A Sample from The Equilibrium of Magic

Chapter 1

MONA SAT SIX floors beneath the main lobby with her supervisor, Bradley, in a world of plastic. The chair, the bench, and even the walls were made of plastic, because the safety protocols required it. She wasn’t allowed to wear a watch, but her inner clock told her it was well past the official end of the Rune Corp workday. The rest of the employees were heading to their homes, the gym, or any number of happy hours in the Tysons Corner area.

None of those options were in Mona’s near future.

A baseball-sized cube sat on the table in front of them, smaller and more advanced than the old ones the company produced six months ago. It appeared to be cut from some type of black stone, but it shimmered as if alive. The cube had veins running through it, similar to those found in marble, but the striations pulsed and shifted as if alive while clouds of dark reds and greens floated through the cube’s center.

In contrast to the frenetic activity of the strange stone cube, the lab itself was quiet, and Bradley and Mona only spoke when necessary. This was mainly because the security wards that Mona’s fiancé, Merrick, had built into the room made it difficult for sound to travel through the air, leaving the lab unnaturally muted. The effect was similar to that of a soundproofed recording booth, except the lab was lined with magic instead of foam insulation.

This precaution was for Mona and Bradley’s protection. They were working in the company’s newly launched weapons division, and their jobs involved exploring and testing unknown dragon words and their effects.

This was one of the riskiest jobs in the entire company, and even though Mona was only a human, she was familiar with magic and with the dangerous effects it could release on the world. Her recent adventures with Merrick and Rune Corp’s CEO, Cara, proved this to her. They also showed her that wars among the Drayoom families and even among the dragons themselves were not relegated to works of fantasy.

They were happening in today’s world, and they were real.

She realized this now, in the dead of summer, but when Mona had been exposed to magic for the first time last year, she had not immediately accepted her new reality. Merrick’s powers had just awakened, and though she had been both fascinated and afraid of what she had seen, she hadn’t really believed.

Since that first exposure to magic, she had experienced things that would cause most humans to die of shock. She had met a sentient tree, seen stones rise up to attack people, and traveled through the core of the planet as a part of the living Earth Dragon, Terrada. She had even found some magic inside herself and had used it to save Merrick’s life.

Now, magic was just an everyday part of her day. And as with anything that happened every day, it could get boring.

When Mona and Merrick first joined Rune Corp, he had urged her to work above ground, where it was safer. For three months, she had spent her days cataloging and tagging new words and phrases that had already been tested and entered into the Rune Corp database.

When the novelty of that work wore off, she had volunteered to join the weapons division. This was partly because she thought the work was fascinating but mostly because she seemed to be the only one in the company not completely convinced that they should weaponize magic more than they already had.

The words stored in the Rune Corp cubes were powerful enough to stand against any enemy Mona could imagine, and she wanted to make sure firsthand that the weapons program would proceed with the proper degree of caution.

And no event deserved a more careful, measured approach than the type of experiment for which she and Bradley were preparing.

Bradley was arrogant at times and always had a sense of self-entitlement, but there was no denying that he was also one of Rune Corp’s best programmers. For a human, he was a complete natural, and he had worked relentlessly since joining the company during its second year—enough to gain the respect of Cara, Merrick, and his co-workers.

Not two hours ago, Bradley had greeted Mona with his usual grumpiness before they made their way together down to the lab. They were close to being ready to test one of the new words from the Fire Dragon tongue that Merrick had brought back with him from Annoon—the island that the four dragons called home and where she and Merrick had almost died.

Almost dying had been a traumatic event for both of them, but Merrick had emerged with a stronger sense of self, and the two of them had ended up with a closer relationship because of it. Merrick had also come away from the experience with an appreciation or maybe even an obsession for the beauty of the Fire language and the power held in its words. One such word was the one they were currently studying.

As best they could tell, the word was an action command that was something close to the verb, to splinter, but Mona never trusted a first translation and knew that dragon words were often subtle in their meanings and in their effects.

Bradley turned to Mona and removed his earphones. In his right hand, he twirled a pencil around and around like the blade of a helicopter.

Even though Mona was officially Bradley’s subordinate, she prided herself on knowing and following the company’s rules that Merrick and Cara had set in place.

Foremost among the rules for the test lab was that having even a simple object, like a pencil, made from one of the elements was strictly forbidden.

She had mentioned this to Bradley several times—that items made from natural materials weren’t allowed for a good reason.

Every time she pointed this out, Bradley looked at her dismissively, demanding that he needed the pencil to think and that he preferred hand-written notes to those typed into a computer.

He made it clear on several occasions that he wanted her to drop the issue, so she had eventually stopped mentioning it.

After all, he was in charge.

“I’ve done all the preliminary tests I can think of,” Bradley said, still spinning his pencil.

“From what Merrick’s told me, it seems like a pretty standard verb. The only thing about it that interests me is that it’s a Fire word.

I could list several names and phrases in the Earth language that cause solid objects to shatter. That makes sense, because most of the things you would expect to break apart belong to the Earth Dragon, anyway. But I wouldn’t expect one of the Fire Dragon’s words to shatter anything. Maybe it would cause something to burst or ignite, but shatter?”
Bradley bit on the end of his pencil, deep in thought.

“No way to really know without trying it out, I suppose. Maybe your fiancé knows something he isn’t telling us.”

Mona sighed.

“Merrick is my fiancé,” she said, forcing her words out so that Bradley could clearly hear them in the heavily muted room, “but I wish you’d stop bringing it up. I’m an employee just like you, and I have no idea why he does most things that he does at this company. I’m here to do my job and to learn from you, so...please teach.”

Bradley grunted and looked back at the glowing cube on the table in front of him.
“You know the routine by now, Mona. But to refresh—the cube is made of divinium, a stone that has, among other things, a living memory. In the cube, we have installed our own proprietary operating system, using a programming language composed of sounds instead of zeros and ones. This allows us to access the dragon words we’ve uploaded to the cubes and use them as we see fit.

“Each word is unique and is taken from the creation name of a single Drayoom. This gathering of names has been going on since the days when the dragons created this mud ball we live on, so we have a vast number of names at our disposal already and are able to construct whole phrases with our software. And that’s when things get really interesting.”

“I don’t know,” Mona said, as she swept back her dark brunette hair from her eyes. “I’m more interested in the fact that each Drayoom is given a name by one of the dragons at birth, but doesn’t remember it until they’ve lived long enough to understand their true selves and are able to control their internal magic. It makes me wonder about my own name. I know Mona doesn’t mean anything, but I wonder if I have a creation name I don’t know about.”

Bradley smirked as he reached out and touched the cube with his outstretched index finger.

“You know we’re only humans, Mona. By our nature, we’re nothing special. None of us are special here, except for Cara…and Merrick, of course.”