“Nay, we played no part in this, Garron.” Rhydan lifted his hands in denial of the accusation. “We would not have taken your queen, nor your princess, and we would have never allowed any other to do so if we had known of it.”
Garron’s nostrils flared again before a dragony smile of such enraged contempt curved his leathery lips. “You allowed many to believe you were here to conquer this land,” he suggested with whispery threads of magick rasping his tone. “You chose to have others believe you intended to Join with the Guardian of these lands, the Princess Marina. This was an untruth, was it not, Wizards? You knew all along who your Consortress was.”
They felt it then, too late to slam their shields down to protect their innermost thoughts with a magick too weak to aid them at the moment anyway.
Torran closed his eyes and placed his forearm over them once again with a snarl of fury as Rhydan cursed the dragon. Because there was nothing they could do to stop the invasion, no way to counter the magick that slipped through their minds.
When it was over, Torran lowered his arm and stared up at the cavernous ceiling, gaze narrowed, his awareness of his brother’s curses still drifting through his senses.
“Leave off the curses you call down from your bedamned Sentinel Select.” Garron’s blasphemy had them both staring at him in surprise now.
The mockery that filled the dragon was far less threatening now, but the superiority was enough to make Torran wish the dragon had just turned them into baked Wizards rather than mere weakened ones.
“Your Guardians of the Lands are no less conniving than their ancestors were,” Garron sighed as he crossed his massive arms—forelegs? Torran wasn’t certain which—over his chest and regarded them with eyes that glittered no less with that blood-red hue of death and rage.
“What mean you, dragon?” It was Rhydan who dared to voice the question with a growl of anger.
“What mean I?” The smile that curled about the dragon’s lips was one of sarcasm and certain knowledge. “I mean, my erstwhile Wizards, that it was the Veressi who caused the Sorceresses to run across ice-capped mountains and fiery lakes to escape the Wizards a millennium ago. And now they send you to near certain death at this time in their efforts to once again steal the freedoms of women whose strength and purity of heart will always outshine their less-than-pure, much-too-darkened magicks.”
“Our Guardians are no practitioners of dark magick, dragon.” Torran forced himself to sit up at this insult. “Neither the gods nor the magick of the land itself would allow such a travesty.”
Garron rolled his eyes at the protest. “Your Wizards are manipulating dracas without honor—”
If he’d intended to say more, he hadn’t the chance. Without fanfare, with no flames, no steam, no hisses or crackles of scales, the Veressi arrived.
One moment the cavern was free of the heavy magick the Veressi carried with them, and the next moment, it filled the stone-enclosed area with stifling force.
“Garron, do you not tire of baiting us?” Was it Ruine or Raize? Only the gods could tell the two apart for certain.
“Never, Ruine,” Garron drawled with mockery as thick as the frightful magick the two possessed as he evidently had no problem identifying them. “Where is my Queen Amoria and her heir?”
“Safe.”
Steam issued from nostrils that suddenly flared larger and eyes glittered like orbs of fire as the dragon rose by several feet. A fierce and blazing magick filled the creature, suddenly heavier, more stifling than at any time the Veressi had displayed their rage.
“Should we leave?” Ruine questioned.
There was no mockery. No threat. It was a simple question based on the threat the dragon displayed.
“Think you can escape me?” Garron hissed between clenched, sharpened teeth. “Even the gods cannot hide from me.”
“Yet you have not found your queen nor your heir,” Raize pointed out as he leaned against the wall. “Neither answer to your call, nor can you sense their magick.”
Garron’s chuckle wasn’t a sound of amusement. “And only the gods can shelter a presence so well. Tell me, Wizards, what did the dark one Dar’el promise you in exchange for your treason against the Select?”
The tension that filled the Veressi was nothing less than a display of the highest offense for the insult Garron had paid them.
“Or what did the Select warn us would pass should we not do as they bid?” Ruine asked as both Torran and Rhydan came to instant alert and Garron seemed to still with a sudden shocking alertness.
Magick clashed with magick in a silent battle as Garron suddenly focused on the two. Threads of Veressi magick, all the colors of Sentmar in darkened hues began to flare and circle the two as Garron simply stared at the pair.
Thinner and thinner their magick became until it blinked out entirely and Torran realized Garron had penetrated their strongest shields as easily as he had penetrated his and Rhydan’s weakened ones.
“Such manipulations and games,” Garron murmured moments later as his size returned to that of merely dangerously threatening rather than murderously huge. “Such secrets and deceptions when you had only to come to me with a warning and the information you held.” He shook his massive head as though wearied of whatever game was being played.
“And think you we could be any more certain whom we faced than the Guardian of this land could be certain as she faced the darkest of the sons of our Select?” Ruine questioned the dragon softly. “Even we, the greatest Guardians of Sentmar, can be deceived by one such as he, Garron.”
There was only one they could mean, and Torran felt his trepidation rising.
If the rise in Secular violence and dark magick was the cause of the dark one indeed, rather than simply his machinations, then all of Sentmar was more at risk than they had once believed.
The son of the gods, Dar’el, born golden haired and with the purest gaze, held an evil that the land had never known before him. It was written that the clash of dark magick against that of the pure Sentmarian power had nearly destroyed the land, as well as the moons above, before the Select had managed to imprison their most beloved child within the realms of Shadow Hell. And only then, The One had been forced to awaken. The creator of the Select and all of Sentmar had shed his golden magick, filled the Select with his power, and watched as the dark one was sent to the deepest pits of the lands.
“Return Amoria and her heir.” Garron didn’t demand, nor did he ask. He made a statement of what would occur.
Ruine grimaced at such a thought. “The danger—”
“You will return them and it will be done quickly.” The tone wasn’t threatening. The red eyes and bared, sharpened teeth were.
Raize stared back at him, stepping forward and drawing the dragon’s attention. “The Princess has the power, among others, to shadow walk,” he stated then. “She can escape the place where she is held, and collect her mother as well, if she so wishes it. Despite your insistence, dragon, Sentinel Sorceresses do well exist, and your Princess Serena is just such a Sentinel. Just as we are Guardians of Sentmar rather than mere Keepers or Guardians of Cauldaran alone.” Raize’s tone was laced with arrogance and command now. “Once our Joining with the Princess Serena occurs, our power will increase then to the level of Sentinels as well.”
The differences between Guardians and Keepers of the Lands balanced, strengthened and helped direct the lesser Keepers of the individual lands. During times of peace the differences in Sentinel Sorceresses and Keepers of the Power were slight. Yet that difference, in times of war, rumored to be the only time such Sorceresses came into their full power, was great.
Garron chuckled. “How humble you are,” he mocked them. “Does it not smite your pride, Wizards, to know you must have a Sorceress accept you willingly into a Joining to achieve such power?”
Ruine’s lips quirked at the irony before he replied, “I believe, Garron, the thought of being truly wanted, needed for that other than our power, we would find greatly refreshing.”
Torran felt shock sear him, as well as the sheer surprise that filled Rhydan. No Sorceress had ever been able to shadow walk without help, nor had ever, at any time in recorded history, been called Guardian. If one Sorceress had such power, then it would be a power that would rival even the Guardians of the Lands of Sentmar, the Veressi Twins. The Veressi could only shadow walk with each other’s help, even when they walked alone, they drew on their Twin’s power to do so.
“I would know if she held such magick,” Garron snapped, his black gaze narrowing at the suspected deceit.
“Even if she hid it from herself?” Ruine asked before pushing his fingers through the long blue-black of his hair as his expression tightened with savage intensity. “Our only wish is to make up for the acts our ancestors nearly destroyed the planet with. It is only our desire, Wizard, to ensure our greatest treasure, a gift even our gods could not bestow upon us, lives to fulfill the destiny the magick of Sentmar itself has offered her. A destiny she must find on her own.”
This could not be. It was the gods who bestowed the powers. They or the One, the greatest Sorcerer of Sentmar. A creature of such legend that even Garron did not believe in his existence.
Torran glanced at his brother, shock manifesting itself, burning between them as they turned back to the Keepers of the Lands of Sentmar. They were the greatest power on the planet, unless Princess Serena was indeed a shadow walker Guardian.
“I would know, even if she hid such from herself,” Garron growled.
Ruine shook his head slowly. “When she was but coming into the power she now wields so effortlessly, we met her in the shadow realms, dragon. There, with Wizards who lived for adventure at her back, she battled the beasts that roamed there with a careless grin and a gleam of adventure in her eyes. Until one day, she no longer arrived within those shadowed lands. Her sword no longer tasted blood and her laughter no longer echoed through the shadowed vales.”
“And she no longer led the Sorceresses she had ridden with,” Garron murmured as, once again, his power surrounded the Veressi, seeing whatever it was they remembered. “You covered her back—”
A Veressi Twin nodded. “Always, we have watched out for our warrioress, the one we knew was born to be our Consortress. Even before we stepped into Covenan, we have fought to see her at our side once again, her sword lifted in battle, her magick burning around her. We will not see this until she once again accepts the magick that is hers alone to wield.”
Garron breathed out heavily, steam emitting from his nostrils as a growl rumbled in his large chest. “A stubborn one that one is,” he said softly. “If she does not want to accept what is inside her, for whatever reason, then she will not. If she entered the shadow realm only in her dreams, and found something there that threatened who she believes herself to be, then she will not accept her destiny easily.”
The Veressi glanced away from the dragon just enough that even Torran realized…nay, knew, there was much they were holding back.
“Did you Join with your Consortress before the time of the aligning?” Fury began to build in the dragon once again.
“Do we appear to be fools to you?” one snapped back, offended. “Nay, we did not Join with our Consortress.”
“What then did you do, my fine Guardians of Cauldaran?” Garron grunted.
“We are the Guardians of the Power of Sentmar.” One stepped forward arrogantly. “Not merely of Cauldaran.”
“Have you not yet learned better, Veressi?” Garron harrumphed. “Surely you have already suspected what I know to be the truth? When the Wizards of Cauldaran tore the Guardian of Covenan from her lands and broke her bonds with the power that filled her, you severed your rule over the entirety of Sentmar. Your ancestors, Veressi, lost that power to your line as long as the two lands are separated by the Winter Mountains and the Feral Glaciers. That cannot be undone.”
It was a truth all Wizards had finally accepted. Their ancestors had done all they could to break the will of the proud, strong Sorceresses who were given into their care. They had abused the strength and beauty of them, denied the hearts of them, and betrayed the bonds that tied Consorts to their natural Consortresses.
“There are many lessons Wizards have learned over a millennium without the hearts that should have been ours. But the loss of the powers given us as Guardians of Sentmar is not one of the lessons we have learned,” a Twin all but sneered.
“And some Wizards have far too much pride,” Garron sighed. “Whatever you believe to be true is not necessarily what will be. In any event, we must now find a way to convince this stubborn princess that dreams and reality can indeed merge.” His gaze narrowed on the powerful warriors. “Take me to my queen. Do so now,” he snapped when they seemed wont to argue. “This is not a matter I will reconsider. You will take me to my queen, or you will learn the power of a dragon’s fury in truth.”
The Veressi glanced at each other before turning back to the dragon slowly. One, Raize if Torran wasn’t mistaken, stepped forward. “First, dragon, there is a debt we owe to the Wizards before us for the sacrifice they made to the Griffons of this valley. They gave the power that was theirs to save the creatures our Consortress, as well, is so fond of. We would replace it, if you would give us but a moment.”
The dragon nodded as Torran turned to the Wizard Twins yet again in surprise.