Toric opened his eyes and looked around the cavern he now recognized as the School. His Instructors stood there and smiled at him. Vanessa walked up to him and looked him over critically. After a very thorough inspection which made him a bit uncomfortable, after all he was still a man and Vanessa a fairly beautiful woman, despite the fact that technically she is dead, she stepped back and nodded.

“Well you look fairly impressive Toric. Why don’t you tell us everything that happened and what you know of the improvements that happened?”

So, Toric told them what had happened, and showed them each thing that he was able to. Demonstrating the dread enchantment without his armor and summoning a massive wall of fire with just a twitch of his finger. The Instructors were all surprised by the draconic gifts. They tested the protection his new scales gave him and discovered a few weaknesses he would have to look out for. It was now nearly impossible to get through both his armor and his skin, but while his skin was very tough, his internal makeup was not on par with true dragons. True dragons internal organs were all housed within solid bone enclosures, like multiple rib cages. His stomach was vulnerable to heavy impact trauma like from the troll’s mallets. His skin didn’t allow itself to be cut, but the force of the mallet’s blow traveled on through his skin and ruptured several important organs. So while his scales added protection, it was still advisable to use his more rigid armor. Toric forgot to tell them about the dew-claws and at one point while sparring with Fury – the lithe and smaller human – he reacted and while blocking the falchion in his right hand bore forward until his fist was only inches from Fury’s chest and instinctively extended the claw. It punched right through the light armor on Fury’s chest and sliced through a gap in his ribs to puncture his heart. Fury ‘died’ and then hopped back up to his feet as the injury disappeared. He was spitting mad, but before he could attack, Vanessa called for a halt.

Fury whined about it, but quickly cooled down and asked Toric a question.

“What the hell was that?”

Toric was embarrassed.

“I forgot about the claws when I was going over everything that changed. To be honest I had completely forgotten about them entirely. When my fist was close enough to your chest I just had a sudden urge to drive my claw through your heart and poof, that’s what happened.”

Fury was past his anger, and motioned for Toric to present his hands.

“Show me.”

Toric lifted his arms and extended both of the claws. Fury got down close to one of them and then turned to yell at the mage wearing black.

“Balth, get over here and check this out.”

Balth walked over with the strange and spooky gliding steps he always moved in. He bent down and looked at the claws, paying extra close attention to the edges. Suddenly he reached into a pouch and took a diamond from it. Holding it up he pressed the side of the stone to the edge of the dew-claw and then pulled it back. The entire group pressed in to look at the gem. It had an extremely deep gouge where the claw had cut it. They all turned and looked at Toric. He was sweating and looked ready to collapse.

Fury spoke urgently into Toric’s ear.

“Sheath the claws, Toric. DO IT NOW!”

Toric barely heard the shout, but he managed to obey and instantly he felt better. It was odd. While the claws were out he had felt like he was being drained of energy at an enormous rate. Groggily he looked up at Fury and then fell on his butt.

Balth fished a potion from his pouch and wordlessly handed it to Toric. After he drank it he started to look better, color returning to his cheeks. Then Balth spoke, and it was the first time Toric could remember hearing his voice.

“Only use those claws in the direst of emergencies Toric. I have no idea why your body generated them, but everything happens for a reason. There is a spell built into the claws that sucks energy from you a prodigious rate. The spell crafts the edge of the claws into sharpness only a single molecule in thickness. It is not important that you understand that only that you understand what it means. Those claws of yours will cut through anything. If you have to use them, then extend them for just a moment, and then immediately pull them back into your arms. If you follow those rules than the energy drain will be barely noticeable. The spell seems to have no way to manage the flow. Either they are extended and the spell is active, or they are sheathed and the spell is off. I have only ever heard of a single dragon having such a spell and that is the Elder Dragon Camnorous the Devourer. He can apply a spell just like this to the claws on his hands and feet. However, he can turn it on and off consciously. If you left your claws extended they would continue to draw energy until you passed out, and then naturally retract. Falling unconscious in battle is seldom a smart move.”

Toric nodded to the explanation and with the mention of Camnorous he at least understood where the spell came from. He looked up at Balth and told him simply.

“My mother’s father is a direct descendent of Camnorous. That must be where my body found the spell, in the Elder Dragon’s memories. While we are on that topic; could you answer a question for me Balth? Is it the Forces of Shadow that I am being molded to fight?”

The question brought all the other Instructors to a halt, and within moments they were gathered around him in a silent circle. Balth was equally quiet, looking troubled as he thought. When the answer came, it was not the one Toric had expected.

“That is a very disturbing hypothesis Toric. We do not actually know the identity of the enemy, and believe me; we have talked of little else but you and the possible identity of your enemy. While we were alive, we were great warriors and goodish people, but while we can help train you better than the Greater Beings, we are not really kept in the information loop.”

Balth lifted his head and looked at the two dwarves.

“Rognor, Tognor, you were both in the Army of Light, what do you think of this?”

Tognor spoke for the both of them.

“The Forces of Shadow were terrible opponents, filled with mortals of the worst kind and led by a being we never got a good look at. All we know for certain is that it was some kind of an immortal. It wore gold armor and suffered what should have been mortal wounds on at least three occasions. It was caught in a fire calling and did not burn, its ship was destroyed once and it walked from the ocean three days later, and it was buried under an earth elemental the size of this cavern only to shrug off the earth and return to the rest of its army.”

Toric added what he knew.

“I have access to the information Camnorous knew before he fathered my ancestor. He met the leader of the Forces of Shadows when they crossed some of his hunting lands. It’s a male Shadow Fae.”

Tognor grimaced and spat to the side.

“Damn, no wonder we couldn’t kill him. Shadow Fae’s can only die through Veil-Magic. They are immune to elemental or physical attacks.”

All of them looked at Toric’s dancing blue fire eyes. Then they all nodded simultaneously.

“It has to be him. Well at least now we have a good idea what we are training you for. Balth, you and Vanessa take over for the rest of the night. It is time to start his training in Veil-Magic. He is going to need to have an instinctual level of control to ever hope to face a Shadow Fae, and if we are wrong about the opponent, it will work out alright. A Shadow Fae is the toughest opponent I can think of to ask any mortal to face, so if we train him to beat that, anything else should be easy.”

Fury’s voice settled the others and Toric took a deep breath before moving off to the side with Balth and Vanessa.

Vanessa was a Walker and as such had a deep understanding and connection to the Veil. While Balth was a Sorcerer; unlike magi, sorcerers did not have to learn spells, they used magic on an instinctual level. Magi took magic from their environment and internalized it, crafting it into a spell and then expelling it for the desire effect. A Sorcerer was born with a connection to the Source of all magic, and all they had to do was imagine the effect they wanted and push the power that they had through to create what they wanted. Magi learned spells that had a specific purpose, and if they didn’t have a spell to do something, they could not do it. A Sorcerer, however, was only limited by their imagination and knowledge. They could not break the Natural Laws of Magic, but they were capable of doing almost anything within those laws. Only the very rarely born Magerors could create new spells for the Magi. They were magi born with the internal connection to the Source that Sorcerers had, but incapable of using that power through imagination. Instead they had to craft complicated mnemonics and gestures and sometimes chants that structured their minds into the correct form to achieve their spells. Balth was a far rarer sort of Sorcerer, as far as Toric had been able to discover, he was unique. He was a Sorcerer that could use his internal Source OR draw on the power that lay around him in whatever world he was in. In this way he was able to do Veil-Magic by reaching out through a rift his Sorcerer power created to the Veil to gather its power. During the time that Balth lived, he was the most powerful magic user alive.

It was a long and exhilarating night for Toric. He learned to do things he had never dreamed of and found that if he concentrated he could feel his half of his soul that existed now within the Veil. He could see through his eyes within the Veil and look over wanders that did not exist within the mortal plane. Rivers of magic flowed like water over rolling hills of steel. The rain that fell was sometimes honey and when dogs barked it sounded like the most beautiful of songs. Balth and Vanessa explained to him that the Veil did not actually look or sound like that; what he was seeing was his mind trying to interpret the uninterpretable. It was chaos and a mortal mind could not understand it, but he could harness it for his own uses. Every single part of the Veil was a very special form of magic and could only be found there on the Veiled World, Veil for short. The magic was thousands of times more powerful than that found on the mortal plane, and it was thousands of times weaker than what was found in the High Realm, where the Greater Beings originated. Balth explained that what mortals thought of as gods, were not actually any such thing, as Daath had said to the original Legion. They were simply powerful beyond our ken and seemed godlike. The Greater Beings however knew the truth and they never pretended to be gods, they accepted that some mortals could not understand the truth and did not continuously correct them. However, they would not answer to the title of god, as they knew the truth. Far above the High Realm was the Highest. The Highest was home to the Creator and He was God and a Being that it was proper to fear.

Toric examined his memories of the other world the Legion had come from and found mention of this Creator there as well. That more than anything convinced him that the Greater Beings were correct, the Creator was a being to be feared. He forced himself to put the interesting theological information to the side and to focus on his learning. Discovering how to summon Beasts of the Veil for different tasks and then leaning forward as Vanessa began a lesson on using Veil-Power to construct a shield that magic from the mortal realm could not penetrate. Just as the lesson came to a close, but before he could practice he felt the School becoming less substantial and felt himself being pulled away. He almost panicked, and then he realized he was waking up. He waved to his Instructors and they waved back, chuckling as he managed to keep control of himself. There was no fooling them; they knew he had almost freaked out.