46. AURELIA

Chapter forty-six

AURELIA

I woke up to arguing. And inevitably, everything hurt. I grimaced in pain as I tried to open my eyes and see what was going on. The light was aggressive, already bringing on a heavy headache. My body ached, and I didn't know where I was at.

"Damian!" I yelled, seeing a bunch of bodies hovering over me, but not seeing Damian's face.

"I am right here. I am right here," he said, running to my side. His eyes, which I still thought may be the portals to Haxnau 1 , came to my vision, and his onyx hair shagged to the side. I sighed, knowing that being with him meant I was safe.

"Where am I? What happened?" I shouted, feeling nervous with others around me.

"You were right, Clemmy, she is a Scaleborne!" said a boy with glasses and a chubby face. He must've seen my golden eyes.

"I am always right, Loker," a girl I recognized called out. Her neon green hair was flipped completely to one side. "But you could've also seen the golden blood dried from her wound."

"Both of you shut up!" a tall, toned girl demanded.

"Always so rude, Angie." This time it was a girl with dark hair speaking. Was I dreaming? Or did all of these people also have golden eyes similar to mine?

"I am just saying, let's let her talk. We need to know where she came from!" Angie said, yelling at everyone else.

"You can trust me," Damian said, looking at the rest of them. "I told them what happened, but you're welcome to tell them the rest since they don't trust a non-Scaleborne." I watched everyone, my eyes still flickering, taking in my surroundings. Their gaze was uncomfortable and fixed, waiting for me to say something. My headache got stronger, crushing my head.

"You don't have to talk," Damian said, fingers caressing my cheek. "If you need to rest, then you can rest more. We need your body to recover."

Everything came back to my mind: the egg and then the wish; I died, and then I lived… Damian saved me. The dragons escaped the gate. Then, I was here.

"The wish!" I sat up, looking at Damian, understanding the events of the night prior.

"Wish? Did you find the dragon gate?" The familiar girl said, pushing her neon green hair again off to the side, combing the sides. The one they called Clemmy.

"I recognize you," I said, thinking back to the underground bar. She was the Scaleborne in the cell. The girl consciously remembered as well and covered the scars on her neck with her hands. Her leather jacket covered the rest of her skin.

"Thank you. You saved me," she said. I nodded in response. "But, the gate," she continued. "How did you find it? You used the wish? I had only ever heard about it in stories and literature."

"Of course you have." Angie rolled her eyes and folded her arms.

"At least she's smarter than you," Loker declared.

"Stop talking! Clemmy's got a good point. What made you seek after the egg? Where are you both from?" A man having chiseled features sauntered toward me, exuding an air of confidence and authority.

"I am the princess of the Clandike Kingdom."

"Princess? The king doesn't have a daughter? I thought she died long ago," Luella, the shortest girl with dark hair and skin, said. She looked a lot younger than the rest–maybe twelve.

"That's what he told everyone, so they wouldn't come looking after me. Scaleborne," I said. They all nodded in response, understanding the difficulties of being a Scaleborne and hiding your whole life.

"How did you know how to get to the egg?" asked the girl named Clemmy.

"I found a map. Well. Stole a map," I said, not sure where they were going with this.

"Did you see the gatekeeper?" Clementine asked. I could tell that she was definitely more educated than the rest. How did she get so educated?

"Gatekeeper?" Loker, Angie, and I asked at the same time.

"Yes, the Scalekeeper. She guards the gates to the dragon. She was put to watch over them, keeping them there until the time was safe to open it up."

"No—" I started, until Damian interrupted me.

"I saw her." We all stopped, staring at Damian. What did he mean by saying that he saw the gatekeeper? The dragon keeper? Was this the Scalekeeper that Belle talked about earlier? The one Nana and Belle mentioned? I remembered her saying, ‘everything comes at a cost with them.'

"Tell us!" yelled Loker impatiently.

"She appeared when I touched the egg. She asked me what my wish would be, and I told her to save Aurelia. She then told me that Aurelia was alive from my wish but still injured and that I needed to bring her your way. After, she then told Belle where to bring us. And it was directly to you."

"Belle?"

"He speaks the truth," she told me, understanding there was a Scalekeeper.

"Did she say anything else?" The head leader asked.

"Yeah. I also asked her about the Deathlies, and she said you would know how to kill them."

"She said that we would know how to kill them? Unbelievable. We don't even know where they are and what they are! Let alone how to kill them," Angie said, rolling her eyes and scoffing. I could tell that she had an attitude.

"She told me to tell you, ‘ yamceeii 2 axuaeii 3 uama 4 ,'" Damian continued.

"Use what is yours," Clemmy translated. "But that doesn't make sense. How could you see the egg or talk to the Scalekeeper, if only Scalekind can?"

"I'm unsure," Damian reported, looking at me, hiding something that looked as if he was uncertain he should share with everyone. "A huge gate opened up. The gates to the dragons."

"I've heard about this. It was a folktale talked about in my Shamla community. The folktale talks about a sorceress who locked up the gate to the dragon world. No one really knows the reason behind it. There were a few different rumors being that her lover was a dragon and cheated on her, so she locked up the gates forever, placing a curse on whoever opened them. Another one was that dragons started to overtake the mortal land, disrupting it and holding no boundaries, so she locked them up for a thousand years until they were meant to escape and populate the earth, but to do so in return for peace and prosperity to the mortal kind."

"Well, what's done is done. Whatever the consequences may be," Damian retaliated.

"I've seen them before. The Deathlies," Luella said softly. "In the Forbidden Forest. They flew across the sky, and I saw them touching the trees and the ground. I watched as everything they touched turned to disease. I knew that their touch poisoned the town next to us, and it killed everyone, starting with their plants and water. I wish I was with my parents…"

"She was an orphan," Angie piped in, protecting Luella. However, she said it in a tone that referred to me judging her, snapping her head in my direction, which I had no intention of doing. "She was left as a Scaleborne baby on the steps to whom she refers to as her parents. They hid and protected her. Until they were tortured and killed," she said aggressively. Luella had her hands covering her face.

"Angie, you don't have to be so graphic," Loker said.

"What? It's the truth. They should know so that they don't go making rude comments or questions about her." I wanted to fight back that I wasn't making any assumptions about Luella, but I let it slide until Angie glared further daggers into my eyes. What was her problem?

"You're acting like you don't have issues of your own," Clemmy stated.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Angie fought back, standing taller.

"Stop! Stop!" Abner cried out, getting between the two of them. "We all have our own issues, but we got to figure out what's happening. These Deathlies must be real, and we need to do something about them. They could hurt our own lands that we walk on. The last thing we want is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"Does anyone else know anything about them?" Angie asked, annoyed. "Because obviously, this lunatic supposedly says that we are their only shot at killing off the Deathlies."

"He's not a lunatic! I believe him," I supported Damian. If he said that was what he saw and heard, I believed him. Even if I was still upset with him for not telling me he was leading me to my death.

He turned and looked at me, giving me a slight smile. I shot him a glance, letting him know he was not off the hook and that we would have to talk about it later.

"How were they created?" Abner asked.

Everyone went silent for a moment in thought.

"Are they real creatures?" Luella asked.

"Of course, they are real creatures. What kind of question is that?" Loker questioned, making Luella blush.

"Luella, you're a genius!" Clemmy exclaimed. "They are real, but they must be spawned."

"Spawned by what?" Damian asked, his arms folded over his chest.

"What do you guys think? The only thing that could create such demonic creatures." Clemmy retorted. Everyone responded with an understanding of where she was going with the conversation. "Old magic," Clemmy said, waving her hands about.

"So, how do you kill them, then?" Luella curiously asked.

"Kill the connection," I added. They all turned to look at me, not thinking that I would pipe in. "You must find the medium and destroy whatever the magical connection is tethered to."

"Hmm, and how do you know so much about old magic?" Abner asked, stepping toward me.

"Doesn't matter, but that's how you kill it off. I never realized that they were created from old magic, and I didn't realize that cutting off the source would be the connection. There's the connection, and then there's where the power resides. If they were created from old magic, I am assuming that someone or something is the medium and that the power resides in their nest. That would be the only thing to make sense." I should've thought about this before. I was so quick to take the crown before Tobias got to it that I didn't think strategically about what I was dealing with.

"Where's the nest?" Luella asked, scared to know.

"In the Forbidden Forest, near my castle." I gulped. "The connection must also be near the castle because they can't be that far off." I thought of the lady running in with the boils. She wouldn't have been able to live for long or had even made the journey to the castle unless it was close. Unless the Deathlies I saw that night physically touched her at some point.

I thought of my grandmother and the shield that she put up on my tower. She could never leave the kingdom grounds, as her magic couldn't extend that far. I remembered her telling me she was the medium for the magic and that the shield was where the power resided. She told me that there was always a medium and an originality of where the power was held. Sometimes sorcerers could transfer the "medium" to objects rather than channel their own energy, but she told me it takes years to do so, and only the strongest sorcerers could make that possible. If she were to transfer the medium to an object in the castle, like a flower, then when that object was destroyed or tampered with, it would affect the magic for what it was being channeled toward.

"It has to be a person. And someone inside my castle."

1. Haxnau (Hah-nah-woo): Hell

2. Yamceeii (Yawm-say-ee): (Placed before the verb in a command)

3. Axuaeii (Ah-wah-ee): The verb to use

4. Uama (Wah-ma): Something to have/Theirs/Yours/His/Hers