Soul Fire

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  “The size of a horse?” Jett repeated, doubt scrawled across his heavy features. “A carnivore, the size of a horse?”

  “You can come with us to check the prints, Jett,” Yasmin said defiantly, defending her measurements. “I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am.”

  Jett cast one look of longing towards the shore, and I knew he wanted a second opinion. If Professor Alena had been with us, he would’ve felt better for having someone to discuss it with. As it was, he nodded curtly.

  “Who will come with me?” he asked, and Dustin volunteered, as did Yasmin and Petre.

  The rest of us watched as they disappeared into the woods. Immediately we were swamped by our classmates wanting descriptions of what we’d found. I left the others to it and headed to our tent, wanting food. I scowled as I pulled out the empty bag, shaking it upside down. Unless we’d grossly miscalculated how much food to bring, I’d say we’d had a peckish visitor. My thoughts whirled to Ispin who had a habit of stealing food and I sighed heavily. My bets were that his and Petre’s food bag was empty too.

  I headed to the edge of camp, carrying the bag. I could go and collect berries and nuts that I knew were edible, but when I cast a glance over my shoulder to the others, they were still talking to the class.

  “I’ll go with you.”

  I jumped, startled, as Phoenix appeared from the woods.

  “What were you doing out there?” I asked him, my nerves humming.

  He shrugged, completely unperturbed by my expression and the class’ fearful demeanour.

  “Alright,” I said apprehensively, wondering how this was going to go. “I don’t want to go too far, though.”

  The sun was beginning to sink below the horizon as we set out together. I came across several berry bushes, but didn’t recognize any, so I left them alone, Phoenix wandering along behind me.

  I was picking black berries gingerly, avoiding the sharp spikes on the bushes, when I heard it. A huffing, not like Echo did when she was exasperated with me, but like an agitated animal preparing to charge. I turned slowly, my heart hammering in my chest.

  An enormous creature, indeed the size of a horse, stood in the bushes behind me. Its red eyes glowed with anger, and it snarled when I turned. Our eyes met for one moment, and then, forgetting everything I’d learnt about dangerous animals, I fled.

  I dropped the food bag and ran through the black berry bushes, not feeling the thorns that scraped my skin and caught my clothes. I could hear that the creature was in pursuit, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to outrun it.

  I headed for a tree with many low hanging branches. When I reached it, I propelled myself into the branches, pulling up my feet as the animal skidded to a halt at the base of the trunk and roared its displeasure. I continued climbing desperately, my sweaty hands slipping on the bark.

  The creature reared up on its hind legs and swatted at me with an enormous paw. I pulled my feet up, tucking them close to my body as I clung to a branch. I was getting near the top of the tree now, the tree that shook as the creature braced itself against it, and the branches were thinning. I glanced down to see where the creature was, and then immediately wished I hadn’t.

  It was a creature of nightmares. It had the body of a lion, was the size of a horse, but was covered in black scales like armour. Steely claws dug into the bark of the unfortunate tree I’d taken sanctuary in, and I shook with the tree, almost losing my grip. Its hot breath reached up to me, smelling like a thousand dead things.

  I had no idea where Phoenix was. I could only hope that he’d seen the creature and gone back to camp for help. I certainly didn’t want him coming after me on his own, not with this beast about to scale the tree for a tasty morsel of mage.

  Mage! I made a fist, letting my magic seep through to its corporeal form. A fireball formed in my hand, and I wasted no time projecting it downwards, engulfing the creature in green flames.

  While it certainly didn’t like the magic in its eyes, the beast wasted no time regaining its footing, the rest of my magic showering off of its armoured hide. That’s what it’s there for, I realised. This beast is a mage eater.

  I abandoned my magic, reaching for the small dagger at my hip. I unsheathed it, feeling a bit better about having a sharp blade in my hand. When the creature lifted a paw, claws outstretched, trying to reach me in the branches, I swiped at it with the dagger. The blade cut the flesh between its toes, and the creature reared back and roared in pain.

  I didn’t have to worry about someone coming for help now. People on the mainland surely had to have heard that.

  My dagger had come in handy. Now I needed to take it up a notch.

  I looped one arm around a branch, wrapping sweaty fingers around the hilt of the small knife as the creature began to attack the tree with renewed frenzy. With my other hand, I carefully grasped the blade, hissing as the blood of the creature burnt my skin like acid. I kept a hold on it, whispering the spell we’d learnt in Magic Prac. The blade glowed and then elongated. I now had a small sword.

  This part was tricky. I couldn’t rely on magic to hold my aim true, and I wasn’t the best thrower as it was. I looked down into the beast’s red eyes, fixing it with a glare, letting it know it had attacked a force to be reckoned with. As though recognising such a glare, the creature snarled up at me.

  “That’s my cue,” I muttered to myself, and bracing myself in the branches, hurled the sword downwards, point first.

  My aim was true; the sharp point of the blade bit deep into the creature’s left eye, and it dropped to the forest floor, snarling. It howled, and I slammed my hands over my ears as it built in pitch and intensity. The creature rubbed its head on the ground, desperately trying to dislodge the knife. With one desperate yowl that made my vision swim, it collapsed to the ground, shaking the leaves of the trees all around.

  I stayed where I was, not believing it to be dead. I think I would’ve stayed there all night if Phoenix hadn’t burst through the trees, Jett and my classmates with him. Together they took in the scene; me high up in the branches of my life saving tree, and the creature crumpled on the ground, the hilt of my dagger protruding from its eye.

  “Sky!”

  Phoenix climbed into the branches and held out a hand to me. I gripped it, steadying myself against him as I climbed down.

  “What is it?” I asked Jett, who was looking over the beast.

  “A Du’rangor,” he said, kneeling in front of it. “But how-“

  “A Du’rangor?” Phoenix asked. “But how is it here?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked him, confused.

  “Du’rangors are native to Gannameade, and only to that country. They aren’t found anywhere else.”

  “Except the Paw Islands of Lotheria, apparently,” I said, unwilling to go near the thing.

  Jett gripped the hilt of my dagger and pulled, wincing as the blade refused to come free from the sucking mass of what was left of the Du’rangor’s eye. When he did finally get it free, only a small portion of the blade was left with the hilt; the rest seemed to have been burned away.

  “Du’rangors are poisonous,” Jett lifted the remainder of the blade to show the class, who wrinkled their faces as eye goo dripped from it in long strings. “And very difficult to kill. How did you do it, Sky?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” I asked.

  “You shoved a knife in its eye, but that alone shouldn’t have killed it. What else did you do?”

  “Nothing. I mean, I made the dagger a little longer using that spell you taught us, because it was only a little knife.”

  “So you threw a blade soaked with magic into its brain,” Jett concluded. “That would do it, and evidently, it has.”

  Everyone gathered around the Du’rangor, but I didn’t go a step closer. They hadn’t seen it in action, the way its muscles moved like liquid steel as it reached for me in the tree, death in its eyes. I looked at it slumped on the ground, noti
cing how much smaller it seemed now that one couldn’t see the two inch long claws retracted back into its paws, the long teeth and the foul smelling maw were hidden from view by its velvet muzzle, the only part of the animal apart from its paw pads that was fur.

  I hardly noticed when Phoenix left my side and Dustin replaced him, too engrossed in my thoughts, reliving parts of what had just happened.

  “What will happen to it now?” I asked Jett.

  “We’ll burn the body, and then we should leave the island,” he said. “I don’t want to find out the hard way that this wasn’t the only one here.”

  I shuddered involuntarily.

  “What were you doing out here by yourself?” Dena asked, wrapping her arms around me as the rest of the group came over.

  “I wasn’t alone, Phoenix was with me. Don’t do that,” I told her as she sent a very untrusting look to Phoenix, who’d slunk behind the group. “I was collecting black berries, because our food bag is empty.”

  “No it isn’t,” she said, frowning, which sent her glasses slipping down her nose. “It can’t be.”

  I noticed Ispin behind her go bright red and begin to shuffle from foot to foot.

  “I must’ve misjudged how much food to bring,” I said quickly, before anyone could look over at him and put two and two together.

  Dena admonished me as my mother would have, and Ispin sent me a grateful look that I dare not acknowledge.

  We packed up quickly and headed for the beach as the sun dropped even lower. We rowed out to the waiting boat, and I watched as the island dropped behind us, a thin belt of smoke rising into the evening air as the body of the Du’rangor burned.

  Once safely aboard, we began to sail back to the mainland. The jetty slowly came back into view, alight with torches so we could find our way home. The sailors moored it with expert ease, and we disembarked on wobbly legs, tired from so much travelling over the day.

  It was only this morning that we left, I mused in wonder. A lot had happened in a day. I’d almost died, and I’d spent time with Phoenix.

  I grumbled to myself as we headed back to our old camp. Why did he have such a strong grasp over me? Maybe it was like this with all soul mates, though I wouldn’t know as I hadn’t much experience with mine.

  Echo greeted me with as much gusto as ever, which faded quickly when she realised I didn’t have treats for her this one time. I stroked her velvet nose, wondering how the nose of the Du’rangor would’ve felt.

  Suddenly a hot ball of pain wrenched my insides. I’d just killed a creature. A large, living creature that was trying to kill me. Suddenly everything rushed me at once, how close I’d come to death. Jett said it had been poisonous; if one of those razor sharp claws had so much as nicked my leg and drawn blood, the blood in my veins would’ve bubbled with acid and I would’ve died.

  I sat in the sand dunes and curled up into a ball. It wasn’t everyday one managed to succeed in killing something that was threatening their life. I should feel elated, even more confident in my abilities than before. But I knew I’d been grossly outmatched, and had I had my twin swords with me, I more than likely would be dead in that tree. Because I would’ve thought myself a match for the beast. I would’ve stayed on the ground to face it as an equal, realising my grievous mistake far too late.

  Cold sand brushed my cheeks and I shivered in the brisk sea wind. Behind me, I could hear someone, Dena, I think, calling for me. I didn’t answer her, instead hugging my knees to my chest tighter, closing my eyes against the grains of sand that sailed on the wind.

  “You’re in shock.”

  I opened my eyes and saw Phoenix sitting a little way down the dune from me. How long had he been there?

  “What?”

  “In shock. You’re trying to deal with the fact that you almost died.”

  “So what if I am?” I said, moody and defensive. “Where did you go, by the way? One second you were there and the next I was being chased up a tree.”

  “I saw you being chased by it and went to get help. I left you alone for only a few minutes. Du’rangors are intelligent; it would’ve waited for you to be alone.”

  “Why? It could’ve killed us both, easily.”

  “Yes, but it was also hungry. The Du’rangor is a cursed beast; it poisons what it kills, and if it eats what it has poisoned, it dies.”

  “How does it kill without poisoning its prey then?”

  He swirled a finger in the sand, not looking at me.

  “It frightens its prey to death,” he said finally. “That howl? It overwhelms the senses, drives its prey insane.”

  Lucky I’d covered my ears then. I remembered its final, desperate yowl, the way my head had swum and my vision blurred. I thought back to the night Dustin and I had heard it howl on the beach. Even at that distance I’d been physically affected by its howl; the terror that had pierced my heart had been the Du’rangor setting all of us up for a tasty meal.

  “Gannameade must be an awful place,” I mumbled. “If there are creatures like the Du’rangor running loose all over the countryside.”

  There was no answer. I looked up. He was gone.

  “Sky,” I looked over my shoulder at Jett. “Are you alright?”

  “I’m fine,” I lied, though my heart hung heavy with Phoenix’s abandonment. Too bad, I thought, we’d almost been having a conversation. “I was just coming back.”