by Marc Secchia
Beautiful Fury
Shapeshifter Dragons Book 4
By Marc Secchia
Copyright © 2018 Marc Secchia
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher and author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
www.marcsecchia.com
Cover art copyright © 2018 Joemel Requeza and Marc Secchia
Cover font design copyright © 2018 Victorine Lieske
www.bluevalleyauthorservices.com
Author’s Note
For greater enjoyment, do please consider reading The Pygmy Dragon and The Onyx Dragon first.
May you soar in beautiful fury!
Table of Contents
Beautiful Fury
Author’s Note
Table of Contents
Map of the Island-World
Chapter 1: Repercussions
Chapter 2: Give of Thy Fires
Chapter 3: Abnegation
Chapter 4: O Exalted Egg
Chapter 5: Sacrifice
Chapter 6: Bobbling Mountains
Chapter 7: Elusive Allusive Wisps
Chapter 8: Race to the Fires
Chapter 9: Of Ancient Grudges
Chapter 10: The Mistral Fires
Chapter 11: Necromancer
Chapter 12: Underestimation Woes
Chapter 13: Tipsy Unto Death
Chapter 14: Turnabout
Chapter 15: Song of Chaos
Chapter 16: Of Fates most Fearful
Chapter 17: A Parting of Ways
Chapter 18: Hunting Abroad
Chapter 19: Shiver, o Mortal Flesh
Chapter 20: Chaos and Starlight
Chapter 21: Fatherhood, Befouled
Chapter 22: The Sixth Moon
Chapter 23: Dramagon’s Plot
Chapter 24: The Passage of Dark Fires
Chapter 25: Paw Slap, Reprised
Chapter 26: Reunited, I Depart
Chapter 27: Departing, We Ascend
Chapter 28: In Storage
Chapter 29: Sung Magic
Chapter 30: Ascending, We Shine
Chapter 31: Mystical Mayhem
Chapter 32: Ancient Mimicry
Chapter 33: Arise, O Star!
Chapter 34: Beacon
Chapter 35: Sneaky Stars
Chapter 36: Falling
Chapter 37: By the Mountains of Immadia
About the Author
Map of the Island-World
Larger size available at www.marcsecchia.com
Chapter 1: Repercussions
BEAUTY GILdED RUIN. How Aranya wished that her fate could not be encapsulated in three simple, life-repudiating words. She gazed over an Island-World deeply wounded – perhaps mortally so – by the travails of a catastrophic conflict, and shuddered at the force of her grieving.
Methodically ordered ranks of mounded ochre and granite-grey Air Breather peaks flanked Aranya’s vantage point upon Yiisuriel’s mountaintop, but the stalwart Dragonkind in turn stood surrounded by random heaps of death. The piles of rotting grey-green Land Dragon carcasses were heaped so high to the North and South and West, a below-Cloudlands depth of over two leagues could not occlude them, nor had the labouring Runner Dragons been able to clear much more than the mouthparts of the entombed Air Breathers. Each corpse among the millions, each broken Island of many thousands, each and every life snuffed out in a paroxysm of horror heaped upon tragedy strangulated by cataclysm, tolled the worthlessness and dishonour of a Star Dragoness worshipped here in Herimor … o bitter, bitter irony!
Her tears blurred all that remained.
As she wept, Aranya reflexively trapped the flow of precious, sparkling droplets in a wide-mouthed gourd she had taken to carrying at her belt. Enchanted tears. Polychromatic motes of magic swirled within each bead of moisture, like miniscule star-fire dragonets sporting amongst liquescent worlds.
Plink. Plink-plink. The irregular chiming of crystalline teardrops mingled with the wuthering of breath through her blighted windpipe.
Would that tears could heal her Island-World. Would that hope might dawn like the febrile torrents of golden light scything from the East now, released to shine beneath the towering curvature of the Yellow Moon. That same radiance enflamed Mystic’s northerly flank until the much smaller moon came to resemble an incensed Dragon’s eye-fire, burnishing every detail in mordant brush strokes of such gruesome splendour it seemed to Aranya that the very bones of the Dragonkind and Humans and Islands devastated by the Thoralian triplicate, those cast down and crushed by his ravaging paw, must rise up shrieking for the vengeance denied them in this life; that the sevenfold thundering of Fra’anior himself must resound from the blackest deeps to the stars above in tempestuous bellows of elegiac, world-shaking woe.
Grief a soul to sunder, she breathed, thinking back to a scrap of her mother’s writings she had once found. What white fires insight had Izariela experienced – or anguish, foreseen – to scribe such elegiac runes?
As the visions beset her and innumerable bleached white bones soared aloft, taking the forms of Dragons wreathed in the most terrible of spectral fires, Aranya shuddered harder and harder, squeezing her knees as if self-inflicted pain might by some miracle deny this travesty of non-life.
Her tears were not for her own ruin, true mirror of the leagues her eyes surveyed. No. Those tears were long since spent. Hope’s ashes shrouded spent pyres, grey and dormant. Her anguish rued her incapacity, endlessly replaying what had transpired in the sure knowledge that she could and should have done more – despite all reassurances to the contrary – to prevent the Thoralians’ triumph. The mighty Shapeshifter had seized the First Egg. He must have, for during that final conflagration her nemesis had vanished into the pit of the Suald-dak-Doon, these three days hence, and nothing she could do could transform this spectacle of destruction in the slightest degree. Hourly, it seemed, her emotions soared to the stars or plunged into the hellish depths of a Cloudlands volcano – never an in-between. Never a steady course for this navigator!
Always the storm.
Furthermore, with the utmost ill-intent his hateful hearts could muster, Thoralian had chosen during their battle to reveal the precise concoction of immedicable Shapeshifter poisons behind her mother’s near-death condition.
Aranya bit her lip. Oh Izariela, mine mother-star, how thou art fallen!
Unbearable, shattering knowledge. What power of this Island-World or any other could restore her now?
She stiffened at the sound of a footfall behind her, deliberately heavy. The intruder knew that although Aranya’s eyesight had been healed, the better to inspect the consequences of her failure to uphold anything resembling Balance, nothing else of her person or powers had recuperated.
Even the starlight-powered healing of so many Dragonkind could never suffice – she bit off the thought, angered yet grateful for Huaricithe’s intrusion.
Time to rejoin the living, a voice said brusquely within her head.
Aranya winced. Zip? Mercy. I thought you were –
Sleeping? Oh, precious amethyst-eyes. Her best friend’s tone made her picture velvet ice. Aranya’s heart sank farther, if that were possible. Soul-hugs for thy priceless tears, purred the velvet, while the ice added snippily, Quite enough sloughing about in self-pity and mourning for one day, Immadia. Snap out of it!
Aranya’s hands jerked as a jangling, discordant shock accompanied her discomfort. Zuziana had promised she would try not to take over command of her best friend’s person, but since this unprecedented situation put into perspective the Fra’aniorian saying, ‘Friends closer than pollen’s shadow,’ what else could they do but soldie
r on, sharing as they did the same physical warp and weft? She alone understood the terrace lakes of Aranya’s grief, and dared to describe these tears as a gift, even a weapon, that would one day restore the Island-World to wholeness.
What a beautiful, infuriating and utterly irreplaceable friend it took to speak such words into her life!
Where did a disembodied Shapeshifter disappear to? How might her best friend and her three precious embryos be enfleshed once more? At least she had rescued them from a fate worse than death, that of being daimonized by the Thoralian triplicate’s ghastly spirit.
One lone straw of victory succoured from endless charnel fields of defeat.
Leaving us as confused as a dragonet flying backward around the suns, petal? Zip teased, but the note of aching gentleness in her voice caused Aranya to clutch her chest as if a talon had pierced her heart. So poignant, she almost imagined …
Soul-hugs for Ari? trilled yet a third voice inside of her.
Sapphire, too. Aranya scowled without real force. Her soul space, as dear Aunty Dancing-Toes would style it, had become a tad crowded of late. Could that be the reason she was so overwrought? Zip and her Azure Dragoness, her three Shapeshifter babies and her faithful dragonet companion all existed as living souls somehow trapped within the confines of Aranya’s being. No longer two manifestations of one soul, but home to many, her Shapeshifter soul was beginning to feel frayed at its margins. What person had ever harboured six souls?
Confusing? Aye! Privacy? Non-existent, and for an introspective Immadian … she sighed. Never alone. Never undisturbed within her own soul.
Don’t forget me, said her Dragoness, elbowing her way to the fore in a virtual sense. Hearken to dawn’s emergence, o Princess most felonious!
Human Aranya chuckled, Criminal me? Ancient history. Catch up with the times, Dragon –
Her Amethyst presence put in, Silence, thou rough-hewn yokel, thou overweening excuse for an icicle of the North. Listen with both of your pointy ears for a change. Huaricithe and I have arranged a surprise for us. A fine treat.
Not more slavering over monkish musculature? Aranya groaned.
What’s wrong with my Ri’arion’s abdominals? the Princess of Remoy almost howled. Do you have the slightest conception how hard it is not to be able to – well, eliding the saucy details … she pulled up with an inner smirk. Oh, very well, read my mind. Your choice.
A picture flicked through her awareness.
Aranya experienced the sensation of blushing inside and out all at once. Zuziana, you … scandalous little rajal! I did not need to know that.
Wicked chuckles tickled her innards as she rose upon rickety knees, careful to keep the precious hoard of tears from sloshing about. Aranya stoppered the purple-flowered taskumi gourd with fingers as gnarled as an old woman’s, and fastened it at her belt. Before she could consider avoidance, Huari’s arms snaked around her middle and drew tight.
Your seventh-generation niece is quite the hugger, Zip observed dryly.
Aranya scowled at the radiant suns-rise as if to decry its rubescent magnificence. Don’t think that gives you license to hug me oftener.
What, like this?
Mercy! She gasped as a benison stole about her soul, burning like tender embers. Zuziana might be snippety-plus at times, but she had the truest of hearts. She had even forgiven the theft of her body. But if Aranya ever caught herself kissing Zip-Zap’s monk …
With a mental touch, the Princess of Immadia, the newly elevated potentate of all Herimor, fondly clipped her best friend across the existential earhole. Do that again, and I’ll never stop crying.
Stoutly, the Remoyan retorted, If we must heal the Island-World one teardrop at a time – let it be.
Aye, let it be, Dragoness Aranya breathed.
In an instant, her knee joints were reduced to hopeless wobbliness. Wonder. Frustration. And an inkling of … hope?
Human Aranya allowed herself to be drawn forth by Huari, and responded warmly to her relative as the two women walked arm-in-arm across the top of what everyone incorrectly referred to as Yiisuriel’s head – in truth, her mountaintop, for her extensive brain-nodes were located leagues below this level – and down into the sprawling cavern-complexes, roosts and Human dwellings deeper within her vast body. En route, she speedily partitioned off her consciousness to check via the mental network on how the healing of her mightiest charges was progressing, especially the newly-budded Air Breathers who had been bowled over during the chaotic climax of that battle. Buried alive, they had survived due to the protection afforded by miles of Dragonflesh mashed together with the Islands thrown at the Air Breathers during the worst of the attacks. She approved sixteen new healing protocols after modifying seven, dealt with seventy-three disparate requests and issued nine new orders. Dhazziala did like to keep a Star Dragoness busy. Doubtless, there would be much more graft in the pipeline.
She grinned inwardly. Good thing her Dad had raised a dutiful little fire-breather then, eh?
Shortly, Aranya inquired aloud, “So, what’s the surprise, Huari?”
“You’re an educated Immadian, aren’t you?” the tiny Shapeshifter riposted, her voice dripping with simulated sarcasm.
“You’re an impertinent Dragoness, aren’t you?” Aranya echoed with a verbal impersonation of a Green Dragon’s acid attack.
“Define the word, ‘surprise?’ ”
“Define, ‘defenestrate?’ ”
“No windows around here,” snickered the other, indicating the grey-speckled granite tunnel. “And don’t you frown as if to suggest you’d simply carve a porthole through reality with your talon tips, Your Inordinately Celestial Obduracy – like your new title?”
Aranya favoured this sally with a dignified sniff of disapproval.
At once, Huari needled, “How’s Ardan?”
“How’s Gangurtharr?”
“How’s about we stop asking each other silly questions? Gang is –” a trickle of suns-shine bloomed in her relative’s cheeks “– wonderful. Just between us girls, he worships every inch of ground trodden by your magical paws.”
“Oh, windroc spit to that. Your paws, to be precise.”
“But you wouldn’t squeeze that truth out of him if you trained that S’gulzzi Lord to sit upon his head. How did I never see it before?” Huari shook her blue locks with such a display of woe, Aranya had to chuckle. Waving her hands, she expounded, “What woman knows her own heart? It’s like knowing one of the great Chaos Beasts of Wyldaroon – now there’s an experience not to be missed! Lethal beauty. And your dark flame, how’s he?”
“Ardan’s equally wonderful – gallant, ardent and possessed of unshakeable faith,” Aranya admitted. “Do you think it’s easier to have faith if you have no past, Huari?”
“The past is the canvas upon which the true artist paints her future. He has a past, Aranya. It’s just forgotten.” Marshal Huaricithe clasped the taller girl’s hand firmly. “I wonder if healing relies upon remaking a better past, or yearning for a better future? Or both, intertwined? Are the materials not one and the same? It all depends upon how one approaches the central conundrum.”
Herimor philosophy. Worse than the monks of Fra’anior, Ri’arion had opined. They loved to circumnavigate any and every consideration with exaggerated leisureliness, and to juxtapose existential sesquipedalians in ways that frankly, made Aranya’s head hurt. But there was a nucleus of balance or symmetry about their thinking that appealed to her. No simplistic answer would satisfy a Herimor Dragon. Thus, to the challenge that confronted them now – the First Egg of the Ancient Dragons had plummeted beyond reach, no mortal person or Dragon could hope to approach the Egg’s depths without the power of Shadow, but in a decidedly inconvenient and not to say dubious coincidence, Ardan had been deprived of his Dragon powers by Marshal Yar’nax’tix, who had met a dreadful end as Thoralian cannibalised her second heart.
Given what the Marshal had tried to do to Ardan, Aranya did wonder what a scorned star mi
ght have essayed in revenge. Better a vengeance denied?
Was her last-ditch attempt to heal the battle into submission even … draconic?
Were Fra’anior’s omnipotent creative labours even … draconic? her second-soul echoed her line of thought trenchantly. Unlike what our Human aspect seems to believe, we Dragonkind are not unthinking engines of destruction, raining volcanic brimstone and hellish fires upon any and every effort to build civilisation! Unless we’re planning to switch sides in this war?
Acid rose in the Human’s craw. Don’t bait us, girly-Dragon.
Bait? Who’s girly? The insults I suffer!
Arguing with her own second-soul? One way to develop a clanger of a headache!
Aren’t we jolly this morning? Zip put in impertinently. Huari, hurry up or this starlight-weaving Dragon-petal will be late. She’s already steaming like a Remoyan sugar sap pudding freshly plucked from the oven.
Zuziana and her Remoyan-isms! The Navy-Blue Shapeshifter made her throat-clicking sound, which Aranya kept meaning to ask her about. What did it signify – droll amusement?
As they briskly forged deeper into the fortress of Yiisuriel-ap-Yuron, she questioned the Land Dragoness, Zuziana and indeed, any creature who might be listening, about this supposed surprise, and received a sum total of zero answers to her increasingly impassioned pleas. Bah, to borrow a leaf from Nak’s favourite scroll of conversational grunts. Clearly, she needed to train her worshippers in the finer nuances of grovelling and unquestioning obedience.
The young Shapeshifter felt her lips quirk into a bleak, scar-twisted travesty of a smile. When she and Zip first embarked upon a madcap quest to break the Sylakian yoke upon the Islands, who would have guessed at this fate?
Absolute potentate of two-thirds of her Island-World, give or take?
Ruler of brokenness.
Her Dragoness said, No. That’s spelled, ‘harbinger of hope.’
And then Aranya found she could no longer speak, nor even think, for a sensation like warm, supple wings curved about her soul, and enfolded her being in sweet tendrils of the whitest of fires.