Abaddon's Mark

Chapter Six

Naena, strangely, took the incident in stride. She only made one comment.

"I don't even like animals."

And then said goodnight to him and waved him out the door.

Which was to say Graydon spent a long and confused night lying in his bed, staring up at the ceiling.

His family could keep animals no better than a mage because of how many mages married into the lines. They trained from a very young age, doing the same exercises a mage needed do to keep control, but animals were still spooked by their presence.

Graydon loved animals. He liked petting them, hugging them, talking to them. He even enjoyed making the sounds they made and watching their startled responses back as he 'talked' to them. Their babies were adorable, especially when they fell over or walked about clumsily.

He loved animals, and he was thought to be a bit of a soulless dragon.

Yet Naena did not.

She was a healer yet did not like animals, that in itself put him to pondering.

He was still turning it over in his mind the next morning as he took his seat in basic care class. Watching Naena from his place at the back of the room, he saw she sketched something on a piece of paper she had slipped out of a folio.

Sometimes she practiced her alphabet in class. Sometimes she attempted to take notes, but only ever with her right hand. The sloppy slanting to her letters, that was real.

That day, however, she sketched something with her left hand as she appeared to pay attention to the lesson half-heartedly. The first day back was always a boring reminder of what had been gone over before a holiday or break. Graydon didn't find the lessons helpful in the least, but he always saw a few students frantically taking notes as if they had never been in a class before.

His nose began to itch.

Graydon scrunched it up and wiggled it about in an effort to not scratch. His forehead burned as if bitten by a mosquito. That he scratched idly as he thought about that fact. He had been in the Deadlands just a few days previously. A bite was not out of the realm of possibility.

It was as that strange burning began in his nether regions that he went still and glanced around the classroom.

His tongue seemed too big to fit in his mouth. The fiery burn of a bug bite spread all over, but he sat perfectly still as he analyzed the reaction.

An itch with no source.

His body reacting as if he had bitten into a honeycomb laden with bees.

Either he had a sexually transmitted illness that had yet to present itself—and went undetected by Qual, who was very thorough and good at his magic—or he was having a reaction to a magic he had never encountered before.

As he appeared to lose vision in one eye, a tingling spreading from that eye across the side of his face and into his tongue, he turned to Naena. She frowned at him, head cocking to the side in concern before she glanced at her paper and back up to him. She gave a little shake of her head as if to tell him it couldn't have been her bothering him.

He opened his mouth as there was a cracking sound. Like wood being ripped apart at the seams.

Time slowed to a standstill.

His father had warned him about that. The first few times Theon used magic, time went so slow that Luk thought it a part of the magic wrapping around him.

Naena's desk began ripping itself apart at the seams, stretching and growing as it let out a splitting groan of a call. The sides of the desk pulled out, splitting down the middle to create arms with fingers and elbow joints even as the other half stayed on the desk, holding it all together. The top of the desk cracked upward, revealing a jagged row of teeth made of nails and a gaping maw that went on forever.