Page 6 of Exquisite Monster (Dragons of Viria #2)

CHAPTER SIX

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KATALENA

S weat dripped into my eyes and burned, but I didn’t wipe it away. Because I couldn’t stop stirring the cauldron in front of me. This potion needed constant movement until it was complete. Any stillness at all would ruin it.

That’s what the scroll I’d studied until it was burned in my mind said.

Constant and intentional movement. If I did it right, it would reduce into something thicker and darker.

A paste that could be placed or wrapped into small parcels.

It ignited on impact, or when struck by something. Anything, really.

I’d never made a potion like this, if you could call it a potion. But I wanted to get it right. Gleym watched from across the room, not interfering and not offering any feedback. This was her way of assessing my skills and deciding whether she would help me.

The sheer number of ingredients she had down here was impressive. When I asked her how? She simply smirked.

She and I both knew there wasn’t any way for some of these to get down here by falling through Evrítha. But she could keep her secrets if she helped me.

The first day she had me start brewing everything I knew by heart. That in itself took three days, with my sleeping normally. I was out of practice with some of them, but they were all passable.

Varí found a mortar bowl and curled up in it just like he had in Mesene’s workshop, alternately dozing and watching. Sometimes helping if there was something simple he could do like crush an ingredient with his claws.

After I finished everything I knew, Gleym handed me a scroll and said, “Make it.”

I had. It had been a simple potion, but powerful.

One of the small magics humans could control by virtue of the ingredients.

You shook the potion to make it glow and again to snuff it out.

You could throw it against something too, if you needed speed.

In a place like this where there was darkness everywhere? It would be helpful.

Now I stirred the cauldron in the light of the bottles I’d made, stationed around the small room. They had yet to cure to full brightness.

My right arm ached as the stirring grew harder. But I didn’t stop. Because if I couldn’t handle this, then Gleym was right. I wouldn’t be able to handle whatever the Elders threw at me when I got back to the surface. This pain was nothing .

The liquid, which had been vibrant orange, darkened as it thickened. It turned into a deep, burnt color, and I only stopped stirring when I could barely move my arm to make it through. It shimmered in the light as it was supposed to.

“It’s done,” I said, out of breath and pulling the cauldron away from the flames.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, but the only way is to test it.” I pulled out the metal rod I’d been stirring with and moved away from the table into the open space, keeping the cloth of my clothes well away as I smacked it on the ground.

The force with which the rod ignited nearly threw me backwards. Pale blue flames licked along the surface, hot and fierce. Relief and satisfaction hit me in the chest. I’d done it. It had worked.

Even Gleym, though her face revealed little, seemed pleased. “Well done.”

“Thank you.”

Glancing at my arm, she crossed to the rolls of books and scrolls and selected a heavy book.

Yet another thing I doubted had fallen from above.

Unless an entire ship of them had somehow made it to the center of the world and fallen down here.

But these books didn’t seem like they’d ever touched water.

“Here.” She set it on the table. “Your body will grow stronger, but you need rest. Read this. Begin to learn it. You have a good understanding, but not a great one. If you want to survive, you must know everything you can. The shortcuts and substitutions. How to make things quickly and in the worst of circumstances.”

She turned to leave the room, and I doused the rod in a nearby bucket of water meant for accidents.

“Why this?” I asked before she disappeared into the shadows.

The dragon didn’t need me to explain. Why was this the metric of whether or not I was ready? Whether I could survive? It was something I was interested in and loved, but I didn’t know that brewing potions of fire would help me save my mates.

“You said you know your way around a blade, yes?”

“Well enough.”

“And that is good,” she said. Her voice had turned low and dark as she came toward me.

“But you could train every day for a decade, and your strength still might not match that of a hardened male soldier, let alone a dragon. If you want to live in this world, girl, you need weapons that can protect you. And though I’m sure you wish it otherwise, your strength is not one of them.

“But fire that can burn at your fingertips? Mist that can blind and control someone’s mind, even for a moment? That might be the second that saves you from death in a world that has already decided to ensure you are returned to the stars as soon as possible.”

I swallowed. Everything she said was true. And though she did not speak it aloud, we both knew that even this kind of knowledge wasn’t a guarantee I would survive. It was a chance, and only that.

“I’ll read it,” I said.

“Do better than read it. Merge it with your mind. Everything you learn here and everything you remember. Until your unconscious self can use the knowledge without thought or hesitation. If you don’t I might as well kill you now.”

Her back was to me when I dared to speak the question that had been screaming in my mind for days. “Who are you?”

Gleym glanced over her shoulder, eyes dropping to the smoke that now rose from the bucket.

Something passed over her face that I couldn’t read.

Then she locked eyes with me, their color so similar to the fire she’d just had me wield.

“I am, or I was, the seventh Elder. Cast out, betrayed, and thrown into a pit purely so I would die.” One small, sad flicker of a smile. “We have much in common, you and I.”

Then she was gone, and what I thought would give me answers only left me with more questions.