44. Syphon
C onfused, Aeden rushed forward and dropped to his knees. All that remained of Nyra’s eggshell was a pile of ash. When he ran his hands through it, it was granular like sand but softer, leaving a dark grey soot on his hands.
“I didn’t know eggshells did that,” Harrison said, taking a closer look himself.
“They don’t.” Aeden continued to inspect it.
The egg had completely disintegrated. It was ground down into nothing more than a fine dust. Aeden scooped a handful and dropped it into his satchel before trawling his hands through the ash.
It was warm to the touch as he continued searching until he finally uncovered what they were looking for: a thick shard of the shell.
The shard was heavy, and the inside had a porous feel to it, with what looked like hundreds of tiny holes. The outside of the shell had no markings, or at least none that Aeden could see in this light .
Not wanting to waste any time, he placed it into his satchel before searching through the ash pile again.
Unable to find any more of the eggshell, Aeden stood up. “This is all we’re going to find. Let’s head back to the others.”
“Couldn’t agree more, let’s get out of here.” Harrison turned to leave while Aeden dusted his hands off. They were still grey and charcoaled as if he had been tending to a fire.
As he stepped through the barrier, the tingling sensation washed over the whole of Aeden’s body like he had just walked through a waterfall. His skin prickled. It wasn’t a comfortable feeling.
“ What was that? ” Nyra said, her voice heightened.
“ Relax, we just left the cave. I think there was some kind of magic barrier at the entrance .”
Nyra didn’t respond for a few seconds. “ No, not that. I can feel something else, something that I don’t like. Aeden, get out of there .”
The cold chattering of teeth reached out from the thick mist, followed by a hollow groaning, gasping breath.
“ RUN! ” Nyra roared.
“What the fuck was that!” Harrison shouted.
Aeden didn’t have time to explain, but he knew exactly what it was.
“Run, now!” Aeden said as the gasping sound grew closer and closer.
He didn’t have time to think about anything other than getting away as fast as they could.
He set off at a sprint, the thick mist still wrapping around them and making it next to impossible to see anything.
He could see Harrison running just ahead of him.
“Where are you?” Aeden called out. “Can you hear me?”
“Over here!” Serene shouted .
“Keep making noise,” Aeden said.
“What’s going on?” Serene asked.
“Just do what he fucking says!” Harrison snapped.
Vivienne and Serene started making noise, enough to draw any other creatures that might be in the forest out, but at this moment, Aeden didn’t care; they just needed to get some distance.
The two of them hurtled through the mist, all the while the creature’s gasping breath drawing closer and closer. A cold sensation ran over Aeden as if it was in touching distance. He didn’t want to glance back, he didn’t want to see how close it was to them.
“Over here,” Harrison said. He rushed to the embankment, grabbed hold of his rope, and climbed as fast as he could. Aeden was right behind him, furiously reaching out for his own rope and making the steep ascent.
The last time he had seen the creature, he remembered it gliding through the air. Would it be able to do the same up the embankment? Aeden assumed as much as the rope tore at his hands. His legs burned, and he was breathing heavily as he and Harrison climbed up.
When they cleared the mist, Serene and Vivienne’s concerned expressions greeted them both, which only got worse once they saw Aeden and Harrison frantically scrambling to clear the mist.
Instinctively they grabbed the ropes, Serene on Harrison’s and Vivienne on Aeden’s, and started pulling. It was the burst of energy they needed to make the climb quicker.
An ear-splitting screech came from within the mist, agonising and unrelenting .
“What the hell did you find?” Vivienne said, grimacing as she pulled on Aeden’s rope.
Aeden looked over his shoulder to see the creature shooting out of the mist, arms stretched out in desperation.
It glided over the surface of the embankment, floating towards them at speed, its long, bedraggled cloak fluttering as if caught by a gust of wind.
Its face was shrouded in shadow as it flew up towards them faster than the two of them were climbing.
“Climb faster!” Serene cried out, pulling at Harrison’s rope. The creature was closing the distance fast.
“ Aeden! ” Nyra cried out through the Weave. “ AEDEN! ”
Aeden spun around, sensing that the creature was almost upon him. With one arm clinging to the rope, he turned to face it as it launched itself through the air at him.
“ AEDEN! ” Nyra’s voice echoed in his mind as the whole world around him vanished into darkness.
He was in the Weave, but where tendrils of lights previously moved slowly, these ones moved far faster, reaching out to Aeden and wrapping around his legs before creeping up his body.
His skin felt energised as they touched him.
The fear, the anxiety, it all faded in an instant as Aeden’s body glowed with a bright, ethereal white light.
His eyes snapped open as the creature drew face to face with him. There was just darkness in the hood, no face, no features as it let out an ear-splitting screech.
Aeden raised a hand up instinctively as the same charge he felt through the Weave coursed up his body, channelling into his free hand.
A blast of light erupted from his palm and the creature screamed again as Aeden instinctively grabbed hold of its arm.
It was like grabbing empty clothing as his hands wrapped around it.
Simmering heat and smoke came from Aeden’s hands as the creature wailed and flailed about.
Aeden held firm as tendrils of white magic cracked like veins on a volcano, growing brighter and brighter until the creature slowly disintegrated into a cloud of ash, its pained gasps vanishing as its ashen body dispersed with the wind.
Aeden dangled from the rope as the magic he had drawn on crackled lightly all over his body until it slowly faded. He panted, his heart still in his mouth. He had no idea how he had drawn on that magic.
“What was that?” Harrison said as he clambered to the top of the embankment. He reached up a hand, which Serene grabbed hold of to pull him over the side.
“I don’t know,” Aeden said. He reached out to Nyra through the Weave. “ Nyra, what was that? ”
“ I don’t know what happened. What happened to you? Are you okay? ” she asked.
“I am now, I just used magic on whatever it was that attacked us in the forest. It came back. But it’s gone now, the magic I used, it turned it to ash.”
“ I felt it too. You drew on it through our Weave. How did you do that? ”
“ I don’t know ,” Aeden said as he pulled himself to the top. His hands were trembling, and a sudden wave of exhaustion came over him.
“That thing tried to kill us!” Harrison said, his face a ghostly shade of white, all colour drained from him. “Why would that be in the forest?” The questions came thick and fast.
“That’s not the first time I’ve seen that,” Aeden said as he sought his breath. He was doubled over, his lungs aching from the run, and he was struggling to concentrate. “Nyra fought it off when we were leaving the forest after she hatched. I’m sure I told you.”
“I thought you were hallucinating!” Harrison said. “What the fuck was that thing?”
“I don’t know.” Aeden’s head was pounding as a headache set in. He rubbed the side of his temple, which only served to dull the pain slightly.
“That thing was terrifying.” Serene stepped in front of Aeden, placing her hands on his arms and looking him in the face through her large, ice-blue eyes. “Are you okay? I mean, you don’t look too good.”
“Well, we did just nearly get eaten by a monster,” Harrison said. He looked over the edge of the embankment, then looked around him. “Do you think there are any more?”
Vivienne joined Harrison looking over at the thick mist below them. “Who knows,” she said, “but let’s not wait around to find out. Did you get what you were looking for?”
Aeden nodded, his eyes starting to water as, for a few seconds, he struggled to process words to form a response. “I got a section of Nyra’s egg, but I don’t know if it will be much use. Most of it had turned to ash. Come on, let’s head back, I’ll explain on the way back.”
“Explain what it looked like once more?” Lyric said as Aeden and Harrison finished telling him about what had happened. The hatchery was noisier now, with four new hatchlings in the whelping pen playing and crying out for food and attention.
When they had entered, Nyra was pacing around her pen, her relief wrapping around Aeden through the Weave. It had brought a sense of calmness to Aeden, just simply being around her, and he needed that, especially with everything going on.
“It was like a ghost, the way it glided through the air. It had this really long cloak that was all torn, with a hood that covered its face. It didn’t have a face, just a black void of nothingness sunk into its hood.
” Harrison was animated as he explained, waving his arms around as he did his best impression of the creature.
Aeden was sitting on a step in front of Nyra’s pen. He needed to; he felt like he had done two days’ full training without any sleep. His eyelids were heavy, and he found the occasional blink getting longer and longer.
Serene and Nyra were by the whelping pen, and Serene was cooing over the newly hatched Aer-Kin as Vivienne stood with her arms folded.
“Do you know what it is?” Aeden asked after another long blink. He just wanted his bed.
“Kind of, but I can’t confirm without seeing it.” Lyric seemed off, like he didn’t fully believe what had happened to them all. He shuffled around awkwardly and played with his thick beard.
“What is it?” Aeden asked. “Is something wrong?”
“It’s just, I think I know what it was, but that itself doesn’t seem right.”
“How so?” Harrison said. He had moved to the remaining unhatched eggs and was inspecting them.
Lyric carried over a large bucket filled with sheep’s legs, which he tossed into the whelping pen.
He didn’t coo at them like he usually would, and his demeanour seemed off.
“I think what you saw was a syphon, but I’ve never heard of anyone seeing one.
I thought they were just a fairy tale.” He corrected himself and shook his head. “No, they are a fairy tale.”
“A syphon?” Serene’s voiced rose. “Like harbingers-of-death-syphons? My mother used to tell me stories about them when I was little. I didn’t realise that was what that was,” she said, “I was always told they had a skeleton frame, with rotten flesh, muscle, and sinew attached. As far as what we could see, this thing didn’t have a body, or a body that looked physical. It was more spectral.”
“Aye, that’s the version I know of, but the noise it was making, the way it glided over the terrain as it chased you, everything you’ve described is pointing towards a syphon, especially when you count that they feed on Aer-Kin eggs and the raw, untapped power inside of them.
” His attention returned to Aeden. “Did you say you managed to find Nyra’s egg? ”
Aeden nodded, reaching into the satchel to grab the last remnants of her shell. “I did.” He looked over the shell in his hand. It was hard to think this was where Nyra had come from. “So, syphons feed on Aer-Kin eggs?”
“Or so the stories say,” Lyric said. “They feed off the connection to the Weave, to maintain their own existence.”
“So when it attacked me the first time, it was after Nyra, not me?” Aeden asked. That didn’t entirely make sense, as it had clearly just attacked him again.
“Maybe it was drawn to your Weave. You do share it with Nyra,” Vivienne said.
“What about my magic?” Aeden asked. “I summoned some kind of power, and it completely disintegrated it.”
“Well, we’ve established that you harbour healing powers.
Although untapped and raw, it’s still energy drawn from the Weave,” Lyric said.
He was mumbling more like he was thinking out loud.
He walked towards Aeden and looked over the egg fragment.
“Fascinating,” he said, “I’ve never seen anything like this. ”
“Lyric, I have healing magic, how could my powers hurt something?”
“Because it was a syphon,” Vivienne said. “They’re said to serve death themself.”
“And your magic is the opposite,” Serene added. “Well, kind of. If death is the ending of life, and your magic can save life by preventing death, maybe there’s something there that supercharged your magic.”
“That is a sound theory, Serene, but we have no way of proving that, as syphons are just a story. I suppose if you’re ever in that situation again, that will be the only way to test it.”
“I’m not going anywhere near that forest again,” Aeden said. “I’ve no reason to.”
“Unless we’re told to by the academy,” Harrison said. “What if Master Storme has us doing an exercise in there?”
“Then we will cross that bridge when we get to it,” Aeden said.
“Listen, you’ll need rest after tapping into your magic again,” Lyric said, turning to Aeden.
“It’s something that we need to keep an eye on, as you and Nyra’s Weave is clearly very powerful.
Let me analyse this egg and do some more research.
There’s a lot to be unlocked, not just from the pattern but also the shell itself.
If I find anything, I’ll ask Nyra to contact you.
But in the meantime, I have to get her ready for tomorrow. ”
Aeden was confused by Lyric’s statement. “Why? What’s happening tomorrow? ”
Lyric let out a huff of air, shook his head, and pinched the bridge of his nose with his thick fingers, the crinkle between his eyebrows deepening. “How in the blazes you’ve survived this long at the academy is beyond me. Have you looked at your schedule?”
Aeden shook his head. “I’ve been a little busy in case you hadn’t noticed. There’s kind of been a lot going on.”
Lyric shook his head again, then headed to his desk and placed down Nyra’s shell before picking up a piece of parchment.
“You best keep track of your schedule, Aeden, especially with the Sable twins being here.” He looked over the parchment.
“Yes, it says so right here. Tomorrow is your first lesson with Nyra.”