by Marc Secchia
She washed away downriver, unmolested.
Travelling by river was relaxing if one anticipated the waterfalls, braved the rapids and generally managed to avoid being summarily devoured. Whisper revelled in the cool wash against her fur, soothing her wounds, as she swam and climbed through the river-gorge all that day. She might be furry, but maybe she was half-fish? As she travelled, she became aware of her mind once again cataloguing relentlessly – the many cleft buttresses, cracks and crevices, and general changes in the geography and geology, botanical features, and always, the swarming subclasses of draconids. The chuckling of a flight of yellow dragonets, the four-limbed, winged comedians of the draconic realm, followed her downriver for several miles. They were virtual copies of Ignothax’s full Dragon kin, or Higher Dragons, distinguished by their greater intelligence and ability to breathe fire, only dragonets reached sizes of barely three feet across the wingtips. They sported frilled, fanciful wings of astonishingly artistic colouration and a variety of body shapes, from the obvious draconic pattern to more butterfly-like torsos furnished with quadruple and even sextuple wing-sets. From the riverine rocks, brown and burgundy drakkids hunted minnows and other aquatic bugs, plopping down into the river’s algae-tinged wash before scrabbling back up the rocks with their sharp talons. They were easily mistaken for lizards, but the ruddy eye-fires were the key distinguishing factor, along with nuances of draconic body patterns and behaviour.
Frequently, her mind returned to the matter of her missing tail. A mental fog drifted across her thoughts and memories. Despite her scientific logging and categorising and her innate familiarity with the immediate environment, she seemed to be grappling with elusive fragments that refused to be assembled into coherent patterns.
Add to that the intense, escalating mental pressure that gripped her head like an invisible vice slowly ratcheted by a Warlock’s hand as she progressed tangentially to her goal – she assumed. Her vision had begun to pale. Details of rock or branch took on a bleached, insubstantial-looking appearance as her headache progressed toward a magic-augmented super-migraine, her lore-keeping function informed her. What use was this? She tried to beat it back, to tell her homing signal that she was working to make progress to that goal, but it was little use. Her own magic was her worst enemy.
As the river bent toward her left paw, Whisper heard herself squeal in agony. No. She would endure. This was the right path. Lights played across her vision. Giving up on trying to swim, she squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed her temples roughly.
“Go away, stupid pain – stupid magic! I’m going to Arbor!”
Her small fangs ground together.
Unendurable. The light escalated. Not sunstrike! Oh no … yet how could it penetrate this deep in a river gorge so well shaded by many layers of lush, light green sentikor leaves and the darker, teal-green aromiko foliage she sometimes glimpsed far above? Of course, she had been travelling deeper and deeper. She must be five or six miles beneath the surface now, descended from the relative heights from which she had viewed the Sundering.
Still not the top of her world. Not by miles.
Faster. She fought the thundering in her ears. Whisper knew she must stay alert and conscious to face whatever lay ahead, but this agony was as cruel a taskmaster as the Warlock, like a Dragon casually sitting upon her temples, were such a feat anatomically feasible. Draconid intestines, that thundering was water! Suddenly, the current gripped her body, sweeping her along before she could think of striking for the shore and shooting her between two boulders in a spigot of white, churning mayhem. Whisper struck out with a shout, but missed her grip. Tonnes of water unexpectedly smashed down upon her head; she had completely misjudged the flow. She tumbled helplessly through the blue, before popping out again. She heaved a grateful breath. A broad flow had joined this river from above, making a small cove in the bank where it thundered down. Another! She swam two or three overarm strokes, but the water’s power could not be fought. Hold the breath and endure …
GRRROOAAAMM!! Boulders slipped by underwater as she allowed herself to be driven deep a second time. Now the river sprinted for the gap she sensed ahead, a whiteness, a vast open space that glowed like sunstrike directly in the eyes. Blinding. Roaring. Pummelling with liquid blue fists. She curled up, bouncing off a smooth ledge. Bubbles burst out of her mouth. Her knee! Her poor knee …
As though launched by a catapult, Whisper shot into the light.
At first, the water threatened to hammer her already febrile consciousness into insensibility. Her world was light and water and falling. Flashing colours. Glorious, symphonic notes penetrated to her hearing through the vast rushing of the waterfall. Then, she spread her legs and arms.
Whisper flew.
I can fly!
Fly? Nonsense. More accurately, this was gliding on the air-currents, for her legs and arms, outspread in the shape of a rough cross, somehow anchored long, flexible skin-folds … or, she had done something even odder … catching the air in beautiful curves of skin that stretched from her elbows all the way along her bruised and cut flanks to her knees … sending her skimming toward the waterfall’s edge, and then out of it. She arced through the air, laughing breathlessly.
Magic of a Whisper – just let the Warlord’s army try this trick!
He had Dragons.
A young female Whisper might not know much, but her body knew what to do. Laughter – defiant laughter, challenging the Warlock’s hegemony over her life – burbled forth with frothing, fizzing delight as she instinctively banked, curving around the magnificent plume of the waterfall’s drop. She fell like a drifting leaf into a broad, deep canyon. So high was the waterfall, it blew away into moisture long before it reached the shadowed depths.
Radiance drew her as a lodestone. A flight of garnet-crystal dragonets hurtled by, laughing at each other as much as her. Sheer cliffs greeted her gaze, shaded overhead by massive, silvery-white crystal formations and hexagonal spars of semi-organic, radiant shinzorlite, so thickly clustered that sunstrike was largely prevented, but conversely, the crystal prisms amplified the radiance of Whitesun, bathing the canyon in a most extraordinary play of vivacious colours.
The Canyon of Light!
Her heart crammed into her throat, throbbing thickly with the awareness of beauty. Whisper felt as if she were falling languidly through edible sunbeams. The cliffs soared nine miles tall and half a mile to a mile apart, their mighty ramparts decorated with such a dazzling array of crystal formations and proto-draconic plants living upon their prismatic surfaces and in the cracks between, that it was hard not to imagine that she glided within a world of pure crystal. Rainbows and flashes of every imaginable spectrum of light played across her fur as Whisper peered downward, spying a canyon floor littered with crystal shards and fragments, some as much as a quarter-mile long, amongst which the crystal-chewing forms of hundred-foot black dracoworms slithered with insatiable abandon.
Extend the arms. Play with the breeze. Breathe easier as the canyon slowly curved Arbor-ward and her headache abated by the moment. Learn how to control her glide, slowing the forward momentum … her nose twitched. There was something else here. An inkling of vital importance, which Whisper knew she needed to track with the single-mindedness of her blood-oath. Now, she filled her lungs, letting her phenomenal sense of smell sort through all the different hints and savours upon the breeze – yet her senses achieved more than she had imagined, integrating hearing, directional awareness, smell and magical perception into one whole. She did not know what she sought, but she trusted her instincts. Even a Whisper without a tail must possess some gifts.
She was an instrument, built for detection.
The wind filled her skin-sails, sending the Whisper soaring past a peninsula of exquisitely perfect blossoms of rose-quartz interspersed with great, thousand-foot columns of near perfect, midnight-blue azurite. She passed an open geode of light purple garnet inhabited by a family of white lazar-draconids; the crystivores lazily blinked t
heir pink eye-fires at her as she raced by, hot on the scent of her target. A few Higher Dragons of the noble Blue colours eyed her curiously as she soared past their roosts built amidst crystal glory, but none bothered to chase her.
Whisper leaned forward to increase her speed, sensing the drop in altitude clearly now, and conscious of a whiff of ash upon the airstream. The Sundering had taken part of the canyon, it seemed, close to her goal.
Singing to her, amidst the chiming sounds of a colony of twenty-foot Violet Dragons tapping their talons upon a crystal piano as they performed their stately courting dances, the special music drew her with greater and greater clarity. She saw the breach of the Sundering ahead, a partial collapse of the canyon wall to her right hand, cutting an intersecting ravine perhaps six miles deep into the strongside wall of the Canyon of Light. She must fly carefully now. Watch for sunstrike, already blighting the crystals it touched. The target was close, below and just beyond the enormous pile of debris deposited by the Sundering’s unimaginable explosion.
Zipping ahead, she jinked to avoid a falling crystal spar. What was that – ah, just Chalky Cloud-Dragons playing overhead on the ceiling formed of crystal, enjoying the lowering sun’s warmth. She should be safe.
Then, a gust caught her. Faster than the twitch of her whiskers, Whisper discovered that she knew absolutely nothing about flying. Well, next to nothing. She knew how to windmill her arms like a cartwheeling dragonfly, tuck up her legs and crash-land. Hard. She bounced off a long calcite spar, skinning her right thigh very effectively, tried to correct her balance and plummeted into a crack she had not noticed. She saw green. A pulsating light rushed toward her.
WHAM!
The beacon slammed into her right eye. Knowledge pounded her into nonexistence.
Chapter 4: Whisper Beacon
THE REALM OF knowing was a treacherous, dark ocean in which she swam like a mote, fearful of drowning. The fear related to loss of self. The magic of the Whisper Beacon took of what was hers, her tail-knowledge and scent-memories and every impression and experience of the last few days, and subsumed it into the heaving ocean – at least, that was her impression. Then, knowledge poured back into her in a thunderous cataclysm, as if her new being cascaded inward, frothing and churning and slopping about before settling and soaking into the materials granted it, the complex brain, long brain stem and tail-ancillary processing units, so lacking, and the senses and person containing this resynthesized, reenergised self.
She tumbled, helpless in the wash. The world was her mother, her muse, her soul’s music. The breath of a world called Whisper ran through her veins and sizzled along the pathways of her being, intoxicating. The early hints she had experienced coalesced into new forms. She had a world-sense. She could learn to listen to the song of its winds, the susurrus of its waters, and the whispering of leaves across its skin. In time, this sense would grow – its foundation was in her tail, she realised sadly. Here was another loss, drawing her back to present reality.
Whisper broached the surface. I am … Whisper!
Not lost. Whole.
Hunted.
Whoever had left the Whisper Beacon, it had served its purpose. Whisper bowed instinctively. “Thank you, unknown benefactors.”
Her eyes flicked open. Once again, the sense of quickening enlivened her senses. For a long moment, she lay and flinched repeatedly as though struck by the Warlock’s draconid-hide whip, before the ghastly sensation abated. She had failed to take on some Beacon-knowledge, she realised, due to her tail’s loss. The backlash left her shuddering. Still, there was a new map in her head. Arbor. She knew that parts were wrong, fragmented and Sundered from existence by what could only be a mighty sunstrike, or a flare somehow extruded from the celestial body Humans called Whitesun and Dragons called eylor-ûl-tanê, the Fires of First Life.
Why did those terrible fires lash her world? Did they not hurt and grieve many?
Yet at last, she saw the land, and her meandering, pain-crazed route through it, tracing the Sundering’s borderlands. Hundreds of leagues back the way she had come lay the mainland, in the direction called strongside, the continental bulwark formed of sheets of impervious emforite. A broad fringe surrounded the continent, of unknown magnitude and extent, its sun-drenched highlands populated only by Dragonkind. This fringe was the living zone, a fractured wilderness of vast dimensions that harboured untold forms of life within its profound, impossibly interconnected cracks, canyons and caverns. It buffered the mainland from the Brass Mirror, which lapped against and undermined the shattered, ever-changing bulwarks, mesas and stele – as best she could picture it, if the mainland was her paw’s palm, her digits described the individual bulwarks and the canyons were the gaps between, up to twenty miles deep, but the reality was far more complex and intertwined than that. Fascinating! The sheer scale and sophistication of its intricacy enthralled her.
The Ocean, called the Brass Mirror due to its colour, lay within twenty leagues or sixty-nine miles of her position, in the openside direction. Many piscine species of Dragonkind lived in the highly acidic Brass Mirror – from small motile drakkids and draconids to Hydras and the class of Leviathans, relatives of the mighty Wyrms. Deeper lived the toothfish and many strange, acid-dependent life forms that recycled the crystalline waste washed out from the canyons and rivers; the crystal dust would eventually be returned via storms that lashed the bulwarks frequently, but most often during storm season, right after the hottest time of the year, when the great highland-living protodragon swarms mated.
Imperative burned through the flood of data. Whisper wrestled her new knowledge into submission. Keeping her eyes squeezed shut, she rasped, “Give me what I need.”
She meditated. Arbor had been reachable by a trade route hacked out of the living rock in olden times by a small army of slaves, but more recently maintained by the merchants who had plied lucrative trade between the scattered Human cities and dwellings of the mid-reaches. It delved through natural caves and dracoworm-forged tunnels, and crossed canyons via artificial bridges and natural, sheltering buttresses, the rock shields impervious to sunstrike, that served the Human cities well – but were clearly not proof against a full-blown Sundering. Furthermore, the exact route had been a merchants’ secret.
Now, all was Sundered.
A new route must be found. The blood-oath magic commanded it. Only the Whisper-kind possessed the skills to seek out a viable, new path.
Her senses tingled with the awareness of Arbor. Spatial location. Scent-memory. Traces of its previous existence. Perhaps a route might be found near the Brass Mirror, for the Sundering had struck from the strongside direction, piling up its debris toward the openside and blasting it many leagues out into the Mirror. Yes. That was the probable solution. She must leave at once, because the sounds outside had changed.
The whippet-draconids approached.
Grinding her fangs together, Whisper snapped her eyes open. The Whisper Beacon was a column of smooth stone fashioned from crystal-infused green marble, set in a cracked geode of chalcedony crystals. She spared this geological wonder a brief, regretful glance, before pressing her forehead against the Beacon’s cool column. Knowledge. Wonder. A part of her life’s thread now resided within this extraordinary magical artefact. She drew back with a wince. Great. Now she had left a blood-smear upon the Beacon for the draconids to imbibe and harden their knowledge of her nearness and exact scent.
A Whisper of foolishness.
Picking up her sling with a silent reflexion of thanks directed toward her Arboreal helper, she ran-hobbled out into the Canyon of Light.
* * * *
Traversing the fallen crystal columns was a labour of agony. Her swollen left knee had been wrenched once more in her fall and could barely take any weight at all. Blood soaked the russet fur of her skinned thigh, drying rapidly in the warm, desiccated air despite the fact that night had fallen – and what a night! Clambering up a long blue garnet column, her talons slipping and skittering upon
the hard gemstone surfaces, she peered up over her right shoulder, and beheld the majesty of a stars-lit night. The playful veils of draconic aurora were absent, but milky bands and clusters of stars toured the endless canyons of the heavens, wheeling overhead like a latticework woven by playful, dexterous fingers. Toward the strongside horizon, as seen through the Sundered gap, she identified the achingly immaculate spiral galaxy of Eoxilor, lying within a few degrees of perpendicular to her gaze. The prismatic colours of starlight engrossed her senses, but to her disappointment, the Beacon had not supplied further astronomical knowledge.
If sheer wonder counted, it was enough to saturate her soul.
Unbidden, a verse tingled in her memory:
Unbounded of beauty I didst stretch the night,
A realm of darkness stitched by light,
For ever in atramental dark must be fondant,
Not desolation, but twinkling hope abundant.
What a peculiar misuse of the word ‘fondant’, she puzzled. Or a poetic word-play – hope alluded to by the abundant sweetness of stars?
Her consuming memories caused her to miss a warning prickling of her danger-sense. A flash of pale yellow to her left flank triggered a swerve and duck, but not fast enough. Fangs slashed her trailing leg. Whisper fell, screaming.
A stipple-backed beige drakkid, perhaps three times the size of the whippets and characterised by insectoid, hard-shelled wings and six legs, stalked her greedily. “Food. Nice,” it growled, waving its deadly, six-foot mandibles about eagerly.
Whisper slashed the air with her knife. “Not dinner. Shoo!”
Shoo? That might scare a hatchling, but not this drakkid. The multifaceted eyes glittered with the characteristic internal fire-swirls of the Dragonkind. “Hungry.”
“Me too!”
That gave the creature pause. It sniffed toward her retreating haunches. “Danger?”
Her opened knee stank worse than a cesspit. Gangrene, or some other necrotic infection, she identified dizzily. Not good. Green pus oozed from the puffy, weeping flesh in multiple locations.