by IGMS
The girl Tallori answered Anduval's call at a door made from scraped sheep's hide, her mother being too weary to rise, and the child led the way to the dragon's corpse, racing through the tall cattails.
There, beside the slow-flowing river, they found Angar under the starlight, standing upon the dragon's skull, his ax raised overhead.
Magus Veritarnus saw what he was about to do, and let out a little cry of shock.
Putting all of his bulk and might into it, Angar let his ax fall.
The dragon's skull split easily, the rotting bone breaking with a sound like a melon.
What happened next, Anduval could never clearly describe.
Shimmering lights rose from the dragon's skull, as soft as fog, as bright and sparkling as opals. They gave off no sound, no smell. Instead, they only glittered, rising up like thistle down.
"Catch them!" Magus Veritarnus shouted, and the holy maiden leapt magnificently, bounding perhaps twenty feet in the air and seventy feet in distance, so that she seemed to fly over Anduval's head.
He raced forward, seeking to catch a light in his cupped hands, but the lights did not move on currents of wind. They seemed to be alive, darting about as if of their own volition.
Angar the drunkard stood, eyes wide with amazement, and Anduval saw lights pass right through him, then circle back around his head.
One of the shimmering lights drew near, and Anduval reached out and caught it in both hands. Strange currents passed through him. He felt his hair stand on end, and a shimmering light rose up. It was as long as a small serpent, but its body was flat and eyeless, much like a tapeworm, and it waggled a tail to propel itself through the air.
Opening his mouth in amazement, Anduval was about to shout a question when the light burst upward and into his brain.
In the way that sometimes happened with Anduval, he dreamt two dreams simultaneously. It was a gift he had, a gift that he had only recently discovered.
Anduval was a dragon, hunting beside the river. His scaly hide was the tan of dying reeds, with stripes of darker green and silver. With such camouflage he could easily hide among the rushes and ambush the hippo-like creatures that waded near.
He looked up, and spotted wings in the sky, another dragon with a soft-blue underbelly, soaring above the clouds.
A thought struck him, an argument so lengthy and complex that a human could take months to unravel and comprehend it; yet Anduval recognized that it was an argument over territorial boundaries and disputes.
The dragon vocalized, sending loud clicks in the air so swiftly that no human could have decoded their meaning.
A second dream struck simultaneously, in which the dragon piloted a starship. The creature was hanging upside down in a cockpit, sending his mind out among the stars -- feeling ahead for meteors and bits of space debris, then weaving a safe path through the void.
The cycor were following his ship doggedly, and he glanced back in anger. He so desired to turn the ship and face the enemy . . .
Anduval found himself lying flat on his back, blinking up at the stars, while the girl Tallori knelt at his side. Magus Veritarnus hunched over him, two fingers pressed against Anduval's neck, checking for a pulse.
"You will be well, child," the magus said. It was the first words that the man had spoken to him all night.
Tallori was weeping. Anduval could not be sure if she wept from fear for him, or in awe of the holy maiden, or simply because the combination of events left her overwrought. Humans that lived outside the palace were simple creatures.
The magus turned aside, as if listening for some inner voice, and then whispered. "It is not for humans like us to touch a dragon's dream. Doing so was unwise. The dragon's memories, its hopes and lore, all are stored in a brain that is nothing like ours.
"The dragons came from a far world, you know. Humans cannot even pronounce the name of their species -- much less speak their tongue. So our ancestors called them dragons, after creatures from legend.
"We cannot even begin to comprehend the math that they understood, their mastery of flight. Perhaps if we had a floccular lobe to our brain, as birds do, we might understand some of the things that are innately known to dragons.
"The skraals can sometimes unravel it." The magus jutted his chin, and Anduval peered off a few yards away. The holy maiden stood now atop the dragon's body, and the lights were circling her, as if greeting an ancient friend, their opalescent hues sometimes bursting into colored sparks.
"The creatures that you see are called piezoelectric life forms. They're symbiotes. They grow and reproduce in the minds of dragons, for the dragons' brains are far different from ours. Our thoughts and memories are stored in twisted strands of DNA -- which is so much less efficient than the crystalline structure of a skraal's brain."
The Holy Maiden Seramasia stood for long minutes, and one by one the dragon dreams entered her. As they did, her eyes filled with tears, and her thorax trembled as if she might shatter.
Anduval worried aloud. "Should we stop her? It looks as if it hurts."
But the magus shook his head. "She does not hurt. Those are tears of joy, tears of revelation. The dragon dreams must find a home quickly, or they will die. So they are lodging within her skull. Like hermit crabs, they need a place where they can survive. A skraal's brain is not like a dragon's. The dreams will not survive there for long, a few years at the most. But our holy maiden is learning things that none of her kind have been able to comprehend on this planet for more than six thousand years.
"We are doomed, you know," the magus turned to Anduval, looked into his eyes. "You're right about my fears. The cycor will make sure that nothing on this planet survives the next attack. They'll hit us with a sun buster, send a missile to the planet's core and let it explode so that we are shattered into fragments."
Anduval was horrified. He knew of border disputes that sometimes happened among human tribes, but that was all that he knew of war. "Why would they do that? I mean, if they wanted to take over, that I could understand. But killing everything -- that seems like such a waste"
"The cycor don't need plants and animals to feed upon," the magus said. "Biological life forms evolve, and highly evolved creatures are a danger to them -- so all life represents a threat."
"For millennia we have hoped that a dragon would come to our world. We're trapped here. Oh, we could build little ships that float through space like rafts upon a lake and try to escape, but the cycor would only find us that much sooner. The dragons alone have the knowledge necessary to build the fast starships that we so desperately need if we are ever to escape.
"But I fear that the last of the dragons have been hunted to extinction. Indeed, this world may be home to the last vestiges of humanity. The center of the galaxy is nothing but a void. The stars have all gone dark, and the planets that whirl around them are destroyed. The home world of the dragons is gone, along with the ancient home of mankind. Perhaps some of our brethren have fled the galaxy, but if so, we may never reunite with them again."
Magus Veritarnus glanced down, the whites of his eyes reflecting the lights of piezoelectric creatures.
For long hours, they waited in silence then, as the moons slid inexorably down to the horizon and beyond the shadowed hills. The stars began to fade, though the sun was not yet up, when the last of the opalescent creatures entered Seramasia.
Anduval could see them there still, deep within her crystal skull, their lights sparking from time to time.
He could not understand completely what was happening. Perhaps such things were beyond the comprehension of mere humans. But Anduval peered up at Magus Veritarnus, and saw a change in the man. He had always walked about with hunched shoulders and a careworn look.
Now he had hope in his eyes.
When the last of the creatures had burrowed into her skull, the holy maiden peered up at her small crowd of onlookers.
"It is done," she said. "I know how to escape, but time is short if we are to build a worlds
hip."
The weight of the world fell upon Anduval's shoulders that night, and as he trudged back through fields misted with morning dew, he understood why the magus always walked with his head bowed.
The palace became a madhouse as the holy maiden began to issue orders to her skraal attendants -- demanding that they begin to gather vast amounts of rare metals from across the world.
Over the coming days the skraal nymph closeted with Magus Veritarnus for unending hours, discussing her plan to create a worldship. Sketches were drawn and sent to far cities, where modules for the great ship were to be produced.
Amid this bustle, Magus Veritarnus seemed to forget that he had been assigned to be a mentor, and Anduval felt as if he was cast aside.
It was not a feeling that he could live with. Anduval had no mother or father that he knew of. He had been raised in a crèche in the palace beneath Shadowfest, one of nine human children.
All of his life, he'd craved to belong, to find some sort of companionship. He'd hoped that by working hard, he could prove himself, and win acceptance from others.
Somehow, as a child, he'd proven himself well enough to become the holy maiden's attendant. But the skraals were not humans. They showed nothing in the way of affection, and the other workers never offered any praise.
Yet Anduval hoped.
So he continued his duties as an attendant, bringing fungus and damselflies for the holy maiden each morning, hoping to prepare her for transcendence.
But with each passing day, he grew more concerned. In his brief vision, he had seen into the mind of a dragon, and the threat of the cycor was a shadow that flooded his mind. The cycor were not human. Properly speaking, they were not even alive. They had no compassion, no emotion, no hope or love in them.
There could be no swaying such creatures from their wanton destruction.
And the end would come swiftly, he knew.
Cycor ships were fast. When a spaceship accelerated, the force of acceleration exerted pressure upon its occupants. Thus, a ship that was constantly accelerating created its own artificial gravity. But it also had certain limits. Accelerate too quickly, and the gravity field would crush its occupants. The safe speed for acceleration over an extended period of time was only a little more than one gravity.
But a cycor ship carried no living creatures within: it could safely accelerate at a speed of one hundred gravities.
Human ships were infinitely slower.
Our only real hope is to hide from the cycor, Anduval reasoned.
But hiding was no longer possible. They had been found.
The holy maiden wished to build a worldship, but it would be destroyed as easily as a planet.
What shall the holy maiden do? Anduval wondered. What can she do?
After two weeks, Anduval was finally able to corner his master. He found the magus bleary eyed and swaying from fatigue as he left the holy maiden's meditation chambers. Anduval had just returned from his nightly run to gather fungus.
"I want to help build the worldship," Anduval begged. "We are in a race against the cycor, and every moment is precious."
"I agree," the magus said, "and someday you shall help to build our ship. But the holy maiden's personal needs are more immediate."
"She has twenty other attendants," Anduval said. "Surely they can bring her food. I can even tell them what to collect."
The magus studied the boy for a long moment, weighing his argument. "You too have been touched by the dragon's dream," he said, "if only for a moment. How much do you understand?"
Anduval bit his lip, struggled to explain. The dragon's dream hadn't come to him in his native tongue. It was like pure intelligence that had flowed through him, only for an instant, and much of what he knew were just stray impressions.
"The scout ship that found us could not have been a long-range vessel," Anduval said. "It had to have come from a mother ship. That means that there is a warship nearby, or possibly a fleet of them."
"Agreed," the magus said. "If a vessel had been stationed in this solar system, the cycor would have destroyed us by now.
"Our nearest stellar neighbor is nearly two light years away. Let us hope that there is not a warship so close."
Anduval bent his head in thought. It would take two years for a message transmission to reach the nearest star, and if a warship was there, it would take two more years for the enemy to reach Danai. "The cycor will be near a planet, won't they?"
"Mining," the magus agreed. "They do not need food, but they may be mining asteroids for minerals or mining the gravity fields of a nearby sun for fuel."
Even the dragons had not understood how the cycor could mine and store gravity.
"Can we build a ship in four years?" Anduval asked.
The magus shrugged. "We must try."
He was not reassuring.
Even if we can build a ship, Anduval wondered, will it be fast enough to outrun the cycor? How far beyond the edge of the galaxy must we go to escape them?
The magus rested a hand on Anduval's shoulder. "Let us hope that the cycor are farther away than that. I will consider your request, but until further notice, you are the head steward. There is nothing more important than the feeding of Seramasia. Even in ancient times, only one in a thousand holy maidens truly transcended. I can find no genetic reason for this, and so it must have to do withnurture . . .
"The holy maiden has begun to talk to me about the requirements of our ship. We will build it in modules -- engines, the hull, life-support. It must be a large ship, large enough to carry every man, woman, and child in the world.
"It will be a complex task . . ." A look of defeat passed across the magus's face. "I confess, I do not understand how it all works. We can only hope that the holy maiden will guide us . . ."
Four days later, Anduval was summoned into the holy maiden's meditation chamber. The room itself was vast, with a sixty foot ceiling, and the deep gray room was perfectly round. Within this space, white silk sheets were wrapped around on the floor, creating something that was not quite a bed, not quite a chair.
The Holy Maiden Seramasia lay cradled in silk. Candles in glass cups provided footlights around the room, but brighter than the candles was the holy maiden's womb.
Her abdomen, that perfect inverted pear, glowed brightly from inside. Anduval could see her ripening eggs through her skin, like clear marbles.
Along the backs of her arms and legs, and all down her spine, mucilage had begun to ooze out -- a clear gel that would harden. Within a few hours, Anduval knew, the mucilage would form into a chrysalis.
Her courtesans crowded near, like bucks in musth, and from time to time they would stoop and nuzzle her abdomen, pushing against it, trying to arouse her.
The sexual tension in the room was electric.
Anduval felt grateful to see the holy maiden, but not like this. There was a soft glow all about her, and she was more beautiful and sensual than ever. He had no desire to watch the skraal males fight over her.
Even to be here was dangerous, lest one of the males inadvertently strike out.
"Come near, little one," the holy maiden urged.
Anduval trembled and drew close, until the big male, Cessari, snorted and charged.
Anduval leapt backward, and Cessari lashed out with one long arm. Anduval ducked beneath the blow. The holy maiden had to reach out and grab the male, restraining him.
"Stay back, little one," Cessari growled. "This one is not for you!"
The holy maiden calmed her consort, patting his head. Cessari crouched beside the holy maiden and placed a hand over her womb, as if claiming it for his own. He glared at Anduval, but dared not resist the will of the maiden.
"You have served me well," the holy maiden told Anduval. "As you can see, I will be going into my long sleep soon. I will eat no more until I wake."
"But it's not time yet!" Anduval objected.
"Many factors help determine the time when a skraal nymph goes into transcendence. I
have been under a great deal of stress these past few weeks, and that has tipped the scales.
"I hereby release you from my service," she said. "I will no longer need you to attend me."
She would be gone for years -- somewhere between three and twenty, sleeping in her chrysalis, lost to the world.
This was bad. An ancient adage came to mind. Early to the cocoon, late to bloom. Chances were good that she would sleep for many, many years. The ancient tomes suggested that the long sleep was a coping mechanism, a way for the nymphs to deal with hard times.
Even worse, Anduval had read tome after tome about the holy maidens. A maiden who went into chrysalis phase early would come out stunted -- both physically and mentally. Seramasia would not come out with the great powers that Anduval had hoped for.
Panic took him. "But, milady, you're the only one who understands how to build the worldship!"
Seramasia nodded sadly. "I have left what instructions I can with the magus. Much of the work can proceed without me. While I am gone, you will grow, and you will help to build our ship. I wish you well. I hope that when I waken, it will be to a better world for us all.
"Young man, find love with one of your own kind if you can. The girl with the damselflies, do you still see her?"
Anduval nodded.
"Bring her to the palace. She wishes to fight the cycor. She will need someone to teach her, to watch over her. I want you to care for her as you have for me.
"Reward her parents. I will prepare a payment for them, to ease their loss."
Of course Anduval recognized what she was doing. She hoped to deflect his affection. She hoped that he would fall in love with some human girl.
But Tallori was only a child, and he had no interest in her.
"Go now," the holy maiden said, "and get her. By bringing her to the palace, you may save her life."
Anduval stood for an instant, wondering. The holy maiden could sense things about people. She could read their thoughts and emotions. Was it possible she knew something he didn't, that this little girl might someday grow to be someone that he could love?