The Treasure Keeper

Chapter Eighteen

Suppose you were made a prisoner inside your own body. A mind without the ability to control physical limbs; a heart without the ability to beat. Suppose you were bound in painful cold iron— yes, painful, even for one of us—and your sole relief was the flight of your spirit, away, away from the miserable dark grave that actually encompassed you.

Toward warmth, say. Toward other spirits like you, or the living light of the one you loved. Suppose people who knew how to do such a thing used their Voice to command that you remain frozen in your peculiar agony. That they used the chips and glistening dust of a magical diamond to ensure that you listened, that your body remained helpless, no matter how far your spirit roamed. And the closer your spirit returned to your actual, physical self—whatever remained of it—the thinner it became; the two separated measures of you cannot fluently share the same worldly space. Our natural state of being fights to reassert itself: Either you combine again with your body to dwell in the frosty isolation of your slow death, or you abandon it once more, you soar apart. Those are your only choices.

You'd, be better off keeping away, wouldn't you?

No matter how strong your Gifts, no matter how much you willed it, you would not escape the diamond dust and the iron, and the wicked, wicked song they sang. Such was the nature of the malevolence of Draumr.

Draumr controls us. He who controls any fragment of Draumr controls us, in small ways or—with enough of the pieces—large.

True, as a species we're varied in our strengths. For some drakon the shattered stone sings stronger and for others weaker; for many of us, even as shards, Draumr is unbearable to the touch. Others still may touch it without pain but fall yet under its spell.

For all our variations, it remains the one horrific, common flaw we cannot avoid.

That is... most of us. For every rule, there is an exception, you know.

That's what Lord Rhys and Zoe Lane were about to discover, along with their illustrious companions.