Chapter Two: Tiran

What’s the point? Tiran thought. His hands gripped the barrier. What’s the damn point?

The ground seemed to shrink away from him, growing smaller and smaller, and a strange, dizzying tremor caused him to lean over more. He could visualize taking a step, climbing over the barrier, his legs dangling into nothing, the ground so far below.

They’d like that, wouldn’t they? All those parasites. Just as they crawled over the corpses of his family, they’d crawl over his.

The despair felt alien and all-consuming. After that phone call, after getting the news – it was all too much.

What’s the point?

It would all be easier if he just…

Then he heard loud footsteps approaching from behind.

“Hey! Wait! Guy on the balcony!”

Startled, he turned to see a panicked woman rushing up to him, waving her hands. “Guy on the balcony! Step away! It’s not worth it!”

What…?

“Who the hell…” Oh. One of the women he’d seen outside his uncle’s office. He’d barely noticed them. Why was she here, and why was she yelling?

“Dude!” She skidded to a halt, cheeks puffed, breathing heavily. “God, I’m so unfit. You’d never believe I used to run track in high school.” She rested her hands on her knees, hair a floppy mess in front.

“Who are you?” Tiran asked. He was too surprised, too puzzled to say anything else.

“Chloe Gardner,” she said, pushing the hair out of her eyes. “Who’re you?”

“Uh…Tiran. Tiran Umber.”

“Oh! You’re related to the professor?”

The thought of his uncle made him flush. “Yes. He’s my uncle.”

She tilted her head slightly. “Whoa. Do you hate him?”

“No.” He didn’t exactly like him either. “Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but why are you here?”

“I…” She grimaced. “I thought you were going to kill yourself.”

“What?” he asked. “Why would you think that?”

“I, uh… my magic,” she said sheepishly. “It’s intuition-based. I sensed you were about to make a really rash decision. And I… well, I didn’t want that to happen.”

A cold chill swept through him. “I wasn’t about to do anything. Go away. I want to be alone.” He walked past her, the coldness spreading, icing his thoughts.

Holycrap.

How did she…?

“Uh, wait a minute,” she said, determined not to leave him alone but rather spring into step beside him. “My intuition’s telling me you shouldn’t be left alone right now.”

“You…?” He stopped. He wanted to snap at her, tell her to screw off, go away, leave him alone, to spit words like arrows in her general direction. He almost did, too – but something in her expression – the way her brow furrowed in genuine concern – and the redness of her face from the sprint – stopped him from saying anything.

He swallowed. “You’re not kidding me? You can really sense that with your magic?”

She nodded. “I’m sorry. I know I must be interfering – no, wait – I should be interfering. You were going to throw yourself off that balcony.”

“I…”

“No,” she said, “don’t lie.”

Ugh.

How annoying. She refused to let it go. Even with her apologetic expression, her body language suggested she wasn’t planning on leaving anytime soon.

“Fine,” he said, throwing up his hands. “So, what if I was? Why should it matter to you?”

“Well, it doesn’t,” she admitted candidly, and again, he fumbled mentally, thrown off-kilter by her attitude. “But clearly, something’s going on with you, and I’m not comfortable ignoring what my magic’s telling me. So, assuming you have time – let’s go someplace safe. We’ll grab a drink or some food, and you can let me know what’s going on.”

Ugh!

He glared at her. What really irritated him right now was that a part of him wanted to talk to someone, to allow the power of a stranger to lead him out of his head and to explain the shit-uation.

And she knew, didn’t she? How irritating. How smug. Yet, for someone who said it didn’t matter – the way she looked at him suggested something else. Not pity, exactly, something unfathomable, but something that made him want to stay rather than turn back toward the balcony.

“What the hell kind of weird ass powers do you have? Intuition? How does that even work?”

She shrugged. “It just does. Look, I can’t really explain it. I’m an oracle – or, well, a sometimes oracle. That’s like seeing into the future. Sometimes, it expresses itself as visions – and sometimes with, like, this gut feeling – this tug toward something. It’s different from a vision, but… I know you were thinking of doing something drastic.”

He sagged. “Great. Trust me to bump into an oracle.”

He knew about oracles, people who saw into the future, who knew things that no ordinary mortal could. It was still annoying.

“So, shall we go somewhere?”

“Fine,” he muttered, stalking after her.

The long walk to the dining hall allowed him more time to settle his thoughts and make sense of the whole thing. The churning, cold horror in his mind of looking over the edge, picturing the plummet, the wind clawing at his clothes, the ground reaching up to embrace him, suppressing the instinct in his soul to give into transformation, to feel the inner dragon grow out of his skin and spread giant wings to arrest his flight.

I… I really was about to do that. He shivered and shivered. I was going to… and then she…

The shaking didn’t stop until they’d reached the dining hall, grabbed a basic lunch, and sat at the quiet end of one of the long tables along with a few other students.

“Food might be tough for you, so I advise just the drink,” Chloe said, smiling at him in that unfathomable way again. “And I’ll listen.”

He stared at the table for a moment, punching through the ice encrusting his thoughts. It took longer, much longer than he expected, to simply say, “My parents died in a caving accident four days ago. I only just found out… when my uncle called me into the office.”

“Damn,” Chloe said softly. After a short pause, in which he said nothing, she added, “Do you know… how?”

“The details aren’t clear. My uncle… he was warning me that my parents’ assets were legally bound to… my other uncle, from my father’s side of the family. The shit uncle.”

“So… just to clarify, Professor Umber from Dreadmor is not the shit uncle?”

“No. He’s… well, we never really got along, but he’s okay, and he’s worried. He’s not sure if my parents left an updated will. The one being executed right now is one that was made some years ago when they were still running a business. And he says it doesn’t look good. The home, the finances, the business – all this will go to my…” Tiran’s clenched his fists. “I have nothing. My uncle and all his disgusting brood are crawling all over my home right now, selling everything they can. And I can’t – I can’t stop them.”

“Damn,” Chloe said again. “That really sucks.”

Tiran choked with a laugh. “Doesn’t it?” He managed to lift his eyes and look at Chloe’s. He held a certain admiration for people who could see the future – no matter how convoluted or unpredictable their powers might be.

Chloe had to be one of the first-year students. Tiran was now in his fourth year, utilizing his predictable, slightly boring fire magic, something a lot of dragons of his type were acquainted with, usable in human and draconic forms, though slightly more impressive in draconic form, of course.

She is not bad-looking either,he thought.

She had dark eyes, an intense stare, plump lips, and… but he was focusing too much on physical characteristics. His mind was all over the place today.

“My uncle Max, rather Professor Umber, says that it’s likely going to be a long, protracted legal mess. He wanted to warn me that if I decided to contest the will, it would be difficult without an updated will but not impossible. He just thinks that it will generate a lot of stress because my shit uncle, Uncle Randall, has been preparing for this moment for a long time while I’ve been away at school.”

Chloe nodded sagely, though he doubted she actually understood the true issues, not that he could blame her.

Then she said, “And it was definitely an accident, right? No one would think of… harming your mom and dad purposely?”

The coldness in him crept back at her words. “Oh,” he said. “Do you think it could be something sinister? Can you see that sort of thing in the future?”

She snorted at that. “No, it was just… I don’t know, an assumption. This takeover you’re describing sounds really cutthroat.”

He slumped in his seat. “Well, I won’t know more until more… details are provided.” He winced. “But…”

“You didn’t want to fight.” Chloe tapped her fingers on the table. “You wanted to throw yourself off a balcony.”

“I…” He took another bite of food. “I can’t compete with them. And I have no resources and very little to fall back on. The Umbers aren’t a big family to begin with. I just… they’re gone. I loved them, and they’re gone, and those parasites will take everything. What’s the point?”

Chloe tried to get herself into a more comfortable position in her chair and, failing, said, “Won’t the professor help you?”

He shrugged. “There would be a price to pay.”

“Can you make it alone?”

His hand shivered as he sipped his drink and ended up coughing it up. “I don’t know.”

“We all have to make it alone eventually,” she whispered then, and he had no rancor left to contradict her. Even though their conversation hadn’t gone anywhere aside from those types of questions – each bit of engagement from her forced him to think a little more. It was hard to think, really, with that dull ache within, that empty absence that once was his parents.

Her little snippets of conversation, her presence, however, kept him from doing the unthinkable. And when he retired to his rooms, with promises that he wouldn’t be so hasty or rash, all he did was lay there, staring at the ceiling, swimming in the mire of his thoughts, in the pain, and a strange oracle girl’s intervention.

He remained in that place of pain for two weeks. His uncle granted him sick leave from the academy, and for the first week, he barely got out of bed, emotions both numb and raw, painful, and yet absent.

During the second week, he regained some basic functions, but he was still a zombie going through the day, and the lawyer that his uncle had hired reported no good news. His uncle said he would try and that he didn’t expect Tiran to fight when he had his studies to focus on. While Tiran appreciated the sympathy, none of it replaced the void he felt in his heart.

However, at the end of the second week, when he got out of bed, he no longer felt quite that impulsive, desperate despair and grief.

Perhaps, in time, everything would be okay, though he’d have to do it without conventional support. Without… without another family dinner or hearing his father’s voice on the phone. All he had were pictures and videos, videos he’d watched dozens of times in his isolation, and voice messages left from when he didn’t answer calls.

Those memories hurt. They’d always hurt. But now, he felt a little less like a zombie. Returning to classes gave him more form and focus, more opportunities to throw himself into his studies without getting lost in his own thoughts.

Three weeks passed, then a month. Still, the ache existed, freshly opened when he attended the funeral, but he had permission there to show how he felt.

The funeral was small – he and his uncle Max did not allow the backstabbers to attend despite their protests. They didn’t deserve that honor.

“You’ll be okay, boy?” his uncle asked.

“I don’t know,” he’d said.

But at least he wasn’t… as bad.

And he remembered the weird oracle girl who’d run after him, yelling that it wasn’t worth it. So absurd, her arrival.

So needed.