Chương 38: Chapter 37: The Descent

Darkness. I was breathing. Then came the migraine. I tried to open my eyes, but the light was unbearable. I had to close them almost immediately. Then kept my eyes close one more minute before I tried again. Open sky. The smell of cold rock and damp air. My head was resting on something warm. I moved it slowly. The warmth shifted.

"Take your time." Ella's voice. Close. I tried to sit up anyway. The world tilted, caught itself, settled. My whole body ached. I was on still the summit. Outside the cave. She'd dragged me out.

"... What happened?" Ella was sitting beside me, knees drawn up, arms resting on them. She looked at me with the flat expression of someone who had been waiting for a while.

"You received a Dragon Mark." I blinked.

"You knew?"

"Of course." No hesitation. No surprise. She said it like she'd been expecting this all along.

"That's why we came." I stared at her. Her expression didn't change.

"Then why were you shouting?" Ella's jaw tightened. A pause. Then, with visible restraint:"Because he wasn't supposed to do it like that." You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. She explained, in that clipped way she had when she was irritated, that the process normally required preparation. Explaining what would happen. Making sure the recipient was calm. Ensuring they wouldn't hit their head on the floor by having them lay down beforehand.

Instead, the dragon had looked at me and forced centuries of magical knowledge into my mind, and then gone back to pretending to sleep.

"It was intentional. He wanted to interrupt me." A pause.

"Deliberately." I thought about the conversation in the cave. The questions she'd been asking. The answers that never came.

"... To avoid your questions?" Ella didn't answer. Her silence was answer enough. I sat up fully. My palm burned. I opened my hand. A mark sat in the centre of my palm. White. A dragon, just like the mark Ella has, but mine was white. She watched me examine it. She didn't lean in. She'd already looked. I looked at her hand. Her mark, dark as ink, pressed into her skin like a brand. I looked at mine again. White.

"Why are they different?" She glanced at her palm, then back at mine. Shrugged.

"No one knows." I waited.

"Dragon Marks come in different colours. That's all anyone agrees on." I frowned.

"Some people thought the colour reflected talent. Others thought it reflected personality. Some believed it depended on the dragon's mood when it engraved the mark." She paused.

"No one ever proved any of it." I looked at the white mark on my palm.

"So what exactly did he give me?" Ella thought for a moment.

"Knowledge." I frowned.

"Circles." I waited. She explained it plainly, the way you'd explain how a road worked or why water boiled. Dragons created the marks. No one knew how, or even why, the circles worked. Their designs were too complex, too dense, too deliberate for any human mind to have created. Interestingly they were made of the only known magic nodes that no one could explain not even the very people they marked. But they worked. A Dragon Mark stored circle components. All of them.

Every basic shape, every node type, every connection pattern. Except the ones from the mark. Not Exactly spells. The pieces spells were built from. Like owning every page of a programming language's documentation without a single finished program. So when I'd felt thousands of circles flooding into my brain — I wasn't imagining it. The mark had just been installed. What I'd felt was the catalogue settling in.

"Can I access all of it?" I asked.

"Yes. But you have to focus, and look for one piece at a time." I frowned. We were about to leave the summit. I stopped at the entrance of the cave. Looked back into the darkness where the dragon's golden eyes had been. They were closed now. Or hidden. I couldn't tell.

"... Thank you." No answer. The cave was silent. Ella walked past me without waiting. I followed. We descended the mountain in silence. The mark sat warm against my skin, and I didn't know what it meant. We walked. All the way down. Travelled all the way home. And when we finally got out of the car, after that long silence, Ella looked at me and said: "Sorry" Then she walked to her room without another word and quietly closed the door behind her. She barely came out that evening. Even dinner was silent.