Sedna cried out in disbelief. “Father, do not desert me!” she begged. She swam to the kayak and reached up, grasping the side of the boat. But the icy waters had made her arms numb and she could not haul herself back to safety.
Still the raven plunged and swooped. The storm grew worse. In his madness, Sedna’s father saw a shoal of rotten char coming to the surface to feed, if he fell. Addled by terror, he grabbed his kayak paddle once more and pounded Sedna’s fingers with it. She wailed in agony but he would not stop. “Take her! Take her!” he shouted crazily, believing that the only way to save his life was to sacrifice his daughter’s life instead. Over and over again he struck, until one by one, her frozen fingers cracked. They dropped into the ocean where they turned into seals and small whales as they sank. With her hands broken, Sedna could not hold on to the boat. Her mutilated body slipped under the water and slowly faded out of sight….
… Yet, she did not perish. Poisoned by the magic of a raven’s bile and further tormented by unresolved grief, she made her house at the bottom of the sea, where she became the goddess of the ocean, raging at men through violent storms….
If you want to know why David Rain calls the now terrifying, rather than terrified, Sedna up from her home at the bottom of the ocean, and what he has to offer her to get her aid, you’ll have to read the book! (In this instance, The Fire Eternal, the fourth in the series.)
The following pages relate several snippets from some of Chris’s own myths and legends, but so your enjoyment of the books won’t be spoiled, I won’t tell you the endings. Sorry! An extract from Lucy’s journal would be a good place to start.
My name is Lucy. Lucy Pennykettle. I’m sixteen. I turn heads. I get noticed. A lot. Mainly for the bright green eyes and mass of red hair. I live in a leafy little town called Scrubbley with my mom, Liz, and her partner, Arthur, and my part-sister, Zanna, and her sweet kid, Alexa. My cat, Bonnington, is the weirdest feline you’ll ever meet. We share the house with a bunch of special dragons, like the one sitting next to my keyboard, Gwendolen. Dragons. More about them in a mo.
Arthur (wise stepdad, sort of) told me once that people believe what they see in print. So here are a few small truths about me, just to get things into perspective:
My favorite food is vanilla-flavored yogurt.
I’m slightly scared of moths.
Squirrels break my heart.
I think I’m in love with a guy named Tam.
I’m totally in awe of the author David Rain.
I’m worried about the mist that’s covering the Arctic.
I’m haunted by the shadow of beings called the Ix.
But there’s one thing that keeps me awake most nights, and lately I can’t wrap my head around it:
I look like a girl. I think like a girl. I walk and talk like a girl.
But I was not born the way other girls are.
I hatched — from an egg.
I
AM
NOT
HUMAN
One of the special dragons, Gadzooks, eventually goes to visit a man named Professor Steiner and writes something on one of the professor’s parchments:
He crossed over to his desk and unlocked a drawer. From it he withdrew a single sheet of paper. It appeared to be made of thick gray cotton, like a small hand towel stiffened with starch. He passed it first to Lucy, who glanced at the pen marks and said, with disappointment, “It looks like a doodle.”
“Many ancient languages do,” said Arthur. “If you’d never seen Japanese or Arabic writing you would probably not associate the characters with the words at first. What do you make of it, Elizabeth?”
She took the paper and examined it. “I see what Lucy means. There doesn’t appear to be a formal phonetic structure. Though the strokes suggest it. They’re very deliberate.”
“I agree,” said Rupert Steiner, buoyed by her assessment, “but it’s quite unlike anything I’ve interpreted before. I couldn’t even guess at its country of origin. The frustrating thing is, I’m sure I’ve seen another example of this, but I can’t place it.”
“Could it be a drawing, perhaps?” Arthur asked.
The professor rubbed the question into his cheek. “The recording of history through storytelling and drawing was prevalent in our earliest ancestors, but even the wildest imagination couldn’t pull these marks into a meaningful picture. No, I’m convinced it’s a text of some kind.”
“Can I have another look?” Lucy took the page onto her knees again, turning it through several angles. “It reminds me a bit of the marks I saw on a wall in that cave on the Tooth of Ragnar.”
“The Tooth of Ragnar?” Steiner jerked back as if he’d been shot. “You’ve been there? But that island is — or rather was — in one of the remotest parts of the Arctic. Were you taken there on a school trip or something?”
“Erm … something,” Lucy replied, putting the sheet down on the coffee table. Her mind flashed back five years to when she’d been abducted by Gwilanna and taken to the island as a part of the sibyl’s bungled attempt to raise Gawain from the dead. Many times she’d been left to fend for herself, with nothing but wild mushrooms to eat and a female polar bear for company. That had been one heck of a “school trip.”
“How extraordinary,” Rupert said. “You must have been awfully young. You were lucky to visit it before it was destroyed by volcanic activity. The Tooth of Ragnar is a fascinating place, steeped in all sorts of Inuit myth. Why —”
“Just a moment, Professor.” Liz cut him off and turned her attention to Gwendolen, who’d just given out a startled hurr. The little dragon was on the coffee table, standing by the sheet of paper.
“What’s the matter?” Liz asked her.
The professor steered his gaze between the dragon and the woman. “Goodness! Can you converse with it?”
“Yes,” said Liz, without looking up. “Go on, Gwendolen.”
Gwendolen stepped forward and pointed to the writing. I know how to read it, she hurred.
“How?” said Lucy.
It’s dragontongue, Gwendolen said (rather proudly).
Lucy moved her aside. “Dragontongue? I didn’t even know you could write it down.”
“Me neither,” Liz admitted, sitting back, stunned. She glanced at Arthur, who was stroking his chin in what she always called his “pondering” mode.
“Elizabeth’s dragons speak a language roughly akin to Gaelic, Rupert. It’s possible to learn it, given time.”
Steiner bent over the coffee table and peered at Gwendolen as if she were a prize. The dragon warily flicked her tail. She hurred again at length.
“Did she speak then? I thought I saw smoke. And did her eyes also change color?”
“You’re making her nervous,” said Liz. “She wouldn’t normally be allowed to act this freely in human company and you shouldn’t, by rights, be able to see her. Somehow, Gadzooks must have made that possible.”
“Speaking of which …” Lucy gestured a hand.
Liz glanced at the writing again. “Gwendolen has just explained that the curves on the paper are like the way she moves her throat to make growling sounds.”
“Yeah, but what does it say?” pressed Lucy.
Gwendolen gathered her eye ridges together and frowned at the markings again. It was not a word she recognized, she said, but she thought she could speak the pronunciation correctly. She cleared her throat and uttered a long, low hurr.
Lucy glanced at her mother, who gave the translation. “Scuffenbury,” said Liz.
After a chat with David, Lucy now thinks she knows a bit more about why Gadzooks wrote “Scuffenbury” on Professor Steiner’s parchment.
“Scuffenbury” in dragontongue
At the end of the last dragon era, it came to a point where there were just twelve left. Driven from their aeries by wild-hearted men who knew no better than to kill a creature they couldn’t tolerate and didn’t understand, the dragons came together and decided to surrender. They didn’t gi
ve themselves up for capture or sacrifice; they just refused to fight anymore. This, to me, is the saddest story ever. I grow tired of people who only think of dragons as fire-breathing, maiden-snatching, cave-dwelling monsters. Dragons had heart. Morals. Courage. Zanna always says they were the spiritual guardians of the Earth, and for once I agree with her. We don’t really know what happened to the twelve. The legend is they separated and flew away to isolated places, remote volcanic islands and the like, where they could live out their lives in peace, and where they could eventually die in peace. Up until yesterday, the only location I knew about was the Tooth of Ragnar, where Gawain set down. Now, if David is telling the truth, there’s one hidden underneath Glissington Tor, close to Scuffenbury Hill, not a million miles from here.
Professor Steiner has also informed Liz and Lucy that he has seen dragontongue written before — in some photographs of wall markings taken in caves at a place called the Hella glacier. Henry Bacon, the Pennykettles’ next-door neighbor, tells David of an incident that happened there when Henry’s grandfather was part of an expedition to explore the area in 1913. A fellow explorer had disappeared there in unusual circumstances — lost, presumed dead. Lorel is a polar bear captured in a photograph on the study wall.
“People say he wandered off to find his watch.”
“What?”
“Had a risky incident a few months before. Found himself stranded near a native settlement with a large male polar bear for company. No rifle, and too far away from camp to summon help. All he had with him was a pocket watch. Played a tune when you opened the casing. Our fellow set it down in front of the bear. Story goes, the beast swaggered up to the watch, sat down, and listened. Our man backed off and escaped to camp. Went back with his comrades twenty minutes later, but the watch and the bear had both disappeared.”
“Who was this man?” David asked nervously.
Henry turned the book around. He pointed to a plate at the bottom of a page. “Third from the left. Fair-haired. Scandinavian.”
David cast his eyes down.
It was Dr. Bergstrom.
As David’s mind wrestled with the incredible conundrum of how a man in his forties who lectured at Scrubbley College could look exactly like a polar explorer reported missing in 1913, the house came alive with the trill of telephones. David thought he detected four at least. Henry snapped the book shut and returned it to the shelf. “Something amiss, boy? You look a bit pale.”
“I’m fine,” said David, “just … thinking, that’s all.” He cupped his hand around Gadzooks and looked through the slatted window blinds. There was a good view of the Pennykettles’ garden from here. He picked out Lucy right away, still by the brambles, puttering about with her hedgehog book. A slightly moody-looking Bonnington was sitting near the rock garden, paws tucked under his tummy, watching. And in the center of the lawn, as if a cloud had dripped and left a great white blot, lay the hunk of ice that had once been a snowbear, still surviving despite the rain. As Henry lifted a phone and the house became silent, David thought about Lorel and turned to look at the bear print again. For a fleeting moment he became the bear, looking back into the lens of Bergstrom’s camera. And from somewhere between the bear and the man, from the bright cold wilderness of frozen ages, from the leaves of books, from the creaking timbers of icebound vessels, came a voice like a wind from another world, saying, There was a time when the ice was ruled by nine bears …
(… which is a whole other story: Chris’s own massive White Fire Arctic saga. But you can read a little more about the nine bears in Icefire.)
There was a time when the ice was ruled by nine bears….
And finally, I can’t close this section without bowing to the wishes of a huge number of fans who have begged to know why all the dragons’ names begin with a G. The answer is in Dark Fire, but for those of you who haven’t read that far yet, here goes. A little preamble from Arthur first, then the reveal by Gwilanna (she’s got to be good for something).
“When I was at the abbey, I had a dream. I saw the universe created from the outgoing breath of a dragon called Godith. Everything was born from the fire of that dragon. A white fire. Auma in its purest sense. You and I, this physical world we inhabit, came into being when the fire cooled down to a low enough vibration to produce ingenious combinations of atoms and molecules.”
Hy-dragon, rather then hydrogen, one assumes. Well, we humans nearly got it right!
“The letter G,” said Zanna, wishing more than anything she’d brought Gretel with her. The potions dragon would have been working on escape routes from the start. Moments to live? What was the crazed witch talking about?
“Not just any G,” Gwilanna drawled on. “A G curling into an isoscele. It represents the tail of their creator, the she-dragon, Godith. Haven’t you ever wondered why dragons copy it into their names? To have the sign of Godith on your breath is a mark of respect. Really, girl, you’re such a waste. You could have learned so much from me.”
So now you know.
The first book in the series, The Fire Within, is an apparently simple, straightforward, and charming story about a young man who comes to stay as a tenant with a single-parent family, helps rescue an injured squirrel, and makes the acquaintance of a few clay dragons along the way.
Even if it was that simple, it gives absolutely no clue as to the power and profundity yet to come in the rest of the books. The stories get deeper, darker, and much more complex as they progress, while still retaining their trademark humor — from slapstick to black comedy — even in the direst of circumstances.
The story lines range from cozy domestic drama to an interdimensional war between races of thought-beings, into which humans are in danger of being dragged. There is mystery, danger, and adventure by the bucket-load, and this chapter gives a glimpse of what happens in each.
The series starts with David Rain about to move into the Pennykettle household on Wayward Crescent. David is marveling at one of the small clay dragons he has seen all around the house ever since he first walked in the door of Liz and Lucy’s home. He does not yet know that they can come to life.
There was a fiery pride in its oval-shaped eyes as if it had a sense of its own importance and knew it had a definite place in the world. Its tall slim body was painted green with turquoise hints at the edges of its scales. It was sitting erect on two flat feet and an arrow-shaped tail that swung back on itself in a single loop. Four ridged wings (two large, two small) fanned out from its back and shoulders. A set of spiky, flaglike scales ran the entire length of its spine.
David picked it up — and very nearly dropped it. “It’s warm,” he said, blinking in surprise.
“That’s because —”
“It’s been in the sun too long,” said Mrs. Pennykettle, quickly cutting her daughter off. She lifted the dragon out of David’s hands and rested it gently back on the shelf.
David soon learns that Liz Pennykettle makes these dragons, styled in a variety of poses and often with certain characteristics emphasized. She sells some of them at the market in Scrubbley. Liz has a studio in a room upstairs, called the Dragons’ Den, and the new tenant is told in no uncertain terms by Lucy that he is not allowed to enter. Needless to say, this piques David’s curiosity, but he manages to stifle the impulse to have a sneaky look in, at least for a while.
In the meantime, Lucy, who is very fond of wildlife, implores David to help her to find an injured squirrel she has seen in the garden, and which she has named Conker. David agrees after some cajoling, but upon meeting the Pennykettles’ next-door neighbor, Henry Bacon, he realizes that he will have competition for this task. Henry’s interest in capturing the squirrel is not benevolent, as he believes that squirrels have been responsible for eating his flowers and digging up his bulbs. To this end, he has gotten the town council to chop down a grand old oak tree that used to be home to a whole group of these creatures, which have now disappeared from the area. Only Conker is left behind.
Back in the
Dragons’ Den, Liz has been making a “special” dragon for David as a housewarming gift. Despite Lucy’s dire warning for him to stay out of the studio, Mrs. Pennykettle invites him in, where he gets introduced to several of the small dragons who are resident in the household. David’s dragon turns out to be similar to the other dragons, except that it (he) is holding something….
… It had a pencil wrapped in its claws and was biting the end of it, lost in thought.
“Hope you like him,” said Liz. “He was … interesting to do.”
“He’s wonderful,” said David. “Why does he have a pencil?”
“And a pad?” said Lucy, pointing to a notepad in the dragon’s other paw.
“It’s what he wanted,” said Liz, coming to join them. “I tried him with a book, but he just didn’t like it. He definitely wanted a pencil to chew on.”
“Perhaps he’s a drawing dragon,” said Lucy. “Do you like drawing pictures?”
David shook his head. “Can’t draw for anything. What do you mean, he ‘wanted’ a pencil?”
Liz lifted a shoulder. “Special dragons are like characters in a book; I have to go where they want to take me. I have a writer friend who’s always saying that.”
Lucy let out an excited gasp. “You mean he’s a dragon for making up stories?!”
“Lucy, don’t start,” said Liz. “Now, David, if you accept this dragon you must promise to care for him always.”
“You mustn’t ever make him cry,” said Lucy.
David ran a thumb along the dragon’s snout. “Erm, this might sound like a silly question, but how is it possible to make him cry?”
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