Dragonfriend

by Marc Secchia

  Lia is just a friend, Shimyal. She–

  Just a friend? cried the dragonet. You stupid null-brain! I’ve put up with seasons of nonsense, with your learning squiggles and watching the two-legged monsters in the world above, and listened to your perverse, twisting thoughts. Come back to us, Flicker! Be one of us.

  Be another obedient clone? That possibility had stepped out of his life when he shouldered aside the shards of his shell.

  Suddenly, understanding filled Flicker’s mind with dark flame. He would never be content in the hive-mind. He was an aberration, a threat to be excised like a cancer should be separated from the healthy flesh, burned up, and its ashes buried forever. Why could he not have been an egg like any other in the clutch? Was it the Great Dragon who had made him thus? And thereby, sealed his doom?

  Yet the moment he thought of the loneliness of tearing himself away from the warmth and companionship of the warren, a smiling image of the straw-headed Human entered his mind. His soul resumed its stillness, burning inside of him with a contentment that seemed neither warranted nor entirely sane. This was his fate. If he was to carry out the Ancient One’s will, what he knew to be right in every fibre and flame of his being, then let his wings flare with courage, and his paws be quick.

  Flicker’s spine spikes tingled with renewed resolve.

  Come, Shimyal, he said, softly. Come, and I will show you such wonders–

  She retreated, quivering with horror, tiny mewls of distress escaping her mouth. You’re mad, mad, mad …

  In his eagerness to follow her, Flicker stepped beyond the bounds of his confinement. Shimyal, my egg-sister, it doesn’t have to be–

  The dragonet stumbled away blindly, wailing the death-cry. It wounded him; Flicker knew he would bear the scars for the rest of his life. Muzzle lowered, he turned side-on to her, a gesture of apology.

  Movement troubled the periphery of his vision. Lyrica.

  An image of the warren-mother stood in the corridor just behind him, her expression bleak. So, you have chosen, Flicker.

  It is not a choice, he replied. Surely, a dragonet could both be friends with a Human, and true to his kind? Why did he have to give up either, or both?

  The Mother’s voice swelled with power. Even now your mind refuses to embrace the paths of goodness. You are blind, Flicker. Thus you have been since breaking the shell. Lyrica’s eyes grew hotter than the twin suns. This, I will not allow! Failure does not exist in this warren!

  No, he thought, failure was discarded like the shell-shards of a dragonet he had once seen born disabled, its wings too malformed to fly. The dragonet had been thrown off the edge of the cliff, the memory of that egg wiped out–except in those like him, who remembered more than the hive-mind would permit.

  Lyrica reached out with her thirteen-fold power, wrathfully immense, and struck him down. You dare, little one! I will teach you such a lesson … I will annihilate the old and remake you. And you will never disobey me again.

  Flicker’s world collapsed amidst dark, mocking tongues of fire.

  * * * *

  A girl, once a royal ward of Fra’anior, walked beneath the mountain, penetrating the roots of a world she thought she had known. Magic whispered in her veins. Wonder weaved filigree thrills inside her soul. She had long forgotten the setting of stones and scratching of arrows on tunnel-mouths, intended to mark her route. Tiny fragments of crystal song entered her mind, striking like droplets of fine rain upon a parched Island, sucked ravenously into a soul desperate to know its identity, to grasp truth in a world which had cast her off not once, but many times. She knew, as the weight of a miles-high Island above her settled upon its foundations, the crushing weight of loneliness and despair.

  Somehow, one learned to walk even when wounded.

  One limped. One drew from grief the expression of dance. One tore it forth, and dangled it in the faces of those wondering how it was possible that beauty should rise from ashes blown across the Cloudlands.

  Queen Shyana, for all her love, had failed to protect her adopted daughter. She had paid the price. Hualiama remembered trying to pull King Chalcion off her as he beat his queen in a drunken rage, but she was too small and weak, just nine years old. He had chased Lia off with the roar of a beast. She had never forgotten the sight of her mother whimpering in that corner of her bedchamber, her battered right eye already swelling shut.

  “Go, my darling,” the Queen whispered. “I will come to you later. I’ll be fine.”

  Did it take courage to suffer like that, or merely acquiescence?

  In a cave filled with light, a pure, reaming, magical light emanating from a million crystals, clustered so thickly upon the walls that the basal rock was not even to be seen, Hualiama wept for her mothers. One, doomed to be unknown. The other, who loved her imperfectly yet unstintingly, and was infinitely the more precious for it.

  Her limbs jerked in a parody of dance, the heaviness in her soul mirroring the slow suffocation of untold millions of tons of rock bearing down upon the caves.

  She wandered the crystal-bedecked hallways, stumbling along in pursuit of that scent which had ambushed her perception, aware only of her soul’s craving to draw deeper, of seeking an elusive presence or purpose secreted in the very bowels of Ha’athior Island. The quality of the light stupefied her senses. It was not the ruddy golden light of the twin suns, warming and beautiful, but an immaculate white which was at once as clarion-clear as starlight, yet inexplicably imbued with a warmth that evoked Dragon fire in her mind. Always, the fire eluded her. Lia could grasp but never hold, bathe but never be.

  Passing through a complex set of cross-tunnels, Hualiama came to a place of darkness. Weary, she rested her back against a wall of black stone, as if the solidity of stone should become her life-Island’s foundation. Silence descended like a thunderclap. For the first time in hours, she began to listen.

  Where was the crystal song? She reached out with her senses. In this place, it was absent. Only the soft sigh of her breathing and the suddenly enlarged throbbing of her heart came to her ears, amplified by the surrounding quietude. So deep and so vast was the hush, the urge she felt to express her burdens bordered on sacrilege, Lia thought. But if she sang for beauty, her song should not grieve the deeps, but meander along their dark corridors and unknown abysses with the air of a soul-lost being seeking the light.

  Lia sang a melancholy lay, one she had learned from a music scroll in the Palace library:

  Alas for the fair peaks, my love, my fierce love,

  Alas for the scorching winds, which stole thee away,

  Let my soul take wing upon dawn’s twin fires …

  And fly to thee.

  It was the song of a Dragon pining for his lost love.

  In that instant, Hualiama began to hear more, as though her song had aroused the Island itself. Sonorous, faraway, conducted into her body through the rock at her back, she heard what seemed to be a gigantic heartbeat, impossibly deep and slow. She laid her head against the volcanic rock, marvelling at the heat conducted into her body, warming the huge crescent scar on her back until it stopped aching.

  Mercy! There was something down here with her.

  Truly? No, of course Lia’s imagination was taking flight, as always. Quietly, she chuckled, “You’re a silly ralti sheep. Come on, time to find your way back to the real world.”

  If she could. Unbidden, her laughter swelled. Being lost underground would only cap her misery. As she felt her way back out of that foetal darkness into the world of light-crystals and their elusive, enticing music, Hualiama found her footprints in the dust and sand of the cave where she had wept. Perfect. She could follow her own careless footsteps back. On an impulse, she knelt to gather together a few pebbles, building them quickly into an arrow that pointed down the tunnel to the place of darkness.

  “This way to the Dragon.” She giggled merrily, stealing a line from an ancient ballad about Land-Dragons, “Ho, Island-biter, I
shall return to speak with thee.”

  Well, that was a touch of Hualiama.

  She offered the tunnel mouth a mocking bow. “Say, Ancient–”

  Quicker than the Roc’s blade, a vision stabbed into her mind. Flicker, facing a huge red dragonet whose eyes burned with a kind of power she had recognised in Ra’aba. Treacherous. Dominant. Flicker collapsed; the dragonet stalked toward him, mouthing words in a language unknown to her, which sliced into her soul as deeply as the forked dagger had penetrated her entrails.

  Lia screamed.

  Tearing at her face, sobbing, “No … no …” Knowing Flicker was in jeopardy, in pain. She shrank away, at first, but his anguish drew her inward, acting as a lodestone for the loss she had borne. He must not suffer on her account. She could not bear it.

  Falling to her knees, Lia reached out for the writhing figure of the smoky green dragonet she pictured in her mind, forming an overarching shield of love. She drew strength from her pain, and clarity from the crystals surrounding her. The light flickered and dimmed. Instinct supplied the movement of her spirit toward Flicker, a single thought placing Lia in harm’s way as she sought to help her friend.

  “Come to me, dear one,” she breathed. “I will be your sanctuary.”

  Perhaps Human thought could not communicate to a dragonet in this way. Forming her words carefully in Dragonish, Lia said, I am here, Flicker. I will shield you.

  His muzzle lifted weakly, his eyes limpid and devoid of flame, as though a vital part of his soul had been extinguished. Horror! She gagged. Flicker did not appear to see her, his mind entrapped by a many-headed monster of darkness which snapped at him, gnawing, ravaging, battering him toward madness.

  The chaos tore at Lia, too. Sensing her spirit-presence, it attacked, roaring, BEGONE!

  She bent beneath the red dragonet’s assault with the suppleness of a reed yielding to storm winds, bowed yet unbroken. Lia drew Flicker close with her love. She enfolded him in a cocoon-like space, as though he were the precious chrysalis and she was the silk, a delicately strong thread woven of the fibres of her being and the white fire of the crystals, too many layers for the creature to break through–yet it would not give up, rending her again and again with the shattering blows of a mental giant.

  His pain became her pain. She supplied her strength without stinting. Slowly, inevitably, Hualiama sank to the cavern floor, wholly focussed on the inner battle. Stone had never felt softer.

  Even the light no longer penetrated her eyelids.

  * * * *

  Lia roused with a desolate cry on her lips, “Dragon! No …”

  It had been a dream of extraordinary lucidity, of Ra’aba trapping her beneath a mountain, bringing down a landslide to bury her alive. Only a blink of time later in her dream, she transformed into a he–Flicker? No. A Dragon of a vivid blue colour, like a gemstone which had fascinated a young girl, found amidst the Palace’s treasures. What had her tutor called it? Tourmaline, aye. A blue tourmaline. Hualiama swallowed away a lump of dream-spawned horror. What must it mean for a creature who owned the freedom of the skies to be trapped in unending darkness?

  Flicker.

  Pushing abruptly to her feet, Lia was running before the cobwebs of sleep had fully cleared from her mind. She sliced her shoulder open on a spar of cream-coloured crystal, ripping what little fabric remained of her dress. Clumsy ralti sheep. Run! Lifting the fleet feet, skipping past an ancient rockfall, taking the twists and turns that led her past several depthless drop-offs, ever upward through galleries she had marked so painstakingly on the way down. Lia ran hard, taxing her strength and agility to the limit as she negotiated the twisting tunnels on her way to the surface.

  Here was the brightness of daylight. Had she spent a whole night underground?

  Hualiama burst into their cavern. “Flicker!”

  Lia scooped up the dragonet’s poor, limp form, splayed on the soft sand. So cold. She gasped at the gentle pulsing of his second heart at the base of his throat. Alive! Cradling him against her body, crooning, rocking, calling his name over and over, Lia checked Flicker’s limbs and wings for injuries, but found none. Only, if her cave-dreams had been true, he had suffered beyond imagination.

  After Hualiama dribbled a little water from a gourd down his throat, the dragonet’s eyes cracked open. Straw-head, you shouldn’t fuss over me.

  Shouldn’t fuss? You … you ridiculous male …

  She wanted to smack him into the middle of the next cavern. Flicker seemed to sense her feelings, because he chuckled, I came back, didn’t I?

  Lia began to say, “I’ll wring your neck, you wretched …” but her voice trailed off. The dragonet flicked his eye-membranes at her, and then with a contented purr, snuggled his muzzle into the crook of her arm. He might just as well have taken her heart in his little paws and squeezed it as the Fra’aniorian Islanders squeezed berries for their juices and berry-wines, Lia thought crossly. “Make yourself at home, little one.”

  He said, I will.

  How could any animal make her feel like this? Several notable Human scholars had raised exactly this issue. Did Dragons and dragonets have souls? Were they animals in the sense that people took them for? The histories taught that Humans had once been slaves to the Dragons, suggesting that Ancient Dragon scientists had created Human beings to serve them, to be the builders of their roosts, and to farm the Islands and bring in the produce. Pictures of Humans cleaning Dragon roosts and polishing Dragon scales, or making them armour for war, abounded in the royal archives. Slowly, over the centuries, Dragons taught Humans the sciences and scholarship, raising their slaves from the level of the animals they had been.

  Of course, it was no surprise that such an unflattering portrait of Humanity should provoke a sceptical response, called ‘adraconosticism’–a smile quirked Lia’s lips at the word–essentially, the belief that Humans arose naturally in the Island-World and were in no way created or shaped by draconic magical powers. The ‘draconist’ or ‘realist’ scholars opposed this movement, but were often accused of seeking to drag Humans back into draconic slavery.

  Whatever the truth, there was a great deal of bad blood between Humans and Dragons as a result, and also between Humans of differing beliefs.

  And the truth of a Dragon’s soul? No-one knew that for certain. Lia gazed at the creature in her arms. Intuition and experience could enlighten her a great deal, however. Flicker was far, far removed from an unthinking beast.

  Scraping a hollow for him in the warm sand, she settled the dragonet down.

  You wait here. I’ll go hunt. Don’t move!

  As you command, mighty Lia.

  She hissed in disapproval, wondering meantime if the ability to be sarcastic might count for a soul-sign. Snatching up her Immadian forked dagger, Hualiama rushed out of the cave.

  Chapter 7: Waterfalls of Dragons

  Fra’anior Cluster’s Hot season marked two months of dry heat, wracked daily by violent electrical storms fuelled by the enormous, ever-burning power of the mighty caldera. In the Human-inhabited lands above, the weather would have turned to an unendurable scorching of the twin suns, blasting and browning the grasses and withering the crops. People rested during the heat of the day. Two and a half miles below the rim-Islands, the warmth pressed in as though Lia were stuck inside a Dragon’s fire-belly. Flicker lazed in the full glare of the afternoon suns-shine, while Hualiama sheltered beneath the shade of a prekki tree nearby. She had no desire to turn herself into a fried egg, unlike the dragonet.

  “You call that clothing?” Flicker asked, not bothering to crack open an eye.

  “That’s right, clothing. In a manner of speaking.”

  Lia eyed her new top judiciously. It would not pass for decent apparel in any royal court of the known Island-World, she imagined. Her options were limited, for the material of her attire that fateful morning when Ra’aba staged his revolt had not been designed with rough living in mind. Her ankle-length ski
rt had now been shortened to mid-thigh, in order to provide enough material to fashion a brief halter top from the remaining scraps.

  “Why ‘in a manner of speaking’?” asked the dragonet, mimicking her delivery with the skill of a parakeet.

  “Because it doesn’t cover enough of my skin.”

  Needlework was not a Hualiama strong point. Fixing Dragonships? Any day. Tinkering with her solo Dragonship was one of her favourite pastimes, adjusting the rigging or figuring out better ways of harnessing an engine’s power. Grease was good. Tiny needles and fine lacework were not. She yelped and sucked her finger. Definitely not!

  Explain this nudity taboo to me, said Flicker. Are your female parts not attractive to a male of your kind, that you must cover them up?

  Flicker! She clicked her fingers rudely at him. My parts … um …

  Tell me, what would a Human male find attractive? Your long, pale straw?

  Aye, my straw! Lia had finally learned the word in Dragonish, and her tone turned waspish as he teased her again. I guess … they might …

  And your haunches? He grinned toothily. I’ve observed Human males are similar to dragonets in this regard.

  I refuse to answer that question, you rude, crude creature.

  Lia drew the length of fabric across the middle of her back, brought it around her ribs, crossed it over the essentials, and drew the ends together behind her neck. She tied a knot and adjusted the fit self-consciously, hoping that the dragonet might change the subject.

  Flicker continued, So, Human males don’t mind you covering your hide? This is ‘polite’ in Human society?

  How do I look?

  The dragonet’s eyes whirled with lively curiosity. Hualiama was certain there was another rash of questions coming from the inquisitive dragonet, or one of his ever-sharp insults. He simply did not understand clothing. Neither did she, in this heat, but the thought of dashing barefoot over the blistering black ledge to their little rock pool on the far side of the ledge was too much to contemplate. Was she desperate enough? Nay.