by Marc Secchia
Aranya cried, Corrupt Storm-power–there!
Flame took form and oriented toward them. Semi-embodied, Storm Elementals were draconic creatures of fire and Earthen-magic lightning, lacking all but the most rudimentary intelligence, but what minds they possessed turned to one channel only, the annihilation of all life. Limbs of tawny, curiously furry fire churned the torrents ahead into a boiling vortex. Half-formed muzzles and throats tossed amidst the tumult bellowed new notes of thunder, changing the voice of the Rift-Storm into a chilling, hostile battle-roar. The storm lumped together and smote the invaders, pummelling Leandrial with fists like monumental, red-hot granite blocks. Lightning flared continually, striking incandescent white-purple sparks off their shield. Leandrial responded with sharp, directed blasts of her eye-cannon, finding a pitch of her Harmonic magic that fragmented the Elementals.
Let us join in battle! the Shadow Dragon howled, throwing his strength behind Leandrial.
Grimly, she forged through a howling sea of Storm Elementals as they re-formed and pounded her from every direction, with waves of semi-solid scarlet fire and pugnacious blasts, shaped lightning bolts and bone-shaking peals of thunder. Barely came a second’s respite and a new voice joined the fray, for each Elemental added a distinctive note to the Rift-Storm’s booming. Suffused with the awesome natural force of their environment, they joined together to assault Leandrial, rolling her over and over with massive, co-ordinated blasts, but the Land Dragoness simply gritted her teeth and swam upside-down.
Zip and Aranya joined their strength to flex the shield, shooting pneumatic jolts at a Storm Elemental pounding Leandrial’s back with its fists. Thunder! Shuddering! Explosions! The Dragoness groaned loudly and long, forging through the storm for three fraught hours, but Zuziana sensed her strength, and that of the Shadow Dragon, fading. Ardan hid their group in Shadow for minutes at a time, but allowing the Storm Elemental magic free reign to wash through their Shadowed beings was an imperfect answer, for even his magic was vulnerable. Strips of armour peeled off, exposing Leandrial’s hide. The Shadow Dragon raged. Every moment of his exertions proclaimed his desire to be battling with tooth and claw rather than the weapons of mind and draconic will.
The Dragons fought in tandem, wielding every weapon at their disposal. Every league won was by wild combat; every Storm Elemental braved, a victory. In the battle’s heat some Elementals even turned upon each other, shooting fire against crimson fire and pounding fist against muzzle, splattering the Land Dragoness with ultra-heated globs of lava strung together with Earthen-fire magic. Yet their numbers seemed unending.
We have to turn back, Ri’arion gasped. I can’t hold any longer!
Strength, cried Zuziana, trying somehow, anyhow, to relieve his pain.
Deep explosions resounded beneath Leandrial’s belly as a group of Elementals attacked from below. They surged through the seething flame-sea as a group, smiting the Land Dragoness so powerfully that the Dragons inside her mouth staggered, before driving her high, high into the storm’s flame-streaked, tempestuous heights. The Storm Elementals fell back at last, and Leandrial began to drop.
Deploy wings, Aranya. Ardan cried. We must fly!
Already on it, Shadow, she gritted out.
Shouts and cheers rang within Leandrial’s mouth as her falling momentum transformed into acceleration, sweeping her over and away from the Storm Elementals on star-fire wings. Fiery billows and peaks swarmed beneath them like the surface of a rapidly-boiling pot, giving chase, but the Land Dragoness’ impetus was enough to make her soar beyond them.
Sapphire said, Ari, big Dragon hurt. Hurt bad.
Ardan cursed softly. Zip touched Aranya’s flank at once. Help her. Can you see to her injuries?
The Amethyst growled, Trying. Leandrial, where does it hurt?
Everywhere. Something’s damaged in my bowels, a few ribs caved in, but my lower heart-cluster … here, little one. Let me show you.
Aranya stiffened beneath Zip’s paw. Oh, Leandrial!
The Land Dragoness gasped, Keep us flying, Aranya. We have to fly. Save your strength.
Zip said, Quick, Aranya. Don’t listen to her. You have to make essential repairs.
The Amethyst Dragon clenched her jaw, already faraway in her mind as she focussed on closing the rents the intense battering had torn in Leandrial’s hearts and circulatory system. Zip sighed. Then, Ardan pointed a claw ahead through the faint outline of Leandrial’s jawbone, voicing an incoherent cry.
* * * *
Fire confronted them in a shimmering, many-pawed battlement that reached the heights of the Rift-Storm, its colour a sickly, greenish-orange, like copper cast into a furnace. The Storm Elementals they had defeated seemed like gnats before this broad-shouldered mountain, the grandfather of their brood.
“Oh, ruddy roaring rajals!” groaned Ri’arion.
Star-fire! gasped Leandrial. Aranya … come back to us. Aranya!
The Star Dragoness reeled, white of eye, as the Land Dragoness leaned to starboard in an attempt to adjust her flight path. Towers of flame crashed upon them. BOOM! BOOM!
Ardan threw his whole being into the shield. I’ll hold!
KAAABOOOM! Ri’arion dropped as if struck by a flying boulder. Ardan shuddered, screaming at the force that overwhelmed them now. The towering Storm Elemental gripped Leandrial by the waist in two monstrous, flaming paws, and squeezed. He had never felt pain like this. Ardan Shadowed desperately, but the Earthen-fires of this beast maintained their grip despite his Shadow-power. Blood burst loose in her body; Ardan tasted his own blood in his throat as his body convulsed with the supreme effort of holding the Storm Elemental at bay. His strength was adamantine, torn from the unknowable depths of his Dragon’s resources and his will to survive. Fire! Vermilion-green fire sheeted over his vision, over them all, searing holes in Leandrial’s flanks …
Desperate, beyond rational thought, he reached for Aranya’s power. Aranya! Help me!
Aranya was faster. Dipping with a hummingbird’s speed into his strength, through the oath-connection that bound them so profoundly, the Dragoness leaped out of Leandrial’s cheek-pocket and onto the middle of her tongue. For the barest fraction of a second, Ardan spied a star standing four-pawed upon the broad carpet of Dragonflesh, thrusting back the darkness with her presence.
Her clarion voice resounded through his being, and destroyed all hope.
Leandrial! Spit me out, now!
* * * *
Ardan howled, No! Aranya!
Protect our friends, Sha’aldior! Aranya cried, as the Land Dragoness launched her out of her mouth like a catapult-shot. She had no need to spread her wings. Heat smote her. Fire. Gasping, terrified, she remembered she had forgotten to shield. No time for that now.
ARANYA!
His despairing cry washed over her as the mighty Storm Elemental turned the hammer-blow of its regard upon her. The creature’s breath was an open furnace, the strength of its gaze, a crucible of reaming, caustic Earthen-fires magic that washed over her scales like acid, before her inner white-fires flared in instinctive protection.
Trust me, Sha’aldior, she pulsed, not at all certain if he heard her or not.
Aranya had clarity of vision, but no clue if her idea would work. All she knew was that this was the only way. She had leaped through the crowd to save Zuziana’s life. Now, the Amethyst Dragoness summoned her sketchy knowledge of that moment, calling upon every power she had ever imagined. Onyx strength. The light and beauty she remembered of her mother. The physics-defying dance she had danced with Hualiama. This was her heritage which spanned the aeons of time itself, and reached beyond where the white-fires of all substance merged into one, and the reality of imminent death could be cheated if a Star Dragoness dared to attempt the impossible.
Reaching out, she leashed Leandrial with a thread of her own white-fires. Then, she drove forward with the utmost, failing strength of wing and muscle. The white slingshot stretched. Stretched further, the tremendous tension fel
t as a stabbing pain in her mind. Aranya’s approach had taken her dangerously close to flying into the enraged, looming presence of the Storm Elemental when she stopped and pivoted, anchoring herself with the air of Fra’anior clutching an Island and her grandsire’s legendary strength. Applying the impossible acceleration through time and space she had essayed when saving Zuziana, the Star Dragoness employed her impromptu slingshot to launch Leandrial over her right shoulder.
BEZALDIOR!!
Her shriek of ultimate effort snuffed out the Rift’s fires but for a moment.
A mile and a half of Land Dragon rocketed away as if blasted from the mouth of a massive volcano. As Leandrial shot by, Aranya infused her friends’ shields with the last of her strength.
Starlight meets Shadow, she whispered, enfolding them with her presence.
The Land Dragoness hurtled into the leagues-tall mass of churning Earthen-Fires, piercing the Storm Elemental like a spear flung on a low trajectory. She travelled so fast, Aranya belatedly heard a booming concussion following the Dragoness as she parted the Rift-Storm’s most hazardous fires and blew a hole through the titan’s churning breast. At that speed, she realised, Leandrial would traverse the remaining leagues of the storm in a matter of minutes.
Hopefully, no Islands stood in her path.
The storm washed back, great incendiary rivers of blood-red, fibrous fires pouring toward Aranya with a staggering screech of rage. Far from being defeated, the Storm Elemental seemed roused to greater excesses. Its fires clumped together in champing fangs, pouring out of muzzles and over proto-limbs as if the creature vomited volcanic fire and detritus from every pore. Heat mounted upon heat, attaining temperatures in excess of ten thousand degrees. The Elemental’s primal magic sang a soul-shattering, injurious song. Now she was a Lesser Dragon cast adrift in the Rift-Storm.
Tugging. Making headway? Aranya realised she was still connected to the Land Dragoness by her tenuous magical thread. Her jaw cracked open. Oh no …
The pale white thread drew taut like spider-silk trembling at the first caress of an impending storm. The Storm Elemental’s paws swept upward to gather her in, but the Amethyst Dragoness rode that tide. The blazing surge jolted her onto a new trajectory. Brutal acceleration drained the blood from her head as the tightening connection forced Aranya’s flight to arc upward. In creating an arcane slingshot for Leandrial, she had unleashed a relative imbalance of momentum that now squared her tiny weight against her friend’s massive tonnage. There could be only one result.
Desperately tucking in her wings and paws, the Amethyst Dragoness blazed a skyward comet-trail through layers of gritty, sulphurous smoke lashed by sizzling whip-strokes of ochre and vermilion fire.
The thread-connection propelled her mile upon mile into the darkening sky, through a region of roiling heat and blue-hearted flame, into churning billows of malodorous smoke that clung to her fangs and throat like charred, gritty ooliti wood smoke. Still the terrified Dragoness continued to accelerate to a phenomenal velocity, drawing a long, fiery jet-stream from the Rift-Storm’s upper reaches into a new realm of cool, clean air, her scales and wings aglow with the speed of her passage. So powerful were the winds she generated, her lips and eyelids fluttered madly and the Amethyst distinctly felt her wing-membranes tearing in multiple locations. Aranya held on only because she knew she must see her friends safe. The only way she could know assurance, was to see them pass through the Rift-Storm’s infernos. Every throb of her complex draconic hearts-beat was for them–a stream of nurturing, protective magic pulsing down the thread.
Still, their passage was a fearsome rending of Storm Elementals reluctant to release their quarry.
Aranya curved her neck toward her breast, peering through slit eye-membranes at the Island-World below. The Rift meandered like an orange river seen from a height, with sickly dark tentacles of poisons spreading to either side reaching deep into the Cloudlands. She saw for the first time the legendary Island-archipelagos of Herimor stretching to the southern horizon, like flotillas of green and brown Dragons floating above a carpet of rolling white. Did she spy darker rifts and canyons breaking up those faraway cloudscapes? She could barely focus against the windstorm’s force. Now her gaze shifted, lighting upon endless mountains to the East. Tan, many-fanged mountain ranges clawed the sky’s very throat, rising so high above even her elevated position, surmounting multiple, pink-hued strata of cloud, it seemed to Aranya that just as Ri’arion had mistaken the Rift-Storm, so the world had tipped upon its side and what she beheld was the backbone of a vast Island lying prone against the darkling sky.
The air’s thinness seared her lungs. She was cold, so very cold.
Her speed abated. Should she not be alarmed? She had ascended many leagues above the Rift, now. Far too high for ordinary Dragonflight.
There! The Star Dragoness screamed in victory as she saw a tiny fingernail of fire break free of the thick orange ribbon, almost immediately vanishing beneath a murky, poisonous layer of smoke. She knew it to be Leandrial, holding her friends secure in her mouth. Deftly, she severed the white thread with a final prayer of speed and protection for her companions. It sloughed away into the Rift-Storm, and vanished.
The panorama viewed from this altitude was so serene, she could almost imagine there was nothing amiss with her Island-World–and if she dreamed of tranquillity, and her wings unfurled so delicately upon stillness that she heard the subtle hiss of blood flow through the arteries feeding their agile surfaces, why then did the Dragonsong of her soul sigh like hot, heartsore rain into the emptiness?
So far was she above any sound, she heard the very starlight chiming upon … impossibility.
Aranya whirled. Mother?
Izariela’s spirit hovered nearby, as white as fresh-blown snow upon the beloved peaks of Immadia. She said, Softly to me, petal. By your selfless defence of your friends, you’ve placed your being in mortal danger.
So I chose; so it must be.
I know, my precious eggling. I know. Now, will you allow a mother’s forlorn love to embrace–
With a sob, Aranya flung herself across the void.
Chapter 17: Ripped Asunder
EVERY LAND DRAGON must dream of flying. Leandrial could boast that she had flown the Rift, but as she finally slowed, she ground her molars together, creating a sound like an avalanche.
Tentatively, the Azure Dragoness tried to comfort her. “We’ll find Ardan, Leandrial. And Aranya. She can’t be lost in the Rift-Storm. Didn’t we sense her flying upward?”
“No Dragon can overfly the Rift. It is imposs–” The Land Dragoness champed her sentence into deeply unsatisfying bits beneath her teeth. “That Amethyst! She’s what’s impossible! Barely have I finished swearing I will never lose another Dragon as I did the Pygmy Dragoness, and I lose three. Three! Curse this fate, these great paws that cannot for a moment hold that which is most precious to me.” She heaved an almighty sigh, her belly-fires soughing like torrential rain. “She saved us. Surely as Islands reach the roots of the world, Aranya saved us all. We should be thankful, not … desolate.”
“We’ll start searching for Ardan and Sapphire,” Ri’arion mumbled, stirring.
“Move an inch and you’re a dead monk!” snarled Zuziana, rushing to his side.
“Ah … love you too, petal?” he grinned weakly, feeling his head as if he expected to have grown horns or to find the mental strain had blown a hole through the side of his cranium. “Frog-skins, I’ve a headache worthy even of you, noble Dragoness. Mighty were your deeds this day.”
“Frog-skins?” rumbled the Dragoness.
The monk returned, “Long story. Legendary–I will tell it at a more appropriate time, I promise. Is there a chance your Balance power can track Aranya or Ardan?”
“I am … sorry. I dwell on my wounds when I should be thinking of our companions.” The Land Dragoness suddenly stiffened. A wordless cry of amazement escaped her battered, torn lips.
“What?” asked Zip.
Poor Leandrial. To hear the speech of her kind, even from afar, for the first time in one hundred and fifty years! Zip looked up as Ri’arion made a strange sound. Beautiful grief welled in his eyes, matching her own joy-in-sorrow. He dabbed his eyes on his sleeve as Leandrial’s muscles quivered uncontrollably, while the spent magic of her being soughed and tried to rise, only to gutter and fail.
Zuziana whispered, “We shall sing with thee, Land Dragoness. In song is Balance, and in Balance thou shalt find healing.”
“You … understand?” Leandrial whispered back. “There is forage here. Life. I hear life, everywhere, and my soul thrills to its every song, yet my delight is a spent current.”
Zip said, “Leandrial, whatever happened to Ardan? Are we safe here?”
Safe, as long as they scraped together enough magic to protect her wounds while she tried to heal, she averred. When Aranya had released them, the Land Dragoness projected from the relative angles of her own trajectory and that of the magical link by which Aranya had ensured their escape, that she would have been flung upward into the verimost heights of the Rift-Storm. Could she have spread her wings and flown out? Zip immediately volunteered to check. As for Ardan, he had been shielding Sapphire from the waves of Earthen-fire crashing through them, when the release of Aranya’s extraordinary magic recoiled to slap him so hard and fast through the side of her mouth, Leandrial calculated that he and the dragonet might have ended up as much as five hundred leagues distant.
“He’ll find Aranya,” Zip said stoutly. “They’ve their oath-magic. Now, carefully onward, Leandrial. Let’s find safety and a place to rest. I’ll fly up top to search–”
Ri’arion snapped, “Without so much as a sniff of magic to shield yourself? I’ll see your lizard-muzzle pickled for a trophy first, girl!”
“Oh.” The Azure Dragoness waggled a brow-ridge at him. “Shall I transform? Then we can argue properly. Mmm …”