Dragon Embraced

by Viola Grace

  He extended his clawed hand and nodded for her to climb into it.

  “Greetings, Father. Welcome to Horcross.” She stretched her right arm out and beckoned, and her scepter tore through space to thwack into her palm.

  The dragon snorted, and his head bowed to his hand.

  “Oh, no. I am not putting myself into your clutches, Father. And you will have to come out to try and convince me otherwise.”

  She stood and smiled as he thought it over. His dragon shivered and shook as it shrank into his human form.

  “Zzara, I need you to come with me.” Her father stepped toward her.

  She chuckled, and a bitter taste surged in her mouth. “This—my life—is no longer about what you need. If that is all you came for, you can leave now.”

  Emory stepped up next to her. He didn’t say anything, but his presence was welcome.

  “Who is he?” Her father paused in place a dozen feet from her.

  “He is a friend. A guard assigned by the diamond dragon. He has been very supportive.”

  Emory’s lips quirked.

  “Where did you find that beast?”

  She was surprised at his sudden change of mood. “Beast?”

  “The monster that ripped into the morgue to take your mother.”

  Monster? Interesting. “Ah, that was Emory. I had suspected that he was a bit of a more exotic creature, but it is nice that you found him so terrifying.”

  Her father’s face turned crimson. “I never said I was afraid.”

  She chuckled. “You didn’t have to. When you are afraid or insecure, you get aggressive. Mom had a talent for calming you down, but it was normally because she had been called out for healing when you wanted her with you that caused the issue.”

  Zzara cocked her head. “Did you know she wasn’t human when you set her up in that cottage?”

  He paled. “How did you know?”

  “The mages needed me to take a diagnostic for their peace of mind. As I am not human, not all dragon, and definitely part creature, it became fairly obvious that it was my mother that was not human. So, you knew.” She flexed her fingers on her scepter. Behind her father, the other dragons were getting impatient.

  “I knew. She promised me a child of pure blood. A son. I got you. If you had been male, I would have been able to marry her.”

  Zzara winced at his words, and then, she analyzed his posture. “You just keep lying, Father. I wonder what your dragon thinks of your attitude. The dragons are usually honourable creatures of benign instinct on their own.”

  Her father’s face went to pure anger. He hated being questioned and despised being caught in a lie. “How dare you!”

  She watched the dragons behind him shift, and she could see Emory tense.

  Everything kicked off at once. The dragons lunged over her father, and Emory shifted to stop them.

  She was staring at the huge feathered serpent that was pushing the dragons back, the coils narrowly missed her.

  Her father grabbed her, and she stared at him as he tried to dig his nails into her arm. She clutched her scepter, and the light from the star burned his eyes.

  He screamed and fell back. “What did you do?”

  “What I have not been able to do until she died, Father. I have defied you.” She cocked her head. “You are probably permanently blind.”

  “What did you do?”

  She chuckled. “My first spell was to banish the darkness so that I could always have light when I needed it. As we didn’t know what I was at the time, I used a standard spell for a mage caster. You got to look into the light of my very own star that came when I called.”

  “It is still burning.” He opened his eyes, and the white film covered the solid black that was the precursor of her own eye colour.

  The coils of Emory were still twisting and pulsing around her. The sound of shrieking dragons sounded when they weren’t talking.

  She thought about giving him one chance and before she could talk herself out of it, she asked, “Would you like me to heal you?”

  His head turned toward her. “You would do that?”

  “I might. Will you swear to leave and not return? That is the price for your vision.”

  He paused and said, “Yes.”

  He was lying, but she had to give him this one chance to correct his behaviour. He might come to his senses.

  She took the chatelaine and lifted the pin, pricking her finger, and as he sat there with his eyes wide, she squeezed one drop per eye.

  The healing was immediate. He leaned back, looked around, and flinched when the feathered body came too close for his comfort. “What is he?”

  She shrugged and licked the last of the blood off her finger. “I have no clue. I will ask him what the word for it is when he finishes chasing off your companions.”

  Her father stood up, and she held her scepter at the ready.

  “I will leave you now. I apologize for...” He trailed off.

  “The attack? The intrusion? The insults? The lies? Or for putting a tracking charm in the wraps around my mother’s body so you could find me.” Zzara tensed slightly. “Why didn’t you bury her?”

  He blinked and backed away, narrowly missing Emory’s coil. Her feathered serpent had to be nearly a kilometer long.

  “Why, Father? Why keep her from the earth?”

  “I was trying to trap you.”

  “Thank you for the truth and the knowledge that she gave you nearly twenty-two years and you were still using her as bait. You are a very revolting man. Get out of my city, and do not return unless you want to see what else I have learned about blood dragons.”

  He pushed against the length of the coil to get away from her, and Zzara backed up, putting another length of serpent between her and her father. When he transformed and flew off, his battered companions followed.

  Zzara walked over to some rubble and sighed as she sat down. Emory’s huge head moved and angled until he was staring at her with one rainbow eye that was the size of half her body.

  “So, this is the mystery shape. Nice. Good to know.”

  His coils reached skyward in every colour of the rainbow with a black crest and ruff around the serpent’s head. He was large enough to threaten a small town. No wonder the dragons had been outmatched. They simply couldn’t get a good angle for attack.

  He stared at her with his eye, and then, his form moved in a frantic gathering of feathers and writhing coils. A moment later, he was straightening up in front of her.

  “Well, that is certainly impressive.” She chuckled.

  “Thank you. You let him leave?”

  She sighed. “Yes. He will be back. He will sneak up on me and try to take me with him.”

  “You are sure?”

  She nodded. He sat next to her on the rubble.

  There was silence between them.

  “If you are sure he will come for you, why did you let him go?”

  “Because nothing he did today is worth what I will do to him next time. There aren’t a lot of options. I don’t want him tied to me via blood or via the enchantment of the blood. Breaking him physically would just enrage him. He would be far worse the next time if I let him live. So, it is either kill him or make another—equally devastating—choice. Gee, having this particular designation is a laugh a minute.”

  Emory took her hand. “You will adapt to it. It is a huge power right now, but your soul will rise to the challenge. It has at every step of the way so far.”

  She sighed again and leaned her head against his shoulder. She just wanted a few minutes of quiet before everything blew up in her face again. Just a few minutes.

  * * * *

  Matron Byall watched her son and the men from the valley organization land in the yard of the manor. The repair crews had left for the day. The manor was nearly complete again, and now, she was going to face the little bitch who was the cause of all the uproar.

  Her son walked toward her, and his shoulders were slumped. Th
e other men looked as if thousands of bees had stung them.

  “What happened?” She rapped it out. “You found her, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, Mother. We found her. She was waiting, and she now knows what she is, and she has been learning magic. She blinded me, and then, she healed me.”

  Matron Byall snorted. “Nonsense. Why would she do that?”

  He muttered as he passed her. “Because she has her mother’s heart, and she knows me. I am the only parent she has left. She is weak.”

  Matron Byall nodded and smiled. “Weak? We can work with that.”

  She watched her son slink into the house, and the others followed him, muttering about cool baths.

  So, her bastard granddaughter was weak, was she? She could definitely work with that.

  Chapter Eight

  After the sun had shifted in the sky, she asked, “So, what are you?”

  “A Quetzalcoatl. We pop up slightly less often than the blood dragons do.”

  “We?”

  “I am not the first, I will not be the last. The Quetzalcoatl is always born to a family descended from the Toltecs. The family is always shifters, and they are in an area away from cities and others who might comment on the new manifestation. My kind appears when cities need to rise. Horcross is apparently that city.”

  Zzara sat up and sighed. “So, you would be here without me?”

  He laughed. “No. You are the reason this city is going to rise. My kind are normally associated with the sun, so I will guard you during daylight, and the Deep will guard you at night.”

  “So, I am building the city?”

  He chuckled. “More or less. You will bring together those who need a city to be what they are when they don’t quite fit.”

  “You are sure about that?”

  Emory chuckled. “Yes. Yes, I am. My serpent feels it.”

  She turned, and one of the feathers brushed her cheek. “Are these feathers yours?”

  “They are. I will spare you the convoluted manner in which I extracted those.”

  “Oh. Right. No fingers.” She chuckled.

  “Yes, but the size is rather nice when it comes to facing down dragons.”

  She laughed. “Yeah. Were you biting them?”

  “Spitting a bit of venom. They will survive, but they are going to be swollen.”

  She sighed. “I think I need some food and another nap.”

  He laughed. “I think you deserve some rest.”

  He helped her up with a hand on her forearm, and then, he let her go as they walked.

  “So, what are the feathers for?”

  “They tell me what you are feeling.”

  “So, when I panic, you come running?”

  He nodded. “Yes. They work better than me staying in earshot. I can move quickly when I need to.”

  They walked to her quarters, and she glanced at him. “Where do you go when you sleep?”

  “I have a cavern set aside for my own use. The Deep set it up for me before you arrived.”

  “Why didn’t you just have them put a guest bedroom into my house when they were creating it?”

  “My kind do not have a good history when it comes to dealing with maidens in a private setting. Especially ones who can be considered priestesses of earth or sky. I will maintain my distance until we begin a courtship.”

  She chuckled. “Will we?”

  “You may find another, but once I begin a courtship, I am rather single-minded.”

  Zzara looked at him and his serious expression. “When I decide on a course of action, I carry it through.”

  He smiled. “I have noticed. Good. So, we are both bullheaded. I can’t imagine how that could go wrong.”

  “Well, I am heading for a nap and a shower, perhaps not in that order.”

  He nodded. “I will be nearby if you need me.”

  As Zzara went inside, she knew that it was true. She went to take a shower and carefully put the feathered vest outside, next to the wardrobe. Suddenly, she wasn’t keen to have it in the room when she was naked.

  She sat up and yawned a few hours later. Her nap had taken her through most of the day, and now, she wanted to check on her spell. She needed to get ready for the final phase.

  She got dressed and put on her daily standard of leggings, her black shirt, and matching vest. She opened the braid she had slept in and let her damp hair dry out.

  Humming to herself, she walked into her living area, and she stretched. She heated up one of the cans of camping food that she had brought along and ate it quickly. Canned stew was not her favourite, but she didn’t have anyone cooking for her, nor any place to go shopping for food. She washed her dishes, drank some water, and headed for the workshop. If the spell were heading into purple, she would nearly be there.

  She went out, and the red of the sun made her lift her chin. That was her colour. She headed over to the workshop and met Althu again.

  “How is it today?”

  Althu chuckled. “It is heading into a rich purple.”

  Zzara walked up and took a peek. The dark swirling purple was exactly where it should be. “Nice. I am just going to verify that the mold is good, and then, I can do the pour tomorrow morning.”

  Althu looked at her. “I thought that the spell didn’t complete until tomorrow night.”

  “It doesn’t. It is going to go from purple to black then to grey, and I will have to watch it for the moment the first swirl of silver appears. That is when I pour it into the frame. It will do the last of its processing as it becomes a flat sheet.”

  “That is fascinating.”

  Zzara looked around and found what she was seeking. The item wrapped in black was large enough to crawl through sideways. She set it out on the worktable on the far side of the watcher, and she set it up and checked it for level.

  When she was done, she covered the frame with the cloth.

  She finished pleasantries with Althu, headed back to her quarters, and found one of the notebooks she had brought along. She had an idea for a city-building spell, and she had a quiet evening to spend working on it.

  She sat with her notebook, drawing Horcross as she would wish it to be, and then, she tried to think of the ingredients that would be necessary to get the ambient magic in the world to shape something out of that. Iron would be needed for strength. Hematite for drawing in people, and mint for keeping the air sweet and fresh. She doodled around the edges of the page and decided that a walk would be a good idea.

  Zzara walked to the edge of the ruins and climbed onto one of the broken buildings. She looked over the shattered city and tried to imagine what had caused it. It was more than just the abandonment of the empty space. Something had smashed its way through the space to take down anything that could have been a shelter.

  Yutin walked up to her and cocked her head. “Is there anything you need?”

  “No. Am I not allowed to be alone?”

  Yutin smiled slightly. “You are allowed and encouraged to go anywhere, above or below. You have simply had a very stressful day with your parental issues.”

  “What a lovely way to phrase it.” She looked up at the stars and sighed. “I feel that there is something I need to do, but I don’t know what it is.”

  Yutin walked closer. “Is the voice inside you or outside you?”

  “Inside.”

  “Is it your dragon? I hear they can be chatty.”

  “No, she’s good. She enjoyed the confrontation earlier. Did you know that Emory was so big?”

  Yutin laughed. “Yes. We have seen him a few times, but he appears to be one of the creatures who can disappear from view if he wishes it. Once he has finished his transformation, he is usually gone.”

  “Ah. Well, that is something, I guess.”

  They were quiet for a moment, and then, Zzara asked, “Do you know what crushed Horcross?”

  “Well, it was a few hundred years ago—before my time—but I believe that it was a living storm of magic. I would have
to ask the elders. One of them might be old enough to have seen it happen.”

  “So, your folk live for centuries?”

  “Yes. If everything goes well, we do.” Yutin smiled. “There is one elder who is willing to speak on what happened here.”

  “You know that... oh, of course. I keep forgetting about that.” Zzara shook her head. “When can I speak with them?”

  “Right now. You also have not eaten yet this evening, so you can visit our communal hall. The discussion can occur there.”

  Zzara climbed down from her perch and smiled at the speaker. “Lead the way, please.”

  “You did well today. Thobin mentioned that you warned him something was up. That was very kind.”

  “I thought it only fair.”

  “How were you so well prepared?”

  Zzara chuckled. “I cheated. The smallest bit of stone can be used to broadcast a field until it strikes something, from all directions. If you put the intent to watch in that stone and leave one every few meters around the perimeter of the city, you can make a very effective early-warning system.”

  “How far out were they before you knew?”

  “About half an hour.”

  Yutin made a low whistle. “That is impressive.”

  “It is a nice, passive, alert system. You can’t even tell it is there.”

  “What kind of ingredients were involved?”

  “Just a little blood, sweat, and tears.”

  Yutin knew that she was being literal, and the subject was dropped.

  They walked into the cavern entrance, and the smell of roasted vegetables and the occasional waft of meat came to her nostrils.

  Zzara enjoyed the smells and the glow from the veins of minerals and crystals in the walls. The moss that clustered at the edge of the walkway had its own soft glow, and it was very easy to walk through the caverns following her nose.

  The common area held about half of the population, and one segment was set apart and near the fire. A man with white hair sat there, his hair streaked with the blood-red that had taken over the rest.

  Yutin walked through the crowd, smiling at some of the folk who stopped their meals to stare. “Elder Uhrman, thank you for speaking with her.”