The Unbidden: A New World (1) (Short Parts)

Part 69 (Nice)

While I'd have to refine the methods, I could really make a lucrative business out of heating a really wealthy family's home.

"You ever had chicken?" I asked Hargen.

"..."

"Why yes, yes I have. It was wonderful!" Hargen chimed in his guttural yet child-like voice.

"Would you recommend it over horse? Cow?" I questioned.

"Only if you add garlic, oregano and bell pepper," he replied.

This was the nature of my conversations with Hargen. He never spoke back, so I gave him voice until he gained his own. I was sure if someone were watching my exchanges, they'd think me a mad man. Could you believe that? A mad man! There were times I truly felt it though.

More often than not, I found myself thinking back to Jayde and Thea. I knew just looking at Thea set me off, and I wasn't sure why it didn't affect most other people. While She was physically out of my sight, I could maintain a grip on my own sanity. Jayde, however, left me with bitter thoughts. She was out doing her own thing.

It'd been an entire year and she still hadn't returned. It made me wonder if she was dead and that Aurias was unable to keep her alive. I tried contacting Aurias several times to no avail. It seemed there was an actual limit to the range of the soul telepathy we had.

Or maybe he died, I thought bitterly.

Then again, were he dead, I would've died, too. The fact that I couldn't reach anyone really pained me. A conversational partner, no matter how simple, would really be a welcomed change.

"A year and ... two months. Will you ever hatch?" I asked aloud as I finished scratching another tally mark into the wall.

No response, as usual.

Not that I expected one, I mused.

I made myself some Loht soup as I liked to call it, and ate up what I could. Now, one might think after over a year, Loht's corpse would have been spoiled and rotten. That's what I thought, too. It turned out that a dragon possessed some sort of natural preservation after death. That didn't stop me from eating her, though. I did employ my own preservation techniques such as drying out the meat. Dragon jerky was actually really delicious.

I wondered how Hargen would respond if it saw me eating its mom. I perished the thought, biting off another piece of jerky.

I could probably sell this for a fortune, I thought.

Time felt as though it passed too slowly after the year mark. Days felt significantly longer than they should have. It may have been an aftereffect of being isolated for so long. Sometimes I'd look at Hargen and the smallest inclination of "if it wasn't here, you'd be free", but I'd quell it as I'd already come this far.

"I wonder if you'll even be sentient. I know in one of the books I read in my old life, dragons were born with no knowledge, kind of like human babies," I spoke idly.

My voice was entirely drowned out by the flames of my Palm Fire, as usual.

"I really hope that's not the case. I don't know how long dragons take to age. Don't want a little tike trying to constantly eat me or other people for a long time," I chuckled.

Things really were going so slowly. I knew I needed to keep the egg warm, but I didn't have a fool-proof way besides making a giant fire around it and keeping it lit. I'd end up smoking the whole cave, so the idea was tossed immediately. I also wondered if I was even keeping it around the right temperature, and so around two years during the new moon, I tried another plan as my patience thinned.

I did everything as normal; ate my dragon jerky after waking, and then starting the ritual of heating Hargen up. Once night fell, and around an hour before I was to sleep, I amped up the spell into over drive. I tied some of the soft skin from under Loht's scales in a wrapping for my left hand after having cleaned it up, and tried out Palm Fire as a Catalyst spell.

It worked far better than I could have thought. My normal flames came out as a light orange, which transitioned to a dark orange with a tinge of blue after I absorbed Loht's essence. Using part of Loht as a catalyst ramped the output out in a massive way, as the flames erupted in a blueish white, spreading at least sixty feet from me in a wide cone, which I made sure to aim at the lower part of Hargen. The fire spread across the floor and up the walls, illuminating the entire cavern.

The heat was nearly as bad as Loht's. It was strange to me as well, that Loht's fire was still orange and red despite the output. I channeled all my concentration into my left hand and funneled the magic out. Immediately the flames turned from the blue-white to an iridescent white that even seemed to become partially transparent near my hand, but filled out as it flowed. Its length doubled and the cone grew extremely wide.

The flames spread half way up the walls in front of me and even engulfed the entirety of Hargen. It felt like my hand was the opening to a fire hydrant with me spewing flames instead of water. The intensity of the heat made me dizzy and I felt my consciousness fading in and out, but I pushed through as hard as I could for as long as I could. I kept the fire going for around two minutes before my magic reserves neared empty. The spell halted and I collapsed on the ground next to my makeshift bedroll.