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

“How much longer will he be out of the city?”

“Hopefully long enough so that we can finish this.”

“There is no ‘hopefully.’” The voices were both so familiar, but I couldn’t move around the dragon to make anything out.

Whatever was happening would take place soon.

Maybe that was why I felt the dragon pull so strongly today.

It had to have been here before though.

“We will succeed.”

“The other attempt did not.”

Somebody grunted. “The other attempt was foolish. Poorly planned. This, on the other hand, is exactly what I told you it would be. I didn’t spend all my time there to come back empty-handed.”

“If it succeeds, you will be given this territory to oversee.”

The voices became more distant, and I moved, trying to slip around so that I could see where they were going and what they had done, but I still couldn’t make anything out. Just the steady murmuring of their voices. The door closed, sealing me inside with the dragon.

They were talking about draining the dragon.

I moved to the dragon’s side and realized there were chains around his ankles. The dragon moved, following me.

“I’ll help you,” I said. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I want to help.”

The dragon leaned toward me, and I could feel the heat radiating off of him, but I didn’t know if he understood what I was saying.

There was something here that allowed them to store the power of the dragon.

And they were going to use that to attack the kingdom.

More than that—whoever had come here obviously was comfortable with the Academy. They didn’t fear coming through the halls.

If power flowed from the dragons, and if somehow these two were siphoning that power off, doing something to harm the dragon, then maybe I could interrupt it.

I closed my eyes, focusing on where I had felt that strange pause in the flow.

I stayed with the energy, feeling the way that it flowed out from me, the connection it formed, and recognized there was some aspect of it I could hold. I could feel that steady simmering energy—how it was going out from me, working away and then back to the dragon. The strange hiccup was there.

Where though?

I followed that power, letting the energy flow through me. It was somewhere in the room. Drawing upon the green dragon, I sent more power flowing through me, and suppressed it down deep, using it to create a band of light that I spread out from me, sweeping around the room in a coil to illuminate everything.

I could feel something.

I headed toward it.

It looked like a small metallic vase with strange writing along its sides. I had seen something like that before, but where? The same writing had been on the item Joran had carried with him.

Could they have been involved?

No. I couldn’t believe Joran and his father would have been involved in this.

But who was?

Still, I had less and less doubt that the Djarn were involved now. I had no idea why. They had never made an attempt on the kingdom before, at least as far as I knew. If only Joran and his father were still here, I would have someone to ask.

Maybe Donathar.

I took a deep breath, frowning.

Could he be involved?

He had spent time with the Djarn.

And there was something else. Something that struck me as uncomfortably familiar.

I had seen a vase like this before.

Could Jerith actually be involved?

20

The vase seemed to hold on to the dragon energy, sequestering it away from the dragon, and diminishing it in some manner. It had to be destroyed. If I could do that, I believed that I could release the dragon's power, and if so, then perhaps I could help this dragon.

Every attempt I made to destroy the vase failed. I tried everything that I could think of, attempting something new each time—lashings of power, looping dragon energy around it and constricting it, attempting weave after weave in order to find some way to overwhelm it—but I continued to fail.

Regardless of what I did, the metallic vase held more power. It was almost overwhelming—the way it flowed into the metal was more than I could hold—and though I attempted to withdraw power, I found I couldn’t stop the metallic vase from holding on to it. Which meant that I wouldn’t be able to prevent it from continuing to drain the dragon.

That was what it did. As I crouched down next to the dragon, next to the metallic vase, I could feel the flow. It reminded me of the way I felt the connection to the dragons as it flowed through me, but rather than some part of me holding on to that energy, the way I did when I looped power through me, this power flowed through the metallic vase and trickled back to the dragon, but the majority of it remained contained.

That trickle meant the dragon was drained of any additional power. Over time, more and more of it would stay within the vase, and less would remain within the dragon. I attempted to call even more power into me, away from the vase, but it didn’t work; during my attempt, I could feel the power gradually replenish within the vase.

This truly did store the power of the dragons.

I sat in front of the vase, holding on to it, feeling the power flow through it. Here I had thought to defend the Djarn, but there was no doubt in my mind this was Djarn writing. I had seen it before. It just didn’t fit with what I knew of them. Why would the Djarn want to steal dragon power?

The answer came to me easily. The Djarn wanted to defend themselves against the might of the kingdom.

More than that, why wouldn’t they take this risk to avoid the same fate as the Vard?

I didn’t think I could leave the vase here. I didn’t want to run the risk of Jerith and whoever was with him finding it again. That had to have been Jerith whose voice I’d