Chapter 137 HE WAKES
Chapter 137 HE WAKES
THIRD PERSON
He was exactly as he had been in her dream that was not actually a dream. Dark hood forward, hands unhurried. He emerged from the threshold and looked at the training field around him with a brief, professional assessment, checking for witnesses, reading the quiet of the grounds and then he looked at Lyra.
His expression was not warm. It was the expression of someone looking at an instrument that is performing exactly as designed.
He extended his hand. Lyra’s hand came up to meet it and he led her through.
~
The realm received them.
The luminous dark was the same. The charged air was the same. The distant movement of the realm’s dragons through the sky above was the same, enormous shapes in the dark, entirely indifferent to the two small figures on the ground below.
What was not the same was the red lightning.
It was everywhere. Not the slow spread that the book had described, not the creeping of it progressing gradually. It was active, present throughout the atmosphere of the realm in branching threads that pulsed, reached, receded and pulsed again.
Carew walked Lyra across the ground of the realm with her hand in his and looked at the red lightning in the air around them with satisfaction
Stormweaver was where he always was.
The ancient dragon lay in the open space at the centre of the realm, wings folded, head down, the corruption moving across his scales in the familiar branching patterns. But there was something different here too, something Carew noted. The lightning on Stormweaver was denser than before. More active. The dark veins of it ran deeper.
He was closer to the surface than he had been.
Carew smiled.
He led Lyra forward until they were ten feet from Stormweaver’s great head. Then he stopped, stepped back and watched. Lyra walked on without him.
She moved toward Stormweaver with the same ease she had moved through the Academy grounds. She stopped when she was close enough to touch, raised her hand and placed her palm flat against his enormous head
The realm changed immediately.
The red lightning on Stormweaver went static, shifting in character, replaced by faster movement with more intention, as though the hand against his scales had provided a direction it had been looking for. It ran along his scales in crackling white-edged lines, brighter and faster than before, and where it ran the stone-like shell that had accumulated over his folded wings began to fracture.
Fracturing but not breaking fully, the first stage of something that Carew knew was going to take more than one session to complete
A pulse went out from the point of contact between Lyra’s hand and Stormweaver’s head. Not red but purple, deep and significant, rolling outward through the realm like a slow wave moving through water. The distant dragons in the sky above reacted to it, sounds echoing down, sharp and startled, the realm’s own creatures responding to a change in whatever balance they had grown accustomed to.
The floating rocks above began to descend
Carew looked up.
He watched them dropping slowly, barely perceptibly, but dropping still and understood immediately what it meant. The realm’s balance was connected to Stormweaver’s state in ways that Carew had studied but not fully understood. What was happening now was at the edge of what he had studied. Waking Stormweaver in a single session, bringing him from this state to full consciousness in one encounter would produce disruptions in the realm that exceeded what Carew had planned for.
He was not ready for that.
He crossed to Lyra and removed her hand from Stormweaver’s head.
The lightning slowed immediately. The purple pulse did not recur. The floating rocks arrested their descent and hung in the air, uncertain, before beginning to drift upward again.
Stormweaver’s scales were warmer than they had been before Lyra touched them. Carew put his own hand briefly against them, checking and felt the heat of it.
“He wakes,” Carew murmured quietly, to the realm around him, to no one. “Slowly. As it should be.”
He turned and looked at Lyra.
She stood where he had moved her, eyes still closed, face still entirely blank. The bandaging around her head was white in the realm’s luminous dark. The violet curls moved slightly in the charged air. She looked entirely wrong in this place and also, in some way he could not fully articulate, entirely suited to it. The storm in the air around her, the realm recognising what she was even in the state she was in.
He traced a stray violet curl back from her face.
“You were born for more than they have made of you,” he observed, his voice very quiet. He looked at her face, the face of someone entirely absent from their own expression and something moved through his eyes that was not sympathy and was not entirely without it either. He let go of the curl. “You will be part of my greatness, whether you choose to be or not.”
He took her hand.
He walked her back across the ground of the realm, back toward the point where the threshold could be opened and the distant sound of unsettled dragons still registered the purple pulse.
He opened the threshold with practiced ease of years of crossing. He helped her through.
He stood on the living world side for a moment and checked the sky, getting brighter, the sun in the horizon, the grounds empty, the Academy windows all dark. He noted the time against his internal calculation.
Fifteen minutes inside the realm.
Five hours in the living world.
He had not fully accounted for this disparity in his planning. He had known it existed, it had been documented in his own notes, but the practical implication of it for a nightly session programme was something he would need to restructure.
He would need to start considerably earlier. He watched Lyra walking back toward the Academy building, eyes still closed, the spell still holding her and then he stepped back through the threshold and it closed behind him.