by Marc Secchia
Dragonsoul said, What is a star without a firmament to shine within? Our dear friends, to us, you’re everything. Thank you.
Very softly but clearly, Yiisuriel-ap-Yuron’s voice resonated in every mind, “The Star Dragoness’ hearts shine her thankfulness to us all. May we be blessed and honoured in our endeavours, and may the work of our hands and paws be pleasing to the Great Dragon.”
Chapter 29: Southerly Fates
Grandion tasted a fey strangeness upon the breezes, all those long days it took the Air Breathers to relocate to Jeradia Island. A restlessness. One only had to ask the Lost Islands Dragons. There was a growing sense that the works of paws and minds, the expansion of the City of Jos for the King of Jeradia and the first major works on the volcano, were not enough. Penance had to be made. Dragons dreamed of the Great Onyx. The Humans became fractious and argumentative, not against Hualiama’s leadership, but against their own misdeeds and those of their ancestors.
As envisioned, Hualiama charmed all seven feet and five inches of the Jeradian King to her will. He signed a title granting the volcano and fifteen-mile radius of wilderness around it to the Star Dragoness, in perpetuity. Through the mighty diggings of Brown Dragons and the combined chanting of Enchanters and Blue Dragons, raising buildings and battlements and carving out Dragon Roosts, she strode like a talisman of beauty and hope for a good future for the Dragonkind.
The Tourmaline Dragon knew only that he was falling over the Isles for her more and more every day – and, that she was tormented. A battle was coming, but she did not know how to fight it.
One day, two months after Prince Elki’s wedding, he found the Star Dragoness dancing alone amongst the thunderheads five miles above the volcano. She played with lightning, twisting it around her talons as she pirouetted, and during his ascent, he realised that she was dreaming.
Grandion waited. He had been a patient Dragon. Some said that the Dragonfriend was no easy woman or Dragoness to love; that she was too powerful, and her Shapeshifters too well hidden to be trusted. They waited for her to start dominating the Island-World as her mother before her, and when she refused to display any tyrannical tendencies, they became confused and plotted against her.
The Tourmaline hovered a half-mile or so off her flank, and waited stoically for her to stop sparking rainbows and tossing lightning to the winds.
Shell-son of my spirit?
Waiting patiently? Grandion very nearly leaped out of his hide as Fra’anior spoke. He glanced about fearfully at the storm cell moving over Jeradia, at the fearsome array of dark clouds reaching several miles over his head, and thought to see the Onyx Dragon amidst that mantling of clouds. Not so.
The voice of the Great Dragon boomed, filling him unexpectedly with a soul-struck shudder of premonition, The Balance changes. In the South, in the Rift, Numistar has spread her foul poisons. I do not understand all that I sense. When the Blue-Star decides to move, will you support her in all that must be done?
Grandion replied, I will.
Only, the penance will not be upon her. You cannot allow her starlight to be extinguished, Grandion.
I will not.
Sometimes, healing of the present-future does not come as easily as we would wish, the Onyx added, with an unexpectedly wistful or even regretful note to his voice. Grandion thought he saw those mighty heads moving amongst the storm, stirring the thunderheads with the panoply of his power. Such was Fra’anior’s might. Go now. Yours is the paw that must guide my star. Be strong, o Tourmaline Dragon. Be as strong as Onyx.
* * * *
Grandion, Hualiama repeated, for the third time. At last, the Tourmaline shook himself and the light of reason returned to his eyes. I thought I was the one whose thoughts were supposed to drift amidst the clouds.
You were.
Hualiama considered her Dragon. “I was … meditating in dance. I’m sorry, Grandion. I’ve had whole Islands on my mind of late.” She winged over to land upon his shoulder. “I’ve been far away when I should have been near. I’ve been neglecting you.”
“What’s on your mind?” Thou, beloved harbinger of my hope.
Always, he returned to Dragonish to express his deepest feelings. Hualiama loved that about him. “I feel my work here is unfinished. Yet, I also sense … I must travel south. Grandion, there’s been – and there continues to be – an enormous change in the Balance, a migration of Land Dragons coupled with Numistar’s near-genocide, and I fear that in order to keep my charges safe, I must follow them. Worse, I feel something drawing me toward Herimor. A darkness which must be fought. Contained, at the very least – but that feeling’s remote. Inchoate. I worry that we haven’t seen Numistar’s sorry hide as yet. The three months are up. But I haven’t heard clearly on … well, anything.”
“What does Yiisuriel say?”
“She’s for the South. For crossing the Rift.”
“With the Egg?”
Hualiama bowed her head to his shoulder, pressing her muzzle against the muscle and hide there. “Grandion, won’t I just be inviting doom to visit some other population? I mean, taking the Egg would make crossing the Rift easier, and might well draw Numistar away from Fra’anior and our Academy … but how do I know what’s right? How do I know, know? I want to dance, but it’s like I have all these coils of fate and circumstance … and everything … tangled around my ankles, and I just – I just can’t …”
She hated feeling broken. She hated the sense that she must draw strength from another, yet had it not always been this way? Without Grandion, Flicker, Elki, Siiyumiel and all the others, where would she be this day? Pushing up fireflowers on a nameless Island.
Slowly circling the storm, Grandion said, “Then, south it is. And, you must find ways to help others assume responsibility for your empire.”
Hualiama groaned, “I can’t ask Affurion. What of Mizuki?”
“He will make his choice.”
“But, I’m pre-empting … Grandion, don’t you understand?”
“I think I do.” Beneath her paws, the Dragon nodded slowly, and his body rippled with the motion. “If I nod my head, my tail wags way back there. I’ve noticed you’ve the same problem, only yours causes you to crash-land sometimes.”
“I … what?”
“You fear that any waggle, even the slightest movement, will trigger unknowable consequences.” How perfectly he articulated her heart! Hualiama blinked, fighting an unaccustomed sense of vertigo, of falling into the beautiful, burning gaze of his fire-eyes. “You fear the dance. You baulk at the unknown – and what this Dragon knows, is the great depth of your care and love this betrays. What can I do for thee, beloved? Help? Advice? An offer of distraction?”
Always, the draconic nuance. A subtle inflexion in that offer, enough to make her wonder if he was, even unconsciously, hinting at … suddenly, her Dragoness hearts pelted along pell-mell in her chest and throat. She had been contemplating this forbidden act for months. Forbidden? No longer! They were a pair of Shapeshifters. She was ready. Certain. Lia searched his eyes, knowing he must sense her passion, her trepidation, her trembling at the body’s betrayal of incipient glory.
Like a zephyr’s passing melody, she breathed, Indeed, we are avowed.
We are, he purred ardently, as if her understanding had forced pure oxygen into the furnaces of his draconic hearts.
Lia added, We’re soul-bonded lovers, and have been from the first, though we did not know it then. For no other. We are … married, Grandion … in every Human … sense, she faltered, undone by the hypnotic colours of his eyes.
We are. Again, just two syllables resonated through her entire world.
Even as Dragon and Dragoness? she pressed.
He added, The way of Dragons regards our state as betrothed of the ascending fire-promises until consummation of the bond.
Despite his delicate phrasing, his draconic fires betrayed a rising rumble of passion. Hualiama regarded him with an arch tilt of her wings. Aye, noble Dragon?
&
nbsp; He said, I desire you more truly and deeply than anyone in this Island-World, Blue-Star, and to me you shine brighter than any star in the boundless realms above. Wilt thou be mine, in wingtip-love and fire-love, breath-of-life love and soul-love, Shapeshifter-love, roost-love and forever-love?
So gorgeously formal! The Star Dragoness breathed, We are of one accord. I too would give myself to thee; all that I am, body and soul. Transform with me, o Grandion.
I … can’t fly, as a Human, he chuckled. You want to … up here?
Where else? I can fly. Triggering her transformative magic, Hualiama gathered the air about her body and leaped off his shoulder. This airy domain is the expansiveness of our love. The breezes are our bed. The clouds shall make for pillows. Come on, slow-slug. Surely, it cannot be that I must teach my husbandly Dragon how to fly?
Never! He grinned quirkily at her. Husband Dragon and Star Wife? Now there’s a cosmos-shaking thought!
And then, he was no longer a Dragon. Just a man chasing his wife five miles above the Islands.
Hualiama had been ruminating over that storm above the volcano. Between her command of the air and Grandion’s natural affinity with Storm, they created a cocoon of lightning-shot storm clouds about their love. Aye, she led him on a merry pursuit through the thunderheads. They sported side by side upon the mighty thermals, spinning above the Islands until they were dizzy and breathless from laughter, and the sharp tang of ozone from the lightning bolts they attracted made Lia start sneezing uncontrollably. They laughed – how they laughed! Their joy seemed as boundless as the skies. He caused the thunder to guffaw for her and she created sizzling, giggling displays of kaleidoscopic light out of any suns-beams that dared to peek into the cloud warren of their aerial playground.
Soon, in tender union, they learned to fly together.
* * * *
“You’re glowing again,” Flicker accused Human-Lia.
“Stars have been known to display this tendency,” she said demurely.
The dragonet let his eye ridges crawl about like hairless caterpillars. “I always get suspicious when you try to look innocent. Are you with egg?”
“Flicker!”
“Is all this wingtip-snuggling the reason for your … shameful radiance?”
“I think you should have been called the dread pirate-Lord of fifty Isles, unlike Prince Qilong.” She scratched his supple neck fondly. “I’ll miss Imaytha. Still, it’s good to start spreading the word about the Islands regarding our Academy –”
“And Shapeshifters,” Flicker added. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed you breathing Amaryllion’s fires from Immadia to Jeradia.”
The Tourmaline Dragon must have noticed too, Hualiama thought. There was much work to be done yet, and new Shapeshifters and potential Dragon Riders to discover. She had only breathed Amaryllion’s soul-fires a dozen times into persons young and old, so far. She tried her best to make no judgements about age or station, Isle or race. In the last two weeks alone, as they made preparations to leave beloved friends behind, she had also initiated seventeen new Dragon Rider partnerships.
May you burn the heavens together as Dragon and Rider. Beautiful.
Now they turned to a new, immense undertaking – shepherding the remaining Land Dragons across the increasingly dangerous Rift.
Standing upon the crown of Yiisuriel’s mighty mountain, Lia gazed to the southern horizon. A stiff, warm breeze pressed back her hair, a breeze bringing the fragrance of spring and the growing season from the Jeradian massif upon their starboard flank, just visible behind a bank of low-lying cumulous clouds. The lights of Jos City twinkled cheerfully in the twilight. Even in Jos, she had found a man who promised to be a new Jeradian Shapeshifter Dragon. Jenx. Six feet and nine inches of hulking Jeradian blacksmith. He would join her old friend, Jarrik the Armourer of Rolodia, and Tadao also, in starting the work of smithing and Dragon armour-forging at the Academy.
She scented the winds and the fates. Would all this be enough? Please, let their endeavour be bulwark enough …
Rather embarrassingly, Flicker was right. She glowed constantly. Night and day. Dragoness and Human alike. The radiance of happiness inside of her was unreasonable and irrepressible – Grandion had merely to glance at her to cause her to bedazzle a room, and a kiss? Every Dragon within a hundred miles knew the bubbling discharge of her magic, Yiisuriel-ap-Yuron had implied. Predictably, Flicker’s assessment of her conjugal bliss had a rather more barbed flavour.
No sneaking up on Numistar Winterborn, then, if she was responsible for the disturbances in the South.
The Air Breathers ambled southward from Jeradia, following the lay of an under-Cloudlands ridge that led down to Elidia and Mejia Islands, and from there toward the mighty breadth of the Southern Archipelago. Fifty to sixty leagues per day. Not fast travel by draconic standards, but certainly quick enough when one considered these were ambulatory mountains supported by several thousand legs each, in addition to lighter-than-air magic which Lia had first assumed was a Kinetic power, but appeared different to anything known to the Dragonkind. Another enigma of draconic lore. All around the Air Breathers, keeping well clear of the great rippling foot pods, came a mass of Shell-Clan and Runners, some eight hundred and nineteen individuals strong – the sole remnant of the Land Dragons North of the Rift, after Numistar had turned Fra’anior Cluster’s surrounds into a graveyard for their kin.
Would they ever return?
Even though she had no reason, not even a sense of Balance to fall back upon, Lia clenched her fist above her heart. Let it be, oh, one day let it be so. An Island-World without Dragons would be no world at all.
To think we once thought to end our life, Dragonsoul interjected affectionately, breaking into her melancholy thoughts. Snooping is the very best part of this deal. Honestly. You’ve no idea –
Dragonlove! You’re terrible.
I just like making us blush. Now, one day when I’m a grown Dragoness, I’ll know what to look forward to, won’t I? Joking aside, Humanlove, there’s something –
Oh no. Please …
That was one problem with communication at the spiritual, emotional and cognitive levels. She knew what her Dragoness was about to say before she said it. Thus, Hualiama wept tears into the wind as her second-soul related the news she had confirmed with Sunfyora before they left Jeradia. So much for Flicker’s and Elki’s snide teasing, and Imaytha’s parting hint at the ‘fluttering of tiny wings’. She was infertile. Perhaps it was that her Dragoness self was developmentally younger than her Human self, and so the reflection of injuries and features from one Shapeshifter form to the other, that they were only beginning to understand, meant that the capacity would develop at the pace of her second-soul’s physical maturation? But that was uncertain. Sunfyora had discovered magi-physical scarring around the immature egg sac and the related reproductive organs in her Dragoness form.
Perhaps ruzal had spoken the last word, after all.
We will have many children of our fires, the Dragoness tried to encourage herself, but her mental voice trembled. Is this … the curse Numistar alluded to?
They shall be the more precious for it, the Human girl wept. Infinitely … oh, my soul …
We must not give up now.
No. Never.
Crushed. One did not always perceive hope’s depth and staying power until it was wrenched away. She spoke quietly to Flicker, and then to Grandion as he approached, having detected her distress through their bond. He held her. Flicker held them both, curling his paws about their necks, and made little snuffling noises that she knew were a dragonet’s tears. These threads of despair and loss wove so inextricably through the weft of her life. How could she have hoped for a moment’s untrammelled happiness? This was part of her makeup. Must she overcome because of her past, or in spite of it? Robbed of a precious joy, she felt like a Dragoness struggling to slough her wings free of a lava bath. Dragging. Unable to win free.
Her fists clenched. She would n
ot suffer this fate! She would not let it rule her heart!
After a long while, the dragonet said, “You dreamed of a clutch, Lia. Your dreams are true, and powerful.”
“The five eggs! Of course,” said Grandion, and then added, “You are not selfish for wishing some might be your own. Already, you mother so many … which is why this injury is so deep-rooted. Do you understand?”
“I …” How could she convey the complexity of the despair that wrenched asunder the foundations of her being, the rawness of the wound; the guilt at having simply assumed she could have what so many women did not? In a flash, she saw the secret heart of motherhood for a place of unforeseen perils, of fragile yearnings and dreams dashed, yet matchless in beauty. She must grow to encompass even this. She would rise, and if she fell, simply endure to rise again, higher than before. As Fra’anior had so wisely bidden her, she must dance.
Never fear to dance.
* * * *
The place atop Yiisuriel’s mountain became Lia’s sanctuary, Grandion observed, in the days of her soul’s darkness that followed their departure from the shores of Jeradia. Islands rose before them and receded behind. The weather grew steadily more sultry in keeping with the little he knew of the southerly reaches, and each evening as the suns receded beyond the lapping Cloudlands or hid behind the Yellow Moon’s immensity, she returned to the mountaintop to meditate, to commune with her second-soul or her great parents, or to draw aside with a friend or confidante to pour into them the offerings of a most extraordinary heart.
No other Shapeshifter simply chatted to their second-soul.
After a week spent travelling south with them, Elki, Saori, Mizuki and Affurion departed to return to the Academy, where Affurion the Brown Overmind was already appointed by the congregation of Dragons to serve as an Elder alongside Yukari, who preferred a teaching and mentoring role to that of leadership and governance. They left with Hualiama’s completed designs for a working meriatite furnace engine.
Elki believed her engine would revolutionise travel between the Islands. Grandion agreed. She gave but one stipulation – the engine must be offered freely to all.