Dragonstar (Dragonfriend Book 4)

by Marc Secchia

  Stiffening her skin still further, Humansoul fired back in agreement, All that would survive such a blast is these soul-fragments undoubtedly hid inside Dramagon’s creatures, and the First Egg. In one fell stroke, he will annihilate his every foe. We must neutralise this pressure, or the Rift will explode before our Shining Ones arrive.

  The Yhishaalylia. Aye, agreed her Dragoness. They’ll obliterate Dramagon’s leavings – one way or the other, we’re doomed, aren’t we?

  Her Human part made a strangled noise.

  Courage, smarty-girl. We were born to flout the fates. We can’t Flow here, but there is another solution, you know. Why don’t you –

  BLADES OF LIGHT! howled the girl, stiffly sinking into a classic Nuyallith pose. The Dragoness sighed something about Humans loving their swords; ignoring that, Hualiama ignited her hands and sliced them awkwardly toward a pair of marauding tentacles behind and below her. Fight! Freed of the mental tyranny of Dramagon’s attack, she began a grim work of exploding tentacles behind her as she rode an increasingly powerful shockwave upward. Not fast enough. Pain wracked her body with every vibration, let alone larger movements. Powerful counter-strikes rocked her pedestal.

  Nitwit, Dragonsoul informed her succinctly. We’re in terrible shape, but I can still engineer better than you. Follow my directions.

  Ten seconds later, Hualiama had formed her very first magical thrust-engine. First, she positioned a circular, slightly convex shield beneath her feet. Then she formed a hole in that shield and shot a tight beam of starlight through it, igniting the dark-fires gravitating toward her magic like moths to a flickering candle. Ha. The constant conflagration provided more than adequate thrust, and she had achieved Human flight. Personal propulsion. She would have to modify her Dragonship design accordingly!

  Could she engineer a way to stay alive first?

  With a fierce, exultant battle-cry, a Human girl shot upward toward the boiling darkness upon a comet trail of crimson fires, yelling orders at an Ancient Dragon.

  * * * *

  Hualiama had hoped Infurion would punch holes in the roof of this almighty cavern Dramagon’s creatures held by their interlocked might; the longer they retained the endlessly renewing Earthen-Fires, the greater the resulting discharge would be. Their formations seethed as the black bodies extended their hold in all directions, joining up in rippling waves as far as the eye could perceive. Sight was tenuous. She saw as through darkened crysglass, a place of black upon black, so that it was hard to make out what was Infurion and what was the Dramagon-spawn attacking him, or to separate the tentacles out from the similarly dark, crystalline substrate that supported them. The interference increased exponentially, degrading her shields at a terrifying rate.

  She flew upward faster than a crossbow quarrel now, but the pressure did not abate as it should. The whole Rift was reaching a critical state. Hualiama agonisingly raised her hands above shoulder height, aiming for points near Infurion’s forepaws. She could not have moved save for the rigidity her armour-like outer casing provided, she realised. Not a good sign when battle loomed. Even her lungs and diaphragm refused to function without magical support – and her heart?

  Working on it, Dragonsoul assured her quietly.

  Therefore, she must not quail.

  BE LIGHT!

  Her starlight power shot forth again and again, as if renewed by that brief encounter. Had she discovered something fresh within herself, or was it merely a mad adrenaline rush and thus doomed to fizzle? She did not care.

  BE LIGHT!

  Hualiama focussed solely on her goal: to release the pressure and thus buy precious time. Her hands moved slowly, as if she dreamed of her old royal music tutor conducting an opera at one-tenth speed. Pinpoint strikes. Precision was critical. She husbanded her strikes, breaking tentacles in locations calculated to create the greatest destabilisation, as best she understood her immediate environment. Black creatures swarmed into the breaches, plugging them efficiently. Her voice rose, summoning still more strength. She pushed back the Rift’s darkest fires as the Star Dragoness made her meagre strength count. Relief? No, it was infinitesimal, no more than a drop of rain plunking into the everlasting Cloudlands. Infurion still had not ripped through, but he threw his might at the rents and tore them wider with sweeping talon strokes, his fires crackling and smoking as he created mayhem. Swarms of his luckless progeny clung to his back and shoulders, burning the Ancient Dragon with their mordacious magic, but her shell-uncle seemed beyond caring about his wounds.

  BE MORE LIGHT!

  More? Who was she trying to fool? She could never be enough light. A star could illuminate the trackless reaches of outer space, but her heat must be forfeit, surely?

  How poignantly she yearned to understand her heritage.

  Then, a rippling movement in the massed bodies alerted her. It was night above, so there was no flood of suns-light to alert her, but the malevolent gleam of Numistar’s orbs was enough. The Ancient Dragoness expended the First Egg’s magic at a dizzying rate as she blasted the dark-fires-riddled rock out of her path, angling for Infurion and no other.

  Infurion roared, Remove thyself from mine path, shell-niece!

  She shot reams of data, readings and conclusions at him. Numistar must not bring the First Egg into the Rift! The consequences … I need to reach the surface, mighty Infurion!

  WHY?

  I … I cannot say, or … she will know. The fiery depths of the Ancient Dragon’s gaze seemed to burn through her soul. Would he assume the worst? Pray that he might read the truth ablaze in her heart. She breathed, We are kin. We fight as kin.

  After the longest breath she had ever imagined, the mighty head dipped slightly. Hide thine powers within mine, shell-niece, and prepare to ride the conflagration high into the thin airs of thine preferred realm. I shall protect the tiny spark of thine fire-life against the storms of mine heart-fires.

  He would give his heart-fires for her? Hualiama bowed stiffly from her waist. You will not die, shell-uncle?

  A ghastly, pyretic grin greeted her assertion. I will not. Prepare thyself.

  Prepare, when her every muscle responded like soggy scrolleaf, or if they managed to clench, it was with a spasmodic, agonising movement? The attacks of Dramagon’s creatures had been crueller than she imagined, debasing her flesh and the magical pathways of her being. She did wonder if the fire-life of her Dragon form might not have been snuffed out.

  Now, a familiar pressure caressed her temples. Exploring the lay of her mind. Teasing the back of her neck and slithering up her basilar arteries into the lower brain.

  Claws seized her mind and tried to jerk her sideways, but a searing conflagration of dark-fires knocked her backward. Infurion! He was defending her? He must have adapted following that first devastating assault. Each time the attack came, the contaminating dark-fires exploded in her face. Lia had a sense of the aether screaming, of magic run amok as her ascent continued and of Infurion’s pained bellowing. Through the sheeting black flames she saw several larger creatures measuring her progress not so much with eyes as with vitriolic touches of mental power, but it was no kind of mental process or power she recognised. They were larger in the body and dark grey in colour with a glittering onyx trim upon their stubby tentacles – more adept or more highly evolved psyches, Hualiama theorised immediately. Like a hive of insects, the myriad others were subordinate to these master-minds.

  Dramagon, she thought.

  Dramagon. The sound ripped back like storm winds picking up explosive lava and hurling it full in her face. Sardonic. Taunting. Tentacles rippled, and she stood in a shrieking pyre of mental agony.

  Hualiama did not know for how long she had been screaming when a tranquil light bathed her person.

  Dragonsoul. She had Shapeshifted her Human out of trouble.

  Once more she rose and the Egg descended in Numistar’s paw, but now she was a Dragoness. All was a somnolent dream. Hostility and madness mingled upon Numistar’s visage as her sn
owy muzzle, body and paws oriented upon Infurion with hatred born of aeons of solitary confinement in that comet; in every inch of that mighty being, Hualiama read the insane compulsion to annihilate her enemy. She cared nothing for a Star Dragoness. She cared only for powers that might stand between her and immortality.

  Around the Egg a corona of destruction developed as it swept down into Infurion’s realm, the opposing branches of magic sparking and reacting, creating a comet trail much like that with which Numistar Winterborn had returned to the Island-World. Opalescent fires raged against sooty destruction. Fields of icy destruction warred with the ever-renewing Rift fires. Dully, beneath her paws, the Star Dragoness sensed the impact of an explosion, and then Numistar’s glaring, frozen gaze seemed to slide past her for several breathless seconds, mildly surprised; her paws twitched slowly to curl about the First Egg as if seeking to protect it from an attack which never materialised.

  KAAABOOOM!!

  Roaring! Fizzing! Wreathed in her white-fires, the Star Dragoness rocketed toward the open air, not decelerating as she might have expected, but quickening at an infeasible rate, so fast that even a Dragon’s physiology could not compensate. Juddering. Groaning. Pressure piled upon pressure, plastering her body and wings against a disc of white, beneath which Infurion’s infernal flames raged. The firestorm blasted her out of the lower Rift so fast that the scarred and scorched mountainscape appeared to leap away from her paws. Yiisuriel! Grandion! They shrank into the distance with shocking speed, and her hearts’ yearning seized upon that faraway tourmaline speck. She needed him.

  Her response was instinctive.

  She chose not to face this fate without her beloved Dragons by her side.

  * * * *

  Flicker shook his muzzle at the Council’s deliberations as the Land Dragons forged along the meriatonium pathway toward the far end of the Rift, still several days’ travel distant. Nothing was proceeding as planned. Hualiama had vanished, their ploy with the Egg appeared to have failed, and the pressures all around reached a critical point. Landslides repeatedly buried the path, forcing the Runners to undertake mighty labours of rock-moving as they blasted the rubble with their light cannons and shovelled it aside. The glowing mountain peaks rose or descended by miles within minutes, casting their baleful glow over the night-time scenery. Gigantic cracks yawned open like hungry draconic mouths, only to slam shut in a splintering of rock. The commotion threatened to drown out even a shielded Council, at the peak of Yiisuriel-ap-Yuron’s mountain. Dragons, Shapeshifters and Dragon Riders gathered around, while the Land Dragons and Humans participated via the mental network.

  Grandion urged more speed. “Hualiama will change the Balance,” he argued. “She will rise even from the darkest place.”

  We have already given up the First Egg, which I counselled against, Yiisuriel-ap-Yuron rumbled deeply. Numistar Winterborn bears it against Infurion, and once she has defeated him with that limitless font of power and destroyed his realm, she will come for us. Your faith is commendable, o Tourmaline, but these are world-shaping forces no Dragon could possibly withstand. She is but a hatchling, untried in her powers.

  “I will ride with the Dragonwings against Numistar!” Grandion roared.

  “The Dragonwings are ready,” Janithyor of the Tynukam declared. “We’ll make her pay!”

  Flicker said, Er, Grandion, you’re –

  “Not now, Flicker!”

  You’re glowing. Remember what that means?

  The Tourmaline Dragon froze in his muscular, four-pawed stance. His jaw clunked gently against the stone he stood upon, the only sound any creature was capable of making.

  Even a dragonet’s words might arrest a nation. He was right, of course. The Tourmaline had turned a positively blinding shade of blue-white as his scales assumed a lustre far beyond what was natural for any Dragon – save his best girl – Hualiama!

  There she ascended! A star jetted above the Rift’s dancing dark peaks, trailing a column of sooty smoke in her wake, and the hope of his third heart soared with her.

  Pointing with his paw, the dragonet snickered, Told you so. She’s the dawn star.

  Sounding far more like a hatchling than Hualiama would ever be, Grandion mewled, What – what is she – what’s happening? I’m feeling – Flicker, you’re also a star? When did that –

  Flicker felt an inescapable sense of tugging, too, but he retained enough presence of mind to reach toward the Tourmaline Dragon, curling his paw. He flicked one talon emphatically. Be off with you, rascal.

  Whaaaa … Grandion vanished in a smear of light.

  The dragonet turned to the stupefied Council of Lost Islands Dragons. Aye, I truly am the most awes – ralti droppings!

  His parting words vaporised in a blinding flash of light.

  * * * *

  Upward she raced into a night sky ablaze with stars, but perhaps only she of all creatures in her Island-World knew how thin was the veil of magic separating the realms of Dragons and Humans from the interstellar powers which lurked beyond. Vile, malevolent beings. Purveyors of death.

  The vista below receded steadily, granting the Star Dragoness a wider and wider view of the Rift. There was Numistar, just a speck of searing white excavating a path toward Infurion, whom she must protect if she was at all able … her gaze returned to the silent skies. Where were the Shining Ones? When would they come, and could she protect her planet from them, too? Had she passed beyond the atmosphere? Automatically, she raised a semipermeable gas shield. A touch of internal oxygen generation such as that enjoyed by the deepest-dwelling Land Dragons would be perfect.

  “… aaaa … what?” The Tourmaline Dragon’s form wavered before popping into being with a sharp crackling of silvery fires that sheeted off his wings and body.

  “Grandion!” she yelled.

  “Awesome!” screeched Flicker, slamming into Grandion’s flank. He bounced, but the Tourmaline caught him with a reflexive snap of his paw. The dragonet burbled, “I am so awesome. Did you see? I flicked Grandion all the way up here.”

  “Hardly likely!” snorted the Tourmaline.

  “Would you look at my beautiful glow?” Flicker added. “All sparkly.”

  Too fraught to ask why or how they had joined her in her ascent, Hualiama just groaned and slapped their noses with a mixed-up brew of shields. Too busy arguing to bother with breathing, boys?

  A song of stars whispered upon the breeze generated by their passage, stilling the three Dragonkind as they found their collective paws and wings; Hualiama could not rise, but Grandion scooped her into his paw as he turned to examine the northern skies with a wondering mien.

  The Tourmaline whispered, “Would you believe …”

  Her every scale tingled. Lia’s head lolled helplessly, as if the muscles of her neck had been severed, but her Shapeshifter Dragon and friend shifted his talons to support her, so that she could gaze up into the vaulting treasury of a moonless night, a night teeming with stars, and more. Much more.

  Lia said, Yhishaalylia.

  Flicker glanced quizzically at her, and nestled closer to her neck.

  Unspeaking, they watched wings shifting across the starry panorama. The night appeared to ripple as the creatures penetrated Fra’anior’s great bulwark, and then they approached at an impossible speed, just shadows upon darkness, best detected when they blotted out their background. Vast wings, like translucent crystal, cut the stillness of the darkness not long before dawn, Hualiama realised, trying to gulp but discovering she had apparently mislaid the power to inhale. Creatures so immense should create noise, a shockwave, or some kind of magical signature, but the Yhishaalylia did none of these, making their flight appear eerily beautiful.

  The almighty Dragonwing oriented upon her faint, shrinking radiance. Hualiama noted her debility with faint annoyance. Courage!

  Yet even the word ‘courage’ seemed to quaver in the presence of such as these. Primordial Dragons. Ancient star travellers which had no need to breathe. They su
rvived and even thrived in the chill vacuum of the far-flung dominions beyond her ken. The Dragonwing drifted overhead until no stars could be seen between their teeming bodies, so dense was their congregation. All was silent. From amidst that stillness, a celestial presence oriented upon the three companions, and snuffed out the fire beneath them with a fleeting thought.

  /Stardrop. Present thyself,/ chimed the creature.

  She had faced much in her short lifetime, but this was a moment more profoundly spiritual than her wildest imaginings. To face such elemental Dragons was to become aware of the scintilla of her life compared to the vastness of the Universe, and to grasp the paucity of her knowledge; to be engulfed in stupefaction. These were allies? These venerable expressions of creation’s first song … they spoke a variant of Dragonish again more ancient than even her unexpected discoverers had spoken, full of quaint, archaic notes that incongruously introduced the fragrant, slightly citrine scent of stars to her senses.

  Aye, and Hualiama dithered.

  She bowed her head as best she was able. I am. Now for her best, /Mmm-rrk?/ Vexation darkened her thoughts. Why could she still not speak?

  This was no occasion for awkward Lia to make an appearance, but apparently both of her forms shared this unwelcome trait.

  One of the creatures moved with eye-blurring speed. Between the ultra-rapid double-blink of her eyes, a multifaceted crystal hove to before her sight, bearing what she assumed was eyes or other sensory apparatuses, but it was not like any Dragon’s head she had ever seen. Sleek, beautiful lines of apparently liquid onyx crystal shifted into and beyond her perception in a mesmerising play of magic. Warmth bathed her soul, bringing solace and hope.

  /Thou hast only to show us thy need, beloved stardrop. Speech develops within … perhaps a thousand of your years?/ it finished on a dubious note.

  She wanted to weep. To dance. To sing of her love for the world, for these were the emotions this inscrutable Dragon stirred within her breast as it gazed into the deepest places of her soul.

  The creature produced a tender explosion of laughter, and said, /Fear not for our fate, fear not for our souls, for of stardust we were and to stardust shalt we return ere this existence hath shone its last, to participate in the greater melody that rings through the eternal halls of time – if you permit it./