9

Major Hailey Valentine, the Earth Dragon, led the tour of Storm Castle. A mix of medieval and modern, the Magitech trimmings blended in beautifully with the cold stone walls of the fairytale fortress. Its tall ceilings were as grandiose as they were practical. The height accommodated the Legions’ training sessions—and allowed angels to fly in and out of the castle with ease.

The castle’s main hallway was wide enough to drive a truck through. Lanterns hung on the stone walls, glowing with magic, humming like an elemental tune. As we walked past them, the lights changed from orange fire, to blue ice, to gold lightning, to green flowers. The halls echoed with a sweet melody, each change of the elemental lights accompanied by a note of music.

Major Valentine brought us to the brink of darkness, stopping just outside the black room. Though the lanterns continued to pulse and shine in all their magical glory, not a single ray of light made it into the black room. Darkness ate light. But when we stepped into the room, a rush of magic rippled past us. The room’s walls changed from opaque to clear. That’s when I realized the room was made of glass—a very magical glass. The floor seemed to disappear. It was so transparent that I couldn’t even see what I was standing on.

“In addition to our large training hall, Storm Castle has four elemental training areas,” Major Valentine said as the floor slowly began to turn.

Far below the rotating glass platform, a red glow illuminated the first training area. Pits of fire crackled. Steam rose from bubbling water pools. Hot waterfalls and springs streamed together in an interconnected system of pools and streams. Glowing stone walls, painted with scenes of fire and volcanoes, surrounded the training area. It reminded me of my nightmare last night of drowning in lava. The scene of an angel battling hideous beasts was painted on the ceiling. The angel flew high, raining down fire on the beasts. His angelic wings the color of a sunset, he looked like a fire dragon.

I felt everything as though I were standing directly inside the fire area. The soft hiss of rising steam. The pop of bubbling water. The sweet, spicy aroma of cinnamon and orchids.

The platform continued to rotate across the vast fire area. We passed smoky caverns. The smoke swirled together, forming monsters. The smoky tentacle of one of these monsters grabbed a lamp post and dragged it into a cave. Apparently, the smoke could take solid form. Past the smoky caverns, geysers shot up streams of burning water. The tiny droplets sprinkled against my skin like hot mist. I reached out, and my hand bumped against the transparent wall. How had the mist gotten through the wall to touch my skin?

The red glow turned gold. The glass platform had passed into the second training area. A hollow whistle echoed through the tunnels. The raw wind cut like steel ribbons at my skin. There was a flicker of movement from within the tunnels. Someone was in there right now.

“It’s a labyrinth in there,” Soren whispered to me and Nerissa. “You have to navigate the ever-shifting barriers, battling the wind funnels that try to push you off track.”

The platform moved past the wind tunnels to the open field beyond. The air smelled of dry grass and something burning. Lightning flashed across the sky and crashed down to the ground with a thunderous roar that split a tree in two. A second lightning bolt hit a patch of grass, igniting the long blades with purple swirls of magic. The air was electrically charged. It popped against my skin and buzzed in my ears.

“Don’t tell me we have to dodge that lightning,” Nerissa commented.

“When you’re lucky, you get to dodge it,” Soren replied. “When you’re unlucky, you have to stand there and let it hit you.”

“What is the point of that?” she gasped.

“To build up our resistance to elemental magic,” I guessed.

Soren nodded. “Yes, only those with an innate talent for elemental magic can cast it before drinking the gods’ fourth gift. No matter how long most of you stare at your sword, for example, you won’t be able to set it on fire. You can’t train it. That’s why candidates for level four train their resistance instead. That’s the best way to prime your elemental magic—and to maximize your chances of surviving the next ceremony.”

We moved into the third training area, and gold gave way to blue. There was nothing but water as far as the eye could see. Either Storm Castle was much bigger than it looked, or they’d made use of some very powerful magic to fit an ocean inside of it. My breath caught when the platform plunged into the water. A few people gasped as a sea monster that resembled a large spiky shark swam past us.

“I take it we have to fight beasts like that?” I asked Soren.

“Yes, you will be training underwater battles. It’s harder than it looks. You have to learn to hold your breath for extended periods. Also, the supernatural speed you enjoy on land is seriously impaired underwater. As you build up your water resistance, however, you will regain that speed.”

The platform rose, breaking the water’s surface like a giant whale. We turned into a frozen tundra, a white wasteland. I inhaled the icy air. It burned like cold fire in my lungs. It nipped at my fingers and nose. My breath froze on my lips. It was even colder in here than it had been during my trek through the Wilds this morning. And I had a feeling the temperatures in this training area could drop even further. This was how they built up our cold resistance.

We moved into the final training area. A warm, green glow dissolved the snowflakes on my face. I looked down at the obstacle course below. Quicksand patches. Tremors. Climbing walls surrounded on all sides by bubbling, gurgling mud pits. A pair of trumpet-shaped ears peeked above the muddy surface.

“What is that?” I asked.

“A mud monster,” Soren replied. “Earth elementals use their magic to create monsters from mud. Using elemental magic, you can do the same with other elements.”

“Like the smoke monsters in the fire area.”

“Right,” he said as we left the obstacle course behind to enter a dense forest. “But summoning these helpers is a master-level skill. Not everyone with elemental magic can do it. It requires a great deal of concentration, magic, and finesse.”

“It’s beautiful,” Nerissa said, looking around.

“It is indeed, but that beauty hides many dangers,” Soren warned.

He pointed at a squirrel running down a tree trunk. A nearby cluster of vines stirred. The squirrel froze at the rustle of movement, its nose twitching in the air, trying to sniff out the danger. The vines struck fast and hard. They snapped out like a whip, coiling around the squirrel’s body before it could flee, pulling it deep into the underbrush.

“Soul-eater Vines,” Nerissa said.

“Lovely name,” I replied.

“They are vicious plants. Swords cannot cut them, but they are vulnerable to several potions,” she said.

“Potions aren’t permitted here,” Soren told her.

“So how are we supposed to defeat the vines?”

I turned to hear his answer. My last encounter with sentient vines had been less than pleasant.

“An earth elemental can control them,” Soren said. “Someone with moderate elemental resistance can break through them.”

“Are there any other vicious plants in that forest?” Nerissa asked.

“Watch out for the moss. It will paralyze whatever part of your body it covers.”

The platform clicked. It had returned to its starting point. The glass went opaque, and a runway of lights showed the way out. We followed the four Dragons past the castle’s forges and armory. Here was where the Legion’s magic weapons and armor were made. Steam hissed. Fire sparked. As I watched the metal magic smiths working, I wondered if the immortal weapons of heaven and hell had been forged within these walls. Creating the Legion’s weapons and armor required strong elemental magic, among other things. The more powerful the smith’s magic, the better weapons he could make.

Past the armory was a training room. The gym hall was large, but after the training areas we’d just seen, it felt very plain in comparison. A rack of weapons stood against one wall. There was nothing else in the room.

“Candidates,” Major Valentine said, drawing our attention to her. “Your training, your first step toward elemental mastery, begins now.”

* * *

We trained the whole evening and late into the night. We started in the gym hall, but we didn’t stay there long. The Dragons divided us into groups for the obstacle course that brought us through the four elemental training areas. Nerissa and I were with Soren. Jace was with Kendra, and Morrows with the pretty petite lieutenant. There were two more pairs here, both from the Los Angeles office. The mentors showed us how to tackle the challenges, and we tried our best not to thoroughly embarrass ourselves.

It was a quadrathlon of elemental magic, one right after the other. We were frozen, drowned, struck by lightning, caught in tornados, set on fire, suffocated in smoke, besieged by carnivorous plants, and thrown into pools of magic quicksand. In other words, day one of elemental training at Storm Castle was nothing short of hell.

Of the six trainees, Jace was the best by far. He was the only one of us who could freeze a fire, if only for a moment. It was only a fragile layer of frost, just enough to slow it down so he could escape, but it was better than anything I could manage. My inability to cast a single spell made me feel horribly inadequate. Compulsion, the power of Siren’s Song, had come so easily to me, that I guess I’d thought I was finally getting the hang of things. I’d even dared to think that making it up the Legion’s ranks would be easy.

There was nothing like a dose of bitter reality to put my expectations in check. This wouldn’t be easy. I was going to have to work my ass off from now to level nine.

“Candidates, gather round,” Major Valentine called out just as I thought I couldn’t take another step.

In these few hours, I’d come to loathe her voice, the sound of her summoning us to the next course of torture. Getting set on fire and then frozen into a popsicle and electrocuted was not as much fun as it sounded. I hadn’t felt this bad since my initial Legion training. I couldn’t even twitch without something in my body hurting. And from the looks of my comrades, they weren’t faring any better.

“We are finished for today,” the Major told us.

I would have sighed in relief—if my chest hadn’t hurt so much. It felt like a family of elephants had done the polka across my ribcage.

“Captain Somerset will show you to your rooms,” Major Valentine finished. Then she, the Sea Dragon, and the Sky Dragon left the training area.

The candidates and our mentors slept in rooms located in the castle’s four enormous towers. Captain Somerset led us to the Fire Tower first, where the four soldiers from Los Angeles were staying. From its fiery peak, you could see the Fire Mountains. The other three lands of the Elemental Expanse—the Sky Plains, the Desert Rose, and the Crystal Forest—were visible from their corresponding elemental towers.

Next, we dropped off Jace, Kendra, Alec, and his mentor in the Sky Tower. Nerissa and Soren each had a room in the Earth Tower. I was alone in the Sea Tower. I walked beside Captain Somerset. She was unusually quiet. The only sound in the spiral stairwell was the hum of the magic lanterns on the walls. The flames blinked against the darkness, casting everything in a pale blue light.

“So, how did I do today?” I asked her with a crooked smile.

“As well as we all did on the first day of elemental training.” Her gaze remained forward. Wherever her mind was, it wasn’t here.

“That bad, huh?”

“You will improve with time.”

With that said, she unlocked the door to my room and walked back down the stairs. A large bedroom with a fairytale canopy bed awaited me. The antique wooden furniture certainly fit with the castle. I swung my door closed, plunked my backpack down on the floor, and explored the rest of the room. I found a private bathroom off to the side. It even had a shower.

I went to the window, brushing aside the thick, velvet curtains to look outside. My room was about halfway up the Sea Tower, and I had a nice view of the Crystal Forest from here. Icicles hung from the branches, glistening and jingling in the moonlight. A waterfall sat at the edge of the woods. It was all so perfect that I almost expected a unicorn to step out of the trees and sip from the sparkling water. I’ll admit I was disappointed when that little fantasy didn’t come true.

I took a moment to stand there and drink in the beauty of this perfect, magical scene. The moment was over too soon. I didn’t have time to daydream. My schedule stated that tomorrow’s first session would begin in just under four hours. Today’s training had drained me down to my last reserves. I needed rest. I kicked off my boots and fell onto the soft bed. I fell asleep without even changing out of my magic-stained clothes.