The Angel Mirror

Chapter 4 - The News

It was a dreamless sleep, for the most part. There were several flashes and images that raced into and out of Zilder's vision faster than he could follow. When he woke up, though, he was immediately blinded. Putting an arm over his face, he sat up and waited for his eyes to adjust. He was in a stark white hospital room, and when he pulled the covers that had been placed over him he saw that he was wearing a white hospital shirt and pants.

He checked his arms, and upon noticing that he didn't have any ivs in he looked around the room once more. What am I doing here this time? He thought. Did something go wrong with the dragons? He moved to step off the bed. That's when remembered everything that happened. Oh, crap- His feet hit the ground, and he was fully prepared to cringe at the pain, but it never came.

His foot was completely fine, which was odd because he distinctly remembered the tree falling and...everything. He quickly patted down his chest and stomach with both hands as if he was expecting to find some horrible growth or something of the like. He even pulled the collar of his t-shirt to look down into it. Nothing, there was no sign that anything had possessed him at all.

There didn't have to be any sign on him, though. The spirit could have done who knows what with his body while he was unconscious. He checked the machine that was supposed to be monitoring his heart rate (which was on, but not attached to him. He guessed that they made sure that he was going to live early on.), and the date said that was two days past the date that he took the dragons out for a walk. Oh, right, the dragons! Did they make it back to the village okay, Zilder wondered?

He needed to find out what happened, so he started walking toward the door of the hospital room. He didn't take five steps before he heard voices approaching. "But how did those things get near the town?" That one sounded like his father.

"It wasn't exactly 'near' you know, they were nearly half a kilometer out." A man that Zilder didn't know

"It's close enough, if they had gotten into the city without us knowing-"

The door opened and his father along in a man in a white coat that Zilder could assume to be a doctor walked in. There were several seconds of silence, and Zilder himself was the first one to get any words out. "What did I do?" He asked quickly.

"What did you do?" His father repeated, it looked like he was about to hug Zilder but was startled by the question he asked. "What are you talking about? We found you in the woods near a fallen tree with the shells of those...things around you." So the spirit hadn't gone on a rampage using his body for fun? What happened to her then?

"We couldn't put a single scratch on the shells once we inspected them." The doctor said. "Upon closer studying we discovered scorch marks, they must have been fried from the inside out. From what I hear from you father here something like that is beyond your ability, so then how-"

"The spirit I summoned." Zilder replied before the doctor even finished. Since she didn't seemingly use his body for anything he didn't have to lie about the spirit, although telling them exactly what happened probably was not a good idea. "It used all of its power to do that. It barely had the energy to float when it was done so it just went back through the circle." When spirits used up all of their power, they faded away into nothingness; there was no recovery from that for them. In the spirit world, though, energy that supplies them is like oxygen here, so they could regain all of their power there. To bring one back, though, the summoner would have had to do the summoning spell all over again unless there was some sort of special magical bond between them.

"Ah, that would explain the circle." The doctor said, nodding. "Odd, though, I thought that they were supposed to disappear after the spirit was summoned." The circle was still there?