by Marc Secchia
She snatched it back. He decided that it was actually a rather good-looking hand, sporting five very correct fingers of feminine slenderness – at least, compared to his thumping paws – only it happened to be a delicate shade of silver. Well, perhaps a silvery teal was more accurate. So much for the idea she might be a normal Human – whatever ‘normal’ meant! There was only a hint of that unearthly colour, mind, but he was paying exceedingly close attention and the early evening suns-shine illuminated her doorway … how, exactly? He twizzled his neck to peer around behind him, wondering exactly how the twin suns setting in the West managed to refract around the Island’s westerly peninsula to irradiate her doorway, so deeply concealed within this cleft, as if she had directorship over her own private patch of suns-light. That brilliance conversely made the shadows within deeper, hiding her person perfectly. Disembodied silvery hand. In the light of his previous, bizarre experience with Nyahi or her beastly magic, not entirely surprising, he supposed, and most discomfiting.
To risk, or not to risk – was he a man or a Mantrian mouse? Squeak up, soldier!
Asturbar said, “Can you do more?”
Gaah! His voice warbled like a nervous teenager. Numbwit!
“I was hoping you’d ask. This might go badly … but I hope not. I’ve really been working on this.” Working on not attacking him tooth and fang? Bargain! “Ready?”
“Ready.”
Five toes advanced into the light, followed by the balance of a bare foot, which trembled and wriggled through some transdimensional visual deception before an ankle solidified above it. The foot rotated fully four hundred degrees of the compass half a dozen times before settling where and how a foot generally ought to behave itself. He breathed a sigh of relief. Harmless? The beast had not tried to bite his head off, yet. However, that unearthly colour was quite distinct. Pretty, or freaky? The jury was undertaking a charge like an excitable infantry unit in the direction of the former, of course. No question there!
“And?” she inquired archly.
Even more drily than the entire Doldrums, he observed, “I take due cognizance of one fine examplar of a Human foot, female, attached to a very shapely ankle.”
“Why are you breathing like that?”
Her senses were how acute? Discomforted, Asturbar tried to respond quickly and managed to blather, “I’m having an … uh, sort of … it’s a physiological reaction. Ouch.”
Ouch? What? Bantukor would have deafened him with, ‘You are a scum-peddling, narrak-brained idiot, sah! Excuse my candour, sah!’
Nyahi evidently did a double-take. “A what?”
He spread his hands. “This is just plain embarrassing. I didn’t mean to say that.” What, didn’t mean to confess the truth? He slapped that thought away as if it were a bloodsucking pest come to sample his neck at an unsavoury hour of the night. “Can we change the subject … because your ankle is definitely … it’s distracting, that’s what it is … alright?”
Darn that little tease, she was wriggling her toes enticingly now, and Asturbar’s jaw just dangled like a toddler handed a dessert the size of his own head. A bone-juggling Necromancer Dragon could not have forced him to look away.
The girl cooed, “So, what does this do for you, soldier? Shapely, did you say?”
“Frigging feral Dragons – can you stop that? It’s blue!” Asturbar groaned and clapped his palm to his forehead. Firmly enough to hurt. “Armour for brains!”
Nyahi did her whizz-bang interior redecoration trick, before subsiding with a groan of her own. They were both panting as if this act of peculiar voyeurism had been more, so much more.
After a humiliating hiatus, he growled, “What is this idiocy? I’m such a moron! Look, all I know is that my tongue fails to talk any form of sense around you, Nyahi. I’ve commanded units into battle hundreds of times. I’ve beaten defences and infantry and armoured vehicles, Jagok lizards, Heripedes, even Dragons, and never lost my cool! But you … everything becomes muddled when I’m near you. I wanted to make it clear that your wretched ankle is probably the most wretchedly shapely ankle I have ever seen in my benighted life and why can’t I just wrestle my wretched tongue into saying something decent and complimentary about it? Blue, silver – who cares what colour it is? It’s actually a very pretty colour, I’ll have you know! And I understand that this is a hard Island for you, but it’s impossible for me too, woman! I cannot express how gruelling, awkward and deeply infuriating it is to feel this way about you but to have to sit over here on a wretched boulder wondering when the hells I’m going to have to run for my life!”
Ugh. Apparently his tongue was stuck on how very wretched he was. What about a few other adjectives, o highly creative soldier? Pitiful effort. Asturbar bit the offending appendage harder than he should have; blood spurted into his mouth.
A flicker of movement. He glanced up.
Rather more thickly than before, Asturbar blurted out, “I’m … oh, wow!”
She was outside. Just half a step had taken her without her doorway. Nyahi peered myopically at him. She stood a shade taller than he in his infantry boots – tall for a girl. Very tall. Arresting eyes of frosted blue were set in a heart-shaped face of singular delicacy. Her simple teal dress reached barely to mid-thigh, making him wonder inanely how much she might have sprouted during her years of exile, and all below the hemline was exquisitely slender feminine limbs, gleaming like a lode of precious gemstone or an element he could not identify just then. She stood exposed and vulnerable, shuddering violently at her daring, on the verge of …
The flare of her transformation caught him unawares. One moment she was present, before the gleam of her eyes dissolved into the swirl of her tumbling jet-black hair, which in turn vanished into a streak of light that burned an afterimage eight times as tall as the doorway etched upon his retinae. She darted back inside at that same insane speed and slammed the door behind herself.
GRAAAABOOM! Smoke roared out of her chimney, momentarily throwing him, so it was only belatedly that he caught sight of light fading into the cleft behind her hut.
With a choked gasp, he sprang to his feet.
He should have known, but he had simply not connected the logical clues. The afterimage burned on his retinae had fangs and steely talons looming out of a body of horrific proportions; its power was immense and as changeable as the reviled magic which had spawned it, and as erratically lethal as the fabled tumultuous storms of her true homeland.
Asturbar knew that he was hopelessly enamoured with a Chaos Beast of Wyldaroon.
His boots drummed on the trail.
Chapter 9: Fireworks
WAS HE A coward for running like a beaten cur? Or wise beyond comprehension?
Comprehension was one quality his brain clearly lacked when it came to all matters Nyahi.
Asturbar drove himself sick with worrying and wondering and hurling recriminations at himself over the course of the week that followed his wrenching discovery of the girl’s true nature. He had doubts. Fears, manifold and debilitating. Nyahi’s condition did not appear to match with any of the Dragon lore he knew regarding Chaos Beasts, he argued with himself. He had never fought one himself, but he had served with soldiers who had, and he had dismissed their hair-raising stories as mere fiction at the time. Now this? Her magic was clearly chaotic. She must have lied. Those hints about her origins had to be complete fabrications. She had not confirmed anything; he had simply assumed.
The beast was not in the cave. The beast was her; she hid in the cave because that was where she felt safe from her too-real, abhorrent magic.
Yet how could he square her very Human emotional responses with the inveterately savage nature of a Chaos Beast? He just could not believe she had feigned her ‘I’m so retiring because I might kill you’ façade. He was either a gullible fool, or she was the finest fabulist the Island-World had ever seen, or … what? They had really connected – hadn’t they? Her laughter. Her playful nature. The engaging timbre of her voice. Was N
yahi manipulating his mind? As a soldier, he had trained for all the years of his life against such an eventuality, for many Blue Shapeshifters were masters of glamour and mental manipulation. Otherwise they’d just turn an army about or order them to destroy themselves.
“She’s so lovely.” He thumped his fist against his own jaw. “Oldest tale beneath the stars. Can’t see the beast for the gilding upon its fangs!”
He climbed and explored for days on end, discovering further resources hidden higher up amongst the Islands, where the suns were stronger – he found fresh azurtan grain sprouting on two or three Islands some six hundred feet directly above the central pool, and wobbled as he considered making that vertiginous jump. Madness! The dragonets showed him several locations where innocuous-looking bare stems stood. When he dug into the rich soil beneath them, those bland and unpromising beginnings yielded different types of edible tubers. Asturbar memorised the foliage. Food was essential. He discovered living water pipes leading up the yethiragions, that when he put his ear to them, he heard the sound of running water. When he traced them to their source, he found dracoflora, protodraconic plants that opened long, delicate fronds during the night to apparently absorb moisture from the atmosphere. They then piped the excess, or so he assumed, up to other Islands to provide one of the most basic resources to their environment – water. Add plentiful suns-shine and excellent soil nutrients, and an oasis was formed.
Night was a whole different wonderland around these Isles. The luminous beauty of the night flowers entranced him – those again turned out to be further subspecies of floral ragions which dwelled in cracks beneath the Islands, and somehow managed to traverse the clinging masses of their fellows to bloom each night, well after the relative coolness of the dark hours began. Ten thousand hues shimmered softly in the starlight – and he had spent weeks snoozing in utter obliviousness to the phenomenon. The richness of their pollens made him feel drunk.
Asturbar spent one entire night lazing beneath the stars, just watching the glimmering play of luminescent petals back and forth, back and forth – thinking and dreaming and reminiscing – until it struck him that the lights seemed to move in organic, communicative ways. Were these Islands alive? Or merely the creatures upon them? Here, in the immense stillness, he seemed at one with his environment, connected to and joined with a whole that was larger, more complex and beautiful than he could ever imagine. He became aware at some unsuspected spiritual level of the great sweep of history and destiny, and the lustrous starlight seemed to infuse his waking visions with unexpected clarity and boldness, as though the doubts and fears and inadequacies of the past must be sloughed away; a true warrior must run the course of his life with freedom, unencumbered, revelling in the power granted to him.
He must waste no opportunity.
At last, the certain knowledge of what he must do stilled his qualms.
Early that following morning, Asturbar swam laps across the central pool, surprised to find himself feeling limber and energised rather than exhausted after his sleepless night. Once he had shaken off the water and dried a touch, he tugged on his trousers and bounded up the faint trail he had created by now, mildly surprised to see that his feet were bare. Unusual for an infantryman. True to Nyahi’s joke, soldiers practically lived in their boots. If they did not take care, especially during the pressure of a campaign, all sorts of delightful fungal infections and foot rot could set in. Some soldiers’ feet he had seen … he shivered.
Deeply embroiled in his contemplations regarding the esoteric topography of toe fungi, Asturbar looked ahead and saw Nyahi curled up on his porch, fast asleep. His left big toe snagged a boulder ten feet shy of his hut. “Slakkid-slugs!”
Crash. Skid. Splutter. Knees skinned, elbows suffering as he juddered to a halt, a wheezing heap slumped across the rough boarding of his porch.
Nyahi’s left eye cracked open. Their faces were barely a foot apart. Her blooming smile filled his world. Demurely, she said, “Best of the morn to you, Boots. Need I –”
“Don’t ask,” he growled.
“I’m intruding. Should I just –”
“Don’t go. Please.”
Her form flickered. One second he was gazing at a tall, curvaceous girl with ebon hair slightly tousled by sleep, and then poof! she was over there in the usual blur, and she was … a plant. Minus dress.
The plant developed a mouth. “Well, this is embarrassing.”
“Nice –” his hand waved aimlessly “– foliage, girl. I mean – dang it! Tongue. Plank.” He pointed at the affronting body part as if that explained everything. Which it did not, obviously. “Please don’t change back. Or … um, I guess you could? If you can?”
The plant waved her pretty indigo tendrils and said testily, “Does it appear to you that I’m the one in control here, Boots?” Whoosh! A tree thumped its crown against the cornice of his hut. “Ouch! Freaking crazy magic!”
Flash-flash-flash! He could not follow the rapidity of her lightning-bolt transformations. Nyahi blurred through something avian with two pairs of wings, a striped rug-cross-lizard thing, a coruscating ball of fire and then a climbing vine that dangled over his windowsill with a clearly exasperated air.
He chuckled. The plant glared at him.
Oh for a clever word; the silver-tongued eloquence of a balladeer! Asturbar opened his mouth, and said, “Ah, can all your forms talk?”
Not the worst question.
A flowering frond waved at him. Whoops. Now he had a patch of pretty pink anemones growing down his wall. One flower expanded and spat, “Can’t you just stop … looking at me?”
He produced what he sincerely hoped was a rakish grin. “When I’m enjoying the show this much? Do carry on.”
“Aaarrggh!”
KABOOM! Asturbar paid for his joke with a singed backside and a charred hole blown clear through his door. He stared at his smoking behind, then at the door. “Did that fireball just … bounce? Off my cheek …”
Whiz-flash-boom! Flash-glimmer-bang! Excellent, now she had become a gazebo just offshore of his porch – again, a comely form – festooned in climbing roses of an improbable hyacinthine colour. This form at least settled in place long enough for her to say, “I know you must think I’m a monster, Boots, but I want you to hear me out.” He nodded to indicate that he was listening, but Nyahi rushed on regardless, “I can’t control the magic and I know it’s part of me, deeply part of me, and what I am most of all is afraid. I’m afraid of who I am and what I become … when I’m angry. It’s worse with high emotions. Or any emotions at all, really. That’s why they exiled me. My loving family didn’t want to destroy me, or maybe they couldn’t; I agreed to have them send me to a place where I could never –” the flowers trembled violently, but she apparently managed to exert enough command over herself to gasp “– never kill anyone again.”
His mouth formed an astounded ‘O’. What to believe now?
She wilted visibly at his reaction. “There. I’ve said it. I was exiled because I killed my uncle. Because when I’m angry or scared I go –”
BOOM! Flames enveloped his house. Asturbar scrambled backward, but the roaring conflagration did not last long enough to cause him any real damage. She shifted again in a mind-bending blur. GROAAARRRR! Twenty-foot fangs blasted his face with charnel-smoke breath. NARRGGHH!! Her roots tore up the ground for fifty yards about, her botanical-draconic form creating a miniature earthquake that knocked his house askew. Again and again, her forms flashed around him, powerful and pyretic and progressively more chaotic. It took all of his courage to stand his ground and observe, but he knew he must do more.
Asturbar understood how to help this creature, whatever she might be. He believed.
Quietly, he said, “Nyahi.”
GRRAAARRRGGHH!
As she passed by, his hand shot out and caught hold of something. A limb. A writhing serpent. A Dragon’s talon! No, fire – there was fire rushing around him and through him, screaming, Let me go! I hate mysel
f! I hate this curse!
It took his utmost strength not to release her as she hurtled through a dozen chaotic, panicked changes that jerked a man of his remarkable bulk about like a toy on a string. Then she was just a sobbing girl, eyes huge with fright and tears smudging the soot on her cheeks. Catching her gaze with his own, with as much authentic gentleness as he could manage, Asturbar drew her toward him. Nothing else in the world did he see but those frosted aquamarine wells of anguish.
“I’m sorry. So sorry … your hut,” she sobbed.
“It doesn’t matter.”
She quivered as if a storm passed through her being, but he persisted until he could enfold her in his strong arms, and himself be enfolded in a sense of wonder that sang a storm’s cry through his veins, yet remained unaccountably tranquil. This was right. It mattered. Nyahi was a living soul, as she claimed, and the frightened fluttering of her heart eased as she yielded to that uncomplicated yet fundamental power of Human touch. She moulded herself to him. As a Dragon to its scales. As fire caressed tinder. Explosively beautiful. When last had anyone dared to hold this girl? Such a seething immensity of chaos magic bottled up in a vessel most alluring; he was as acutely aware of her femininity as he was of the razor’s edge of peril he chose to negotiate.
The scent of her hair was charred lilies, and it tickled his wrist as he encircled her waist with his arm. Strikingly long hair of the darkest sable, creating a frame that emphasized the white-azure of her eyes. After the longest time he whispered, “I’m here. I’m not running away.”
She placed her palms flat against his chest, and tried to shove herself away from him. “No!”
Gruffly, Asturbar said, “Was that your worst? Because I’ve seen worse. Battles. Carnage. Horrors you would cringe at. I’ve seen a Necromancer Dragon clothe his own bones in reeking strips of flesh!”
GRRAAARRRGGHH! A Dragon’s humungous paws pulverised the ground all around him. Maybe he was just too terrified to move. Or brave. Ten flaming heads writhed against the sky, then with an incredible roar she transformed into a pyre of entwined lavender-orange flames two hundred feet tall. That was unequivocally the end of his hut, make no mistake, but Asturbar stood his ground, only shielding his eyes with his forearm. He retained enough presence of mind to dart through the lapping edges of the orange flames to snatch up his tool bag containing the precious record of his past. He slung it well out of harm’s way.