Chaos Shifter

by Marc Secchia

  Soon, he frowned and peered more narrowly at the horizon. His eyes swept far and wide, from the lawless Gladiator Pits of the North to the serrated peaks of the South, before returning to that oily-dark smudge. Just a finger above the horizon, but it was different.

  When the Doldrums changed, a soldier hearkened to danger.

  A light footfall behind him brought a hair-trigger response from Asturbar. A battle-ready response. He was at the enemy so fast, it took his breath away, and hers … he had Nyahi by the throat, his great paw encircling her neck, and her eyes popped with shock. With a grunted curse directed at himself, he released the pressure, but before she could go anywhere, he slipped a hand behind her thighs and swung her into his embrace. He kissed the red fingerprints upon her neck. “Sorry.” He kissed her pulse. “Sorry.” He checked beneath her right ear. Definitely kissable. He made sure his apologies were so comprehensive that she began to laugh.

  “Get off, you silly man, your stubble’s scratchy.”

  “It’s a soldier’s curse that sometimes the mind slips into the battle-state. I’m so sorry.”

  She said, “You’re frightfully strong, Boots. I don’t think you realise sometimes.” She snuggled against his shoulder. “It’s also one of many things I love about you. You’re like a rock.”

  “Thanks.”

  “A great, big, fuzzy boulder.”

  “Thanks again. Minus the fuzz. I do not have fuzz.”

  “And these calluses on your fingers are so cute. Every scar and mark a story of your life.”

  He growled something wordless. The marks of lifelong training were cute? Ha!

  Nyahi said, “I don’t mind you watching the dawn, but I worry when you disappear like that. We need to make a sign or leave a message somehow. You must think I’m terribly clingy and glued to your shadow the whole time, and I don’t mean to be that needy sort of woman, Asturbar … why are you laughing? I’m baring my heart here!”

  “Because I feel the same way,” he explained simply.

  “Urrrrrgggh!” she growled. “You were being sweet and I was thinking, ‘as sensitive as a chunk of granite.’ You … feel the same?”

  “Insanely jealous of our little love-Isle,” he said.

  “Our thousand-Isle, enchanted love oasis!” Iridiana agreed. “I’ll make no secret of the fact that I love, love, double-love with Dragon gold heaped on top, your size and your strength and your manly, craggy good looks as you sagely survey the far horizons. I feel safe with you, and cared for. Boots, it’s only natural we should feel covetous of this love we share. Love is in many senses the proverbial green-eyed Dragon, but it is also – and what’s that look for? What have I done now?”

  She blushed beneath his gaze, and then flickered tremulously through at least fifteen transformations before settling in her Human form with a yell of annoyance.

  He said, “Do you realise what we are saying, Nyahi?”

  Her colour deepened beneath his scrutiny. “No.”

  “Think about it.”

  Ducking away, the girl recovered her dress and slipped back into her garment. Nibble of the lip. A toss of the long, wavy black hair to clear her face of a few stray strands. “Alright, enlighten this poor Chaos Shifter who is having a brainless moment … oh.” She searched his eyes. “Oh! Oh, Asturbar …”

  “I love you, Iridiana.”

  Fireworks! “I loooo … loooovvveee … whee! Love you, too!”

  Strange how something could be without being said, yet when it was spoken that somehow changed the fates, the course of lives and stars and Islands! Asturbar watched his girlfriend with envious delight. Oh to fly like that! Oh that she could have seen fizzing fireworks as those simple words ignited his own heart. He probably had the most inane smile in the universe plastered across his face just then, but he did not care one whit.

  “Incoming! Watch this – dragonet!” yelled Nyahi.

  That would be twenty tonnes of Dragoness, and he was flat on his back. Wham! “Oof.”

  “Oops.”

  “The weighty paw of love, o my fiery femme fatale?”

  The massive Dragoness giggled with an incongruously soprano sound. “Oh, come to Isle with me, my man-cake pancake.”

  “Uhh … what’s a pancake? It doesn’t sound at all comfortable.”

  She whisked him to his feet with a deft flexion of her motile talons. Sheathed, for which he was thankful. “If we had eggs and honey, I’d make you pancakes. Maybe later.” Suddenly, it seemed that the whirling colours of her eyes changed, deepening and darkening as the Iridium Dragoness lifted her muzzle. “What’s … why do I sense … Boots?”

  He flipped her a slapdash salute that would have thrown any self-respecting Drillmaster into an apoplectic fit. “Dark clouds on the horizon, o mighty Dragoness.”

  “Hmm, mighty Dragoness?” she preened shamelessly. “I could get used to that. I like a spot of grovelling, too.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “All forms of drivelling Dragoness worship are very acceptable to her most majestic draconic –”

  “Not happening.”

  “Hey, I’m the one with the title,” she mock-complained.

  “I’m the one with the battle axe. What say you we try me riding in your paw, or upon your paw?”

  Nyahi chortled massively. “What say you, I just throw you at the enemy?”

  “I’m not sure –”

  She lifted her fore talon and pointed at the horizon. “That’s magical, I think …” Her body flickered several times. “It’s a storm, right? The odd thing is, I sense the Amethyst Dragoness out there. It’s the same presence I felt in my dreams.”

  “Fra’anior was the Lord of Storms.”

  Poof. Back into one of her flower guises. Quivering.

  Asturbar knew how she felt.

  With studied gentleness, he clasped her person with his hands and said, “I think we should get you to your cave, don’t you? I mean, there’s nothing much to see out there bar a dark smudge that’s growing inch by inch, but we can’t be too careful. Storms and Chaos magic seem all too closely aligned for my liking. No telling what it might do to your magic.”

  Her stems dipped in agreement.

  That day, the storm’s footprint increased at first in tiny increments, but later in the afternoon began to swell visibly. Having installed Nyahi safely in the cave – safely, he hoped – Asturbar climbed up top to check the storm’s progress. First, a black line. Later a sooty, thunderously dark ridge, like the mounded backs of ten thousand onyx Storm Dragons on the rampage. Now, come mid-afternoon, a piceous rampart half-obscured the Yellow Moon, but its depthless darkness was unlike any storm in his experience. Lightning flashed constantly out there, right along the storm front which spanned the horizon to fully two hundred and fifty degrees of the compass, but that lightning was not white. It was purple. Amethyst purple, to be precise. As a soldier possessed of a reasonable streak of common sense and a pragmatic view of life, that ominous prospect made him itch. All over.

  It was beginning.

  If a single Dragoness commanded power upon such a scale … what could have provoked such a response on her part? Nyahi, huddled away in a corner of her cave in the form of a scaly boulder – a tortoise-like khaki creature covered in an unmistakably draconic scale-carapace – told him that the evil she sensed did not emanate from the Amethyst. It might be Azhukazi the Iolite Blue stirring up some horror from his graveyards, or another power entirely. She seemed incapable of imagining a Star Dragoness turned to evil, he reflected, but surely such an awesome storm was also terribly destructive and therefore, malevolent? Was he reading too much into the phenomenon? Maybe Dragon powers so immense could never be controlled. Was the Star Dragoness like Nyahi, wrestling with the elemental forces of nature itself? There had always been whispers of Chaos magic around Wyldaroon, but he had no idea from where Chaos Beasts originated – there was a fabled homeland of Chaos away to the South, beyond the mountains, but that legend was thin indeed and
most likely a balladeer’s fabrication. His girl came from no such realm. How, then, had Chaos magic entered her bloodline? Could she be one of the so-called spontaneous Shapeshifters, the emergence of which was ‘discouraged’ by the great Shapeshifter Lines?

  Asturbar rounded up his Scamps and tried to explain to them that they should take shelter along with the rest of the fauna around the Isle; they listened closely, appeared to understand, and promptly flitted off to sound the alarm. Clever little pests. Actually, the other creatures were already on the move, he noticed now. Clouds of colourful butterfly-dragonets streamed over the sides of the biggest mother-Island, plummeting toward the caves he knew dotted its sides in many locations. Here came the stately green dracomantas in flotillas of a dozen and more, rippling their broad, wedge-shaped wings as they glided past the admiring Azingloriax soldier. Now darting wings and schools of the tiny pollinators, singing their playful pollinating songs full of bustle and golden dust, buzzed past him in torrents of iridescent colour. He saw flightless dragonets scampering down the Island-binders, scuttling along in neat order as if unwilling to tread on each other’s tails. They were generally less colourful than their flying brethren, apart from the violently crimson fire lizards, which were poisonous and aggressively territorial – well he knew!

  Word could apparently travel even to the lowest denizens of the draconic hierarchy.

  By the time he returned to the chasm wherein Nyahi’s cave lay, a chill wind had begun to stir the foliage. He watched the vines and the bushes tossing restively, and measured the storm’s progress with his eyes before deciding it would strike before evening. He should batten down the hut. Roof. Windows and shutters. This was going to be a bad blow – would it even shift the oasis to an entirely different location? Or sink it?

  He rappelled swiftly down the cliff face and sidled up to the cavern’s entrance, where he found a very worried girl, returned to her Human form. She clutched his arm. “I think I should ward the entrance. I’m afraid … it feels like the storm’s calling me. She is. I’m sorry, Boots, but in a moment’s madness …”

  Asturbar nodded. “Alright, Iridiana. I understand.”

  Breaking of voice, she replied, “The storm’s voice – so insistent – it’s calling to the wildness of tempest and trouble, to the fierceness and fire and fury within me! It’s as if we are in harmony. I can’t stop the magic’s rising.”

  “Irid –”

  “My blood’s boiling, literally, as if it’s a river of frothing bubbles! I don’t know what to do. Maybe if I warded myself inside and let you set an opening sequence I didn’t know … Asturbar, I cannot fly out there. I’d be lost. Helpless. I’d plunge into the Cloudlands, alone and without you, and I couldn’t bear that. I’d rather suffer here.”

  He held her tightly. “I couldn’t bear it either.”

  “Then lock me inside, my lovely soldier, and no matter what you see or hear, don’t let me out. My life depends upon it.”

  Chapter 13: The Raging of Thunder

  IF THAT AMETHYST Dragoness was on the move; if her voice summoned his Iridiana to battle and conquest and glory, and her fury shivered every Isle for a thousand leagues … if Her Rambunctious Highness of the Starry Demesnes wanted his girl that badly, she could jolly well flap over here and ask nicely! Asturbar cracked his knuckles deliberately, and his toes for good measure. Then he set to work, boarding up the windows, securing the roof with additional ropes and boulders, and checking up on the dreadful seven. Apparently his bed was no longer his own. It had become a dragonet warren.

  Scamps! he snorted.

  Fatty lifted her paw to show him three tiny, perfect little eggs. The only poison in the pipe was that they looked a great deal like the Jewels of Instashi, with similarly intricate gemstone patterns and slight irregularities to the surfaces. Asturbar almost popped an eyeball at the sight. That was a great deal more than he needed to suspect about the contents of his belly!

  Congratulations again. No, you stay put. Could he imagine Iridiana being broody over eggs? Phew!

  His eggs?

  The wall needed holding up at that point. Not him, clearly. His knees were just fine.

  The storm arrived in the evening with an eerie howling that reminded him of feral Jagok lizards, only this soon escalated into ten million of them rampaging through the skies at once. The Island shook and the hut with it. Asturbar chopped a few vegetables for a light dinner and on second thoughts, roasted a couple of those blue-banded rock hyraxes he had trapped that morning for the suddenly agog dragonets. When he had carved generous portions and offered the dragonets three bowls, all-out warfare was about three seconds in arriving in his kitchen.

  He thundered into their midst. NOT IN MY HOUSE, YOUNG … ah, dragonets! He shuffled his boots awkwardly. Maybe he’d be an alright parent after all. Human children could not possibly be naughtier than a clutch of seven scaly scamps – could they?

  To his surprise, the dragonets shared the meal decorously after his outburst.

  By the time dinner was over, the rain and hail arrived with thunderous intensity, lashing the Island and clattering against his walls in short, intense flurries. He peeked out the front door. Despite the hut’s sheltered location, the tempest was driving in sideways.

  KAAABOOM!

  Thunder voiced its immense displeasure right inside his head, it seemed. Nyahi! Asturbar pulled the door shut behind him, and ducked into the driving rain. His quick check had the cavern as silent as a tomb. So far, so good.

  “Goodnight, Nyahi!” he bellowed.

  No reply, just one of those silences that was entirely harmful to his constitution. Asturbar departed, and decided he might as well get some shut-eye.

  Toward morning the rain eased but the tempo of the thunder increased until he rousted himself from his bed – he had shovelled the dragonets aside at some point during a chaotic night’s dreams, only to be repaid by seven warm little bodies snuggling against him – to view the storm. Immense sheets and jagged trees of lightning played constantly about the Island. Concussive, booming peals smote his ears every other second, it seemed, whilst through the tempest he saw three or four of the smaller Islets lighting up at once as lightning crashed into them. He was certain the tumbling black spots he saw beneath the Isles were ragions falling off into the Cloudlands. Several Islands already sagged from their binders, and although the Cloudlands below were impossible to see through the racing clouds which had enveloped his home, Asturbar sensed movement. The wind must be forcing the oasis away from its original location.

  Cavern check-up.

  It was mayhem in there. Uncontrolled, spasmodic bursts of magic shattered against the wards, causing Asturbar to take a backward step before he remembered that the strength of her conjuration meant they should hold against anything short of a volcanic eruption. Lights flashed. He heard and felt the booming of a mighty body smashing against the walls, and then her screams raised his hackles.

  Let me out. Let me OUT! Asturbar, please! I must … I must go …

  He cried, That’s the storm calling, Iridiana, not her. Not the Amethyst. He swiped at the rain pouring into his eyes. Be strong, my beloved!

  Set me free, oh, it hurts! It hurts so much! I can’t stand it … nooooo …

  GRRAABOOM! He staggered at the impact somewhere just beyond the warded entrance.

  Her wild wailing chased him down the path. Despite that he had his hands clapped to his ears, Asturbar heard every cry, every plea, every sob until he slammed the hut’s door behind him. As if to underscore his cowardice, the hail then began to lash down with a vengeance, drowning out all sounds indoors bar flat-out shouting.

  He waited. Endured. Agonised. He could not have stayed to listen, but neither could he bear to imagine what she must be suffering. Asturbar exercised steadily in the main room. Paced in circles. Sang a few bawdy ballads he had not dared to voice around Iridiana. He listened to the voice of the storm, marvelling at the Star Dragoness’ power. If she was indeed Fra’anior’s p
rogeny, then command and control of storms would definitely fit her like armour to infantry. The seven-headed Ancient Dragon was said to appear mantled in unending storm, lightning playing between fangs capable of biting off Islands – yes, balladeers had to earn their keep. Might as well scribe a few fables here and there!

  The following morning, Asturbar awoke to thunder beating the Island black and blue. He could not believe the decibel levels being hammered against his ears. The blasts hurt! He could feel the pressure sucking and pounding, sucking and pounding, and the dragonets huddled beneath the blankets, clearly terrified judging by the whimpering sounds they were making. He fumbled through the darkness to comfort them. Grief! He knew at last what it was for the voice of the Great Onyx to be heard. This thunder did not bother to thunderclap. Each peal was more a thunder-detonation. The timbers rattled. Dishes leaped and crashed in Nyahi’s cupboards. By the light cast by multiple strobe flashes of lightning firing through the slatted shutters, Asturbar saw his boots hopping across the floor. Insanity! He felt a shrinking fool for ducking beneath the covers together with the dragonets, but for the sake of his ears as much as his sanity, it seemed necessary. Even the six Jewels seemed clumped together right beneath his left lung, or perhaps they were sitting upon his liver. Whatever the case, that area felt tight and sore.

  Nyahi! How was she dealing with this?

  Asturbar flung himself into action. Plug the earholes with bits of cloth torn from the oldest of her blankets. Snatch up his axe – why? Run! Bootless as he was, he sped along to her bolt-hole, spying through the drenching, shockingly frigid rain several boulders which had fallen into the crack. That was the crashing he had dimly heard in the night! He hurdled one and then crawled awkwardly beneath another tall thin boulder which had become wedged into the narrow gap. The entrance to the cavern was almost buried. A gap the size of his hand remained, but even as he scrambled up to it he retained the presence of mind to remain on the safe side of her wards.

  The pile shook. Concussion! That was his first warning, but the second was hard on its heels. With a living earthquake of a roar, a body flung itself against the entrance area. BOOM! He tumbled backward in a minor rockslide, but recovered immediately, protecting his head with raised forearm. Several of the pieces that tumbled down from above could have knocked him unconscious.