As he wandered into the forest, he focused on the darkness and the shadows and everything that he could find. He didn’t see anything other than the tops of the trees.
The forest dragon would have to be here.
And the key was in finding her. If she was here, why would Therin have left her?
But then, he’d left her before. Maybe Therin didn’t need the forest dragon, but only needed her power. Maybe he’d left her here because this place was the key to her power.
Maybe Therin had only borrowed from her power, not knowing what it was.
That would be the best-case scenario, but Jason didn’t believe that was the case at all. He believed Therin had somehow found the key to using her, and had controlled her, trying to train her, and in doing so, he had changed something about her.
“How are we going to find her here?”
“She won’t let us find her unless she wants to be found,” Jason said.
He believed that, but maybe there was some other way?
He thought about the illusions.
That was the key to the forest dragon. If he could find her, if he could connect to her sense of illusion, then perhaps he could draw her to him. He didn’t have nearly the skill with illusion that he needed, but there was a way to do it.
He focused on the iron dragon, and on the glove. As power flowed through him, the contour of his hand changed, the glove taking on a different appearance, disappearing and becoming more like his other hand. Then there were his eyes. Rather than focusing on making them both silver, he decided to make them both green.
It was a different sort of illusion, and he wondered if perhaps it was a mistake, but he wanted to try to draw the forest dragon out. By making both his eyes green, he could mimic the way her eyes looked.
That seemed to be the key.
He focused, holding on to the sense of the iron dragon, holding on to the sense of the ice dragon, but as he tried to use those two dragon senses, he wasn’t able to change his eye color.
What about focusing on the sense of the forest dragon?
As he did, a strange tingling washed over him.
He stared up at the trees.
He had no idea if he was connecting to that power, but he believed something had changed, whether or not it was anything he could fully control.
The power was there.
He thought about what he needed. He needed to use her ability, but without having a connection to her the same way he did with the iron dragon and the ice dragon, he didn’t know if he would even be able to do so. Jason focused on what he remembered, the way the wind gusted through the trees, the way that her scales fluttered, and he thought about the colors and the way she’d leaned close, breathing him in.
That had to be the key somehow.
As he thought about it, he sensed a strange stirring.
It was almost as if the breeze fluttered through here, but as he looked around, there was no sign of the breeze. There was no sign of wind. It was all in his mind.
Much like everything in the illusion was in his mind.
Jason looked up. He stared at the distance.
Everything around him was muted.
“I know you’re up there,” he said.
As he stared into the darkness, he had no idea if he was even seeing what he thought he was. The trees began to shift, taking on a hint of color. The darkness began to fade, transitioning to the filtered light of the forest.
Even that wasn’t real. The longer he stared at it, the more certain Jason was that it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. It was imagined, but dark green eyes looked back at him.
She was there.
He climbed the nearest tree.
He watched, worried she might try to slither away from him and disappear into the forest, but she sat perched in the tree, observing him.
Jason focused on her. Those deep green eyes stared back at him, seeming to know him, to understand him, and as he climbed, he could feel her sense within him. There was an awareness, a knowledge of her. The longer he climbed, the more certain he was that he was going to be able to reach her.
Once he reached her, what would it change?
Jason had no idea whether it would change anything. For his part, maybe it didn’t matter. All he needed to know was what she was doing and what she was responsible for, and he needed to know why she was doing it.
He squeezed his heels against the trunk of the tree, climbing as quickly as he could. When he reached the top, he looked at her eyes, meeting her gaze, and didn’t look away.
There was the strange sense of wind gusting through the trees the same way he’d noticed each time he’d been here, and that sense seemed to fill him, and with it, he recognized the nature of her power.
It was a stirring, a swirling sort of power, and it seemed to infiltrate everything. That wind fluttered through, and it changed everything around her.
“What do you really look like?”
She stared at him, blinking for a moment, and he couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps she was masked from him at all times. Maybe what he saw wasn’t even her real image. And if it wasn’t, why would she be hiding from him like that?
“Is there any reason you don’t want us to see who you really are?”
The dragon shifted, pushing her head toward him, and she took a deep breath.
Her wings fluttered, catching some of the breeze, and as she did, Jason stared, looking up at the top of the trees. He noticed the way that her scales seemed to ruffle, the color shimmering along the surface, and there was a surge of power as they did.
That shimmering was all too familiar from when he’d been trapped in the illusion and had not known what was real and what was not.
Watching that shimmering now, he couldn’t help but feel as if she were the one controlling him.
“Have they forced themselves on you?”
She didn’t answer, and he decided to try something different.
He drew upon the ice dragon.
The power of the ice dragon filled him. He could borrow from it and was aware of how the ice dragon flew high overhead, the sense of him drawing cold and energy from the desolate sky. He drew from that power, summoning it, and it flowed from high above, a burst of ice lightning that crackled down from the sky and raced through Jason.
That power filled him and he pushed it out, letting it wash over the forest dragon.
At first, he didn’t detect anything.
For a while, Jason wasn’t even sure if there was anything to detect and whether or not the connection he used to the ice dragon would reveal anything. He pushed outward, letting that connection flow from the ice dragon to him and out to her.
It still wasn’t enough.
She kept her head away from him and Jason scooted forward, climbing up the trunk of the tree, straining for her. He wasn’t sure if she would even let him get close, but as he reached, he could feel the warmth radiating off her, and he had to know whether or not she was even willing to let him touch.
Then he touched the side of her cheek.
It was velvety soft. It was different than what he felt from the ice dragon or the iron dragon. The ice dragon was cold and sharp, almost painful. It was slick from the melting of the ice that radiated around his body. The iron dragon was heat and the shifting sense of metal beneath him. And all of that was different with the forest dragon.
Not only were her scales velvety, but he could feel the striations beneath the surface of her skin. It felt similar to when he touched the leaf, and it reminded him of the forest.
He held his hand there and reached forward with his other hand, the iron dragon hand, and he pressed that on her other cheek.
Jason pushed.
This time, he drew power not only from the ice dragon, but also from the iron dragon, and between the two of them, that power flowed through him, racing outward, and it arced into the forest dragon. Jason felt it fill her.