The Quiet Light (Sage’s Sanctuary #1)

Chapter 1

I have been drifting alone for a long time.

I don’t actually know how long it’s been since I put myself into this magical stasis to create the dampening field over Sanctuary Isle that prevents the priesthood from working magic against our people.

They call this region the Quiet.

In this meditative state, I can’t see the seasons pass; can only feel the presence and absence of those with powerful magic as they come and go.

And, in one case, speak.

But it’s been a long time since the dragon has spoken to me.

Other than the dragon—and only the one has ever visited—no one besides a sage, the most powerful magic users in the world, can even get close enough to approach Celestial Sanctuary Temple. And if they do, the magic of the Quiet suppresses their power.

Even animals sense the unnaturalness and stay away from the temple.

And nothing here changes.

I wonder sometimes if anything changed when I put this into motion.

The dragon used to tell me that it mattered. But it’s been a long time since he told me what the world is like now.

I wonder if he thinks I’ll give up and die if I know it’s useless.

I wonder if it is worth holding, after all this time.

Maybe I’ve done enough.

Maybe I mattered once, but not anymore.

Then suddenly, as if my roaming thoughts summoned him, I feel the dragon’s magic.

I always sense him sooner than anyone else, even the sages.

Perhaps it’s because he’s a dragon, but before I created the Quiet I’d met—and killed—other dragons.

And this dragon, I recognized the first moment I laid eyes on him, before I hatched this plan.

Before our eyes met, I knew what he was, and I could see he knew that I knew.

And then he turned away from me, like I couldn’t do anything, wasn’t worth anything.

I was unreasonably hurt, considering that I didn’t know him, that we were supposed to be enemies—

And that I agreed.

That moment changed something for me. Gave me the clarity I needed to turn away from the path I was on, which in turn gave me the power to create the Quiet.

I recognize the feel of the dragon’s magic in my current meditative state, even though I’ve never seen him since.

I’m walled into a chamber in the temple. I can’t see anyone.

But I can feel his approach now.

He’s moving fast.

Only then do I realize that I can feel more people, too—many more people than have tried to come here in a long time.

They slow as the power of the dampening aura hits them but don’t stop, their magic fading the closer they get.

But that I can feel it at all at this distance means they are priests working in unison, making a concerted effort to combat the effects of the Quiet—to pursue him?

Is the dragon being hunted?

In some ways, dragons and sages are not so different. We’re both born powerful, and everyone wants our power for themselves.

The difference is that sages have been made to serve others and spend our power, whereas dragons only serve themselves and hoard their power—

And the priesthood will always hunt them for that alone: for the raw magical power contained in their scales.

For priests to pursue the dragon this far into the Quiet, for him to be fleeing rather than fighting...

I don’t feel much in my current state. I can’t, not without breaking the magic that maintains the Quiet.

But a sense of foreboding creeps into my still bones.

The dragon stops outside the temple, because of course not even he can enter.

By the shape of the magic I sense, he’s in human form—the memory of his brilliant blue hair and icy eyes against his alabaster skin flashes through my mind, and I wonder if he still looks like that.

I’m wondering a lot, today.

The sense of his magic is also fainter than I’ve felt it in... No, it’s never been this low, not in my memory.

That’s why he’s running. He can’t fight the priests in this state.

If they make it up to the temple, even with them weakened, he still won’t be able to fight all of them, which he must realize.

It crashes through me at once with crystal clarity:

The dragon came here to die.

At the hands of priests.

And all at once, my long-banked wrath—my strength, my heart—crashes through me.

This dragon, intentionally or not, opened my mind, enabling me to save people when the priests of my time would have had me murder them en masse for their own gain.

This dragon has been the one constant in all the time I’ve been drifting, when I gave him nothing at all.

I did not hold the Quiet this long only for him to die for it.

Maybe I don’t matter anymore. Maybe I never did.

But maybe I can do one last thing with my life.

In this magical stasis, my body doesn’t move, which makes doing much harder.

But wrath is powerful, especially when I can see the situation with perfect clarity:

The priests cannot have this dragon.

And I can stop them.

The mental kata that I’ve turned into a meditation is a hard habit to break, the habit of years.

And it takes more will to break habits than to start them.

But I feel my power flaring, know that I will be glowing the same magenta as my eyes if there were anyone here to see as I gather my wrath, my will, and move.

That’s all it takes: Movement.

Simple; powerful.

I clench a fist.

And the Quiet shatters.

The dampening field has always felt in my mind like a miasma, a powerful magical aura unfurling from me at the center out into a sphere.

Now, it feels like a glass globe that has splintered into a million shards, a breaking, before the magic begins to dissipate into the air.

I expected to feel a backlash from releasing the most powerful working I—or possibly any single magic user, ever—have created.

Instead I just feel tired.

Like that was all I had left in me.

I should move. Get off this stone floor where I have lain for so long.

But that one movement took so much out of me, my burst of wrath after years of calm drifting spent.

Then I remember the dragon, low in power and facing a cohort of priests.

And I try.

My senses are scrambled—I’ve gotten used to sensing magic across the entire tidal island, which is connected to the mainland of the Empire of Kameya by only a strip of land that is most often underwater. The different scope is an adjustment—but just as I manage to sit up, I hear pounding footsteps.

They stop right on the other side of the stone before me.

Where, once upon a time, priests walled me in, to pressure me into doing what they wanted.

That had not gone well for them.

No priests remain here, so now I can break the wall and let myself out.

Just as soon as I can move again.

But then a hoarse voice asks, “Yora?”

I know this voice. I know this magic, low as it is.

The dragon.

He doesn’t sound lost like I feel; he sounds desperate.

I swallow convulsively, trying to wet my throat. Cough. Try again. “I’m here.”

The dragon sucks in a breath in astonishment.

Then he says firmly, “I’m taking down this wall. Can you back away?”

“Not quickly. But you don’t have to.”

“Yes,” the dragon says, “I do.”

I open my mouth to argue—he’s already so low in magic, and he’s long since done enough, my one anchor to the world outside—but then the stone—the stone—begins to heat.

If the fire burns hot enough, anything can burn.

Fortunately the walls that surround me are not ones that support the temple. The ancient grout melts first, and the hot stones start falling away as the dragon pushes his way inside.

And I see him, for the first time since that day our eyes met across a crowd.

As beautiful as ever.

He looks just the same—the same slight build, the same wild blue hair, the flawless pale skin that practically glows.

Those icy eyes, though—

This time, he’s looking on me with something like wonder when he says, “You’re alive.”

I blink. “You knew that. You talked to me.”

“I was never sure if you could hear,” he says quietly, his voice at odds with his stare, which is... hopeful? Desperate? No:

Hungry.

It takes me aback, because he turned away from me all those years ago. What could he possibly want from me now?

“And it is still different,” the dragon says, “to have believed something for five hundred years, and to finally see proof.”

My eyes widen, my train of thought fracturing. “Five hundred?”

I knew I wasn’t fully aware of the passage of time, but...

I’m five hundred years old.

What must the world look like now? How much has changed—

And how much hasn’t?

How much has been in stasis like me?

The dragon opens his mouth, but then a shadow crosses his expression. “I don’t have time to explain,” he says like it physically pains him. “There are priests coming for me—”

“I know. That’s why I opened the temple. You needed sanctuary—”

Now he looks stricken. “For me?”

I feel slow and stupid. This dragon and I have never actually met, I realize, and what felt so obvious to me in my trance seems somehow ridiculous faced with an actual person. But—

“They can’t have you,” I tell him.

The dragon stares at me.

And then arrives at a decision.

“No,” he says. “They can’t have you.”

He takes off a pack, puts it in front of me.

“I wish we had more time,” he says gruffly, “but this will get you started.” The dragon struggles for a moment and finally says softly, “Be well.”

And then he’s gone, back down the hall of the temple, his footsteps retreating fast.

I’m so stunned by the suddenness that it takes me a minute to react.

In my defense, it has apparently been five hundred years since I reacted to anything, so maybe I can be forgiven for a delayed reaction time, but on the other hand I don’t have time for it.

Gods damn it. He really thinks he needs to defend me from the priests, and now he’s still going to get himself killed.

And what was that look all about, then?!

I haven’t had to make decisions in—literally an age, apparently—let alone quick ones.

But wrath, my old friend, is always with me.

The dragon was supposed to shelter here, damn it all. Use the temple architecture to lay ambushes to take the priests on one at a time, separated and weakened.