‘Can you showme my spirit aura.’ said Aquitain and when he saw it he wasshocked.
‘What are youdoing? That can’t be me.’ His spirit aura didn’t look remotely likehe remembered it when it was shown to him by his Granddad. It wassomething else entirely. The thing that scared him the most was itlooked ominously powerful. What had Llanlorian done to him inAstaria? Was this the mark of his father? Was this the mark of anAgent of Chaos or perhaps something to do with his becoming anAstarian citizen? That calmed him a little. That must be it.Llanlorian had said that she might give him more powers when hecame back to Astaria. Maybe he already had them and they justneeded her to unlock them.
‘Can you pleaselet me see the detail.’ he asked.
When he saw thedetail he was again shocked. It looked nothing like the memoriesthat Yllandril had shown him. His were thick-skinned bubbles thatwould take a long time to decay. Several large bubbles and lots ofmedium and small bubbles were opaque. He concentrated his thoughtson the guardian. A large number of bubbles lit up and began tocluster. He noticed one large one in the cluster was totally opaqueand had a very thick wall.
‘It looks likeI have lots of memories of the guardian blocked. That wouldcertainly be the case if she had been with me all my life.’ hethought. ‘I’ll have to check them out but not now.’
He thoughtabout the mantras of Yith and noticed dozens of small bubblesclustered together, most of them opaque. Among them was a mediumsized opaque grey bubble with thick walls and a small bubble thatwas golden when all the others were various shades of white orcreamy yellow.
‘Why is thatbubble golden?’ He asked but she didn’t answer. Instead she cut offcommunication with him.
‘What have Idone.’ he pleaded but she wouldn’t answer.
Chapter 24 Mistakenidentity
After a couple of daysPrendergrass declared that Miranda was successfully altered to hernew identity as Dragonfly and she moved to share a room with Lashwho wasn’t exactly thrilled about the arrangement.
She spentseveral days learning to play the part of Dragonfly by accompanyingPrendergrass on his daily rounds. In general she found the estateseemed to be well run and efficient. However, there were too manysoldiers around to guard the estate and the ones present seemed tobe training hard as if they expected to see some action soon.
On one occasionshe quizzed Prendergrass about how he created illusions. He toldher that he had to memorize a page of high Draconic which wasbasically a recipe on how to manipulate magic essence to create theillusion effect. Then he would use a key phase of high Draconicthat would activate the recipe causing the effect.
She then askedhow a sorcerer might do the same thing. His reply was veryinteresting. The sorcerer didn’t have to memorize the high draconicrecipe each time they wanted to use it as it was somehow etchedinto their memory. All they had to do was use some mental token toactivate it and draw from the magic essence that their body hadaccumulated.
Tain had placedin her mind a very powerful magical illusory image, as a token ofhis love. It was his passion flower that acted as the token toactivate her little illusionary bear defender. He had saved herwithout even realizing it.
In the odd fewminutes that she found herself alone she began to create illusions.She had always known that she could have been a sorceress but hermother wouldn’t allow it. The torture session had somehow imbuedher with the ability to create illusions; her body supplied themagic essence to fuel her creations and the passion flower allowedher to trigger them.
She firstcreated animals that she knew from the jungle and adjusted theirsizes and appearances to look more dangerous to scare people thenfor amusement had them do crazy things like dance around or growwings and fly.
At thesuggestion of Lash they had several weapon sparring sessions.Miranda took the time to brush up on the use of the scimitar, herfavourite weapon, while Lash seemed to be skillfull at a widevariety of blade weapons and expert with the whip. When she wieldedthe whip in one hand and a short sword in the other she couldreadily disarm or trip even the best of Darkmantle’s fightersearning her considerable respect amongst the troops.
The mockfighting with Lash was very useful to Miranda. It showed her thatif she ever had to fight Lash seriously she would have to use magicor cheat otherwise she would lose.
In the currentsession she was covered with bruises and sweating heavily as shetraded blows with one of Darkmantle’s fighters. They all consideredher to be no better than an average fighter and she didn’t do muchto change their opinions. She wished that she could shape change.She would like to see the expressions on their faces if she changedto a big cat and went after them.
At the end ofthe session Prendergrass appeared and called both her and Lash overfor a quiet chat.
‘I’ve justtalked to Darkmantle. He wants the two of you to go on a shortmission with some of the troops to harass a group of Llanlleanrebels who have been causing the Queen some trouble by attackingoutlying villages.’
‘Llanlleans area type of giant spiders that can grow as big as Mudrun coursers.They’re very dangerous as they are born fighters, quiteintelligent, they can shape change to look like Elendari men orwomen and some of them are expert sorcerers. Their bite is alsovery poisonous, so be sure to take a vial of my antidote withyou.’
‘Are you comingwith us to counter their magic.’ asked Lash.
‘No, I haveother business to attend to. However, I’m told you will have magicassistance from a powerful new Llanllean wizard, supplied by theQueen, whom I haven’t met yet. I want both of you to keep wellclear of him.’
‘More likely itwill upset your plans.’ thought Miranda but she said nothing.
‘When do wego?’ asked Lash looking rather excited.
‘Early tomorrowmorning. You had better see the weapon master and get yourselvesequipped
