(Who are you, and why have you come?) He sensed a grudging resignation in the formless words, the feel of a ritual as eternal as the rain.
“I am a man who should have been a king. I’ve come to you, who are King of Storms, for help in regaining my own kingdom.”
(You ask me for that? Your needs mean nothing, human. You were born to misery, born to crawl, born to struggle and be defeated by the powers of Air and Fire and Water. You are meaningless, you are less than nothing to me!)
Lassan-din felt the truth of his own insignificance, the weight of the dragon’s disdain. “That may be,” he said sourly. “But this insignificant human has penned you up with the Earth’s blessing, and I have no reason to ever let you go unless you pledge me your aid.”
The rage of the storm beast welled up in him again, so like his own rage; it rumbled and thundered in the hollow of the mountain. But again a profound agony broke its fury, and the raging storm subsided. He caught phantom images of stone walls lit by shifting light, the smell of water.
(If you have the strength of the Earth with you, why bother me for mine?)
“The Earth moves too slowly,” and too uncertainly, but he did not say that. “I need a fury to match my own.”
(Arrogant fool,) the voice whispered, (you have no measure of my fury.)
“Your fury can crumble walls and blast towers. You can destroy a fortress castle—and the men who defend it. I know what you can do,” refusing to be cowed. “And if you swear to do it for me, I’ll set you free.”
(You want a castle ruined. Is that all?) A tone of false reason crept into the intruding thoughts.
“No. I also want for myself a share of your strength—protection from my enemies.” He had spent half a hundred cold, sleepless nights planning these words; searching his memory for pieces of dragon-lore, trying to guess the limits of its power.
(How can I give you that? I do not share my power, unless I strike you dead with it.)
“My people say that in the Golden Times the heroes wore mail made from dragon scales, and were invincible. Can you give me that?” He asked the question directly, knowing that the dragon might evade the truth, but that it was bound by immutable natural law, and could not lie.
(I can give you that,) grudgingly. (Is that all you ask of me?)
Lassan-din hesitated. “No. One more thing.” His father had taught him caution, if nothing else. “One request to be granted at some future time—a request within your power, but one you must obey.”
The dragon muttered, deep within the mountainside, and Lassan-din sensed its growing distress as the water poured into the cave. (If it is within my power, then, yes!) Dark clouds of anger filled his mind. (Free me, and you will have everything you ask!) And more—Did he hear that last, or was it only the echoing of his own mind? (Free me, and enter my den.)
“What I undo, I can do again.” He spoke the warning more to reassure himself than to remind the dragon. He gathered himself mentally, knowing this time what he was reaching toward with all his strength, made confident by his success. And the Earth answered him once more. He saw the river shift and heave again like a glistening serpent, cascading back into its original bed; opening the cave mouth to his sight, fanged and dripping. He stood alone on the hillside, deafened by his heartbeat and the crashing absence of the river’s voice. And then, calling his own strength back, he slid and clambered down the hillside to the mouth of the dragon’s cave.
The flickering illumination of the dragon’s fire led him deep into the maze of stone passageways, his boots slipping on the wet rock. His hair stood on end and his fingertips tingled with static charge, the air reeked of ozone. The light grew stronger as he rounded a final corner of rock; blazed up, echoing and reechoing from the walls. He shouted in protest as it pinned him like a creeping insect against the cave wall.
The light faded gradually to a tolerable level, letting him observe as he was observed, taking in the towering, twisted black-tar formations of congealed magma that walled this cavern…the sudden, heart-stopping vision they enclosed. He looked on the Storm King in silence for a time that seemed endless.
A glistening layer of cast-off scales was its bed, and he could scarcely tell where the mound ceased and the dragon’s own body began. The dragon looked nothing like the legends described, and yet just as he had expected it to (and somehow he did not find that strange): Great mailed claws like crystal kneaded the shifting opalescence of its bed; its forelegs shimmered with the flexing of its muscles. It had no hindquarters, its body tapered into the fluid coils of a snake’s form woven through the glistening pile. Immense segmented wings, as leathery as a bat’s, as fragile as a butterfly’s, cloaked its monstrous strength. A long sinuous neck stretched toward him, red faceted eyes shone with inner light from a face that was closest to a cat’s face of all the things he knew, but fiercely fanged and grotesquely distorted. The horns of a stag sprouted from its forehead, and foxfire danced among the spines. The dragon’s size was a thing that he could have described easily, and yet it was somehow immeasurable, beyond his comprehension.
This was the creature he had challenged and brought to bay with his feeble spell-casting…this boundless, pitiless, infinite demon of the air. His body began to tremble, having more sense than he did. But he had brought it to bay, taken its word-bond, and it had not blasted him the moment he entered its den. He forced his quavering voice to carry boldly, “I’m here. Where is my armor?”
(Leave your useless garments and come forward. My scales are my strength, lie among them and cover yourself with them. But remember when you do that if you wear my mail, and share my power, you may find them hard to put off again. Do you accept that?)
“Why would I ever want to get rid of power? I accept it! Power is the center of everything.”
(But power has its price, and we do not always know how high it will be.) The dragon stirred restlessly, remembering the price of power as the water still pooling on the cavern’s floor seeped up through its shifting bed.
Lassan-din frowned, hearing a deceit because he expected one. He stripped off his clothing without hesitation and crossed the vast, shadow-haunted chamber to the gleaming mound. He lay down below the dragon’s baleful gaze and buried himself in the cool, scintillating flecks of scale. They were damp and surprisingly light under his touch, adhering to his body like the dust rubbed from a moth’s wing. When he had covered himself completely, until even his hair glistened with myriad infinitesimal lights, the dragon bent its head until the horrible mockery of a cat’s face loomed above him. He cringed back as it opened its mouth, showing him row behind row of inward-turning teeth, and a glowing forge of light. It let its breath out upon him, and his sudden scream rang darkly in the chamber as lightning wrapped his unprotected body.
But the crippling lash of pain was gone as quickly as it had come; and looking at himself he found the coating of scales fused into a film of armor as supple as his own skin, and as much a part of him now. His scale-gloved hands met one another in wonder, the hands of an alien creature.
(Now come.) A great glittering wing extended, inviting him to climb. (Cling to me as your armor clings to you, and let me do your bidding and be done with it.)
He mounted the wing with elaborate caution, and at last sat astride the reptilian neck, clinging to it with an uncertainty that did not fully acknowledge its reality.
The dragon moved under him without ceremony or sign, slithering down from its dais of scales with a hiss and rumble that trembled the closed space. A wind rose around them with the movement; Lassan-din felt himself swallowed into a vortex of cold, terrifying force that took his breath away, blinding and deafening him as he was sucked out of the cave-darkness and into the outer air.
Lightning cracked and shuddered, penetrating his closed lids, splitting apart his consciousness; thunder clogged his chest, reverberating through his flesh and bones like the crashing fall of an avalanche. Rain lashed him, driving into his eyes, swallowing him whole but not diss
olving or dissipating his armor of scales.
In the first wild moments of storm he had been piercingly aware of an agony that was not his own, a part of the dragon’s being tied into his consciousness, while the fury of rain and storm fed back on their creator. But now there was no pain, no awareness of anything tangible; even the substantiality of the dragon’s existence beneath him had faded. The elemental storm was all that existed now, he was aware only of its raw, unrelenting power surrounding him, sweeping him on to his destiny.
After an eternity lost in the storm he found his sight again, felt the dragon’s rippling motion beneath his hands. The clouds parted and as his vision cleared he saw, ahead and below, the gray stone battlements of the castle fortress that had once been his…and was about to become his again. He shouted in half-mad exultation, feeling the dragon’s surging, unconquerable strength become his own. He saw from his incredible height the tiny, terrified forms of those men who had defeated and tormented him, saw them cowering like worms before the doom descending upon them. And then the vision was torn apart again in a blinding explosion of energy, as lightning struck the stone towers again and again, and the screams of the fortress’s defenders were lost in the avalanche of thunder. His own senses reeled, and he felt the dragon’s solidness dissolve beneath him once more; with utter disbelief felt himself falling, like the rain…“No! No—!”
But his reeling senses righted abruptly, and he found himself standing solidly on his own feet, on the smoking battlements of his castle. Storm and flame and tumbled stone were all around him, but the blackened, fear-filled faces of the beaten defenders turned as one to look up at his; their arms rose, pointing, their cries reached him dimly. An arrow struck his chest, and another struck his shoulder, staggering him; but they fell away, rattling harmlessly down his scaled body to his feet. A shaft of sunlight broke the clouds, setting afire the glittering carapace of his armor. Already the storm was beginning to dissipate; above him the dragon’s retreat stained the sky with a band of rainbow scales falling. The voice of the storm touched his mind a final time, (You have what you desire. May it bring you the pleasure you deserve.)
The survivors began, one by one, to fall to their knees below him.
* * *
Lassan-din had ridden out of exile on the back of the whirlwind, and his people bowed down before him, not in welcome but in awe and terror. He reclaimed his birthright and his throne, purging his realm of those who had overthrown it with vengeful thoroughness, but never able to purge himself of the memories of what they had done to him. His treacherous uncle had been killed in the dragon’s attack, robbing Lassan-din of his longed-for retribution, the payment in kind for his own crippling wound. He wore his bitterness like the glittering dragon-skin, and he found that like the dragonskin it could never be cast off again. His people hated and feared him for his shining alienness; hated him all the more for his attempts to secure his place as their ruler, seeing in him the living symbol of his uncle’s inhumanity, and his father’s. But he knew no other way to rule them; he could only go on, as his father had done before him, proving again and again to his people that there was no escaping what he had become. Not for them, not for himself.
They called him the Storm King, and he had all the power he had ever dreamed of—but it brought him no pleasure, no ease, no escape from the knowledge that he was hated or from the chronic pain of his maimed back. He was both more and less than a man, but he was no longer a man. Lying alone in his chambers between silken sheets he dreamed now that he still slept on stones; and dreamed the dream he had had long ago in a witch’s hut, a dream that might have been something more…And when he woke he remembered the witch-girl’s last words to him, echoed by the storm’s roaring—“May you get what you deserve.”
At last he left his fortress castle, where the new stone of its mending showed whitely against the old; left his rule in the hands of advisers cowed by threats of the dragon’s return; left his homeland again for the dreary, gray-clad land of his exile.
He did not come to the village of Wydden as a hunted exile this time, but as a conqueror gathering tribute from his subject lands. No one there recognized the one in the other, or knew why he ordered the village priest thrown bodily out of his wretched temple into the muddy street. But on the dreary day when Lassan-din made his way at last into the dripping woods beneath the ancient volcanic peak, he made the final secret journey not as a conqueror.
He came alone to the ragged hut pressed up against the brooding mountain wall, suffering the wet and cold, like a friendless stranger. He came upon the clearing between the trees with an unnatural suddenness, to find a figure in mud-stained, earth-brown robes standing by the well, waiting, without surprise. He knew instantly that it was not the old hag; but it took him a longer moment to realize who it was: The girl called Nothing stood before him, dressed as a woman now, her brown hair neatly plaited on top of her head and bearing herself with a woman’s dignity. He stopped, throwing back the hood of his cloak to let her see his own glittering face—though he was certain she already knew him, had expected him.
She bowed to him with seeming formality. “The Storm King honors my humble shrine.” Her voice was not humble in the least.
“Your shrine?” He moved forward. “Where’s the old bitch?”
She folded her arms as though to ward him off. “Gone forever. As I thought you were. But I’m still here, and I serve in her place; I am Fallatha, the Earth’s Own, now. And your namesake still dwells in the mountain, bringing grief to all who live in its cloud-shadow…I thought you’d taken all you could from us, and gained everything you wanted. Why have you come back, and come like a beggar?”
His mouth thinned. But this once he stopped the arrogant response that came too easily to his lips—remembering that he had come here the way he had, to remind himself that he must ask, and not demand. “I came because I need your help again.”
“What could I possibly have to offer our great ruler? My spells are nothing compared to the storm’s wrath. And you have no use for my poor body—”
He jerked at the mocking echo of his own thoughts. “Once I had, on that night we both remember—that night you gave me back the use of mine.” He gambled with the words. His eyes sought the curve of her breasts, not quite hidden beneath her loose outer robe.
“It was a dream, a wish; no more. It never happened.” She shook her head, her face still expressionless. But in the silence that fell between them he heard a small, uncanny sound that chilled him: somewhere in the woods a baby was crying.
Fallatha glanced unthinkingly over her shoulder, toward the hut, and he knew then that it was her child. She made a move to stop him as he started past her; let him go, and followed resignedly. He found the child inside, an infant squalling in a blanket on a bed of fragrant pine boughs. Its hair was midnight black, its eyes were dark, its skin dusky; his own child, he knew with a certainty that went beyond simply what his eyes showed him. He knelt, unwrapping the blanket—let it drop back as he saw the baby’s form. “A girl-child,” dull with disappointment.
Fallatha’s eyes said that she understood the implications of his disappointment. “Of course. I have no more use for a boy-child than you have for this one. Had it been a male child, I would have left it in the woods.”
His head came up angrily, and her gaze slapped him with his own scorn. He looked down again at his infant daughter, feeling ashamed. “Then it did happen…” His hands tightened by his knees. “Why?” looking up at her again.
“Many reasons, and many you couldn’t understand…But one was to win my freedom from the Old One. She stole my soul, and hid it in a tree to keep me her slave. She might have died without telling me where it was. Without a soul I had no center, no strength, no reality. So I brought a new soul into myself—this one’s,” smiling suddenly at the wailing baby, “and used its focus to make her give me back my own. And then with two souls,” the smile hardened, “I took hers away. She wanders the forest now searching for it
. But she won’t find it.” Fallatha touched the pendant of rock crystal that hung against her breast; what had been ice clear before was now a deep, smoky gray color.
Lassan-din suppressed a shudder. “But why my child?” My child. His own gaze would not stay away from the baby for long. “Surely any village lout would have been glad to do you the service.”
“Because you have royal blood, you were a king’s son—you are a king.”
“That’s not necessarily proof of good breeding.” He surprised himself with his own honesty.
“But you called on the Earth, and She answered you. I have never seen Her answer a man before, or since…And because you were in need.” Her voice softened unexpectedly. “An act of kindness begets a kind soul, they say.”
“And now you hope to beget some reward for it, no doubt.” He spoke the words with automatic harshness. “Greed and pity—a fitting set of god-parents, to match her real ones.”
She shrugged. “You will see what you want to see, I suppose. But even a blind man could see more clearly.” A frown pinched her forehead. “You’ve come here to me for help, Lassan-din; I didn’t come to you.”
He rubbed his scale-bright hands together, a motion that had become a habit long since; they clicked faintly. “Does—does the baby have a name?”
“Not yet. It is not our custom to name a child before its first year. Too often they die. Especially in these times.”
He looked away from her eyes. “What will you do with—our child?” Realizing suddenly that it mattered a great deal to him.
“Keep her with me, and raise her to serve the Earth, as I do.”
“If you help me again, I’ll take you both back to my own lands, and give you anything you desire.” He searched her face for a response.
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