A Father's Dream (The Dark Prism Book 1) Page 9

  See? I’m popular! People like me.

  Still, by the time he reached his room, he had mentally listed every true friend he had.

  It had only taken one hand.

  A week had passed since he and Aleric had learned they were working on the same research project for months on end, and things had mostly returned to normal, though there was no talk between them of combining their work. Aleric had made good on his threats and dropped his Prisms research entirely for the moment, saying that he didn’t want to start a new project until he had a truly groundbreaking idea. Until then, he was determined to focus on his work with Master Sark, which was still earning him a lot of regional fame.

  Asher had decided that the time had come to make some changes in his personality, since his current track wasn’t getting him the results he wanted. Instead of being loud and sarcastic and touting his own brilliance, he decided to ignore most of the Masters (and his father) entirely, as though they were beneath his notice. He answered their questions as directly and tersely as possible when asked, and then went about his business. So far it was working reasonably well, though he thought his face might soon go numb from lack of changing facial expressions.

  At least no one really bothers me anymore.

  A knock on the door interrupted his thoughts, and Asher looked up from the desk in his room to turn to Aleric, who was sitting up in bed.

  “Did you invite someone over and forget to tell me?” The two of them had been roommates for years, starting back when there were four to a room and remaining roommates even into their mastery-year, when they got bigger quarters and only had to bunk two to a room.

  “No, I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  Asher had no idea what his friend was doing sitting in bed, because he didn’t have any notes or homework in front of him, nor was he trying to go to sleep. As far as Asher could tell, Aleric had been sitting upright, staring off into space and contemplating his own thoughts for the last hour or so.

  He has seemed distracted lately…

  Asher got up to answer the door, and was pleasantly surprised to find Maralynn on the other side.

  “Mara!” he greeted her warmly, a smile tugging at his features reflexively.

  “Hi, Asher.” She poked her head in the door and added, “Hi, Aleric…”

  “Maralynn,” Aleric waved without changing position, returning to his musings now that the identity of their visitor was known.

  “What brings you to our humble abode?” Asher drew her attention back to him, wishing he had combed his hair or freshened his breath or something.

  Mara looked confused when she asked, “Did you forget about our challenge arena tonight? We had a planning meeting an hour ago, but you didn’t show, and now we’ve got to get to the arena…”

  Asher grimaced and said, “Ouch, is that tonight?” He mentally scolded himself for missing the chance to spend an hour in Mara’s company. “Sorry about that, I completely forgot. Lead the way.”

  He motioned for her to precede him and she did, bringing them out into the hallway and back towards the main stairwell that would take them to the ground floor.

  “Did I miss anything illuminating in the planning meeting?” he asked, determined to do well for her in this arena challenge so that they could score well, even if it meant being nice to Michael Warren.

  “Not really,” she admitted. “It was more of the same: Tricia trying to speculate on what they’ll throw at us this time and what we should do to deal with it, while I spaced out and Michael sat around looking nervous.”

  Asher snorted in amusement and said, “Michael always looks nervous, probably because he knows there’s about a ninety-percent chance of him getting killed in whatever arena we go into.”

  Maralynn sighed and said, “Yes, I wish the Masters hadn’t saddled our group with him this year, but I suppose they had to give us some kind of disadvantage as a counter to you.”

  “What do you mean?” Asher looked down at her as they exited the castle and began their trek across the back lawns to the translocation circle.

  “Well you’re obviously super powerful, so any team with you on it has an unfair advantage,” she explained pragmatically. “So they had to give us Michael to slow us down a little. I don’t blame you for it at all—you’re definitely worth the trade-off!—it’s just frustrating.”

  Asher felt his insides inflating rapidly at the unsolicited praise from her. Having Maralynn tell him that she would willingly endure a team with Michael Warren on, it if it meant being partnered with him, made the last few weeks of unpleasantness worth surviving.

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he smiled warmly down at her. “I’ll do my humble best to help us get top marks for this arena.” He doffed an imaginary top-hat and bowed to her.

  Mara giggled and punched him gently in the arm as they approached the translocation circle, where their teammates were already waiting, along with the six mastery-level students who would perform the translocation.

  “Nice of you to join us,” Tricia greeted him dryly.

  “No problem,” he winked at her, feeling a bit more like his old self.

  Tricia rolled her eyes at him as the translocation took hold, and since arenas weren’t technically real places, it looked as though the world was slowing and blurring around them, making Trish look momentarily wide-eyed and insane. Then the moment was over, and they were in the arena.

  Unsurprisingly, they started out in a wooded area. About half of all arenas began in some sort of forest, given the likelihood of encountering trouble in one in the real world. It also allowed the Masters to throw in surprises, with visibility so limited.

  “Which way?” Asher asked Tricia before anyone could ask him, remembering their discussion when he was feeling down on himself, and determined to be a better friend to her.

  “I see a trail of some sort over that way…so, west.”

  Asher nodded and they made their way over to a barely-visible dirt path that meandered around the trees. They hadn’t gone a dozen feet when Michael screamed, “Ow!”

  The others stopped and asked what was wrong, though it was immediately apparent, judging from the rapidly swelling hives on his neck and face.

  “I got stung by a bee, and I’m allergic!” he looked terrified, his lips beginning to swell alarmingly.

  “Of course you are,” Asher said so softly that only Maralynn could hear, lowering his compounded prisms to look for a useful alignment before his teammate died.

  “I’ve got an elixir for that,” Tricia pulled a phial of dark green liquid from her belt with floating bits of heartsbane in it.

  Good job, Trish, he saluted her mentally, hoping to save his prisms for when the real work began.

  Within a minute or two, Michael was mostly back to normal, and the group continued onward. They followed the dirt path as quickly as safely possible, occasionally pausing long enough to battle a chimaera or a twenty-foot tall gorilla. Asher had them all duck under the canopy of a tree when a thirty-foot long feral dragon flew overhead, because unlike dragonlings, common dragons possessed no magic and no intellect; they were wild, senseless killing machines that he had no desire to fight right now.

  They had only been inside the arena for about ten minutes when they rounded a bend and came to the edge of the forest. His teammates gasped in unison at the sight in front of them, but Asher felt only anger. The red trigger crystal that they were supposed to be seeking was already visible, about a hundred yards away across a wide field, bordered on three sides by the forest. On the fourth side, where they now stood, about a hundred assorted monsters stood between them and victory, all lined up neatly in columns and rows as though waiting for them to make the first move.

  “Are you kidding me?” Asher asked with disgust. He knew the Masters didn’t like him, but what were they thinking pitting the four of them up against countless hordes of monsters?

  They think I don’t try hard enough in here? They think I’m not us
ing my full potential? Asher thought furiously. Fine, I’ll show them the full breadth of my abilities.

  “Asher, I think we’re supposed to—” Tricia was talking somewhere behind him, but he had already spun his prisms into place and charged forward into the slavering masses.

  He incinerated a warg and cast Amplify before the flames could fizzle out, blasting a wall of fire in front of him that washed over the nearest monsters. He used Suspend on himself to leap over a charging rhino with eight horns along its head like spikes, landing behind it and using one of his wands to open a hole in the ground that swallowed the rhino whole.

  He had no idea if his teammates were following or not, or whether Michael Warren had already been killed by another passing bee. For the first time in a very long time, Asher was releasing every ounce of power and ingenuity he had, not holding anything back for anyone, blasting magic out of his Foci so fast that he could actually feel it slowly draining his Source. He hadn’t overexerted himself to the point of Source-fatigue since the I.S.C. finals during his first year at Mizzenwald.

  He laughed out loud as black blood from a cockatrice splashed across his clothing, swapping prisms as the first two were consumed while holding off his foes with his wands and charms. He could occasionally feel the tug of power from his shielding charm that let him know it was blocking magical attacks that he hadn’t spotted in time. As long as it held, he should be okay…

  A group of hyenas fell to his Sear, and the thirty-foot long dragon flew back into view and made its way towards him.

  Bring it, he thought gleefully, compounding his prisms and casting Stop at the monster’s heart. The power required to pull off a spell that was strong enough to kill a dragon made a considerable dent in his remaining Source power, but he was too high on adrenaline and anger to slow down.

  The dragon fell from the sky and crashed to the ground behind him, on top of a cluster of other monsters, which he wouldn’t have to worry about fighting anymore. His left eye traced alignments so rapidly that the speed at which he could twist the prisms with his hand was the limiting factor in his spell-casting. One spell followed another so that he barely had time to think each one in his head as he was aiming.

  Pierce! Incinerate! Shrink, Break, Water, Suspend, Disperse, Align, Freeze!

  The last of his prisms was fully consumed and the unstable remnant burst into gritty dust in front of him, but there were still monsters remaining, so Asher switched to wands until he had used all of them as well. He kept a couple elixirs and powders on him, which rarely got used; he activated those now, blowing up three wargs and a yeti.

  A lone lynx attacked him as the smoke cleared, and Asher was now weaponless and exhausted, but still determined not to give up until he was incapacitated or killed. He stepped out of the way as the feral cat lunged past him, jumping on its back and flattening it against the ground, taking care to avoid being bitten by its fangs—which were filled with a poison called kalin, illegal to harvest or use in all Nine Lands on the southern continent.

  He wrestled the lynx at length, occasionally getting the upper hand only to be overpowered by the beast. Finally he managed to get a good chokehold on it and broke its neck with his last surge of adrenaline.

  All of the monsters were apparently dead, which was good because his adrenaline was gone and his Source was drained. He forced himself to his feet and was so dizzy he almost fell over. Not wanting to betray weakness, he focused on examining himself for signs of injury, surprised to discover long gashes from claws along the length of both arms. They didn’t hurt until he noticed them, and then they were agonizing.

  He looked back at his teammates, who were all standing where he had left them, staring at him with either amazement or horror; it was too hard to tell with his vision blurring on him.

  “Are you guys coming?” he called out, turning his back on them and walking slowly towards the trigger crystal to allow them time to catch up.

  Thanks for the help, team…

  Maralynn was the first to reach him and said, “That was incredible!”

  She looked nearly as admiring as when she normally stared at Aleric, which was a refreshing change of pace. It was a shame that he was so close to losing consciousness that he couldn’t properly bask in the glow of her praise just now…

  “What in the world were you thinking, fighting all of those monsters by yourself?” Tricia scolded him, coming along his right side and slipping her hand into his for some unknowable reason. “I was sure you were dead.”

  “Well you were welcome to help out at any time…” he responded wearily, about to wrench his hand away from hers when he saw her subtly draw a powder from her belt with her free hand and cast a silent spell. A cool rush of energy surged through their joined hands and into Asher’s body, and he blinked and refocused his eyes as he felt a small amount of energy return to his Source—enough to keep moving, if nothing else.

  Tricia released his hand without a word, not drawing attention to the fact that she had just loaned him some of her own Source power. She alone must have noticed how fatigued he was and she temporarily weakened herself to help him maintain his dignity…

  “I wouldn’t have had to, if you had listened to what I said in the first place,” she stifled a yawn, looking away from him.

  “Which was what?” he raised an eyebrow with interest.

  “Tricia was telling us that she found the path we were supposed to take,” Maralynn added helpfully. “I think it was a mistake for us to come out at the field, and to stop us from getting to the crystal too quickly, they put all those monsters there so that we’d have to go back into the woods and wrap around the long way.”

  That would explain why they didn’t attack until I charged at them…

  Asher wasn’t sure whether he wanted to laugh at his own stupidity or cry from it. Either way, he knew better than to admit the error to anyone else.

  “I didn’t feel like walking through miles of forest when the crystal was in plain sight,” he explained as they took hold of it, translocating back to Mizzenwald. It was probably the quickest arena they had ever completed.

  All signs of injury vanished from his body when they returned to the real world, but the Source-fatigue and the adrenaline burn had all been real, so he still felt like he could sleep for a week.

  “Do the Masters want to see us?” Michael spoke for the first time, addressing the mastery-level students who had translocated them to and from the arena.

  “No,” one of them answered simply, eyeing Asher like he was some kind of freak of nature.

  After all that, they don’t even want to deride me for taking on a horde of monsters single-handedly?

  He was almost disappointed, but on second thought was glad for the reprieve. He needed to get to bed before the energy Tricia loaned him wore off and he collapsed in front of everyone.

  “Well, it was nice to get out of the arena so quickly…” Maralynn said into the silence. She was the kind of person who hated long pauses in conversation, because they made her feel awkward. Asher personally didn’t mind the lull in general.

  “I hope we score well for it,” Michael opined from behind them.

  Why? It’s not like you did anything but almost die of anaphylaxis…

  “I guess we’ll find out tomorrow when the scores get posted.” Asher shrugged as though it didn’t matter, though he was genuinely interested to see how they would score them for this challenge. “Not to be a downer, but I’m going to take a shower and head to bed.” He waved goodbye to the others at the door and took a less-traveled route to the main stairwell to avoid company.

  “I’m surprised to see you still on your feet,” a voice startled him so badly that he nearly jumped out of his skin. His perception was way down with his energy so tanked.

  “You nearly rectified that problem yourself just now,” Asher turned to face Master Willow, who was now walking alongside him, presumably having just come from his office.

  “That was quite a show
you put on for us.”

  Asher chuckled and said, “Always happy to provide the entertainment around here, sir.”

  The Master of Wands watched him closely as they walked towards the main stairwell, as though waiting for him to pass out at any moment.

  I probably would, if not for Trish. I need to remember to thank her tomorrow.

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen someone wrestle a lynx to death with their bare hands,” Willow observed mildly. “That is also the first time you have consumed all of your weapons in an arena before.”

  Asher shrugged and said, “You all have been on me to show you the extents of my capabilities. Well, now you know.”

  “Yes, now we do,” the Master of Wands said lightly, watching him ascend the stairs to the second floor without following. “It was most illuminating…”

  Asher turned down the hallway without saying ‘goodnight’, stumbled into the room he shared with Aleric, and collapsed face-down into bed. The last thing he heard before falling asleep was his best friend saying, “You’re back already? You must have bombed…”

  6

  Merina

  Aleric hadn’t even reached the bottom of the main stairwell before he realized something was up. A group of people were blocking his entry into the Pentagon, huddled around the ranking lists for the challenge arena groups and talking excitedly.

  “—heard he called down a pillar of fire from the sky and burned everything in his path,” a fifth-year boy was telling a group of younger girls, puffing out his chest importantly.

  “I didn’t even think something like that was possible…” one of the doe-eyed girls whispered in awe.