by IGMS
Or was this a great serendipity of existence?
I pushed the questions out of my head. Even at the end, I was still grasping for understanding.
I typed in the code that gave me access to the forward shield, and at the same moment the communications board lit up. Either the Bishop or the military -- perhaps both -- had found us.
Quickly, I released the solar layer. Covering my head, I ducked beneath the dash, not quite comfortable enough with my fate to let the radiation hit me straight on.
Ephah's eyes snapped towards the bright star, staring at it directly. Her eyes and face appeared to blur, but the fogginess quickly resolved into a glow. Her hair already stood on end, and she unbuckled herself to float freely within the cabin.
The shuttle's insides grew hotter, and within moments I was sweating. I wiped the droplets away from my eyes. I couldn't miss this.
She lifted her arms, and light shown from her fingertips. I waited impatiently for her to dissolve out of existence, away into her own universe, but she did not leave.
"Go!" I said, my tone laced with urgency.
"It is not enough," she replied calmly.
The shuttle jerked and vibrated. Someone had fired a warning shot.
"I must have the full output of the star," Ephah said.
The air was so heavy I couldn't breathe. And the metal around me was too hot to touch -- everywhere my skin brushed against it blisters erupted. This was going to be a painful death.
Ephah twisted in an unusual way, her strange knees folded in the wrong direction, and her arms shot out dramatically to each side. She looked like she meant to push against the shuttle walls, though her fingers did not touch them.
In the next moment my world exploded. The escape shuttle burst apart at every closure and seam, reduced to its basic parts in the blink of an eye.
And I was now suspended in space, fully exposed.
Ephah floated beside me, her face pure calm and her body pure power. I reached towards her, expecting no response, but she took my hand. Looking into my eyes, she smiled. Her glow brightened, became blinding.
And then there was nothing.
"You do not belong to me," Ephah said.
I didn't hear her with my ears, or see her with my eyes. I couldn't feel my limbs, or my heartbeat.
"I cannot make you a part of my universe," she said.
I wasn't dead, but I also wasn't alive. Ephah must have saved me, but where were we now? Not in her universe, and not in mine.
There was something I'd wanted to say before, but had missed the opportunity. "Please, don't recreate the fear you saw," I pleaded. If there was a chance at a pure universe, I had to take it. "Forget what they did to you, and just remember my help. Don't create more suffering."
"True happiness and true suffering are both birthed from knowledge. If I refuse to create suffering; I refuse to create knowing." She was different again, wiser. She'd evolved further.
"I cannot make you a part of my universe," she said again, "But if I send you back you will die." She was trying to get me to understand something. "If you let me, I will save you as He saved me."
"What do you --" But I knew.
Ephah had helped a god -- my God? -- just as I had helped her. And now she . . .
It was a cycle, of salvation and creation.
"Right now you are weak," she said. "Too weak to do anything but linger. You will linger for eternity -- except there is no eternity, because there is no time -- and you will forget yourself. But, eventually, something will slip from my universe into this place and make you remember. And then you'll follow that spark and visit my world. And knowledge will be your friend and enemy, just as it was mine." There was a dual happiness and sadness flowing from her. She was remembering.
"I will teach my creations what you reminded me of, Thomas: compassion, compulsion to aid the helpless, the acceptance of ignorance without fear. And when you emerge, one of them may see me in you. I can only hope."
There was a softness in the nothingness, something I could only liken to the most chaste of kisses. And then she was gone.
And I was alone in the time before time, waiting for my turn to be reborn.
Dragonslayer
by Nathaniel Lee
Artwork by Anna Repp
* * *
The door creaked open, spilling smoke and sullen firelight out into the darkness. The slender youth, blondish and pock-marked, slipped inside. After a moment, the flow of conversation resumed, a constant undercurrent of sound. This inn - the Sheps Hedde - was a popular stop along the King's Highway, standing at the conflux of three major roads and supporting side businesses and a half-dozen cottages with the steady flow of custom.
Handel, the barman, tucked a pair of half-pennies into the pouch at his waist and turned to regard the boy as he approached. The young man had the look of a servant of some kind, though he wore no livery or sigil. Clean and healthy, at least, if a bit old for squiring or apprenticeship.
"Yuh?" Handel said by way of greeting.
The boy blinked pale green eyes at him, the color of mown grass. "My master, Sir Timor, requires lodging for the night. He begs a small room and four stalls in the barn." With a clink, the boy set down a golden sovereign on the bar. Handel tried not to choke; the coin was enough to rent every room in the ramshackle two-story building.
"He has a fair . . . a fair few horses, eh?" Handel's voice was unsteady, but his hands made the coin disappear with barely a whisper of motion.
The boy shrugged. "Don't get too excited. You'll probably need the extra coin for the repairs." He headed for the door again. "I'll get him settled, and then I'll come back for his meal. Get some vegetables in it; I'm sick to death of meat."
"Wait!" Handel had accommodated a few Knights and would-be Lords in his day, and this was not going according to the pattern. "He's staying in the barn?"
"It's an oath. Very important." The boy met Handel's gaze with a painstakingly guileless expression. "He doesn't like to be disturbed. There's another full sovereign in the morning if you can find us a spare sheep. A good plump one, for preference." The boy blinked. "Burnt offerings to the Lord, you know."
Handel coughed. "I think something can be arranged," he said in a strangled voice. "Er . . . who should the boy ask for when he comes out?"
"Call me Draco," the youth said and departed back into the night.
"You did that very well," Sir Timor said as Draco led the horse inside. His basso growl of a voice drew answering cries from around the barn. The other animals had all gone half-mad with fright at Sir Timor's presence, but the white warhorse - dubbed Ransom - was by now used to the reptilian musk that filled the air around the dragon, and he submitted to a rubdown and grooming with his usual good manners, knowing there was a hopper of sweet hay for him at the end of it.
"You heard?" Draco asked. "From out here?"
"Predators have keen senses, as a rule," Timor sighed. He lay down in his enclosure, having removed the interior walls of four stalls, and rested his head on his forelimbs. "You play the part nicely. Where did you learn that tone of voice? I could almost hear the sneer in it."
"Oh, you know. Observation. You pick things up." Draco bent to his task, Ransom's glossy hide almost swallowing his voice. "The money does the talking, really."
"Interesting name you chose for yourself."
Timor coughed, sending wisps of straw flying on his sulfurous breath.
"Yes, sir. It seemed appropriate."
"As I have taken your name, so you take on mine?"
"Something like that, sir."
There was a rumbling growl that Draco only belatedly realized was a chuckle.
"You needn't be so timid . . . Draco," said Timor, moving to pluck up his gear and begin his nightly ritual of polishing and cleaning his sword and armor. The implements looked like table utensils in his massive claws. "I'm hardly going to exact bloody revenge on my own squire, am I?"
"Don't know, sir. Never been a squire b
efore."
"Nor have I been a knight. We are learning together, ha?" Timor held up one of his shields and peered down his snout at the mirror finish. He had quite a collection, most of them cracked and warped from heat, and he wore them on a harness across his back, like horse armor. With the care of a jeweler, Timor pinched a handful of straw between his foreclaws - each themselves as long as a dagger - and rubbed at a spot of tarnish.
Draco shuffled his feet. "Sure you don't want me to do that, sir? I'm fairly certain that the squire is supposed to clean the knight's armor."
Timor snorted - more laughter that set the chickens roosting overhead to a shrill frenzy - and moved to examine his sword. "I prefer to do it myself, for now. It is all so unfamiliar to me. But you are a good lad for offering. I knew it when I first met you: you have good blood. I can smell it." The nictitating membranes flicked across Timor's eyes as his slit pupils widened. Draco had learned to be wary of that expression; it was very much like the look in a cat's eyes when it was debating whether to go for the dangling string or the hand holding it.
"I don't know what you mean, sir," Draco said, moving to the other side of Ransom to fuss at the saddle. "My family has been farming that land since my great-grandfather's days. The closest any of us came to noble blood was when my Aunt Magarat was took to be a lady's maid."
"Ha! Good blood isn't a matter of breeding, boy. It's something you have, not something you inherit. Believe me, if there's one thing I know, it's blood." Timor dropped despondently back to the floor, shaking the whole building. "Likely it's all I'll ever know," he muttered. Timor's softest voice could still rattle windows in their panes.
Draco glanced around for structural damage, but the barn seemed steady. "I should head back inside. You'll be okay out here?"
"Take the gold, perhaps? It would be safer inside, yes?" Timor flicked his tail at the two massive leather satchels; remnants of his hoard, like the shields.
Draco raised an eyebrow. "Safer inside a den of thieves with a four-stone teenager than hidden in a barn with a dragon guarding it?" He tugged at one of the straps experimentally. "I don't know that I could even lift it all, honestly."
"Oh, very well." Timor sounded almost petulant. "It grates on me. I can feel it there, and it wakens all the old urges. To gather, to hoard, to clutch and keep, to carry down to the darkest and most secret places . . ." His tail began to lash back and forth as he spoke. Draco hastened to find a way to avert the dragon's growing agitation.
"Like my Da and his bottle," Draco said. "D'you know, he stopped for years when my sister was born. Kept a bottle the whole time, but left the cork in and set it on a high shelf in the pantry. It gathered dust and not one fingerprint, right up until the weeping sickness came and took Angelica, along with half the village. Wasn't too long after that that he passed, too, and . . . well . . ."
"And we embarked on our noble quest, yes. I recall." Timor's head rose to a proud angle on his serpentine neck. "You have wisdom beyond your years, boy. Draco! I shall have to remember that. Yes, the gold is a burden, but it is also a test. A test of my devotion! I'll embrace it, then, in that spirit."
"But not literally."
"Right! Yes, the gold will stay in its bags, safe but emphatically un-coveted. Well-spoken, lad; well-spoken indeed." The dragon curled himself up in his oversized stall and blew a smoke-ring of contentment. "I'm feeling more knightly all the time. Hair shirts and mortification, ha?"
"Yes, sir." Draco wondered briefly what Timor was talking about, but decided it was better to leave his mercurial master while he was on an upswing. "Good night."
"Good evening, Squire Draco. And tomorrow, our journey truly begins!"
The food at the Sheps Hedde was passable, and the bed far softer than the moldy pallets Draco had grown up on. He only realized he'd overslept when he opened his eyes to a piercing sunbeam and a hesitant knocking at the door.
"M'lord . . . Draco?"
Draco cracked open the door of his tiny room - a room all to himself, too! - and grunted sleepily. The tow-headed innkeeper's boy stood nervously outside.
"Sir Timor calls for you, m'lord. He said to rouse you if you were slugabed, and to remind you that Sloth is a deadly sin." The boy cringed, as if expecting a blow. Draco gave him a half-penny and shut the door before the shock wore off. After a quick splash of water from the basin and a brief visit with the thundermug, Draco tugged on his overshirt and belted it in place as he bounded down the stairs, his boots still loose on his feet. He skidded to a halt at the inn's door, propped open now for the morning custom. Men, women, and children bustled about in all directions: travelers, merchants, farmers, and tradesmen, all busy with their own concerns. None of them paid any mind to what Draco thought ought to have been a rather mind-boggling sight.
Timor was outside, in his ersatz knightly regalia. His harness of shields rattled along his flanks; his sword dangled like gimcrack jewelry from the upper half of his left forelimb; the breastplate he'd hammered into a crude helm bobbled ridiculously atop his horns and feathery mane. He was leading Ransom for a morning trot around the yard with his tail tangled in the reins, and he was engaged in a very earnest discussion with a grubby older man who looked to be a farmer. The farmer, like all the other people in the yard, didn't seem to notice that his conversational partner was an enormous fire-breathing lizard, fully thirty feet from nose to tail-tip, but the young sheep the farmer held on a short halter assuredly did; the poor animal was straining backwards with all of its might, held firm by the farmer's practiced hand.
"Ho, Draco!" said Timor, lifting a foreclaw in greeting. "Goodman Brown here has brought us our morning sheep. Don't you think two sovereigns was a bit much to offer?"
Draco stepped forward, giving the farmer a penetrating stare. Goodman Brown returned the look with pursed lips and raised eyebrows, completely unfazed by Draco's disapproval. "I'm sorry, sir," said Draco, unwilling to cause a scene. If Timor lost his temper in the midst of all these innocents . . . "I thought it might increase the urgency our local benefactors felt if the reward was high."
"Well, no harm done, no harm done. I'm happy to support the local agricultural base. Farms are the backbone of our kingdom's wealth, for what good is gold if you cannot eat?" Timor gestured to the oversized saddle bags. "Pay the man, Draco."
Draco sidled around Timor's bulk and loosened the belts holding the bags shut, careful not to reveal the full extent of the wealth inside. He slid his hand under the flap and retrieved two small gold coins, which he offered to Goodman Brown. The farmer's eyebrows had nearly disappeared under his hat, but he took the money without comment. Draco noticed that a large amount of the hustle and bustle had gone quiet as every man and woman in the yard stared at the bags. Draco could almost hear the furious calculations, like the buzzing of a hive of bees. He sighed.
"They can't see a dragon right in front of them, but they can see gold through three layers of leather, wood, and metal," Draco muttered.
"Whassat?" said Goodman Brown. "A dragon?"
"Yes," Timor interrupted, snaking his head between them and shooting Draco a reproachful look. "We are on a quest, you see. We heard there was a marauding dragon nearby?"
Goodman Brown rubbed at the back of his head. "Not around here, no. I heard tell of some sort o' trouble up the river, nigh Brytheton. A fire, or some such. Coulda been a dragon, I s'pose."
"Excellent!" said Timor. "Then we must be off. No time to waste, not while people are in trouble. At the very least, we can help the victims of the tragedy to rebuild."
"Doubt it," said Goodman Brown. "Mostly they's dead."
Timor's tail and feathery ruff drooped, and Draco hastened to gather Ransom's reins before the horse took advantage of his sudden freedom. "Then we will help the widows and orphans," he said firmly. "Sir Timor?"
"What? Oh. Yes." The dragon was still gazing fretfully into the middle distance.
Draco sighed again, then moved to lift the bags of gold one at a time onto the horse's back wi
th many a grunt and gasp. Ransom cast a resentful glare over his shoulder, unhappy at having his pleasant trot interrupted. "Good people!" Draco called, his voice strained from the effort - even that tiny fraction of Timor's old hoard was literally more gold than he could lift at once. "Sir Timor the Great-heart has a quest that takes him far away. He leaves now, but he thanks you for your kindness and hospitality. May you all live long and blessed lives!" He waved and then tugged on Ransom's reins until the horse grudgingly moved forward. "Farewell!" He coughed. "Sir Timor?"
The pageantry had revived the dragon's spirits somewhat. "Yes. We are off to slay the fell beast that plagues your countrymen! Go in peace, all of you!" He waved cheerfully. His wings fluttered and flapped like pennants, but he did not fly; he had not flown, in fact, since that fateful day he had first landed in Timor's village and struck a bargain with a luckless farm boy.
The knight and his squire strode away from the inn and toward Destiny. Several pairs of eyes watched them go. No one seemed to notice the platter-sized markings of dragon claws in the mud of the yard, and they were quickly obliterated by the passage of many feet.
The journey along the river was pleasant, especially compared to their hot and dusty trudge to reach the inn. This road was not so well used, and the water nearby cooled the air, providing a pleasant gurgling accompaniment as they walked. Timor talked constantly, recounting stories of bold knights and chivalry and feats of daring - sometimes with commentary about the inaccurate details they contained regarding the habits of the slain monsters - while Draco walked mostly in silence.
As they passed a small pasture, Timor's tail lashed excitedly, knocking over a portion of the fence. He didn't notice. His body did not fit entirely on the roadway, and every step crushed flowers and grass and, in one case, some poor farmer's crops. He didn't notice that, either.
Draco wondered if it was inherent in the dragon's nature to cause destruction; the beast seemed sincere in his perverse desire to become a knight, and even so he had yet to pass a man-made structure that he had not somehow damaged.