Chapter one
Tiera looked up at the dragon, and just stared for a while. It was beautiful. The head was a good two or three stories above her, and the large green eyes looked almost like those of a cat. They had slits in them, instead of round pupils. The scales weren't all huge, but many of them were the size of her hand or better, all in an iridescent purple color. That part, the color, was a dead giveaway as to who had made it, of course. Only one Builder in the whole world was all that married to that particular shade.
Her brother. Tor.
The thing wasn't really looking at her, even as it moved toward her position, which really, wasn't hard to find. She was standing out in the open, just looking at the thing. There was jungle to the left of her, and she stood on a sandy beach, with a crystal clear ocean to her other side. The creature, which she understood not to be real at all, moved on her anyway. It didn't scrabble on the white sand however, moving toward her smoothly, as if designed for uncertain footing. The black claws looked sharp and like they'd lend toward that end, at any rate.
Kolb, her Weapons Master from school, pointed a copper tube at it, but naturally, nothing happened. It was made out of shield material. That basically meant, even though it was visible and solid, it really wasn't there at all. It also didn't have a brain.
That meant, she realized after half a second, that she needed to look for the real threat, which would be the mind behind the thing. It wasn't Tor, she knew. Or at least hoped, since that would be bad right now. She didn't have time for a long drawn out discussion, or half an hour to find him. Her brother was a Master Builder and possibly one of the best Wizards in the whole world. That meant he could hide his thoughts from her, if he tried, she didn't doubt. She could hide hers from him, after all, and she really doubted he was less capable of that than she was.
Pulling herself up, a dragon closing with her and the muscular bald man next to her, she let it all go, and simply focused, as if she had all the time in the world. In that dark bit of clarity she reached out with her mind and felt the line that ran from the mythical beast to the left, into the brush, about two hundred feet. That was what she had to hit then.
Without opening her eyes she pointed with a bit of white glassy looking stone that had the rough shape of a pen. It was a weapon of her own making and a thing of true magic, but it was a bit different than what everyone else had. It didn't have a sigil on it at all, and it was activated by simply thinking what you wanted it to do. Well, as long as it was one of the four things it could. It had a nice explosive weapon on it however, which is what she chose to strafe the tree line with. It made the world shake and roar, like lighting striking for nearly twenty seconds.
Then she opened her eyes.
The line of mental connection to the dragon was gone, and in a way that she thought might mean that the person controlling the things was dead. That was, if it wasn't being faked, in order to catch them off guard. They were dealing with people that might be clever enough to have figured out how to get that done, after all.
She no sooner thought the words when a person stepped out of the Jungle about half a mile away, and fired something at them. A missile, she thought. It moved at them rapidly enough, and both she and Sir Kolbrin waved at it with their weapons, causing it to explode. Then, being the better fighter by far and having so much more life experience than she did that it wasn't even worth joking about, Kolb immediately picked out the others in the group of cloned Ancients and started trying to kill them, before they could escape.
Tiera did the same thing, but focused on the forest behind the two men and the woman that suddenly decided that the jungle was a nice place to visit. She nearly hated to do it, but she burnt the trees behind them with a line of fire. Not really behind them now, she corrected, since they turned to face it.
The goal wasn't particularly to take prisoners this time. They knew what this was, which was a small group of clones that all looked like Gray or Cordes, that had been trying to infiltrate Noram as a group. Probably to lay waste to a city with that dragon and some of their other old tech devices.
It was, she knew, disturbing.
At least she thought so, on a deep level. It took a bit, but Kolb killed them all, even at a distance. They were all fast, but the two women were faster than the man by far. It didn't help at all. When they moved toward the water to flee, they died. Blowing up into thousands of chunks and turning the air into a red mist. That was hard to look at too.
Regina had died like that, and seeing these people go that way... well, it hit her so hard she nearly cried. It was only the fact that she lived in a pretty deep trance state most of the time now that stopped that from happening. It still wasn't perfect, but she was doing a lot better than she ever had before. Her concentration was tighter and she could keep herself from thinking about things, if she tried hard enough. For the most part.