Starkiller

If a cave system had glitched and overlapped with a cathedral ruin covered in graffiti, I imagine it would look similar to Dschubba's lair.

Lair was definitely the right word, I decided as I walked over grimy cracked mosaics and around the occasional grouping of stalagmites. The place felt...desecrated. Clearly it had used to be a place of beauty; now the wall carvings of people and dragons were adorned with childishly scribbled mustaches, and cruder things that made my captors snigger as I rolled my eyes in response. The natural beauty of the stone outcroppings weren't spared either, in fact they bore the brunt of scratched-in initials and more crude doodles. We passed openings to caves for every purpose imaginable, from storage to laundry to kitchens and what looked like classrooms. Everywhere I looked there were dragon spirits, working in the rooms or lounging in the halls like bums in a subway. Weren't spirits supposed to be rare? Why were there so many, and all in the same place? Did dragons wipe out an entire village at one point and all the inhabitants became spirits?

We passed another archway and I froze in shock. It must have been a large cavern, possibly opening to the sky, but I didn't notice because my eyes were locked on a dragon laying on its side, with a dragon spirit calmly carving into its throat. As I watched, the spirit reached into the gushing split, grabbed hold of something, and with a grunt of effort wrench it free. I must have cried out, because she turned to look at me quizzically. I felt more than saw a pulse of light from whatever she had pulled free. One of my guards shoved me forward down the tunnel, away from the sight. I noticed nothing else as we walked; my mind was seared with the image of the dragon laying there, like a plucked flower that had wilted and been thrown out.

I only half-noticed when I was shoved into a small room and a lock clicked behind me. I looked around. I was alone. The room was nothing special; the most basic bed imaginable off to the side, what looked like bathroom facilities carved into the corner with a folding screen for privacy, a short table in the center with two cushions on either side of it, and a window with cold light coming through it. I went to the window and looked out.

A circular courtyard sank far below me, sheer cliff walls enclosing it. A massive sundial stood in the center, with faint patterns of colored stone on the ground around it. Some kind of calendar? There were dragon spirits busily hammering away at some kind of apparatus bolted onto the sundial. Whatever it was, they needed a ladder to reach the top; it was easily three times the height of the tallest one. I squinted at it. They were taking out a large metal tube with a glass disk covering each end. It couldn't be a telescope, but whatever it was, they handled it with great care.

I stared at all of this, mind more or less blank from exhaustion. It occurred to me that maybe I should sleep. I walked over to the bed and laid down on it. Despite the waking nightmare of last night, I slept deeply and dreamlessly.

                                                  ~~~~~~~<><><>*<><><>~~~~~~~

I awoke to someone peeling back my eyelid. I batted away the offending hand and blinked. The spirit who had cut open the dragon's throat stood over me. In my sleep-addled state, I instinctively reached to cover my neck. She chuckled.

"Oh don't worry, I'm not cutting you up, I need all of you, little miss power source."

I stared at her, wondering what on earth--or whatever this world was called--she meant by that. Two spirits, the same dragonriders from yesterday, heaved me unceremoniously out of bed as the throat-slitter strode purposefully out of the room. I followed, assuming I had no choice in the matter anyway.

She didn't turn to look at me as she spoke. "I was the one who detected your mana, but I have to give the Dragonbane credit; I didn't think of using you instead of the dragonstones. You've saved us a lot of time by showing up, we'd only collected a third of what we needed. Still a good backup plan though."

I wasn't sure I wanted to know, but asked anyway: "What do you need me for?"

"Ah, it speaks!" She laughed. "Like I said, you will be the power source for the sunkiller."

A childish kind of rage spurted up within me. The only true star I could see, and these people wanted to snuff it out? This wasn't fair.

You have no right to the stars, little one.

I stumbled and recovered. That wasn't my thought. What had Dschubba called the huge dragon? Meissa?

"What, no further questions?"

I refocused on the throat-slitter, reluctant to let my captors know that I was hearing voices.

"How will I be your power source?"

She finally turned her head in order to smirk at me. "You'll find out."

I followed them down steps and gentle ramps, all the way to the courtyard entrance, wondering the whole time if the magic of this world could snuff out a star.

It was almost noon. A handful of spirits stood around the apparatus strapped to the sundial, clearly waiting for us. My escorts behind me grabbed me again and propelled me forward.

"Careful now," the throat-slitter said, "We need every bit of her for this."

Asa's words from my first lesson in magic came back to me.

“There have been experiments to remove magic entirely from items, some were successful."

The memory of the phoenix spirit disappearing into sparks flashed through my mind. Belatedly, I started to struggle. I was made of mana; I wasn't some kind of battery they would drain, with a chance to recharge. I was fuel to be utterly consumed.

I only remembered that I could literally summon fire after they had chained my hands behind my back. Good to know that I was useless in an emergency. I did wonder why they hadn't chained me before, then decided they had accurately figured that I wasn't enough of a threat to bother. They probably didn't want me to damage their equipment, and that's why they were chaining me now. The metal and glass tube I had seen before was on the ground, hooked up to a crane, with crates of large crystalline stones nearby. Bizarrely, the stones struck me as both comforting and deeply sad. I didn't have time to wonder why as I was shoved into the empty tube through a hatch on the side. Moments later the muffled clatter of the crane reverberated around me as the tube was heaved upright. I unsteadily stood and balanced like a surfer in the center of the glass disk on the bottom. The tube was big enough that even if my hands had been free, I could have stretched my arms out and not touched the sides.

The tube swung into the center of the apparatus, and after a few minutes of bolting and hammering, the spirits had it secured. Then there were a few more minutes of silence as I stared down at the inner workings of the machine that would be my doom.

My thoughts whirled uselessly. I didn't know how mana extraction worked. I couldn't picture my own impending death.

But I could picture Orion's death.

And that's what finally ripped a scream from my frozen throat.