As he did, as he felt that surge of energy, he let it flow through him.
It exploded within him.
The iron dragon roared.
Jason continued to call on power, peeling it out of the sky, through him.
He could tell the illusion was beginning to fade.
At first, it shimmered. That was the telltale sign that all this was an illusion. He should have tested before, and he hated that he had made the mistake of not testing, of not trying to determine whether or not this was an illusion, and yet now he knew.
Somewhere, someone screamed, and Jason tried to ignore it, but it was Sarah.
He turned, but he couldn’t see her. The light glowing from the iron dragon was too much. And yet, the illusion held.
Whatever was happening, whoever was responsible for the illusion, was incredibly powerful. He needed to keep pulling on it, to keep calling to it, but as he tried, nothing changed. There had to be some other way.
What had he done before?
Jason had shattered the leaf.
The only problem was that here, he didn’t know where that leaf was. Somehow, he had to uncover the core of what Therin was doing, the way he was holding on to this illusion, and yet he had no idea where the other man was going to hold it.
Would there be any way to destroy the illusion without knowing where to find that leaf?
It was about destroying a dragon pearl.
The key was in understanding the nature of the dragon pearl, understanding the source of that power.
There had to be some way. It wasn’t just burning it off.
The ice dragon.
Jason focused on the sense of the ice dragon. He thought about what he wanted, the way he’d healed in the past. He thought about the connection he had to the ice dragon. That was not imagined. He called the ice dragon in his mind, and he appeared there almost as if he had within the vision.
“You’re creating the illusion,” the ice dragon said.
It seemed as if the ice dragon were directly across from him, sitting within the cave. The ceiling glittered, and yet, rather than a stream of water, it glowed with what appeared to be molten metal.
“I need your power. I need to somehow mix the two in order to destroy this illusion, but I don’t know if it’s going to be enough.”
“You may have my power. You’ve never been restricted from it.”
“But I need a lot of it.”
“You think you need the dragon pearl in order to summon power?”
“That’s the only way they have been able to draw enough power.”
“You used my power in order to heal the forest dragon. You didn’t need the dragon pearl for that.”
“I needed contact for that.”
“Why do you think you need contact now? The power is within you,” the ice dragon said.
Jason didn’t see how that was possible. The ice dragon might believe that the power was within him, but he was drawing power from the ice dragon and not from himself. Then again, he’d not needed to connect to a dragon pearl in order to summon that power. He didn’t need a dragon pearl in order to connect to the iron dragon. Did he need a dragon pearl to connect to the forest dragon?
Jason called upon the energy of the ice dragon. As he did, a burst of ice streaked from high overhead and shot toward him, the largest bolt of ice lightning that he’d ever experienced. It slammed into him, and he joined it to the heat blasting off the iron dragon.
Jason redirected that energy.
He sent it washing outward.
It was an enormous blast of power, more than he’d ever summoned before, and it rippled away.
Everything around him shimmered, the sky seeming to shift and change.
The dragons fighting overhead, shimmering and swirling, became hazy, and for a moment, they flickered. Then that flickering began to stabilize.
Whatever he was doing was not quite enough.
He needed more power.
He looked down at the iron dragon. “I need more heat.”
“I don’t know if you can tolerate it,” the iron dragon said.
“Don’t hold back because of me.”
He wrapped his legs around the iron dragon, using the dragonskin to protect himself, hoping that layer of leather was going to be enough, but not certain at all. It was possible—even likely—that the energy of the iron dragon would burn off his dragonskin.
He gripped the iron dragon with his gloved hand. He held his other hand out, reaching for the sky, and he closed his eyes, focusing once more on the ice dragon.
Heat built beneath him. He focused on that energy, on the sense of the iron dragon that continued to flow, the rippling of heat and flame rolling through him.
And he focused on the ice dragon.
The connection of the two was what he needed. Now that he understood that, now that he knew what was going to be the key, Jason had to find some way of using them together.
He could call to the ice dragon, and he could mix the ice dragon’s energy with that of the iron dragon, and if he could pull the two together, then he might be able to overpower what was happening.
A burst of energy started from high overhead.
Jason felt it coalesce. It started high in the sky, and had he not shared that connection with the ice dragon, he would not have known about it, but as it began to build, thunder rumbled. It started to rain, then sleet, then snow. Even that began to shift, the snow turning over to sharp shards of ice.
Wind whipped around him.
All of this was familiar to Jason. This was his homeland.
The iron dragon pulsed heat beneath him, pulling it through him, and it filled him, radiating up from someplace deep. The energy continued to build, swirling all around him.
Jason focused on the sky. He focused on the iron dragon, which connected him to the ground itself. The two began to merge.
Rather than water swirling, mist began to form, rising off the iron dragon’s back. Snow and sleet hammered down from the sky, leaving painful needles striking his exposed skin.
He ignored it, summoning more and more power. Rather than a single bolt of power, the ice dragon continued to send the winter weather, the northern mountain power, arcing downward.
As it merged with that of the iron dragon, it became something different: steam and mist and water.
He washed it outward, rolling it away from the dragon, away from himself.
The constant pressure from the ice dragon gave Jason enough energy to withstand the heat coming off the iron dragon. The two of them mixed together, the water radiating outward, and the energy washed over him.
Everything around them swirled. Jason wasn’t sure if it was the mist or the fog or something else. He continued to push, letting that power flow, hoping that the curative water would restore everything to break this illusion.
There came a resistance.
It felt like what he had detected when he was trying to help the forest dragon.
He pushed outward. He had no control, not at all like he did when he was working with fire and ice. This was nebulous, the use of the mist, the water that swirled around him, and so was controlling it in any way that made sense. He forced it outward, letting it flow away from him, and it slammed into that resistance. He pushed again.
Gradually, everything began to shimmer. The ground trembled.
And he continued to push.
Jason let himself draw everything through him. He couldn’t hold back at all. If he did, the illusion would be maintained and Therin would win.
More than anything, that idea filled him. It terrified him.
But he had to hold on. Once he broke the illusion, he would still have to stop the other man. He had no idea what it was going to take, or how many Dragon Souls would be out here, but he had to have enough strength to stop Therin, and if he called upon too much power now, he wouldn’t be able to do anything later.