38. Arienne
38
ARIENNE
Arienne could not take her eyes off the slithering tongue of the dragon. She could feel Eldred’s Power in the violet haze over the dragon’s eight eyes. As much as her mind screamed at her to run, her legs refused.
This was a primal fear. She had beaten Eldred once; she was not afraid of him. But the fire-dragon of the mountain was a creature of legend, the guardian of Arland that went toe-to-toe against an Imperial gigatherion. There was nothing she could do.
The claws of the dragon swung toward her.
Arienne closed her eyes and waited for death.
But the dragon only left a deep scratch on the floor before her. Was he going to toy with her before killing her? But then, the dragon’s voice bellowed Eldred’s words. “This beast persists in its useless defiance.”
Arienne could feel two waves of Power colliding. The awakened dragon was battling Eldred inside itself. The dragon was more powerful than Eldred, but the sorcerer had already created a room inside the dragon’s mind and settled in like a parasite. If half of what Eldred boasted about his sorcery was true, the room would be a veritable fortress. And Eldred, free of his constraints, would eat away at the dragon from within.
All Eldred needed to do was breathe fire once or strike her with the dragon’s claw and she would die, instantly. With all her might, she willed her feet to move.
“Where do you think you’re going? Do you really believe you will leave this cave alive?”
The door to the valley had melded back into the wall, and the key, Loran’s Wurmath, was wedged in the chains. She was trapped.
But there was one other place to hide. Eldred had left the portal open in the room of her mind; without a second thought, she jumped into it.
She had been to this room many times. But this was the first time her body physically entered her own mind. The room was in disarray from Lysandros’s attack. She ran to the window and crouched beneath it before carefully peeking out of it. The window showed not a pastoral scene of Arland but the interior of the cave.
“Hiding in one’s own mind…” The dragon, or Eldred, smacked its lips. “You truly are a rare talent. Only one other student of mine survived what you just did… But how long do you think your mind can withstand the contradiction? What do you think will happen if you linger there too long? Do you know what happens when a bag tries to go inside itself?”
With the portal closed, Eldred couldn’t enter this room. But Arienne still needed considerable courage in looking out the window. The dragon’s movements were awkward and slow. Eldred was still fighting the dragon from within.
Around her, Arienne felt a pressure like the one she had in Lysandros’s presence. The room was collapsing again. The doorframe creaked loudly as it leaned into an improbable angle. Eldred was doing the exact thing Lysandros had done. He was crushing her mind with the immense power he now had at his disposal.
If she didn’t do something now, everything was done for. She would die, and Loran and Arland would be pulverized by the Empire’s gigatherion. Eldred would roam the world in his dragon body. This room was her last bastion. But even that was falling apart.
Eldred shouted, “We must still be connected, I can see you cowering like a rat in that room with the stink of manure! How I long to be rid of you forever. Now that I am free, you have finally learned to fear me! Look outside the window!”
Arienne did as she was told. The window no longer showed the cave but a room of obsidian with a throne made of a hundred white skulls, where Eldred sat. He wore black robes, and on his head a crown made of bone and gold. His eyes were still sunken and his flesh was withered, but he looked more alive than she had ever seen him.
This was a true sorcerer. Fear washed over her like a wave. Trying to ignore it, she looked around the room for anything she might use. A mess of a room collapsing in on itself, but a room she knew intimately by heart. A room where she’d lain in bed on her stomach, drinking warm milk, reading and rereading her books. A room she had cried all night in when she received her decree of entry condemning her to an eternity of serving the Empire.
Something lay on that very bed now. A small bundle, wrapped in bandages.
The sack on her back had felt light. What had happened to the Power generator she had carried? When she saw the bundle on the bed, she knew.
Even smaller than the pillow it lay next to, the bundle was covered in runed bandages. Power generator Tychon. Arienne leaned over the bundle and whispered the name.
“Tychon.”
Outside, an anguished roar was followed by a maniacal laugh. Arienne undid the bandages, revealing the dry corpse of a newborn inside. This was the child Eldred had kidnapped and Lysandros had murdered to be made into a Power generator. Next to the baby lay Arienne’s decree of entry to the Imperial Academy.
She undid the last of the bandages. In an instant, the shriveled corpse became a plump baby with bright, blinking eyes. The bandages became a blue blanket that swaddled the baby. It had white flowers embroidered on it. The baby was quiet as if asleep, but he was audibly breathing. Who had his mother been? There had been no mention of her in The Sorcerer of Mersia. Violet lights swam deep within the baby’s eyes.
A tiny hand protruded from the blanket. Arienne placed her index finger in its grasp. Something flowed into her, a shock that went all the way to the top of her head. The room filled with violet light.
Blue fire hit the window. Even if it was dragonfire, nothing on the outside could harm this room. But this pressure, applied to Arienne’s mind by Eldred in the body of the dragon, even more powerful than Lysandros, would crush the room soon enough, if the contradiction of her body being inside her own mind did not obliterate her first.
Arienne finally understood what she needed to do.
She picked up the baby, who cuddled against her as he would to his mother.
Holding the baby in her arms, she stepped out of the room.
The cave was full of scratches and burnt rocks, casualties from the turmoil inside the dragon. The sulfuric fumes made breathing difficult. In Arienne’s arms was the lead sarcophagus containing Tychon.
The dragon turned its many eyes to her. “Wait only a moment longer, Arienne. Soon, it will be your turn.”
The dragon whipped its neck, slamming its head against the wall. It stumbled but regained its balance. A pained roar. Eldred’s laughter. The dragon seemed to have lost control of its body completely.
“Now we shall see the end! You have talent. But what use is talent that I can’t control? You should have been more obedient.”
The dragon turned its head toward her. Its jaws opened wide. Down its cave-like throat glowed a hot blue flame.
Arienne glanced once more inside the room in her mind. It was a complete mess. Her mother would have scolded her had she left it like that as a child. But there was no way, now, that she could explain why the room was in such a state, not in a way that her mother would understand.
Arienne stared at the fire in the dragon’s throat.
“Eldred! Remember my room? The room you were trapped in when you were bound by your bandages?”
Even the dragon’s scoff was hot enough for her to barely withstand.
“Do you think I would miss that hole of a room that stinks of cow dung?”
“On the contrary. I’m going to stop missing it myself.”
“You’ll miss nothing when you’re dead.” The dragon opened its mouth once more. What would come out of it was death. Or destiny.
Arienne closed her eyes. Tychon, who had been a baby in a swaddling blanket in her mind, was again a corpse in a lead sarcophagus when she walked out. But she could still feel the clasp of his small hand on her finger, and the Power that coursed to her through the connection made in her mind’s room. It bypassed the lead as if there were nothing between her and Tychon. Her professors at the Academy had said that a sorcerer could not draw Power from a generator. The human body was not designed for it. How it was now possible for her, Arienne didn’t know. But there was an undeniable feeling of symmetry between them. She had never felt so right.
She recalled Eldred’s room, the one he had shown her outside her window. His black regalia, his crown of bone and gold, the throne of skulls, the smooth obsidian walls.
And upon the image of Eldred’s throne room, she overlaid her own collapsing room, as she had done at the tower to kill the inquisitors, and at the abandoned inn to bury Lysandros. She stretched out her left hand, reciting an incantation she had never spoken before.
Her mind’s room, the one that might still exist on the second floor of her childhood home, started to pulse with her heartbeat. Eldred’s surprised shout escaped the lips of the dragon.
“This is… this…”
He shouted something, an incantation, a scream, Arienne couldn’t tell. Her room twisted violently, warping everything inside it, the books, the bed, the patchwork dolls, the shelf her mother made, her decree of entry.
Arienne was destroying the last good memory of her childhood. Just as a bag could not enter itself, a room could not exit itself. It was flipping inside out. But there was no outside for this room of the mind. The room began to compress itself, to collapse inside her. And at the same time, the room Eldred had made in the dragon’s mind, the skulls and obsidian and all, collapsed with it. The Power flowing from Tychon to Arienne to Eldred’s destruction made her feel as if the very blood in her veins were on fire.
Eldred screamed. It was not the dragon’s voice but the insidious voice she knew from inside her own head. The screams did not last long. The dragon collapsed in an avalanche of red and black. Its wings covered the floor like falling twilight.
Her mind’s room was now completely inside out. Somethingness had entered nothingness. She retched a bit, but nothing came up. There was, however, the feeling that a heavy thing had finally left her. Arienne stroked the lead sarcophagus in her embrace.
“Lovely boy. I’ll make you a new room soon. Just you wait.”
The fallen dragon lay on the ground as it came back to itself. Its eight eyes were open, and the violet aura around them had disappeared. One of the eyes reminded her of Loran.
Arienne straightened her back. Something within her had changed. She was no longer afraid of the dragon. Was it because she had defeated Eldred, or because she had destroyed so much of her own past when she collapsed the room? She couldn’t be sure. Arienne walked up to the dragon, with no hesitation or fear.