by Marc Secchia
“Again,” he growled, swinging his fists at the nearest Ice-Raptor only to realise that his Human reach was somewhat different to his Dragon’s. “If Hualiama can do it …”
“Do what?”
“Fly, and fight, as a Human,” snapped the man-Dragon. “She’s just – I’m good at copying, alright? Climb on my back.”
“Sumio!” cried Mizuki, snatching the huge man away from an Ice-Raptor’s jaw. “Grandion –”
“One moment!”
Nothing like a combat to sharpen a Dragon’s wits. They were battle-built from the ground up, with the senses and reflexes of a born predator. Grandion listened closely to his inner presence, according to Hualiama’s instructions, and implemented what she had communicated.
He failed his first flying test. Miserably.
More accurately, he succeeded in Human-style flying – flailing arms and legs, and not a hint of aerodynamic beauty. Neither result was pleasing to a Dragon.
Exacerbating his already immense displeasure, as Imaytha’s magic fused with his, Grandion sprouted tourmaline-and-amethyst fists from his hands rather than anything resembling kinetically adapted wings. He swung again in a cesspit of spitting fury, and saw a semi-transparent limb spurt forth to belt an Ice-Raptor half a mile across the sky.
Unholy, undraconic magic … he stared at his outspread hands. Even a Tourmaline Dragon had never learned a trick like that! Actually, this could work … his chest ballooned with the realisation of power gushing through his Human veins.
“GRRAA-HA-HA-HAAAR!”
So wickedly did he roar, every Ice-Raptor in the vicinity jerked in shock and burgeoning Dragon fear. Grandion threw an experimental left jab. BOOM! Two Raptors collected the brunt of a fey tourmaline-hued fist approximately the dimensions of the Dragon he had been. Focus. Concentrate on the magic. Shape it. Right hook – BOOM! Jab-jab-jab straight left! KABOOM! Gratefully, he saw Flicker clearing the dragonets smartly out of his path as he rotated while falling in the air, throwing punches like Hualiama embroiled in one of her wilder martial arts forms. What he lacked in elegance, he made up for in sheer granite-mindedness and an acerbic draconic compulsion to clear the sky of enemies. By himself.
Perhaps he wasn’t as adept at mimicry as he thought. This Human form was too different, too unfamiliar to understand straightaway. Right now, he wrenched his left shoulder as he overextended, but an urgent word from Imaytha, hissing eerily into his sensitive ear, brought him back on track with faster, more compact movements. BOOM! He picked another target. BOOM-DA-BOOM!
Mizuki swirled beneath him, inviting the Tourmaline to land on her back. Grandion thumped down just behind her sleek, minimal ruff of skull spikes, unused to the springiness of his Human musculature, but Imaytha still clung on, steadying him as he stumbled.
Grandion gritted his teeth – nonsensically tiny teeth! “What’s next?”
Imaytha pointed beneath his arm, because she barely measured up to his left bicep. “Tidy up, Dragon.”
Gnarrr-BOOM! Grandion grabbed his aching left shoulder, inadvertently shovelling seven Raptors across the sky with the swipe of his right hand. “Oh. Interesting.”
“See what this action does,” said Imaytha, clapping her hands.
Thunderclaps! Brilliant!
When Grandion had finished cuffing Ice-Raptors about the ear canals to the tune of his uproarious guffawing, he struck a magnificent male-Dragon pose upon Mizuki’s back, muscles popping, chest thrown out. Grraaarrrggh!
The Shapeshifter bellowed, “How was I? Did you see those Ice-Raptors – I swatted them like flies!”
Elki snorted, “Saori, cover your eyes, darling.”
“I’m not looking,” said the Eastern warrior, peeking through her fingers with a mischievous air.
“What’s the matter? Oh – your nudity taboo?” Grandion inquired.
“No, that’s the matter,” said the Prince, pointing horizontally. “That’s … spectacularly … indecent. Of course, I’m not jealous in the slightest.”
“Elki!” Saori slapped his arm.
“Well, call a dragonet a dragonet, says I. More so a Dragon.”
The man-Dragon looked down at himself, startled. “Oh. Does it … um, operate in the same way as male Dragons? Does this mean –”
“You must enjoy winning,” said Imaytha, ever so dryly.
The Tourmaline beamed about their small company upon the Copper Dragoness’ back. “And, may I conclude by these coy responses that this sight is desirable to the female of the Human species? Am I suitably colossal? Generously proportioned, at the very least? How do my dimensions compare to –”
“Oh, shut the fangs yesterday already!” Elki growled. “I need to teach you about being a man, and lesson one is, even if you have it, you mustn’t flaunt it!”
Grandion quirked an eyebrow at the Prince. “Peculiar. Is this customary behaviour?”
Sumio threw a pair of trousers over his head. “Put those on. My spares should fit. And then, I challenge you to a wrestling match. At last, I’ve met a man worthy of a real fight!”
“Except, he’s a Dragon, so good luck not getting your head twisted off your shoulders,” said Saori. “I’ll leave you boys to argue it out, but Grandion – please ascertain your strength before you hurt someone. Come on. Let’s go help set everything to rights down below. After that, Elki, you really do need to talk to the man-Dragon, if only for the sake of my raging nausea.” She winked broadly at Grandion “Joking.”
To the tune of the Shapeshifter Dragon’s incensed bellowing, Mizuki winged down to the battered campsite.
Chapter 16: Juggling Eggs
TARRYING in close proximity to the First Egg had one benefit – a surfeit of magic. A preposterous, nerve-jangling, never-ending glut. Trapped in the Flow state as she churned steadily along with the Egg’s passage, Hualiama eventually worked out a way to channel the awesome outpouring of magic with a construct similar to the audible-earthquake spectrum she had been using to attempt to speak with Grandion – although she had heard nothing back so far – and set about blotting out every dark shadow in sight.
The S’gulzzi flitted along behind the Egg in their tens of thousands, riding the bubbling, gaseous result of the intersection of their Dark-Fires magic with the Egg’s Sky-Fires magic. Hualiama swatted them grimly. She wrangled the Egg’s torrential magic with her finest constructs, and flailed like a person attacked by a swarm of gnats. Their numbers never appeared to diminish. The best she could achieve was to keep their grubby shadow-appendages off Crackle. Barely.
Oh – one more surprise, as she took her measurements seven days after leaving Crackle’s volcano behind. The volatile by-product of her flailing defence had thinned out their volcanic stew with gasses under insanely high pressure and created an artificial thrust which accelerated the First Egg to over double its previous velocity. They were fairly flying now, twisting first between Yorbik Island and the tiny outpost of Rorbis, and then coursing onward beneath a widespread Cluster of Islands called the Twenty-Six sisters, a misnomer every cartographer she had ever met, hooted at. They meant the twenty-six major islands, those more than five miles in diameter. Counting every boulder and volcanic outcropping scattered across the square leagues was a fruitless undertaking.
As she travelled, she returned to her tutoring, this time with a Magma Dragon whose primary mode of delivery appeared to be the angry-volcano cannonade of information. Once Hualiama managed to tame her instinct to duck every time he let loose, she learned a great deal about the ways of the world beneath the Island-World.
She had never imagined the realms of Humans and Dragons to rest upon such instability. How had she thought of her planet – Crackle had stressed the ancient draconic scientific term in place of ‘Island-World’, by which Dragons referred only to the great crater blasted by the comet carrying the First Eggs – as solid? Its core was molten fires of searing temperatures and constant, albeit slow, tectonic flows. It fascinated her how Magma Dragons, S’gulzzi and the
deepest-dwelling Land Dragons could not pass beneath the Rim Wall either. Why had Fra’anior created or left an impassable barrier to the world beyond the mountains? Was that to keep Dragons and Humans in, or something else out?
What about the Rift? Hualiama asked.
What about it? Crackle responded, a classic draconic deflection.
What is it? Why do you say it is dangerous? Why had the Great Onyx responded so strangely, that day Aluki had interrupted her dreaming, and rushed off in a panic? Her Human and Dragon parts quivered identically. There’s Imbalance, I know …
Slowly, the Magma Dragon said, I dishonour your knowledge of Dragon lore, little one. Truly, you are the Dragonfriend. I’m an expert in Rift lore. Well do you use the word ‘Imbalance’, but why did you stress it so, with terror-nuances and memory-reflexive-quest indicators?
Umm … Hualiama rapidly sorted through what she knew of Dragon linguistics. Crackle had just articulated what she had not identified for herself. Fra’anior hinted at a great hazard – the Imbalance – related to the Rift. I hadn’t realised, but resolving that Imbalance will be a task for a Star Dragoness, if I am not –
NO! The Magma Dragon modulated his tone, but only barely above a growl like an impending eruption. It is fearfully dangerous. Incline your attention. The Rift stretches right across our Island-World, from one wall to the other. It is a place of foul Earthen-Fires, which arise and are distilled from the deeps of the world by a mighty presence, a terrible being we call Infurion.
An Ancient Dragon? Hualiama interjected before thinking the better of interrupting the Dragon.
Crackle’s ire showed in the rapidly increasing temperature of his being, over two thousand degrees in his core fires. Perhaps. None have beheld this creature’s visage and lived. The Rift fires are like what you have sensed of the S’gulzzi, only unimaginably multiplied. No creature of Sky-Fires can survive there – to your questions, little one. The Rift is like a great, magical collection apparatus and eternal containment of all the foul energies rife within our world. Conflictual magic. Deathly toxins. Creatures unimaginable to our kind. There are few paths across the Rift, and those which exist are perilous indeed. If the Land Dragons indeed migrate as you suggest, they must have great reason. Reason you and I cannot understand; reason which perhaps they do not even hold in conscious perception, but sense deeply within their fires.
Crackle –
Hold! he roared, battering the burning lava substrate until her Flow being recoiled in pain. Still, Hualiama lashed out at the eager S’gulzzi, driving them back. He said, Great disturbances already reach thousands of leagues from the Rift. Perhaps you cannot feel them here, but those sensitive to molten pathways know that the base of our world fractures, and those chasms and fractures extend from the Rift. This must be what the Great Onyx fears.
Hualiama pondered his words. Truly? Something was amiss in the Rift?
The Magma Dragon said, Your starlight presence brightens all you influence, little Star Dragoness. But I adjure thee not to travel to the Rift. Light cannot survive that darkness. Such a quest would far exceed the ambit of your power, even augmented by the First Egg. These are the fundamental fires of creation itself. Therefore, by my verimost fires, I counsel you to leave this matter of the Rift’s Imbalance to the Onyx whom you name your shell-father. It shall be your death.
Portentous words! Soul to soul, her manifestations nodded in agreement. This was not the hour to be treading upon Fra’anior’s paws. The Onyx would know what to do and his mote of a shell-daughter would only dance into trouble.
Besides, here was trouble enough for one day.
She said, I’d be happy just to escape from the S’gulzzi, Crackle. What’s our plan?
I’ve determined that there’s a major crack beyond your Sisters! The Magma Dragon smashed the lava with his fiery fists. That’s the place. We will rise! With great pressure! And explode above!
In a glorious fountain of volcanic debris, Hualiama agreed, once she could make herself heard.
You will instil power in my rock! By which, he meant his flesh, she had learned. The magma will surge! The Egg will storm free!
Then, she would simply catch it with all the Kinetic power she did not possess, before it sank back into the Cloudlands and they restarted the Land Dragon war. Her starry presence glanced about yet again. She could not scan upward far enough, through an estimated forty-seven miles of crust according to Crackle’s penetrative sonar measurements, to know the movement of Land Dragons above. But she sensed them. Balance? Intuition? No, simple logic. The great Dragons of the deeps understood the Egg’s progress better than she did. Hualiama’s guesswork involved her best knowledge of geography coupled with Crackle’s mental map of the lava flows above and below the crust. His kind did not ordinarily travel below due to the danger posed by the S’gulzzi, which continued to infest and injure him despite her best protective efforts.
Furthermore, she sensed the S’gulzzi gathering for … something. An assault? A change of tactics? She could not say, but the probing at her ruzal had decreased in frequency while increasing in variety. The S’gulzzi learned. They exhausted her with unrelenting purpose. They tested her willpower and knowledge according to criteria she could not begin to understand. So many attacks failed. They were pinpricks, easily batted away – but that very ease made her uncomfortable. Intensely uncomfortable.
The sense of wrongness only swelled in her mind. Thrust it away. She must focus on the now, on the giants already terrorising the lives she felt responsible for, not on esoteric speculation best addressed by Fra’anior.
Only, he was not physically present anymore …
In her dreamtimes, Hualiama worked assiduously with Istariela. The famous Star Dragoness did not ask again about the ruzal, but they discussed Azziala’s situation in detail. “The parasitic twin holds the key,” Istariela concluded. “Forgive me for putting it this way, shell-daughter, but you need to understand that she operates in a similar way to your Shapeshifter soul link.” Cringe! “It is vanishingly rare for a person to grow to adulthood with a functional parasitic twin inside of her. We cannot know which mind holds primacy or how they work, whether in cooperation, antagonistically, or even parasitically. We cannot even know how the twin clings to life. Magic is an obvious culprit – whether a magic of inheritance, an accident of birth, or a deliberate irruption or experiment upon the gestation process. It grants her a duality of power similar to that which you enjoy in a different, superior form.”
“Superior?” Dragoness-Lia said drolly.
“Do not disparage my words, child,” Istariela admonished her. “You are more excellent than your Human birth mother in every way, and your Dragoness is –”
“No, don’t say that. I love you, shell-mother.”
Istariela smiled her best cryptic Dragoness smile, and replied with a gently, sympathetic curl of her paw about the girls, “You shan’t change my opinion by denials. Very well, the twin. Horrific as it is to contemplate, I believe that it is the twin who must be defeated in order to secure the final victory over Azziala. That’s my best intuition.”
She mirrored the Shapeshifter Dragoness’ instinct, only, she wondered what it meant. Kill the twin, kill the host? A foul echo of her own Shapeshifter nature. Tear the twin out of her mother’s abdomen? Awful, awful, awfulness …
When she did indeed sleep, it was to voyage through endless nightmares of darkness infesting her flesh like a necrotic infection.
* * * *
For a day and a half, the growing fleet sailed and winged southward to the Yorbik Free Federation, braving blustering winds and a severe hailstorm that disabled nine Dragonships. Dragons evacuated the Humans before they could perish in the Cloudlands.
Bolstered now by Dragonwings hailing from Pla’arna, Ferial and as far afield as Herliss in the North and even a powerful Dragonwing from the eastern fringes of the Western Isles, which had flown in via Horness and Jendor, and mercenaries from Helyon and Ferial, Grandion led a group
numbering over one thousand Dragons and three hundred Dragonships of war.
They crested the long, gentle slopes of Yorbik Island, at thirty-one leagues in height and an immense one hundred and nine leagues in breadth the largest Island in the known world, and found devastation. The lower slopes had been stripped of all but lichens by the powerfully acidic wash of the Cloudlands in this region, but above that, the rolling hills that should have been carpeted in the immense hardwood forests for which Yorbik was famed, and which provided one of its principal exports, had been stripped bare. Not just knocked over. Numistar had storm-wrecked Yorbik with winds so powerful, the levelled trees had been picked up bodily and dumped into the southern terrace lakes, where they lay in mournful mounds a mile tall. She had ice bombed the villages and laid waste to anything resembling a Dragon roost.
Ten Dragons had survived the carnage. Ten, of an estimated four thousand which had inhabited the sprawling forests and huge cave systems of Yorbik.
Flicker looked on as the largest of the remaining Dragons, a middle-aged Blue called Yuzikion, related how he had bidden his Dragon-kin take shelter and wait for the Dragonfriend’s army rather than fight, and had been branded a traitor to all Dragonkind. He and his five shell-brothers, and four other Dragons, were the sum total of the survivors.
“They came against us with weapons of ice and light,” he concluded. “None could stand against, not even the Land Dragons – the ones you called Runners – that tried to oppose them. The Winterborn struck us with a paw more immense than anything the Dragonkind have known since the age of the Great Onyx himself. How does the Dragonfriend plan to defeat this Ancient Power? Where is she now?”
“She is travelling in secret with the First Egg,” Grandion stated boldly. “The Star Dragoness will meet us soon.”
Flicker knew Grandion had repeated this half-truth numerous times to many different Dragons; those ranged about this small council said nothing, but the tenor of their fire-eyes betrayed rage. The Dragonfriend must arise soon. She must! The Tourmaline added that their second foe, Azziala, was even more dangerous than Numistar Winterborn, and to everyone’s surprise, the ten Dragons of Yorbik agreed at once.