Talismans | Next Chapter

Jul 22

Jul 22 Talismans

Book excerpt

CHAPTER ONE – Awakened One

A tremendous crash woke him and fine dust fell on his upturned face. He opened his eyes in alarm but saw only profound darkness. Blind? Another explosion just beyond his head drove him to sit up in alarm and he groped across a rough stone floor, feeling his way away from the fearful blasts.

“You’ve got to come out now!” a voice roared, making his head ache with the reverberations.

“How?” he shouted back, groping around for a wall or something to give a frame of reference. “I can’t see.” A third explosion rocked the chamber and he desperately staggered to his feet. The cavern sounded as if it was crumbling and he could barely remain upright when his reaching hands finally met a wall to help him balance. “What’s happening?”

“You are under attack,” the deep voice returned. “You are outside the Seal. You must break through before they find the cavern. Feel your way toward my voice.”

He staggered against the wall, groping along as the pounding continued, bringing down a rain of rubble onto his head. “I can’t break through solid rock. Where are you?” he called again.

“I am right here. You must wish very hard. Feel for the power. Yes, right there. Now push!”

The terror of being buried in a collapsing cave, of eruptions, of utter blindness and the alarming awareness that he could not even remember his own name combined to flood him with adrenaline. He wanted out, even if his own death awaited him on the other side of this wall. Out!

Abruptly the rough stone barrier disappeared and he staggered through, almost thrown forward by yet another explosion and landed on his knees on a ridge in bright daylight. With bloody knees he realized he was naked as a baby and he rose up painfully. At least he could see but the light almost burned. When he finally got his vision to focus he saw something so large he had to step back.

A gold and black iris, flecked with fire and as large as he was tall blinked at him no farther away than his reach. The iris belonged in an eye the height of a house. He tilted his head back to look up and up and found the face of a golden dragon, scales and spikes flaring about the jaws and sharp ridges over the eye that had come down to his level. An entire dragon lay draped over a black cinder mountainside, gold and glittering like a jeweled necklace on the throat of a lady.

I’m dead, he thought.

“No, little one,” the voice rumbled. It took a bit of concentration to understand it, as if this was a foreign language. “You have just been on a long journey and it will take some time to recover.”

Journey? He couldn’t remember a journey. Indeed, he couldn’t remember anything. That observation made him shudder as another detonation rained cinder down the mountainside behind him. Where was he? Who was he? How did this happen to him? Explosions around him, a dragon about to eat him and a vast void where his past must have resided; there was nothing to steady his thoughts.

“We must deal with the sorcerers now that you have hatched,” the dragon’s voice returned. “If you will move aside, I will deal with this one.”

So the thunderous explosions within the cavern had not been this enormous reptile attacking but something else? Without any recourse, the human stepped to the right, as far as he dare on the little shelf that stood out from the mountainside on which he perched. Curiously he watched the dragon’s eye close in concentration and then a wave, almost invisible to his eye, pushed out from the dragon’s forehead and into the mountain.

The rock wall imploded and avalanches of stone roared above and below. Only this little landing and wherever the gigantic dragon rested remained untouched. The top of the mountain erupted, blowing out the far side in a wave of billowing gasses and washed over, out of sight. The human instinctively crouched down to balance against the earthquakes that threatened to pitch him off the shelf. Then the eruption above eased abruptly and the dragon again rested his head on the ridge again to look at him.

“There, that’s better. I’m sorry that your hatching place was outside the Seal but we didn’t know precisely when you would arrive and the mountain just kept growing until it left the protections of the Seal. And of course that made the outlanders think they could come attack.” The dragon’s golden eye rolled down at the stupefied human. Apparently the dragon’s pushing the volcano had done its job for the explosions within the mountain had ceased.

“We will call you Owailion,” the voice returned, as if nothing had interrupted this singular introduction. “It is not your true name, which we will keep hidden. Owailion means the awakened one. You are the one we were promised.”

The human straightened up, stupefied by it all. Owailion….could he accept the name? He couldn’t remember his real name. Nothing, not his work, or if he had a family; nothing of his life remained. The looming fear this emptiness created in his soul threatened to swallow him, and he deliberately dropped those thoughts like burning coals.

“Promised what? Who are you?” Owailion murmured, his voice cracked with disuse and the strange language on his tongue.

“You may call me Mohan. My real name is too long for humans to speak easily,” the dragon replied. “And your coming…it is a long story. I will tell you it all when you are able, but for now, we must get away from this volcano before the outlanders return. Also, we do not know how to care for you precisely. You must help us understand what you need.”

Owailion waited for that to make sense and then realized nothing would for a long while until he could remember his life. How would he know what he needed if he didn’t remember that? He looked down the slope of the volcano toward the forest below and beyond that in the distance, a chain of mountains capped in snow. None of it was familiar. In his amnesia he had lost much though he surely knew people did not wake up completely encased in stone. Humans didn’t regularly have the ability to burst right through a rock wall and they certainly didn’t find a dragon waiting to swallow them on the other side.

In this surreal situation Owailion reached forward and touched the steely gold scales just below the dragon’s eye, and Mohan blinked in pleasure, sending a waft of warm musky air up Owailion’s arm. The rumble of a purr echoed up the mountain ridge. That sound alone nudged more pumice and rock to slide down the bare slope.

“No, Owailion, all this is new to you. We have not met before but you have come a long way to join us. This is the Land…our Land and you are most welcome here, the first and only human to come through our Seal.”

“Mohan? Are you listening to my thoughts?” Owailion asked, just realizing then that the dragon had addressed his concerns and comforted him without the human even saying a thing.

“How else would I speak with you? You can hear me and I can hear you no matter where we are if you will learn to listen. The language is new to us both but we can understand each other. This is good. Now, you must have needs. You are so newly hatched. What can I do to help you?”

Hatched? Owailion looked back at the crumbled cliff wall where he had been encased. Did dragons come from eggs? It made sense that Mohan would think he had ‘hatched’ in that Owailion had somehow broken free just like a chick hatching.

Mohan rumbled like he tried to chuckle. “What else would I call it? You have broken out of the mountain’s shell. Fledglings are weak but you will get stronger with time. What do you need to be stronger?”

Owailion dropped all his questions and considered Mohan’s instead. What did he need? He needed off this cliff. He needed clothes. He needed to understand.

“Clothes?” he asked Mohan in embarrassment. He could not imagine climbing down off this mountainside in his bare feet, let alone the rest of him bare.

“Clothes?” Mohan replied curiously.

Had Mohan never seen another human? One wearing something other than their skin? The thought almost made Owailion laugh.

“We did call you Owailion for a reason. There are other men on this planet, but few that we dragons have seen. The Land is sealed so no men may enter. You are the first human God has promised to send. Perhaps you are hungry. All fledglings are hungry. Do you require food?”

Owailion thought about that suggestion and then decided it could wait. “No, clothes are more important right now. I don’t have scales like you and I’ll burn in this sun and unless you intend for me to stay up here, I need clothes to get down off this ledge.

“I do not understand clothes but if a fledgling needs a clothes you can make this for yourself,” Mohan rumbled apologetically.

“Make them?” Owailion did laugh this time. He stood naked on a mountainside, conversing nose to nose with a creature he had assumed was a myth. Mohan could swallow him whole and wonder where the rest of the supper was coming from.

“I can’t make clothes here,” Owailion admitted, motioning to the panoramic but useless view down the mountainside.

“Why not? You could break free from your shell. A clothes is easier. You imagine a clothes and wish for it and it comes to you.”

Owailion rocked back on his heels, wondering when the dream would end and he would wake with understanding. “That sounds like magic. What am I saying? Everything I’m experiencing right now – amnesia, breaking through stone, forcing a volcano to erupt, a conversation with a dragon; it’s all magic.”

“You are magic, Owailion,” Mohan confirmed. “You used magic to break through your shell. The outlanders attacked because you are magic. God sent you to us for magic. A clothes should be easy.”

“Magic? How?”

“God gave you magic as you arrived here. It is new to you but I will teach you. Can you imagine a clothes? Wish it into being.”

Mohan blinked, mesmerizing Owailion into settling his mind. Okay, think about clothing and wish them into appearing. Nothing else here made sense so he might as well try. Unwillingly Owailion closed his eyes. He had to tune out his latent fears of large predators, unseen sorcerers and looming volcanoes and concentrate on something to wear. Then he wished for these things to appear.

Mohan snorted and Owailion opened his eyes in alarm. At his feet, right under Mohan’s chin he saw the clothing he had imagined: pair of leather pants and breeches, a linen tunic and some rugged boots for climbing. Without waiting for the invitation, Owailion sat down on the ledge and began to dress. “That was the most amazing…you say I’m magic? I know a lot about being human, but I didn’t know I was magical.”

“Very few humans have magic…unlike dragons.” Mohan’s mental voice held just a tinge of pride in this fact. “You weren’t magical in your life before, but you have come to help us and so now you are magical. You wanted this.”

“I wanted this?” Owailion prodded as he put on the boots that, to his amazement, fit perfectly. Why would he have wanted to be a magician or to come to this place…the Land Mohan had called it?

“I thought as a fledgling you would know more of these matters,” Mohan commented.

Owailion took a deep breath before trying to explain. “I am not a fledgling,…precisely. For a human, I think I am relatively young, but I am full grown. Humans are born, not hatched. I just don’t remember magic or anything of my personal past.” Then as he stood up in his new clothes he felt much closer to trusting this new world he was encountering. “That’s better. Now, can you explain some things while I get down from this ledge?”

“You will not get bigger?” This observation seemed to concern Mohan. “Men are so small. Are all so tiny?”

Owailion chuckled at the thought. “Women and children are smaller. Does that bother you? It makes me a little worried myself. You might yawn and accidentally inhale me, but this is as big as I get. Why are you…why am I your fledgling?”

“Well,” Mohan tried to clarify as he lifted away from the slope allowing Owailion a fuller view of possible paths down the volcano’s sides, “the Land is sealed and there are sorcerers who want to get inside. They think they can take over the magic here. We built your volcano for your arrival but it was too near the Seal that keeps them out. It grew beyond our borders and that is why they attacked, to go through the mountain. They weren’t after you exactly, but getting into the Land itself.”

Owailion scooted off the ledge and began sliding down embankments of cinders as he thought about that. “And you keep saying we. Are there others here?”

As if Owailion’s words cast a spell, the sky, the other sides of the slope and even up above the little ridge filled with dragons of various colors and sizes. Over a dozen had all been invisible until he said something. Silver and gold predominated their hides, but with accents of sapphire, ruby, emerald, topaz and amethyst. No two appeared the same in Owailion’s eyes. Some had wings and others, even flying ones, had none. Some had one head and others as many as three heads and an even wider variety of tails. The smallest he could see hovered above Mohan’s back and looked to only be triple the size of a large human. Mohan appeared to be the largest, covering easily a thousand feet toward the foot of the mountain. Most disturbing was the fact that every single one of these newly appeared dragons had eyes only for him.

“We …my fellow dragons have been waiting for you,” Mohan admitted, “but we didn’t want to frighten you at first.”

“Too late,” Owailion admitted. “It’s the situation that alarms me. You must explain this all. Why do you need me?”

Mohan must have said something privately for the family of dragons disappeared again leaving only Mohan’s gold visible although Owailion doubted they had actually left. Then Mohan continued as if this display of power meant nothing.

“As I explained before, we were promised a man by God and He sent us you. We need your help. You see, we dragons are going to sleep. The Land needs someone else to hold off the sorcerers and stop the demon attacks while we sleep. We need you to take mastery of the magic here.”

“Attacks like the one that woke me?” Owailion looked over the peaceful countryside beyond Mohan’s bulk and saw nothing but forest and summer sky.