Germaine Pov

Waking up after expending all of my magic was an unpleasant experience. It felt like something had raked through my being and left parts of me that didn’t normally feel sore and aching. The sheets over me felt cool and I could feel them channeling warm thoughts and healing power into me. It had been a long time since I had felt this. I opened my eyes and looked down. Indeed…Master had kept my old blankets. The familiar dark blue blankets hand stitched with the phases of the moon.

It was, despite its simple appearance, a masterpiece of magic. One that I knew had taken my master months to craft, mostly due to the stringent requirement for every stitch to be stitched with pleasant and warm thoughts. Something I knew the old man struggled with. I looked around the unfamiliar room, until my eyes fell on Moonlight, my blade sitting bare upon a nearby table, basking in its namesake pouring in from a window.

I stood from the bed, taking a moment to carefully fold the blanket, before grasping Moonlight. The blade poured energy into my aching soul and the world was crisp and sharp, the pain eased to a minor itch, and the emptiness where my magic usually sat replaced by the soothing moonlight. I breathed a sigh of relief, once you began upon the path of magic it became a part of you. Being drained of magic was like losing a part of your mind and body both at the same time. It was terribly distressing even if you knew it was alright and that you would recover. An instinctive distress from being unable to do what your mind thinks it should.

I brushed my rumpled clothes down and stepped out from the room into a moonlit hallway. I looked out the window to see an internal garden, and then turned to head down the hallway. I could feel my Masters power somewhere, awake and working at something. The hallway led by a number of doors, one of which opened to reveal the butler, I raised an eyebrow at the shirtless fellow in sleep pants as he inspected me. Between his ripped abs and waist length blond hair he appeared as some noble ladies' pet more than a butler. His languid pose, and you could not tell me it was not a pose trained until it was habit, only sold the image more.

“The master should be on the veranda; I trust you can find your way?” He asked.

“Indeed,” I replied.

He nodded in response “Then I shall return to bed until breakfast, we will be having a large spread so I am certain there will be something to your tastes Sir.”

I continued down the hall as the door closed firmly. It did not take long to find my way to the front of the manor. And there I saw my master, sitting one robed leg hanging off the railing, Dawnbreaker in his lap as he polished it with a red cloth. I stepped through the windowed doors and closed them carefully behind before walking to lean on the railing, Moonlight dangling from my hand over the railing, reflecting the moon in its blade as I gazed down at it. Waiting.

“So, how does it feel to be a dead man?” My master asked, and I made a face between a smile and a grimace.

“So how close was I?” I asked.

“The demon could have reformed, there was a chance that with Dawnbreaker and an archmage that his weakened form would have been sealed.” My master spoke calmly as he continued cleaning the spotless blade. He had told me years ago that Dawnbreaker found it soothing.

I sighed. “So, in other words, I probably wouldn’t have made it.”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“Teleporting three people to my estate and then breaking in the door probably didn’t do you any favors in that regard.” He continued.

I nodded, that was true, both had been draining but… “Death doesn’t come for those who are ready to handle it.”

I could hear the smirk as he replied. “So, you do listen sometimes.”

I snorted and looked up from its reflection to the real moon above. For the first time since I arrived my master looked up from the blade in his hands and turned with me to the moon.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” He asked.

“As ever” I responded.

We stared at it for a while. The wind blew and the trees rustled, before I asked my next question. “Didn’t you give that to Seraphina?”

“I did, but it was a rush job, and someone was kind enough to bring me a wonderful material just after.”

I turned to look at him as he moved, and pulled a red orb, its surface covered in cracks radiating outwards from a deformed bullet. I felt my face twitch.

“Is that a bullet, in a dragon's eye” I managed to get out calmly.

“Of course, what else was I going to do, lightly reprimand it?”

I looked down at Moonlight and patted it consolingly. It wasn’t its fault that it couldn’t cut a dragon’s eye, my master was just absurd, and cheated. He definitely cheated. Knowing him he not only cheated, but he only did it because it was more amusing to him than just doing it some other way that would make more sense. Like, I don’t know, sealing it with his incredible powers and rendering it inert for a millennium. Of course, that was too mundane for my master, let's just shoot the unbreakable magical artifact, that’ll solve it.

And then it did.

When I finally came to terms with what was in front of me and managed to ignore the amused smugness rolling off the featureless red robed figure in front of me. He didn’t even have his eyes out and looking at me.

I asked. “So, what does that have to do with Dawnbreaker?”

He responded with a question. “Do you remember how it was made?”

“Angel's feather and heirloom blade, Arcane blood and mystic might, Forged beyond mortal sight, Hunter's blade for darkest Night.” I recited the rhyme with practiced ease.

My master snorted “Quite, that fool bard really managed to make that popular.”

After a moment he continued. “The details are all gone, and perhaps it is best that way. I was more hoping that you had studied some of my crafting related journals during self-study time, but the rhyme will do.”

I watched as he held Dawnbreaker in one hand, and the dragon’s eye in another, his white gloved hand suddenly gone, in its place a claw made of the shadows that emerged from his robes. With ease one of those clawed fingers dug into the sphere, pressing through the bullet's impact point, and then vanishing as the sphere…dissolved. Red blood poured down onto the blade, leaving his glove pristine as it sank into the metal, vanishing without a trace.

“This was the arcane blood I used in the forging of Dawnbreaker” He spoke, as the blade thrummed with power, and a single red eye opened on its hilt.

I inspected the blade before me now, with my eyes and my power. Permission given by the blade itself after I carefully extended a wisp of intent. Hidden inside of its blade was a core of blazing impossible light that I turned my gaze from the moment I saw it was there. In the hilt though, there was a soothing darkness, protective shadow that prevented any who wielded the blade from being erased by the power inside of, power too great for a mortal body to handle. That explained a lot about the Verain family. Continued use of the blade had altered them in ways that left them human, but more.

Then my gaze was pulled, to something else. Not blazing light, or soothing shadow, but a deep endless well of power. Blood, born endlessly with a sliver of its creator's soul to give it life, to allow it to be truly alive and wield magic. I was staring at a dragon’s eye. One that stared back at me for a moment, before it simply settled into a torpor. Not quite asleep, but not fully awake either, resting, conserving its power. Brought to the edge of waking and readiness by the power of another dragon’s eye being sacrificed to it. But I knew, just from looking at it, that this eye had the potential to devour me, mind, body and soul, even when I was at my best.

I closed my eyes, magical and physical and asked my teacher. “That’s always been there?”

“Since the day it was forged.” He assured me happily.

Some days I hated dealing with him. He got like this sometimes around objects or secrets he knew from the past. It was like an old man finally getting to share a tale from the past. Some secrets or gossip about people they used to know. Because for him they were just that, gossip and old tales. For normal people they were world shaking revelations that raised questions that you perhaps did not want to know the answer to. Questions like…

Why was Drakule’s eye in the sword that had been forged centuries before his death to slay him?

Someone else could ask, I knew better.

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