Legions of Bone: Dragon Rider Book 3

Chapter 16: Growth is A Process

While writing this, my pride for Death Boy was at its PEAK. There was cheering and happy dances and going to my family to boast about his progress because this bitch has never done anything to improve himself. So I was just really excited and I'm super excited to show this to you. 

Dagen

Dagen found another cloak.

Not the one in Norah's tiny white box. It was probably destroyed by Etin or if it wasn't, Holland was in that room with other people, including Cedric, and Dagen would rather die than face either of them.

It's not that he was attached to the cloak, he had taken it off a frozen body during one of Raider City's harsh winters. Everything could be replaced. But... Dagen didn't own very many things besides the loot he'd collected over the months, two daggers, and a cloak.

Still... He had to find a new cloak. It was off-putting and Dagen didn't know why.

"Why do they fight like that?" he asked, peering over the edge of pale stone down the two hundred foot drop to colorful blobs, some the size of Dagen's thumb, others were the length of his finger. The dragon's scales gleamed and shifted like fish scales beneath the scorching sun.

Dagen was fairly sure they were trainees, but he had overheard Holland talking to his family about Cedric stopping usual training and swapping them for arenas. So many people whispered about it in the markets that he'd gotten curious. He watched mages manipulate the arena grounds, forming lakes and mountains or cities and rivers, all so the three factions could be put against each other.

Mass quantity training, Norah had told him. "Cedric wants students training for war without them realizing it. Says it's to cope with the "excess of people.'"

"To learn war stuff," he guessed, frustration seeping into his words. "I don't know."

Dagen watched as figures walked through people, watched dragons fly overhead that seemed too... Not alive. There was so much death.

A harsh wind pushed against his back, and if his feet weren't planted so well into the stone he might have fallen off the top of the Main Halls.

Eoin's eyes followed a dragon with a missing tail and broken wing limp across the field where students gathered, swinging glinting swords at one another. "Can you touch them?"

"Touch?" he raised a brow, throwing his hood on for protection against the wind. "Like Norah with the ghost? Of course, I can."

No matter that she had tried to teach him how she did it. But Norah knew as much about harnessing necromancy as he knew about necromancer history.

Nothing.

"Do you think she could play with me?" His grey eyes slide to his, bright and vibrant as his grin.

Dagen extended his hand, poking his brother only to have his finger pass through. Eoin pursed his lips. "You can't do it."

"I can too," he said. "I just choose not to."

Eoin pursed his lips. Folded his arms with a hmph. "Would another necromancer know? If you could do it we could play together." Eoin's face lit up. "We could play hide-and-seek."

Dagen's stomach twisted. He almost doubled over from the sheer pain of those memories. Of finding his brother beneath the family pine tree, his neck snapped.

"No," Dagen's mouth was paper dry. "Maybe a different game."

His mind spun, slowly at first. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, collecting bits of snow as it rolled and gained momentum.