Beautiful Fury

by Marc Secchia

  Zip chirped back.

  * * * *

  She’s speaking Ancient Southern? Aranya guessed. What’s she saying, Zip?

  YOU HAVE HER? Infurion boomed.

  The Amethyst Dragoness glanced up from her inner world to regard the self-proclaimed Lord of the Earthen Fires. Do you travel aloft, Great One? What of the Rift?

  Thou shalt Balance this mine demesne for the good of all, Aranya. That task shall fall to thee and thine.

  To me? She failed to understand Infurion’s motives.

  Aye. Only mine legacy shall remain. Now, o daughter of Fra’anior, all that I have promised I have delivered thee, despite a lamentable lack of reciprocation. Thou hast thine key and when the Egg shalt crack, this Academy shalt at last be thine – and know this, o Star Dragoness: Mine life would be forfeit shouldst I allow Fra’anior’s precious stardrop to be subsumed by this vile triplicate. I cannot allow it. Now, in full cognizance of mine will in this matter, wilt thou not stand down?

  The Princess hesitated. Fatally.

  UNGRATEFUL HATCHLING! BE BANISHED FROM MINE SIGHT!

  * * * *

  Softly cajoling, Zuziana spoke to the Pygmy girl. Pip was confused. She did not understand where the danger was or what had happened. Her mental processes seemed fragmented and sluggish. The girl kept wanting to lapse back into sleep, or hibernation – perfectly understandable after one hundred and fifty years or so, Zip supposed. There would be mental degradation. She kept chirping, ‘Silver? Where’s silver?’ Zip had no idea what she meant. She was just grateful the girl was still alive. That gave them a slim but definite chance.

  Come join us family-friends, she said, wincing at her poor enunciation.

  Cannot-cannot – magic-impossible, slurred Pip.

  Impossible? Had she been properly alive, Zip knew her heart would be pounding its way out of her chest with excitement.

  Construct – this? Why … spirit-girl? puzzled the Pygmy.

  I’m sort of … stuck here, inside a Princess.

  Prisoner?

  N –

  Infurion’s roar thundered over them, drowning out her reply. Ardan bellowed and Aranya yelled orders … her best friend’s magic flowered to sweep them away, again at an unbelievable speed. The Amethyst had deployed her slingshot magic. Zip observed events unfolding simultaneously with the superhuman clarity she had experienced that fateful day when Aranya had saved her and her babies from being daimonised.

  She saw the way Pip had trapped herself within the Egg.

  She saw the jaw-dropping vastness of Infurion’s many paws lashing toward them in an attempt to protect the Star Dragoness from – so he claimed – a terrible fate. Ardan’s powers gathered like a seething lake of darkness.

  She saw that there was no answer save one.

  With a sob, Zuziana prepared herself. Ri’arion, I’m so sorry.

  Her life for all.

  * * * *

  Aranya only heard Zip’s trailing ‘sorry’ as Infurion launched a devastating attack. The Ancient Dragon’s fiery, black-rimmed paws seemed to erupt from everywhere at once, flying toward her and even overlapping along every conceivable vector. She reacted instantaneously, reeling in her slingshot line in an attempt to fling herself and her Riders up and over a seething armada of paws.

  Somewhere already far below her, Ri’arion howled, Zuziana!

  KAABOOM!!

  A sonic shock rattled her bones. Zip? Zip!

  Ardan attempted to Shadow, but Infurion’s disruptive attack somehow negated his magic just as the Chrysolitic dragonets had held him. She had a millisecond to wonder how the Ancient Dragon possessed that particular knowledge when Ardan and his Riders all cried out together as Infurion swept them away like specks of chaff trapped in the pyre of his wrath. The conflagration did not so much detonate against them as behind the group, she suspected, supplying a bone-jarring flash of acceleration that usurped the bounds of any physical laws she knew.

  In a blink, Ardan, Asturbar, Ri’arion and even Leandrial vanished beyond the ambit of her perception – struck back the way they had come, she realised, so flat and fast that they would smash against the mountains a hundred leagues away.

  Her fate was not so.

  Aranya blinked as she saw Zip now framed against that white space of inner perception, while at the same instant a hard nub of a body crashed against her chest. She clutched the gift instinctively, her heart zinging toward the very stars as she cried, Zip, you’re alive – not – oh no!

  She held a girl even smaller than the diminutive Remoyan.

  Hope, crushed.

  Then she saw another of Infurion’s paws, its fiery thousand-foot talons curving with vindictive intent above the lifeline that connected her with the First Egg. She stretched a despairing forepaw toward the prize, just a couple of leagues away. So close, she could at last taste the wash of its magic even here in Infurion’s realm. Zip where are you? Don’t, Infurion! Nooooo …

  The white line ignited with Infurion’s Earthen Fires. Faster than the flap of a hummingbird’s wings, she sensed many, many layers of complex magic drawing together about her body, trapping her more surely than any ant beneath a Dragon’s paw. With a devious smile, the majestic Ancient Dragon boomed, Fly well and live long down below, o Star Dragoness. No power of thine can stop me now, for I intend to live forever!

  His eye fires flared triumphantly.

  Aranya could not breathe for horror. All that escaped her twisting throat was a rasp. Traitor!

  His paw flicked them away.

  * * * *

  Once, gazing over her broken Island-World, Aranya of Immadia had wept inconsolably. Now her grief turned to fire. Incandescent fire.

  Cocooned in Infurion’s gravity- and friction-defying ovoid of Earthen Fires magic, which protected them as surely as it held them prisoner, Aranya clasped her sister, Sapphire, Pip and the dragonets to her bosom, and watched the Islands fly by to the tune of a mind-numbing roaring of wind without that demonstrated the velocity they achieved. She waited.

  For Zip’s sacrifice, she had only admiration.

  From the suns’ position seen through the shifting veils of anathematic magic, like sooty strands juxtaposed against the white fires threads she had come to understand represented magic, the Amethyst Dragoness knew they soared Northward on a heading that approximated a line drawn between the Rift and Jeradia Island, ending at Fra’anior Cluster. Doubtless this was a planned gesture. The traitor Infurion, in hot pursuit of the ultimate prize, delivered Fra’anior’s daughter to his symbolic doorstep, safe and sound. Or did Infurion indeed believe he was doing right by Fra’anior’s will? Could his concluding statement be interpreted another way – perhaps the thinking was that he destroyed the Thoralians, subsumed their powers, birthed the Egg safely and lived forever? No. Infurion saw her power opposed to his, and she stood with Fra’anior.

  His actions said: interfere one jot more, pesky Star Dragoness, and we shall become mortal enemies. He saw his purposes as greater than theirs even as the suns shone brighter than the faraway stars.

  Iridiana whispered, We’ve left the Rift behind, Aranya?

  Aye, we’re already hundreds of leagues beyond its northernmost border. Are you alright, Nyahi? The Rift Storm –

  I’m injured in some way I don’t quite understand, said the Chaos Shifter. Magically, I think.

  I’ll try to help you –

  Thanks.

  – return to your naturally anarchic state of being.

  Iridiana chuckled appreciatively. So, your invisible friend swapped with the Pygmy?

  Aye. Aranya eyed her unconscious passenger with a jaundiced eye. Despite knowing Zip’s purpose, she still felt the substitution left her the poorer. Zip sent a sort of flash of insight, last I could detect, anyways. Without a Word of Command being physically spoken from without the Egg – which we did not know anyway – there was only one way to satisfy the magical laws governing the constructs Pip had created to protect herself and the Academy. Seein
g Infurion’s behaviour, she exchanged herself and her egglings for Pip, in the hope that the Pygmy girl could return for the Egg – oh, Iridiana! She sacrificed herself for them all. For the entire Academy, and for our future.

  How brave is she? Iridiana whispered, sounding awed.

  She’s quality.

  What Zippy say, Ari? Sapphire piped.

  She sighed heavily. She said, ‘It’s one life for thousands, Aranyi. You’d do the same. Come find us, alright? Don’t dilly-dally.’

  Dilly-dally? What does that mean?

  Delay, Nyahi. Well, it’s sort of four lives for forty or fifty thousand, if we’re bothering to keep score …

  What did it matter? How could she be comforted now, even if it was by a sister masquerading as a tasteful piece of jewellery that managed to move in a comforting, hide-stroking way to express her empathy? Or when Iridiana, in a blatant attempt at cheering her up, timorously suggested that Zip would tell her not to be morbid?

  Aranya suppressed a wild urge to slap her sister.

  Failure no longer rankled. It nauseated her. She was past being done with fiasco and disaster and malfunction! And here she sailed along like an overgrown purple prekki-fruit with wings waiting for Infurion’s insidious magic to relent and release them from this unbreakable prison before they ended up somewhere North of Immadia. Worse, before they arrived at Fra’anior Cluster and she had to explain to King Beran, Nak and Oyda, and worst of all, her precious Aunt Va’assia, how thoroughly she had been duped and then paw-slapped by the last Ancient Dragon on their planet as he absconded with the fate of the Island-World in his paws.

  Maybe.

  Had Beran’s drilling over the years been for nought? Take stock, Princess. Think! They were hurtling toward daddy dearest at a ridiculous clip, and that meant toward the famous Dragon Library, too. Her eyes narrowed dangerously. Had Fra’anior seen this betrayal coming? It seemed too fine a coincidence that Infurion would smack her like an errant hatchling in the precise direction of her shell grandfather’s enigmatic parting clue. Nak and Oyda knew the Pygmy girl. She must prepare Pip for the distress, however, of seeing the famous Dragon Rider pair a hundred and fifty summers older than she would remember them.

  Usefully, she was alive and in possession of a healthy proportion of her wits. Allegedly. She had Iridiana, Pip, Sapphire and a clutch of dragonets by way of allies. Her best guess was that the men and Leandrial were several thousand leagues away, stuck on the far side of the Rift. Flexing her neck until she looked backward over her shoulder, Aranya sucked in a breath. A black line rose into the sky above the Rift, which had been reduced to a thick black smudge on the rearward horizon, pointing like an accusing finger at … nothing? No, at the place where the Mystic Moon would be in a few days’ or perhaps several weeks’ time, depending on how long the journey might take. There was still time. Not much, but there had to be a window of opportunity if they could work out a strategy.

  A strategy that actually worked for a change, her inner Human suggested with lashings of extra snark. Zuziana would have declared it was time for an all-girls-in war.

  Her attention snapped to the Iridium-diamond wristlet. “Hey, lavender twinkle toes?”

  “Aranya?”

  “Can’t you just shake a little Chaos about the place?”

  The wristlet grew a tiny muzzle and sparkling eyes. “Do I hear the dulcet tones of Remoy?”

  “Unfortunately not. You hear the charming voice of your cherished sister.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  Throwing back her muzzle, Aranya chuckled heartily. There. Much better. “Right, listen up, Iridiana. Here’s a riddle. What do three girls and a clutch of brave dragonets do when an Ancient Power rises up to belt the stuffing out of them?”

  “Belt him back?”

  “Try to be serious, petal.”

  “Why do I sense that the very last answer you’d accept would be, ‘give up?’ ”

  “Ooh, nasty words! Did Asturbar teach you to swear like that?” As the bracelet broke into a somewhat forced round of giggles, Aranya said, “Aye, exactly. I am not about to bow my wings and meekly accept defeat. We need to break out, preferably in time to make our landing at Fra’anior Cluster. So, I’m thinking that if Infurion’s fires affected you so badly, we have to assume you can influence them in return, correct?”

  The bracelet pursed its very pretty and undoubtedly razor-sharp lips. The fangs were pure diamond, of course. Sharper than sharp.

  “Fine. It’s a stretch, I confess.”

  Nyahi’s brilliant fangs flashed into a smile of the sort that threatened to shorten errant fingertips should someone dare to try and stroke her. “I see now how you take after our father, the Immadian Fox, Aranya, in mastery of strategy.”

  “Er … how’s that?”

  “Do I recognise the virtuoso technique called, ‘I have no other ideas so we’ll try this one?’ ”

  Aranya gave her a mock-glare. “What say you we find a disreputable jeweller to assess your market value, Sparkles?”

  “Oh no, please let me rather battle Infurion and the Thoralians simultaneously! I’ll do anything you desire – I’m grovelling upon my knees, o iron-pawed dictator of the skies!”

  “Very good. I’m glad we have an understanding. To work, minion.”

  * * * *

  Ardan came to in a discontented tangle of legs, wings and Human body parts. He felt as if Leandrial herself had spent a night dancing upon his ribs. Something was definitely broken in there – still, why didn’t he feel worse? He was in a room that could have been anywhere in the old Lost Isles, aboard one of the Air Breathers.

  “Good morning, Ardan,” Dhazziala said cheerfully.

  He flinched. “Ouch.”

  “No, I no longer harbour romantic notions toward your person.”

  “Ouch.” He hated being read so easily.

  “Besides, with all due respect, I’ve replaced you with a far more toothsome prospect.”

  “Ouch! Enough with these insults.” She grinned. Belligerently, he said, “I’m marrying a star. Beat that if you can.”

  “I don’t intend to try,” said the First Hand, still looking as dreamy-eyed as a displaced rainbow. “Anyhow, I didn’t come to exchange pleasantries with a mere shadow. We need to talk, Ardan. Are you ready to re-enter the communal mind?”

  He checked himself over. By rights he should probably be dead. “All in all, I feel remarkably well considering we were slapped by an Ancient Dragon before flying headlong into a mountainside.”

  “You’ve Bane and Lurax to thank for saving your scrawny neck. Briefing. Receive data.”

  For a woman who had frankly speaking scared him to begin with, Dhazziala seemed in an ebullient mood. He assumed her new man must be at fault. Leaning back against his bed furs, he closed his eyes and accepted the briefing package.

  Asturbar, broken right arm. Apparently for an Azingloriax warrior, only a shattering impact could achieve that. Ri’arion was heavily bruised but otherwise fortunate. Leandrial, severely injured with multiple lacerations and broken bones, also had life-threatening internal injuries. She had dozens of healer Dragons working upon her as they spoke. Aside from that, the data summarised events as shared by Ri’arion which Ardan simply did not remember – Genholme the Metallic Fortress Dragoness had been scouting ahead, over the canyon, as the Air Breathers tried to determine what to do, when Bane and Lurax ‘felt’ Ardan’s approach. They had alerted Genholme, who in turn warned Yiisuriel, who had deployed a kinetic-psychic rescue net barely in time. Leandrial’s injuries resulted from a miscalculation relating to her overall momentum – she had struck the cliff side heavily but been caught before she tumbled away into the canyon.

  Ardan caught his breath. “They mean to sacrifice an Air Breather to bridge the canyon?”

  Dhazziala nodded, her golden face set like a graven statue. “Yes. Samgandural’s injuries are mortal given his venerable age. Air Breathers heal slowly at the best of times. His flanks will be trimmed and
adjusted before he is lowered with dignity into the place of his final rest using the Star Dragoness’ flotation techniques. He has chosen a path of great honour.”

  He could barely speak past the lump in his throat. “Aye, that he has.”

  After that, the Air Breathers planned to fill in the bridge part over the canyon using sunken Islands and ragion cement which they were already bringing through the tunnel, together with sunken Islands by the hundreds and ragions in their tens of millions. They would construct protective barriers either side of the path to try to mitigate the impact of the Rift fires and Storm Elementals. Their plan was no less ambitious than to entirely open the Rift path to commerce in the future.

  This was engineering backed by the power of thousands of Land Dragons.

  Yiisuriel’s voice intruded. So, will the Star approve of these plans, noble Ardan? Are you recovering well?

  Aye on both counts, Great One, he replied respectfully.

  Good. Then we must urgently consider how we may serve you to get aid to the Star Dragoness in time. Our dealings with the treacherous Infurion are far from done and I, for one, trust in a Dragoness’ cunning – particularly that one!

  Indeed, he laughed, especially at the double meaning explicit in her statement. I suspect Aranya will require aid at Jeradia when she returns in triumph with the Academy in tow, the Thoralians beaten, Infurion thwarted and the Egg’s mighty denizen succoured.

  He breathed out shallowly, touching his ribs. Laughing hurt. Was it the bone or his sternum which had been injured?

  She chortled, What could be simpler?

  Yiisuriel, your humour is sounding positively Human these days.

  Huh. Always something to learn, even from you hasty ones. She added, I trust you noted the data regarding Aranya’s trajectory and condition?

  Aye. I am as relieved by that news as I am staggered by Infurion’s deviousness. We should have known all along that he played solo upon his own drum, as we’d say in the Western Isles. Everything of his dealings with us was couched so as to frame the possibility of this course-reversal. We were foolish not to see it before.

  Perhaps. Or simply too trusting – as I was trusting of Aranya before she brought that pernicious Chaos Shifter to my very portals!