by Marc Secchia
Flying in the centre of the formation, Aranya shook her head. That was so Nak. She had never seen Oyda look so alive. Islands’ sakes, the old woman was waving a Fra’aniorian bow! But as they traversed the sky, Aranya suddenly imagined them as the King and Queen of all Dragon Riders. She blinked. Dragon tears? Now?
Her vision shimmered. With the sweep of her eyelids, an acidic tingling entered the orbs. Aranya blinked again, and the world swam into focus–imperfectly, but better than before. Mighty Dragon-challenges around her alerted Aranya to the world as it was, the lethal beauty of a Dragonwing slicing through Thoralian’s forces, laying them to waste, setting a course for the self-styled Emperor of the Island-World.
Thoralian rested on the wing, undaunted.
For a long moment, her universe consisted of her and Thoralian, seen through a narrowing tunnel of drakes. Aranya husbanded what little power she had left, praying it would be enough to sustain her. Fra’anior, if ever I needed your aid, now is the hour.
The Black Dragon was silent, but he watched. Why?
A cloud of red butterflies rose from the sinkhole. Hundreds. Thousands.
Zuziana, flying to her port side, gasped, Drakes! Danger, my friends!
Aranya gasped as her waking vision cleared, revealing the truth. Wicked, cruel animals spat out of the sinkhole as though a living eruption were in process, occluding the suns in their multitudes, and still they came. Their harsh, chittering chorus was a travesty of birdsong. Chilling. Alien. Greedy for the taste of Dragon blood.
Thoralian’s smile seemed especially meant for her. Arise, my darlings. Kill everything.
Clouds of drakes mobbed anything that moved–man or machine, Dragon or dirigible, they did not care. But their hatred burned most strongly against the Dragon-kind. Suddenly, Thoralian’s forces over the sinkhole had to fight for their lives. Snarls of Dragons and drakes developed as if by magic. They tore engineers off catapults and exploded themselves together with the Dragonships they attacked with their fire. A hundred drakes piled on a Sylakian Red Dragon, shredding his wings in seconds. Onward and upward they teemed, overwhelming the fleets and the ground troops as though the Cloudlands themselves, turned crimson, poured over everything in a tide of destruction and death.
He’s mad! Aranya exclaimed, overcome by the spectacle.
Follow me! Ja’arrion roared. Lyriela, be strong. Va’assia, my fire-breathing kin, clear our path. The Star Dragon must face Thoralian and destroy him.
Champing jaws. Tearing claws. Spiked tails lashing into soldiers. Drakes dropped in their hundreds as the Dragonships responded, firing blindly into the mass. Still they streamed up from the caverns beneath Yorbik Island. The day turned dim. Dragons bellowing, thrashing and writhing on the ground as they tried to scrape off their attackers, Hammers cowering beneath their shields, Dragonships firing every weapon they could command, Sylakians and Immadians fighting side by side, all thoughts of their previous battle, ashes upon the Cloudlands.
The Shadow Dragon glided through it all, untouchable.
Upon Ja’arrion’s command, the Dragons opened their throats. Fire, acid and lightning streaked the sky, carving a tunnel through the swarming drakes which ended in the monstrous form of Thoralian. Aranya was surprised to see fire spurting from Lyriela’s mouth. How did she do that so easily? It had cost her many days and a burned throat before she produced so much as a puff of Dragon fire. Was everyone else a better Dragon than she was?
Sha’aldior! From below, the Shadow Dragon’s fire roared upward, passing not ten feet in front of their muzzles. He had come to their aid. The drakes closed in with a vengeance, turning their flight into an ugly brawl. Dragons fell, snarled up, fighting tooth and claw. Ja’arrion and Va’assia fired at a measured tempo, with the calm of long experience. Aranya readied her fireballs. Thoralian was not a good flyer, fattened by his preferred diet of Dragon meat.
She intended to roast him like a ralti sheep.
Zuziana! The Azure Dragoness vanished in a swarm of drakes. Lightning flashed between them, charring the attackers. She saw Va’assia flying headlong into the thickest pack of drakes yet. Another two Reds peeled off to help her.
Nak shouted, “Attack indirectly! Guard your mind!”
And then he too was gone as Ja’arrion had to swerve to avoid a Dragonship. Acid burned across her flight path. Aranya was alone. Her wings trimmed for the utmost speed. Wind whispering across her sleek scales. Power and grief coalescing in her belly, thunderheads swelling against her breastbone and up into her throat.
Thoralian opened his mouth and breathed out a stream of freezing air. Aranya jinked so hard she felt something tear in her right wing. The cold passed her by, numbing but not disabling. The Yellow-White Dragon gasped as a fireball engulfed him from below–Ardan! Now the Shadow Dragon stalked Thoralian, firing dark-flame fireballs at him, making his shield vibrate and glow white-hot as he and the Nameless Man flung all of their wiles into the fray.
Thoralian endured.
Pfft! Pfft! Pfft! Aranya joined the fray, striking his shield with such power that although it did not fail, she knocked Thoralian toward the ground. The direct attack would be her feint. Aranya knew she had to be wilier than ever. Could she close with him? Use the star-fire?
Her form shimmered at the thought.
Abruptly, Thoralian assaulted her mind. Image after image bombarded her. Pictures of herself, suffering, dying, being eaten by worms from the inside. Yolathion twisted up in the machine, so hoarse from screaming that he could hardly produce a whisper. Immadia being fired by a Dragonwing who slowly moved over the city, methodically setting each building alight. Pox. Wounds. Ulcers. Scars. Ugliness.
As her loathing blazed, so her Dragon changed colour, deepening into the Red range.
Yes, said Thoralian. Join me, Aranya. Swear loyalty to me and save your precious mother.
A touch of his mind set all the drakes in the immediate area at the Shadow Dragon’s throat. Ardan’s dark fire burned, but the sheer weight of their numbers drove him back, away from Aranya. Ri’arion and Ardan’s magic flared over and over again, cutting the drakes to pieces and burning them by the hundred, but still the creatures swarmed the Shadow Dragon, innumerable, forcing Ardan to break away to save his own hide.
Kill me if you dare, the Yellow-White Dragon mocked.
They circled each other, momentarily, as if the clear air were an arena set aside for their battle. The other sounds faded away. In her world, only Thoralian existed, and the horror he represented. His sallow eyes glistened with magic, drawing her in. Mocking. Hypnotising. Offering the price of her mother’s cure.
The Amethyst Dragon attacked with a throbbing howl, shame and rage mingled into a toxic brew. They grappled–no shields for Thoralian, now. He was bigger by far, and the cuff of his paw sent her spinning. Aranya darted toward his left wingtip. He countered with his ice-breath. Storm winds shielded her from that deadly blast. A blue fireball formed her riposte, but it was too powerful, torching a neat hole in his upraised wing membrane as it whizzed through and away.
Aranya wheeled around to his port flank too rapidly for the larger Dragon to follow. She peppered Thoralian with shots, but even her blue-hot fireballs steamed off his hide without causing any apparent harm. What? Was that a power of ice? Of course, she realised–water or ice being the quencher of fire, she was expending her power in a fruitless exercise. Aranya hunted for a weakness as the Yellow-White Dragon stalked her, wearing her down with attack after attack. Thoralian had responded in fear to her Star power before, being quick to throw her off balance with images of physical hideousness. She knew that her once-adamantine confidence had been shattered; the new Aranya was a more fragile being by far. If only she could be as Oyda, refined by suffering, conversely the stronger for it. How did anyone draw strength from brokenness?
Self-belief was not enough. It was an illusion, though a powerful one. This insight filled her with an unaccustomed stillness. What she needed was a simple, courageous decision. Ma
ke it so. All else could follow, if she simply decided. Reality could shape her belief, just as belief in her brokenness continued to shape her reality.
Thoralian harassed her, just a hundred feet separating the two Dragons as they circled over the sinkhole.
Unleashing her storm-powered Dragon challenge, Aranya charged.
Staggered by the sound, or perhaps by a Dragoness less than a third of his size choosing to challenge him in head-to-head combat, Thoralian was slow to respond. Aranya skated over his rising bite and lashed out with her hind claws, slicing open the flight muscle atop his left shoulder and taking a long, trailing strip of his wing with her.
The Amethyst Dragon reversed direction rapidly, waving the flap of wing-membrane as her trophy. If it has to be one strip at a time …
You freak, you revolting whelp of a–
Aranya hissed, I’ll butcher you as I did Garthion, that yellow-bellied swamp leech you called a son.
“GRRAAARGGH!” Thoralian bellowed, making her pay for the insult with a blinding flurry of ice shards. Aranya tried to dodge, but his snaking neck tracked her flight path. The ice felt like knives, slicing into the deep pocks on her face, a distinct sensation of chipping away at her exposed cheekbone and tearing into her scarred flesh. She swivelled, suffering the ignominy of taking the attack on her hindquarters as she fled.
Drake! Aranya tangled briefly with an already wounded drake. She punched her way free, only to sense Thoralian right on her tail, rearing up to strike with all four paws. The Dragoness twisted violently beneath his assault, trading another section of his wing for a bite on her shoulder. Aranya broke away again, trying to gain space to reduce the burning in her lungs. She was in no condition to survive an extended battle with a Dragon of his power.
How could she change the odds?
Acid. Ja’arrion’s acid. Her slight transformation shivered through her body, weakening her reserves even further. Not good … Aranya worked her throat, concentrating on regurgitating the contents of the correct stomach.
He spluttered, You’re a Chameleon?
Thoralian had only just realised what she was capable of. Had he thought her transformation into a Star Dragon perfectly natural?
Aranya controlled the acid-spit just as she controlled her tiny fireballs, firing as rapidly as one of the new-technology crossbows. A neat line of green blobs stitched across his torso, splattered against his left secondary wing-strut. A ghastly sizzle resulted. Thoralian’s howl rose above the din of battle, but not for long. He collected himself. A violent quiver from muzzle to tail gave rise to a mist so cold, it clouded around his body and turned his breath to dust. The acid froze, and dropped off in a rain of green icicles.
So much for that idea.
Nak was right. The Yellow-White Dragon seemed impervious to direct attack–besides, even when she did succeed in a strike, she was too small to inflict serious damage. Aranya fell to trading feints with Thoralian, but as time ticked away, she was also becoming more and more concerned for her friends. They entered a period of standoff. The drakes left them plenty of leeway, perhaps at Thoralian’s command. He chased her. She ghosted away, racking her brains for something, anything, that she could use against him. Her friends trusted her to finish the job, but she was so weak now, so worn out …
Aranya risked a glance around her. Zip, battling, bloodied, diving into a melee of drakes to rescue Lyriela; her cousin carrying Jia-Llonya into battle, who in that blink of time shattered a drake’s wing-bone with her war-hammer. Ja’arrion sprayed his acid-mist in expanding circles, clearing his immediate airspace of two or three dozen drakes. The Shadow Dragon, seizing drakes with his invisible-hands power, hurling them to their doom twenty at a time. But she could not expect help any time soon. They were all too far away.
Suddenly, she remembered what she had done once, very long ago. Launching into another frontal attack, trying to dodge the blasts of cold he generated, Aranya somersaulted over Thoralian’s head, feeling his talons hook into and tear her wings as she passed overhead. So icy! Her breath misted in front of her nostrils. Her muscles had begun to cramp from the cold. Now, she breathed. Flaming swords extended from her talons–just an extension of her magic, shaped in a different way. White-hot. The Amethyst Dragon furled her wings and rolled, bringing her weapons down on Thoralian’s back. Strike!
With a roar, Thoralian arched in pain. Bloody, sizzling trenches paralleled his spine-spikes, thirty feet long. Roaring in feral delight, Aranya did not see his tail whipping upward.
A terrible force slammed into her muzzle.
She could have blacked out for only a few seconds. Aranya found herself clasped in Thoralian’s paws, close to his chest, swooping toward a rough landing. The Yellow-White Dragon drove her into the ground with the full weight of his bloated body, cracking her ribs and knocking the breath from her lungs. She was surprised her wings were not torn off by the impact.
With a despairing blast of Storm power, she knocked him off toward the sinkhole, a dark space just beyond her wingtip. That spent the last of her magic. Aranya, powerless and unable to rise, faced the monstrous Sylakian Dragon.
Make your oath to me, and I’ll call off the drakes, he panted.
Aranya willed her lungs to function, thinking herself unable to speak before she remembered that Dragonish telepathy did not require any breath. You’re mad. You’d kill everyone and everything.
There need be no more dying.
As if the war was her fault! But the accusation stung. He still wanted her. How could she turn this to her advantage?
Come to me. Great pincers gripped her mind, squeezing as if she had an Island balanced on her skull. Aranya writhed under the force of his coercion. YIELD TO ME!
I … will … not.
I see bone through your muzzle. You’re raddled, but that’s not the least of what I’ll do to you. Ice speared into her shoulder, twisting so viciously that it flipped Aranya over onto her back. Thoralian moved closer, dragging himself across the ground. I will brutalise you, body and soul. I will destroy your friends, your parents and your Island. The name of Aranya of Immadia will be the ashes of memory, lost forever.
Aranya groaned, You’ll never defeat me.
His hypnotic gaze drilled into her eyes. YIELD!
No!
A word she had dared to scream at an Ancient Dragon. Now, from the unknowable storehouses of her magical being, she unleashed a power seen so many times in her dreams. A buzzing sensation ran from the bones of her skull, down her spine, and galvanised every muscle of her body.
Crying, Fra’anior! Aranya sprang at her tormentor.
The Amethyst Dragon bowled Thoralian over with the force of her attack, rending with her claws, slashing with her fangs, battering him from every conceivable direction as though she were the great seven-headed Dragon himself. Thoralian scrambled backward, bleating in confusion, turning this way and that only to have scales torn off his muzzle, his wings chewed and holes punched into his hide by more talons than seemed possible for any single Dragon to possess. The Black Dragon’s strength blazed within her. She smashed his muzzle against a rock, flipped the larger Dragon over with a kick and fell upon his bloated torso, her terrible, storm-heightened snarls making him quake.
Terror heightened Thoralian’s powers, too. A wedge of ice shot from his mouth, knocking Aranya aside. His ice-breath hissed over her, so wintry that Aranya felt as though her skin had shrunk about her body. The paralysing cold robbed her lungs of breath. No matter how much fire she produced, the Amethyst Dragon could not break free of his icy ambit. Her strength dwindled.
His paw crushed her windpipe; the bulk of his body rolled over her torso. She was cold, so cold, both from his touch and from the hatred consuming her.
“Aha!” roared Thoralian. “Submit to my power!”
Dimly amidst the freezing pain, Aranya recognised a new imperative. Ri’arion and Ardan had somehow contrived to dismiss some of the nearby drakes, breaking the cycle of bloodlust. The red pre
dators began to flee in small but increasing numbers. Dragons emerged from beneath heaps of bodies, mutilated, bleeding, unable to fly. Dragonships slewed crazily through the sky. The ground troops eyed each other warily. But the bulk of the drakes remained aloft, intent on their terrible work. Even Ri’arion and Ardan’s powers could not reach that far.
None of that matters, said Thoralian, wheedling, probing for her weaknesses. Yield to me, lest the lineage of Star Dragons be broken. See? I know the secret Dragon lore. I’ve studied the ways of your ancestors and I know what needs to be done. Cease this pointless resistance, Aranya. If you come with me, you’ll stand a chance of living.
She could never serve him. Aranya did not understand why both Izariela and Thoralian were so concerned about her Star Dragon heritage, but she did know that to have that power fall into his paws, or the power of the First Egg, would spell the end of everything she held dear. She had to hold out. She had to deny him. However, Aranya wavered on the cusp of temptation. Anything to end the pain. Anything to stop the chill seeping through her body, the unbearable assault on her mind, the knowledge that she had nothing left with which to fight him. Surely, if she yielded now, she could find another time and place to bring Thoralian to his ruin?
Too broken, too exhausted even to think …
Thoralian’s foreclaw extended, resting delicately on the hide at the base of her neck, above her second heart. Do you know what it is to have the blood freeze in your veins and arteries, Aranya? Can you imagine that kind of pain?
The pain you caused my mother!
Despair turned to untainted, searing fury. The hatred drained away, subsumed into a storm of love for her mother. Aranya touched a fragile place of knowing, a potential hidden right inside the threshold of her soul.
She crystallised inward.
* * * *
A speck of starlight drifted between Thoralian’s paws. Soundlessly, it scoured the winds of the Island-World. All before it was insubstantial, as if matter itself had ceased to exist. It searched for what it knew not, for a purpose left far behind in a forgotten place, for a knowledge which had long since lost its meaning.