Darkness and Hellfire

Chapter 38 I’m So Confused.

Lenna found a tunnel that had collapsed which branched off of their path about an hour after they had set out. She stopped in front of it waiting for Isaac’s input. “I need more sleep. Also there is something I wanna test out with a clear head.” He told her.

She nodded and dropped her pack at the entrance. Isaac set his down across from hers and began pulling his bedroll out. “Don’t go too deep.” Lenna said, referring to the collapsed tunnel.

Isaac glanced at the piled stone and rubble before nodding at her and getting back to sleep.

The next few hours passed peacefully with Lenna on look out and Isaac fast asleep. When he finally awoke it had only been another four hours. He stretched and yawned. Lenna watched him for a bit while he got something to eat and then joined her at the mouth of their tunnel.

“My magic is weird.” Isaac began. Lenna just let him talk. She knew that her being silent and listening would be more fruitful than interrupting and distracting him. Isaac pulled the dragon skull out of thin air and set it on his lap. “Last time I did this I saw the moments before it died. I was alone and I have no idea how long I was vulnerable reliving the poor guy’s last memories.” His gaze moved from the skull to Lenna’s eyes. “You should rest before I get started.” He told her.

Lenna was a little tired but that wasn’t something a few more hours of meditation couldn’t fix. She had slept a whole six hours which was more than she had slept within the last two weeks combined. Elves' ability to replace sleep with meditation was supernatural compared to the non-long lived races and she leveraged that ability as much as she could, now that she didn’t have the safety of her family’s castle.

She shook her head. “If I can meditate for another four hours or so I’ll be back to normal.”

Isaac searched her eyes for a moment before asking her a question: “Should I wait?”

“No.” She replied. “While I’m meditating I can still hear. That’s what I do when you are asleep.”

“Alright.” Isaac closed his eyes and picked up the skull. Lenna shifted her gaze down the tunnel before closing her eyes and meditating again.

Isaac ran his death mana through the skull and almost immediately fell into the dragon’s memories again. The more he relived the moment right before life left the dragon, the more he understood about the creature. The young dragon was blue and could breathe lightning. This might have seemed obvious but it confirmed that the wizard had not modified these aspects of the dragon when it made the chimera.

He also learned the dragon’s name and how old it was. The dragon was only ten years old and his name was Kahtesh. Kahtesh was still growing into his ever changing body but was both strong and nimble nonetheless. His scales were conductive and lightning would arc through them away from the dragon’s heart and brain when they were exposed to the dragon’s element.

Isaac also learned how the dragon could breathe lightning bolts. The dragon’s epiglottis, the flap that keeps a creature from inhaling whatever it is swallowing, grew with a special magical sigil carved into it. As strange as this was, it seemed to be a natural process and as the dragon got bigger so would the sigil. The sigil would convert the dragon’s internal mana into the lightning bolt as soon as the dragon would focus its mana through the sigil.

The inside of the dragon’s mouth and throat were completely non conductive. This forced the lighting bolt out in whatever direction the dragon’s mouth was facing. The magical nature of the lightning is what helped it keep its direction and travel in an almost perfectly straight line.

The dragon was still in the process of learning how to fly with its magic as it had rarely found the need to fly down in the Innerworld. It did know that by circulating mana around its wings it could generate lift without the need for wind or speed. This had allowed Kahtesh to fly short distances in the past to cross over canyons and pitfalls.

As Isaac’s understanding of Kahtesh grew, so did his connection to the skull. After what, to Isaac, felt like ten minutes but was actually an hour, something changed. This time the skull hadn’t sucked mana out of him but simply let Isaac explore and understand at his own pace. Now, however, the skull seemed to need his mana.

Isaac felt his mana reserves plummeting and his death mana being taken from him like a starving vampire. When he was about to run out of mana he dropped the skull and opened his eyes. Lenna had been watching him since she felt the mana flowing from him spike.

They both stared at the skull in shock. It had regrown seven of its vertebrae and the skull had thickened. The new bone growth was seemingly carved to look like scales. The new vertebrae started to grow plates out of their sides that bent around as if they were trying to form the outside of the dragon’s throat.

Isaac and Lenna just stared at it for a while. Neither of them were sure what had just happened. Isaac eventually looked at Lenna and her gaze left the skull to make eye contact with him. “What did I just do?” He asked her.

Lenna was stunned for a second at the question and eventually cocked her head in confusion. “How am I supposed to know?” She asked.

Isaac shrugged his shoulders. “Well I don’t know. I’ve only had magic for like what sixteen, seventeen days? Which by the way are impossible to keep track of when it’s always nothing but dark tunnels and things trying to kill me.” He ranted.

Lenna just shook her head. “Your magic is unlike anything I have ever seen.” She admitted much to Isaac’s disappointment.

Isaac could feel a connection from his core into the skull and then from the skull into his shadow. He looked down but he couldn’t see his own shadow as the entire cavern was pitch black. Neither he nor Lenna needed light so they had been traveling without it. He focused on his shadow and an inky black pool began to grow from underneath him.

The pool seemed to just expand outwards in all directions. He focused and it moved in front of him. He placed the skull on top of it and the skull sank into the inky pool. He just stared at it for a moment before a thought occurred to him. Panicking he reached into the pool both with his hand and his will and wished the skull back out. It rose far enough out of the pool that he could grab it and pull it out the rest of the way.

“I’m so confused.” Isaac said to himself. Lenna who had been watching the entire process from a few feet away just nodded in agreement. She had no idea what kind of crazy magic he was stumbling through. After a moment he just looked at her with a pleading look on his face. “Why? No, better question, how?”

Lenna could only shake her head at him. “I have no idea.” She answered honestly.

“I don’t know how anything works anymore. I give up for today.” He grumbled. “You can get some rest. I'll stay on watch.” He assured her. “I gotta figure out the nature of death, shadows, and mana apparently.”

“Yeah…” Lenna said. She was just as, if not more, confused as Isaac. She shifted into a more comfortable position and closed her eyes. It took her a bit to get back into the right headspace for meditation but soon she had tuned out her own thoughts and let her mind and body continue recovering.

Isaac spent the next hour muttering to himself and staring into nothing. After that he shifted his attention to his shadow mana. Something he thought he understood until the whole inky portal to nowhere that had opened up underneath him. He practiced shaping it into a dagger and making it both sharp and hard. He was making slow progress but progress was still progress in his eyes.

Eventually Lenna was ready to go and Isaac called upon the inky portal again and put the dragon skull inside it. He packed up his bedroll and walked a dozen feet away from where he had been sitting. He called upon the portal again and pulled out the skull. “Good. It is connected to me, not to a location.” He said out loud. He put it back and then dismissed his inky shadow again.

Lenna had been watching him with her backpack on, waiting for him to be ready. She didn’t want to rush him because his magic was incredibly interesting to watch. She felt like she was seeing things that mortals shouldn't every time he made that inky black portal. Something about it was just off.

“Alright, let’s go.” Isaac said and they started off again towards Safeharbor.