Yakira asheadi's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Yakira Asheadi pressed her palm to the dead shrine and felt nothing. Once, the stone had answered her people with light and power. Now it was cold rock. The pale men had cut off the source of Rititah's magic years ago, and her homeland had starved without it. She had one goal: wake the sleeping shrines and give her people back what was stolen. Tonight she meant to start. She had crept past the outpost fences with a stolen ration card and a knife. The guards drank near their fires. Beyond them stood the ridge where the oldest shrine slept. If she woke it, the others might follow. If she failed, the pale men would hang her like the others who tried. A hand caught her wrist in the dark. She twisted and raised the knife. "You strike like a farmer," the man said. His voice was low, amused, tired. He wore cracked armor and a red scarf, and marks she knew from the old stories crossed his brow. Yakira lowered the blade. Only the ritta warriors bore those marks, and every child was told the last one vanished in the final crusade. "You're Kobo," she said. "You're supposed to be dead." "I hid," he said. "Dead men can't teach." He looked at the shrine behind her, then at her hand. "You feel it, don't you. The pull. Few still do." "I feel nothing but stone." "Because you push. Magic is not force. It is invitation." He knelt and set her hand back on the shrine. "Ask. Don't demand." Yakira breathed and stopped fighting the stone. She thought of her grandmother's songs, of fields that once glowed. Warmth crawled up her fingers. A thin blue line lit inside the rock and spread like a crack of dawn. The shrine woke. Light burst upward and struck the sky. Far off, a second ridge answered with its own glow, then a third. Energy poured back into the land she had never felt whole. Something huge stirred beyond the trees. A horned dragon lifted its head, its scales shining with the same blue fire, and its voice pressed into her mind without words. Kobo grinned. "They remember you now. All of them." But the light climbed too high to hide. Down at the outpost, alarms screamed. Boots slammed on stone. A cold voice cut through the noise, giving orders that stopped every soldier where he stood. Commander Alvarez climbed the ridge alone, pistol drawn, the scar on his cheek dark in the shrine's glow. He looked at the burning stone, then at Yakira, and did not blink. "So," he said. "The witch found the switch." He raised the pistol. "I cut it off once. I'll bury it deeper this time." Yakira stepped in front of the light. The dragon growled behind her. The magic was awake now, and there was no putting it back to sleep.