by Dante King
I turned to look at the messenger-drake. It was still eyeing me with beady intensity. It was a little bit pervy, what with me not wearing anything. I found my boxer shorts, and then started to dress.
“Uh, do you fancy delivering my message then, buddy?” I asked awkwardly as I pulled my shirt back on.
The messenger-drake turned its little head and spat a gobbet of green flame into the dormant fire pit. The fire caught and then sprang up until it was about two feet tall. Suddenly, the twisting tongues of green flame morphed and writhed and changed into technicolor, and the top half of a blue-skinned woman appeared in the fire. She had long blue hair, pointed elven ears, and looked to be wearing a deep blue robe, which Saya quickly pointed out was the regalia of the Crystal Spire librarians.
I looked in surprise at the flickering image of the woman. It was like something out of Star Wars crossed with Harry Potter’s fire communication, like some kind of arcane hologram.
“Michael Gilmore,” the blue elf woman said, staring out of the fire, though not at me, “this is a message to inform you that your presence is required at the Grand Library immediately for your orientation. I await your arrival with extreme anticipation. The messenger-drake will guide you to the Grand Library if you do not know where to go.”
The fiery message flickered, and the woman’s face dissolved and died away. I looked at Saya.
“I guess that’s what you’ll be doing next,” the tall blonde said to me. “You heard the librarian. Follow the messenger-drake to your orientation.”
“But, what about my squad selection?” I asked. “I was kind of looking forward to that.”
Saya shrugged and laughed. “Don’t fret, Michael Gilmore,” she said. “You are a prospective dragonmancer. Once the word is out that there is a new dragonmancer looking to find his squad, there will be warriors camping out for their chance to fight you. It can wait. Besides, after I’ve taken a little nap, I’ll get the gossip circulating that you’re looking to pick your squad. Get the interest stirred up a little.”
“All right, if you say so,” I said. “I’ll meet you back here after I’m done with this orientation thing?”
Saya nodded. She flopped down on her bed, sadly dressed again, and crossed her long legs. “I can wait,” she said, putting her hands behind her ash-blonde head and closing her eyes.
Swallowing back some rather ardent misgivings about leaving the stunning blonde for the inevitable hush and tedium of a library, I turned back to the still-hovering messenger-drake.
“All right, small-fry,” I said, “lead the way.”
The messenger-drake guided me with the unerring assuredness of something that had spent its whole life zipping around these halls. The only time that it stopped was while it was waiting for me to open doors for it. At these times, it would use its long talons to grip onto the rough stone of the keep walls. Then, when I’d heaved a heavy door open, it would dart through and continue on its way.
After about a quarter of an hour of following the messenger-drake along the labyrinthine corridors and through one enormous hall after another, we fetched up outside of a particularly grandiose-looking door. It was at least twenty feet high and, once more, wide enough to admit even your most Smaug-sized dragon. It was the sort of door that impressed upon you the importance of the room beyond.
“This is us, is it?” I asked the messenger-drake.
The little beast gave a strange fluting trill, which I took to be dragon-speak for, “No shit, Sherlock.”
I raised my hand to knock upon the massive door but, before I could lay fist to wood, a side door that I had not noticed sprang open to my left. Without hesitation, the messenger-drake swooped through it, and I followed.
I stopped in my tracks after stepping through the little side door, and only dimly heard the sound of it snapping shut behind me.
I had been prepared for some dusty, quiet room filled with the smell of mildewed paper and rows upon rows of books on tall shelves. Perhaps a backing track composed of a studious murmuring blended with the soft rustle of pages. What I had not expected was to walk into a sort of scholarly, cerebral cathedral.
The ceiling of the truly enormous room ended at least one hundred yards above me. It was a dome of intricately constructed ironwork and glass panes. It was what St. Paul’s Cathedral in London might have been, had Christopher Wren decided he wanted to use it as a greenhouse rather than a place of worship. Now that I was looking at it more closely, the entire magnificent structure depicted a dragon with a scroll on one side of it and a sword on the other. It was, essentially, a stained-glass window, and of giant proportions. It filled the room with natural light, which I supposed was conducive to study and reading.
I managed to wrench my eyes away from the dome and lower them so that I could take in the rest of the library.
The main floor, which was all white marble veined with gold and silver, stretched away from me like a spreading, shining pool of molten gemstones and precious metals. This floor was littered with bookshelves laid out in concentric circles.
There were quite a few dragonmancers—all of them female, of course—perusing the voluminous tomes and furled scrolls on these shelves. Interspersed around the room were rows and clusters of desks. At these study stations sat more dragonmancers poring over books and reading through scrolls, their crystals sitting on the desks in front of them in much the same way that people back on Earth might place their wallet or phone in front of them.
“It’s like a museum, not just a library,” I muttered to myself as I looked around the vast space.
There were statues hewn from great lumps of rock that were so lifelike they would have had Leonardo da Vinci high-fiving the sculptors responsible. There were paintings that, at a glance, I might have mistaken for being photographs because they were painted with such skill and realism. These works of art depicted dragonmancers in various positions; holding swords and spears aloft in defiance of something or other, standing with their hands behind their backs, kneeling in poses of exhausted delight and great woe and, of course, riding on the backs of their mighty mythical steeds.
The walls of the Grand Library were, as you’d expect, stuffed to the gills with books, scrolls, and manuscripts. They lined the ginormous circular space, the shelves rising right up to the bottom edge of the glass dome.
Dotted about the place, scooped out of the walls, were about two dozen alcoves. These nooks held a desk and chair each, which were set off to one side, and were obviously the Grand Library’s version of private study rooms. Each of these study nooks also held a large nest of clean, fresh straw in which, I guessed, the dragonmancer’s dragon could relax in, while their bonded dragonmancer hit the books.
Even as I watched, one dragonmancer climbed onto the back of her pale pink dragon and launched up into the air, heading for one of the topmost shelves. When she reached her required row, her dragon pulled up and hovered, beating its wings to hold steady while the dragonmancer reached over and found the text she was after. Then, dragon and rider soared across the Grand Library and into one of the study nooks.
“Wouldn’t see that in the fucking Beverly Hills Public Library,” I said to myself, shaking my head in rueful awe at the sight.
There was no way to reach these nooks—no stairs or anything of that sort—and I assumed that the only way was to ride your dragon up there.
“Impressive, is it not?” a quiet, earnest voice asked from off to my right.
I closed my mouth and turned to see the blue-skinned, elven-looking woman dressed in the deep blue robe moving toward me. She was the same woman from the arcane hologram.
“Impressive,” I said, glancing back up at the glass-domed ceiling. “Yeah, impressive is one word for it, all right.”
There were a couple of glassy, iridescent blades over both of the woman’s shoulders, which I hadn’t noticed in the flaming message that the messenger-drake had delivered.
Not blades, dumbass, I said to myself. Those are freakin�
�� wings!
Obviously, my sudden wonderstruck look had not gone unnoticed by the librarian, for a navy blush suffused her cheeks, and she smiled shyly.
“I’m sorry,” I said, thinking that, maybe, in this world, staring in amazement at someone’s wings might be akin to gawking at a chick’s hooters on Earth. “It’s just, where I come from, we’re very much a wingless society.”
The blue woman’s face was a picture of astonishment. “No one has wings? No one can fly?”
“Only those with sizable visual-effects budgets,” I said.
The woman ruffled her wings in the same way that a human might give their head a little shake when they didn’t understand something and meant to ignore it.
“My name is Penelope, Bearer of the Rooster Dragon, Glizbe,” she said, “and I am a Knowledge Sprite.”
Thankfully, I managed to quash the impulse I had to make the inane, “I’ve heard of a Tropical Sprite, I’ve heard of a Zero Sugar Sprite, but I’ve never heard of a Knowledge Sprite” quip.
“I’m Michael,” I said, holding out a hand, “but feel free to call me Mike. Everyone else does—or did back on Earth, at least.”
Penelope reached out and took my proffered hand, and I was amazed to see how small hers looked in mine. She was very dainty up close, with the bone structure of some delicate bird. I felt like I could have crushed her hand in mine had I wanted to. Our hands clasped for a second or so longer than propriety dictated, then Penelope blushed navy again and looked fixedly at the floor.
“So,” I said, taking one more look at her pearlescent wings, which looked remarkably similar to a creature I had seen before, although I couldn’t remember which at that moment. “The little messenger-drake, that’s not your dragon, huh? Saya said that was more a sort of general dragon that anyone could ask to carry messages.”
The Knowledge Sprite nodded. “That’s correct,” she said. She spoke quite clearly, but her voice was pitched very quietly—a result of spending all her time in a library, I supposed. “My dragon, Glizbe, is right… here.”
With a flick of her hand, Penelope summoned her dragon. Around her neck on a leather thong, a shard of iridescent abalone-looking stone glowed like a rainbow spark.
Penelope’s dragon was a sleek snow-white beast, five yards long and about a yard and a half tall at the shoulder, and almost more bird than reptile. It had no visible horn on its nose, but its snout looked to be hard as bone and its top jaw ended in a sort of curved beak. Under its bottom jaw it had a feathered wattle that looked a little like a beard. All in all, I got the impression of a wise old man crossed with a rooster—albeit a rooster that could tear your head off and trample your body to mush. I looked at the glittering, long insect-like wings, and then glanced at Penelope’s own wings.
“Dragonflies,” I said softly. “That’s what I’m reminded of. Dragonflies!”
Penelope looked quizzically at me. “Of course, most dragons fly,” she said hesitantly.
“Yeah, right,” I said, “it’s just on Earth we have these bugs call dragonflies and—”
“There are dragons on Earth,” Penelope said, all keen interest.
“No—look—nevermind,” I said. “Why don’t we forget about the last twenty seconds and you can tell me why it is that I’m here?”
“Oh. Yes,” Penelope said. “Quite. Sorry. I’m fairly new to my position, you see. In actual fact, technically speaking, you would be the, um, very first prospective dragonmancer that I’ve ever helped induct.”
“Well, look,” I said, giving the woman an encouraging smile, “if it makes you feel any better, I have absolutely no idea about anything here. This is all new to me. I’ve got a feeling that my unfamiliarity with this place is going to make me stick out like a goddamn scorpion on top of a birthday cake. So, whatever you had in mind to tell me, give me the layman’s version, okay, Penelope?”
The Knowledge Sprite looked slightly mollified, but she still fumbled with a sheaf of notes as she pulled them from a robe pocket and almost dropped them. She shuffled through the notes, shooting furtive glances at me from under her long eyelashes, and then dropping her gaze when she caught me looking at her.
Is she nervous because this is her first gig, or because of me? I speculated as Penelope cleared her throat a couple of times but said nothing. Is it because I’m the first male dragonmancer in this place? Because I’m the first one that she has ever met?
Penelope cleared her throat once and then gave a little sigh.
“Look,” I said, “how about I ask you a few questions that I’ve got in my head? A couple of key questions that I think would clear up a hell of a lot for me. How about that?”
“That’s not really adhering to the procedure that I’ve been taught…” Penelope said.
“Shit, if we adhere to the procedure that you’ve been taught, I think we might both be here until our dying day,” I said.
Penelope gave a nervous little giggle.
“Okay,” she said, “why not? Fire away, Mike.”
“All right,” I said, “but before we start, I suppose it’s all good for me to let Noctis—my dragon—out? I figure it can’t be nice for him to be trapped inside his crystal when all the other dragons get to frolic around the bookshelves.”
“Of course,” Penelope said.
“Great,” I said, and summoned Noctis from the confines of his crystal.
Penelope’s almond-shaped eyes lit up when she saw the sable dragon standing behind me.
“Wow,” she breathed, “an Onyx Dragon! I never thought that I would ever get to see one in the flesh. Magnificent!”
I turned to Noctis. “Man, you’re just collecting fans all over the place, aren’t you? Am I going to have to start carrying a pen around with me so that you can sign autographs?”
Noctis snorted at me, blowing my hair back.
“Well, I thought it was funny,” I said to him.
“What is your first question then, Mike?” Penelope asked me.
“Do you mind if we walk too?” I asked.
“Not at all,” Penelope said, and we took off toward the outer wall of the Grand Library and began a leisurely circuit of the mammoth hall.
“Okay,” I said, “so, I suppose the first thing that I want to know is this: what actually is a dragonmancer? What do they do?”
“Well, I would say that dragonmancers are, essentially, the most elite soldiers at the disposal of the Mystocean Empire,” Penelope said.
“And the Mystocean Empire is governed by…?” I asked.
“By Empress Cyrene.”
“Right, so dragonmancers are bad-ass super-soldiers. Got it. And we’re obviously trained exclusively here, at the Drako Academy?” I asked.
“That’s right,” Penelope said. “The dragonmancers attend the Academy until they’re deemed worthy to graduate. Once they have attained the required level of training, in the eyes of their instructors, they are sent on missions that will help benefit and strengthen the Empire. Of course, the first missions that dragonmancers are sent out on are usually assignments that will help boost their skills. They are undertakings that need to be done, yes, but they are also lessons in themselves.”
“So the missions are like a final test, of sorts? Except, if you fail these tests, you don’t just flunk your class, you flunk out of life itself.”
Penelope nodded thoughtfully as we passed a table stacked with scrolls, behind which sat a dragonmancer with a shaved head and tattoos that ran all through her hairline and disappeared into the collar of her shirt. Her nose was almost pressed to the piece of parchment that she was scribbling over with a quill but, as we passed, she looked up and flashed me a wink before returning to her work. From what I could see of the parchment, it looked as if she had been making a detailed drawing of a wing joint.
“Yes,” Penelope said, recalling me to her presence. “Yes, it must be said that the lessons that a dragonmancer learns during this period in their career can sometimes be somewhat terminal.”
“You say that the missions dragonmancers go on are tailored to help them boost their skills,” I said. “But does that also mean certain dragonmancers are picked for certain types of mission?”
Penelope nodded and gave me a small smile. She looked genuinely pleased at the questions I was asking her.
“Yes, absolutely,” she said. “Missions are most often given to riders who are bonded with dragons, or have specialist powers, that are most likely going to help in the fulfilment of said mission. That is part of what makes the Mystocean Empire’s coterie of dragonmancers such a formidable fighting force.”
“The fact that Empress Cyrene and her captains have a multitude of ‘tools’ to choose from, each one with slightly different powers and abilities?” I asked.
“Exactly,” Penelope said.
A shadow passed over us, as a dragon leapt from one of the study nooks above us, its wings snapping open with a crack as the membranes caught the air and it glided down to the hall floor.
Penelope and I continued around the circumference of the Grand Library. As we strolled along, the weight of all that knowledge, of all the potential secrets on magic and warfare waiting to be discovered, pressed down on me.
“Can you tell me what sort of missions dragonmancers are requested to go on?” I asked the Knowledge Sprite as we sat for a moment on one of the many benches dotted about the hall.
“The jobs and responsibilities of a dragonmancer are various,” Penelope hedged. “However, the chief responsibility and care for all dragonmancers is the continued prosperity and safety of the Mystocean Empire.”
“Makes sense,” I murmured, my eyes making their way once more to that incredible glass dome. “Where do the chief threats to the Empire lie, then?”
“There are very few places that threaten Empress Cyrene’s Empire,” Penelope said loyally.
“Oh, come on now,” I said. “There is always someone or some civilization lurking in the background and threatening to piss everyone right off by sticking their nose, or a dagger, where it’s not wanted. If the Mystocean Empire is as strong as you claim, I doubt it got to that point by going around to its neighbors and offering them cookies.”