Outlawed

Tuesday 7:30 pm At my office.

Generally I prefer to keep clients out of my office. It was old, run down and didn't give off that successful high end feel I tried to fake when I was meeting with prospects. But somehow this lady had found her way to my door. The sound of the bell over the door begged attention from my wandering mind, but the knock out at my door demanded it.

I tapped out my cigaret as she closed the door.

"Mr. Miller?" Her voice was soft but clear. As my eyes readjusted to the light of the office I looked her over. She had long dark hair, a pretty face and a knock out body. Apparently she knew it too, because she was dressed to show it off. Tight black skirt, and a white blouse that was just the wrong side of transparent.

"That's me doll. Can I help you?"

"I'm looking for the detective, a George Miller."

"Well come on in. And tell me how I can help you out." I stood from behind my desk and moved around to shake her hand. The knights might all be gone, but there was something about a pretty face that made a fella feel chivalrous. I offered to take her coat but she declined.

"You can find a missing person?"

"Maybe, but shouldn't you go to the cops for that sort of thing?"

"I can't. I fear he was involved in, magic."

"Oh. Ah, I don't normally deal in that sort of thing. I'm strictly legal here." I was ready to see her out, but the look on her face was, well not one I could say no to. "But, everyone's got to be somewhere right? Maybe I can just take a look around for you. What's this wizards name?"

It wasn't that I was particularly against magic or wizards in theory. Even though spellcraft has been outlawed for a generation, that wasn't what bothered me. It was just that magic made things messy. I didn't have a lick of it, and I didn't have any way to deal with it. Sure there were black market options; anyone who knew where to look could pick up a potion or spell from some voodoo priestess or a charm or hex from some wizard claimant. And if you paid enough they would probably work, but it was just too much of a gamble.

"Not a wizard, nothing like that, he's Jerome Kareen."

"Why's that name familiar?"

"His father is Max Kareen, the billionaire."

"Ah, then can't daddy help?"

"Max doesn't exactly like me. Jerome and I were going to elope."

"Are you sure he's not just having second thoughts? Dodging your calls?"

"No, I'm sure not. I know Jerome, I know he's gone. You've got to help me, find him." Her voice broke up as she struggled to hold back tears. I handed her a handkerchief, knowing I was going to regret taking the job, but I was never one to turn down a woman in distress, or a paying job. What did I know?

"You said he was involved in magic, but he's not a wizard... what exactly is his deal?" If I was going to poke my nose in the iffy waters of magic I have a better chance of getting out in once piece.

"He's part of a liberation group. They think the purge is active, and they are trying to protect any magical beings they can. 'just because someone is born magic doesn't mean they don't deserve rights' and all that."

I grunted. Activists. Yeah they were probably right, but that level of idealism was just beyond me. The government had long since squashed any resistance to its’ anti magic agenda. "Gotcha. Well, let's see if we can find mr. save the world."

Thursday 8:25 am Jerome's Apartment.

It didn't matter much to me that Jerome was wrapped up in some magical conspiracy. I went about things the same as I would any missing person. Old fashioned paperwork. Everyone had paperwork, and if you knew where to look you could find it.

In Jerome’s case it was a job application. He'd left home a few years back after a falling out with his rich dad. And so he'd had to find a way to pay the bills.

He found himself working a shit job in a crap part of town. But even the worst businesses had to report their employees to the state. Say what you wanted about the government, it keeps thorough records. His application listed an address. I followed that to his apartment.

His apartment was a trove of information. Unfortunately it was such a mess I'd need years to find anything in it. I guess growing up he'd had maids and never learned how to clean up for himself. I figured he probably didn't ever see this as his new life, but more of a vacation from the tedium of living in the lap of luxury.

Of course it didn't really matter to me. I wasn't there to judge his lifestyle, and I sure as hell didn't give a trolls fart about his hygiene. I was tossing his desk, looking for a calendar, notebook or such when his phone rang. I watched the striker hit the bell a few times before I picked it up.

"Jerome?" It was a man’s voice, not one I recognized. I wasn't going to answer, and no one talked to an empty phone long.

As soon as he hung up I slapped the receiver and dialed the operator. I was in luck, I did recognize the next voice to come on the line.

"Operator." Sally's buttery smooth voice always made me wish I'd never met her. Having a visual of the large lady ruined the fantasy her voice inspired. I guess sedentary jobs sitting at a desk all day could ruin even an elf's figure. But damn she still sounded like a dream.

"Sally, it's me George."

"What can I do for you George? And what are you doing on this line, it's pretty far outside your normal haunts?"

"Yeah, I know. I'm working here, can you by any chance tell me who the call that just came to this line was from?"

"George, you know that’s not allowed."

"As a favor, to me. I'll owe you one. A big one. It's important."

"Okay, but I intend to collect. And this time I'm calling the shots." I stifled a groan. I knew what she meant, and if she'd been a couple hundred pounds fitter it'd be an amazing way to pay off a debt.

"Anything you want Sally."

"The call was from a warehouse not too far from your location. You got a pen to take this down?"

"Yeah." I grabbed a piece of paper from Jerome's desk and pulled out my pocket quill. "Hit me."

Thursday 6:00 pm Jerome’s Cabals hangout

The address Sally had given me wasn't far. In fifteen minutes I was there, and in twenty I was staring down the wrong end of a wand.

"You a cop?" he demanded again. Any jerk could have seen I wasn't, but if you dabble in magic these days paranoia seems to be part of the package deal.

Most times when you saw a wand these days it was some dime store rip off, a crappy tchotchke sold to tourists at some historic site of some age old battle. But if I was any judge of crazy, this guy at least believed his want was the real deal. I didn't feel like testing him.

"I told you. I'm no cop. I'm just looking for Jerome." The man glanced around nervously. I could tell he was weighing if he should blast me right there, or if he as too exposed hanging out of the doorway as he was. It was a dark street, but there were still a few vagrants wandering around. I had no idea what kind of light show the wand was likely to make, but clearly it wasn't subtle.

"Mike, get in here!" A urgent voice called from inside the warehouse.

"Damn it." Mike grabbed me by the collar and pulled me inside. Better than being hexed in the street I guessed.

I followed Mike into the warehouse. In a back room there were four people, a couple foreign looking guys, a bruiser that I'd swear was half troll, and a broad who was almost as ugly as the troll looking fellow.

The troll blocked my way as I entered the room. "How'd you find us?"

it wasn't hard, as sloppy as these guys were I was amazed they hadn't been arrested a long time ago. Their continued presence in the seedy underworld of magic was probably due to nothing so much as their being too small of fish for the cops and the purge to care about. But I didn't think it was a good time to poke the troll as it were. " Jerome’s girl Judith sent me. She's worried about him."

"Well he ain't here."

"She's dying!" Mike gasped. When we'd entered the room I hadn't seen but he'd joined the others and was no staring down into a crate at something that gave off a soft blue light. That seemed more important than grilling me and they all turned to look.

I stepped in between the beauty and one of the foreign guys. I'd never seen a pixie before, and at first I didn't know what she was. I knew right off that it was a magical being of some sort, but honestly I wasn't sure if she was an elf, fairy, pixie or some other mystical being I'd failed to remember from school. Still, any jerk could see she was hurt. She was coughing in a weak sad way, and there were specks of what seemed to be blood on her lips.

We all watched the pixie for a while. I wondered if there was something we should do, if there was anything we even could do. None of Jerome’s cabal buddies seemed to have any better notion than I did. One of them spoke up though.

"Jerome took off a couple days ago. Right after Travalia here arrived." He gestured to the pixie before he continued. "Jerome was the one who had arranged for her to be smuggled here. It was his plan, but when he saw her she freaked out, he freaked out, went loopy, and left in a real hurry."

"That doesn't make any sense." Something wasn't adding up, I needed more information. "Where's Travalia from?"

Travalia sat up and looked like she wanted to speak, but she collapsed back into a fit of painful sounding coughs. One of foreign looking guys answered for her. "She was the last of her kind, she lived in a deepwood grove. Jerome got wind of the purge's intention to clear cut the grove, they would have burnt it to the ground if they had to, just to kill her!"

I put aside the questions I had about how Jerome could have working knowledge of the plans of a group that as far as I knew, no one could even prove existed; and focused on trying to get information that could help me find him. "What happened before he left?"

"Nothin, we got Travalia out of the dolls." he pointed at a pile of nesting doll shells on the floor nearby, "And she screamed when she saw Jerome. She went on and on in pixie for a while, but none of us could understand her. Jerome freaked out, and left."

I scratched my head trying to figure out what had set Jerome off. "Is that when she got sick?"

"She was sick before she got here. Poor thing." The unfortunately homely broad reached down to try and sooth the pixie, but its tiny body shook with spasms and she withdrew her hand.

She was wracked with progressively more violent shaking, then she went still and a burst of blue light flashed from her in a shower of pixie dust. The miniature fireworks were so bright I had to blink away spots before I could see again.

"What?" I stammered.

"Dead, she died," the big guy announced as he placed a small cloth over her. I needed a drink, bad.

Thursday 10:00 pm The Golden Harpy

Most clubs had long since banned smoking. But not the Golden Harpy. It was a classic establishment, one of the last whiskey and cigar joints in the city. It also had the best jazz you could find. Mostly since it was the one place that Gronik still played. At three foot he was barely taller than his sax, but when he puffed those green cheeks and played, he physical size didn’t matter. The lumpy face, the bat like ears, even the yellow eyes, all disappeared, and all that anyone noticed, was the sugar smooth music.

Gronik was a legend. The goblin that took the music world by storm. He shot to the top of the charts, playing with all the greats, and sold out every show he put on. Until, at the height of his career he left music behind. For years people thought he'd died, so absolute was his departure from the public eye.

It turned out that Gronik hadn't died. His love had. The poor little fellow had been desperately, madly in love with a dryad named Mist. She'd been his muse. He'd claimed that her love was what people heard when they listened to his music.

Then one day she'd disappeared. Dryads weren't like pixies or imps. They didn't use magic, and couldn’t cast spells like wizards or witches, but they were magical beings all the same. A dryad would live forever if it wasn't killed. And along with the general fading of magic in the world, the last few magical beings disappearing as well.

No one knew for sure why, but everyone had theories. Some claimed that without wild magic in the world magical beings just faded from existence, others, the more cynical, thought that the purge was still active. They’d go on about how government agencies which had waged the wizard wars, and fought so long to crush any wild and uncontrolled magic where ever it found it, was still out there, still secretly killing any stragglers that remained, regardless of their potential threat to the public good.

When Mist disappeared, it had devastated Gronik. He'd followed her, but his disappearance had been a steep dive into a bottle. Some years later when he'd pulled himself at least partially out of the funk that had clouded his life, he started playing again.

He never headlined again or released another album. But the call of music in the goblins soul was too strong to deny, and he eventually found himself playing again at the Golden Harpy.

I'd been a fan of his jazz for years, and I felt like I'd won some kind of lottery when I walked into the club and saw him on stage.

He looked older, smaller, but damn he could still play. His music changed though, it wasn't the blues, but there was an undertone of sorrow and regret that you just couldn’t miss.
I'd bought him a drink that night, and we hit it off talking over a bottle of Stone Mount whiskey, the real dwarven stuff, not that swill the marketers slap a fancy label on and sell to punters at the duty free store.

After that I was a regular at the Harpy, and after each time he played, Gronik and I would share a drink.

Even though he was playing again Gronik never stopped drinking, and when he got drunk he would talk about old times. Goblins weren't immortal like dryads, but they could live a long time. And Gronik was an old goblin.

Like most right thinking civilized people he'd been against the purge, but it has been particularly hard on him knowing that there was a good chance that Mist had been a victim of such bigoted malice.

It was shocking really. After all, this was a dryad who had live through the great wars. He recounted to me once a story that she told him about the battle of Light Lake. That was the one where Estarix, the last great dragon, had died. Brought down by canon fire and what, at the time, had been the newly developed Gatling gun. Estarix was 200 feet from tip to tail and had lived a thousand years if the stories were to be believed.  The last shot that finally brought him down sent his body plunging to the depths of the lake. At that time it wasn't called Light Lake, but when he hit the water it bubbled and churned, and for over a year the water of the lake glowed with energy. It was still officially labeled something else, but everyone called it Light Lake.

Even after the lake had stopped glowing people would sell bottles of glowing water claiming it was from Light Lake, and making all sorts of claims about its magical properties. Most were harmless flim flam, some were dangerous and potent potions,  but I doubted that any were really from Light Lake.

Mist had seen it all with her own eyes. And yet, now she was gone. Without a trace. I didn't know what to think, but Gronik was convinced that it was the purge.

The purge still active, still hunting down the last of those that, through some attunement to magic, were outside of government control or regulation.

He was just finishing a set with the regular band, when I got there. I waved to the bartender and signaled him for two glasses and pointed to our regular table. He nodded and I met Gronik after he stowed his sax.

"How ya doing peach?" He grumbled as he lifted himself onto the chair. The first time I'd met Gronik I was growing out a beard and he had laughed at me saying it was peach fuzz. I liked to think that his continued use of the old joke was a sign of friendship, but with goblins, especially depressed goblins, it was hard to gauge.

"Keeping busy. Sorry I missed your show. Looks like a bigger crowd. I think words getting out that you're playing again."

"Yeah, well what are ya gonna do?" The bar tender made his way over and deposited a couple glasses and a bottle on the table. I had a running tab so he didn't bother discussing price. I just nodded and he left us.

"So, what's got ya busy these days?" He asked while filling his glass.

"A missing person." That got his attention. "Rich kid, the son of that Kareen guy. Well, his fiancé, the kids, not the old mans... came into my place and asks me to find him."

"Didn't know you did that sort of thing any more." he muttered over a sip while sliding the bottle to me. I took it and pored my own drink.

"Normally I don't but works been thin as of late, and I figured considering who it was there might be good money in it."

"And?" He raised one of his knobby eyebrows and stared at me.

"Nothing solid yet. But it seems the kid was mixed up in a cabal. Some underground magic types who were smuggling a pixie out dodge. I tracked them down to a warehouse over by the river district."

"Fucking hate pixies, but still, yoemens work if they were actually helping any magical being, and not just diddling themselves while reading old wizards tomes."

"Oh they were legit. I saw the pixie myself." He sat up and leaned in close.

"Truly?" He whispered.

"Truly." I nodded solemnly to him. "They were none too happy to see me. And one of them almost hexed me when they thought I was a cop."

"Oh, what kind of hex?" He asked curiously.

"Not sure, he had some old earth mother style wand."

"Some of those are still pretty potent. Could'a been messy."

"Yeah, anyway, once I convinced them I was just trying to track down a missing lover for a pretty girl, they eased up a bit. Apparently they knew about Judith."

"Ya got lucky. What about the pixie?"

"Sadly the poor creature died. Not as lucky there. They had smuggled it in a Matryona doll." I could tell from his look he had no idea what I was talking about. "The little dolls that hold more smaller dolls inside them, the nesting kind."

"Ah. Dignified." He took a long slog from his drink.

"I don't think that was much of a concern at the time. They were more concerned with keeping the thing alive. The whole time I was there I was half expecting some commando style raid. Something to show that it was the purge that was killing off magical beings. But nothing like that happened. It just died."

"What from?"

"I don't know, old age I guess. The thing was pretty sickly looking. It just groaned, then pop! A flash of light and pixie dust and it was dead. Happens to everyone."

"Not everyone." He grimaced.

I refilled our glasses and raised mine in a toast. "To Mist." He raised his and took a sip.

"So your missing kid, Kareens son, he was there when the pixie croaked?"

"No, I was there, questioning some of his cabal friends. Apparently the kid Jerome, went missing soon after they picked up the pixie. A day or so before I found them. Stupid that they were still there. But dumb people make my work easier. So I guess I shouldn't bitch."

"So this guy was part of a mages cabal, they somehow hooked up with a smuggled pixie and he suddenly goes missing?"

"Yup, apparently the pixie seemed in shock when... "I stopped. I suddenly thought I saw a connection. The pixie had been shocked when it had seen Jerome, it had recognized him. But there was no reason the pixie would recognize Jerome, it had to have been mistaking him for someone else... and I had a suspicion who.

I finished my glass and slammed it down on the table. "I've gotta run." I muttered as I stood and reached from my coat. Gronik just snorted and pored himself another glass.

Friday 6:00 am Judith's house

I rang the doorbell for the third time. I’d been up all night putting pieces of the case together and I was grump, it was raining and I was getting irritable. I rang the doorbell again.

Finally she answered the door. She looked worse than I felt. She'd been crying and had hastily tried to make herself presentable. Personally I didn’t think she should have bothered, she was a looker regardless of the tears, but women had their vanity.

"Have you found him?" A tinge of hope sneaking into her voice.

"Not exactly. Can I come in?" I nodded over my shoulder, reminding her of the rain.

"Oh, of course." She held the door and I tried to shake off the excess water before I dripped all over her expensive hardwood floors.

She stood waiting patiently while I got myself situated. I didn't make her wait long before I pulled a newspaper out of my coat pocket and held up the front of the political section.

"Recognize him?" I asked, knowing she would.

"Is that Mr. Kareen?" She asked but it wasn’t really a question, she knew who it was.
"Yes it is. And unless I'm mistaken he bears a striking resemblance to young Jerome."

Judith gathered her purse from the corner of the foyer and pulled out a photo of Jerome. We held them up together and it was shocking how similar the two men looked. If I didn't know better I would have sworn they were the same man at different ages.

"No wonder the pixie had a fright." I muttered.

"What?" I could see that I'd lost her. But it didn't matter I knew where I had to go to get my answers. And I'd have plenty of time along the way to fill her in.

Friday 12:30 pm At the Kareen Institute

"Do you have an appointment?" The secretary demanded, starting to go from bored to confrontational.

"I had a wedding date!" Judith's anger probably didn't help. But I couldn’t blame her.

I tried again to smooth things over. "This is fiancé of Max Kareen's son Jerome. We just need to talk to Max. It shouldn’t take long. It's important, and it's a personal affair." She wasn't impressed.

"It doesn't matter what you want, if you don't have an appoint…" The light on her intercom lite up. "Just a second." She picked up the handset and a muffled voice on the other end clearly said three words. "Let them down".

Next thing we knew we found ourselves in an elevator heading deep into the Kareen institute. The place was immense. I'd never seen it before but I'd heard stories. It was almost a dozen kilometers around. And as far as I knew no one had ever said anything about it extending so far underground.
As we passed 20 floors on our descent I whistled. My suspicions about Mr. Kareen were feeling more and more solid.

The doors opened and deposited us in an entry room that looked to me more like a military base than some private business. It'd been years since I was in the service but there's a particular atmosphere to military facilities that you never forget.

Mr. Kareen greeted us with a large smile on his face. Judith had told me the man had hated her, and strongly objected to her relationship with his son, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from the way he welcomed her.

"Judith, and…"

"George Miller." I offered him my hand. He had a strong confident shake, the kind you'd expect from a man with enough money to own a place like this. But I noted another thing, he had callused weathered hands. The kind you'd expect on a man who'd worked for a living, not the soft hands of a paper pusher.

"Mr. Kareen, we need to talk to you about Jerome." I faltered for a second, trying to decide how to start. 'Excuse me sir, did you have your son killed because he figured out that you were part of the purge? Was it to hide your secrets or merely to punish him for helping to save magical creatures that the oppressive government you work for fears it can't control, and so marks for death?', somehow it just didn't seem like a good way to go. And if I was honest to myself the mile or so elevator ride had made me question my ability to get is out of here if things turned nasty. As they were likely to do.

"You killed him! Your own son, you bastard!" Judith erupted, she leapt at the man and pounded on his chest with ineffectual fists. Mr. Kareen was impressively still as though her assault was barely worth noticing.

I pulled her off of him and he adjusted his tie and suit jacket. "Ah, I had feared you'd suspect as much." He looked genuinely saddened, but no less confident. It was out there so I didn't see any point in beating around the bush.

"Mr. Kareen, you should know I've let people know we were coming here tonight. And I've left everything we know in writing for them to open and share with the media if for any reason they feel we've come to harm’s way."

"Mr. Miller, you're not a fool, but you're out of your depth here." He turned and started to walk away. "Follow me please."

Judith and I shared a glance before we followed, not seeing what else to do.
Mr. Kareen lead us down a corridor that seemed endless. As he walked he seemed content to let us wonder at his intent.

Finally we reached a large set of doors that opened into a massive room. Let me rephrase that. The biggest god damn room I'd ever seen. You could have tucked an aircraft hangar in the corner and forgotten about it.

Mr. Kareen nodded to a security guard stationed inside the door and started walking along a path marked down the center of the room in yellow paint on the floor.

On either side of the path were monstrously large tables. Each table was accompanied by life support systems like a coma patient might be kept alive with.

But the tables didn't hold anything so pedestrian. Upon each table was a dragon.
Supposedly extinct for years, yet here they were, and there were dozens or more. Each one lay in what appeared to be a vegetative state, wires and hoses connected to and running in and out of various parts of them.

"What in the hells?" Judith voiced my thoughts exactly.

Mr. Kareen chuckled. "Yes. Mr. Miller, you're right. I am part of the purge. I have run the purge for the past 40 years. And yes, it was unfortunate but my son figured that out when that damn pixie mistook him for me."

We followed him past dragon after dragon. They varied in size but all were massive. Their scales gleamed black, green, red, and blue… there were more varieties than I knew had ever existed, and yet they were right there. Still alive, still real.

I shook myself out of the wonder of the moment and realized he had been right. I was so far out of my depth that it was laughable. My precautions were way beyond insufficient. Even if the information I had left with my friends got to the media, and Mr. Kareen had to face in investigation, no one who dealt with this kind of thing would have trouble paying off a few cops or judges.

"It's sad, my son couldn’t grasp the necessity of what we do. We've struggled under the oppression of magic for millennia. And finally we are free of it. No longer can a wizard oppress and destroy on a whim, merely because he was born with the cursed attunement to a power that he has not earned."

I could see at the far end of the room there was a set of doors big enough hat the dragons could be wheeled in and out, and he was taking us right towards it. I wasn't sure what lay beyond but I suspected it wouldn’t be good. "But there's still magic in the world, witches, magic artifacts…"

"A few yes, but give us a little more time and we will have those wrapped up as well. You see the purge finally cracked the problem a few years before I took over. For the whole history of the world, magic had been beyond control. If the people rose up and slayed a wizard another would be born. Kill one nest of witches and you were bound to find another causing havok soon after."

"It was a force of nature, it was everywhere, until it faded. You just got lucky, with it getting weaker you could kill and oppress through force of numbers." It was no secret that the purge and the fading of magic had happened together, an everyone knew that if not for the fading of magic the purge wouldn't have had a chance.

"Ha, yes that it the common belief. But I assure you, Mr. Miller, you don't give us enough credit. Look around you. What do you see?" He stopped in front of the doors and waved his arm to the myriad of dragons around us.

"Dragons, on life support. Some kind of sick torture or experiment. I don't know. " Judith took my hand and held it tight as we knew the calm was about to end. If our suspicions about Jerome were enough for him to consider us a thorn in his side, the information we had now had to be a death sentence.

"Containment. That's what this is." He smiled and pushed open a small door set in the middle of one of the massive double doors. It was dark on the other side but there's a strange sort of acceptance that comes over one when you know your chances of survival are gone.

I squeezed Judith's hand and we stepped through the door. The door closed behind us and it was pitch black. I waited for my eyes to adjust and slowly I saw before me two red lights.

The lights grow larger and recognized them as the eyes of a dragon. Massive, red, glowing balls of fire.

The beast was lying flat on a huge steel table, and it seemed to just be waking up.
Judith and I both took involuntary steps back, slamming against the very sturdy and by this point very locked door. A wave of heat rolled over us as the dragon slowly sat up and belched fire at the ceiling.

My mind raced, and it all came together. I understood for the first time what was going on. Not just now but what had been happening in the world for over a generation.

I turned back and looked at the dragon. It was lazily stepping forward, having just realized that there was a meal before it. But this meal had other plans. I looked over the machine attached to the table, the wires and tubs still stretched up to the dragon. It might be awake but it was still hooked up, and likely dependent on that infernal contraption.

It spit a small focused jet of flame at us and we dove out of the way. The heat caused my jacket to burst into flames so I threw it away and stepped in front of Judith. I was screwed, so I might as well go out in an act of chivalry, even if it was futile. I held my hands up defensively, in a laughable attempt to ward of our demise.

The dragon stopped and stared at us. Some inscrutable notion going through its head, which of us to eat first, what the hell this human might think it was doing standing up to it… I couldn’t guess…
But then when it closed its eyes and took in a long slow breath we were dropped into darkness once more. And I noticed something amazing. My hands were glowing. The same soft blue glow that the pixie had given off.

The dragons eyes opened again and I wondered if I was going crazy, if I had imagined it.

Judith's hands clawed into my shoulder, she shrieked in my ear. "You glowed!"

The dragon leaned forward and sent a massive rolling inferno our way. It was so bright I feared I'd be blinded even if I somehow survived. I felt the heat rolling past us, it was agony. But it wasn't death. Amazingly the fire faded and we remained, a soft blue bubble around us shimmered and popped out of existence, a very familiar shower of pixie dust falling all around.

Kareen and his purge had underestimated us. They had no reason to suspect either of us had any magical abilities, or they would have drugged us before trying to feed us to the dragon.

But I didn't know how long or how potent whatever magic I had gained form the dying pixie might be. I knew enough history to know that despite our surviving that blast of fire, there was no way the magic of a dying pixie was going to be enough to defeat a dragon, even one in a drug induced stupor.

But that was where the purge had given us our one hope. I didn't need to beat the dragon at anything. I didn't even need to fight it.

I focused on the machines hooked up to the dragon. I didn't know anything about it, but I knew that like any modern marvel of technology, it needed electricity. I focused on that.

The dragon took in another deep breath, and as another blast of blinding fire crashed through its jaws and scorched the air around is I felt something happen. Like a phantom limb I had forgotten about I felt the touch of the machine. I caressed it with my mind and then, I grabbed a hold of it and tore it apart.

A shower of sparks blasted out of the thing, and then the dragon jerked, an uncontrolled spasm took its body and it flailed. It flailed then it died.

I couldn’t see it at the time but all the machines, the life support for every one of the ancient dragons in the institute, all exploded. And each and every one of the dragons followed suit.
The fire of the dragon gone Judith and I were once more dropped into darkness, the only light some remaining sparks from the life support system, and he faint blue glow coming from me.

At first I thought it was my eyes getting used to the dim, but soon it was undeniable. There was light flowing from the body of the dragon. Like glowing honey it poured forth, wave after wave of ethereal illumination.

"Light Lake." Judith gasped.