The Betrayed Dragon (Cycle of Dragons Book 2), Dan Michaelson [best books to read all time .txt] 📗

sleep habits. Some were nocturnal, and would be much more active flying and hunting at night, while other dragons were far busier during the daytime. It wasn’t always consistent, either. I had seen that some of the dragons present in the pens during the daytime were not always the same dragons there later.

I could feel the green dragon in the pen. He slept much of the time. From what I’d learned, smaller dragons were very active for short spurts of time, but then they would eat and sleep. I didn’t know if their activity was tied to the magic they drew upon or not, but considering how much energy I’d connected to from that dragon recently, I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps I’d called upon more of his power than I should have.

I opened myself up to the energy, feeling that power. It was there, and it flowed through the dragon and into me.

It was a vague and faint sense, but I recognized it, and found that I could call it to myself much more easily than I had been able to even yesterday morning. I let that power course through me, starting with the heat in my own core, working through my arms and cycling around.

“Better,” a voice said behind me.

I looked over my shoulder, careful not to release my hands from the bars where the power cycled for fear of unleashing power accidentally. Thomas was there, watching me. He had a deep frown on his face, and there was a flash of darkness in his eyes, something that left me troubled and more than a little unsettled. I wondered if he was disappointed in what I had done.

“You must’ve been practicing.”

“You told me to,” I said.

“I did.” He smiled slightly. “Though I must admit I wasn’t expecting you to have done it. It has been my experience that very few devote themselves to their studies the way they should.”

Turning back to the bars of the dragon pen, I ran my hands along them, feeling the heat within the iron. They were thick enough that I couldn’t close my fist around them entirely, solid enough that they would give off the appearance of protection, though in reality they did very little.

“I needed to know whether I could do it,” I said.

“Have you proven it to yourself?”

I thought about what happened with Brandel the night before. “I’ve proven I can call power to me. Whether or not I do it with the measure of control I need is a different matter.”

“Everybody has to start somewhere,” Thomas said. He was dressed in a heavy black cloak. I realized that there were what appeared to be dragon scales worked into the cloak, and it seemed to ripple as he moved, catching only the faintest hint of the wind. The king’s emblem was marked on his left chest. The hood hung back behind him.

“Where did you start?” I asked.

Thomas glanced over to me, joining me at the dragon pen, holding his hands up against the bars, similar to how I stood. “I started where you are, at least in a certain sense,” he said. “When I first came here, I could not call upon any more power than others. I wanted to learn to connect to the dragons, but I feared for a long time I would be nothing more than a dragon rider.”

I grunted. “I’m not so sure that’s all bad.”

Thomas nodded. In the darkness, I couldn’t make out much about his expression, though I could feel the heat beginning to build from him as he reached through his connection to one of the dragons inside the pen. I wondered which one he connected to, and whether or not I could feel that.

“Not all bad,” he said. “In fact, there are times when riding is superior to anything else I have done.” He took a deep breath, and he glanced over to me. “Learning to access the connection is the first piece. What I would like for you to do is to begin to focus that power.”

“Isn’t that what you told me not to do yesterday?”

He looked over, grinning. “Perhaps I did. But at the time, I would have said you weren’t ready.”

“What makes you think I’m ready today when I wasn’t yesterday?”

“I can feel what you have done,” he said and chuckled. “Much like I could feel yesterday how you were not ready. Perhaps you will surprise me and develop fine control.”

“What sort of fine control would you have me demonstrate?” I wondered if perhaps it would be the same as what I had done against Brandel.

“Turn to me,” he said.

I released the bars, turning to him, and stared for a moment. I focused on my breathing, opening myself up to the dragon. I used the green dragon, mostly because he was the easiest for my connection to reach, though I didn’t know if that was all that I needed to draw upon.

“What do you feel when you draw that power through you?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“When you are calling upon the power of the dragons, what is it that you feel?”

I shrugged, shaking my head. “I don’t know. I feel the torrent of power as it flows through me.”

That seemed about as good a description as any. I could feel that energy as it worked through me, rolling through the entirety of my being. Though I could feel it, I could also tell there was some other aspect to it I needed to control. When I had dealt with Brandel, I’d seen what happened when I released my connection, letting power explode from me.

“A torrent of power is an interesting description,” Thomas said. “Most would call it a trickle.”

That was the way he had described it when he had called that power yesterday, but when I felt the power of the dragons rolling through me, it was not a trickle at all. It was something much more. Considerable energy raced through me, forcing me to react to it.