by Marc Secchia
“Grandion’s secret name is–” she ducked “–Alastior!”
Lia found herself stuck between his talons this time.
As he watched her scramble back onto the surface of his paw, brushing back her ruffled hair with irritated slaps, Amaryllion said, “Grandion’s name means ‘noble-hearted son of flame.’ He is Sapphurion’s only shell-son.”
Hualiama stared up at the great old Dragon. This, too, he had made her forget. All her life, she had prided herself on being a forgiving soul. Now she knew that forgiveness might be far harder than she had ever imagined.
Slowly, she said, “Sapphurion knows where Grandion has gone, doesn’t he? He banished his own son?”
“Aye, Dragonfriend. He sent the Tourmaline Dragon on an impossible quest.”
“You mean I–little Human me–must fly to Gi’ishior, home of the Dragons, where they will eat me alive for being audacious enough to set foot on their precious Island–” her voice crackled with positively Dragonish anger “–when I already stink like a windroc’s breakfast in Sapphurion’s estimation, and convince the leader of the Island-World’s Dragons to tell me where his traitorous son–”
“As thou might wish,” said the Ancient Dragon.
“As I wish?” She could roar, too, although that effort was wasted on the monster baiting her. “You’re ordering me to so wish.”
“Never ordering, mouse. You’re my friend.”
“So, an undersized royal mouse is friend to the scrawniest of Ancient Dragons? Do I earn a long life under a mountain, too?”
Then, Lia had to hold on for dear life, for the earthquake of his laughter thundered over her. Yet she knew that such laughter would never grace the Island-World again.
Amaryllion said, “In a moment, we must go down to the Dragons’ graveyard. Thou must remain on the mountainside and be stiller than a mouse. When the time is right, speak my secret name. And then my fire will join Flicker’s gift, which I’ll grant thee now.”
Hualiama could not speak past the Island-sized lump in her throat.
“I would beg a boon of thee,” he added. “Wilt thou dance for me one last time, Dragonfriend?”
Chapter 4: A Dragon’s Soul
Hualiama poured her utmost skill into dancing for Amaryllion. To her surprise, he vocalised the music from the soul-dance of the Flame Cycle–she had once told him it was her favourite passage–which ranged from dejected to frenetic, full of leaps and twirls reminiscent of the frolicking of flames. But what of the musicianship of an Ancient Dragon! Lia knew Dragons could produce at least three notes in harmony when they sang. Deep, sonorous notes issued from the lower larynx, right down in the chest, mid-tones from the middle throat, and piercingly sweet notes from a flap of skin in the roof of the mouth. Amaryllion’s song was a vast symphony of instruments, horns and bugles and drums mingled with softer flutelike tones and haunting strings.
As she danced, he wove magic.
Tendrils of fire began to flicker around Lia’s torso. The flames coalesced, gathering form and developing wings and a neck and muzzle, and a body as supple as molten lava. A fire-dragonet, she realised, spurring herself on to greater effort, to greater artistry. Her slippers spun across Amaryllion’s paw, barely touching his hide before she vaulted aloft again, soaring, stretching, burning with the passion of her inner infatuation with the flames, as graceful as the first gleam of a twin-suns dawn upon a pristine Islet. The dragonet danced with her, looping and spiralling about her spinning body, weaving his own melody.
Flicker! Her heart squeezed in her chest. It’s you! Oh, my darling …
Magic, as thick and buoyant as water, bore Hualiama along on its own wings as Amaryllion juddered into motion, slithering down the gully with a vast, metallic scraping across stone, creating a vibration which drilled into the mastoid bones of her inner ear, and caused the Island to quiver as though a Land Dragon gnawed at its roots.
Faster and faster they descended, following an ancient watercourse. The tempo of Hualiama’s dance quickened as she chased the fire-dragonet, playing with him, laughing as he flitted about her face, as Flicker’s incorporeal tail stroked her shoulders with a touch of silken fire. Amaryllion bore her upon his paw through vast caves filled with eerie, phosphorescent light and dazzling spars of crystal which made the roots of Ha’athior Island gleam like chambers fit for a king descended from the stars. At length, a new light came to Hualiama’s awareness, which she realised was the radiance of the outside world.
The fire-dragonet hovered before her face.
Come, Flicker, she invited him. Be with me forever.
The dragonet dived down her throat. Lia gasped, her lungs scorched by heat, a searing sensation that passed almost instantaneously up her spinal cord to detonate behind her eyes. All was flame. Roaring. Lambent. Burning, yet not consuming. An awareness of a mischievous presence darting and diving somehow within her resolved into a conviction that some part of Flicker, perhaps the dragonet’s fire-soul, had entered her being without fusing with her, as she had expected. His fire soaked into the most deep-rooted parts of her being, as if a hot volcanic rain fell upon parched ground.
Hualiama soared into the finale of her dance, dimly realising that the Ancient Dragon had halted a few hundred feet before exiting Ha’athior Island, the wide ledge of his forepaw held just above his cavernous nostrils to allow him to regard her with both eyes. She sensed formidable fires mounting within her friend. As Lia stilled, holding the concluding dying-flame position, she read the coils and blossoms of fire stirring within his great orbs, and felt she might understand the mighty Dragon’s emotions.
She said, Don’t be afraid, Amaryllion. The eternal fires are your birthright.
Her thoughts whispered against his mind like a bird’s wings skirting the cliff-edge of an Island. Yet, the Ancient Dragon heard her, and chuckled, And I thought to comfort thee, little mouse!
I’m also afraid, she admitted. I fear what your flame will do to me, mighty Dragon.
Thy fate will rise not from what I do, but from who thou wert born to be. Hualiama bowed her head at his kind yet immutable words. Alight now. I must not tarry, for these Dragons who wait, know not the weakness of my third heart–its deep and abiding weakness for thee, Hualiama of Fra’anior. To know thee has been the highest privilege.
Lia alighted from his paw. May your soul take wing upon the eternal fires of the Dragonkind–dear friend.
Speak my name and be ignited, he replied.
The Dragon’s body began to slither past her with a majestic scraping of hide against stone. The lung-scorching heat suggested she must be so low down Ha’athior Island, the caldera was close. She should use the cover of his movement to find herself a place from which to observe unseen.
The Human girl crept alongside Amaryllion, angling for a curtain of long, trailing vegetation partially covering the tunnel from which the Ancient Dragon emerged. Mercy, in the twin-suns daylight, he was even more gigantic than she had imagined. But that was far from the only sight which launched her heart into the frantic pulsing of an overheated furnace engine. Dragons! It seemed every Dragon from a thousand leagues around must have gathered to honour Amaryllion’s passing on. They covered the cliffs of Ha’athior Island in a living blanket of Dragon hide. Hundreds soared on the thermals above, causing a twin-suns eclipse of the febrile morning air in which myriad Dragon eyes gleamed like living coals in the semidarkness.
She saw Green Dragons and Reds, Oranges and Yellows, and a hundred shades and variations of every colour, here an ultra-rare Grey Dragon and a family of Browns … and Sapphurion! Oh, flying ralti sheep! Hualiama shrank behind a boulder, wishing for Grandion’s concealing magic to supplement the solid rock and a veil of leafy vines.
Lia’s gaze dipped, only to light upon another wonder. A Dragon graveyard.
Who of the Humankind had ever laid eyes upon this sacred place? From above, much of the graveyard was shielded by a ledge protruding from Ha’athior Island’s flank. The ever-billowing smok
e of Fra’anior’s fires shielded the caldera floor from view. Below the ledge, a cave bored into Ha’athior’s roots, gaping wide enough for a dozen Dragons to fly into side-by-side. A tingling of magic made pinpricks of multi-coloured light twinkle behind her eyes as Amaryllion’s onyx length crunched over a boneyard, a vast spill of white Dragon bones that lay at the cave’s base. This was the Natal Cave, she realised–the fabled resting-place of the First Eggs of the Dragonkind.
Still the Ancient Dragon’s body poured sinuously from the cave, shaking the Islands like an earthquake, until at last his mighty hindquarters and tail emerged. The Dragon slithered four-pawed down onto the caldera floor. Three-quarters of a mile of gleaming, Onyx Dragon was he, a living mountain. A legend in his own right. And she called this Dragon her friend?
A person’s soul must dissolve into a puddle of awe.
A rush of warmth from her belly presaged the realisation that the Dragons had fallen silent. Magic, thick and profound, curbed even the desire to breathe.
Her friend roared, I AM AMARYLLION FIREBORN, LAST OF THE ANCIENT DRAGONS! I AM … BEZALDIOR!
The Island-Cluster shuddered at the power of his spoken name. Fresh cracks snaked across the caldera floor. Lava fountains gushed upward, some exploding in sheets of fire hundreds of feet tall. Thunder pummelled the skies above. Lia knew that they must have felt this earthquake all the way over on the Human Island of Fra’anior, eighteen leagues distant.
The massed Dragons began to hum, a deep thrumming vibrating the air.
More softly, Amaryllion trumpeted, The age of the Ancients must end, my brethren. A new power shall rise in our stead. I leave thee the blessing of the Ancient Dragons, the sulphurous breath of the Great Dragon Himself.
He exhaled. It seemed to Hualiama that the Dragon’s entire body exhaled, for white-golden fire erupted from his body with the force of a volcanic explosion, three concentric ripples of magical fire that washed over the draconic congregation. She blinked. This heat was more spiritual than physical, a thawing of places and capabilities she had not imagined might exist within a person, and the flame-dragonet danced within her, inhabiting her mind and heart simultaneously.
Sapphurion the Dragon Elder led a bugling, joyous chorus of approbation, which rang back and forth in the great bowl of the caldera until it seemed that the Island-World itself raised its voice in song, and the little Human could not withhold the tears pouring down her cheeks, and steaming on the rocks beside her feet. She did not care. Glorious! Exultant! Every hair on the nape of her neck tingled separately. Now, the Dragonsong split into a hundred harmonies.
From the outside, she felt an interloper, one of small understanding gazing in on the spectacle of Dragon worship, an unworthy eyewitness to the greatest event of this age. Never had she imagined … the raw sensation … the spine-tingling glory! Wonder gripped her, multiplying until Lia became dizzy, intoxicated, and had to grip the boulder in front of her as a reminder of solid, physical reality.
Now, pure white flame began to issue from the cracks between the obsidian slabs of Amaryllion’s scales, lighting the boneyard, the spines and ribs and skulls of the Dragons of yore now seared in glorious light. A Dragon took shape above his recumbent body, an image of a fiery light so unadulterated it seared Lia’s eyes to look upon, for he shone like starlight. Majesty. Incomparable beauty. Amaryllion’s fire-soul filled the space between the assembled Lesser Dragons, a majestic bewinged emblem of draconic power. His brethren had raised the Islands. They had shaped and breathed life into the world she knew.
Amaryllion roared, I MUST FLY!
The shock-wave of his declaration punched Hualiama’s eardrums. She knew that this was the moment. She must speak, but the pain in her chest rendered her mute. Dragon fear sealed her throat. Yet a word swelled within her. It blazed with irresistible force, summoned by an inaudible command. She meant only to whisper his secret name.
Instead, the word boomed forth so powerfully that Hualiama flew backward. BEZALDIOR!
She cracked her head on a granite outcropping behind her.
As Lia glanced up, wincing at the ache in her skull, she saw Sapphurion’s quizzical gaze directed at her hiding-place. Mercy! May he lack the power … but the huge Blue Dragon did not appear to detect her presence. Instead, he and all the thousands of Lesser Dragons, from the smallest to the greatest, directed geysers of Dragon fire at Amaryllion’s body. Stifling waves of heat rolled up the cliffs. Brighter and brighter blazed the inferno, now emanating from within the Ancient Dragon’s vast body. Dragonsong swelled, the elegiac harmonies attaining complexities almost incomprehensible to the Human ear, the magic and music and heat building to a crescendo, the radiance of Amaryllion’s Dragon soul surpassing even the twin suns, and though Hualiama’s heart thundered in her ears, the magnificent farewell seemed to reach through her nerves and ears and pores to pluck notes upon her soul’s own strings.
KAAAABOOM!
Though her eyes were shuttered, Hualiama saw through her eyelids the Ancient Dragon’s fire-soul rocket skyward like a comet in reverse–or did she perceive his departure with the eyes of her spirit?
Then, a fragment of starlight detached from the Dragon’s soul and shot back toward her. Lia had barely registered its descent before it detonated within her chest. She could not scream, for her lungs seized up. She could not see for flames filling her vision. Hualiama knew only a scorching so sweet it was indistinguishable from pain.
Before she could articulate a single thought, darkness engulfed the light.
* * * *
Waking was a slow surfacing from a faraway place, as though her soul had slumbered in the depths of the Cloudlands. There was an awareness of breath wheezing in her lungs, of life’s fires spun in ethereal filaments about the chalice of her soul, of a thinness of spirit as though she had indeed been stretched across time and space. Lia bit back a groan. Aye, four limbs. A chest still whole, not quarried away by Dragon fire. She felt … normal.
Perhaps normal people did not need to pat themselves down as if they expected to find a few vital pieces missing. Sitting up, Hualiama pensively took in the silent, deserted caldera. Judging by the shadows, most of the day had passed. Had she imagined it?
“Right, dust the knees. Be off with you, Island girl.”
Before the Dragons found her. Before … she scanned the caldera floor. Lia bit her fist, stifling a cry. Bones. All that was left of Amaryllion, were bones as black as he had been in life. A ribcage she could have flown a full-sized Dragonship into with ease. A skull five hundred feet long. The paw upon which she had danced, lay beneath his chin as though the Dragon were only captivated by an unfathomable Ancient Dragon meditation. Gone. Finally … departed. And with him, the prodigious magic of his kind. What did he mean by passing his mantle on to a Human girl?
Could she believe that something of Amaryllion lived on in her, as he had intimated?
Farewell, Island-biter.
A bittersweet chuckle quivered her lips. He was no Land Dragon–just a titchy Ancient Dragon. Shaking her tender skull with care, Hualiama turned deliberately on her heel, and re-entered the Island.
Two hours’ steady hiking brought her to the place where Amaryllion had lain for so long. Stumbling across one of his scales, Lia decided to roll it up to the small stone pedestal where she and Flicker used to sit and converse with the Ancient Dragon. As she sweated and groaned over shifting the seven-foot diameter black platter of Dragon scale-armour up the slope, the wind lamented with desolate mien through the now-empty halls of Amaryllion’s abode. The hours she had spent in this cave! Learning, chatting, laughing, singing and being instructed in Dragon lore by Flicker and Amaryllion, Dragonkind’s diametric opposites in size yet kindred spirits in their love of legend and fable, and in their caring for a vulnerable Human waif.
All that was left was to cherish memories fled to the everlasting fires of the Dragonkind.
The crystals above lit the cave almost to a daylight brightness, brilliant and magical.
She rubbed her arms. There was a special quality about Ha’athior, a sense of the nascent, as though anything imaginable could emerge from the chrysalis of possibility. What? Lia knew she would not seize her destiny by standing in this cave, yet she tarried.
She regarded her reflection in the polished, slightly glittering surface of the scale once she had set it against the pedestal. Serious greenish-blue eyes stared back at Lia from the pearlescent black surface, as though reflected upon a starry night sky. Shadowed, smoky eyes. Wells of mystery framed in an elfin face, the eyes a fraction larger than might be expected, giving her a waiflike appearance that earned itself a kick of her foot in the sand and a snort, “Islands’ sakes, girl, you fought Dragons! Rode Dragonback! What’s bitten you now?”
Was this the price of forgetting six years of her life?
She should not blame the Ancient Dragon. Aye, he had done wrong. But who knew if those powers that sought her, the prophetic, Dragonish powers, those fey and greedy watchers of whom Amaryllion had warned, might have located and destroyed a Human girl before she was prepared for whatever burden of fate the future held?
Zing! Her Nuyallith blades sprang free of their sheaths. She remembered! Forms and patterns of combat, grounded in dance, flowed like the wind caressing an Island’s curves. At the speed of thought, the matched blades cut through the air. Blades forged in Dragon fire, as supple as her limbs yet far stronger. Form upon form. All that she remembered. Ja’al had not completed his task of transferring Master Khoyal’s memories of the Nuyallith forms to her, Lia recalled, spinning into a ferocious series of intersecting cuts called the Dance of Dragonets technique. On and on she danced, driving her body with all the ferocious power only grief could summon.
Finally, Hualiama finished her martial exercises, panting, “You’ll need more of that to get in shape.”
Aye, much more talking to herself, and she’d be dancing on the winds like a dragonet.
Hualiama whirled, and set her feet upon the trail.