Chapter Five
Grave Mistakes
By Lundlaeva
Grave Mistakes
By Lundlaeva
Deep in the heart of the Starwood Strand, a pair of Nocturnes made their way along a barely-there track through the trees. It wasn’t easy going: the delicate webbing of the female’s cloak kept getting tangled in the bushes, and the galactic smoke surrounding the male’s chest kept getting out of hand and drifting into both their eyes.
Eventually, they reached a clearing in which a series of crystalline spires rose up out of the earth in a rough circle, some straight and flat-topped like pillars, some curved over and coming to a point, and others twisted into strange, reality-warping spirals. Within the ring of spires, the grass and mosses underfoot petered out, revealing the bare, pink-tinged rock underneath. The female Nocturne went straight to the centre of the open space and started to flip through the book that was harnessed to her waist, but the male was drawn to the nearest piece of crystal: he peered at it closely, noting the runes that had been carved into the surface, just as their mentors at the Observatory had said.
“Hey, did you see this, Nightwing?” he asked.
“Orion!” the female Nocturne called, managing a passable imitation of the strict Skydancer librarian who had given them the book and making him jump. “Stop wasting time. We need to complete this spell.”
“Right, right, sorry,” Orion muttered. He waddled over to join her and the two of them peered at the book, reading through the instructions again. Most of the page was taken up with an elaborate diagram of a protective sigil which was made of two lines twisting together. It was surrounded by tiny Fae writing. The runes were narrow and unsteady and there were ink-splatters obscuring some of the words.
“Okay – this seems simple enough,” Nightwing said. She looked up at Orion. “We’re supposed to draw it out and then add magic? Right?”
He stared back. He wasn’t about to admit that he found the writing completely illegible. “If you say so.”
She pulled out two sticks of chalk and handed the magenta one to him. “Right. You draw the pink part – start over there – and I’ll draw the white bit. Make sure you get it exactly right!”
She hopped across the clearing using her wings for extra lift and started to draw. Orion glided to the far side of the bare rock, took a deep breath. After this, there was no going back: no interruptions, no mistakes, or the spell would go wrong – and nothing could go wrong.
Not this time.
Not again.
He brought his piece of chalk down onto the stone with a soft little click. He shuffled backwards, sideways, backwards again, tracing out a copy of the image from the book and twining it with Nightwing’s ghostly white efforts. As the sigil grew more complex, they both had to step carefully to avoid smudging the criss-crossed lines. However, despite the jagged and rippling surface of the rock, both Nocturnes managed to finish drawing out the symbol without breaking or blurring their chalk lines.
Once it was complete, Orion jumped into the air and beat his wings to join Nightwing, hovering just above the spire circle. “Now what?”
“Let me just check,” she said. She stuffed her chalk away and opened up the book again. She glanced between the page and the ground below, comparing the sigil they had drawn to the diagram. Orion swooped over to peer over her shoulder. They looked the same. About the same. Pretty much. Given that one was on a flat piece of parchment and the other was on a big piece of uneven rock and blown up to gigantic proportions.
“Looks good to me,” he said. Nightwing nodded and scanned down the instructions.
“Now just we have to transfer a little of our magic into the two halves of the symbol, and then it’ll start to draw power from the Isles themselves?” Nightwing said, a waver of uncertainty creeping into her voice.
“Sure. That sounds pretty much like what they told us,” Orion shrugged, and tried not to mimic the anxious twitching of Nightwing’s neck-frill. It would only make her more nervous and unsure of herself. He honestly couldn’t read the text either way – he just had to trust that she had got it right – so there was no point in ruining her confidence. Anyway, it did sound similar to the explanation they had been given before they left the Observatory.
Everyone was adamant that there could be no cataclysmic events threatening the whole of dragonkind this year during the Festival, and since all eyes would be focused on the skies for the duration of this year’s Starfall Celebration, that went double for space-based catastrophes. So the Festival Planning Team had sent dragons to three linked sites of power in the Cytstalspine Reaches, Starwood Strand, and Focal Point to cast the same protective spell. Once all three sigils had been drawn and activated, they should protect the Starfall Isles from anything that might come from the stars, drawing on the Arcane region’s inherent magical forces to maintain their power. It couldn’t last indefinitely, but the spells would remain intact for the length of the Festival.
“Let’s do this,” he said, and clapped his hands together.
His hands, which were covered in chalk. A little cloud of dust whumph-ed up and engulfed both Nocturnes’ torsos and heads in pink dust. For a second, nothing happened. Then Orion’s nose-crest twitched and shuffled. Nightwing’s face scrunched up.
“ACHOO!”
A pair of explosive sneezes catapulted the two Nocturnes backwards, tumbling them tail over horns in opposite directions – so neither of them noticed the little chain reaction of purple and dark blue sparks that glittered in the cloud of chalk dust before being absorbed. Orion righted himself first with a flail of his wings. He rubbed irritably at his nose crest, leaving behind a fuchsia smudge, and then spun around to look for Nightwing. She was all the way over on the other side of the clearing, shaking her head and still sneezing.
She was also lit from below by a strange pink light that hadn’t been there a moment before. He looked down.
The sigil was a gleaming a deep, angry shade of pink, the glow from it pulsing intermittently. Its lines moved sinuously on the rock as if it was unhappy to be trapped there. He stared in horror as he realised that it was not only shifting but actually changing into a different symbol entirely.
Orion darted across the clearing and said, “Uh, Nightwing? Is it supposed to look like that?”
She finally recovered from her sneezing fit, blinked her eyes open and looked down. “Oh, no! What have we done?!”
Nightwing scrabbled the book open and leafed through page after page of miniscule runes, muttering to herself. Orion kept his eyes on the fluctuations of the sigil. Something was definitely happening. It had to be because of their simultaneous sneezes, but there was no way of knowing what the effects would be if Nightwing couldn’t find a reference in the book.
Something fwish-ed past Orion’s wing at high velocity and with a disproportionately loud fwump and a plume of displaced earth buried itself in the ground near the edge of the clearing. The nearest tree, an enormous and deeply-rooted birch, shivered visibly at the impact.
Orion and Nightwing looked at one another. Then she slammed the book shut and both of them swooped down to take a closer look. There was a smoking crater nestled among the tree roots. In the center was a miniscule grey ball, no bigger than a peppercorn. The Nocturnes’ eyes met again.
“Is that …?” Orion said.
“A meteorite?” Nightwing finished.
As she said it, a bright light flickered into view between the trees. A streak of white soared towards them, leaving behind a trail of lilac vapour – a comet, soaring out of orbit. It grew brighter and brighter until suddenly it flared into a silent explosion, filling the whole sky with light and forcing the Nocturnes to shield their eyes. A moment later, another small meteor thumped into the ground nearby.
Nightwing lowered her hands and stared up at the sky, which was starting to fill with specks of light.
“It has to be the sigil,” she whispered. “Instead of protecting the Starfall Isles from things from space it’s attracting them.”
“So are those all meteors?” Orion asked. He couldn’t help but think of the larger meteors that normally circled the Focal Point, controlled by bizarre alien creatures. If the spell affected them and one of those crashed down onto Sornieth at terminal velocity, the results would be – well, apocalyptic.
Again.
“What do we do?!” Nightwing yelled, turning and grabbing Orion by the shoulders and shaking him. “How do we stop it?”
Orion suggested the first thing that popped into his head: “Destroy the sigil?”
“Yes. Yes! That might work.” Nightwing calmed for a moment, then when she turned to face the glare of magic coming off the symbol they had drawn, her wings drew up in panic once more. “But how?”
“Well, it is just chalk, right?” Orion said, tilting his head on one side.
“Yes?” Nightwing replied, looking at him curiously. “I mean – it’s enchanted chalk mined from a very remote area in the Crystalspine Reaches, imbued with the Starfall Isles’ innate magic, but yes: essentially, it’s chalk.”
“Great - so we can wash it off,” Orion said. “Come on, let’s do it before any more of those meteors land.”
“But we don’t have anything to wash it off with!” Nightwing wailed, throwing up her hands and spreading her wings.
“Nightwing,” Orion said very seriously, placing his hands on her shoulder, “You’re a Water dragon.”
She blinked her deep blue eyes at him, and then her face lit up. “Oh! Of course!”
She took off with a flick of her wings and Orion hastily followed, dodging yet another small meteorite on its way down. Nightwing drew on her magical reserves and swiftly conjured a jet of water, which she angled down onto the sigil. It was not the most elegant or well-aimed piece of magic ever – she was out of practice with such specifically elemental magic – but it quickly destroyed the warped sigil, wiping it off the rocks and leaving them clean.
As the glow faded, Orion looked around. The skies weren’t clear yet, but it did look as if the rain of meteorites was slowing, slowing, and yes – stopping.
“Thank the Arcanist that worked!” Nightwing sighed, letting her wings carry her downwards until she landed on the wet rock and sat down heavily. “Though … that was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Surprisingly easy. Suspiciously easy.”
Orion followed her down into the spire circle and said, “Never complain that preventing the end of the world is ‘too easy’. Shall we try this whole protective spell thing again?”
“Without messing up this time,” Nightwing said. She pointed an accusatory finger. “No sneezes!”
“No sneezes,” Orion agreed with a serious nod. He turned and made his way across the slippery stone until he reached his starting point and, with a sigh, started again.
It was more difficult to draw on the wet rock with the chalk, but the two Nocturnes managed it. They met in the air above the spire, the symbol complete and perfect beneath them, and this time channeled a little controlled magic into the chalk. This time, the sigil didn’t try and escape its own shape and didn’t start turn an eye-burning shade of pink - instead the chalk glittered gently and let out a soft, diffuse light. In addition, the runes carved in the spires surrounding the sigil started to glow white as the they connected with the other two locations, strengthening the spell and the protections on the Starfall Isles.
The two Nocturnes let out twin sighs of relief and started to fly back towards the Observatory, both carefully brushing chalk dust off their claws.
As they skimmed over the Starwood Strand’s treetops, Nightwing said, “We’re not telling anyone about what happened just now, right?”
Orion shuffled his still-chalky nose and gave her an incredulous look. “What do you think?”
“No?”
“No.”
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