Free The Dragonswarm by Aaron Pogue Page B

and drew a breath. I pushed against the stone and rose to my feet. I exhaled, long and slow, and straightened my shoulders. I could feel a fury like a thunderstorm pounding against my mind, but I wrapped myself in quiet, perfect darkness and waited. I raised my chin. I smiled.
    At last the assault relented. I nodded once and opened my eyes.
    The drakes were gone. The adults who had come to stand over me had left as well, though I saw the yellow soaring once more in the slow, chaotic swarm that hung around the monster's head like a nightmare halo. That head was closer now, barely ten paces above me. It hung over me like an avalanche. It snorted, and the furnace blast knocked me back three paces.
    You are not my equal , it said. You are my prisoner. You are my toy.
    "I can hold your mind at bay," I thought. "I am more than you imagine."
    A sound like a forest fire's roaring crackle rattled in my head, and I recognized it as the monster's laughter. Your eyes are far too small, it said. You retain some shred of sanity by power stolen from me, and you think that is a victory?
    I barely saw the blur of motion as the monster lazily flicked its tail. Thirty serpentine paces of plated muscle rolled in an easy arc, curling forward around the mountain of gold, around the monster's body, and the tapered end of it whipped toward me. It hit me like a battering ram, crushing my right elbow against my ribs and flinging me across the hard stone floor. I landed hard and scraped across rough stone.
    I started to struggle to my feet but a drake leaped from the darkness and landed with all four talons on my back. I slammed hard against the stone again, breath driven from my lungs. I wheezed a cough and clung desperately to the tiny fragment of my mind I still controlled.
    The monster laughed again. It brought that terrible head close to me until I could feel the puffing heat of its breath, and it spoke into my agony. You are a diverting puzzle , it said. And you are useful bait. But do not dare imagine you are any more than a plaything. You will be food for my drakes before three moons have set.
    "Why?" I asked. The word sounded shrill in my own head. "Why do you want me at all?"
    The head rolled to one side. A flash of curiosity from the monster broke across my mind like a wave off the sea. You don't know? Because you stole from me. No one steals from me and lives.
    I frowned. I turned my eyes back to the mountain of treasure and shook my head. "I have...I've stolen nothing from you."
    The monster reared until it towered above me. Even the vastness of the cavern seemed strained by the dragon's immensity. It roared until the very air grew heavy with the sound. Then it slammed down hard enough I could feel the shock of it through the stone, and with no warning at all it burst the bubble of sanity I'd built within my mind.
    But there was no pain. There was no screaming fury. There was just a moment's perfect clarity as it seized my thoughts. My perspective shifted as the monster dragged my awareness up and out of my body. I'd done the same once before, when I was still new to the wizard's sight, and now as then I hung some distance above my body and looked down on me.
    I did not burn with the bright red light of other men. I did not glow noonday bright, like the wizards I'd seen. There was a thread of red, a cocoon of pure white light, but the power of my life was tainted, dimmed, by a bed of absolute blackness that suffused me. All three energies washed together, roiled, and left me cloudy and indistinct—but also unique, unlike any power I had ever seen.
    And then the vision vanished. I fell into my mind again, into my body, and the monster was barely there at all. Instead I felt the full weight of my fear, the vast inventory of my injuries, starving hunger and burning thirst—all the angry complaints of a body dragged far beyond its limits. And over it all, I felt a devastating understanding.
    "Vechernyvetr," I thought. The black dragon that