by Tony Corden
The next thing she knew, she could feel the room around her with Thad, Granite and Shaman. She could also feel Mìng and another dragon, but she couldn’t move, she was trapped, held in place by something covering her body. She checked her levels and was a little shocked at the numbers but pleased to find everything was at one hundred per cent. She tried to move, and after struggling felt the barrier around her begin to shift, although grudgingly. With one last strain, Leah felt the barrier give-away and then dissipate.
Leah’s wings lifted her onto her feet and moving to press herself against Mìng she said, “Wow, that was unintended. What happened?”
Thad put down his hammer, walked over and took her in his arms. “T: You almost died. Whatever that whirling blue-and-black mist was, it suddenly rushed into you, and you literally started to expand in a slow-motion explosion. Mìng must have been on her way up, for almost as soon as I saw you begin to break apart you were surrounded by that green ice you used on the other dragon. You’ve been out for almost two hours. You had me worried.”
Leah turned her face as if looking up at Thad and was surprised that he didn’t seem anywhere near as tall as he had previously. She said, “Sorry to do that. I still feel a bit strange. Things feel different.”
“T: That’s not surprising. Besides the swirling blue and black patterns running across your skin, it looks like you’ve grown six to eight inches and the pupils of your eyes look like those of a dragon. I’ll let you check your messages while I finish mining this altar.”
Leah shook her head, then said, “Thank you, Mìng. How are the others?”
“S☼: You are welcome, but it is you who deserves praise. I am healed, and the others will all wake soon. With me is Lord D’durulmuş D’hşet’s mate, the Lady Yeşilimsi Buzul.”
37
December 28, 2073
DUNYANIN
Leah turned and focussed on the frost dragon. She said, “Greetings Lady Yeşilimsi Buzul, it is good to see you returned to health.”
“B❄: Is it true? Have you killed both Avinin Eli and my mate Lord D’durulmuş D’hşet?”
“Yes. Avinin Eli for all he has done to you and your offspring. Lord D’durulmuş D’hşet to fulfil the oath made by Iyilik to avenge his daughter. Your mate had learned nothing and in his madness would have become a blight upon the land.”
“B❄: And what of those who remain?”
“The dwarves will leave the Citadel, and I will appoint someone to oversee the Citadel in my name.”
“B❄: You claim the citadel? You would become the Frost Queen?”
“Yes.”
“B❄: I must think on this.”
“Lady Yeşilimsi, you may think on it at your leisure, but I wasn’t seeking permission. I was explaining what will occur.”
“B❄: That is as it should be. One may not rule over dragons except by intent, by strength, and by service. My Lord had the intent and the strength, but he was lured away from service to his people by the glitter of his hoard.”
“Where is his treasure room?”
“B❄: Have you not found it? Have you not claimed it? If not, how can you claim the title of Frost Queen?”
“The wealth, the gold and the glitter will be found, for they add strength and power to dragonkind, and without them, the citadel would slowly fall into decline. I claim the title not based on the hoard but based on those who are the true strength of this eyrie, the dragons.”
Lady Yeşilimsi brought her face close to Leah, and her eyes, with her muzzle resting on the ground, were in line with Leah’s. Leah did nothing except wait. Finally, Lady Yeşilimsi said, “B❄: Even without your sight, I can see the sincerity and strength shining from your eyes. Listen, do you feel your heart’s beat?”
“Yes.”
“B❄: Can you feel mine?”
Leah used her blood sense, then said, “I do, it beats in time with mine.”
“B❄: As do all those in your brood. Even as they lie encased in the healing ice, I can feel them matching pace with yours. I, Lady Yeşilimsi Buzul, mate of the Frost Lord, D’durulmuş D’hşet, do declare fealty on behalf of all those in the eyrie to the half-dragon, Empress Atherleah, the Frost Queen.”
Mìng spoke sub-vocally, and Leah felt the impressions on her finger. “S☼: You must fly to finalise the claim.”
Leah asked Three to communicate sub-vocally. “How am I supposed to do that?”
“S☼: You have had the blood of Lord Frost, and you are now more dragon than anything else. Link your mind with mine, and I will guide you. But first, you must open the eyrie.”
Leah turned to the far end of the cavern and where she knew the opening had been. She could sense the dwarves’ stonework which filled the vast expanse. Turning to the Frost Lord’s spellbook, she found a spell called Blast of Frost which she could do, and after dual casting Changing Attraction to weaken the wall, Leah cast Blast of Frost simultaneously with a ball of shadow wrapped in light which she brought together as it hit the weakened wall.
The wall crumbled away showing a thick barrier of ice. Mìng said, “S☼: Take the form of a dragon, and the ice will crumble at your touch.”
Leah considered using the vambraces or the blood connection. Instead, she decided she neither wanted to be a legendary dragon, nor a copy of Lord D’durulmuş, so using what she’d learned from both she used her ability as a vampire to change her appearance. Frost dragons ranged in colour from a deep blue to the lighter sea green of Lady Yeşilimsi. They were generally narrower and longer than other dragons, except the water dragons. Leah pictured herself using her body as a canvas and describing additional detail to Three.
Her image was a mixture of a darkness dragon and a frost dragon. She had the length of the frost dragons with the added width and musculature of a darkness dragon. Instead of separating her colours as on Mìng, she pictured each scale with the ice colour and shaded the edges, so each became tinged with shadow toward the edges. She kept the central part of her body white but used blue and blue-green tones along her spines, horns and claws.
She willed herself to transform and felt her body morph. She was missing the right front leg, but the earth shroud seamlessly morphed as well. She didn’t need two sets of wings, so she reformed the shrouds into additional spines running the length of her body and extending her claws and wingtips. She was already at a higher level than Lady A’lev Sevgilisi had been, and her body was over a hundred and thirty paces long, which was longer than Mìng.
Walking forward, she touched the ice barrier which crumbled away leaving an opening large enough for two dragons to exit, side by side. Leah let a braid of psychic mana form between her and Mìng, and then with Mìng controlling Leah’s body she leapt off the mountain. Mìng had almost complete control and moved Leah’s wings and body to catch the winds to rise even above the top of Siddetli. Leah found that the code for dragon magic allowed her to slow her breathing to protect her lungs and used some of her mana to fuel the muscles. She could sense the traces of gravity mana as it lightened her and added force for turns and wing strokes.
As the world around her was imprinted on her body, she found there were details from leagues away that she could now make out. Three informed her that this was the information from her improved sight. Three also added the airflow and thermals into the picture to mimic what the dragons could see. Slowly, Leah began to exercise more and more control over her body until, after almost an hour, she was flying solo.
As she achieved this, she headed for the top edge of the western face where she’d seen her hand of guards. As she flew overhead, she reached out and communicated using the psychic connection, “Yürek, we are almost finished the dungeon.”
“Y☼: War Leader?”
“Yes, what do you think?”
“Y☼: Of your form?”
“Yes, isn’t it amazing?”
“Y☼: Is it permanent?”
“No, but it is so totally cool. See you soon.”
Yürek didn’t h
ave time to respond as Leah turned on a wingtip and dove down the edge of the face. Five minutes later she came into land at the edge of the roost, needing only a little help from Mìng. As Leah landed, she willed herself back into her newer, larger, half-elf form. Stepping inside, she saw the two were still mining and although she was tempted to use the spell Changing Attraction, she thought they would be more likely to bond with the elementals if they did all the work.
After Lady Yeşilimsi formally accepted that Leah was the Frost Queen, she showed Leah where the treasure was. Leah, encouraged by Mìng, spent half an hour wandering through the hoard and cataloguing things. She removed maps and spells and chose gifts for each member of the team and then said, “Lady Yeşilimsi, I have a record of what is here. Soon I must leave, for I have tasks in the rest of my growing Empire and would leave you in charge of the roost. I leave the treasure under your oversight and should it be added to, then you, or those who add to it, may keep half of what is added that you might start your own treasures.”
Lady Yeşilimsi seemed stunned, and Mìng shared that a dragon lord would never share their wealth, that it was only passed on through death. Leah explained that her roost had different values and spent some time explaining them to Lady Yeşilimsi. This was brought to an abrupt end when the altar in front of Granite split in two with a considerable noise that startled both Lady Yeşilimsi and Mìng.
Granite reached in and pulled shards away from the amorphous ball of elemental darkfire. Leah couldn’t hear what happened or what was being said but watched the scene as it was inscribed on her. The elemental slowly moved toward Granite and then after a time moved up his arm and settled on his shoulder. Even as this was happening the altar in front of Thad also split, and the same scene was carried out with the Shadowfire elemental forming a bond with Thad.
When the two elementals had bonded, Leah, with Thad, Granite and Shaman headed down to the dwarven area where the crypts were. The dwarves were standing as instructed near their loved ones. As Leah walked through the crypt, she checked what each was carrying. When she came to the dwarf Nalbant, she said, “Nalbant, my name is Atherleah Do you know the way through the maze and down the mountain?”
“N: I do, Clan Chief Atherleah.”
“For what was done to the dragons you should all be executed, as it was a monstrous torture. Still, there has been enough death and pain here. You have a choice, I could send you back to the homeland, or you can join my army in a war against gods like Kötücül. Which would you choose?”
The dwarf looked down at his hands and said, “N: We cannot go home. After what has been done here, we cannot face our kinfolk with honour. I believe we would join the army and seek to regain our honour through service.”
“Then lead these dwarves down the mountain to the winnowing entrance. I shall come tomorrow and meet with you. At that time, each shall give me a pledge of fealty and join my army, or they shall be cast off and left to wander the land without honour and without clan.”
Nalbant nodded and soon the crypts were empty. Leah said, “I have one more thing to do, then we can go. While I do that, why don’t you guys go through the rooms and collect everything they left behind? We’ll share it out after.”
“S: My bag isn’t big enough for what Val described.”
Thad pulled a mining bag out of his backpack and said, “T: Here, use this. I have a few. We all started carrying a few of these when we did dungeons with Leah.”
Leah pulled a similar bag from her backpack and gave it to Shaman, then headed up to the top level to discuss with the dragons what they wanted done with their blood which had been harvested and kept in stasis. Not only were there over twenty full buckets from where they’d been hanging, but there were another hundred or so stored in the Treasure Room.
After dealing with the issue of blood, Leah said farewell to each of the dragons and then transformed into her dragon form. Thad climbed up to sit on her neck while Granite and Shaman climbed onto Mìng. Leah leapt into space as Thad screamed with excitement and after a few minutes flying around for fun, she and Mìng came in to land at the top of the western face. Once the hand of Günahkâr had climbed aboard, Mìng led the way back to the clan’s camp area.
Their appearance sent the camp into a frenzy until the Günahkâr, who were in contact with Yürek, calmed them down with news that this was Leah and her dragon Mìng. Mĕi was waiting there with Amy, Wisp, Mist, Melez and Val. Once everyone had had the chance to get a close look of Leah in this form, she changed back. She then had to spend some time discussing the changes to her half-elf form as well.
“A: That is so cool. I just love flying.”
“Have you talked with Mĕi about her babies? I haven’t had a chance to yet, but she’s due in less than a Dunyanin month. If they don’t pair with a traveller, then they’ll revert back into Chimera.”
Amy looked stunned, then turned and started communicating with Mĕi. The friends discussed things for the next half hour and then settled, ready to log out. Leah made a time with her team to sort out their options and then logged out.
38
December 28, 2073
GATES UNCHAINED
After a break in the real world to take her supplements and to eat, Leah had Three transfer her to Jenny’s training world Gates Unchained. Jenny was waiting in the reception, and said, “J: I’ve created a separate instance for our training, and it won’t show up on a public search for two days. As with all public worlds, we’re required to submit our records for scrutiny. Your details and those of your trainer, me in this case, are encrypted on our server, but the existence of the instance will be filed in real-time and is usually entered into the various multiverse metrics within a few hours. There is an archaic forty-eight-hour cooling period before this becomes a matter of public record. If we used the regular training area, it would be a matter of record that someone used the world for training within a millisecond.
“Everyone knows Danika is training you, but she’s practically untouchable. I’m a bit more fragile, and my partner asked me to set this up to aim for some form of anonymity. Danika will manage your races, and I’m on her books as a consultant. Meredith will probably overlook that, though I don’t think she’ll be so forgiving when she finds out I’m actually training you. Each time we meet, I’ll form a new instance and hope the training gets lost in the details.”
Leah thought, then said, “How many training programs are there like yours?”
“J: Thousands! Good ones that are worth the money, maybe twenty.”
“Then we use hats and umbrellas.”
“J: I’m sorry, hats and umbrellas?”
“Yes. If you’re following someone, then there is always a danger to get fixated on something they can change, like a hat, an umbrella, or a particular coloured jacket. A hat can change heads, or what’s worse is when you follow a hat, and suddenly you walk into a hat convention. You need to follow what they don’t, or can’t, change—their gait, their head movement, their subconscious patterns and sometimes their height. Even when people try and walk with a limp, they almost always use the same timing to their walk, it’s just a change of instrument. People can change their hat, but they don’t usually change the way they move their head.
“If people are looking for someone training to do the two-wheeled Gate and Time attack, then we’ll let them wander into a room filled with hundreds of players learning to do it. Give me a list of training programs, and we’ll get people to sign up, hundreds of people.”
“J: That’ll cost a lot.”
“True, but it’s protection for both of us. Have we entered the instance yet?”
“J: No, we’ve still got to finalise the registration.”
“Then let me wait a few minutes and let the others join up.”
Leah set the request through Three, and Gèng put out the request to people who’d helped on the Survival trials. Ten virtual minutes later, as Jenny was describing some of the strategies used, she got a message from h
er AI. She turned to Leah and said, “J: We’ve had an influx of trainees in the last three minutes. Ten new students have signed up.”
“Good, then the other training programs will have the same. Shall we begin?”
“J: OK, thank you! TRAX has several hundred different scenarios it can throw into a Gate and Time attack and they keep adding new ones every month or so. Still, there are five or so main types, and the others are more or less variations on a theme. So, the main five are off-road, urban, airtime, track and stunts. The biggest group is the off-road scenarios. There are green lanes—that’s mostly unpaved roads—and forest trails, hills climbing and rocks, mud and water, dunes of sand or snow, or even something like a scree slope beside a volcano. Each of those can have added features like quicksand or stampeding buffalo.
“There are urban scenarios where you mainly stay to the roads from a populated twentieth-first century city, to one where the city is a desolate wasteland filled with burnt-out cars and groups of ravaging zombies. Sometimes you’re being hunted, and other times the crowds are there to cheer you on. Airtime has you doing most of the race on bridges or steel beams. Sometimes they are single-use and crumble behind you. In those, you need to access the best ones first before the others get to them. It could be high up in the Amazon on rope bridges or on a partially constructed high-rise. Again, there are a range of obstacles that you only discover during the race. Most of the more challenging obstacles don’t appear until the sixth tier races.
“Track races are on race tracks with multiple lane options. Usually, the race is fifty laps, but there are hundreds of gates spread over dozens of alternate routes. You always move in the same direction, but your choices limit which gates you can attack. Finish forty-eight laps in the sixty minutes, and you are dead in the water because the last two laps will blow your time out. If there are thirty in a race, each gate might only be able to be used by two or three riders. The gate worth the most might only have a single-use. It’s a nightmare to work out in your head and on the run. Then there are the dangers, like rotating gates, or intermittent waterfalls. The sky’s the limit.