THE HIDDEN TEMPLE
1577 Words
Kael didn't answer Varyn. He couldn't. His throat had closed around the words, trapping them somewhere behind his sternum where they burned like coals he couldn't swallow, couldn't spit out, couldn't do anything with except carry.
The dragon moved first. Lunging between them with a speed that shouldn't have been possible for something so massive. Jaws splitting open. A wave of blue fire rolled across the clearing, bright enough to turn night into day for one impossible instant. Varyn's black dragon met it with a roar of its own, the sound tearing through the air. Black flame erupted from its throat. The two fires collided mid-air, blue and black twisting together. The blast threw everyone backward. Heat scorched across Kael's face, singeing his eyebrows.
He hit the ground hard. Gravel bit into his palms, embedding itself in his skin. The mark on his wrist flared hot enough that he cried out, the sound lost in the chaos around him.
"Run!" Astra grabbed his arm. Hauled him to his feet with surprising strength.
They ran.
The forest blurred around them. Trees. Rocks. Roots trying to catch his boots with every other step. Behind them, the two dragons clashed, and the sound of it was like mountains breaking, like the earth itself coming apart at the seams. Kael didn't look back. He just ran, following Astra through paths that appeared and vanished between one heartbeat and the next, trusting her to know where safety was even though he wasn't sure safety existed anymore. Even though every breath burned in his lungs and
his legs felt like they might give out at any moment.
They ran until his lungs burned. Until his legs shook. Until the sounds of battle faded behind them into nothing but wind and his own ragged breathing and the hammer of his pulse in his ears.
Finally, Astra stopped. Kael bent double. Hands on his knees. Gasping for air that didn't seem to fill his lungs properly no matter how deeply he breathed.
"How did we..." He couldn't finish.
Couldn't get enough air.
"The dragon bought us time,"
Astra said quietly, her own breathing barely labored despite the desperate run.
"We have to use it."
Kael straightened slowly, every muscle protesting.
Looked around. They stood at the base of a mountain, its peak lost somewhere above the clouds, gray stone streaked dark with old rain and darker with something that might have been soot from ancient fires. At its base sat a door. Carved from solid stone. Covered in symbols worn smooth by time, the edges of each one softened like riverbed stones shaped by centuries of water.
One of them stopped Kael cold.
The flame. The looping lines. The exact mark burned into his own wrist. Carved here in stone long before he'd ever been born. Long before his parents had been born. Maybe even before the village he'd grown up in had existed.
Astra pressed her palm flat against the stone. Her fingers spread wide. Waiting.
Nothing happened. No shift. No sound. Not even a tremor of dust drifting free from the ancient carvings.
She stepped back and looked at him instead, something almost like an apology in her face. "Your turn."
Kael hesitated for only a second. Then he reached out. Pressed his hand to the cold stone, the surface rough and freezing beneath his palm, gritty with age.
The door groaned open like it had been waiting eighteen years to do exactly that. A long, low sound that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside the mountain itself, from chambers that had held their breath for longer than human memory.
Inside, a temple older than anything Kael had ever stood inside opened up around them. Walls covered floor to ceiling in paintings gone soft with age, the colors faded to whispers of what they must have once been. Dragons in flight, their wings spread across entire sections of wall. Warriors mid-battle, frozen forever in postures of striking or falling, weapons raised, faces caught in expressions of fury or fear or determination. And scattered among them, again and again, people bearing the same mark he carried on his wrist, painted small and deliberate into every scene like a signature.
"These people,"
Kael said slowly.
Walking closer to the nearest wall. His fingers hovering just above the cracked paint without quite touching it, afraid that contact might make it crumble to dust.
"Were Dragon Guardians like me?"
"Yes," Astra answered.
"Where are they now?"
No one answered him. He didn't need them to. He already understood what that silence meant, the same way he'd understood it in the clearing when Astra had said they disappeared, all of them. The same way he understood every silence that had followed him through his life like a second shadow.
At the center of the temple stood a stone table. Worn smooth at the edges by countless hands over countless years, the surface slightly concave in places where palms had rested again and again. On it sat a single leather-bound book, its cover worn soft from handling, the leather cracked and supple with age, the spine creased in places where it had clearly been opened again and again.
Astra lifted it carefully. Like it might crumble in her hands. Like it was made of something more fragile than paper and leather.
"This was your father's."
Kael's chest went tight. A lump rising in his throat he hadn't expected.
"He wrote this?"
"Yes. Your father was known as one of the gentlest Dragon Guardians in living memory — a man who spent more time listening to dragons than commanding them.
He believed the bond should be a conversation, not a conquest. That's what made him different from the ones who came before him."
He opened it with fingers that weren't quite steady, the pages dry and thin beneath his touch, the edges brown with age. The first page held only one line. Written in a hand he'd never seen and somehow already recognized, as if some part of him had been waiting his whole life to read exactly these words.
If you are reading this, then they failed to protect you.
His hands began to shake in earnest now. The book trembling in his grip as he stared down at his father's handwriting for the very first time. Below it, more words waited.
My son.
If you have found this book, then the Dragon Guardian has returned.
Your life was never an accident. You were hidden because there are people who fear what you can become.
Kael turned the page. His father's handwriting continued, slightly messier here, as if written in haste.
Do not trust everyone who claims to protect you. His eyes lifted slowly to Astra. She saw the look. "You doubt me."
Kael closed the book. The sound of the cover snapping shut was loud in the quiet.
"I don't know who to trust anymore. Not tonight. Not after everything.
"Her expression cracked. Just slightly.
Just for a second. A flicker of hurt she didn't quite manage to hide. Then she looked away.
"Trust is earned," she said quietly.
Kael turned back to the book. Opened it again. Kept reading, his eyes scanning the faded ink. The mark on your wrist is more than a symbol. It is a bond. A connection to the first dragon, forged in your blood the moment you were born. When it wakes, you will be called to a choice your mother and I tried to spare you from.
His father's handwriting grew shakier here. As if written in terrible haste, or with a hand that trembled. There is a reason the world fears Dragon Guardians. A reason they hunted us to extinction. We were never meant to control dragons.
Kael. We were meant to become—The page ended there. Torn roughly, the edge jagged. The rest of the sentence gone, ripped away by hands Kael would never know. Kael stared at the ragged edge.
"Become what? "Astra had gone very still. Very pale.
"I don't know."
"You're lying."
"Kael—"
He slammed the book shut. Spun to face her.
"My father was about to tell me what I am. What I'm meant to become. And you're telling me you don't know?"
Her jaw tightened. "Some truths are dangerous."
"No." He shook his head. Voice hard and certain.
"The truth is mine."
The words landed in the room like a struck bell.
The sound of them settling into every corner of the ancient chamber.
For a long moment, no one moved. Then Astra exhaled. Long and slow.
"Your birth mother," she said quietly, each word careful, measured, "was the first Dragon Guardian in three generations to successfully bond with the first dragon."
Kael went very still. "What does that mean?
"It means she could command it. Speak to it. Share its power.
" Astra's eyes met his. Haunted. Afraid. "And it means the bond killed her."
The ground shuddered beneath their feet.
Dust rained from the ceiling in thin streams, catching the torchlight.
And from somewhere deep below the temple, something ancient began to wake.
"No," Astra whispered.
The stone floor cracked. Splintered. A golden light spilled up through the widening fissure, bright enough to make Kael squint.
Kael stared down into it.
"What i
s that?"
Astra's voice was barely audible. "Your birth mother tried to free the first dragon. And this is what's left of what she started."
- Writer
