Beautiful Fury

by Marc Secchia

  “How can anyone live where it snows?” Iridiana echoed.

  “Not taking the bait,” said Aranya.

  “Oh, come on,” said her twin.

  “Very well. How can anyone decorate only in ruby? Great leaping Islands, look there! I’ve spotted Immadia!”

  “Where?” chorused her companions.

  “There! Do you see where the Cloudlands are bluest? Just beneath the long band of white where the suns-light is moving, there’s a gleaming white Island … do you see it? Right at the top.”

  “I think so, yes,” Iridiana said doubtfully.

  “It’s tiny,” said Pip.

  Taking in Aranya’s expression, the pair babbled, “But, so beautiful!” “Oh yes, disproportionately beautiful to its size.” “Couldn’t imagine a more beautiful Island.” “It positively shines, doesn’t it, Pip?” “Jewel is what I’m thinking.” “Aye, a wondrous jewel.”

  Aranya folded her paws and scowled at them. “Just you wait, you scoundrels!”

  Sapphire said, Why Ari angry?

  Ari is homesick, petal, she realised. I wish my shell mother were well again.

  The dragonet embraced her neck with her wings. Ari see. All good. Sapphire know.

  “What I like is the way that neither the Thoralians nor Infurion have bothered to turn back and swat us all the way over to Immadia,” Pip said brightly. “We must be so obvious, travelling all this way with tonnes of water, now and again dropping the odd bit of waste from orbit to splatter upon an unsuspecting head –”

  “You are truly disgusting,” Iridiana observed dutifully.

  “The point is,” Aranya said, “they just don’t care. We aren’t seen as a threat. Infurion and the Thoralians are either working together, or we’re going to see a spectacular showdown in a day or two. Infurion’s definitely catching up.”

  She pointed to where the pearlescent Egg floated serenely, almost like a miniature moon, out above nothingness. Bearing down upon it was a shadowy, soot-grey cloud at least ten times its size. Occasionally, the cloud took on the rough form of a colossal Dragon. By the calculations received via light-beam code from the astronomers the night before, they should intersect the orbit of the slow-moving Mystic Moon in just under fifty hours. They were already under its gravitational influence. The question was whether the Thoralians would reach the Moon before Infurion reached the First Egg.

  They had debated strategy until it was oozing out of their ears, Pip complained half-heartedly when Iridiana began to wonder aloud that if by identifying Pip within the First Egg, Infurion had demonstrated his ability to penetrate it too.

  Did the Moon have an atmosphere? It was very difficult to tell without some magical ocular shading trickery, but the threesome had agreed that it definitely seemed plausible. The faint haziness around the edge of the great, blindingly white sphere argued as much – but that much horiatite in one location was definitely starting to play havoc with their draconic senses.

  How could the creatures of darkness not see its glorious, enchanted radiance from without the planetary shield? Good question. Fra’anior had answers, and he was not talking.

  The closer they drew to the Mystic Moon, however, the more often the Amethyst Dragoness’ white fires perception began to play up. It started with gleaming streaks of light appearing in the corners of her vision. Then, an awareness of glowing dust particles that would not seem to fade no matter how much she rubbed her eyes. After a couple of days, Aranya was able to fine-focus her sight to behold an incredible netting seemingly made of gossamer threads of onyx upon which hung nodes that gleamed like starlight, only it was a substance or perhaps, a magical effect with no parallel in her experience. Seven distinct and slightly differentiated layers in all, Fra’anior’s shield and masterwork arched over her world and way, way out of the ambit of her sight.

  One evening they saw a meteorite cut right through the netting – the rock whistled through apparently without any disturbance whatsoever, before igniting when it struck the atmosphere and burning up in a brilliant smear of light.

  Often, Aranya’s thoughts turned to the lacework lustre of stars all around them, best viewed when the suns dipped behind their world. There had to be ten thousand times more stars than ever she had imagined, hanging like veils of hard-edged diamonds embedded in the blackest folds of velvet; waterfalls and whorls and webs of stars, some with curling spiral arms and other formations like clouds or wings of ruby and chalcedony dust – yet why, when she looked at the glory of all these, did she sense nothing of the life-affirming warmth she had heard in that voice? Did these stars burn, yet existed without life?

  Then, what did it mean to be a star?

  * * * *

  When Casitha did at last stir, it was to great confusion but little apparent pain. She could not string two coherent words together. She lolled and moaned and promptly fell unconscious once more.

  Zuziana persisted. Gently.

  When she had finally coaxed the girl awake a second time, she tried to wheedle the name of a healer out of her. Casitha’s incomprehension might have been funny on another occasion, but on the fortieth try or thereabouts, she managed to gurgle, “Yay … unh.”

  “Yaethi?”

  She might have nodded, or it might just have been her slipping back into unconsciousness.

  So much for the strength of Remoyans.

  Retracing her steps to the Helyon Islander, Zip regarded her with greater sympathy than before. She hoped that Pip had been useful to Aranya – her friend would have set the girl back on her feet in no time, to be sure. Right. She had oodles of patience and noodles for brains. She had seen Aranya strengthening her friends dozens of times. Could she not manage that much?

  Yaethi stirred pleasingly quickly compared to Casitha. “Hmm? Wash – um, schmorn-ug?” she just about managed.

  Zip was getting rather good at addled-brains speech. “Not quite morning,” she said cheerfully. “Strength to you, petal. Ready?”

  To her horror, she promptly zapped Yaethi with her Azure electric power! With a loud buzzing noise, the girl flopped about like a live trout tossed into a heated saucepan. The Princess of Remoy wailed something very un-princess-like at herself. Prize ralti sheep!

  Careless of the lightning spitting from the girl’s fingers and away from the white-blonde hair now splayed out in an audibly crackling shock from beneath her conservative headscarf, Zip leaped to her aid. “Oh, flying ralti sheep, I didn’t mean – I’m sorry! Come on, Yaethi. Don’t die on me just yet. I’m not a healer. Obviously. I guess you felt that?”

  “Ffffaaa …” moaned the girl. She was smoking from her ears!

  “Look, I’m sorry I electrocuted you. I need your help and I guess I overdid … whatever I did. I’m actually a friend.” A friend who was prattling like a rabid parakeet and not actually helping one jot. “Reversal! Aye. I’ll pull the electricity back into myself like this, and then strengthen you like … well, I’m not totally sure how, but hopefully this should help?”

  Not frying the girl in her own juices was a good result.

  “You’re lucky,” slurred a voice behind her. A dagger dropped over her shoulder.

  Thump. “Yeow!”

  That was how Yaethi awoke, bottom of the pile beneath Zuziana and an insensible Casitha. Ice-blue eyes snapped open. “Why are you lying on top of me?”

  Zip was holding the back of her head where Casitha had inadvertently head-butted her. “Not a whole heap of good, clearly,” she groaned. The tang of blood filled her mouth. Bitten through her tongue, too. Perfect. “Uh, Islands’ sakes … you seem remarkably alert for someone I just tried to electrocute.”

  “Electro – what? Am I dreaming? Gently with Casitha there! Who are you?” Yaethi demanded in a loud, bossy voice. “And where on the Islands are we?”

  Casitha moaned, “Atha … noth … athatthin …”

  “Not an assassin. See?”

  “Seems we’re both alive, no thanks to you!” Yaethi continued to rant, “Get o
ff me. I can do without your kind of help. Actually, once you’ve climbed off me, you psychotic figment of Re’akka’s diseased imagination, you can use your smutty mouth – and nothing else – to start explaining what in the volcanic hells is going on here!”

  Twisting about carefully, Zip managed to manoeuvre her fellow Remoyan to the ground without dropping her head on the ground, say, or causing further injury. Yaethi sat up slowly, feeling her limbs with great suspicion before she began to take in the scene around her. As a Helyon Islander she was naturally pale, but in a second she looked as if she had been bleached, her pallor matched only by the extraordinary platinum blonde of her hair and eyelashes.

  “Whaa … oh, mercy! Fra’anior have mercy …”

  Zip waved a hand helplessly. “This is what I need you for. Apparently you’re a healer, and we have a whole battlefield of troubles here. I’m not very good at this, but I do know where we –”

  Yaethi said, “Inside the Egg? We’re still inside?”

  “Aye.”

  “Pip sent you?”

  “I took her place.”

  “You …” Yaethi’s pretty features scrunched up as she clearly tried to solve a few mental equations. “I had best … apologise. Aye. Sorry. Excuse me – I never – I don’t know what came over me, speaking like that. Sorry ten times over. So, how many weeks has it been since the battle?”

  The Remoyan Princess exhaled. “Just stay seated for this bit, alright?”

  * * * *

  When they were not discussing ways of stopping unstoppable tyrants, Pip, Aranya, Iridiana and the seven dragonets played in the strangely weightless environment, ate a little, or slept. From being chary and openly discomfited at first, the Chrysolitic dragonets had now decided that this place spelled playtime in the best possible way. Only the water they carried provided enough resistance to fly within as they were used to. The rest was a madhouse of drifting, flipping, squealing collisions, running over the larger Dragoness’ scales, or playing a dragonet version of hide-and-seek perhaps better called ‘hide and ambush.’ Cute? Aye. Annoying? Eventually!

  After a few initial hiccoughs with producing oxygen and removing waste, Auli-Ambar’s scientific prowess provided easily maintainable solutions that kept the companions alive and breathing hundreds of leagues up in orbit. They were hungry, but alive.

  They conversed incessantly.

  When they set out, the Egg had been a shining point of light. Now it was a small Moon, an oval a quarter-mile diameter across its midsection and half as long again.

  “Curious,” said Iridiana, comparing mental notes with Aranya. “It’s grown, hasn’t it?”

  “Aye.”

  Pip drawled, “When you say ‘aye’ like that, you sound like a pirate. Oh, but your father was a royal buccaneer for a while, wasn’t he?”

  Aranya wrinkled her nose at the Pygmy Dragoness. “Says the talon-sized tyrant? Nak warned us about your predication for mischief-stirring. Now, what do you make of those liquid meriatonium bonds the Thoralians are using to lasso the Egg? Do you think they plan to use something like that power to capture the hatchling and then daimonize its mind?”

  All eyes turned to the Egg, coursing away onto what they recognised as a low orbit of the Mystic Moon. The suns were lowering behind the Moon’s gleaming flank to their left paws, causing a shadow to move across its face. From this distance the companions could see many pockmarks and lengthy scars as though the Moon had come under attack at some point, but if there had been meteorite strikes in the past, they could see no sign of other types of rock. All was gleaming pearl, brilliant on the suns-side and softly agleam where night had begun to fall. Aranya estimated that they were a mere eighty leagues behind the First Egg now, moving at an unsettling speed which appeared to increase exponentially the closer they approached the surface at their low, skimming angle. The horizon seemed alarmingly close due to Mystic’s relatively small size.

  Where would Dramagon’s Bequest be hidden? The Moon’s surface grew nearer and nearer, close enough to observe that what had appeared homogenous before was by no means so; deep cracks spidered between mountainous deposits of nacreous horiatite crystal, some as large as Islands. Torrents of lustrous magical energy seethed between the pellucid crystal behemoths; Aranya was certain she saw life-forms sporting in those rivers, like quicksilver fish playing in turbulent mountain streams, but their height made it difficult to ascertain for certain. Here and there, volcanoes or fumaroles spat white and golden lava in mighty fountains across the scorching landscape.

  Had she imagined this much magic must be inert? Not so!

  “There’s a touch of atmosphere slowing us down now,” Iridiana noted.

  Aranya said, “I think we’re starting to pick up on oxygen again, but there’s a few other nasty rare gases out there. Probably poisonous to Humans at least, if not to Dragons. Let’s keep the vacuum shield tight for the time being.”

  “And, Infurion’s attacking the First Egg,” Pip added matter-of-factly.

  “What?” The twins’ identical Dragoness necks snapped about.

  Black bolts of flame shaped like long grappling hooks spurted from the shadowy presence of the pursuing Dragon, seeming to home in on the Egg with a languid lack of care. In reality, the strikes were precise; timed and accurate. Lightning jagged away from the Egg in response. A mere fraction of a second after striking, the grapnels appeared to be enveloped in a seething terrace lake of white and golden flame as the Egg’s natural defences retaliated. Searing flashes of light erupted across the nearby surface of the Mystic Moon in response.

  Even Dragons had to shield their eyes from the ferocious glare as the mêlée rolled on. It was impossible to tell which of the parties – perhaps all of them – were trying to draw power from the Egg or from the Moon itself, but even with the help of nictitating membranes and sight filters, the conflagration was enough to give them suns-spots. Infurion pounded his way along with the obtuseness of purpose they expected of one who would not contemplate failure against those he must see as no better than fleas. White lightning sheeted off his burning black presence, sparking miles between him and the egg and leagues between him and the surface, but he tracked the Egg like a juggernaut, renewing himself from the inside in consecutive waves of jarring Earthen Fires. The Thoralians struck with reaming blasts of fire sourced from the First Egg and psychic tremors that passed right through the Ancient Dragon and washed up against their shield bubble. Sapphire and her brood shrieked and dived for Aranya’s paw. She held them close, soothing.

  I won’t let them have you. Her eyes narrowed. Now comes the fall of the Thoralians.

  Infurion had shown them how to speak to Pip before, even inside the Egg. Could she use a similar technique to find Zip? Could she call to the Ancient Dragon and help a baby understand what manner of danger he or she faced now?

  * * * *

  Facing Master Kassik, Silver, Casitha and Yaethi, Zuziana yelled, “You clutch of first class, limp-pawed lumpwits! Why won’t you listen to me? I don’t care what you think is possible or impossible. I am telling you we are in orbit. The crashing and thrashing out there is most likely –” she yelped as a particularly violent detonation staggered her.

  “You’re pregnant,” Casitha said with concern. “Please calm down.”

  “This is my calm!”

  Yaethi said, “Silver, don’t you think –”

  “I think she stole Pip! There’s a potent stench of glamour about this creature, I tell you,” he insisted, glazed of eye but somehow up on his paws.

  Zip put her hands her hips. “Do I need to electrocute you too, Mister? Might help your brain actually start working.”

  “See? She’s completely lost the Isle of Sanity,” rumbled Kassik, curving a protective paw about Casitha. “Keep your distance, beloved. This one’s dangerous.”

  She growled, “I ruddy wish I had the ruddy Pygmy up my ruddy sleeve!” Kapoof! The Azure Dragoness added, “Or hidden in my hide! I am not feral, I am not egg-crazed
, but I am mad, you stupid, foolish men! Focus on what I’m saying.”

  “Shapeshifters, not men,” Kassik pointed out.

  That was it. Leaping off the ground, the Azure tried to seize Kassik by his rather enormous nostrils. Hibernation-slow as he was, the Brown still managed to jerk his head up and away, and his huge paws shovelled the much smaller Dragoness inadvertently down toward his hind legs as he reared. Frustration boiled over. Zip zapped him squarely – ahem – well, right in his most sensitive parts. Worse, she was far too angry to hold back.

  AAHHHOOO!! howled the immense Brown, hitting an unlikely soprano note at ear splitting volume.

  “Holy Fra’anior!” Yaethi winced.

  Silver’s eyes bulged as Kassik danced about, alternately holding and blowing upon his injury to cool it. The Silver Shapeshifter took several backward steps as Zuziana turned a severely jaundiced eye in his direction. “Never. Spite. A. Dragoness.”

  “Especially not a pregnant one,” Casitha agreed.

  Kassik wheezed, “If you weren’t pregnant, so help me …” but the way his eyes watered rather spoiled his threat.

  “Are we paying attention now?” Zip cooed.

  Zip … Zip-Zap!

  Aranya! She turned to the surprised foursome. “Aranya’s the Star Dragoness I told you about.”

  “I see how you earned your nickname,” said Silver, who for reasons best known to him seemed keen to hide behind Yaethi at this point. The girl clucked in annoyance as he jostled her from behind.

  Aranya, put Pip on, please.

  They all listened intently; all feet and paws braced as the ground trembled at another tremendous detonation outside of the eggshell.

  … attack … Inf – old …

  “That’s not Pip,” Kassik interjected weakly. “Although, if this is some kind of revenge –”

  “Hush, my flame,” said Casitha, with a firm headshake. “Let speech follow knowledge.” Zip nodded approvingly. Definitely a backbone in that one!