Read Online The Forging of the Dragon (Wizard and Dragon Book 1) by Robert Don Hughes - Free Book Online Page B

to find something to eat somewhere else, just to prove I’m wrong.” Dark found a patch of grass and sat down on it. He picked up a rock and tossed it idly into the river. Seagryn did, indeed, search the other tents first. The boy waited, watching the water glide past. After a few minutes Seagryn rejoined him, frowning in frustration as he shoved some dried meat the boy’s way. Dark took it, saying, “Just tell me when to shut up. My s’mother always does.”
    “Where is your mother?” Seagryn asked gruffly. “Does she know you’re here?”
    Dark took a bite and chewed reflectively before answering. “She knows I’m safe. I’ve told her that much. More than that she doesn’t want to know. It’s very tedious having someone around who knows everything you’ll do before you do it. But you’ll discover that soon enough.”
    Seagryn was thinking he already had learned that when it registered upon him that, if he felt that way, Dark had again predicted his reaction properly. “No!” he lied brightly. “I don’t think it tedious. In fact, I find it fascinating!”
    “Right,” Dark muttered, lying back in the grass to gaze into the clear summer sky.
    “I do! How do you do it?”
    Dark turned his head to frown up at Seagryn, then closed his eyes and laced his fingers behind his head. “How do you become a tugolith?” he asked.
    Seagryn thought. “I don’t know.”
    “Nor do I understand my ability.” Dark shrugged. “It’s just the way I am. A part of me. My gift, or curse, or whatever you want to call it.”
    “It’s a gift, certainly,” Seagryn said. “Look how it’s helped us already.”
    “How?” Dark frowned.
    “Why, we can ...”
    “Don’t say we can avoid trouble, because we can’t. I have the welts on my back to prove that.”
    “But you could have avoided it!” Seagryn challenged. “You could have ... been home with your mother!”
    “Oh,” Dark grunted. “Like you could have avoided turning into a tugolith last night?”
    “I don’t control that,” Seagryn muttered.
    “And I don’t control the future. You think I didn’t try to avoid these outlaws? I did. I wanted to stay with you! But — as I knew you would — you sent me away. So, I was trying to run home and ran right into three of them instead.”
    “But didn’t you know you would?”
    “Of course I knew. Don’t you understand? Knowing just makes it worse! You can’t avoid the future any more than you can avoid the past!”
    Seagryn puzzled over this awhile. “Then everything in the future is fixed? Is it all preordained?”
    Dark snarled in frustration. He’d obviously tried to explain this many times. “It’s not like someone, the Power for example, orders the future to be such. It just is. Decisions now don’t change the future, because the future isn’t, yet. My problem is I know what it will be, what all the decisions will add up to. If I decide to do something to change an outcome, inevitably it’s the very act that makes that outcome happen. Augh —” He broke off wearily. “Why do I even try to make people understand ...?”
    “Then,” Seagryn began in a philosophical tone, “you know the instant of your own death —”
    “No!” Dark shouted, and he was suddenly onto his knees and had grabbed hold of Seagryn’s robe. His words tumbled out. “Please don’t ever say that, don’t ever mention that again, Seagryn, in the name of friendship or the Power or whatever you want to say! Please don’t! My sight of the future is like your memory of the past. Things are there; you could give attention to them if you wanted to, but some things are too painful, so you don’t, you block out those memories by thinking of pleasant ones, right? Don’t you?”
    “Ah — I guess —”
    “You do, everyone does, and so do I! I block that out, I talk about foolish things, I look at the future of others, I play games with their minds, and all of it is designed — Listen to me Seagryn! It’s all