The Dragon who called me king

The Mud Fields

The cold rain stung my bare chest as Commandant Cole glared down at me. Her heavy leather whip trailed in the thick slime and her eyes burned with a cruel satisfaction.

"What is this?" she hissed, stepping closer. She pointed the tip of her weapon directly at my chest.

My heart stopped beating. The glowing royal mark,the dragon wrapping around a broken crown,was fully exposed to the night sky. The skin around it was still bright red from the magical burn.

“Think fast, Kael!” Erebos roared in my mind, his voice filled with sudden panic. “If she recognizes that crest, we are dead right now.”

I didn't wait for my brain to process a plan. I dropped to my knees, throwing myself face-first into the freezing mud. I deliberately rubbed dirt and wet grime all over my chest, wiping the cold muck over the glowing lines until the mark was completely covered under a thick layer of black filth.

"Stand up, you pathetic worm!" Cole barked, kicking mud into my face with her polished silver boot.

I sat back on my knees, coughing and trembling violently. I kept my head low, letting my shoulders shake from the freezing temperature. "I... I am sorry, Commandant! The lightning from the sky earlier burned me when the roof collapsed! My shirt was scorched and it hurts to touch!"

Commandant Cole leaned down, her sharp eyes scanning my mud-covered chest through the torn fabric. The thick grime successfully blocked the faint violet glow of the mark. To her, it just looked like a messy, blistering burn wound from a stray magical blast.

She let out a disgusted snort and straightened her back. "A weak peasant body cannot even handle a little stray static energy. You are a stain on this academy, Ashford. Cover yourself up."

She snapped her whip against the mud right next to my leg, making me jump. "Get to work! Move those blood-stones to the cart before sunrise, or I will let the guards use you for target practice."

She turned on her heel and marched back toward the warm guard tower, her silver armor clanking loudly in the dark.

Zane crawled over to me through the muck, his face pale. He helped me pull the torn edges of my shirt back together, tying the loose threads into a rough knot to keep the cloth closed. "Are you alright? That looked like an awful burn."

"I'm fine," I whispered, wiping the cold mud from my eyes. "Let's just move the stones."

For the next several hours, Zane and I dragged large, glowing black rocks across the field. They were called blood-stones, used to fuel the academy's defensive barriers. They were incredibly heavy and every time my skin touched them, they drained a fraction of my physical energy, leaving my muscles sore and weak.

By the time the dark sky began to turn a faint gray, my arms felt like lead. The silver key Erebos had stolen from the laboratory was safely tucked inside my boot, pressing hard against my ankle with every step I took.

"Kael," Zane whispered, wiping sweat from his brow. "Look at the edge of the fence."

I looked up, squinting through the morning mist. A lone figure was standing right outside the iron perimeter of the labor fields. She was wearing a heavy, dark travel cloak but her long silver hair peeked out from underneath the hood.

It was Lyra Voss.

She wasn't looking at the other working students. Her cold blue eyes were fixed directly on me. She stood perfectly still for a long minute, watching me struggle with a heavy blood-stone. Then, she turned around and walked away toward the main academy towers, disappearing into the fog.

"Why is she watching you?" Zane asked, his voice full of worry. "She's the daughter of the General. If she suspects something, we won't even make it back to our dorms."

"I don't know," I muttered, but my mind was racing. Lyra knew my father wasn't a traitor, or at least she knew her father had eliminated my family for a hidden reason.

“She is a danger to us, Kael,” Erebos warned in my mind. “But she is also the key to finding out how much the Headmaster truly knows. We need to get out of these fields.”

The next night, the storm returned with a vengeance. Thunder shook the sky and the guards retreated into their warm tower, leaving the working students alone in the dark mud.

"Now is our chance," I whispered to Zane as we stood near the back edge of the field, close to the stone foundation of the academy.

"What are we doing?" Zane asked, shivering.

"We are going back down," I said. I pulled the small silver key out of my boot. The metal hummed with a faint, warm energy against my fingers. "Erebos told me there is a secret maintenance grate near the base of this wall. It connects directly to the lower tunnels."

We crept through the dark, avoiding the scanning magical lanterns from the watchtowers. It took us ten minutes of digging through wet weeds to find the heavy iron grate embedded in the stone wall. It was locked with a large rusted padlock.

I pressed the glowing silver key into the keyhole. It fit perfectly. With a loud click, the heavy lock snapped open.

Zane helped me pull the heavy iron grate open. A rush of foul, stale air blasted into our faces from the dark hole. We slid inside one by one, dropping onto the hard stone floor of a narrow passage.

We walked for twenty minutes in total darkness, guided only by the faint violet glow emitting from the royal crest on my chest. The passage sloped sharply downward, deeper than the basement, deeper than the secret laboratory we had fallen into before.

Finally, the tunnel opened up into a giant circular stone chamber. In the center of the room stood a cage made of glowing white bars of pure magical energy.

I froze, my breath catching in my throat.

Sitting inside the glowing cage was a young boy. He wore a simple white tunic, his eyes tightly closed as if he were fast asleep. He looked exactly like me. It was a perfect duplicate.

Suddenly, the boy's eyes snapped open. They were not brown like mine, nor violet like the dragon's. They were a terrifying, solid pitch black. He looked directly at me and a horrific distorted mirror of my own voice echoed through the stone chamber.

"You shouldn't have come here, big brother," the duplicate boy whispered, and the iron door behind us slammed shut with a deafening bang.