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 inThe 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 soright.
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.
