by Marc Secchia
“The Dragon Elders?” he spat. “I took care of that detail months ago, little Lia. You won’t be seeing them any time soon.”
But one Dragon was coming, or had she sensed falsely, Lia wondered? Through whose eyes had she seen the Dragonship explode? Her heart sank. She fervently hoped Grandion was on his way with all the strength of the Dragons of Gi’ishior at his back, because the thundering of those Dragons out over the city sounded victorious … she had to trust her Dragon. When was the time to start using the information she held against Ra’aba?
“So, these Greens pander to the whims of a Human? You know what they say in Dragonish? Only a worm serves a Human.” Oddly, the two Green Dragons only blinked at her, apparently unmoved by her insult. Lia changed tack. “Unfortunately for you, the Nameless Man has already predicted your demise, Ra’aba. You’re on the wrong side of fate. Try to kill me again, I invite you. The very stones of Fra’anior will rise up to strike you down.”
As she spoke, Hualiama watched him narrowly. A slight tightening of the muscles around the Roc’s jaw provided a fraction of a second’s warning. With a terrifying scream, the sword appeared to leap into his hand as Ra’aba executed his fast draw technique and split the air with a mighty, cleaving stroke.
Lia whispered aside.
The Roc struck again. Metal screeched as angrily as a windroc. Hualiama allowed herself to return to the first rest position, swords crossed in front of her chest.
“Is that all you have?” she inquired, smiling.
Her words were hydrogen gas piped into a blast furnace. Their swords blurred, the violence of clashing metal echoing from the famous arched ceiling, painted in glorious life-size pictures of the different colours of Dragons, causing the soldiers to step back cautiously. Hualiama danced before him, absorbing the fury of Ra’aba’s attack, negating his power, yielding with a suppleness that allowed Ra’aba no direct route to strike her as before. But the Roc had his inhuman speed and strength, and so he bullied her around the floor, relying on his greater muscle and reach to keep her at bay.
Hualiama switched forms to the raging volcano technique, striking with increasing power and agility from a variety of angles. Her right blade clanged off his elbow. So, the famous stone skin was intact! The Roc frowned more darkly. He settled grimly into defence. His yellow eyes blazed, measuring her attack, probing for weaknesses. A misplaced parry jarred her right wrist painfully, but Lia recovered. She must be careful. With his power, Ra’aba could snap her wrists.
“Not bad, little Lia,” he sneered. “Unfortunately, you’re still just a girl.”
His lunge snagged the cloth above her hip. Lia struck backhanded from her left side, but Ra’aba’s forearm smashed into her elbow, seeking a disabling blow. Pain spurted through her nerves into her fingers. Lia twirled away instinctively, trying to protect that hand; a fallen weapon rolled slightly beneath her foot. That was all the opening Ra’aba needed. He plowed forward, taking advantage of her imbalance, thrashing her defence until he was able to kick her front foot out from beneath her. Hualiama’s skull connected the marble floor with a sickening thud.
She groaned, “Oh, mercy …”
“Get up!” His finger crooked beneath her nose. “Fight me, you little dragonet. Fight!”
His phrasing; that exact gesture, transported Lia all the way back to the Dragonship, to the moment when Ra’aba slashed a frightened girl’s back open with a single, merciless blow. She was that girl. Lia tasted fear and inanition, and the knowledge that the Roc would kill her as surely as a man slaughtered a ralti sheep. Images flashed through her mind. Crashing to the sand in the training arena. Losing to the monks again and again. Master Khoyal’s expression as a dagger slipped between his ribs. The exact taste of Lia’s terror as she fell from the Dragonship … which suddenly mutated into the sensation of flying with the Tourmaline Dragon.
Aye. She was that victim no longer. Hualiama had suffered and trained, and refused to die. She counted an Ancient Dragon among her friends. At this thought, the cheekiness of a dragonet mingled with the courage of a Dragon in her spirit. Infectious. Exhilarating. A liberation of chains which had bound her soul for so long.
“Same tired old lines, Ra’aba?” she chuckled.
“You–you laugh? You dare?”
She could not more effectively have punched him on the nose. The Roc’s eyes almost watered as he stared down at her; a tic leaped in his cheek. His heavy boot stamped at her throat. Missed. His sword crashed down. Missed again. Lia remembered playing this game with Grandion. No Human could be faster than a Dragon. As she rolled across the floor, Ra’aba chased her furiously. Suddenly, she reversed her legs into a scissors throw she had learned while wrestling Hallon, catching Ra’aba across the knees and upper thighs. Her momentum flipped him onto his back. Her Nuyallith sword clinked against his chest. No way through.
For half a second their gazes sparred, for Hualiama straddled the Roc’s torso as she brought her blade down to stab him in the neck.
Ra’aba waved his left hand, and struck with his magic.
Lia gasped, punched by an unseen force. She skidded twenty feet backward on the polished marble flagstones before recovering her balance. Ra’aba struck her again, and again, furious blows of unseen magic. Out between the pillars. Dazed, she tasted blood in her mouth. Wham! Over a wide planter of fireflowers. Hss … a dull explosion burst against her chest. “Unnh!” she cried. Lia crashed against the balcony’s retaining wall. Black occluded her vision for a moment. All she heard was the thudding of her heart inside her aching skull.
Her swift touch to the back of her head brought back a smear of blood.
* * * *
The fungus-face had done quite enough to his girl! The dragonet swooped in with a furious screech, but Ra’aba batted him away with a casual surfeit of magic. Flicker careened across the balcony, fetching up in a thicket of aromatic vines trailing up one of the marble columns. He shook his wings. How could they possibly fight this madman?
Ra’aba stood just a few wing-lengths from Hualiama, facing outward from the balcony as though she no longer mattered. “Look.” He pointed out over the city. His blade was sheathed once more. “They will bring me the King.”
Wincing in evident pain, Lia raised her head.
The dragonet looked, too. Smoke rose from many places in the city, but it was the mayhem surrounding the King’s forces that drew Flicker’s eye. Yulgaz the Brown led the attack, along with half a dozen Green Dragons. Master Jo’el and a handful of monks withstood them, holding the Dragons’ repeated acid attacks at bay with a shield that shimmered like bubbles on a volcanic lake. He scanned the horizon. No Dragons? Why then had he sensed Grandion’s presence when Lia froze for several seconds while shooting arrows over Rallon, and again, just seconds before? If the Tourmaline Dragon was able to help her from afar …
One of the Greens screamed in pain. A six-foot crossbow bolt plugged in his chest. The Green’s Dragonwing smashed into Jo’el’s force, time and time again. The monks buckled and struggled but somehow forced the Dragons back. Just behind them, King Chalcion stomped up and down, screaming orders. Suddenly, Yulgaz drove his talons into the wide cobbled roadway. A hundred feet of Brown Dragon burrowed beneath the ground like a mole. The King’s forces broke into a full retreat, leaving the pocket of monks standing on a deceptively unbroken stretch of road. Yulgaz broached! Rocks and dirt exploded upward in a huge brown fountain, the Brown Dragon’s great jaws snapping and grinding against the monks’ shield. Master Jo’el staggered, struck by a flying rock. The shield collapsed. The Green Dragons hurtled together like hounds fighting for a choice bone, and when the dust settled, there was nothing left. Not even a scrap of a monk’s robe.
A low sob escaped Lia’s clenched teeth.
“You see, my victory is inevitable, said Ra’aba. “I’ve planned for every eventuality.”
Hualiama groaned longer and lower, her face twisted in the Human expression of grief. She fo
lded in on herself, holding her stomach as though gutted like a hunted lemur. Flicker began to hang his head, his fires dampened in sorrow at the great Master’s demise, when he saw her countenance change. Strength from grief. He remembered now. Every one of his scales prickled in anticipation.
The Human girl transformed before his eyes. Flicker thought to see hatred. He saw sorrow. He thought to see weeping, but instead Lia’s eyes widened, swirls of smoke gathering in their orbs as though ignited from within. He expected dark Dragon fire, but instead, the magical fire that poured forth from her soul was so pure and white, it hurt his eyes to look upon. It was adamantine purpose. Obligation. Necessity. A manifestation of the fibre of her will brought into beautiful being, the light coalesced in the blades lifting from her sides, very slowly. Hualiama rose with draconic grace, a hunter’s stalking sinuosity that brought Flicker’s own fires roaring back into life.
She said, “Go help Ja’al, Flicker. I will take care of Ra’aba.”
Fungus-face seemed frozen, stupefied by her transformation. Rightly so. For a long second, Flicker understood the awe that rooted the Human in his clumping boots. Ra’aba knew fear. He knew that destiny’s claw shadowed his very soul.
Hualiama said, “Fifteen and a half years ago, I was born amidst mystery. I grew up in this household as a royal ward, aware only of the strangeness of my existence, of the fire-dreams that inhabited my soul. You see, Ra’aba, I have always longed to fly.” As she moved forward, it was as if an invisible bubble of Lia’s presence drove the man to retreat. No need for blades. “Why did you try to murder me, Ra’aba? Why did you send Razzior to burn a no-account royal ward?”
He shook his head violently, retreating into the Great Hall.
“You were right. I’m no Princess. For I know that a woman came from the East to treat with the Dragons at Gi’ishior. Her name was Azziala. Tell me, what do you remember of Azziala? Was she small, Ra’aba? Did she have smoky eyes like mine?”
“Ready archers!” Ra’aba screeched, sounding the exact note of a feral windroc.
The monks still fought furiously, though they were surrounded by purple robes. At the Great Hall’s doorway, Flicker glimpsed a hand-to-hand conflict before the four inch thick wooden panels were slammed shut and barred.
“You see, I have dreamed of my mother,” Hualiama said, as if that very dream entranced her now. “From the very beginning, the paw of the Great Dragon has shaped my destiny. Tell me your fears, Ra’aba. What do you fear most? Why do you tremble? Do you know that the Dragons of Gi’ishior are at hand? I have felt them. They come, and your rebellion will be immolated in Dragon fire.”
Flicker’s eyes shifted at a commotion up on one of the balconies. A shadow stole between the pillars. Both of the archers there crumpled, dead.
Slain by the shadow? What was this?
He must help the monks! He must get Lia the help she needed!
* * * *
Hualiama reacted to a flicker of movement in the corner of her eye. Her blades screamed aloft, slicing a single arrow into three disparate pieces.
She said, “Is this your best, Ra’aba?”
An archer pitched off one of the balconies with a choked-off cry. Even the pair of Green Dragons, so far disinterested in happenings in the Great Hall, began to shift uneasily. Hualiama’s nape pricked with a sense of foreboding. What on the Islands was going on?
Looking to her hands, Lia saw one blade blazing the red of a volcano’s heart, and the other the blue of a pearlescent sky. Insight crystallised within her. There was only one way to reach Ra’aba.
She had to beat him.
The Nuyallith forms surrounded her mental space in the likeness of a host of ancient warriors, Master Khoyal foremost among them. Honouring them with a mental bow, Hualiama picked a form. Her small feet tripped deftly across the flagstones, closing the distance with Ra’aba.
Their blades converged with shattering force. Hualiama harassed him like a small whirlwind, her petite frame generating so much power that chips of metal flew off the edge of Ra’aba’s blade. He parried robustly, sliding and coiling, trying his wiles and his trickery, reversing his strokes and even switching hands in a bid to throw her off. The Nuyallith blades struck sparks off his skin. And again. Whipping the blades around in parallel to strike neck and shoulder simultaneously, Hualiama sent the Roc staggering, yet still she could not break his skin. She drank deep of the pain of her father’s betrayal and Master Jo’el’s death, slowly driving Ra’aba up to the Onyx Throne, between the two Green Dragons.
She was living fire, flickering, burning from every angle. She was the spirit of a Dragon expressed in dance, the movement of her limbs becoming ever more expansive and flowing, the red and blue fire surrounding her artistic representation of the Dragon flying skill like a nimbus, yet Ra’aba withstood all she had, fighting grimly with his blade, using his forearms as shields when needed, and his stone skin power seemed unbreakable.
Lia stepped back, breathing hard. Not a single archer remained. Instead, on the final balcony, there stood a beautiful young man, clad in a Fra’aniorian Royal Guard’s purple uniform, yet Hualiama knew he was no soldier or courtier she had ever seen around the royal court. Had that mystery soldier struck down all of Ra’aba’s archers, singlehanded? Who was he? For his eyes glowed in the shadow of the balcony. Blue as gemstones. Tourmaline blue.
What? Now she was imagining the spirit of Grandion in Human form? Her sanity had to be cracking, the magical fire too much for any Human to bear …
The young man bowed deeply and smiled at her.
Ra’aba, too, looked to the balcony. His knuckles turned white on his sword. He ground out, “You can never beat me!”
With a scream of pure fury, the Roc hurled himself at Hualiama. Insanity! Frenzy! Ra’aba had the strength of many men, the power to cut through mountains, it seemed. But the flame refused to be beaten down. Lia met his assault with the supple, ever-shifting elegance of the higher Nuyallith forms. Parrying with the left blade, she struck with the right, driving her father back. Lia grieved. Was this how it had to be? Duelling her own father to the death?
She was storm. Lia roared at him, the Nuyallith feral Dragon form fuelled by the anguish her father had caused over the years; all the pain and suffering he had inflicted upon her kingdom. Real thunder snapped the Roc’s head back.
“FOR THE DRAGON!”
Her cry smashed Ra’aba against the Onyx Throne. He grabbed the seat, shaking his head groggily, unable to rise. The two Green Dragons thundered their own challenges, as though a tiny Dragoness had dared to voice her challenge before the mightiest beasts in all creation.
Silence rippled across the fabric of the Island-World. Every person, every Dragon present, stilled to view their confrontation. Hualiama gazed upon the father who had despised her, and could not find it within herself to hate him. Though she knew the strange, blue-eyed young man watched her with unnerving intensity, she focussed on Ra’aba as though he were the only person in the world. Did he still not know who she was? Did he not see her? How could he deny the truth, shaking his head as though wishing her away would change the fact of her existence?
Lia’s arms parted slowly, leaving her chest vulnerable. A sacrifice.
Someone in the crowd gasped–Ja’al?
Ra’aba bounded forward, stabbing his blade right into the centre of the Human cross formed by her arms and torso. The Dragoness’ scale pinged sweetly, incongruously even, given the bruising power of his thrust. His blade bounced off.
He stammered, “W-What?”
Distinctly, Lia said, “Like father, like daughter.”
“You are not my daughter. It’s impossible.”
No trace of colour remained in his cheeks. At last, Hualiama knew she had rattled him to the very core. Her words were blades, now. Lia said, “Denials are pointless. You are my blood father, just as was prophesied.”
The yellow eyes appeared lost, cast adrift on the Cloudlands
of his inner turmoil, a mounting disbelief which staggered Ra’aba more surely than the strike of a Dragon’s paw. Gasping, “No. It cannot be,” the Roc fell back against the Onyx Throne, clutching onto the stone arm for support. “No. You can’t prove a thing.”
Almost, Lia pitied him. “I don’t need to, father. I have the Maroon Dragoness’ word on it.”
He began to speak, before grinding his teeth shut. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. Hualiama stared at her father–to avoid telling the truth, he had bitten through his own tongue?
Then Ra’aba lunged, bellowing and flailing, his face screwed up into a bizarre rictus of insanity–or, had she imagined the face of a Dragon, of Razzior, peering out from within? The heat of her magic must be playing her false. At the speed of thought, Lia’s swords crossed in front of her face. One parried his blade. The second extended simultaneously, piercing Ra’aba cleanly beneath his lower right ribs.
He screamed in shock and pain.
Then, he vanished.
* * * *
Lowering her swords, Lia turned a full circle on her heel. Twice. “Where is he?”
Around the Great Hall, the soldiers of the Royal Guard appeared equally nonplussed, shaking their heads or examining their weapons as though they had only just realised where they were.
She shouted, “Where is Ra’aba?”
“Lower your weapons!” yelled Ja’al.
“Come with us,” Rallon ordered the soldiers nearest him. “Join us and fight for the true King of Fra’anior!”
The striking young man had also evaporated like smoke over the caldera. Lia shook herself. Flying ralti sheep, had she or had she not just been fighting Ra’aba? Who had bled upon the Onyx Throne? The Nuyallith swords had only begun their brief journey back into their sheaths, when Lia heard two distinct noises. There came the cry of a Dragon, a wonderful, well-known voice, but it was a bellow of pain rather than triumph. Grandion! And another mighty voice, bawling, Dragons, to me!