by Marc Secchia
Star, Chaos, Onyx and Azure were the four Dragonesses who flung themselves into the abyss in pursuit of Zankaradia the Corundum Red.
Chapter 33: Arise, O Star!
ZUZIANA OF REMOY knew that she had to cast off the nagging suspicion that she was the perennial spare Dragoness. She was not superfluous. Aranya wanted her here. She had been her best friend right from the start, when they had tried to beat each other bloody and instead fallen into the most incredible friendship she could ever have imagined. Stars. Legendary Dragonesses! And one little Azure.
What could she do?
Call Zankaradia! Aranya’s warm mental voice intruded upon her thoughts. The Azure’s fires flushed heatedly. Had she been listening? I … to do what?
I don’t know. Get her attention. Teach her to use her fangs.
She doesn’t have any.
Huh?
Zip tried to recall what she had observed. She has – very sharp tooth ridges, I think you’d say. They’re forked like your old daggers, about fifty feet long and several hundred feet deep into her muzzle …
Tell her to use them!
Iridiana gestured with understandable frustration. Battle? There?
Aranya said, We’ve always chatted our way through battles.
You chatted enemies to death?
I suppose! The Amethyst growled, Join with me. If we can’t reverse direction, we need to throw enough down into that hole that we can buoy Zankaradia up. NOW!
The Dragonesses each supplied their characteristic powers – the strength of Onyx, the subtlety of Azure, the reality-usurping guile of Chaos, and the purity of starlight – as they funnelled a tornado of churning power ahead of their flight. Ahead, Zankaradia snapped alternately at Infurion and one of the Thoralians, who had gripped onto her back and was now working his way up to the skull, perhaps aiming to try to penetrate her brain by physical means. He dodged the gleaming barbels as she shook her ruff angrily, trying to dislodge him. Meantime, her mystic golden breath wafted over Infurion and the other Thoralian, who were embroiled in a life-or-death battle below her, between her coils. Her breath vaporised large patches of the Earthen Fires Dragon as they watched. That helped Thoralian. He had changed tactics and was now attacking Infurion’s mind with his daimonising power.
Perhaps sensing Infurion’s weakness, Zankaradia struck out at the entangled Thoralian. Her unique teeth snapped off one of his hind paws!
“We can’t hit that one on her back!” Pip shouted.
“No. Let’s clear the other one, and Infurion.”
“Warning Zankaradia,” said Zip, biting her lip. She risked a backward glance. Academy slowing. Fighting the Bequest’s force.
Aranya said, Dramagon’s magic operates even on the Chrysolitic plane? Holy Fra’anior! I need to check –
Focus, Aranya! Zuziana ordered.
Marshal Zuziana? her friend teased. Thanks. Still, she sensed Aranya compartmentalising. And they called Remoyans stubborn?
The dragonets were struggling mightily back there, drawing dangerous levels of power through their network as they fought to stabilise the volcano. Aranya’s consciousness slipped back to lend a helping paw, so to speak, showing them how to increase their efficiency.
The timing would be crucial. Listening to her best friend’s strategizing, Zuziana opened herself to Zankaradia. Strike incoming. Distract. Thoralian on your back – there!
The stalking Yellow-White Shapeshifter startled as the barbels struck in concert. His dodge was almost perfect. One glowing crimson point touched his tail about two thirds of the way to its base. For the first time, they heard his howl rise even above the din of his shell brother’s clash with Infurion. Poison flared within his flesh. Zip had never seen anything like it. Lodes of gleaming crimson appeared beneath his scales before the flesh combusted from within. In seconds the hole in his tail was two feet in diameter and growing wider and deeper by the second. A necrotic fire poison? Several barbels struck again, one slightly grazing his flank. Thoralian writhed away, howling as though a blazing log had been flung into his eye.
Stung, the other shell brother tore into Infurion with feral ferocity. Ardan had described how they worked together; here it was in action. Meantime, Thoralian somersaulted free of Zankaradia’s back. His sinuous body contorted as he tried to make sense of his injuries.
Now, Aranya said quietly.
A white-blue torrent of power poured down the side of the tunnel, gathering form and shape as it thundered away from the quartet of Dragonesses. The horiatite gleamed afresh where it had passed by. Warned by Zip, Zankaradia flung herself into a mighty contortion to avoid the strike as it speared beneath her coils, shearing Infurion’s presence away from her body. The Dragonesses dove in as fast as they could, pouring more and more into building a buffer between her and the enemy. The Dragoness gripped the tunnel’s side, but the force of Dramagon’s secret weapon still dragged at her tail, slowly, inexorably, hauling her toward its maw.
More! cried Pip and Zuziana as one. Sable lightning crackled through the seething whiteness below, drawing aggrieved bellows from two distinct voices.
They were close now. So close!
Differently! cried Iridiana.
Aranya immediately whipped their power aside at the second, lurking Thoralian, but he appeared to Shadow through it – with a stolen ability? Zip followed with eyes and senses not her own as the Amethyst followed his progress. Just a feint! The real Thoralian appeared right above Zankaradia’s skull, his curiously elongated talons bared as the youngling gazed quizzically up at them, clearly awaiting instructions as to how, perhaps, to clamber out of the tunnel.
She had no idea.
As the Thoralians smiled deviously, Zip’s outcry seemed to take forever to leave her mind. He was blanking them! ZANKARADIA … NOOOO!!
* * * *
Aranya felt rather than saw Pip leave their diving group. One instant she was with them, the next, the fearful talons of Thoralian’s left paw stabbed deep into her back, while the other parted Zankaradia’s flesh and bone with ghastly ease. He buried his right forepaw inside of the Ancient Dragoness almost up to the shoulder, but the real, obvious shock to him was the way that his other paw stopped. Pygmy-stopped.
Pip shuddered beneath the terrible force of that strike.
Faster than she could think about it, Aranya linked with Iridiana and forced the young Dragoness to roll on her axis, twisting Thoralian’s paw so viciously that his bones snapped cleanly at the wrist.
Then, all was instinct. She rode a mauve wave down at Thoralian. He convulsively jerked out a pawful of Zankaradia’s brain matter as he tried to escape, but the Pygmy Dragoness gripped him by the muzzle and forced him to stay put as the trio smacked simultaneously into his flank, rolling the burly Yellow-White Shapeshifter over onto the poisonous barbels. His jaw gaped as the poison touched him in a dozen locations.
Thoralian screamed, I will … his paw again tried to quarry into the Corundum Red hatchling’s skull. Despite her convulsions, he managed to gain a grip inside that first wound just as Iridiana transformed into a hulking Asjujian Emoflit. Two thousand tonnes of Chaos Shifter was too much even for their nemesis. Her wooden muzzle shovelled him sideways across the barbels. Skiss! Skiss! Poison flared in his flesh, gouging great trenches as she liberally rubbed him over the poisonous spears.
Thoralian writhed in agony.
“Nasty,” said Pip, her grin spoiled by an eruption of golden Dragon blood from her throat.
Zuziana had two of the barbels in her paws, holding them below the dangerous tips, and was stabbing Thoralian repeatedly around the shoulder, head and muzzle, sobbing, “You – you vile – I hate this, I hate I hate I hate …”
The shell brothers screamed in mortal agony as the poison burned through one’s flesh, blackening even the bone beneath.
Aranya reached out for Zuziana. “Enough. Stop, petal.”
“I cannot have mercy …”
“He is finished.” Could it be true? Another Th
oralian destroyed? She drew her best friend into her embrace. “It’s done. Help me with Pip and Zankaradia –”
A lunatic outburst cut through her words. Spinning upon the Corundum Red’s head, Aranya gazed down her stretched-out length. Through a gap in the dissipating fires they had flung at the other Thoralian and Infurion, she saw them still locked in a death grip as they passed into the darkness of Dramagon’s Bequest.
From the depths, Thoralian bellowed, Now you are finished, Star Dragoness! I take Infurion with me! O NOBLE DRAMAGON, RECEIVE MINE SPIRIT!
And again, he roared in a far greater voice, AN’TOL SÛYA SHAO’LUKAYN – ARISE!!
A metallic, sibilant rattling began to shake Dramagon’s Bequest.
Zip shook Aranya out of her unnerved gawking. “Petal, isn’t now the moment we flee like Dramagon himself is breathing down our necks?”
“Aye – let’s shake a wingtip, girlie!”
* * * *
Ardan surveyed the barrens at the northern end of Jeradia with disdain. From low, wet and miserable to high, wet and miserable. The thunderstorms over Jeradia Island were doing their search no favours, but Amazothion, by dint of communing with his pet snake, claimed he would be able to lead them directly to the location. Crazy? Maybe. The Cognates had certainly weighed in with their opinion, which Ardan could have translated by means of any number of pithy Western Isles expletives.
The hour was much closer to morning than to midnight as they skated low through one final squall, and now Ri’arion murmured appreciatively as the clouds opened to reveal a night sky replete with stars. “Communication lines open,” he said.
“Pay attention, holy man,” Amazothion sniffed. “Majuskar says we must head farther East.”
“That area has already been mapped,” Ardan explained.
“East.”
“Very well.” The Shadow Dragon tilted his wings to take them directly toward a small peninsula on the North-Eastern tip of Jeradia. “I wish we knew what the measurements –”
“I have supplied the data,” said the man, cuddling his pet.
“Aye,” Ri’arion said drily. “Is Majuskar not cold?”
“Ah, you hear him too! Perhaps you are a holy man, after all,” the fellow returned slyly. “Aye, he is not comfortable upon this ill-tempered Dragon’s back. Perhaps his services are not sufficiently appreciated?”
Perhaps we should wring the reptile’s neck? Ardan thought to himself.
The snake immediately hissed angrily.
Very well. How a Dragon must abase himself for his Star’s sake. “Amazothion, I personally swear I will provide Majuskar a lifetime’s supply of anything he desires if he can lead us to the right place. Furthermore, I am right now deploying additional heating elements to our environmental shielding. When the temperature is optimal for the noble Majuskar, please do let me know.”
“Bah. You are still ungrateful. Majuskar senses your deepest feelings, Dragon.”
Most of those feelings involved the anaconda strangling his owner straightaway, Ardan decided, feeling charitable about the whole affair. Still, he winged on quickly as he was bidden privately by Asturbar. Soon they hovered over that desolate spit as Amazothion consulted once more with his pet at interminable length.
“This is the place,” he said.
Ardan eyed the location. It was right upon the edge where Jeradia Island’s massif dropped in sheer cliffs many leagues tall into an Impossible Deep that gouged a trench uncrossable by the shelled kind of Land Dragons almost from the Western Isles to Jeradia and across to the Spine Islands. A thin peninsula jutted out, curving back to the mainland in what could conceivably have been one edge of a round volcano, if only there had not been absolutely nothing beneath where the main part of the mile-and-a-half diameter volcano, he imagined, should lie. The cliffs above the Cloudlands were three miles of bleak granite upon which only the hardiest bushes scrabbled for a roothold.
“Here?” said Ri’arion.
“Majuskar’s birthplace was in that forest to the South,” said the man, pointing to a thickly tangled patch of forest lying at the foot of the start of Jeradia’s famously wild interior mountain range, about three miles away. It was almost uninhabited, even by these hardy giant warriors. “He distinctly remembers the lower entrance to the volcano being just about over there.”
Shaking his head slowly, Ardan set aside his disbelief and surveyed the terrain in detail. He tried to imagine what could have been, matching it up with Leandrial’s faulty memories. Could Pip conceivably have gouged out that much rock, or … he pointed with his fore-talon. “Could those be claw marks? As in, Land Dragon claws?”
Asturbar grunted, “You know, you might just have a head on your miserable shoulders after all, soldier! Ah –” he chortled softly, “– old habits.”
Amazothion laughed his annoying, nasally laugh. “Do you see now? The legend of the traitor Shurgal tearing at the bedrock in his fury, was true! So, I hope you men and Dragons have the King of Fra’anior’s own resources to hire the labour you’d need to rebuild this place you’re so set upon, and a decade or two for your nice building project. And you call me crazy – ha ha ha!”
Ardan threw back his huge black head and bellowed a laugh that shook the rainwater off the trees a mile off. “No, my friend. We will rebuild this bedrock within a week, by which time we plan to fly the Academy in from the Mystic Moon. Will you help us?”
“Ah, you are crazy indeed! Majuskar likes you after all, Shadow Dragon.”
Crazy depended upon one’s measure, didn’t it?
* * * *
Unfortunately for those bent on fleeing, brain-damaged Zankaradia could not proceed at a pace much greater than a laboured crawl up the tunnel, despite healing and physical assistance. Aranya had done what she could under the circumstances for both her and Pip – but a bigger problem was growing in intensity right behind their tails.
The Shao’lûkayn threw up a disturbing racket. The deepest chill of outer space emanated from that sixth Moon now. How could Fra’anior have mistaken its import? How could Dramagon have hidden its living payload from his shell brother – unless nothing in that Moon had been alive when it had originally impacted Mystic? Perhaps it had embedded itself on purpose, then millennia later, tunnelled toward the surface in search of magical power that would cause its denizens to grow and mature?
They passed around several large fragments of eggshell apparently stuck to the horiatite. The hatchling climbed in a dazed state, palpably traumatised by whatever Thoralian had tried to do to her mind, but her paws gripped the cracks in the horiatite firmly enough. Aranya wanted to rail at her to hurry, but that would be useless. Instead, her focus was on the Academy’s laboured progress above. Too slow. Far too slow to avoid whatever was about to –
That!
A metallic thing fluttered out of the hole. She wanted to say that it had wings, but they looked more like spokes or spines that moved so rapidly, they hummed. The Shao’lûkayn was blacker than night all over, save for a crimson spot on its underbelly that reminded her of a variety of venomous spider she had once inadvertently shared her bedroll with in the Western Isles. Almost quicker than her eye could follow, the creature nosedived into the tunnel wall and expired in a puff of black dust that darkened a section of horiatite perhaps thirty feet in diameter.
Another fluttered up weakly, barely making it out of the mouth of its lair before dropping back inside. A minute passed before another, stronger creature spat forth. This one made it several hundred feet before expiring in the same way as the first.
“Move!” her voice crackled with thunder – fear, she realised.
Zankaradia was not going to make this. Not by miles. A rough reckoning had them ninety miles beneath Mystic’s surface. The night sky up there bore a chilling resemblance to the darkness behind. They were perhaps a mile above Dramagon’s Bequest, and the Academy four miles ahead of them, also travelling far too slowly despite repeated attempts by the Chrysolitic dragonets to drag it i
nto their Flow space. They kept wavering back to reality again.
She glanced behind. Flick. Flick. Two of the creatures soared toward them before falling short. The spikes appeared to wave in a sensory fashion before they veered to collide with the walls. Three! Another pair! Suddenly, the horiatite was being eaten away more rapidly than Aranya wanted to credit. Four at once! Faster and faster, and stronger each time, the creatures spat forth. Their bodies were seemingly spikes upon spikes, but so dark it was impossible to discern detail save for that crimson spot which, Aranya feared, might be a mouth or some other vile organ.
Now the first soared up to their level. Iridiana smashed it aside with a fireball.
The sibilant rushing sound increased in volume. The whole tunnel was starting to shake now, like a volcano building up, the gases fizzing, the pressure increasing – so suddenly that Zankaradia stumbled and fell upon her nose, the force redoubled in intensity. Despite her digging in all eight paws, Aranya noticed peripherally, she was being dragged backward and her winged companions with her.
Iridiana! Pip! Join paws with me! She had an idea of how to combat these things.
Shao’lûkayn spat from the pit faster than one per second, now. Some passed them by. One landed upon Zankaradia’s tail and set her scales alight there. She groaned but kept struggling on.
Dark bodies whizzed past in their tens. Twenties. Explosions rocked the tunnel.
With me, now. Make light!
Pip said, But I can’t. I’m not a –
We have to try, Aranya insisted. And, I think you can.
She exchanged a brief, incredulous look with Zuziana and Iridiana. Umm … wrong end of the colour spectrum?
Not even on the spectrum, Aranya wanted to protest – not that it mattered! That had been the last thought on her mind.
Iridiana demurred grimly, And I’m just the zany Chaos girl around here –
Zip rapped, Just shut your fangs and do what she says, alright? The first of the creatures powered right up to the Academy, striking it squarely on the underside. Where the shield had been, a wide round hole appeared in the magic before it automatically resealed, drawing on the resources of the Dragons within. Oh, no …