Headmaster Lorken dusted off the white powder residue clinging to his wig. He flattened the curls on the grayish hair, and his servant stepped into his room as he took his place in front of the tall mirror. He looked at his aging reflection, watching as he grew increasingly fragile over the years was one of his greatest sources of anxiety.
Lorken knew he didn’t have an infinite amount of days left on this earth and with every sunset, every new monster that crept out from the void, he knew his days were numbered. The servant lifted the wig from its stand and Lorken bent down to accommodate. She hefted the wig on top of his head and covered up his most glaring flaw.
The servant moved to the dresser and pulled out a blue silk scarf. She held it up against his face and Lorken stared at the scarf in the mirror.
“Will it be the blue one today, Sir?”
Lorken made a sour expression in the mirror, and she returned to the dresser.
“Blue washes me out,” he said.
“Red then?”
The servant walked up with a crimson red scarf and held it up against Lorken’s face. He turned his head left, then right. The scarf made his cheeks pop.
“Yes, red it is,” Lorken said.
The servant wrapped the scarf around his head and tied it at the base. She helped Lorken with his matching red robe and tucked in the ends of the scarf underneath the buttoning.
Lorken moved his gaze to the bedroom window and saw the opening to the dragon forge glow. It burned hot this morning. A smile spread on his lips and he felt proud.
The enemy was moving, but Lorken was working on something, too. Something that could turn a tide in the war, perhaps. He was proud of his most recent invention.
When his bedroom door snapped open, Lorken stared at the guard with a frown on his forehead. Anger spread out to his limbs. He didn’t like being interrupted when he was in his thoughts.
“Sir, the governor sent a messenger,” the guard said. “He wants to see you today.”
Headmaster Lorken grabbed a hold of the edges of his robe and squeezed the fabric tight in his hands. The governor wanting to see him could mean both good and bad things. Lorken turned back to his window, staring at the glowing light from the forge, and sent a quick prayer to the mother for good tidings to come.
“Sir?” the guard said.
He reminded Lorken that he hadn’t dismissed him yet. Lorken turned to face the guard and, as he looked at the blue uniform of Aldrion, the earth rumbled underneath him. Lorken grabbed the windowsill with his hand.
His servant was standing in the middle of the room and fell like a domino, hitting the floorboard with her hip first. The guard grabbed the door frame to steady himself, and his eyes were stuck on the window behind Lorken.
Lorken turned toward the dragon forge and, before he even saw the flames, he felt the heat licking his back. Lorken’s eyes grew wide and his face contorted into a horrific silent scream. His work, his schematics were all inside the dragon forge. From the mouth of the forge, flames shot up and rocks were dropping from the ceiling.
A hand fell on Lorken’s shoulder and he jerked around to see the face of the guard too close to his own. He pulled his shoulder free from his grip in a violent gesture, and the guard stepped back.
“Sir?” the guard said.
Lorken felt panic rising in his chest and he stumbled away from the guard. The void would not take him today. He could still fix this.
#
At the town hall in Aldrion, Headmaster Lorken met with the governor a while later. He had spent most of the time composing himself and sending out his guards to the dragon forge to search for survivors and to recover his schematics. The guards had found no survivors and no schematics. A fatal blow to Lorken’s reputation and his plans.
Fortunately, the dragon stones were all still intact. Somehow they seemed completely indestructible and Lorken knew that if something had happened to them, his head would have been mounted on a pike today.
The assistant showed Lorken inside Governor Perrole’s office and closed the door behind him as she left him alone with the governor. He was seated behind a huge mahogany desk and Lorken felt his own heartbeat pounding against his chest. This wasn’t the day he wanted to be here.
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“Headmaster Lorken, please take a seat,” Perrole said.
He pointed to one of the two chairs in front of the desk and Lorken sat down on the plush leather seat. He was breathing furiously still and all his attempts to calm down before seemed to have been futile.
“You wanted to see me,” Lorken said, his voice trembling.
Perrole walked around his office and sat down face to face with Lorken. “Yes, but news just reached me about an accident at the dragon forge. Could you tell me what happened?”
Lorken squirmed in his seat and the air felt too thick to breathe suddenly. He loosened the snare around his neck. The red scarf curled away from his throat and clung to his robe.
“I’m not sure what went wrong,” Lorken said. “It just happened moments ago. But I sent in a search party and they didn’t find any survivors. The schematics were lost in the flames. But I can assure you that with some time I can redraw them and we can figure out why the explosion happened.”
Edward Perrole ran a hand over his chin and turned his gaze out the window of his office. “So there was an explosion. That isn’t entirely bad. Of course, it is a setback. The mage smiths who were in the forge died and the schematics were lost. But we managed to create an explosion. Do you think it could be strong enough to kill the dragon?”
Lorken licked his lips. He hadn’t considered the implications fully yet.
“Perhaps,” he said. “I haven’t had much time to analyze the explosion the mage smiths created. But yes, potentially it could work. I need more time to examine what happened this morning. I have no survivors who can tell me.”
“Yes, sure,” Perrole said. “And do you have enough mage smiths to continue?”
Lorken nodded. “Only about half the staff died. I had them working in shifts.”
“Half,” Perrole said. “That is more than I had hoped for. But it’s an acceptable loss.”
“Yes.”
It was quiet for a moment. Perrole staring out the window, seeming to think through something. Lorken fiddled with his hands in his lap and sunk into the chair, feeling like he, for the first time today, could breathe. The worst of the day seemed to be over.
“I called you here today to discuss entirely different matters,” Perrole said. “I wanted initially to bring you some good news.”
“Good news?” Lorken said, sitting up in the chair.
“Yes. I was able to allocate some of the army’s funding toward Falden. I want you to use it to rebuild the dragon forge and make progress with the explosions. We need that weapon fast.”
Lorken swallowed hard. “Yes, Sir. Of course, I will get my remaining mage smiths to work even harder on the new weapons.”
“Good,” Perrole said. “I also have one more request for you. It may seem a bit strange, but I need you to trust me on this.”
“Yes, Sir, what is it?” Lorken asked.
“I need you to hold a student back,” Perrole said.
“Who?”
“Her name is Melissa Temper. She’s the student I approved of to start Falden last semester and I want her to undergo some tests in the name of education.”
“The dragon cult girl?” Lorken asked. “I remember her. I still don’t understand why we even accepted her into the school. We’ve never had spies attend before.”
Perrole held up his hand to Lorken. “It doesn’t concern you why. What I need you to do is create a special test for her. I need you to test her elemental abilities on an advanced level, a very advanced level. See if she can do things that would normally be impossible for a student at her level. I want you to test her limits and to not pass her until you have shared the results with me. Then I’ll approve of letting her attend the next semester at Falden.”
“Okay,” Lorken said. “I could do that. But, I have to ask, why let her attend next semester at all? She is studying to become a mage smith, as I recall, and that means she will be let into the dragon forge. She could see our plans, our new weapon. If she reports back to the dragon cult or even the void, that could be a major setback.”
“Yes, it could. But I have people watching her. Making sure she won’t report anything to the dragon cult or the void. And I do agree with you that letting her attend another semester could be dangerous. But if she shows a certain skill in your tests, it could be worth keeping her for a while to learn what else she knows.”
He frowned and watched Edward Perrole with uncertainty. Lorken wasn’t a spy, and he didn’t enjoy concocting tests to hold students back at Falden. In fact, he didn’t even like running Falden.
Each year he was forced to be the headmaster of the school, he stepped back into the shadows a bit more. He didn’t like running a school. It had never been his calling. Lorken was an inventor and a man of experiments. Not some stuffy professor stuck in a classroom teaching nosy students. He had left that to his lecturers, and he guessed he could do so with the test as well.
He would leave it in the capable hands of his professors to come up with a special test for Melissa Temper, and then Lorken could focus on the more important matters at hand, creating a weapon to destroy the dragon.
“I will gladly help you with your request,” Lorken said. “As soon as I have had the girl tested, I will present the results to you and you can make a choice about her future. In the meantime, I will work on getting back to smithing the new weapon and rebuilding the dragon forge. Thank you for your most generous funding to the project.”
Headmaster Lorken and Edward Perrole stood up, shaking hands. Lorken gave him a tentative smile and headed for the door. Each step he took away from the governor felt like relief. When his hand touched the doorknob, Perrole cleared his throat. Lorken took in a deep breath and turned back to him.
“I know you like to delegate the running of Falden,” Perrole said. “But I am asking you to personally oversee the test of the dragon cult girl. This could prove to be even more important than creating the new weapon. So don’t disappoint me, Lorken.”
Lorken felt an icy chill move through his body and he nodded almost involuntarily toward the governor. He turned back to the door and opened it with a deep sense of dread about what was to come.