Dragon's Blood

Tobias

The world slipped away into night while Iyla and Tobias talked. He told Iyla that on the night their village had been attacked, he had seen their father fall to Kade. Whilst Kade was not at full strength after destroying the sorcerers, he still had enough protection to withstand the fire of the dragons, and more than enough dark magic at his disposal to strike Iydra from the sky. Tobias had watched helplessly as his father disappeared into the flames below along with his dragon. Iydra had told his son to flee, but in grief and fury, Tobias had turned Drago towards Kade. They had of course taken a direct hit from Kades magic and began to plummet towards the flames too but at the last moment, something had thrown both Tobias and Drago clear of the flames. It was no rescuer however, Kade had not suddenly taken pity on his nephew and it was he who had thrown them clear of the flames for a terrible reason.

Both Tobias and Drago were badly injured. Tobias told Iyla how Kade had the ability to invade a person's mind if they were vulnerable and, as Kade had watched Tobias plummet to earth triumphantly, he had suddenly seen an opportunity. He wanted to punish those who he thought had turned his sister against him; Kendra and Iydra were now both dead, Iyla was nowhere to be found but there was Tobias, unable to defend himself, lying broken and unconscious and providing Kade with an outlet for his vengeful anger. He took the boy and the dragon, imprisoned them and got into Tobias' mind. He controlled him like a puppet but all the time, Tobias had been aware of what was happening.

"It was like being a passenger," he had told her sadly, "I was in there, I experienced everything that Kade made me do but was helpless to stop it, I remember everything."

Iyla cried for him as he told her that Kade made him heal Drago, who was close to death, and then took his healing power and gave him instead, the power to torture by touch. When Kade had started hunting down Chandak in his efforts to find and dragon eggs, he had use Tobias to torture answers from them. It had broken him, crushed his spirit, knowing the pain he had caused those people and Kade took immense pleasure in this, he kept Tobias alive purely to torture him and to use him to do the same to others. He didn't need to do it, he had chosen to do that to his own nephew. It was horrific, Iyla felt nothing for hatred for him and nothing but compassion for the poor broken man that he had turned Tobias into.

The capture of Drago also meant that Kade had free access again to Dragons blood. He knew that the blood of a fully grown dragon would serve him better than that of a youngling, he had learned that lesson when releasing power of the Dragon Heart Stone had weakened him, even after well over a year of constantly consuming dragons blood. He had had power enough left to destroy one small village but no where near the power and protection he needed to conquer vast kingdoms as he wanted. Kade was paranoid too, about where the Dragon Heart Stone may have ended up. For all he knew it was in the hands of those who he saw to be his enemies, ready to be used against him if he strayed from the Darklands himself. So he bided his time and focussed his energies on growing his power and his protection, and on trying to destroy dragons and find the whereabouts of Iyla and of her mothers powers. Once all obstacles were out of the way, he could reemerge back into their world safe in the knowledge he was the most powerful being in existence and no-one would be able to defeat him.

When speaking of the terrible things he had witnessed became too much for him, Tobias listened instead to Iyla's talk of her life with Sam. He had hung on her every word as she described the flat they'd lived in, the shop, her school and all the things she had experienced growing up in another world. She felt so guilty that she had once felt discontent with her life when her brother had lived the past ten years in such abject horror but she could see that hearing her talk of such normality gave him some peace.

"I thought you had died at first," he said, "I knew you were hidden but I just couldn't see that there was anyway you could have survived. When I found out that Sam had taken you away to hide you my feelings were indescribable. I think that is when I first began to resist Kade, when I first started trying to hide my thoughts from him. I was sixteen, maybe I got stronger with age, I don't know; but from the moment I knew you were still alive I had something which I hadn't had since the day Drago and I fell from the sky; I had hope. Kade needs to find weakness to get into someones mind, he'd been doing it since I was a child, but knowing you were out there, it made me stronger."