this writing that aren’t from any language I’ve ever seen before. This isn’t magi, elfish, orcish, or dwarfish, nor does it contain any letters from an alphabet of human origin.”
White Eye grumbled. The sound reverberated through the cavernous opening as Lark was compelled to delve deeper. His influence over her nearly overpowered Lark, and she had to restrain herself from sprinting down into the darkness.
I’d forgotten how influential your will can be when my guard is down,she thought toward him.
Cautiously, Lark ventured deeper into the cavern. A strange mixture of feelings tugged at either side of her consciousness. The warning Nix sent by refusing to emerge though Lark had called on her in a moment of need, told her to turn back.
But because Lark trusted White Eye, she continued to follow him while also studying the strange mixture of languages. The dragonrider runes were so interconnected with the shapes of this unfamiliar language that they seemed to be used almost as one new language, creating a message she could only partially decode.
Lark recalled a lesson from her rider training. Barrik had been answering her questions about the use of magical languages.
“When spoken together, can two dialects make a spell more powerful? If I were to cast a spell using elvish and magi, would it be stronger than had I coaxed the power from a Yogo Sapphire using only one language?” she’d asked.
“Of all the magical languages in Sataran, the intention of the words crafted behind a spell are what cause the power from a Yogo or Hyalite to take form. They are not defined by the words or by the language. That is not the case for power used through other bonds,” Barrik explained. “A draconic bond, for example, can give a rider access to wield power without speaking at all.”
Lark paused, seeing it here, two languages that were clearly mixing with each other in the carvings. There seemed to be no pattern to the mix. Some of the verses were carved entirely in the dragonrider’s original language, some completely in these new runes she couldn’t identify. In other lines, the two styles were so tangled that some phrases and symbols overlapped.
“This doesn’t make sense,” she said, pressing her palm flat against the stone.
“If these runes have been created for magical use,” she reasoned. “And the languages to pull power out of a Yogo to infuse the runes are truly shaped by the intention of the writing, why would whoever created these need to write in a mixture of two languages?”
“The only explanation I can come up with is whoever wrote these messages was using more than one system of magic. But everything I was taught, everything I’ve remembered, says the dragonriders have never shared our unique source of power with another magical race. Dragons bond with a rider so they can wield the powers of a god, much stronger than the magic they can wield inherently. Why would these runes be merged here?”
A sudden gust of wind howled through the ruins, carrying with it an ice-cold musk, sharp and undeniable. It triggered a shockwave of remembrance.
That smell. Lark recognized it instantly. The frost clinging to the rocks in a place where no other snow or ice was present now made perfect sense. Only one kind of shade brought that icy edge with it everywhere it spread its corruption.Rimeshade.
Lark twisted to face the wind entering the cavern, nearly losing her balance as her side and arm flared with pain. White Eye steadied her with his snout, his attention remaining fixed on the opening to the courtyard beyond. The daylight revealed no chilling creature cloaked in an inkwell of smoke. She looked out at the empty sanctuary, silent and devoid of life.
“Okay, White Eye. Show me why you brought us here,” she said, finally surrendering to her dragon’s insistence. “Show me what’s so important that we’re leaving Venrick and the others to whatever fate found them.”
2
UNBOUND
“Viyetlo,” Lark whispered, crafting a spell from the power born in her dragon bond. A small celestial light appeared like a tiny glowing star before her. Its white starlight illuminated their path and exposed a disturbing scene.
Lark let out a shallow gasp as black veins spreading all through the carvings in the rock wall became apparent with the light. These black veins stretched out like a web, each vein darker than the pitch black of the underground cavern. Yet, within that blackness, the veins held countless flecks of silver lights that sparkled like stars in the night sky.
“This is rimeshade magic,” Lark said, her heart pounding. “They’ve been here recently. But why?”
She leaned in to examine a single vein that ran eye level with here five-foot nine-inch height, careful not to touch it. Lark recalled what she knew of the rimeshade’s magic. When active, it spread out with black tendrils that crawled like tentacles across its target. Spiked icicles grew out of these specks of silver, spreading with raised rime frost as they consumed their victim.The ice paralyzed the victims first, as the dark veins underneath injected power like a poison.
Though a layer of frost coated the cavern floor, Lark observed no frost spreading out from the silver flecks within the veins. This meant only one thing. “The rimeshade have taken root here, but an active rimeshade is not down here right now,” she discerned. “If there were one, these veins would be covered in a rime ice so thick and crisp, we wouldn’t be able to see the black underneath.”
White Eye let out a soft growl in response, a warning to anything that might be lingering within the cavern.
“That the veins are lingering, though,” she continued, “means the rimeshade’s influence is being powered by something other than their presence. But what? And how did they find this place?”
Her mind drifted to her lark-shaped pendant for a moment.I wish you were here, Nix. You could help us.
Nix was of the fae. She likely knew more about the rimeshade than Lark and could offer more insight than Lark’s still hazy knowledge of them.
“How did you know this was happening?” Lark asked her dragon.
A string of complex emotions came pouring through their bond. Lark struggled to put them together, not understanding what White Eye wished her to glean.
White Eye stomped his paw and snorted in frustration at their as-yet imperfect communication. They were still working at getting reacquainted after a long, tumultuous separation.
