The Dragonswarm by Aaron Pogue Page B

outlet, some escape I hadn't found before, but there was none.
    And then that same force that had flooded my mind took control again. It used my will, reached out through my wizard's sight, and grabbed several threads of air from the cavern above. It wrapped them around me like a cloak. I took a breath of captured air, then that other will pressed out and down against the water, and I sped to the surface like a piece of cork. I just had time to prepare myself before I was thrown out of the water. I landed on the hard stone, stumbled once, then caught myself and turned.
    The drakes were there—that handful that had come to watch over me, and dozens more. They gathered around me as they had that first night, and the dragons screamed on the wing above me. The gold adult flashed past just above my head, hissing like an angry snake. The huge red monster, too, had turned to watch, to stare. Its massive head hung low over the pool, barely a pace away from where I stood, eyes fixed hard on the depths. Fire boiled in the back of its throat, and when the monster roared, every beast in the cavern took up its cry.
    I could feel their rage, their hatred for me, but not one among them looked my way. They all stared at the water. For a moment I froze, overwhelmed by my own curiosity, but then I heard the voice one more time. Go! Stupid human. Move now, Daven!
    And once again the thing took control of me. I had a moment's understanding, in the tiny part of my mind still left to me. A moment's recognition. The voice was not the monster's. Not that monster's anyway. It was another's. And now it threw me into a reckless sprint, straight at the hard stone wall of the cavern. Fear bubbled up in my chest, but it could not reach me in my cocoon of calm.
    A thousand filaments of air still wrapped me head to toe, and that other mind flexed my will to reshape them at every footfall into cushions beneath my feet. I went a dozen paces over hard stone without making a sound, and then as I reached the wall the air unraveled around me. Though I did not guide it, I saw the shape of the plan one heartbeat before I struck the wall. My will stretched out toward the numberless grains of earth energy that combined to make a mountain of solid stone.
    I saw how easy it would be to exert authority over them, to make them bend and spread and wash around me just like water. I imagined myself diving through a mountainside as easily as I had dived into the cooling pool, swimming through the earth and out to safety. But in my wizard's sight I could see three hundred paces of earth and stone between the cavern and open air. And I knew what the dragons did not—I knew the physical cost of altering that much reality. I hadn't enough strength to shift one pace of earth around me, let alone a whole mountainside.
    But the presence in my mind had full control. I scrabbled frantically to stop it, to extend the barriers of my concentration, to stop my churning feet, to catch a breath. I panicked inside my own head, and it gained me nothing. The dragon threw my body at the stone wall, through the stone wall, into the stone wall.
    I felt pain like a thunderclap in every inch of my body. It was the weight of a mountain pressing down on me from all directions and my body screamed in agony. Darkness hit my mind like a hammer, and ringing through it I felt a sudden flash of surprise. And then annoyance. And then a fire bubbling up through my stomach and catching in my heart.
    I felt heat like a geyser blast upward into my mind, out through my limbs, and suddenly the darkness was gone. Suddenly the pain was gone. Not just the weight of the mountain, but the agony of days of torture, the fatigue and hunger and fear. All of it evaporated beneath that blazing heat, energy and power raging through me, and then I began to move again.
    I looked out through the mountain and saw the Chaos blackness waiting for me there. No...not blackness. I'd called it emptiness before, the void in reality