Song of the Storm Dragon

by Marc Secchia

  Ardan, probably wishing to re-establish his maligned masculinity, reached in and snaffled the eight-foot monstrosity into his paw. It was flat and whitish all over, the same colour and consistency as a maggot, but furnished with the fat, stubby legs of a tick and a flat, disagreeable bulb for a head. Apparently, it did not much fancy being rousted from its warm, comfortable abode. It squealed and waved its legs ineffectually.

  Charming critter, said Zip. Toss it, Ardan.

  No, bring it up to the business end of this magnificent Land Dragon, Aranya ordered. Her friends’ expressions told her they were indulging another mad whim; playing along to see what breath of Island-World pollen moved her now.

  “Right. Ardan, present mite.”

  Leandrial found herself gazing at the scale-mite from a distance of a hundred feet, give or take. The Amethyst Dragoness drew herself up with a pompous air. “Behold, students, the common draconic scale-mite.”

  “Glad that isn’t one of mine,” Ardan put in.

  “Aye, imagine that monster crawling up your–”

  “Zip, you vile guttersnipe,” Aranya snapped. “Concentrate, will you? Right. Scale-mites are a common parasite, afflicting all types of Dragons. Many scale-mites specialise in particular types of Dragons, or in particular regions of a Dragon’s body.” She leered at Ardan. “Don’t they?”

  He squirmed.

  “So, class. Who can explain to me why scale-mites are not cast off during a Shapeshifter’s transformation? This fine specimen of a darkly handsome Dragon being a case in point. Why, after Shifting, bathing and living in Human form, does he still display every evidence of a nasty infestation of the nether regions?”

  Zip said, “Because he has the same problem in Human form? Just … smaller?”

  Poor Ardan. His belly-fires howled the exact note of his mortification as he thundered, ZUZIANA OF REMOY!

  Leandrial said, “Ah. How cunning you are, Aranya. The mites shift with the Shifter. Therefore, there is a link, either physical or magical. No, you argue that the link is magical. A mite is a parasite of Dragon magic. Correct so far?”

  Aranya bowed. “Carry on, student.” To Zuziana, she added aside, “I’ve waited so long to say that to Leandrial.”

  The Azure Dragoness clearly decided that laughing directly at an eye-cannon was ill-advised.

  “Now, we ask ourselves, what does this have to do with Land Dragons?” The mighty Dragoness warmed to her task. “Aranya theorises that scale-mites parasitize the innate magic of Dragons. She says, ‘what is their diet?’ It was always assumed that mites lived on ambient nutrients or those lubricants secreted by a Dragon’s living hide for protection, repair and nutrition. However, by this we conclude only environment-related symbiosis.”

  The Amethyst shook her head. “I think the relationship is parasitic, not symbiotic. Could you, without destroying Ardan’s paw, examine this mite’s physical makeup and tell me what you find?”

  With a hum that indicated lively inquisitiveness, Leandrial bent to her analysis. Her eye brightened, beaming out so powerfully that Aranya began to see the outlines of Ardan’s bones within the talons clasping the wriggling scale-mite. For several long minutes, the Land Dragon cogitated away, muttering, Hmm, interesting. No. Trace metals, aye. What does the little one seek? AHA!

  Her bellow shook them all.

  Zip complained, “Alright, I’m deaf. Any Dragon who feels like enlightening us …”

  Leandrial’s mouth curled in a massive Dragon-smile, showing her sharp triple row of incisors, and even a few premolars, which were great blocks of draconic tooth-matter ninety feet long and fifty wide. They grew constantly throughout a Land Dragon’s lifetime, for to lose the teeth would be to starve.

  The behemoth said, “I find many trace metals and elements essential to good draconic health–antimony, magnesium, vanadium, thallium and silicon, to name but a few. Most importantly, I find my missing and very rare metal sulphites and phosphates in the very forms essential to my wellbeing. Aranya, this is an incredible discovery. A paw-stroke of genius.”

  “A lucky guess, triggered by sniffing around her boyfriend’s backside,” Zip tittered.

  “I’m sure Dragon scientists worked out this relationship aeons ago,” Aranya demurred, thumping Zip with a kick that would have flattened her friend’s Human form, but only made an Azure Dragoness giggle. “You do know what I’m going to suggest next, don’t you?”

  Leandrial’s entire body stiffened. “I am exclusively vegetarian!”

  “I know. But better a healthy, occasional meat-eater than a dead vegetarian, right?”

  * * * *

  From the south-westernmost corner of the Spits, the four Dragons cut across a deeply riven, rocky landscape, habitat for whole new classes of crawling and flying organisms, drawn to the warm vents of the plenteous underground volcanic activity. Yellowish smoke and poisonous gases drifted languidly around grey basaltic columns and across fractured, sooty black lava flats traversed by multi-jointed crustaceans, similar in body form to the freshwater crabs they had enjoyed at Yorbik, only, these creatures had pincers and mandibles fit to make a meal of a Dragon rather than the reverse. Even the Shadow Dragon flew respectfully around the larger denizens of this realm. Leandrial enjoyed a brief scrap with an aggressive giant lobster large enough–and foolish enough–to grasp her body in its pincers. The Dragoness flexed her neck and blasted away with her eye-cannon before indulging in a disrespectful dance on the twitching fragments of orange carapace that remained. Immediately, the under-Cloudlands equivalent of windrocs gathered; the long-legged spider-like scavengers and aggressive carnivores skittering and hopping across the rocks, leaping in vast, fixed-wing-assisted bounds, or flying with a rapid click-clicking of their bony wing appendages.

  Leandrial showed them how life thrived around the smoking fumaroles, from the smallest bacteria to the myriad chains of creatures that depended or even thrived on the aerobic and anaerobic forms of life drifting up from the hellish volcanic activity below ground. She did not grumble at the diet the Lesser Dragons regularly foraged for from beneath her scales, but laughed uproariously when Zuziana and Aranya engaged in a full-blown battle with a scale-mite larger than either of them, extracted from the region of her right armpit. Tonnes of scale-mites disappeared down that cavernous maw. The Land Dragoness’ magic swelled enormously.

  So did her lectures. A four-hour lecture on magical osmosis, the process by which she deduced scale-mites extracted essential nutrients from their hosts, brought the Dragons to the foot of Fra’anior’s mighty rampart, the greatest active volcano North of the Rift.

  Here, the atmosphere was so dark as to be almost impenetrable. Leandrial’s eye-beam regularly speared through the particle-laden gloom to show the way; dank smears of soot ran down their pressure-shields, forcing the Lesser Dragons to learn to cycle their shaped aerodynamic constructs so that the dirt sloughed off to the rear. Flying became a chore rather than a joy. Pumice and whole boulders tumbled from above, knocking even shielded Dragons about like male cliff-goats playing at head-butting during mating season.

  Ardan cleared Aranya’s back of a clinging grey rock-Borer. She returned the favour when he flew headlong into a school of bulbous brown creatures that resembled Dragonships, which had long, trailing tentacles that delivered a powerful electrical discharge. Eventually, five brawling, battling hours later, they broached the Cloudlands.

  Leandrial pointed upward with one gigantic talon. “Fra’anior lies yonder. You will treat with the King?”

  Aranya craned her neck, but could not clearly see the top of the volcanic rim, five miles above her head at this point. By the angle of the suns, she judged the time to be seven hours after noon. Perfect. She might catch the King at dinner.

  “I hope to–how did you put it? I hope to buzz in his ear-canal before the others arrive.”

  “Aye? Then buzz off, as your Zuziana likes to say,” returned the Land Dragon, with a smile that reminded Aranya of how she could swallow an e
ntire village in a single bite. “I shall bathe in the caldera. If you need me, sing my name before the suns dip beneath the horizon tomorrow evening. Otherwise, I plan to head West for a day’s running to find a feeding ground which has served me well in decades past.”

  Sometimes, she forgot how extraordinarily venerable Leandrial was–a mere matter of Aranya’s seventeen summers, plus four hundred and one more! Even Nak had gasped, and acted most put out. He rather enjoyed the privileges of age, which he took to mean ogling pretty girls, whacking anyone younger than him with his canes–bar Oyda, whom he still feared and doted upon after nigh one and a half centuries of marriage–and invariably demanding the most comfortable seat.

  Aranya said, “I may need you to meet the King.”

  “You may want Leandrial to intimidate him?” Zip clarified at once, with her cheekiest grin.

  “No–oh, Zip. Aye, I wind up like a war-catapult at your slightest teasing. Ardan, maybe you should find a handy lava-flow as well? Just a suggestion.”

  “A suggestion with bite,” he riposted. “See you around the Islands later, pretty-scales.”

  Stinging! Aranya made a bland response and tried not to flee.

  They were a further mile up-Island, beyond the level to which the fantastic tropical foliage of Fra’anior descended, when Zip burst out, “Sometimes he is just a stinking barbarian!”

  “Zip, no. Don’t go there.”

  “Sorry. Slipped out,” muttered the Remoyan, clearly seething. “I meant, in the way of men who are trying to be cheerful and funny, and just end up being insensitive.” When Aranya did not reply, she hissed, “Thanks for agreeing with me, best friend. Islands’ sakes!”

  Enwrapped in a brittle silence, they winged upward. Aranya tried not to dwell upon Zuziana’s accusation as she took in, as best she could, the wondrous colours of her mother’s home Cluster, the volcano whereon, the balladeers claimed, ‘lived a clutch of volcano-grubbing madmen’–a notable comedic effort introduced to her by the exceptionally fine voice of none other than Prince Ta’armion. She had to admit, more than a grain of truth lurked therein. Give her the solidity of mountainous Immadia over twenty-seven Islands quivering three and a half to nine miles above an active volcano, any day.

  Undeniably, Fra’anior had excelled himself in sculpting the Cluster which bore his name. The cliffs were sheer, unrelieved majesty, the masterstrokes of mighty talons. The verdant Islands, even in the dry season heat, shimmered like precious emeralds far above the simmering caldera. As they gazed past the northernmost point of Fra’anior Island, Aranya’s poor vision identified at least five active secondary volcanoes. As quickly as Dragons flew, they soon surmounted the visible layers of volcanic gases and broke abruptly into a realm of heady scents and birdsong. Pollen hung so thickly in the air, it shivered like golden veils as their wings stirred the fragrant grains. The wash of their passage stirred waterfalls of trailing flower-vines, hundreds of feet long, with their bell-shaped blossoms expressed in subtle purples and vibrant, joyous pastels; birds darted into hiding, trilling with alarm, and a quintet of dragonets flashed out of the dense foliage to gawk at the newcomers.

  Big, big so big! chuckled a pretty yellow dragonet.

  Why you a mommy dragonet? chirped another.

  Zuziana had a three-foot blue dragonet turning somersault after somersault around her head. She’s like me. She’s me! Whee!

  Choking up in the face of this overwhelming feast for the senses, Aranya voiced a cry that began as a laugh and broke off as a sob. She had not laughed in so long. She feared to unleash a maelstrom of grief.

  The dragonets fled at her forlorn bugle.

  Zip’s left wing caressed her flank briefly. I know, girlfriend.

  She saw little as they flew down the length of Fra’anior Island to the elegant boulevards of the capital city, hearing distantly that Zuziana had spotted the incoming Dragonship fleet perhaps four hours offshore; her friend noted dryly that she had witnessed Ardan warming his rump in a handy caldera-level lava flow, contorting his face as if he were working on a difficult problem.

  Aranya groaned. “Zip, you can’t possibly see that from up here.”

  “Every nuance of his posture communicates a severe case of constipation,” Zip added, pulling various faces as she pretended to strain. “Ooh, it’s a bad one.”

  “Zip!”

  “Can you imagine Leandrial? Wow, like oooooh, I’m trying to pass an Island here!”

  “Zuziana of Remoy–”

  “Wooo-eeee … blam!” she yelled, making a shrill whistling sound before smacking her left fist into her right forepaw. “And you thought those were earthquakes. Silly girl.”

  Aranya’s wingbeat hitched as laughter attacked her belly with claws. Oh, Zip! A few minutes later, she quietly apologised for being angry with her friend earlier.

  The two Dragonesses winged rapidly over the central wilderness of Fra’anior, angling for the city near the southern tip. They raced over an uninhabited region of tangled forests and deeply scored ravines, miles and miles of rajal country before cresting one last brace of fang-toothed purple peaks. The city of Fra’anior spread out before them.

  Repair works were in full swing. The scorch-marks of Dragon fire were still clearly visible on the ground and on several buildings, including the Palace itself, but the fallen bodies and Dragonships had been cleared away.

  “Well, we’ve been spotted now,” said Zip, pointing at a couple of Dragonships patrolling above the city, before her paw suddenly curled. “What was that? Did you feel–”

  “Aye. I can’t … can you see anything, Zip? A Dragon?”

  The Azure Dragoness scanned the Island alertly. “Do you mean Yolathion? Grief, there’s a million places he could be hiding around here. Nothing. Did you–”

  “Almost certainly. Leandrial described this Dragon-sense as a kind of itching in the mind–actually, she said, ‘like the nostrils of your mind’. You scent a presence, your sixth sense makes the connection to a harmonic convergence of memory, scents, impressions and magical signatures, and–”

  Zip said, “Oof. It’s all muddy Land Dragon-ese to me. Say, we could ask the local dragonets if they’ve seen a large, feral Brown Dragon–what do you think?”

  “Great idea.” Aranya tried to scan the Islands as well. “I wonder where Jia-Llonya and Kylara might be? I’m sure Her Warrior-Chiefliness still wants to trim a few of my scales with her scimitar. And what was Kaiatha’s Dragon’s name? I don’t sense him.”

  “Yedior the Brown–it makes sense. You knew Yolathion much better than Yedior,” the Azure pointed out. “So, where are we landing?”

  “The Receiving Balcony on the Palace roof, of course,” said Aranya, waggling a brow-ridge at her friend. “Knowing how Remoyans love to make an entrance.”

  “Remoyan Dragonesses,” came the jaunty reply.

  A tilt of the wings, and two Dragonesses came screaming down onto the Palace roof, startling the living pith out of the blue-robed Royal Guards stationed there. Aranya grinned. Sweating, panicking guardsmen? Sometimes, being a Dragoness was far too much fun. Extending her four paws, she landed lightly on the talon-scored granite flagstone surface, absorbing the momentum of an Immadian Princess’ tonnage with her coiled thighs. Half a breath later, Her Fiery Lizard-Ship, the Princess of Remoy, alighted beside her and, being Zip, smiled–one hundred fangs and a mischievous puff of bluish, sulphurous smoke between those gleaming daggers–at the soldiers.

  “Hi, boys!” Zip said brightly.

  Some of the soldiers had their swords half-drawn, most were trying to decide if refuge behind their ceremonial shields bespoke cowardice. Or perhaps, a hasty retreat might be in order?

  Identifying the Guard Captain by his highly embellished shield-boss, Aranya turned to him and said, “Captain, we would like to transform. Do you mind ordering your men to turn around?”

  “Turn?” he barked.

  “Around,” said Aranya, making a small circle with her fore-talon. “We’re S
hapeshifters. Girls. Princesses, actually.”

  “Turn our backs upon Dragons?” The Captain seemed to have one mode of communication, the parade-ground bark. “Are you mad, lady … uh, Dragon? Dragoness?”

  “I might be if you insult me again,” Aranya cooed.

  “You’re totally awesome and splendid, noble Dragoness,” spluttered another soldier, evidently cognizant of the value of his hide. What a nice young man!

  “Observe, Aranya. This is how it’s done,” said Zip. Whirling toward her friend’s starboard flank, she transformed.

  Aranya caught the saddlebags with a reflexive snap of her paws. “Zuziana!”

  The highborn Princess of Remoy jiggled her trim derriere in the Captain’s general direction. “Now would you turn around, Captain?”

  “About face!” he howled, spinning on his boot-heel with alacrity.

  A second later, the girl and her Dragoness were surrounded by the backs of tall Fra’aniorian Royal Guards, not one of whom, despite their tan skin-tone, had necks and ears that were not burning red. Aranya stared about her with a degree of consternation. Well. Effective.

  Remoyan exhibitionist, she snorted.

  “Come on, slow-slug,” said Zip, unbuckling one of the bags. “The King’s waiting.”

  “The King is at dinner, lady,” said the Captain, in a strangled whine.

  “Good. Send a man to inform him–”

  “–to request his good pleasure,” Aranya interrupted, transforming. To a man, the soldiers flinched at the whoosh of air that accompanied her radical change in size.

  “Anyways, just do what she said.” Zip prodded Aranya in the ribs, making her yelp. “I am Zuziana, Princess of Remoy and my very under-dressed companion is Aranya, Princess of Immadia. We visited not long ago to battle with Thoralian, and furthermore, Aranya is the cousin of Prince Ta’armion’s new bride, Lyriela of Ha’athior. Do you have all that straight, you charming man? I do love men in uniform. So very … leopard.”

  “Shameless,” Aranya hissed.

  “Aye, my Lady!” rapped the Captain, dispatching one of his men immediately. Aranya noticed the man snuck a glance as she tugged an under-shift over her head. She failed to ignore his hiss of shock.