Codex

7 - A Scar of the Past

We packed our backpacks onto the carriage on an early morning. The sun faintly lit the light forests outside Aquan.

Volt oozed a hodgepodge concoction of emotions, the two most outstanding being anticipation and nervousness. His brother was just rearing to go, like an easily excitable kid. Dawn on the other hand, well, I felt like she stuck to me. Her ambitions were the most clouded in my mind.

I understood she loved magic, but there had to be some reason why she'd tag along. I climbed up and helped her up afterwards. Pyro jumped in spritely.

The carriage driver whipped the reins and we were off, slowly. I didn't take into consideration the travel time, those daunting three days until we met the last town before Inferno Desert.

Thankfully, the notorious desert wasn't all sun and sand. There were patches of shrubs here and there, puddles of water. A chaparral partly.

"Alright, we'll camp here," I said, looking up at a small hill between two mountains. We were in a valley, a good enough hiding spot and a great place to camp. After we set up our base, I called Volt to have a private chat.

"The minute mom said I could hold my own in this desert, you insisted on coming along," I pointed out, "I don't know why you wished to come here so badly, nor is it any of my business, but I will oblige. As long as you don't do anything rash, or anything that could endanger you or us, I'm good."

He chuckled, a little forlorn, "Sorry, teach. It's nothing like that. It's just, closure, for a part of my life that is still with me."

Good family, good job. Engaged.

"The picture-perfect life." Donna commented.

He's probably lost something here.

We returned to the others, and they peered daggers at us. "Quit being so nosy," I commented. I left them setting up and scouted around the desert. Coyotes, scorpions, your occasional deer near watering holes. Nothing out of the ordinary when it came to the wildlife. The magic aberrations however, were a different pest altogether. Some areas stifled your casting, whilst others boosted it. There were failed summons of spirit creatures roaming the sands, some of them quite aggressive.

I returned once again after mapping out places of interest. We had lunch, and began practice afterward. "Like I said," I walked around them, "we'll skip a few spirits and attempt summoning an advanced one."

I surged my mana and brought forth three wyrms. They floated mid-air and were just small enough to wrap around your neck and rest on your shoulders. The lightning-based wyrm was white in colour with little accents of blue here and there. The fire wyrm had red scales with hints of yellow scattered about. And the water wyrm was mostly blue with white accentuating it.

"Visualise, form the base body in your mind, and call it forth. Focus not on speed, but accuracy. This spell is rather costly."

"Piece o' cake!" Pyro grinned and actually successfully summoned it! Well, for about five seconds until he lost control and it returned to the spirit world. His breath increased substantially from that, as the stamina it sapped was no joke. He looked a bit down.

"No, that was good, actually. Dawn," I looked at her and blanked out for a while. Her beauty really was undeniable.

She tilted her head and caught on after a few seconds. "Oh, right, sorry!" She summoned part of hers but it faded before it was completely summoned. She too, breathed heavily.

Volt tried after, but nothing happened. A poof, that's what we called totally failed spells. He slumped down afterwards, his breath even more erratic than Dawn and Pyro's.