The Chronicles of Brendan Earle, Apprentice Mage.

Use of Weapons 2

Phoebe

When we were flying away I called over to Adam.

“Did you see their faces?”

“The Duerg?”

“Yeah. They creamed those Vere and they’re guarding and protecting helpless humans ‘stead of the other way round. We’re going to get more of them from the other Gards and more Wyrm too. Maldon might as well give up now, eh?”

He just nodded. It didn’t seem like enough of a reply, but I couldn’t be mad at him. The Duergars got a poor deal of it in the books, when I thought about it. Here things were better. Soon they’d be free and I’d be going back to Edinburgh and Dad.

There was something about that last thought that didn’t come out right, and I started to think it through. I wasn’t too happy with the answers I was getting, though, and I was going to ask Adam if he’d thought about this and what he’d thought about this when Black River Bridge started to come into view. We’d be back soon.

Then I saw the tiny red shape flying high in front of us. “Hey, Adam, is that a Wyrm?” I called.

“Where? Oh, wait, I see it. No, too small,” he replied. “Is it someone flying? It looks like a boy, a fat little boy.”

“I don’t think so, it looks like it’s holding something.”

The thing was flying as if it was carrying something heavy. There was a bright light, like the reflection off shiny glass.

“It’s heading straight for the City, is that normal?” he asked.

“I don’t think so, but I think it’s going over the City, it isn’t going down.”

Then it was over the City and dropping the shiny thing and we both realised what was happening at the same time. The red thing started to climb away from the place.

“Up!” yelled Adam, “Get as high as you can.”

Our Wyrm got the feeling from us and climbed furiously. It was like one of those dreams where you run in slow motion and just can’t get away from the scary thing. We just didn’t seem to be moving at all. Then there was a moment of…

He removed them all from my accessible memory. Gone, all those memories gone! Taking away my mind!

…nothingness. Then it was… well it was just us climbing up into the sky on a pair of Wyrm. But it was something horrible.

“What just happened?” I screamed, “Something just happened! What was it?”

“The City,” he said. “We’ve got to go to the City.”

I could see Black River Bridge. It was still there. I couldn’t see anything different. It didn’t feel right though. We flew on. As we got closer, I was thinking, ‘It’s ok, the city’s still there. Everything’s ok. Nothing bad happened. You’ll land in a minute and you’ll see; nothing bad happened.’ I was wrong though.

Adam

I knew what it was before we got there. There was no movement. No people on the streets, no animals in the farms we passed over, no birds in the sky. Now I knew what the expression ‘a lifeless silence’ meant. I hadn’t heard it all of the time we’d been in the Land. 

He’d used ‘magic’, of course, but I didn’t think we’d get away with spraying this with Rowan berry juice. We didn’t stop at the City. I wanted to fly on to the Gard and see if the effects had reached there. I knew they had before we got there, but some things you don’t want to believe.