by Marc Secchia
Burning with shame, Ardan wrapped up the memory and presented it to Yistarill. I believe that this data may corroborate your excellent hypothesis.
Very good, cherished Shadow, Aranya approved softly.
Ardan flushed fierily as her unshielded thought echoed into the public space. Arrrgggbb, he grumbled before cutting off the sound. Should they not court? He purred back, Thou, mine treasury of starlight incarnate.
Aranya’s fires burbled like a boiling brook running merrily over stones, and her expression turned pleasingly bashful-cross-provoked. Ardan! By the mountains of Immadia –
Grinning broadly at her, he said privately, My specialty is molten Immadian Princess. Like it?
You’re incorrigible.
Do I hear Nak gnashing his teeth in a jealous rage?
You’re like a male terhal strutting down a street.
Admit it, you prefer scales to feathers.
I’ll admit nothing for fear that your grossly swollen vanity might spark a messy explosion, Aranya protested, but her eye-fires seethed as she considered her Dragon with fierce pride. Returning to more important matters – well, other matters –
The discussion, in the way of the Lost Isles, proceeded at the speed of thought. They efficiently hived off mind-cells to examine different aspects of the problem, including nine separate teams to puzzle through counter-arguments and pick apart Yistarill’s work – positively but aggressively, following the custom of the Dragonkind – while Aranya meantime dealt with three urgent disputes. Ardan was unconvinced about the way the Princess had summarily been promoted to Star Empress of Herimor, but she showed no signs of growing overly fond of worship. Contrariwise, she seemed to grow more inward-looking and pensive the more attention she garnered.
A Shadow Dragon could only wish he might one day feel worthy of this woman’s love. How he longed to see her fully healed!
Stars were meant to shine, not to weep starlight tears.
* * * *
In the night’s uttermost stillness, Aranya awoke from a chaotic dream, her heart thudding in her throat like a drumbeat run amok. In her life she had not often experienced such an overwhelming awareness of dread, so as she lay in the semidarkness calming her frantic, muted wheezing and swallowing down the tang of blood in her throat, she attuned her consciousness to the nearby rhythms of life.
First, her own heartbeat and the tenebrous presence of lives slumbering within her soul. Second, the ever-present Land Dragon minds, maintaining the shields and constantly at work with their badly injured brethren. Now, her ears caught a subtle fluctuation in the gentle rasp of Ardan’s breathing as he stirred on the wide couch opposite her low, rounded bed. He lay face down on the edge of a blue orrican-wool pillow, his left arm dangling upon rush tan mats woven through with blue-dyed strands that traced runes recounting a legend of the Dragonfriend. So many traditions here. The rushes and plush woollen coverings were a holdover from the days Hualiama had written about, when the Human Lost Islands had been snowbound winter fortresses not unlike Immadia’s castle, she supposed, and the Dragon Islands had been temperate. Yiisuriel’s vivid memories had shown her the comet bearing Numistar Winterborn’s presence smashing into the midst of the Isles. Through indomitable willpower Hualiama had forged two nations into one. Yet she wrote also of the quest to ascertain their destiny – the quest which had brought the Lost Islands to this location, the resting place of the First Egg.
Their story was far from complete.
How far the shadows of history reached, like great Island massifs looming over the Cloudlands of the lives that swooped so briefly into and out of their ambit.
Her eyes lingered upon her husband as she tasted the strange, delightful echoes of that word upon her tongue. Husband. My Dragonlove, my man Dragon, my shield and warrior heart. Roaring rajals! Aranya’s hand rose unbidden to explore her ruined cheek, examining the achingly slow creep of new flesh growing into the wound. Filling the lesion; slowly consuming the scars. Tender new flesh clothed the previously exposed bone, only thinly as yet, the wound was unquestionably on the mend. Perhaps by plumbing her healing powers, her oath-declared husband had snatched a miracle out of the darkest stronghold of hate and despite, and in so doing had reignited hope’s flame in her heart. Leopard. A dark, beautiful flame of a man wrapped in the innocence of sleep. The power of his Dragon form more than hinted at in the mounded muscles of his shoulders and arms …
Aranya dried the scarred corner of her mouth with a stifled giggle. “Drooling is so unbecoming in a Princess of Immadia.”
With that, she turned to Hualiama’s lore scrolls, and began to read.
Questions swam languidly through her brain like Dragons gliding upon thermals with stately grandeur. Why could she not heal herself, yet the exquisite expression of Ardan’s wish had touched this wound – and no other – with uncanny effect? Why had Hualiama not written about these most profound issues? She spoke neither of the fabled Word of Command, nor of the heritage of Star Dragons. The lore scrolls were silent on that point. Suspiciously silent? Perhaps. Hualiama’s relationship with her birth mother had been one measured in war, overweening greed and ultimately death, as related in the annals of the Dragonfriend. Izariela’s fate was a living death, framed in a darkness of not knowing, of loss yet not-quite-loss. Hers was a life arrested on the cusp of eternity.
Her gnarled fingers cramped painfully upon the scroll, until Aranya feared to tear the vellum. She forced herself to unclench her clawed digits, to roll up the tale of Hualiama’s rescue of Grandion from the lair of Shinzen in the East, and to place the warm scroll within the folds of her night shift. She would read more later.
Rising, she belted the soft turquoise garment purposefully at her waist, and padded barefoot to the arched doorway.
Upon the supplest breath of magic, she departed.
For hours, Aranya roamed the hallways of the Land Dragon behemoth who carried the better part of a nation upon her back. Sore wounded, Yiisuriel would survive. Yet she was elderly for one of her kind, and others of the deepest-dwelling Dragonkind had older memories still, stored in a kind of communal mind archive accessible to all members of their subspecies. Some remembered the days when the terrible paw of Dramagon smote the Island-World with fire and fury; some had even confirmed the legend of Amaryllion Fireborn, the shell brother of Fra’anior who had lived thousands of years beneath Ha’athior Island – her mother’s birthplace!
Enigma within mystery within … life itself.
The Shapeshifter Princess pressed on with her jaw set and her hands clasped behind her back, pleased to examine her readiness for the mission to the Suald-dak-Doon and to find it undaunted, her mettle strengthened by the forges of battle and failure, and her commitment adamantine. The Thoralians would know the measure of her vengeance. They would combust before the purity of a Star Dragoness’ fires. He had made a mistake, infecting her with the Shapeshifter pox yet letting her live, for while she yet drew breath, she would learn and struggle and dance and grow until she found a way to excise his evil from her Island-World!
Grand dreams juxtaposed with grim reality.
At length, Aranya’s footsteps echoed in the tunnel to the surface, to the peak where it was said Hualiama had been Reaved by the Dragon Haters, and had died only to be reborn as a Star Dragoness. Were the scrolls accurate on that point? Or had the fire always burned within her, as it did within her niece? And why a fire distinct from that of all other Dragonkind, a starlight fire that was as unprecedented as it was esoteric?
Dawn had not yet begun to glimmer in the East, where the elusive blue star for which Hualiama was famously named shone in the tales, so Aranya slowly swivelled from that horizon to scan the sweeping, intricate traceries of starlight overhead. Dragons had come from the stars. Perhaps they still existed out there, watching their tiny, distant, unimaginably different cousins sporting and living and warring and dying in an almighty impact crater that, though it scarred the face of their Island-World like her own cratered
cheek, must surely appear tinier than any grain of sand to their sight. Somewhere, somehow, in a time before knowing and under deadly threat, the Dragonkind had found no better alternative than to launch their precious egglings across the void between the stars.
Was she such as one of those, shining above? Drawn from one? A precious – well, what did one call the child of a star? Twinkle? Minitwinkle? Aranya giggled quietly as Zip’s dream-sleepy thought filtered up to her awareness. Gleam? Sparkle? Mellow, rippling streams of light poured across incandescent portals, the awakening of dawn. Each drop of starlight infused with life, the verimost essence of her being. A heritage she might never know.
So profound was her yearning, she groaned against her gritted teeth, I wish … how I wish …
A heart wished beyond imagination, for what she did not know.
/O stardrop! Precious … peril …/
Her neck twizzled about so fast, the Immadian Princess tweaked a shoulder muscle. Ouch! Who spoke?
The silence was immense.
At length, Aranya sighed. Disappointment. Her overactive imagination, no doubt, or an echo of these arcane powers swilling about her insides. Sometimes she longed for simplicity and a return to innocence – yet she could never allow that. Too much rested upon her shoulders. She must continue.
Stardrop? What an odd word choice. That wisp of sound had not been any voice she knew. It was definitely a male voice – indistinct, as if emanating from an incalculable distance, and its mysterious inflections were entirely unfamiliar to her ken, yet it triggered a memory of a voice of similar timbre. The accent she recalled had been far closer in every respect to Gangurtharr’s pronounced Wyldaroon burr. When had that been? Neither voice had belonged to Izariela, nor Hualiama. Intriguing! Turning rather more gingerly than before to face the West, Aranya reached out with her Dragon senses on their highest alert. The first voice was mystical, the second, tangible. She had been training in sensory techniques with the Lost Isles Air Breathers the better to detect Thoralian’s nefarious doings, but here was a better application, she wanted to propose. The memory was of a mysterious feminine presence she had … she had once called to out of her Storm! Aye! That was the detail which had eluded her at first.
Excitedly, she reached afar. Westward. Past the Straits and deep into the territory through which she had passed in a welter of trepidation and vengeful focus upon the Thoralians’ doings. There. As she attempted to hone the precise trajectory of her farsight, Aranya sensed part of the immense consciousness of Yiisuriel responding to her instinctively expressed needs. The great Air Breather’s mind was her bulwark, strength and mentor. Wakening immediately, Yiisuriel showed her how not to overreach, how to separate out that elusive psychic scent trace from the myriad fascinations the floating Isles of Herimor had to offer. She bypassed great rafts of sleeping Dragonkind and the profound, redolent life traces left by the unnamed denizens of the deeps, her cognizance awakening to the immense play of life forces across the leagues, their fires like delicate stars glistening in the sable folds of Islands, hidden in cracks and fumaroles and soaring, aye, way above the upper clouds in those ethereal Wisp Dragons, undulating like the most delicate silken cloth of Helyon.
They rippled to the slightest nuances in the aether.
More sensitive than a spiderweb.
Entranced, Aranya observed the play of the delicate, insubstantial threads of their magic. As thin as gossamer, yet as strong as the binding forces of life itself. That was the nature of the sensitivity she required. That presence was coy, apparently not amenable to persuasion. It seemed to shift and morph the more closely she tried to focus upon it. Was this the one she had imagined speaking? Or another voice altogether?
Aranya communed with Yiisuriel, and tried again, with the air of sneaking a sidelong glance. Looking, but not looking. Deploying her softest touch, as if her questions were mere breaths whispered across innumerable leagues. Intelligent, certainly. Feminine? Aye, but she could discern little else.
At some considerable length, she snorted, She’s tricky, noble Yiisuriel!
A whimsical mite indeed, the leviathan agreed so equably that the Immadian sensed a jest aimed in her direction.
She chuckled dutifully. Indeed. I … I think I might better try to inveigle her, Yiisuriel.
How?
By planting a suggestion that when she dreams, she might call upon me in her hour of need. That way – her power is so peculiar, like one of those multiphasic shields Hualiama’s writings describe. I cannot see how I could directly contact her psyche otherwise. It’s weirdly … inchoate. As slippery as a terrace lake trout.
Or a chaotic manifestation, the Air Breather rumbled contentedly, adding her own nuances to Aranya’s insight. A most excellent postulation, little one. Worthy of the Daughter of Onyx.
Aranya shivered at the compliment, and then shivered again in annoyance at her reaction. After several minutes of further discussion, she laid her bait. A hint. Perhaps a nudge of the subconscious which might result in that peculiar – well, most probably Shapeshifter presence – dreaming of a Star Dragoness. The only aspect of this interaction she truly understood, was that a similar inkling had led her to the Shadow Dragon of the Western Isles. How her life had changed since! How long ago that straightforward military campaign seemed now.
Oh Fra’anior, protect her father in his endeavours, and her mother in her undying sleep in the tomb behind Immadia’s palace …
Could it be that the Thoralians purposed to return to the Rift in order to steal further powers from the Ancient Dragon Infurion, as Fra’anior had suggested?
As their linked minds focussed on the matter of the Thoralian triplicate, Aranya and Yiisuriel stiffened simultaneously – the Shapeshifter physically, and the Air Breather mentally. They should have been focussing their attention much closer to home. They should have known, by some unthinkable miracle, that the Yellow-White Shapeshifters would have survived to fight another day. While they had been reaching to the farthest Isles in pursuit of intriguing wisps of fire life, they had contrived to ignore the mountain practically slapping them in the collective nose.
The Thoralians were rising. They had the First Egg.
Chapter 4: O Exalted Egg
DRAGON Ardan stared to his starboard flank, as grim-lipped as a living granite boulder, and thundered a Western Isles execration he sincerely hoped his Rider would not understand.
“The tone’s clear enough,” said Aranya, casually eavesdropping on his mood.
“Sorry,” he snarled.
Her tiny hand patted the scales beside his spine. Despite the thickness of his Dragon armour, he felt her touch keenly. “All our training for that deep dive, Ardan …”
“Whoosh beyond the Moons,” he replied, illustrating with an upswept wingtip.
“Replaced by whooshy excesses of magic?”
“A joke, beloved?” he snorted, playfulness tempered with trepidation. Both knew what this meant. Conflict. Barely a lull; never a day without experiencing either the consequences of battle or the prospect of more. Even he, a warrior born, grew jaded. When would it end? They were so weary.
“A sense of humour, beloved?” came the instantaneous riposte.
“Ha, would you imagine that?”
Every masculine sense, every Dragon or Human reaction within him, had felt hyper-sensitised to all that was Aranya – with or without her direct presence – since she had redrawn his draconic soul in that beautiful yet staggering irruption of what, by all magical science known to the Lost Islands communal mind, was meant to be real, plausible and even possible. Magic could not be created from nothing, they claimed. Aranya begged to differ. Causality must be grounded, they muttered. Aranya graciously swooped past that constraint without so much as blinking. A Shapeshifter’s second-soul must be demonstrably present before it could be embodied. Aarrrgghh … obviously, the draconic wisdom of aeons was as insubstantial as a breeze she wrapped about her incomparable little talons.
“Pollen-fluff
to the Princess of Northern Storms,” he growled.
Melodious, husky laughter played over his senses, the melody of Immadia marred by the blighted pathways of her lungs and throat. Even the timbre of her voice had changed. Ardan grinned, yet a pang clenched within his belly, beneath the double-armoured muscular diaphragm that protected the lower lung-set. This marred woman faced her fate with grace, but his anger seethed like Fra’anior’s own caldera, depthless and unchanging.
His dark, lidded gaze turned to the West. To the Thoralians’ rising.
He could not yet see the trio of Yellow-White Shapeshifters, but the import of their revival was clear. Tendrils of eerie green fire leached upward from a broadly oval area of Cloudlands perhaps a league in diameter, spreading like wicked tongues both through the dense grey cloud layers out there and lapping hungrily toward the sky. Ardan suppressed an urge to start scratching his wingpits like a flea-ridden feline. His spine spikes prickled irately at the indignity implicit in his thoughts. If this was the First Egg’s power, it was fey. Had the Thoralians already corrupted their prize?
The region his Dragon-senses placed as lying immediately above the Suald-dak-Doon was beginning to stir and bubble like an ill-tended cauldron filled with a toxic brew of fate. Gaseous pockets burst randomly through the viscid air, roiling and popping and sparking with flashes of torpid lightning as though the magical power seething from the Egg changed the very atmosphere.
Inanely, his mind seemed set upon trying to place the colour of that phenomenon. He said, What do we call that colour – sickly moss-green? Tarnished brass, or –
Aranya grated, What has he done?
Her raw exhalation perfectly matched his response. All around they sensed the Air Breathers starting to react to avalanches of irksome, disruptive magic rolling against their flanks leagues beneath the watching Lesser Dragons; the great outcry in the communal mind as the alarm protocols triggered fear-fight responses especially amongst the Dragonkind. Yet despite the widespread disturbance, the initial clamour quickly settled as first Aranya and then Yiisuriel took charge, examining the vectors of danger. Information seemed to sift and flow about his awareness as Ardan took in the initial conclusions. No immediate danger. Disturbance, aye, and a type of magic unfamiliar to these immense Land Dragons, but unless this was merely a prelude to the Thoralians’ attack, the discomfort they felt would remain just that – discomfort. Still, the communal mind began to slam up barriers and gather its depleted resources, while the fatigued Dragonwings assembled in the great hangers.