It didn’t take much, or long, for the council chambers to be converted into a battleground. The seating was already in a coliseum-like semi-circle. The council members shimmied a few rows higher to shield themselves from any potential elemental spray, and that was it.
It made Caltyr wonder just how many of the council’s decisions were made by battle rather than discussion.
The council leader had asked he and Sara to stand facing each other, with her standing between them.
She dwarfed them in size, like all adult dragons, but compared to the others she was tiny, thin and wiry, with hard, knobbled scales like stones. A fan of rigid gem-frills that moved with her mood encompassed her face.
“A Battle of Wills is an ancient elemental dragon tradition that has allowed our kind to make difficult decisions through our elements for millennia,” the council leader rumbled, with a weight to her words. “It is believed that the forces behind our elements know the best path forward, so if your cause is worthy enough, your elements will grant you the power to emerge victorious. Caltyr, please step forward and tell us what elements you’ll be casting with in this Battle of Wills.”
Caltyr stepped forward. “Water and light, miss…” He realized he wasn’t actually aware of the council leader’s name, so he ended in silence and looked curiously upward.
“Delphine, Caltyr. My name is Delphine, and thank you for asking.”
“I already knew that,” Sara muttered from the sidelines.
“Caltyr. To begin, I will have you speak to your Water and your Light. Picture them swirling before you and tell them what cause you’re calling upon their aid for. Ask them for their power.” Delphine moved backward to give space to his ‘swirling elements’.
Caltyr suppressed a chuckle at the silliness of it all. She wanted him to talk to his powers as if they were a person he could ask for things from in front of all of the most important dragons in the region? Would this even do anything?
“Water and Light,” he began, trying to visualize a gust of wind kicking up a twirling column of light and water, “I’m starting a Battle of Wills today because I’d like to fight for the safety of somebody who’s been abandoned and has nowhere else to go.”
He glanced out into the crowd and there were at least a hundred pupils trained on him, hanging on his every word. To his surprise, what he was picturing inside himself began to happen in the room. A snake of water rose from the pores of the floor and began to curl around a beam of flickering light.
He didn’t know how much he was supposed to say, but the mana looked tired and in need of more juice, so he kept speaking.
“I want Emily to have somewhere she can call home again. I think that’s what we all want. I don’t care that she’s human—actually, no, I do. I care, because we’ve lost students and mentors to the humans’ greed, and have experienced kidnapping at their hands, but this specimen is too young to have been involved. She’s been cast out by her own kind for showing kindness to ours, and I want to encourage that. I don’t want to see it snuffed out.”
With a frothy roar, the water exploded into multiple vigorous streams and the pillar of light between hit the high ceiling. Hopefully that meant the Water and Light, uh, approved?
“Please lend me your power for my cause,” he requested.
Delphine held out a rugged gem. It glowed strongly and illuminated the undersides of the council leader’s frills. “The elements of Water and Light have heard you, Caltyr. Return to your spot and I will call upon Sara next.”
The water and light before him dissipated into vapor and nothingness, and Caltyr returned to his place paralel to Sara.
“Sara, step forward. I will ask you to tell me the same thing. Which elements will you be using in this battle?”
Sara jaunted forward so fast it was like she herself was the lightning. “Lightning and water.”
Delphine nodded, but it wasn’t toward Sara, it was toward the gem in her palm. “Sara, call upon the elements of Lightning and Water and tell them of your resolve. Ask them to lend you their power.”
The yellow-and-blue dragon turned her eyes upward, to the nothingness before her, and began to speak. “Lightning and Water, I call upon you today because I need your help protecting dragonkind from another human attack. This time it’s coming to us in the form of a sniveling human, seeking to make us let our guard down so the last of us can be wiped out. But I’m not going to let that happen.”
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A buzzing sound filled the chamber as sparks began to fly around in front of Sara like a swarm of weaponized fireflies.
“Lend me your power so that I can be the one to put an end to this!”
A dark, rumbling storm cloud formed in the air above and began to rain angrily down.
The stone that had been dormant lit up again, and Delphine put a palm out toward Sara. “The elements of Lightning and Water have lent you their power.”
“Sara, return to your place as I discuss the rules,” the earth dragon began, her voice sounding clearer by the second as the brief storm disappeared.
“Normally, there are no rules in a Battle of Wills besides not inflicting harm on the audience– however, we do not condone students killing each other, so that will be the only additional rule this time. Do not kill each other, and do not cause harm to the crowd. Doing so will result in immediate expulsion from our school and our protection.
“I trust these rules will be easy for you to follow. The battle ends when one of you is deemed too injured to continue to battle, which will be judged by myself and Kraven. You will be healed by Malika when the battle is over and the victor is chosen, but as you may know, the healing will be done with light magic, and its healing will be limited in scope. Time will have to do most of the job. Do you accept these conditions?”
“I accept,” said Caltyr and Sara in unison, earning Caltyr a split-second scowl.
Delphine joined the other council members in the crowd, sitting next to Emily, who was sandwiched between Kraven, Vermonysis, and now the leader of the council. Emily was wringing her hands together in a praying motion. He felt a surge of inspiration to earn her a true place among them.
“Then you may commence your Battle of Wills on my count of three. One…”
So this was really happening.
“Two…”
Caltyr had never seen an official-official Battle of Wills before, but now he was about to be a main participant. This was no longer a child’s imagining of what such an ancient ritual might look like.
And that meant it was all the more important that he won.
“Three!”
Sara zipped forward at the same time as Delphine’s lips formed the tail end of the ‘3’, her form blurring with sheer speed.
Caltyr knew Sara would bolt forth, favoring the first move.
Like the water that was his element, he flowed backward. Immediately he noticed the new smoothness his limbs cooperated with. They felt slippery and buoyant, as if he was skating on the surface of a pond.
Something was different about the way his body was acting. Caltyr tried to figure out what to do now that he had all this room.
A memory pierced into his brain at that moment.
Mister Terumin, his Water teacher, had instructed him of how he would have battled a lightning dragon using water as his element. As soon as he had a dedicated Water instructor, he couldn’t help but ask what he could have done in his childhood scuffle with Sara to have come out on top.
He told him that while lightning was offensively devastating, it was also difficult to control. It had a mind of its own.
”I would have used the water to control the flow of the lightning,” he said, moving calmly through the classroom, “since water conducts electricity. And lightning is so difficult to control. Picture it like a human bullet; once it’s been unleashed, it’s almost impossible to control. She’ll always be focusing on moving it around.”
Caltyr remembered his advice, even though it was many years old by now. He shot a burst of water like a gun into Sara’s face.
It jetted forth with the ferocity of a lightning bolt, the water appearing more readily and with more abundance than it ever had before. It was like he’d been connected to a great well with infinite depth, granted the key to great power.
Sara gargled, surprised and angered, as she was pelted in the face by a pressurized stream that sent a cluster of her face scales flying like paper in the wind.
But she pushed through it to the other side, earning a pink, scale-free area on her forehead. When she opened her eyes again, Caltyr was nowhere to be seen.
Caltyr, now behind her, flicked his hand forward. The water dotted around Sara’s body crystallized into ice.
When she went to turn around to find him, her body lagged, a frigid chill seeping beneath her outer coating.
“I’m using water too, Caltyr,” she groaned with a roll of her eyes, quickly returning the ice on her to its wet state. It slid easily off of her body.
Then, she arced a thin streak of lightning behind her. It hit the ground with a crackle. Sara turned around with a gasp. “That was so easy!” She exclaimed, and her golden face brightened to a neon, flickering yellow of glee.
As soon as she caught sight of Caltyr, she threaded another bolt from above and fired it downward, this time at Caltyr.
It hit him true and he felt the energy course through his fingertips, the energy discharging into the ground. He couldn’t even begin to dodge it was so, well, lightning fast. It felt like he’d been stabbed by needles in all four of his feet by the time it fizzled out, and he bit back a cat-like hiss of pain.
“I always forget how much easier the elements respond after the ritual.” She grinned, looking down at her hand with pride.
So Sara’s element was supercharged too. Supercharged water and lightning versus supercharged water and light in a battle.
He wouldn’t bet on him, if he was a betting man, but he could feel his resolve pumping viciously through his veins. He didn’t know if Sara actually truly cared about how Emily might harm all of dragonkind, or if she still just hated him and wanted to flaunt another victory to this set of peers too.
But he did know that he, at least, felt the true desire to not see this pink, defenseless thing thrown back out into the wilderness.