by Marc Secchia
His jaw gaped. Fra’anior’s beard!
She flowed. Was that Balance, or the power Shill had been trying to impress into a dancing girl?
Whatever the case, she needed help. Mizuki swooped in a vengeful blur of coppery scales. WHHEEE-BOOOM! Her characteristic Shivers power exploded ahead of the girl. The action slowed in his hyper-aware vision. Her arms, extended like wings. Her shielding glinted so close to her slender, entirely nude form, it was like a skin sheath or the fabled stone skin her father, Ra’aba, had been capable of producing. Hualiama spiralled around a tumbling foreleg, hesitated in that fraction of a second required to make a Raptor’s mauling bite snap shut on thin air, before she dived again, accelerating as she borrowed a tiny curl of Grandion’s levitation power. Of course, Humans could fly. She had seen the monks do it. Now, she was plagiarising one of his core Dragon powers – with instinct-driven modifications – to do the same, and selflessly, feeding back to him new knowledge about how he could strengthen his own understanding of Kinetic power!
Multi-tasking mid-battle?
Crazy girl.
She was best when she danced. The Tourmaline spun through a tightening knot of Ice-Raptors, shearing off a white head with a millisecond-perfect talon stroke, while letting his shields take care of the others. What was the plan while she confronted Numistar Winterborn? Were they supposed to just hold out while the feral Chrysolitic Dragons took pot-shots at – wing-snap-dive! Nine searingly cold fireballs screamed past his departing back, slicing through the flight of Ice-Raptors as though they were knives created of the coldest, purest fires the Tourmaline had ever experienced, yet there were more of these Dragonkind, hundreds more, swarming between him and the Blue-Star.
Imagination. That was his Lia’s gift. Grandion’s ice stomach contracted painfully against his spinal column. Aye! But he could aid her with his strength.
I AM … ALASTIOR!
A tremendous, terrible Storm-amplified challenge cleared the airspace ahead of him. By the power of his voice alone, he smote them. Ice-Raptors tumbled as Grandion’s dreadful battle laughter stampeded over their flaccid, stunned bodies.
I AM THE TOURMALINE!
He powered through the bloodied morning skies, shovelling Ice-Raptors aside and into each other with the impunity of directed Storm blasts, where their impromptu mêlées made them worse than stupefied ducks sitting on a lake waiting to be gobbled up by hungry Dragons. The apparently friendly Chrysolitic Dragonkind took up the invitation with commendable fervour. His Riders took their pick of the leavings, feathering poisoned arrows into furry white hides almost at will.
Still ahead of him in the fray, Hualiama duelled her way through the press with arm-blades fifty feet long, sparking starlight every time she touched an attacking Ice-Raptor, but these belligerent fools did not seem to understand the need to leave her alone. They could not. They attacked in droves, battering the Shapeshifter Dragoness about the skies, and she slew them with the brutal exactitude of the Dragoness she was, and always had been, he realised. Meticulous strikes. Blinding speed. Power flaring lambent, even as his senses tingled to her presence checking upon her three companions’ state of health.
His throat thickened. I AM DEATH!
Grandion revelled in the reflected battle-glory of his beloved!
* * * *
At the last instant, Hualiama noticed the dense white struts of the lattice rocketing toward her, and realised that she would crash-land unless she changed her trajectory. She pulled up sharply and tucked in her shields, shooting into a gap at a thirty degree decline. The speed and change in aerodynamic posture caught her by surprise. Lia skinned her kneecaps at high speed before managing to correct, but that was enough.
Numistar cried, Ah, she hath touched my web.
The white walls shifted. Narrowing. She had made a misjudgement of epic proportions. This lattice was partially organic, infused with the Winterborn’s presence. The trap was not beyond the lattice. It was right here. Right now.
A wall of white slammed across her path.
The hurtling girl threw up every shield she knew. Blam! Next she knew, she was trying to untangle her arms and legs and count to ascertain if all her limbs were intact. Thankfully, the pneumatic elements of her shielding saved her from any broken bones, but a trickle of blood ran from her nose and her neck ached. Lia glanced backward. Windroc spit! She was trapped in a bubble of white – clearly, the Ancient Dragoness’ plan all along.
Try your star fire, I dare you, sneered the ageless, awesome voice of Numistar Winterborn. Here is a cage that will hold even a Star Dragoness.
You’ll never hold me, Numistar.
I play a game longer and deeper than anything you can imagine, hatchling. You play for a time. I play for eternity.
Hualiama shivered at the nuances conveyed by her brief statement. Like Fra’anior, her voice held that especial resonance that lifted her meaning beyond even the shifting, kaleidoscopic intricacies of ordinary Dragonish, and left the listener feeling overwhelmed and belittled – literally, figuratively, it hardly mattered. Starlight flared as she tested the wall nearest her right hand, but she let the fire gutter even more quickly than she had summoned it. The strange white substance sucked away both her magic and the blistering heat of star fire so eagerly! Not even a scorch mark remained. It must conduct and dissipate better than any material known to science. That was how it resisted draconic attack … and was this how Numistar planned to augment her strength?
Hualiama gritted out, Give me the First Egg, Numistar, and we can depart this battlefield as friends.
A thunderclap of cloying, contemptuous laughter smote her to her knees.
If Numistar exerted such mastery over physical substance that she could imbue a comet with her essence, or this lattice or a cloud of dragonets, how could one ever be assured of destroying her? Hualiama stretched out her hands as the walls of her white cocoon shifted, closing the trap still further.
Unexpectedly, Numistar sang:
Fight, mite of white,
Child of light,
Feckless whelp of Onyx!
“Mercy!” Lia jumped as tiny green sparks flared around her bare feet. She shielded, but the environment pressed in, leaching away her strength every time the slightest connection developed between her magic or body and the walls. Magical sinkhole? Anti-magic? A reversal technique applied through vectors she did not grasp? She twirled on a fractional bed of air, then lashed out with all of her strength. Lightning blasted the walls. The lattice reverberated around her; she was far overmatched for physical strength. Draw on the Balance. She needed …
Her voice rose in a wild, skirling wail, seeking a vulnerable range or frequency that would hurt Numistar, but again, even the sound seemed to vanish with a deadening effect.
The Dragoness had prepared her trap well.
She groaned. The pressure ratcheted up in her ears as the hole drew closed. Another idea! This was the beauty of magic; that once visualised, it seemed to bend to her will. She should never undervalue such a gift. Thrusting out her hands, Lia envisioned a drill. She created an air-drill formed of storm winds whistling about her body and corkscrewing into a tiny, tinier, achingly minute drill point formed just ahead of her rigid fingers, and when the power was spinning with a howl that drowned out all thought, she plunged it into the wall ahead of her. Don’t touch it with magic, she thought dreamily. Just a touch as ethereal as air itself.
Her inner engineer chuckled, “Crazy.” So stringent was her control, clamped down on that revolving endpoint, that the scream of overstressed materials suggested an ultrasonic vibration – pure guesswork, but her flair had often served her well. She shut her eyes, and drilled savagely into Numistar’s semi-organic structure.
The scream of fury she provoked from Numistar made the Star Dragoness imagine the world had just come crashing down. Magi-mental processes stretched over many leagues fled from her advance, creating instabilities that cracked and rippled far, far beyond the widening hole s
he drilled. Dust and grit fountained into her face despite her shielding, but Hualiama shut her eyes and mouth and forged forward, step by unwavering step. The ultrasonic pulsation was a form of Harmony, she suddenly realised, thanking Siiyumiel for his teachings. The key was not always a fiendishly complex arcanum.
Just air.
Would this aid the Land Dragons charging against Numistar in the depths?
Yes! She felt sympathetic vibrations rising from faraway, miles below. The Winterborn bellowed for the Egg, whipping her Land Dragon cohorts into action. Suddenly, that chill, powerful presence flowed away, growling, The Egg … aye, at last. Bring it to me!
Hualiama’s drill charged forward into space. The material sloughed aside. Run! Sprint!
Fly? suggested Dragonsoul.
As if I wasn’t –
Awesome? her Dragoness cut in. Sparkly Princess awesome?
You’re so going to pay for that comment, pretty-scales. I’m going to make you so very, very cutesy with your sweet little wings and petite muzzle …
Grr!
If you say so, petal.
I AM NOT A PET – Dragonsoul stumbled as she careened into being, her claws skittering in the narrow gap, just eight feet wide in this space. Grandion could never have fit through.
Flap the wings! She had never flown through such a tiny space, so Hualiama thumped her head and bruised her wingtips half a dozen times as she wriggle-ran-flapped through the lattice and dropped into the space below. Right. Next problem – Numistar. This time, she would not be absorbing her Star power. That blunder already receded into the past, but would an Ancient Dragoness not have anticipated another Isle, and another beyond that? Hualiama vacillated for a second, her wingbeat stuttering. The commonest sense around the Isles must expect another trap. Where was it?
Beside her ear – making her jump twenty feet sideways – Shill chimed, Brave little she. Used her powers cleverly. Flow could not see?
She could have Flowed through that trap? Thanks, Shill. Next time?
Next – look. The Egg rises.
Already? How long had she been trapped within the lattice? Hualiama stared downward from her height of two miles above the Cloudlands, which had begun to boil like an unwatched cauldron about three miles to her left wingtip. The disturbance eddied torpidly, but with increasing force as a light blue colour rippled free, spreading like a virulent infection comprised of pure magic. The power staggered Lia. This was a font of magic unlike anything she had ever imagined, like a star’s blazing heart, raw and savage and uncontainable, yet at the same time, wholly beautiful. White-fires raged across her vision. Ecstasy! Agony! The glorious, raging colossus of magic that was the First Egg of the Ancient Dragons blazed like a comet as it rose, borne forth in the paws of fifteen Welkin-Runners from a depth of three leagues or more beneath the surface.
She saw as if there were no Cloudlands, by the power of white-fires. Detritus sprayed in a narrow fan from an impossibly broad and thick ridge of white Dragon scales, delicately edged in the lightest of eggshell blue, toward and over the edge of a gloomy abyss. Ten miles to the West, she saw a frozen Dragoness’ limb dangling over the edge of that half-mile wide abyss, almost filling it with the breadth and thickness of the elbow joint. But she also saw Numistar Winterborn leaching out of her lattice like a frigid, oddly oily mist, amalgamating into the as-yet shadowy likeness of a draconic head of a size to rival Immadior herself – that magnitude of maw that gnawed on Islands for fun. As the magic poured into Numistar, the Dragoness gained form and substance at an alarming rate, writhing and pulsating as though the process pained her in unimaginable ways. So, she intended to embody herself? Lia nodded grimly. If she was allowed to complete this process, it was entirely likely no power in the Island-World could oppose her. She sensed the fusing and swelling of mighty powers in that as-yet insubstantial belly; saw a ghostly paw standing upon the mountain of Immadior’s flank, and visions of doom washed her mind. Numistar walking over Islands. Her paws tearing Fra’anior Cluster asunder, and the Dragoness bathing in the lava flows exploding out of the cracked caldera, her thunder resounding maliciously even across the aeons to shake Hualiama’s bones.
She must be opposed. Stopped.
With allies … and a distraction. Whirling mid-air, the Star Dragoness yielded at last to the knowledge that she must unleash the warring Land Dragons. Her lungs expanded. Potentials crackled in her belly, swelling like storm clouds pregnant with rain.
BEZALDIOR!!
The ruzal slipped free with glee!
Tainted, her broadside thundered deep beneath the Cloudlands, seeming to gather force and velocity in the denser air layers farther down. A murderous, grey-black cloud cannoned into the lattice’s base over a broad reach of six or seven miles, shattering the supports and in places, annihilating swathes of the material. The Land Dragons beyond reeled as many were killed instantly, but even as grief-realisation froze her wings, Hualiama saw them surging forward with ferocious roars, hoots and bugles, their massive magic primed for battle. No regrets there! Light-cannons thundered in concert, burning and crushing the Welkin-Runners bearing up the First Egg with devastating precision.
NO! roared Numistar.
Immediately, her great mental power sucked at the Egg and swept outward, turning Dragon after Dragon to her cause – much as Azziala dominated her minions. Hualiama ducked behind her mental barricades, well-prepared by her experiences among the Dragon Haters, as the Ancient Dragoness tried to turn even her will. The pain was excruciating, but the touch of an embodied paw steadied her in the sky and swept her irresistibly toward Numistar.
Shill growled, Allies we are. Let us finish this ancient evil together.
* * * *
Grandion blinked. One moment, they had been embroiled in the thick of a life-or-death battle with hundreds of Ice-Raptors, and the next, the furry white Dragonkind wheeled away and dived, racing to engage the seething mass of Land Dragons – visible through the Cloudlands which under an unimaginable magical assault had suddenly, for the first time in his life or to his knowledge, begun to break up. The Winterborn owned them, mind and soul. Bloodied, panting, he faced the unstable lattice. Hualiama had squeezed through. Now, she faced the Winterborn alone, just a girl against an Ancient Power of unspeakable malevolence, who had just turned thousands of Dragonkind against each other and who supped at the volcanic well of power that was the First Egg, unshielded.
She was not even wearing any clothing.
Why this should matter, he did not completely understand until he beheld the conflagration of desire within his breast, raging hotter even than the battle fires that squeezed his three hearts.
Hualiama! A red haze descended upon his vision.
He must fly to her.
She speared toward the Ancient Dragoness, battling her dark power, but Numistar’s presence was as overwhelming as the first fires of creation itself, so utterly dominant that not even a star could hope to stand against. She snaffled Hualiama’s starlight for herself, drawing it deep within to fuel the growth of her insatiable powers. Now, the Dragoness loomed like a mountain … he scrabbled at the lattice in a blind rage, insensible to the cries of the mosquitoes upon his back … he must go to her, fly to her, but he could not and the fires filled him up to his throat … he saw Hualiama dying, racked upon the claws of ice that Numistar thrust into her precious belly … he ran over the shaking white struts to be above her, tracked by further cries behind him, but Grandion could see nothing through the sheeting crimson flames of his grief-desire.
She was so beautiful. He had always admired the smoothness of her Human hide and the softness of her hair curling upon his talons. He had never understood why, until now.
The Dragon saw so clearly, his hearts could barely remember how to beat. He could be like her. With her. Forever.
He thundered, Blue-Star, my hearts are for thee!
The most extreme magnification of his Dragon sight brought him the soul-rending sight of Hualiama’s face sheeting bl
ood, of Numistar gurgling over her as she prepared to snuff out the girl’s eyes, and the Tourmaline Dragon could not bear it any longer. He was too big! His Dragon could never fit through these gaps … his strength was not enough, but through the oath-magic … Grandion reached into her, sensing her shock and whirling in the air, yet yielding her skills and her magic to his ultimate need. She feared for him, even in her extremity!
Again, his desperate cry belled forth, For the love of thee, I shall become Human indeed!
The world Shifted.
He fell.
* * * *
Hualiama’s shock at her Dragon’s cry, despairing of life itself, it seemed, multiplied as she sensed him reach within her. She offered her skills instinctively. How could she refuse?
Then, his words registered upon her mind. For the love of thee, I shall become Human indeed!
What?
Weakness. She knew inanition, the guttering of powers as an inordinate drain on her resources flashed across the space between them, faster than any possible thought.
Numistar’s laughter shook her violently. Ah, that Tourmaline fool! Look at what he has done for thee, Blue-Star – oh, the sweetness of unrequited love! She twisted the word ‘love’ with curse-indicators. I was not yet strong enough, but now, thanks to the Egg’s power, I shall be, and you cannot stop me …
The Dragoness’ eyes lifted, sensing him. Her beloved.
From above, fell a man most beautiful. Her eyes widened. His shoulder-length black hair flapped as he tumbled through the air. His extraordinary, gemstone-blue eyes winked with impossible fervour as they gazed pleadingly at her, almost as if he had seen her death? His magnificent physique … his unclothed … dancing dragonets, how she blushed! She had never seen a man to compare, draconic of musculature and bearing, yet against all logic, odds, or any hope she might ever have entertained in her most secret heart, Human. He was Human. Grandion had just transformed for her – for love!
The bells of her heart broke into wild peals.