Dragons Rising ✔️

Ch 23: Mindstones

Immediately bored, I leaned off the couch to grab one of the only books within reach, Varnest's Take on Moonstones. On closer inspection, it was missing half its pages, and most of the other pages were unreadable because of water damage. After finding a semi-intact page, I started reading.

"The mindstone is an spherical, crystalline organ located at the base of a dragon's neck, on the outside of their scales. Its full range of uses are unknown by many bipeds. It is not necessary for normal survival functions, though without it, dragons have no..."

What looked like a burn mark obscured the next words. A few lines down, I found a couple other readable sentences.

"Mindstones are required to activate the Stones of Change when a mage transformation ceremony is held, so a non-katalni dragon could never be a dragon mage. While most dragons respect these mediators, many would rather remain as the largest four-legged carnivores on the Terallel continent."

The dragon mages interested me, but the only other reference to them said that most mages kept their magic through the transformation, though some of them didn't. How annoyingly vague.

I flicked through the rest of the book but could only read short snippets on some pages. Something told me that mindstones were important, especially since dragons didn't have them anymore. Maybe they were some vestigial organ from millenniums past.

Callah soon returned, and I found that the pain in my chest had faded enough for me to sit up properly. She gave me my wand and rune book, which I pocketed. After charging my alabri in a miniature fountain that weighed about as much as I did, I asked again what to do with my fangs.

"Simply transform your fangs and lock that transformation as if it were any other shape shift."

I raised an eyebrow. Locking a shift made it permanent, at least while I had the energy in my alabri to maintain it, but changing a single part of me would be a lot different than the full transformations I normally did. "Locking a partial shift is like trying to hover in midair halfway through a jump. It's pretty impossible."

"You're not locking a partial shift to some part talme, part animal creature. You are locking a full shift to talme."

I tried to explain that it was also impossible to turn into other magical creatures, but she cut me off with a wave of her hand.

"While it will be difficult, I assure you, you are not the first half-talme paltor to encounter this difficulty. I have met several who manage this kind of shift quite well." She stepped back with a look like 'you'll see.'

Maybe I'd been wrong about the fire magic thing, but I wasn't an elent. I couldn't really be expected to know about that. Shapeshifting magic, on the other hand, was something I'd done since I was a kid. This wasn't going to work. I didn't even know the magical word for a talme. I could guess it based on naming conventions, though.

"Here goes nothing. Teter Ceacsi Telmar." There was a slight glow from my alabri, but I saw none of the normal skin blurring that happened with most transformations. I felt a faint tickle of magic in my gums, and when I retrieved the hand mirror from the shelf, my canine teeth were completely normal. I worried that staying transformed all the time might drain my Alabris faster than I could get access to Callah's charging fountain, but I supposed that was a bridge I would cross when I got to it. Right now, I had bigger things to deal with, like a dragon who hated me and the fact that I made things smoke with my mind whenever I got upset.