The Wizard And The Dragon by Joseph Anderson Page A

”
    “Underground?”
I said without being able to hide the disbelief on my face. I gawked at him.
    “Yes,”
he nodded seriously. “This is a place of power, which is why the gems form in
the ground here. The further down you go the stronger and denser that power
gets. We are still near the surface and deal with the vermin, so to speak, of
what calls the underground home. But go deeper and you will find monstrosities
that could give dragons the same nightmares you have about them.”
    “How
do you know about my nightmares?” I raised my head as I spoke.
    “Who
wouldn’t have them after what you went through? They may never go away. Your
fear may be with you forever, and you will have to conquer it each time that
you come to face with it. Just as I do, each time I have to come down here.”
    “The
mines scare you?”
    Tower
nodded. “Every time.”
    I
couldn’t imagine being scared of anything if I was a wizard. Somehow, I found
comfort in his confession. I stood up straighter and steeled myself against the
darkness we were about to traverse. The barrier was removed and we stepped
through.
    He
held the bottle of light ahead of us with one hand, and kept his other twisted
at his back clutching one of my own. We walked together, slowly at first and I
matched each twitchy movement of Tower’s head as he assessed the mines with
each step pretending, as a boy does, that he knows far more about what he was
seeing than was actually true.
    After
a few minutes we came to a fork in the tunnel. The mine abruptly diverged to
the left and right. Tower waved the light to get my attention, then pointed the
bottle down the right passage. There was a gemstone barrier there that must
have been placed the last time he was down here. He then turned to me and held
the light to his face. He shook his head firmly with a stern expression on his
face. He then pointed the light down the left passage and led us down it.
    My
mind exploded with possibilities about what was in the other direction. The
likes of trolls and undead, the very things I had thought might infest an
abandoned tower in the forest, seemed boring and harmless in comparison.
    Things
skittered along the walls and shied away from the light as we walked and only
served to fuel my imagination. The thought of gigantic insects and hungry
vermin, as Tower had called them, seemed real enough to reach out and claw at
me from the darkness.
    My
house in the village, where I lived with my parents and sisters, once had a rat
problem. It had only been a single rat but I had only ever seen mice. My father
had told stories of a huge, black rat that would bite my sisters while they
slept if they misbehaved, and the diseases that they carried might my make our
fingers and toes shrivel and fall off.
    My
sisters had screamed and then slept soundly at night, while I had laughed and
then stayed curled in my blanket with my back to the wall so I could keep my
eyes on the door. I thought I would see it moving in the shadows of the
bedroom, a patch of deeper shadows that shifted closer to me, but it was never
really there.
    The
next morning I woke up and my dad had killed the rat. He displayed it proudly
outside our front porch and I convinced myself that it wasn’t as intimidating
as my thoughts had built up. It wasn’t quite as large as what I imagined I saw
in the room at night, but it was still bigger than a cat, with teeth longer
than my fingers.
    That
had been our definition of vermin. The vermin down here were the farren. They
had been shaped like a man, shrieked horrible noises, felt around with claws
instead of hands, and had taken a concentrated blast of fire to kill. That was
just the vermin. The rats.
    I
never let go of Tower’s hand until we reached the end of the tunnel. There had
been no other turns, and when he held up the light I saw that the wall
glistened. It was bloated with gems and crystals and looked far too beautiful
to be in such a terrible place.
    He
unhooked one of the