A Warrant of Wyverns

by Michael Angel

  Galen lowered his hand, letting the weirlight globe wink out in a puff. The Wizard gasped in wonder, and I followed suit. Liam, and even Shaw stood breathless, dazzled by the swelling galaxy of light.

  Unlike the complex, abstract patterns I’d seen before, the pinpricks of light formed into the silhouettes of serpentine creatures against fields of red or green. It occurred to me that, by using pieces of magic crystal this way, the wyverns had created a kind of reverse mosaic. Instead of using chips of stone or glass to reflect sunshine, they had opted to build vast pictographs of self-illuminating crystal murals in the dark.

  Instead of coming back down, Nagura clambered easily across the ceiling breathing more and more life into the figures overhead. We all had to crane our necks as we watched her move, leaving a panoramic starfield of light in her wake. Finally, she moved to crouch like a scaly gargoyle high up on a rocky shelf to our left.

  Nagura paused to pick up her marker and board again, breathing out one final time to light the stones on the ceiling nearby. The light-patterns flared up like hot coals, clearly displaying a white-blue rock face cloven by a bubbling river of lava. The river stretched back up a steep slope towards a huge volcano, its caldera bubbling over with a froth of molten rock.

  “We of the Hakseeka are ancient,” Nagura stated. “Ancient beyond the reach of legend, beyond the reach of myth. That is because we existed, but we had not been Raised.”

  I traded looks with my three friends. Shaw shrugged, while Liam and Galen shook their heads. They didn’t know what the term meant either.

  “Thus it was that we Hakseeka spent countless eons existing as mute beasts. Until the fateful day arrived. The Day of the Eruption. The Day of Ascension.”

  Just as with the word ‘Raised’, I could hear the capital letters in the stately way Nagura continued to tell her story. She stretched out a winged forearm, in doing so blotting out part of the first picture, calling attention to the next section.

  “The earth, the Eternal Mother of All, gave birth to mass upon mass of ruby crystal. Charged with magic from the Eternal Mother’s core, these rubies were thrown from her fire to glitter upon the hearths of our ancestors.”

  A vast sweep of the light-mosaic showed a massive volcanic eruption. Chunks of blood-red crystal littered the landscape. Galen’s breath whistled out in a gasp.

  “By perchance,” he ventured, “would those be the ‘Hearts of the Mother’?”

  Nagura paused in her story to scribble on her board. “That is what some call them. We are curious now. How did you know?”

  The Wizard glanced my way. I nodded, so he turned back to the wyvern queen.

  “We know,” he said, “because we spoke with a member of the Seraphine.”

  Nagura gave a hiss of disgust. “The Seraphine are also an old people, but wisdom did not come with age. Besotted by their own glory they are, yet they may outlive us all. Behold, for they were Raised at the same time as the Hakseeka.”

  My eyes grew wide as I saw what she pointed to. Within the eruption itself, three creatures had been carefully depicted. One was clearly a wyvern. The second figure, which had been outlined in bright red, resolved itself into a phoenix.

  The third figure was larger than the other two put together. It bore scaly armor and had phoenix-like wings. I squinted at it, my brain refusing to put two and two together until Liam muttered the answer.

  “No mistake,” the fayleene stated solemnly. “That is a dragon. Like Sirrahon.”

  “The peoples who bathed in the light of the Hearts of the Mother found that they had been Raised, for they were forever changed,” Nagura continued. “We Hakseeka found that we could pass on our thoughts with our talons. Though we live long, we are not immortal. But being Raised gave our minds the ability to shatter time itself.”

  We hadn’t even gotten into the ‘Great War’, but already Nagura was making my head spin with her revelations. The wyverns, the phoenix, and one other species each had a variant of the same creation myth. And it was for a good reason.

  “Astounding,” Galen breathed, as he stated aloud what I had just thought. “The creatures exposed to the same concentrated crystal magic gained intelligence. Or, to use Nagura’s term, they were ‘Raised’ to sentience. Given enough of an intellect to develop writing, because writing is how you shatter time.”

  “Mayhap I do not comprehend,” Shaw complained. “Methinks the wyvern learned to write only because they lack the ability to speak beyond a hiss or growl.”

  “Yes, that’s part of it,” I said. “The limits of their vocal abilities meant that it would be easier to develop a written language. But there’s more to it than that. For example, I can read books today that were written by people who lived hundreds of years ago. Their bones may be dust, but their words and ideas live on beyond their time. If nothing else, writing helps preserve civilization, because you won’t lose whatever was learned in a person’s lifetime.”

  “Such a gift would have helped the fayleene,” Liam said, with a sigh of regret. “The murder of my sire, Protector Quinval, stole a great deal of accumulated magical knowledge from my people.”

  Nagura nodded. “Before the Hearts of the Mother changed us, we Hakseeka would also lose the most brilliant minds of a squadron. We would lose the best artists of an entire hive.”

  Liam considered that for a moment. “You use the terms ‘squadron’ and ‘hive’, Nagura. Do the Hakseeka – live like bees?”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Do wyverns live like bees?

  Nagura paused to consider the question. She absently scratched one of her skull-spikes in thought before picking up the white board to write again.

  “It is possible. We know little of ‘bees’, save that they visit flowers and live close together in dense nests.”

  Galen stepped forward with a clop of his hooves. “The Protector puts forth an interesting question. I have observed wyverns before, and they do ‘swarm’ much like insects.”

  “I share in what the Wizard hath ‘observed’,” Shaw put in. “Doth a queen create all of thy hive’s eggs, much as a hill of ants? Or might thy species use one-on-many couplings, as we griffins do?”

  Again, Nagura stopped to think about her answer. I already liked her better than Korr and Jett, the two Seraphine we’d worked with before. But I especially liked how open she was to answering our questions. Particularly on potentially touchy subjects like reproduction.

  “The answer lies somewhere in the middle,” she wrote. “The Hakseeka have male and female genders, and produce eggs as individual couples. It is the responsibility of the parents to ensure that their offspring is brought up properly as a Raised One. However, it is also our duty as Queen Mother to bear multiple offspring for the Royal Guards and Harvesters each year. Ever since we were selected and birthed as a monarch, it has been so.”

  Once again, my friends and I traded looks over that last statement.

  “Selected and birthed?” I asked. “Forgive me, but that’s the first time I’ve heard that combination here in Andeluvia. In the human kingdom, one is a royal from birth. It’s the opposite way in other kingdoms.”

  “Aye,” Shaw said. “The griffin Counsel of the Chosen is aptly named. One must be chosen ‘ere one sits in the Lair of the Elders.”

  “It is much the same with the centaurs,” Galen added.

  Nagura nodded and returned to her board. “It may be the first time you have heard of the Hakseeka’s way, but it has worked for thousands of years. When a hive’s ruler dies, the remaining workers and warriors select an especially large, healthy egg to become the next queen. We were chosen long ago, and nourished with special foods infused with the Radiance of the Mother. Thus were we selected to become queen, and when born assumed the throne.”

  “Amazing,” the Wizard breathed. “Dayna, the wyverns do have insectoid features to their society. Consuming what was essentially concentrated magic altered Nagura’s size and physical structure. The food quite literally turned N
agura into a monarch. It is exactly the same process when a hive of bees converts a worker’s egg into a queen with a diet of royal jelly.”

  “It was the mindfulness of the Hakseeka that allowed us to do something novel in the history of our world,” Nagura continued. “It allowed us to live and work together more closely than any people that had come before.”

  She moved across to the next set of talon-holds and breathed upon a new section of ceiling crystals. They shimmered into a new picture, one of a city upon a mountaintop, one with tall white walls and golden, dome-shaped towers. Miniature wyverns sat atop the ramparts, manning them much as Fitzwilliam’s knights did today. Their black and green scales glittered in their crystalline representations.

  “The first of the Raised among my kind came up with a new concept,” she said. “The concept of anrakira. The idea that beings should work together to live amidst order. To build cities and exist harmoniously.”

  I let my breath out explosively as my mind put things together with a big click.

  “Dayna!” Liam said, and he slipped his warm, furry torso under my arm, steadying me. He carefully kept his antlers to one side as he spoke. “You almost fell over there.”

  “I guess it was from…the force of revelation,” I wheezed, as I steadied myself. “Now it’s all clear in my mind. What Thea told me. About the nature of the Creatures of the Light and of the Darkness.”

  “Praytell, enlighten us!” Galen insisted.

  “I’d better clear something up for our new friend first,” I said. I looked up to where Nagura still crouched against the glowing embers of light. “Nagura, you remember the people that you knew as the ‘Hoohan’, do you not?”

  She let out an angry snort. “We remember. They are foes that make up in cunning what they lack in size.”

  “Then I have news for you. In the long centuries while you slept, the Hoohan switched sides from the Darkness to the Light.”

  Nagura chuffed again, as if trying to digest a particularly troublesome morsel. “Could this truly be so?”

  “My being here is proof of that,” I insisted.

  “This is true,” Galen chimed in, and both Shaw and Liam backed him up with a growl or a hoof tap. “With the Hoohan’s insistence, Dayna was called to this world. She was brought here as a bold strike against the Creatures of Darkness. She has been their foremost bane and fiercest foe.”

  “We trust what you say, and hope it is so,” the wyvern queen said, with a resigned air. “What role do the Hoohan play now?”

  “They remember their role against you before,” I said. “But they have become the guardians of civilization. I learned of their former place amongst the Creatures of the Dark when I spoke in confidence with their leader, Albess Thea. Her predecessor told her that, in times past, the creatures of the world split into two warring camps.”

  “Yes, that is right. The camps we knew of as the Light and the Dark.”

  “Thea told me that the Creatures of the Light embraced what we broadly call ‘civilization’. Living with laws, plans, cities. But the Creatures of the Dark hated this. It hindered the strong from simply taking what they wanted from the weak. And that’s when the Albess told me the most important bit.”

  “What was that?” Liam asked.

  “What those of the Dark hated the most…was ‘living in a hive’. Thea spoke those very words. She didn’t know it at the time, but she was using the language of the wyverns to describe their cities, their civilization. Which means the wyvern, the ‘Hakseeka’, are not just Creatures of the Light.”

  “Then what else are they?”

  “They are the first Creatures of the Light. The original founders. The ones who led and won the war against the Darkness. The ones who kept the records.” I slipped off my backpack, my burden completely forgotten amidst the torrent of revelations. I drew out the green-scaled Codex of the Bellus Draconum and held it up to Nagura.

  “And that means,” I concluded, “that this belongs to you.”

  The wyvern queen froze for a moment as she caught sight of the book. Her forearms and wingtips shook as she clambered down from her high perch, continuing to tremble as she reached out for the Codex. When I placed it securely in the grasp of her talons, she almost dropped it, as if it were red-hot.

  She opened it, turning the pages slowly, in reverence. I noticed that Nagura’s talons fit almost perfectly into the grooved, runic lettering. It made sense, after all. This book had been written by the wyverns, and the marks had been made by their claws. For the longest time, I’d fallen into the trap of thinking that, since the Codex was a book, it must have been created by human hands. That sort of logic could get you into trouble in Andeluvia.

  Nagura looked back at the ceiling for a moment. Her mouth opened, and she let out a low ululation I’d never heard before. A keen of wyvern anguish.

  “We thought this was lost forever in the vast ocean of time,” she finally wrote, Galen’s magic giving her voice a sorrowful tone. “This tome was created by our most talented writer and seer. Our brood-sister, Kyratha. She gave this text the greatest honor among my people. By scribing it upon the skin of our mother.”

  “You skinned your own…” Liam gasped, with stunned-looking flick of his ears. “I mean…”

  “‘Tis not an unknown practice among my kind,” Shaw reminded him. “Though it hath never occurred to my kind to make texts out of those we killed.”

  The griffins only flayed people and tacked them up on the ceiling, I thought with a shudder, as I recalled the fate of ‘the Skinned Ones’ back at the Reykajar aerie. But now something else made sense. When I’d studied the material that made up the Codex – called sartuul in this world – I’d discovered that it was a form of protein known as keratin. I’d wondered what could grow keratin in such large sheets. Now I knew.

  “We are misunderstood in this,” Nagura clarified. “We do not slaughter our kind to produce these works. The ‘skin’ we refer to is from a molt, where the Hakseeka shed their scales twice or thrice in a lifetime.”

  “Nagura, I’m sorry if this brings back bad memories,” I said. “But this Codex…I’ve long suspected that it held a lot of the answers that we seek. We’ve only been able to understand a fifth of it, if that.”

  She nodded wearily. “The Protector explained it to me earlier. Our tongue has fallen silent over these long years. I can tell you what is within, almost from memory. For it is a tale of three parts.”

  I frowned. “Three?”

  “Yes. One of the War. One of our Fall. And one of the future. The future that all here shall live in, whether they accept it or no.”

  Chapter Thirty

  For a moment, my friends and I were simply stunned into silence.

  The existence of that book had brought us into contact with the first demon we’d encountered – the Old Man of the Mountain. It had also nearly driven us into murderous conflict with Lady Behnaz, the woman who’d found and possessed it.

  I’d spent too many bleary-eyed hours over it, trying to figure out what it said, worrying about its meanings. What warnings it had to convey, what dangers to expect.

  It was safe to say that the Codex of the Bellus Draconum had hung over us like a sartuul-wrapped version of Damocles’ sword.

  And now the author’s sister was ready to tell us its secrets.

  “I think I speak for all of us here,” I said slowly. “We’d very much like to hear about what is within that book.”

  Nagura let out a great sigh. “We can tell part of it now, for we are already growing weary in body and spirit this night. Behold, the last scene that we commissioned so long ago.”

  With that, the wyvern queen set the Codex down and clambered back up to her perch. This time she moved slower, as if she carried a heavy weight upon her shoulders. She had to huff and puff a few times, but she exhaled across a swath of ceiling we hadn’t yet seen. Hoof, paw, and foot falls echoed in the chamber as we moved to where we could best see the last picture.

&nbs
p; It was a massive battle scene.

  Wyverns of bronze, green, and black fought dragons and phoenix. Wisps of smoke in the forms of misty skulls floated like deadly clouds, shooting lightning at their targets. A couple of the wyverns were shown imprisoning these misty forms inside cages made of stone.

  “Those forms,” I breathed. “They’re representations of the demons.”

  “And there are the wyverns who can perform sorcery,” Galen added. “They are completing the task described in the Codex, of ‘sealing the demons in the great stones’.”

  The demon-imprisoning at least looked bloodless. Elsewhere, the carnage of blood and gore threatened to swamp the viewer. Liam looked more than a little put off by it. Shaw on the other hand seemed to be studying the picture with more than professional interest.

  The wyvern artists from the earlier pictures had given everything a very defined, stately look, one that reminded me of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. By contrast, the images in this final picture blurred and shimmied as if still in motion. The whole horrific effect made the piece feel as if it were still happening.

  “We have spoken as best we could with the Protector of the Fayleene,” Nagura stated. “It seems to us that you know a great deal about what you call the ‘Old War’.”

  “Well, we know some,” I said. “Albess Thea told me that around three thousand years ago, the Creatures of the Light and Dark couldn’t settle their disagreements. Specifically, over whether ‘civilization’ or ‘might makes right’ would be the dominant mode of living. The dragons, demons, owls, and phoenix ended up on one side. The griffins, the fayleene, and of course the wyverns ended up on the other.”

  “That is correct, so far as it goes. The demons were the ones who struck first, and relied upon the leader of the dragons to pull the others into line, so that they could overwhelm us, destroy us in one blow.” She clambered back down and puffed herself up a little. “They did not succeed, despite the cost to us. Still, if even the owl-folk are involved to this day…almost all of the players in the Great War have finally been revealed.”