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“Yes, let’s,” Maddox answered. He grabbed a chair and put it right at the front of her desk. I noticed Claire suppress a grin.
She cleared her throat and pulled out a thick black leather-bound book from inside her desk, setting it on the center of her table. “Just keep your voices down. I left him outside to browse around. He seemed like he needed a distraction from something.”
So that’s what I was picking up on. The lub-dub rhythm of a relaxed heart just on the other side of this wall. Dragon senses were sharp, but something about the guy’s heart sounded clearer to me than anything else. Like I already knew the rhythm as if it were my own.
“I thought you were going to need some backup out there,” Maddox said, chest puffed out.
Claire dipped her head to the side with a skeptical look. “Buddy, I am the backup.” She lifted her hand and made colorful threads of mana appear; opal pinks and teal blues shimmered and glittered around her wrist, collecting in the center of her palm.
“We’ve all got our tricks,” Maddox said with a wink before he blew out a puff of sparkly white snow.
“Alright, enough, you two.” I stepped forward. These games were cute, but the matter at hand was far more serious. As in the survival of the entire dragon race serious.
The survival of our little brother.
“What did you find, Claire?” I asked her, the gentle heartbeat still playing as a background track to my thoughts.
“This book. An old friend of mine found it in an auction. The pages were blank, and no one knew what it was even titled. She didn’t care. Bought it for three hundred bucks based off a feeling. Turns out, her feeling nabbed her a priceless artifact.”
“What is it?” I asked as we all leaned forward. The tome looked nondescript, with a title that had been rubbed off from the leather cover years ago. The pages were yellowed with age, smelling like an ancient library.
“This is a firsthand account of the first fall of the dragons.”
“What? This happened before?” Shock filtered through me. I heard a gasp from one of my brothers but wasn’t sure which one made it.
“It has.” She opened the book and set her hands over the pages. She shut her eyes and slipped into the trance all Marvels were able to achieve, seeing the otherwise invisible threads of magic that wound through the air all around us. We watched as ink seemed to spread across the pages, words taking form in an ancient and floral scrawl. Claire opened her eyes as the text filled up the entire page. “It doesn’t have much, I’ll preface with that. The rest of the book is an autobiography of a traveler from the days following the opening of the Tears. The author talks about a sequence of deaths in their family, starting with the mother and then working its way through the family lineage, jumping from youngest to oldest and ending with the father.”
That was exactly what we were observing. I could hardly believe it. This could be it. This book could be the answer to saving my little brother.
“What kind of sickness does that?” Xavier asked.
“None,” Claire said, pointing to the last sentence on the page. “It was a curse, placed on the dragons by a jilted Marvel lover. Apparently, he was so heartbroken by the betrayal of his dragon betrothed that he decided all dragons should be extinct.” Clair rolled her eyes. “Leave it to you boys, getting unhinged because someone turned down date night.”
“A curse?” That would explain why it seemed like one dragon would get sick at a time. If it was a virus, then we all would have been exposed. “How was it placed?”
“And how can it be stopped?” Maddox asked.
“The details on those two things are also slim. But I did find this. It’s a prophecy.” She handed me the book, and I read the scrawled words, ink droplets staining the thick yellow page.
When the dragons’ roars fall silent, and the curse burns through their veins,
To ash they turn, their life’s fire to wane.
Yet a glimmer of hope in the human remains,
The one who was sacrificed, yet now again regained.
Death’s icy grip shall lay claim, to undo what has been done,
One of two souls, under the waning dragon moon and sun.
The lifeblood of the one who invoked it first,
May be the lifeblood that quenches the curse’s thirst.
Claire cleared her throat, explaining the prophecy to the entire room. “Apparently, the Marvel had to sacrifice a twin under a dragon moon, when it’s bright and red in the daytime sky. But that twin also had to have been born under a dragon moon. Unfortunately, the way to break the curse was never written down.” Claire flipped through the rest of the pages, filled with random sketches and long, rambling paragraphs. “The author of the book decided to include a lot of cake recipes and mutton dinners but nothing about how they saved the dragons from becoming extinct.”
