Gideon looked down, his thoughts running away with him. “What if he did resist?” he posed. “What if The Crow didn’t really get into his mind like we think? What if The Crow only sought to break Alijah down so Malliath could assume more control. He would seep into the cracks and bury Alijah under millennia of suffering and hate.”
“This hate of magic that drives him so fiercely does speak more of Malliath’s mind than his own,” Inara opined. “I suppose Malliath’s age could mean he is simply powerful enough to control Alijah.”
“Possibly,” Gideon reasoned. “He’s older than history.”
Inara leaned in. “If we’re right, that means there might be something of our Alijah still in there somewhere.”
“Somewhere would be accurate,” Gideon told her. “If he is still in there, he will be buried beneath The Crow’s brutal torment and Malliath’s over-bearing mind. Asher has spent years just trying to rid himself of Malliath’s echo. I can only imagine the oppression of being bonded to him.”
The revelation brought some new life to Inara, who managed to sit up on the edge of her cot. “So what do we do now?”
Gideon opened his mouth but nothing came out. He could feel Ilargo searching for an answer to that same question but even the dragon failed to grasp any option that could help them.
Finally, his response was identical to the last time he had been asked that question. “I don’t know.”
Inara sighed, the fight in her ebbing away. “Even if there was something we could do, we could also be wrong,” she theorised. “There might be nothing left of him in there. And if there was, how many people do you know who would be willing to try and save him? Everyone has lost someone and they all put the death toll at Alijah’s feet.”
“What if it’s the only way to beat him?” Gideon suggested. “He’s powerful. He has Jainus magic at his disposal and Malliath’s strength flowing through his veins. And that’s without taking Malliath himself into account. What if separating them is the only way to beat them?”
Inara tilted her head. “You’re talking about turning Alijah to our cause, pitting him against Malliath?”
Gideon locked his jaw while considering his next words. “Alijah might be the only one who can beat Malliath. We have to accept the fact that Ilargo and Athis cannot kill him.” The old master could feel an argument rising in his companion, leading him to quieten his bond temporarily.
“I think you might be overestimating Alijah,” Inara cautioned. “If we did find some way to pull them apart, the Alijah that we knew might not appear for some time, if at all. After all their time together, he could truly agree with Malliath and then we’ve just made it harder to kill them.”
There was a hard edge to her voice that jarred with Gideon. “So you think we should use this knowledge to focus our efforts on killing one so that we might kill them both?”
“Alijah couldn’t fight off all of us with Ilargo and Athis coming down on him,” Inara reasoned. “We now know that if we kill Alijah, we kill Malliath. Surely that is our only advantage from this.”
Gideon thought of the young man he had known, a man who only wanted to help the world, regardless of the cost to himself. It made his bones shiver to think of that same man being trapped inside his own mind, within a web of lies and deceit constructed by the one being who should love him the most.
“Do you want to save him?” he asked bluntly.
Inara held his gaze for a moment. “If we’re right about all of this - if you’re right about all of this - he was born to be the destroyer. He is here to be the evil that unifies the realm against him. Shouldn’t we seek to kill him? To end his threat?”
“Ending the threat he poses and killing him are two very different things, Inara. I’m talking about a way to free Alijah and offer him a real chance at redemption.”
“By having him kill Malliath?” Inara countered. “And that’s if he can. You could bring forth a broken shell of a man who doesn’t even know what world he’s living in. And that’s the good scenario. You could separate them and discover Alijah is just as twisted as we’ve thought all along. Then there’s two of them to fight.”
Gideon prepared his side of the argument as he shuffled forwards, but Inara beat him to it with a blunt question and a clipped tone. “Do you know how to separate a dragon from their Rider?”
The old master swallowed, his confidence faltering. “No.”
“What about the Jainus?” Inara pressed. “If anyone in history was going to try and find a way to do that it would be the Dragon Riders’ sworn enemies.”
“If they did I found no mention of it in their library,” Gideon replied. “Given that the Dragon Riders won the war, though, I imagine they destroyed anything that might harm them.”
Inara continued to look at him, her victory clear to see. “There you have it, from your own mouth. There is no way to separate them, which means there is no saving him, no redemption, and absolutely no chance of him killing Malliath for us. The advantage is simple - we focus all our efforts on killing Alijah alone.”
Gideon didn’t agree and he could feel Ilargo backing him up. “Our efforts should not be directed towards Alijah or Malliath right now. Both of our companions will die if we don’t try and find a way to save the tree.”
Their argument shifted, Inara paused to take a breath but it quickly led to her head dropping into her chest. Gideon could see the energy draining from his old student, her skin paling. He grasped her arms before she fainted and flopped onto the ground.
“Easy,” he cautioned. “You need
