Dragonsoul by Justin DePaoli

Author:Justin DePaoli [DePaoli, Justin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-10T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Valeria finally took the vial of Red dragon blood in hand. She looked at it, swirling it like fine wine. It was a deeper red than her own blood, thicker too.

“If I drink this,” she said, staring at the viscous liquid, “I will… I’ll be able to—” She pinched shut her eyes.

“Conjure fire. That’s what you’ll be able to do. It’s quite unbelievable, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It is.”

From the corner of her eye, she saw Tibor fidgeting.

“Er, your dragon. It’s climbing up my leg.”

Valeria ignored him. A whelp summiting Tibor was the least of her concerns right now. So long as Ruul didn’t bathe him in fire, there wasn’t much harm the little one could inflict.

“All right,” she said with a heavy sigh. “This dragonsoul you think I have—”

“That I know you have.”

“Fine. What is it?”

A last sprinkle from the clearing sky dripped onto Evantor’s receding hairline. “It traps a dragon’s sorcery within, extracting qualities from blood, allowing you to use and manipulate it as you wish.”

“How—” Her search for the right words was becoming infuriatingly difficult.

“Was she given it?” Tibor asked. “The dragonsoul, I mean. Or was she born with it?”

That’s a good way of putting it, Valeria thought. She felt mentally exhausted, as if Rage had taken from her mind.

“I don’t know,” Evantor admitted. “When the old war was at its cusp, the Amber Parish infiltrated a secret human fortress where various projects and research were undertaken. That’s where we learned of the dragonsoul’s existence. The Parishes were as unsuccessful as the humans were in creating it.”

Tibor stroked Ruul’s chin, allowing the whelp to rest peacefully on his shoulder. “Dragons wanted a… oh. Well, I suppose that makes some sense. Imagine if one parish could use the powers of all the others.”

“Precisely. But every time we—or humans—came close to success, a catastrophic malady would befall the dragonsoul’s victims.”

Of all the things Valeria wanted to hear, that was near the bottom, just above “Look out! There’s an arrow coming for your jugular.”

“What do you mean catastrophic maladies?” she asked.

“Hemorrhaging of the organs, brain, eyes. Sudden and permanent loss of physical movement. Sudden scalding of the throat, nose, tongue. Death usually followed in all cases. Demorian forced us to discontinue our efforts after our research produced nothing successful. We assumed humans also discarded their research, once they abandoned Amenaur.”

As much as Valeria wanted to know more about Amenaur—why it was abandoned, why a bloodwitch would still live there—her immediate concern was the apparently highly lethal dragonsoul within her.

“When did the symptoms start?”

“Are you asking if the victims perished quickly after given the dragonsoul?”

“I’m asking if they lived to be eighteen.”

“Some were older than that when the research began. They never survived longer than three months after the soul was given to them.”

Given or forced? she wondered. That was a conversation for another day.

“How does one create a dragonsoul?” Tibor asked.

“A successful one, you mean? You’ll have to ask the bloodwitch who blessed Valeria with hers.”

Valeria and Tibor exchanged looks of bewilderment.

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