The Dao of Magic

34 - Converge

A few thousand years ago, a certain dragon hatched from its egg. From the moment it was born, it was showered with praises. Expectations upon expectation from every level of their society were offloaded on this growing creature. It therefore grew up proud and arrogant, even judged by dragon standards. Dragons by themselves are filled with pride and nobility, so imagine the inflated ego of this being.

But things did not pan out all that well. The dragon did not make any groundbreaking discoveries, nor did its power grow any faster than its peers. From the spotlight, the dragon's mediocre performance caused it to be forgotten, its unique colouration now a mark of shame. This caused said dragon to grow rebellious, the unfulfilled hopes and dreams still pressing it down, even if it was starting to be forgotten.

So the dragon, now in its juvenile stage, sought attention through other means. This dragon seemed to live by the motto, even negative attention is attention, so from a beacon of hope, it grew into a thorn in the side of the ruling classes. Nothing the dragon did was bad enough to warrant serious punishment or expulsion, but slowly the forgotten status turned into a hated one. Other dragons whispered behind its back, sabotaged it from the shadows or ganged up on it out of the adults' sight.

The moment a new overseer position opened up, everyone jumped at the chance to get rid of this eyesore. Even the dragon itself was thinking about this chance to get away. Even though the dragon was too young to leave the nest, not even ten thousand years old yet, the decision was unanimous. The previous prodigy was sent into the semi-banishment of one that watches.

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Rhea snaps out of her daze. She had been staring at the spot the human jumped down from, her mind still a mess. With glazed eyes she looks at the small object in her hands, a red book covered with intricate lines flowing around a gem set in the middle of the cover. She does not know why she agreed to the human's request, but something in the core of her very being had told her to accept. Something had whispered into her ear that, yes, she should accept the weird agreement the human had proposed. So she did.

Now she opens the small cover and looks at the first page. A mess of symbols, lines and illustrations greets her eyes. Blinking slowly, she pages through the entire book, not learning a single thing.

Twenty minutes later, she is still reading the book. Methodically flipping through every page one by one. She closes her eyes while snapping the book shut. Half a minute later she looks back at the book, flipping it open to the first page. She has done this thirty times now, the casual flipping turning into serious studying.

The first time through the book was just nonsense to her eyes. The second even more so. Only by the third time did she start to realise that the symbols all had their own meaning. A single symbol, a rectangle with a triangle stuck to it, is used a lot. By comparing the uses and various forms this symbol took, she understood that it was meant to draw attention to something. Either another object, of the flow of something the page cannot illustrate.

The fourth time she paged through the thing allowed her to understand a few more of the strange symbols. By the tenth time through, the first few pages were beginning to make sense. The densely packed symbols and line drawings were telling her a story, a story about air. A story about flowing rivers through the sky, a story about evaporating water and rising columns of white clouds.

It did not describe any specific rivers of columns, only outlining the basic principles of the things. The line drawings were starting to make sense too. The first part of the book has only simple diagrams, the middle has diagrams that seem to flow into more than one direction. The last part of the book is filled with lines that seem to jump out at her, as if she needs to see them with volume, instead of flat on a page.