Stealing the Dark Moon

The Boy who Stole a Dragon God's Magic

No one else could see it. Only dragonsight allowed Aerohim to perceive the boy's last breath lingering like a bright thread on the edge of his lips. The sapphire banishing flame burned it thinner by the second. His banishing flame. What had he done?

"I take it back!" the dragon bellowed. "All of it, all of this is my fault—"Aerohim blasted Foxkit's body again and again with fiery emerald bolts of healing spellfire, but his last breath continued dissipating until only the barest wisp was caught in his teeth.

"I have lost so very many, bright-scaled strong ones. Just let me keep this one puny, stubborn creature alive," Aerohim pleaded. He vowed to keep barraging even the tiniest shred of final breath back into the boy, even if he spent every last trace of spellfire.

"Come back, Foxkit!"Aerohim cried from the wild raw ache of his heart.

***

Kit wondered if all the dead washed up at the moon.

He awoke floating in the heart of a shapeless night. His gaze was immediately transfixed by the massive dimensions of the glowing orb overhead. The full moon ate up the sky with its silhouette so that not even a single star could edge its way across the horizon. An invisible force pulled him ever closer to its silver face.

Correction. Fangs.

Goosebumps prickled his skin, for the moon's surface writhed with the luminous coils of a gigantic dragon. The beast's teeth bristled like the innumerable trees of the Galefang, its body rippled with more scales than waves in the sea, and the great lamp of its opal eye lifted wide to gaze at him—Aerohim's body would be a mere speck next to it! Kit gulped at the realization that his death had brought him before the mythic Grandfather Dragon himself.

The dragon spoke in barely a whisper, yet Kit felt the vibrant warmth of his voice flood every corner of his consciousness. "There lie many ages before I rise, yet this magic twisted in your soul, it was mine once. It should not have awoken without me," Renatus mused with an irritable twitch of his tail that created a mile-long canyon across the moon.

Kit cleared his throat nervously as a blizzard of dust settled over the new canyon. "I'm sorry, it was an accident," he started to say, but then a streak of stubbornness shot through him. "No, I take that back. I needed it. Your magic is strong enough to break the world, but I just used a little bit to save it," he added, wondering if he'd been too bold.

"You did all that, little morsel—ahem—mortal?" Renatus asked, and Kit started as the dragon chortled; a rather undignified noise for a deity, he thought. "Not even I, in all my slumbering visions, would dare to imagine such a wild dream!" Renatus said.

Kit was used to being belittled, ignored, and generally disbelieved, but today, he was simply not going to have it. He folded his arms and scowled up at the lunar serpent. "I don't need to imagine anything. My life . . ." A half-smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as Kit remembered the sweeping shadow of Aerohim's scarlet wings falling over the road when he rescued him from the Fairchilds. The gleaming flick of Sheen's black hair as she tossed it impatiently over her shoulder, the warmth of Moony's fur in his fingers as they raced against the night, and the laughter of his friends as they gorged themselves on apple-butter biscuits in the Ladyslipper's galley. "Even without your magic, nobody could make up anything half so crazy as my life!" he finished with supreme confidence.

"Hmm, a gallant boast, boy—I shall test it!" Renatus said.

The dragon's translucent coils shimmered to an abrupt standstill as he focused all of his attention on Kit. The boy froze, every inch of his body paralyzed as he was swallowed up in the great opal lamps of the dragon's eyes. The reptilian colors swirled through him as an iridescent ribbon stretched deep into his memories, deeper still to his heart, twining around the faces shining there.