by Marc Secchia
“Dragons ahead,” Sanu whispered. “Go invisible?”
“Do it. We can’t give up now.”
The path took them beneath a fast-moving patrol of five Green Dragons swooshing through the mists. Invisible, the Horse and her Rider proceeded unmolested, but their hearts thudded in their throats. Before that Dragonwing had disappeared, another came roaring up from behind, clearly patrolling the route. And a third, and a fourth, spearing rapidly through the mists. Had it not been for their invisibility, Zaranna knew, they would have earned a swift talon through the chest.
Very softly, Sanu said, “Nervous about something, are they?”
“Hope they don’t find Kenzo.”
“Huh. Hope they impale that arrogant son of a scorpion.”
“Oh no,” said the Horse. “The path’s starting to move. I’ve a bad, bad feeling …”
The Safeway moved faster and faster, like a single, inescapable travellator whisking them to an unknown destination. A portal loomed out of the mist, no larger than any other at approximately thirty feet across, large enough for a fully-grown Dragon to squeeze through, but this one was surrounded by a beautiful border of garnet crystals that spelled a single word, over and over.
“Beyond,” said Sanu.
The Beyond. The place of Dragons. Zara had no time to think further, for the Safeway rushed them at that opaque, shimmering barrier, and they punched through. Twice. Three times, in rapid succession. Briefly, Zaranna smelled a familiar scent of jasmine and sulphur. Then they were through and skating along a path of crystal ice through a wide cavern toward a crystal-fringed window to a dazzling sunset sky.
“Slow us,” breathed Sanu.
Zaranna set her hooves, increasing the friction against the ridiculously slippery surface. The tunnel sloped slightly downward, leading to a ice-ring studded with large, spiky crystal formations – the largest crystals she had ever seen. Some were hundreds of feet long, reaching right to the cavern’s ceiling. Others were as delicately branched as coral, or as deadly as the spiked ball of a mace. Each was beautiful in its own right, shimmering with amazing colours. Three times, she deliberately bumped into crystal formations, collecting glass-like cuts, but slowing their progress from a breakneck speed to a merely dangerous velocity. Then, the surface dipped toward a chute and the light grew brighter. They were about to shoot out into something, pun intended, and Zara had no doubt that would be very unwise indeed.
“Ancestors!” hissed Sanu. “Left! Go … hold on!”
Suddenly the girl was balancing on the Plains Horse’s back as they skated toward an overhanging crystal branch. She reached upward, twisting her legs around Zaranna’s neck simultaneously, just under her chin. Whap! Sanu grunted, but held on. Scragged by the neck, Zaranna almost swung off her hooves. Sanu’s hands slipped. But the arresting of her slide was enough to swing them into a different trajectory. The Horse slid to the right of the chute, fetching up against a spiked, emerald-like crystal thicket that punctured her hide in half a dozen places.
The Human girl groaned softly, but said, “Good work, Horse. Only two holes in my leg.”
Zaranna arched her neck. “Alright, Sanu? I think my vertebrae are all straight now.”
“Let’s get into hiding. I’ve an itch.”
“Agreed.”
Rapidly, the companions used the remains of Cyantoria’s royal trappings to clean up the spots and streaks of blood. Good thing they had left Amorix’s crown jewels concealed back near the Sky-Fires portal, Zaranna decided. She had a similar itch to Sanu’s. Her best guess was that they had travelled through to the Beyond and were now stuck in Dragon lands. Terminally detrimental for certain Human and Equine spies, for, judging by their surrounds, they had penetrated a part of Equinox perhaps unknown to their kind, or at the very best, forbidden.
Zara and Sanu snuck deeper into the crystal formations to lay low and lick their wounds. Zara released her white heart-horses with great care, slowing the bleeding. She watched the process carefully. Was this a miracle? Wounds did not disappear, but they did appear to heal at an accelerated rate. What had happened to Alex, therefore, if her sister’s assessment was true and his scar tissue had vanished? Had the scars come from all the beatings his father had dished out over the years?
With a sharp fluttering of wings, two Dragons speared into the cave and started casting about.
“Unauthorised entry in this sector,” said the first, a deep Blue about two thirds the size of Illume. “Scent anything?”
“Aye, blood,” said the second, a grass-green, very sleek female Dragon who appeared to lack Illume’s skull and spine-spikes – perhaps a different subspecies? Her scales were much smaller, like snakeskin, and her wings were shorter but wider than Illume’s. “Something came through.”
“More blood here, leading to the chute,” rumbled the Blue. “Smells like animal. Whatever it was, it’s drowned in the Crystal Sea by now. The Constructor-Dragons of old designed these passages well. Look. The creature struck here and here, then whoops! A long flight to a crushing end.”
The two Dragons laughed hideously.
“Thugs,” Zara whispered.
Sanu silenced her with a hand against her mouth. “If you can draw in our scent, do it.”
“Right …”
The two Dragons cast about for a further ten minutes or so, coming within twenty feet of the pair of burglars, but they did not appear to scent anything amiss, nor did they hear a pair of hearts drumming away like a maddened pop band. They moved sinuously, grinning and breathing little spurts of fire between their fangs as they searched, clearly high on excitement and the thrill of finding potential prey. But they were disappointed. Muttering that the incident needed to be reported, the pair of Dragons eventually departed the cavern, winging through the chute with enviable grace.
Zaranna let out a quiet sigh. “Shoot, Sanu. I think we’ve landed splat in the proverbial manure this time.”
“I vote we go find out what kind of manure and how deep.”
“Are you quite certain you’re Sanu?”
The girl just slapped Zara’s flank sharply. “Listen here, you walking dustbag. I made a promise. Are you insulting my honour? No?” She thumped her chest. “Because I happen to know this Dreamer who will concoct an unbelievable exit from this pile of manure, just as soon as we’ve finished exploring the precise flavour of trouble that we’re in. Now, follow me.”
Zaranna was left shaking her head as the girl made her exit, crystal right. She backed up carefully. Right. Time to skate to the edge without whizzing down the garbage chute – again.
The cavern was really a horizontal crack between an overhang of the peculiar cyan rock and a layer of ice-like crystal, with one large exit for Dragons and a number of other, smaller exits between the thick crystal stalactites and stalagmites linking the floor and ceiling, helpfully highlighted by the orange sun setting in the West. The refractions and prisms of light cast within the cave were stunning. The view outside trumped that by miles.
Sanu and Zaranna found themselves teetering on the edge of a crystal cliff. So vast was the vertical cliff face, studded with every imaginable form and colour of crystal beauty, that Zara experienced a sharp pang of vertigo, a sense that the world was incorrectly tilted upon its axis. Could she not simply walk down … there? To an ocean, a crystal ocean, stretching beyond to the horizon, a vista lined with glittering, slowly rolling combers that must be a mile high, she guessed, trying and failing to truly understand the perspective and majesty of what they saw. Were they six or seven miles above that ocean? The light seemed to somersault and roar and storm over all of those tumbling prisms – at least, that was what she imagined from what the Dragons had said, the seething play of light, and from the sound that reached her ears, like the faraway thundering of surf mingled with a chiming, strangely melodious crystalline song, evocative of stars singing in chorus.
Adding to her sense of vertigo, she saw islands floating offshore. Each was a wonderland of different
crystals, some bunched up, some chunky, some massively stellate, some spraying in great, fern-like curves over the waters – if waters they were. Each boasted a unique variety of sparkling colours in every hue of the rainbow, and a few Zaranna suspected were not – perhaps magically enhanced colours, or some trick played on her senses. Even the puffy clouds floating over the great, horizon-spanning ocean had no business being the hues and shapes they were, some resembling great swimming whales with baleen teeth, others clumped together like fanciful, frilly Dragons or comets or dangling, bell-shaped flowers. All was pervaded with light, gorgeously redolent of jasmine, and simmering with magic.
Staggering.
Amongst this overwhelming wonder, Dragons swooped and played and laughed, more Dragons than the mind could comprehend. Legions of Dragons. Dragons of every colour and shape and form, from thumping monsters with twenty or more wings buzzing hummingbird-like about their torsos to wondrously frilly Dragons that rippled along like ribbon-toting angelfish; long, snake-like Chinese Dragons and seven-headed, writhing Dragons walking upside-down on the bottom of the nearest Island, a peculiar cluster or family of Violet Dragons that flew in linked rings and tiny, swarming shoals of Dragons … it was too much to take in. Away from the bustle of what Zaranna took for youngsters, great ranks of Dragonkind flew in stately array around one of the nearer Islands, and in their midst, she caught a glimpse of a tiny, faraway dot of unique blue that might just be Illume holding court. Maybe.
And in a flash, it came to her what all of this meant.
“It’s a Dragon army,” she whispered to Sanu.
“What?”
“Look at the ranks by colour and clan, the way they’re flying. Sanu, it’s obvious. It’s a military parade or gathering. And here’s my guess.”
Sanu interrupted, “They know the Hooded Wizard is on the move. In fact, they’re very happy with this development. Because once the Equines clash with the Wizard’s forces, both sides will inevitably be weakened. Then, the Dragons will make their move.” She spat near Zara’s left forehoof. “That’s what I would be planning, if I were one of those scum-sucking lizards.”
Ah – she might just be talking to such a scum-sucking lizard. Full-blooded Dragoness, indeed. How could that be? A Dragon’s blood or genetic heritage passed down one hundred percent through the generations? Didn’t that flout every known law of genetic science?
Perhaps now was not an opportune moment to broach the subject.
Yet there was something peculiar about the way the Dragons circled that island. The dance seemed endlessly complex, yet it evinced a hypnotic quality, as if the Dragons danced to a single beat, fixated upon something in the centre of their gathering which Zaranna could not fathom. There was great magic out there, yes. Thrilling, exotic magic of a type she had not yet encountered upon Equinox. But she could not distinguish it from the heaving crystal magic, which thrilled her senses beyond the point of overload. Most peculiar. What were those Dragons up to? Imprinting? Planning? An Indian war-dance?
Horse and Human watched the faraway dance until the flaming orange sun dipped into the sea, setting it alight with the fires of crystal light and life; for a few moments as it reached its nadir upon the horizon, the far-reaching rays highlighted the monstrous beat of the oceanic rollers. Amazing. Surfer-Whiz would love this.
“We should rest while we can,” said Sanu. “Shall I wake you in the early hours so that you can call Illume?”
“Alright. If that dancing stops. Weird, isn’t it?”
Sanu peered at Zara in the twilight, which would not become night due to the light now radiating back out of the wondrous crystal cliff they stood upon. “I was thinking the same. I’ve heard stories about how pony-bees dance in their hives to tell the others how to find flowers – doesn’t this strike you as similar? So amazing. Nothing like this on the Obsidian Highlands.” The girl rubbed her eyes. “I’m too tired to think in equinoctial curves, Zars. Would you mind if we caught a few fireponies?”
Cool expressions. “Me too. Just let me take in this panorama a little longer. It’s … unbelievable. Equinox is just awesome.”
“It’s home,” Sanu shrugged. “But I never imagined home could look like this.”
Zaranna yawned, fixated by that unending dance. Something was not right. Was this the sense of a Dreamer, the work given to her alone under the heavens? Or did others Dream, like her? Would that she could learn to understand this great task, to heal the flow of magic between the worlds. But people would be people, Dragons would be draconic, and the Pegasi would still dream of ruling all. That was the nature of creatures.
How could rescuing a Pegasus Prince put some measure of this to rights?
* * * *
In the morning, Whiz drove the sisters over to the hospital to pick up Alex. Doctor Martinez had already left in the early hours, called to another cardiac emergency. That left her and Yols to tootle up the road with Gramps, who had a predilection for whistling along to his favourite tunes.
Whiz had a few interesting anecdotes to add about the Dragonstones, such as how they could be used to summon and control Dragons. He believed that the stones had truly ensured balance between Dragonkind and Humankind, and pooh-poohed her suggestion that the Dragons were incredibly bitter about the existence of the Dragonstones. “They would be,” Whiz opined. “Dragons hate any measure of control or compliance exerted over them, even that of their own leaders. There must be balance, or the Dragons will destroy everything.” Apparently, each seasonal Clan of Wizards had possessed at least one powerful Dragonstone, and used them to command and manipulate Dragons. He had also related the story of the destruction of one stone, the Indurthal, which he disparagingly called ‘an early prototype.’ Only Dragons could destroy the stones, once they were made.
One key was to clearly state commands to the Dragon, or one might face being eaten by an irate, poorly restrained beast. More than a few Wizards had suffered that fate, too.
Alex was halfway through signing a mountain of paperwork when they found him. “Medical insurance will have a heart attack of their own over this bill,” he said, with a quick beam over his shoulder.
Doctor Christi smacked his arm. “Priorities, young man.”
Blushing, Alex turned to deposit a decorous kiss upon Zaranna’s cheek. Nonsense. With a growl, she snagged his neck Sanu-speed and planted a passionate kiss full upon his lips. Alex pulled back to give her another huge, goofy grin. He started to apologise, so she kissed him again just to make her point. Yum a million times over. Mister Hunk of Beefy Goodness smelled fabulous. He tasted better than fabulous. And he was all hers.
“Hey, I want to leave today,” he mumbled against her lips.
“Ok, I relent. You have five minutes with the paperwork before you start paying forfeits.”
“Gosh, I feel a sudden attack of procrastination coming on.”
Zaranna tickled his knee from behind, making Alex jump. “Hurry, and I promise you, the reward will be even better than the forfeits.”
Whiz put in, “Cue one confused young man, Zoo-Storm.”
Alex was not too confused to tear through the paperwork in record time. Then he took command of her wheelchair. Just as they walked and Zaranna rolled into the parking lot, the penny dropped.
“Er, is there something different … Zars?”
“Perceptive plus,” said Yolanda. “Let’s see how long it takes him to – ouch! You mean old Nonno.”
Her tall, dark Scotsman looked her over with a quizzical expression, shaking his head. Suddenly he yelped, “Legs! What are you doing with … oh. I feel stupid. Zaranna, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wear those, except at the physiotherapist.”
“Surprise.”
“Oh, the least you can do is surprise him properly. I slaved long enough on those,” Whiz complained, starting to explain that he had modified the straps and braces for her thighs to accommodate slim female jeans, so that Zara would not have to suffer tell-tale lumps and bumps when she wore legs.
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Alex was looking at her jeans-clad legs – well, hungrily, making her feel awkward. Was she not good enough without prostheses? Had he secretly been longing for a girlfriend with actual legs?
“Wonderful,” she said, testily. “Turn around, Alex.”
“Ooo … kay.”
With a heave and a wobble, she struggled to her feet. “I’m good, Yols. Sort of.”
Whiz whistled, “Alex, don’t fall over.”
The feeling was akin to walking on stilts, Zara thought. It took time for the brain to adjust to the idea that the feet could not and would not provide any sensation, that the stump-pads would sense pressure and movement and the artificial foot tapping on the ground. The main movement must come from the hips and thighs, not a push-off from the ankle, supported by the calf muscle.
“Five steps back – forward, Alex.”
“I’m still not looking?”
Zara smoothed her green Elle T-shirt and checked her jeans. She consciously bade her voice not to squeak. “Ready.”
Alex turned to look over his shoulder. She was a bundle of nerves; a bride poised at the church entrance. His sombre expression melted into wonder. “Oh, wow!” He squeaked soprano enough for the both of them. “You’re tall! I mean … wow!”
He started forward; Zara chuckled, “No. This is my bit.”
“Alright,” he said, beckoning with both hands. “Come to me. Come.”
No mind that Whiz, Yolanda and Doctor Martinez were laughing at the pair of them. His eyes were for her alone, alight with astonishment as Zaranna, biting her lip, tried for a cool, confident walk toward her boyfriend. Six or seven steps on smooth asphalt. It seemed a mile. Any moment, she feared she might trip over a wrinkle on the surface, but suddenly she was within reach and she saw his eyes were full and moist, like rainbows replacing storms. His strong hands caught her, slipped around her waist and drew her close. She was tall, her blonde crown level with his nose. Perfect for kissing.