Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Prologue

The last thing Neal would remember would be the courtroom, and how small he felt as he was sentenced. He would remember the press of the stone floor under his knees, the edge of the sword against the back of his neck forcing a bow, and the King, towering over him as he sat on his throne and prepared to read his sentencing.

He would remember the fear, and the injustice, and the quiet burn that there was nothing he could do to help himself.

He would remember being certain he was being sentenced to death.

Autumn

Chapter 1

The first time Neal woke up, the only things he could register were the ache in his back from laying prone too long, the smell of stagnant, damp earth, and air heavy enough and dusty enough to make him sneeze. He rolled over on to his side, and both the stifling air and the ache shifted with him, so he willed himself back to sleep in spite of them.

The second time he woke up more, enough at least to sit up and take in his surroundings. At first he thought it was too dark to see anything, so he quietly cast a light spell. The small, glowing orb floated out in front of him and in its bluish light revealed that he was actually in a bed, a really nice bed, surrounded by a red canopy that was drawn closed around him.

He tugged on it with one hand until he found a seam in the drapes, then pulled them back and took in the sight of the room, only realizing after he had done so that he should’ve been more careful. He grabbed the light and snuffed it out, listening instead for any sounds nearby. From the brief glimpse he got of the room, it was large, but not grand. If anyone else was inside, if they had seen the glow, he should've been able to hear them coming. But nothing came.

He waited until his eyes adjusted before trying to stand, and in that time alone the exhaustion threatened to pull him under again. He almost lay back down, but the anxiety of a new, unknown location pushed him forward. He stood slowly, careful to not make noise.

There was a plush rug under his feet, but he could feel the dust and dirt creeping in between the fibers under his skin; someone had removed his shoes, and considering his last, vague memories were from his trial, he didn’t think it had been done for his comfort. He could also feel a deep coolness emanating from beneath the carpet, meaning stone floors, not wood, which meant he didn’t have to be as cautious with his steps.

In front of him was an armoire and dresser, the former with a mirror that was no longer reflective with the layer of grime over it, the latter rotting around the ornate handles set into the drawers. There was also a cobweb-ridden candelabra, with half burnt-down candles on it. They were grey with dust, as well. On the far corner was what must’ve been the entrance to the room, a heavy-looking wooden door.

As Neal rounded the bed, he saw just how large the bedroom was. It could’ve been a king’s bedroom with the length; there was a table made to sit six, circled by ornate chairs and set with fancy plates and goblets, as well as once-reflective silver cloches in the middle. Behind it was a regal fireplace, tall enough Neal would barely have to duck to stand inside it. It could easily keep a stone room this size warm even in the depths of winter, as long as the ration of firewood was plentiful enough. In front of the bed was a spacious trunk, gilded with some kind of reflective material, but without his small orb of light the room was too dark to make out any coloring aside from the dull shine of old metal.

Finally, on the other side of the room, was a lavish desk that had nothing on it but more dust and more candles, set against the only window in the room. The half-drawn curtains, the same red of the canopy around the bed, allowed in just enough moonlight to see by.

Neal sat down on the trunk and took a deep breath. The exhaustion was powerful, more extreme than anything simply human, but he couldn’t rest without some understanding; some peace. So, he closed his eyes and forced the well of magic in him to respond. It resisted at first, the fatigue making it hard to grasp, but Neal pushed harder.

Suddenly, the magic did respond, not only letting Neal grab hold but washing over him, almost eager to supply itself to him. He let out a breath at the sudden shift, feeling like he had stepped into the sun on a warm day, the veil of weariness lifting. Sitting up a little straighter, he cast a canvassing spell. It was only meant to be for the room, to see if he was alone, if he was being watched, but the spell spread further than he intended. An incantation that typically only went a few rooms went for acres, covering a large swatch of land, revealing that not only was he alone in the room, but that there were no other humans within a day’s journey, at least.

That was…strange. The expanse of the magic, the way it coursed through him, something wasn’t right. However, before he could consider it further, the magic that had swept through him disappeared as quickly as it arrived, and the exhaustion was overwhelming in its return. He was shaking as he returned to his feet and collapsed back into the bed atop the dusty covers and half-tangled in the canopy he’d pushed through as wave after wave of heaviness tried to tackle him.

It felt as if only a breath passed before he was awoken again, startled to awareness. He snapped up, this time able to see the red curtains that surrounded him. He pushed them aside and stood, heart pounding as he looked around for whatever had disturbed him. He wasn’t sure how long he’d slept; it felt like moments, but Neal felt much more rested, much more himself as he looked around the room a second time, noting that it was now draped in sunlight. He could see that there wasn’t just the one window behind the desk, but there were small windows in a row near the ceiling, with stained glass that projected small colorful spots around the room. It was… gorgeous.

Or it would be, if not for the dust everywhere. Constellations of it were trapped in the colorful light, dancing vertically across the slanted beams in a colorful haze of unkempt decay.

It was a lavish room that clearly hadn’t been used in decades. Every step sent swirls of dust up around his feet, and it made him itch and it made him sneeze, which reminded him of the sniffling he had done the first time he’d woken up.

What kind of prison was this? To place him in a room that was almost as grand as he had always wished for, but to make it unenjoyable? He could barely remember how his sentencing had been, just kneeling beneath the smirking king, and now…

He went to the ornate door first and was unsurprised by it being locked. He had spent years in locked rooms, cells, unable to come and go as he chose. That was more due to the people who watched over the doors though, and if his canvassing spell last night had been correct, there was no one around for miles. Except… the spell had worked too well, it had gone too far, far more than Neal’s supply of magic could’ve possibly gone. He had once tried to search a three bedroom house, to track all of its occupants, and even that had left him winded. To cover enough ground to track all the land that could be covered in a day’s walk?

He must’ve imagined it. His mind must’ve been half blurred between reality and dream from his exhaustion. There were no mages with that kind of magic. And even dark magic, while sometimes feeling limitless to trained mages rather than born, Neal knew it wasn’t that powerful. If it had been possible, Mozzie would've trained him to use dark magic more, even if it was uncomfortable.

Taking a step back, he shook off the confused adrenaline brought on by his exhaustion, and cast the canvassing spell again, and this time got a much more reasonable sense. It was a multilayer building he was in, and it stretched further than he could sense to either side, but he was somewhere in the middle, with floors above and below him. Still, there was no one around. No one to stop him.

Neal spread a hand over the door, trying to get a sense of what spells covered it, and was surprised to find that it was covered in archaic magic. It was thick, and unintelligible, a labyrinth of powerful magic Neal had no chance at untangling. It wasn’t spells, it wasn’t potions, it was barely even castings at all, it was just magic.

“Interesting.” Neal said out loud to himself as he took a step back. It was the most puzzling punishment he had ever endured, that was for certain.

He turned back around and looked over the room, intending to head towards the window, but his attention was drawn somewhere else. Looking over the table, he saw that the dust had been disturbed around the chair at the head. While the other plates and goblets held similar a coating of dust as the rest of the room, that seat had a clean-and-polished dining set up, with a cloche that was so clean its glow blindingly reflected the sunlight.

Neal spread his magic to it first, making sure there were no traps or poison before he stepped closer and pulled up the silver dome. It was a tray full of food; chicken, carrots, potatoes, all still radiating heat, with a bowl of grapes and an apple next to them. There was even a pitcher of water.

With a start, he realized that that must’ve been what woke him up; someone had come in while he was sleeping, delivered food, and then disappeared behind the door and sealed it with magic. Someone Neal couldn’t detect, or at least had gotten farther than his magic could sense very quickly.

The punishment was shaking out to be stranger and stranger the more Neal learned, but… A nice, albeit dirty, room, with delivered meals? Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad.

Neal found his boots at the foot of the bed, and pulled them on before he went to the table. 

He double checked for poison before pouring himself a glass of water. He didn’t know how long he had been sleeping, more than a day at the least, based on his thirst. Then he grabbed the apple and carried it with him across the room.

Now, with the daylight, he could recognize the window behind the desk was a door. A double, glass door, that led out to a balcony.

It was supposed to be a balcony anyway, but the stone flooring had cracked. It not only had holes across it, and was missing half the banister, but it looked like it had separated from the building proper in several places. Neal could only imagine the many ways he risked falling if he stepped out onto it.

And fall he would, because the view from the window revealed the building was perched on a cliffside. Not near a cliffside, not next to a cliffside, but on a cliffside. A mountainous cliffside where below, far below the balcony floor, was a vast ocean with white-crested waves.

From this height, they moved in silence.

That scared Neal more than anything. He wasn’t normally bothered by heights, he had scaled the sides of buildings and towers numerous times, but this wasn’t just height, this was…

The King’s castle wasn’t anywhere near the ocean. He tried to remember if the King had said anything about being taken here, about where here was, but except for a vague dread he couldn’t remember much about his sentencing at all. 

Neal took a step back and wrapped the curtain around his arm, securing him, before he leaned out the glass doors to get a better look.

He was in a castle, a large one, but it was dilapidated. It jutted out slightly from the cliff, and each corner had jagged holes in it where the walls were starting to fall apart, probably from storms that swelled from the ocean. There was also a tower towards the right, and Neal wondered what the view from it must be. From here, all he could see was the cliffside and ocean.

Once he got out of the locked door, that would be his first destination. From there he could try and figure out where he was, at least.

He pulled himself back into the room and looked around, taking a bite of the apple as he did. The puzzle was revealing itself to have an answer Neal wasn’t particularly fond of. An old castle, shrouded in archaic magic, and a prison guard that either moved too quickly to be detected, or, more likely, wasn’t human at all. 

Plus, the dutiful ache in Neal’s chest. He’d been ignoring it, letting the thought that it was a sore muscle from intense sleep or an injury from his capture, but on this line of thought he needed to consider it truly.

He leaned against the edge of the desk and took a bite of his apple before he closed his eyes. The ache was steady, but deep. He’d thought it was in his chest, or maybe his shoulders, but he was deeper than that. Farther inward in him, in that spot next to his magic. As he took a deep breath, he brought his magic forward to investigate it.

The same sensation Neal felt the night before, a rush of magic eager to add to his own, warmth spreading through his whole body. It was only for a second, then taken away from him. Pulled. It wasn’t the roll of waves, ebbing and flowing, like how magic normally flowed, but it forcefully wrenched away from him.

It was the last piece of the puzzle, the full picture revealed to him.

The apple soured, and he swallowed the bite without chewing it, and held the rest of the apple away from him while his stomach churned.

A soul-tether.

A soul-tether to old magic.

To a monster.

It was the only thing that sensing that much magic could mean; as a mage he’d learned to detect the magical wells of humans—a feat in its own right, since most practitioners had such small reserves they had to rely on exterior, dark magic for their spellwork—and this came nowhere close. One of his earliest memories was the instinctive recognition of his father’s magical well, the deepest he’d ever felt outside his own. This… This was a living, deep, roiling ocean compared to that, and only magical creatures possessed that kind of well. 

This was worse than a regular soul-tether; it was unheard of, it was obscene. A tether to any animal would eventually diminish the life-force of the human, and a soul-tether to a wild animal was just forcing the timeline by ensuring the tether limits were breached. But a tether between a mage and a wild magical animal? He could feel the magical connection, and the creature obviously felt it, too. What could be wrenched away could also be taken by force, and that kind of magical siphoning was said to be the most gruesome—and painful—of deaths. Neal could control his own magic along the tether, and resolve not to draw on the magical well of a helpless creature. But there was no way to expect a griffin or a unicorn to avoid drawing on his magic, and doing so until he was a broken, dry husk, cut off from his own magic, his own will, his own thoughts. 

He was the animal in this scenario, he realized, and he couldn’t bear the truth of the thought. He was the one meant to die, and the beast—

“Great.” Neal muttered to himself, hoping the sound of his own voice might mute the certainty that was clawing inside him. “Mutually assured destruction. I get sentenced to death when the monster kills me, which makes it easier to slay with my death. They keep their hands clean and get a new head for the mantle.”

His heart pounded with the instinct to run, to get away from the monster they’d tethered him to, but his feet were planted by the certainty that running is exactly what they wanted him to do. He was stuck. Stay in place and be slowly siphoned to death by a monster, or leave, and force his own death by breaking the tether.

There had to be another way. 

Neal absent-mindedly ran his thumb along the apple, and then looked at it. Realization slowly dripped in, that his assessment wasn’t quite right. He was, most likely, soul-tethered to a monster, but one that brought him food? That put him in a bed and pulled off his boots and drew the curtains closed? That didn’t sound like the doings of a griffin, who would’ve abandoned him long before he woke up despite the pain of snapping the soul-tether, or of a manticore, who would begrudgingly drag him along until Neal perished on his own.

Now he was more curious than distressed.

He went back to the clean seat at the table and half focused on forcing food into his growling stomach while he also tried to explore the new tether connected to him. It was a strange sensation, in multiple ways. The first being that he could… basically feel his soul. His magic could almost sense the outline of it now, like it was a physical thing that existed in his mind. Not only could he trace the edges of it , he felt where a piece flowed outside of his soul, outside of his body, and outside of his room, further than his magic could stretch. He couldn’t find the end of it though, which he thought was unusual for a soul-tether. They were rare, but he’d heard a few stories amongst his friends who knew people that knew about others who knew someone sentenced to it, and in those stories the soul-tether was an acre, at most.

Either those stories were wrong, or Neal was a special case, which was seemingly the more plausible, preposterous truth.

The answers laid outside the door.

The bad news was the door was locked and layered with archaic magic to prevent Neal from magically unlocking it. 

The good news was that Neal knew more than one way to unlock a door.

He grabbed the candelabra from the dresser and brought it over to the table and smashed the leftover chicken bones, creating long, fine splinters. That, along with the knife he was supplied, worked perfectly to pick the lock. As he suspected, the magic was specific to the locking mechanism, not to the door as a whole; picking it worked just as well. As Neal started to pull the door open slowly, he could feel the slightest resistance, which typically meant the door would creak.

Hesitating, Neal pulled back from the door, and turned his attention to the hinges. They were rusted over slightly, far from well maintained. His typical approach for a door like this was a small fire in his palm, just enough to soften the metal, but the awareness of the creature on the other end of the tether would prevent that. He didn’t dare use any more magic than strictly necessary.

Scanning the room, he looked around for options, and his eyes landed once again on the candelabra.

Whoever his captor was, they had really been terribly mistaken leaving him so many supplies. It was probably because he was so used to tending only the creature Neal was tethered to. 

It took a long while, with Neal checking the pull of the door at the end of each candle, but on his second to last one the resistance he was met with had softened enough for Neal to slide himself through the smallest crack.

The hallway he found himself in was empty and long, with extremely high ceilings with wooden rafters stretched across them, and unlit chandeliers that hung from their cross sections. There were ceiling-tall windows on either side, or holes where windows used to be. Neal could make out that they used to have some art to them. The glass that was left showed soldered lines and remnants of colorful patches, but whatever design used to lie there was gone, instead replaced by a slight breeze whistling through. Neal paused in front of one of these hollowed windows to take in cold, crisp air, untainted by dust, and was at least given his first small taste of orientation as he looked out; the sun, on its journey into sunset but not quite there, was directly before him, which meant his room was facing north.

He stayed still for long minutes, listening for any sounds, for any sense of someone (or something) approaching, before he cautiously started to walk again. His room was near the end of the western wing, and in the middle of the hallway was a luxurious staircase, leading both up and down.

Neal headed for the stairs that went downward, and it was only after a minute that he realized it wasn’t a conscious decision; there was a sensation existing next to his soul that  was nudging him along. More, it was reeling him in, like a fish on a line.

He stopped and held his breath, which took more effort than he was comfortable with. It was an odd feeling, only similar to when he had to force himself to stay awake to finish a painting, or when he had to push through pain of a wound to get to safety. The sensation of resisting his own body’s wishes to force it to bend to his mind’s will, except here his body was bending itself to an outside force that had nothing to do with Neal. It wanted… someone.

Something he reminded himself. Then a fresh burst of nausea breached through him. He was not only soul-tethered to some kind of unknown monster, but he wanted to be close to it. It was almost akin to longing, the steady thrum pulling him along, which meant he was longing to be close to the beast that would kill him, one way or another. He was being forced to crave being face-to-face with a basilisk, or maybe a troll, or something equally as horrible.

Maybe outright death was a kinder punishment after all.

Oh. He suddenly remembered he had thought that before, at his sentencing.

After accepting the edges of his composure were going to stay frayed no matter how many deep breaths he coerced into his lungs, he pushed forward again. As he went, he found that his instincts were being overridden; he stopped being slow about his steps, stopped staying close to the wall, stopped listening for steps or breaths nearby. It added to his unease, but he could no longer stop himself to observe the emotions. His feet kept pushing forward.

He descended into a large, dark foyer and barely took note of the vast space; smooth, stone  floors, hardwood doors between what must’ve been windows covered by the same rich red curtains as his room, towering over the space as they flowed into the vaulted ceiling. It made the space eerily dark and faintly tinted crimson.

A sense that wasn’t his had him navigating the new space with a learned familiarity. He took the corner around the stairs sharply, missing a table tucked into the corner by inches.  He approached a wall and reached out for a doorknob, pushing in with no hesitation despite the anxiety clawing at his chest.

He stepped through the doorway, and was rewarded with his body feeling like his own again. The desperate urge that had been dragging him closer vanished, and Neal’s wits returned to him, just in time to be incredibly aware of the danger he was in.

It was a long space, the length of a field from one end to the other, with curtains drawn over every window. A banquet hall, two tables on either side of the room that spanned the entire length of the space, a fireplace large enough for a bonfire in the middle. The tables had white cloths with some kind of intricate design draped over them, covered with the same dishware Neal had up in his room, and layered with just as much dust and cobwebs.

That was, except for the marks across the middle of the floor. A walking path by whatever creature Neal was bound to, that led to the middle of the room, where a circle formed, wide enough that Neal could lay in it without getting dirty before the dust started to gather again in accumulating layers.

High overhead he could hear wind pushing inside; whether by design or degeneration, the ceiling opened into what looked like an attic space, beyond which there must’ve been a hole to the sky , though it must have been in some kind of tiered construction, because no light made it in. 

The unyielding pull Neal had felt might’ve relented, but Neal felt disgust, hard and thorough, rush in along its vacated fault lines. He tried to pinpoint its origin, but he could see nothing in the room that merited it. It was old, but the weight of years lent it charm; dusty, but oddly cared-for. He was sorry that he probably wouldn't get the chance to explore the rest of the castle, Neal thought, as glanced around the hall again. 

But he was pulled here for a reason; he was here to come face to face with the monster who would probably end his life, one way or another. 

For a moment he wondered whether he should have stopped to look for a weapon—he was proficient with a blade—but disgust flared again within him and he dismissed the thought. He wouldn't be able to slay whatever beast he'd been tethered to anymore than he'd be able to siphon its magic. He would happily forge the King's seal on a hundred writs of payment, but to take the life of an innocent creature? Even if his own life force wasn't more-or-less guaranteed to extinguish by the action, he wouldn't have been able to do that. 

Did all soul-tethered humans go through this? Were they dragged by their magic until they were forced to confront the creatures they were paired with, never to part from them again? Had the magic on his door been a kindness?

As if answering the question, “How did you get out of your room? How did you get past my magic?”

Neal had been certain that there was no one beside him, and for a beat he was startled into place. Then he unfroze and turned around, but no one was there. He felt… buffeted, pushed and pulled by several currents and unable to swim. The words were spoken directly next to him, but there was no one there; the disgust he had felt earlier surged again, and he realized that it wasn't his; and encompassing all was the surety that the monster was close.

“I… unlocked the door.” Neal responded as he continued to scan the room. No movement around him, no newly stirred dust other than his own footsteps, but the voice had been so close. He bent over to look under one of the tables.

“How? That magic—”

Neal stood up again, slowly turning on the spot as he took in the room, looking for anything large enough to conceal a man. The words seemed to cut into him—to cut out of him—and he belatedly realized that maybe the human keeper was an enemy, too. The darkness felt pressing now as Neal scanned for any shapes that didn’t belong, any shadows that were too big. “I didn’t need magic to unlock it. I picked the lock.”

“You—?”

“You’re in my head.” Neal cut off. “You’re talking to me inside my head.”

“The soul-tether allows for—”

“Nope.” He argued back, indignation fueling a small amount of bravery. “No. No hiding in the dark and scaring me by talking to me when I can’t see you. Come out and talk to me directly.”

A growl resonated through the space, a deep sound pushing through vocal chords far too thick to be anything domesticated, a sound Neal had never heard before, from somewhere above him. 

There was something dark moving along the wooden rafters. A living shadow, crawling along the beams, blocking out the darkness with something worse. It was the deliberate prowl of a hunter with cornered prey, and it washed away any bravery Neal had. It was something he didn’t recognize, something he wasn’t prepared for, and it was big.

Neal started to back away from the spot on the floor, but he kept his eyes on the shadow as it slunk from the head of the room toward where he stood. He couldn’t make out any distinguishing features; the blackness that advanced above him was lackluster, a matte blur that blended with the decrepit, shadowed walls and ceiling high above him. His eyes thought they tracked a glimmer, perhaps small eyes, a golden glow amongst the darkness, but it lasted only a single shifting beat before it blinked out. It was a clouded, darkened night sky on the prowl.

A night sky that dove at Neal.

The fear was all his own. The shape lunged with the grace of toned muscles well-suited for their task, and the descent was liquid and powerful and swift. 

“Whoa!” Neal yelled as he jumped back, and the combination of his fear-laced legs and the sudden gust of wind sent him stumbling over his feet, landing on his ass. He had to lean back on his hands to look up at the creature that now towered over him.

“Dragon,” slipped out with his breath.

The beast growled again as it approached Neal. It was taller than he was, slightly wider than a horse, with a head that was nearly half his body. Dark scales, black like old, long-extinguished coal, covered it. They were varied and irregular, like river stones, but dry and almost brittle-looking. Neal could almost make out a honeycomb pattern that used to exist, but they had grown so close, molten and fused over, that it was more like a dark, dense, thick coating. Black and grey flakes dusted to the ground where the overgrown material on its legs brushed up against its flank. Eyes that flickered like embers, speckles of reds and oranges that Neal could now see up close, focused on him. Large, snarling teeth seemed to glow with some hidden illumination.

“That room kept you safe. That magic kept you from following the tether.” The voice inside his head spoke as the dragon approached, nearly on top of Neal.

Neal craned his head higher, breathing heavily. He was aware that he was exposing his throat, but he was determined not to die looking down, and not to waste his final moments without appreciating the opportunity he'd been given. He didn't have time to sort through the implications of being tethered to a dragon, but he was tethered to a dragon. 

This close—to a dragon—Neal could feel the magic, not a well like his own, but a primordial ocean of depth he could never fathom, and it was pure and rich. It filled the air around him like the scent of honeysuckles in the summer. It made Neal’s own magic itch to be let out, to show off its own strength.

But it was also distant. It was undoubtedly there, it was almost more present than anything else in the decrepit hall, but there was something subdued about it. From where he lay sprawled, Neal could swear he saw flecks of it, like the brief glow of fire-red fireflies, glittering and snuffing out deep beneath the surface of those tight, dusty scales. 

Neal readied himself for the inevitable fire (he'd never seen any dragon, let alone a fire elemental, but he knew it when he saw it), but the dragon stopped advancing.

When seconds passed with no further words or movement, Neal pushed back on his hands, maneuvering himself away from the dragon. “Well, it’s too late now.” 

The stone floor was warm under his fingers, and he realized the dragon was radiating heat. “I’m out, and I— we’ve met. What are you going to do about it? Kill me?”

The dragon psshed a breath, Neal would’ve sworn smoke came out of the slits of nostrils, before it turned away. “You’re not worth killing. That would be too easy.”

“Oh. Um. Okay?” Neal’s inelegant response made him wince, suddenly aware of the fact that he was cowering on the floor. He forced a deep breath before he pushed himself up to his feet. The dragon either shifted in suspicion or defense, taking a step back. 

“Just to make sure we’re on the same page, you’re not going to kill me?”

“You’ll die on your own time, you need no assistance from me.” 

Neal suppressed the urge to roll his eyes at the answer. As he brushed himself off and adjusted his clothes, he observed the rest of the dragon’s body. He was mostly long and lean, not nearly the two-story brick-house of pure desolation he’d grown up hearing dragons were. But the menace of those teeth, that muscle, those brittle scales, all directed by the sharp intellect of those sentient eyes, almost seemed worse. 

“But what does that mean? You had someone bring me food earlier, water, so on my own time meaning—”

“I will not let your punishment become mine,” the dragon growled as the voice spoke in Neal’s mind, the two inputs of sound disorienting him. He shut his eyes and tried to focus on the words. “You can serve out your sentence back in your room as your life force diminishes in time and you die a natural death. I will be hurt for a time but will recover, but it is a price worth paying for keeping you away from the populace. The dark magic you reek of…what a sinful waste.”

The dragon didn't elaborate, but Neal was infused by disgust so powerful along the line connecting them that he staggered back a few more paces. 

The accusation pierced a part of him Neal hadn’t realized was vulnerable. “I don’t—I don’t know what they told you, but I don’t use—” 

“The King was right, you lie for a living. I can sense the dark magic, and your denial just proves you can’t be trusted amongst the civilized.” 

The words echoed and reverberated in Neal’s skull, somewhere between sound and thought, and his mind couldn’t quite process it as either; the result was a dull ache building at the base of his skull, thumping rhythmically with the cadence of the dragon’s communication. Neal abandoned his meagre defense. 

“The telepathy,” he said instead. “I'm not used to it, and the intensity of the tether makes it worse. Is there another way we can communicate?” 

“NO.” 

The single word echoed in his mind with force he could tell was intentional. 

“We needn't communicate at all. Return to your room and remain there, and refrain from any further dark magics, or I will snap this tether myself and return your body to King Phillip for internment.” 

It wasn't bravery that pushed Neal to argue; it was panic. 

“You can't expect me to spend the next however many years in a locked, dusty bedroom,” he said, ignoring the barb about the dark magic. That was a nonissue for him, and the dragon would realize that eventually. But to be confined, kept indoors indefinitely for a crime he couldn’t remember— “That’s basically torture. How is that not making my punishment your problem?” Neal could hear the desperation in his voice, and he could feel some of it travel along the invisible, magical tether. 

“For the foreseeable future you’re mine,” the dragon said, accompanied again by a growl that forced Neal to close his eyes again or risk falling over. It stepped closer. “And I can do whatever I want with you. Go.” 

The words faded and a deep, subaudible growl took their place, so low it seemed to settle painfully in Neal's teeth. The dragon advanced again, and Neal could feel the heat wash over him in an uncomfortably encompassing embrace. 

He wasn't sure he believed the dragon would snap the tether; he'd felt his ocean of magic, felt through the depth of the tether, and knew it had never been darkened by taking a life for pleasure or spite. But remaining this close was becoming increasingly painful, and Neal hated being at a disadvantage of the dragon’s accusations without even his memories to offer counterclaims. 

He turned his back on the dragon and, heart pounding, made his way back to his room. 

His cell. 

His new life. 

The end of it.

Chapter 2

By the time he arrived back in his room Neal was physically shaking. There was no direction, no lens through which any of this made sense. Tethered—to a dragon—for a crime he didn’t know at a trial he couldn’t remember, accused of dark magic which he’d never had a stomach for, no matter how hard Mozzie had pushed him to use it? 

It didn’t make sense. 

The dragon seemed to think that dark magic was the worst of his sins, but by no means the only one. Neal didn’t know whether that was his own magical moralizing or the actual accusation leveled against him, but either way he knew it was false, and it shouldn’t have been enough to earn him… this. Mages who excelled in dark magics often found a place in the King’s court, if they could provide him with some power or influence over his enemies.

 Natural born mages were rare nowadays, those with the innate ability to wield magic without spells, but magic itself still lingered in the air. Those with the right skills and know-how could pull it from the air and weave it into spells, carefully cut instructions to get the magic to respond. They learned how to manipulate magic into doing almost anything, into cruel, unnatural acts, things magic itself wouldn’t willingly comply with. Torterous acts, like mind control, or soul tethers. 

Neal was a natural born, so he’d been able to use magic since before he could talk. However, no one in his small village was a natural mage, so Neal could only learn what he could figure out on his own. Some things he didn’t remember learning at all, like crafting the small blue lights, or creating small breezes, and some things he had learned to do after hearing about them. He’d navigated his magic to be plenty powerful this way.

Mozzie always touted how powerful he could be if he would get into dark magic, of forcing magic to bend to his will, and when they first worked together Neal had tried a few times. Something was off about it though, he could feel the way the magic itself resented the work, the way it bucked its cooperation, unlike the ways he could normally cast. He eventually set the rule for himself, no dark magic, ever. Mozzie begrudgingly accepted.    

Now that he’d come face-to-face with the dragon, the tether seemed to become a conscious tug on his soul, and he could place the dragon exactly behind him. But all the same, Neal kept glancing up at the rafters, as though afraid the darkness might swoop down on him again, that the flickering fire deep beneath the scales might swoop at him, that the booming voice inside his head might overpower him with that same, deliberate indifference. 

He pushed into the room and closed the door behind him, heart still racing, and irrationally scanned the ceiling for dark shapes and armored scales. He breathed once, deeply, and decided the dusty air in the room simply wasn’t enough. 

Neal crossed the room and pulled apart the curtains behind the desk, and searched for the latch to open the large doors onto the broken balcony. He threw them open—one of them creaked on a broken hinge—and inhaled the brisk, salty air. It was too cold to be comfortable, but he didn’t want to be comfortable right now. He wanted to understand. Anything. 

As far as Neal knew, soul-tethering was reserved only for magical practitioners who had committed crimes against the Crown itself. The King would have the mage magically linked to some farmyard animal, or on rarer, more serious occasions, something wilder, like a squirrel or a crow. The weakening of the mage was said to be immediate, beginning with immense, unbearable headaches of chattering noise and fleeting sensations. One couldn’t go farther than a couple of feet from the animal one was bound to, and upon the death of the animal the mage’s own life-force would be diminished at least by half. Most never recovered enough to walk unaided, and none ever cast another spell again in their lives. Of course, those who were tethered to wild animals rarely lasted a month. There was no way to keep the tethered animals close, and once the tether was extended beyond its limit, the mage either had to close the distance, or, more likely, die trying. It was as cruel as it was humiliating. 

But none of that made sense, either; Neal hadn’t even realized he’d been tethered at first because he had none of the symptoms of a classic tether. And not only had he been legally tethered to a magical creature, which should have been unheard of, but the range of the tether seemed to be enormous. 

He stumbled back to the bed, somehow not tired but overwhelmed into exhaustion, anyway. 

A dragon. 

A living, breathing, sentient dragon that seemed content to keep him here until he died of old age. 

Neal wasn’t sure if he fell asleep or passed out from panic. 

___

It took a week for him to realize that whatever spell was blocking his memory of the trial wasn’t going to dissipate on its own. All but the strongest of dark incantations would last for a few days, at most. Whatever he was hit with was powerful, probably powerful enough to leave a residual mark the dragon could sense, but nothing he did with his own magic and none the spells he knew could untangle it.

He spent a lot of time using his canvassing spell to study what parts of the castle he could. With more direct concentration rather than the broad net he’d been casting before, he could get a general sense of the rooms that were on his floor. Another bedroom across the hall from him, filled with generally the same supplies as his own, but further set into the mountain, meaning no windows. Then down the hall on the other side of the staircase was a large, empty space. Neal could sense the crack in the walls, so it must’ve been emptied to spare whatever objects it once held from the weather, or maybe to protect any potential occupants from the chill of the ocean.

Across from that room though, was a library. A magnificent library, with shelves that probably went up two floors and took up half the floor, from the large window to the stairs. Neal told himself that, in a castle owned by a dragon, there had to be a book of spells that could guide him on how to break the memory block, or one that could teach him how to break a soul-tether.

Or just books to read while he waited to die, to help pass the time.

He tried to get to the library on his own first. The dragon hadn’t put further reinforcements on to the door, which made leaving his own room easy, but Neal could feel the moment he stepped outside of it that the dragon was aware of him again. It was an awareness as if a hundred eyes were on him, sensing every movement he made, every breath he took.

Since the awareness went two ways, and Neal didn’t feel the dragon approach any closer to reprimand him or to demand Neal go back to the bedroom, he pushed himself forward. For the first moment since he’d awoken in the castle he felt a small glimmer of hope.

The hallway beyond the staircase was barricaded by magic. An invisible wall that Neal walked straight into.

It was shocking first, and then annoying, and a rush of pride and amusement not Neal’s own came in through the tether, and that pissed Neal off.

He slammed his fist against the invisible wall once, twice, and then moved towards the one that blocked the staircase and hit it again. “This is worse than death! If you want to torture me into madness, then you’re doing a damn good job of it, but I didn’t do anything to deserve this!” 

He might not know what he had done, but Neal knew who he was, and he was damn certain of that.

The dragon’s surprise rolled across the tether, and Neal screamed aloud. Their emotions were arguing, he couldn’t even feel something without the damn dragon’s input.

He slammed the door to his room shut, and the dragon’s presence in his soul was eased instantly. His breathing was still labored, and his hand was throbbing, but Neal was all adrenaline and vitriolic energy. He was not going to spend another day being treated like his life wasn’t his.

First, the dust. 

He dragged the desk closer to the balcony doors, then climbed on top of it, pulling the curtains down completely and letting the room be filled with light. He tossed them aside to be dealt with later, then jumped down.

He threw open the ceiling-high balcony doors , and turned to face the room. He’d been in shock and wallowing for days now, but enough was enough.

His magic followed his emotions as he cast a wind spell from the bedroom door, a large, angry burst blowing the first cloud of dust outside the balcony doors. Being from a line of air mages always made this magic easiest for him, but it also meant it was most influenced by his own emotions, more than a textbook spell would be. Today, that suited him. He didn’t care about being careful, about respecting his prison with any kind of decency, so he let the magic run hostile as it blew through the room, until a cat sized tornado swept across the carpet. It brought out the decades of dust and dirt between the fibers as it went, but it also stole the curtains he had thrown aside as it chased itself out toward the balcony.

He couldn’t even bother himself to be upset about it; less for him to dust.

By the time the room was completely clean, Neal was both emotionally and physically exhausted. He’d spent most of the day fixing, clearing, shining, and rearranging what he could, and he laid back on the bed satisfied, at least, that he’d earned this rest in clean sheets. 

“What have you done?” The voice—not a voice, his brain argued with itself—woke him early the next day. Neal startled upright, heart pounding at the abrupt disturbance, and at the realization that the dragon had somehow come in here again while he was sleeping. 

But when Neal stumbled out of the bed the room was empty. A meal had been left for him, but otherwise nothing seemed disturbed; the doors to the broken balcony still hung open, but the dragon couldn’t have possibly fit through them, and the caretaker couldn’t have possibly walked across the broken, moss-slimy stones.

“Where are you?” Neal asked out loud, raising his voice. He wasn’t sure he was capable of communicating the same way the dragon was. 

When the response came, it was a command instead of an answer. “To the banquet hall. Now.” 

Neal briefly considered not, mostly on principle, but he was so tempted by the idea of being out of his room after more than a week that he simply followed the instruction. This time when he entered the banquet hall he raised his eyes to the rafters immediately, and this time he was prepared—or less surprised—when the dragon swooped down on him. 

“I asked, what have you done?” 

Neal raised two empty hands. “I haven’t done anything. I haven’t even been able to make it down the hallway.” 

The dragon lowered its head so its eyes were level with Neal’s. The flickering red magic was visible in the angle of his shoulders. “Do not lie.” 

“I don’t know what you think I’ve done,” Neal said, “but I haven’t done it.” 

“Your room. You were told explicitly to refrain from your dark magics here. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t throw you off the cliffside right now?” 

It was an empty threat, Neal was surprised to know. He could feel annoyance along the tether, and impatience, but no true violence. But that accusation again. He wondered why the dragon cared so much; natural casting like Neal’s was rare, but it was more an issue of schoolboy snobbery than an actual difference in magical tone, as far as Neal knew. He personally never had a taste for it—it literally cause a sourness to drip down his tongue into a pit of nausea whenever he tried—but he was the only one he knew he reacted that way. It was just… a tool. 

Neal funneled every ounce of sincerity, outward and otherwise, into his words. “I didn’t use dark magic. I think—you should be able to detect it on me if I had.” He wondered whether the dragon could detect his own intention, as well. 

“I can,” the dragon said, and Neal felt the wind knocked out of him in a combination of vindication and violation. The dragon continued, “And while I don’t detect a lie, I do not see how you could have transformed the room as you did into a portrait of luxury.” 

Neal resisted the urge to roll his eyes at the dragon. “You’re inside my head, you’re attached to my soul, but you can’t feel that I have my own magic? My own skill? I’m completely capable of cleaning without using dark magic.” 

He wanted to rail, to rage against the insinuation that somehow a dust-free room was a portrait of luxury during a life-sentence, indoors, without even access to the greater building, to the library, to the hallway.

He didn’t though, keeping his emotions in check as he brought a hand up. The banquet hall curtains were still drawn, the flicker of the fireplace behind the dragon the only source of light, so Neal cast the small light spell. The dragon recoiled from it before it growled, a clear warning and wordless threat, but Neal ignored it. He swirled his other hand around the egg-sized ball of light, creating a whirl of wind of azure around it, before he pushed the light out into the room.

It slowly drifted along, the spinning wind gently collecting the floating dust as it went. The light was quickly covered by it, the light it produced becoming hazy and dull by the sheer volume.

“I don’t need dark magic to do anything. I’m a born air mage, and a damn good one.” 

He waved his right hand in a dismissive gesture, and the light blinked out, and between heartbeats the globe of collected dust collapsed in a greyish-brownish cloud midair.

Neal felt a fleeting regret run across the tether, like a rope lit on fire and burning out in a flash; but before he could parse whether the feeling was his the dragon spoke again. 

“I can detect your magic, but it… it hadn’t occurred to me to check since natural born mages are beyond a rarity in humans after the war. As I know, not one in a thousand families carry the magical line necessary for independent magic control. I recognize that I may have… rushed judgement in that regard.” 

“May have? You had judgement on a tether.”

Neal felt a jolt of surprise, and took pleasure in knowing that it wasn’t his. He could catch the dragon off-guard if he thought quickly enough.

“Regardless,” the dragon continued, and although he spoke with no sound the words took on a lower, impatient quality, “I realize that I may not have been tending your human needs properly.” 

Neal’s heart stepped up its beat, and a million eager requests perched on the edge of his tongue; he wanted to ask if he could help prepare his own meals, if he could have a bath and a change of clothes; he wanted to know whether the dragon had a name.

He realized belatedly that even having the desires pass by in his mind left them exposed to the dragon, and that made his eagerness evaporate. Neal wanted to be believed that regardless of what the dragon had been told, he wasn’t dangerous, or a threat. But he felt exposed, even in his head. To have his thoughts so clearly monitored made them impossible to voice, and made him realize that maybe this was his true punishment. It wasn’t just his freedom that had been taken from him, but his privacy, in every sense.

The dragon nodded slightly, answering the conversation Neal was having in his head. “I will remove limitations to your movement within the castle. You may access the library freely, and request access to the kitchen, the baths, and the lower spaces when you desire to use them. And I will refrain from using the tether to scan your thoughts. It had not occurred to me that a human might be made… uncomfortable that way.” 

With that, a door seemed to close gently around the tether. Neal could still feel it, could still feel the vague echoes of emotions along it, but the feeling of an awareness inside his mind that wasn’t his own faded. 

“Thank you—” he stopped short, realizing that at least one question went unanswered. 

“Petrostias,” the dragon said, and Neal examined the space around the tether, but the door was still shut; his thoughts were still his. The dragon had merely read his hesitation correctly. 

“Thank you, Peter,” Neal said, with no intention of twisting his mouth over the Ancient Tongue for the rest of his natural life. 

“That’s not—” 

Neal smiled brightly. “I’m going to check out the library.” 

___

Time moved faster once Neal had access to other parts of the castle. His trial had been a rushed thing late in the summer, he could still remember the humidity that clung to him in his cell, and as far as he could tell, and the leaves of the trees in the forest, which he could only glimpse out of the kitchen windows had still been lush and green when he’d finally been allowed to expand his radius there. 

As the days shortened they yellowed and oranged and reddened, and Neal took notice of it as he tried to keep track of his sentence. 

But mostly, he spent his time in the library.

At first, he was engrossed with researching the spell that had locked him from memories of his crime. It took weeks for him to admit defeat. But by then he had managed to peek at enough scrolls to soften his disappointment. The library had everything. 

His canvassing spell had been correct: The shelves around the perimeter took up the entire wall, which were twice as high as the ones in his bedroom. A wooden balcony encompassed them halfway up, slightly rickety but beautifully carved, and clearly cared for and maintained. It was apparently a favored place of the human caretaker as well; the layer of dust much finer than the rest of the castle, maybe a few years rather than a century’s worth.

There were smaller shelves along the ground floor, and even books that categorized where everything in the library was. Off to the far side of the space was a door that Neal didn’t discover until his third visit. It led to a small parlor space, a few couches and tables around, as dust free and polished as his own room, with a rack of firewood full and a bundle already in the fireplace, waiting. 

After discovering that, Neal stole some of the blankets from his room and spent some nights on the parlor couch, ankle deep in the stacks of books he had gathered.

But even the library couldn’t take up all of his time. Neal found himself often in the helpless combination of restless and trapped, even with more of the castle allowed to him. He had been sentenced with only the clothes he’d been wearing, and the dragon had very little to offer him as a replacement. Every few days he’d spend a full day heating water and washing his clothes, then another drying them by the fire in his room. He always smelled like smoke, and his clothes grew ragged from week to week, and it meant that two full days were spent within the confines of his room, except for when he asked for permission to prepare himself food.

And even that, he was forced to do over the tether. 

Even after weeks—the colorful leaves had shed themselves from brittle branches, and the days were cold and often wet—communication with the dragon remained an uncomfortable pull on his consciousness where his brain expected either silence or sound, but not the odd combination that was both and neither at the same time. 

The dragon, on his part, either respected how much discomfort it caused Neal, or merely intended to honor its earlier resolve of letting Neal die of natural causes with as little bother to itself as possible; it hadn’t summoned him back to the banquet hall except for once, to offer him a second set of clothes it had found in one of the rooms, and it never addressed Neal except when he asked to go to the kitchens or to the library. He was never refused, but the need to ask still stung. It was a constant reminder that lavish bedroom or wonderful library notwithstanding, he was jailed within this castle, and entirely alone. 

He could feel panic rising at the absoluteness of that, at the promise of how unchanging it would be, at this glimpse of what forever meant whenever he thought that, so he did his best not to think about it. 

The only time he saw the dragon was late one night, as he was making his way from his own room to the library. 

“You didn’t ask to be in the library tonight.” It wasn’t a question, and it was launched at Neal with enough force that he dropped the blanket and the three books he’d been holding, and raised his hands to his ears. It was a fruitless effort to stem a communication that was coming up from within—like his own soul couldn’t stand the sight of him—but when he was unprepared, like he was now, it hurt. 

“It shouldn’t hurt,” the dragon said, and Neal searched within for a second awareness, but he couldn't find one. More prepared now, Neal opened his eyes, still breathing heavily. 

“It does. Especially when you surprise me with it.” 

“You surprised me, human. As I said, you didn’t ask if you could retire to the library tonight, and I expected to be alone.” 

This standing on ceremony was more humiliating than forcing him to ask in the first place. “May I retire to the library tonight.” 

Neal realized it hadn’t been a question when the dragon responded to his frustration rather than his words; for the first time in weeks, he hadn’t answered with a straightforward yes.

“I merely meant that I am working with raw magics tonight,” the dragon said, tilting his long neck behind him, toward the gaping windows and broken frames. “And that is dangerous for humans, even naturally born mages. But the castle needs repairs before full winter sets in. It’s too cold for you as it is.” 

Neal looked at the offshooting hall where the dragon was standing, and he could see that the wall behind him, which had been cracked all the way up to the ceiling, had been sealed against the wind. The whistling that haunted this hall was gone, for the first time Neal could remember. He hadn’t missed the implication that the dragon had noticed that the castle grew colder around Neal. It was struggling to stay warm, and the gaps of missing window panes and holes in sections of the walls were making the entire building radiate a chill that seemed to surpass mere skin and flesh and settle directly in his bones. As it was he was underdressed for the weather, and the dragon hadn’t found any warmer clothing for him beyond the simple wool trousers and undyed cotton shirt he provided when Neal asked for a second set of clothes. Even when he wore both sets at the same time the air inside was cold enough to ache, and he had taken to covering himself with a blanket, even in his waking hours.

“Thank you, Peter,” Neal said, and he felt a jolt of surprise at the name deep inside him, the same place where the non-spoken words originated. It was the dragon’s surprise, not his own, and the invasion of forced intimacy, of feeling someone else’s emotions without control, became its own sort of distressed pain. 

“Human?” 

“Neal,” Neal corrected absently, barely noticing how soft the overture had been. 

“Neal.” The dragon corrected with a dip of his head, and something constricted in longing at the not-sound of his own name. He hadn’t heard it since his trial, and wouldn’t have taken an oath that Peter even knew it. Neal could see that where there had been a handful of firefly freckles a few weeks ago, now glowed long lines of red-hot magic that flowed deep below the surface of the dragon’s scales. Their honeycomb layout seemed neater, now, as though rearranged into position by the brighter magic that flowed beneath them. 

“Neal, the connection, the soul tether? It’s there, whether you like it or not. For communication, at least, it may help if you don’t fight it.” 

“I don’t know how not to fight someone inside my soul, Peter. Your words, your emotions? They don’t belong inside me.” 

“Be that as it may, they’re there, until one of us…” He didn’t finish, and Neal found he was grateful for that small kindness. They both knew that he would be the one to. 

“You felt me retreat from your mind, yes? You have control over my presence with you, just like you have some control over yours with me. It’s the same as any other magic you wield. When you cast a spell, you’re not just sucking in all the magic you can, and then bracing yourself against the overwhelm, are you?”

Neal shifted from one foot to the other as he processed the idea. “No, I guess not. So you’re saying I…am too accepting of it?”

“You just need to learn how to not hold so much of our souls at the same time.” Peter moved to curl his tail around his legs, looking at Neal like a sentient, overgrown, scaly dog. “I try to communicate with you, and your soul is trying to let in too much at once. Think of it like… if water could flood down this hallway. There’s a door, which you can control, on one side, and a door I can control on mine. Right now your door is wide open, letting in all of the water. You can close it a little, ease some of the flow...” 

Neal didn’t answer. He tried instead to follow the lines of possible manipulation of sharing this information. What the dragon might gain, and what he, Neal, might lose by following his advice. 

He came up with nothing. 

He was already imprisoned on the bedroom-library-kitchen axis, and the dragon was already capable of decapacitating him with a single, well-placed question, no matter how innocuous. Neal wasn’t sure how it could get materially worse, so he experimented. 

He felt along the tether, around the spot deep in his chest that seemed to bleed outside of him, and found the outline of… something, like Peter had suggested. Door and flood were perhaps  crude metaphors, but they were apt, and Neal tentatively pulled. 

Immediately a pressure inside him eased, like he’d been pushing against something that could just as easily float in front of him. 

“You never answered me,” he tried, tentatively, to say, to think, over the tether. “About the library.”

Peter’s answer wasn’t unexpected, but Neal still felt surprised at how gentle the words felt, how easily they flowed between him now that he had some control over the force of their impact. . He could barely reconcile how the same sensation had been downright painful only a few moments ago. 

“Of course you may. But I ask that you remain in the library for the night, or inform me before you intend to return to your room, because the magic I will be using is volatile. It would be unsafe to wander the halls.”

Neal didn’t answer. He simply contemplated the feeling  that transferred with Peter’s words along the tether. They felt earnest, sincere.

He collected his blanket and books and headed to the library. 

He spent the night there, but he didn’t sleep. Something had shifted, but he wasn’t sure what, and the uncertainty robbed him of sleep. Instead, he dove into interwoven sheets covered in delicate ink unfolding secrets of magical theory; handbound books of bard songs dating back centuries; manuscripts of imaginative tales, of medical knowledge, secret memoirs of kings. 

Most of what he read he forgot as soon as he turned the page; his thoughts kept returning to the dragon. 

To Peter. 

He hadn’t been prepared for it—him—to not only notice the castle was growing increasingly inhospitable, but to go through the effort to fix it, after decades and decades of neglect. Coupled with the fact that he’d shown him how to reduce the terrible weight of the dragon’s silent communication, Neal wasn’t sure what to think. 

It probably didn’t change anything, he thought, as he put down the memoir of Philip the First and picked up a history, instead. 

At first, he drifted in and out again as he replayed the conversation in the hallway over, and then again. The words blurred together on the pages as his subconscious worked overtime. He only realized after he passed by a few pages that there was handwriting in the margins, and it drew his attention when a paragraph was nearly scribbled out entirely, the writing along the side reading, None of this is true! in thick, black letters.

Neal flipped back a few pages, finding the title of the section. It was about the first King Philip, and his campaign against  mages, thirty years ago. Neal knew about it as the Deadly Winter.

It had been a sudden, unrelenting attack that lasted for months. Many mages were arrested and killed in secret before people realized what was happening, and the outrage nearly ignited a war. That was until a dragon slayed King Philip the First and brought his son into power.

Neal’s own father disappeared during this time, and though his mother never said it outright he’d come to realize that he was one of the mages who were murdered by the King. Neal sometimes raged at the thought, and sometimes it comforted him; even now, he wanted to believe that the father he hadn’t seen since he was three couldn’t come back. But he’d never actually seen a written account of the Deadly Winter until now. 

The first few pages of the section covered the parts that were common knowledge amongst the people, and mages in particular: the brutal, bloody attack on mages lasted most of a winter, and the mages were nearing extinction when Philip the First suddenly perished and his son took the throne. At his side was an extraordinarily powerful High Mage, who brought on a golden era for magic in the kingdom. The castle often hosted balls, parties, and grand magical performances. Between the King and his High Mage a magical peace was brokered between the kingdom, its magic users, and its magical creatures; the High Mage famously shared his knowledge and his teachings, even with lesser mages, and encouraged any powerful mages to come and show off their skills at in in the service of the Court. They were stories of how the two men, King Philip and the High Mage, restored peace in the Kingdom, and brought back the respect for magic and mages, even if many  of the family lineages of mages had been destroyed.

Here though, in these books, Neal discovered rewritten version of the stories. Hand-writing laid in the margins, short scribbles that Neal could only partially understand. He’s lying, this isn’t wh— and Siegel said that they came in—

The human caretaker, who obviously lived in a part of the castle Neal had no access to, was apparently a history afficionado who cared deeply enough about the Deadly Winter to destroy books by writing in the margins. However unpardonable that crime, Neal longed to ask him about it. It sounded like he’d known someone who witnessed the events, and even though he was a very young child at the time, Neal couldn’t help but feel that the Deadly Winter was part of his story, too. 

If he’d been a little older, or had he grown up two villages over, he might have been one of the mages rounded up in the middle of the night and quietly disappeared into an anonymous mass grave.

If the caretaker thought the official stories were wrong, well, he wanted to know how. 

Neal wished he could share his findings, however limited, with Mozzie. He always did appreciate a good coverup, and this one promised to be in the very least interesting, even if he had no details beyond the vague accusations in the margins of a history book. The thought filled him with a unique kind of dread, one he was glad the dragon— Peter— couldn’t feel from him. He knew it was unlikely he’d ever see his oldest friend again, so instead he spent the rest of the autumn and the early months of winter reading histories fervently in his honor.