The Fire Ascending

by Chris D'Lacey

  Guinevere picked up a broken twig and began drawing patterns in the soil around her feet. “I could take you to her dwelling place before the sun rises, but how just would it be to betray a woman who has cared for me since I was a baby girl? What harm has she ever done you?”

  “She gave Zanna this, for a start.” Rosa pushed back her sleeve and showed us her arm. At first, there was nothing to see. But as she brought her fingers closer to the skin, a scar began to form in the flesh near the elbow — the same three-lined mark that ran around the tornaq. “It’s getting deeper,” she said to David. “Taking longer to fade every time. I’m becoming her, aren’t I?”

  David chose not to comment. “You know this symbol, Agawin?”

  An owl hooted, making me jump. The night wind played with the tips of the fire and the treetops all leaned in to listen. David had seen me peering closely at the mark and now I had to give a reason why. “It … follows the pattern of a unicorn horn.”

  “To the exact — and infinite — twist,” he said. “You’ll see it wherever dragons have roamed. It’s the most potent and powerful sign in their language. It can work many wonders — when used with the right intent. In these regions you will even hear it given a name. The Inook call it the mark of Oomara.”

  “But this is an old scar,” Guinevere said, carefully examining the wound. “Have you met Gwilanna before … in the future?”

  “The witch is as old as these woods,” said Rosa, growing more assured with every toss of her hair. “She keeps herself alive, or so she claims, with the auma she absorbs from a dragon scale — one of his, when he grows.” She nodded at Gawain, who snorted and rested his snout on a stone. “She seems to be immune to death.”

  Guinevere let that smear go by. “I have served Gwilanna all my life and seen her perform many acts of healing. Her powers are strong and she is feared by some, but I have never seen her stray very far from her dwelling place — other than to snare food or gather water. How, then, can she travel through time?”

  The unicorn auma inside her, buzzed the Fain. She must eventually learn how to harness it.

  And I, in a moment of blunt stupidity, had made her aware of what she was. I had unleashed the sibyl on the universe and sent the dark Ix forward through time, along with the sleeping spirit of Voss. David saw me shudder. I pulled my robe into my shoulders and he let it pass.

  “That’s the question we’re here to answer. We have no wish to harm Gwilanna. We simply need to … alter her plans.”

  “Show them the picture,” Rosa said.

  David dipped into a pocket of his jacket and drew out a piece of yellow parchment. “This is a drawing of something you might recognize.” He unfolded it and turned it around.

  “The tapestry picture,” Guinevere gasped.

  I sat back, stunned.

  “It’s called Isenfier,” David said, still not asking questions of us. Once again he’d noticed my reaction, but for now he seemed happy just to talk. “It’s the scene of a battle between dragons and a life-force known as the Ix. What you see is the battle at a critical stage, suspended over a nexus of time. A clever move by the dragon holding the pencil.”

  Guinevere wrinkled her pretty nose. “That little creature stopped time?”

  “Mean crossword solver, too,” Rosa said. To ease our confusion she added, “He’s smart.”

  “Is the writing dragon kin to Gretel?” I asked. He looked of her breed, though his eyes were less striking.

  “Yes,” said David. “His name is Gadzooks. He, too, was made by the woman, Elizabeth.”

  “And she is my kin?” Guinevere asked, just to be clear about this again.

  “If the timeline remains unaltered, yes.”

  And if it changes? I asked the Fain. But I knew the answer before they spoke.

  The woman, Elizabeth, might not exist. Or any of the dragon breed she makes.

  “May I?” Guinevere held out her hand.

  David allowed her to take the parchment. Fireflies danced all around her hair as she held it closer to the light of the flames. After studying the drawing for a moment she said, “Gwilanna has a proper tapestry of this.”

  “Not the original, surely?” said Rosa, pitching her question quietly at David.

  He turned to Guinevere. “How did she get it?”

  “I don’t know, but Agawin claims he drew it from a dream.”

  “Is this true?” asked David, turning to me. “You had this vision of Isenfier?”

  I lifted my shoulders as if it was nothing. “I was traveling with my seer and we stopped in Taan. A woman there encouraged me to try their art. I was thinking of dragons and the next thing I knew … this was in my head.”

  “How is that possible?” Rosa asked.

  David didn’t reply. Instead, he asked, “Did you stitch it, Agawin?”

  “No,” I replied, looking down at my feet. “It was finished by a girl I met in Taan. Her name was Grella.”

  “Gwilanna inherited the tapestry, then?”

  “I suppose so,” I said, which was at least half true. Therein lay the story of Grella. I still had no idea of her fate, or the truth about that skull. And I didn’t want to go into it again.

  “It’s not right anyway,” Guinevere said.

  We looked toward her.

  “The drawing, I mean. The mountains and the dragons are exactly the same, and the girl, and the writing dragon. You were on the tapestry, too,” she said to David. “But you’re not on this. And what’s Gwilanna doing there?”

  “Gwilanna?” I rudely snatched the parchment from her. Sure enough, the sibyl was on the hillside. But in the place where David should have been standing was a wiggly line, as if he’d been squeezed right out of existence. And in the corner, more like a smudge than a drawing, was something else. I put my finger on it. “What’s this?”

  David said, “That’s probably a firebird, arriving too late to protect the timeline.”

  “Firebird?” Guinevere looped her hair.

  “They monitor the time continuum,” he said, making no attempt to simplify his words. “I was telling Agawin about them earlier.”

  “Are they colorful?”

  “Very. Though some of the early ones were almost translucent, like moving wisps of light.”

  “Gideon,” she said. She slapped her knees and sat up smartly.

  “Gideon …,” Rosa muttered.

  “Search your memories. You’ll find him,” David said. “You’ve met him, Guinevere?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He flew here with the egg Gawain was hatched from. He came to us an eagle, but his body was changed by a fire the like of which I’ve never known before. He rose from his ashes and disappeared into the shimmering sky.”

  “Portal?” said Rosa.

  David hummed in thought.

  “Do you know where he went to?” Guinevere asked.

  “He was taken to our world,” David said, though from the set of his features he wasn’t sure why. “Every firebird there is descended from him.”

  “But he was an eagle, first — on Earth?” Rosa repeated it, just to be clear.

  David nodded. “According to the legend, he was in the air for several days with the auma of Gawain between his claws. He was always going to be changed by it.”

  “He had tufts, like an owl,” Guinevere chirped. “His colors were amazing.”

  “Once seen, never forgotten,” David said. He looked pointedly at me.

  “Only Guinevere witnessed this change,” I insisted, desperately trying to save my blushes. I knew it would make little difference now. David would be wondering why I hadn’t mentioned Gideon when we’d talked about creatures that traveled through time. I hastily turned him back to the tapestry. “What does this picture actually tell us? Why is a battle happening here?”

  He took the drawing out of my hands and spread it by his feet, using stones to hold the corners in place. “This is a place called the Vale of Scuffenbury, though its name might be different in your p
resent day.” He waved his hand above the cluster of hills. “In the foreground is Glissington Tor, a smaller hill than the rest but still large enough to hide a queen dragon. Gawain’s mother went into stasis here after giving up her fire to her unborn sons.”

  “That must be very recent,” Guinevere said. “Two seasons at most.”

  I glanced at Gawain and grunted in agreement. A dragon’s egg, once laid, took six and one half cycles of the moon to hatch.

  “The Tor is a long way south of here,” said David, “but word about dragons travels fast. It won’t be long before you start to hear rumors of a betrayed queen dragon sending her surviving egg north, guarded by a trusted eagle…. Shall I go on?”

  “Yes. I want to hear all of it.” Guinevere reached down and rested a soothing hand on Gawain. He gave a quiet graark and wrapped his spiked tail across his back.

  David said, “The Isenfier tapestry describes events much further down the timeline. Thousands of years after the queen goes into stasis, for reasons that would take too long to explain, her sleep is unlocked and she rises again to do battle with the Ix. After a bitter struggle, she forfeits her life in an effort to defeat the Ix:Cluster for good. The sacrifice, though brave, is only partly successful. A unicorn sent mad by the dark forces at Scuffenbury plunges itself into the Fire Eternal and infects Gaia, the Earth spirit, producing the Shadow you see emerging from the hill.”

  “The dragons are losing?” I asked. Galen’s auma stirred uneasily. I had to work to keep him under control.

  “Yes,” David said. “And Gadzooks is aware of it. He knows if they surrender the fight to the Shadow, the Earth and every species on it will fall under its spell and the Ix will become the masters of a force called dark energy. They would use this force to create or imagineer a dark fire from the unseen matter of the universe and set it in a physical form they call a darkling. These darklings, a kind of antidragon, will attempt to invert the very nature of being. Imagine a life that is a mirror of this one, where evil dominates every thought and goodness is crushed at every turn.”

  My mind raced back to the ledge on Kasgerden and the transformation I’d seen in Voss. I pictured a flock of the darkling creatures and began to feel very sick at the prospect.

  David went on, “So Gadzooks does the only thing he can. Using every spark of his creative power, he inscribes the unicorn symbol on his pad. This has two effects: Time stops, and a beacon is transmitted across the universe, even into worlds you could barely imagine. In one of those worlds, a place called Co:pern:ica, I — or a version of me — hear his cry for help. That sets off a course of events which culminates in me and Rosa Traveling here. This is difficult to understand, I know. But it is the truth.”

  Guinevere puffed her cheeks. “And all this is because of Gwilanna?”

  “More her equivalent on Co:pern:ica.”

  “Her what?” I said.

  David steepled his fingers for a moment, seeking a way to explain. “Do you understand what I mean by ‘imagineering’?”

  “Yes,” said Guinevere and I together.

  This seemed to surprise Rosa. “Really? This early in Earth’s history?”

  To which David replied, “It was a limited, but natural, ability once.” He turned to me and said, “Co:pern:ica is an imagineered world, very similar to Earth, but not quite identical. Some … copies of the people here exist there. Gwilanna is one of them.”

  “A world?” said Guinevere, leaning forward. “Who could imagineer a whole world?”

  A Collective, such as the Higher, said the Fain. My head tingled as they vibrated faster.

  Explain “Higher.”

  A multiple gathering of Fain beings.

  Why would they imagineer a whole world?

  We do not know. We are an isolated cluster.

  And all David would say to Guinevere was, “Just go with it, Guinevere. Under the right circumstances, it can be done.”

  “And Gwilanna exists in this place?”

  “Sort of. As a result of what she did there, Gadzooks is now struggling to maintain control and Gwilanna, as you can see, has put herself into the Isenfier scene. If the battle restarts according to this picture, or Gwilanna attempts to manipulate the outcome, there will be serious repercussions all along the timeline.”

  “People will die?”

  “Or simply fade out of existence.”

  “How you can stop this?”

  David shifted his position to look me in the eye. “There are options involving the firebirds. Ways we might nudge things in our favor. But that would involve a confrontation with the Shadow and many birds could die as a result. It’s far better that we undo Gwilanna’s influence — here, at the earliest stages of the timeline. Gwilanna is what we’d call a spoke in the wheel. She acts impulsively, for her own ends. We know she’s gained awareness of the way time works, but what she may not know is that any distortion of the forward timeline causes an echo back through history. All our knowledge points to the fact that the seed of change begins at the dawn of Gawain’s birth. We think she’s acquired an advantage on this timepoint that she didn’t have in the original legend. If we can find out how she learns to meddle, we can restore the timeline, keep the legend secure, and save a lot of needless suffering.”

  Guinevere hummed in thought. She crossed her legs and pulled her robe over her knees. “But I don’t understand why she’d want to do this. She seemed content with a life healing others. What ambition could serve her so well that she would risk the lives of so many people?”

  “She wants illumination to a dragon,” said Rosa. “She’ll do anything she can to get it.”

  “But there are no dragons now,” I said, “except —”

  And we looked at Gawain, snoring gently. In him was Gwilanna’s entire purpose.

  “All right,” Guinevere said with a sigh. “She lives in a cave not far from here. I’ll guide you to it, but I will not bear any prejudice against her until I know for certain she’s a threat to Gawain. A meeting will prove her charity, perhaps. If she wants what you say, to be part of him, why would she send us by night to the sea to put him on an island where he’ll be safe? Why didn’t she just … take him from the cave? Or slay him and be done?”

  “Because she’s plotting something,” Rosa said. “Whatever you think of Gwilanna, think again.”

  “May I ask a question?” A curl of wood smoke rose from the fire and twisted slowly beyond my face. I let Galen enjoy its charred gray scent, then I reached over and picked up the drawing. “Who are the other people in this picture?”

  “The tall man looking on is named Tam,” said David. “A friend to Elizabeth’s family. The young woman with him is Lucy, Elizabeth’s daughter.”

  “And who is the child holding Gadzooks?”

  Rosa took a breath. “That’s … David’s daughter.”

  “Your daughter?” Guinevere looked at him, stunned. “This girl is your child?”

  The one I’d heard them talking about. The one whose voice I had heard in my head. This little girl was David’s kin?

  Rosa fixed her gaze on the child. “She’s the one in real danger if we don’t stop Gwilanna.”

  David shook his head. “We don’t know that for sure.”

  “Look at her,” Rosa snapped at him. Her dark eyes flared and she was suddenly more spirited, more like a sibyl. The bands of metal on her wrist clanged together. “Her face is vacant. There’s nothing in her eyes. And Zanna remembers her with wings — doesn’t Daddy?”

  “Wings?” said Guinevere, echoing my thoughts.

  The Fain said, The child must be a new breed of human.

  Why do I sometimes hear her voice?

  We do not know. This is unclear. Your link to this girl always ends in a paradox.

  Explain “paradox.”

  An absurd twist in the layers of time.

  “She’ll be nothing like the girl we knew,” Rosa said. “She might as well be dead to us, David.”

  “Us?” said Guinev
ere.

  The wind gave a long, low moan.

  Rosa turned her face away.

  “She’s ours — in a manner of speaking,” said David. “Her name is Alexa. She’s very … special. For some reason we’re not quite sure of yet, Rosa feels her presence strongly.”

  I was about to ask how a child so young could ever be involved in the heart of a battle, when Rosa unexpectedly turned on me. “You.” Her dark eyes swooped into mine.

  “What?” I blustered, leaning back a little. “What have I done?”

  “Who are you, exactly?”

  “He’s Agawin,” said Guinevere, protective and perplexed. She sat up and shook her long red hair. Gretel, still braiding, huffed in annoyance and snatched back the strands she’d been working on.

  “There’s something weird about you,” Rosa pressed, as if we were the only two people present. “Something you’re not telling us. Something … deep.”

  “Rosa,” David cautioned, but she wouldn’t stop.

  “You know about her, don’t you? You know about Alexa.”

  “He can’t,” said David.

  “What are you hiding?”

  “Me?” I cried. “What am I hiding?” I stood up and threw the parchment down. It slipped toward the flames and one corner caught fire. Guinevere cried out, “Agawin! What are you doing?” She immediately bent forward to save the drawing, but David held her back and said, “No, let it burn. Its job is done. Let Agawin speak his mind.”

  His increasingly guilty mind. I knew what I should be telling them. Gwilanna was filled with unicorn auma; I had a tornaq hidden in my robe. The enchantments of time were all around me, but my vanity and anger prevented me from sharing it. Pushing my hand through my hair I said, “You Travel to our world as strangers in time and you dare accuse me of harboring falsehoods? Tell me how you are kin to Gawain.” I whirled around and stared at David.

  There. It was out. Now he knew I recognized the dragon in him.

  The flower dragon, Gretel, blew a smoke ring or two. Gawain himself popped one eye open.

  Guinevere pointed at the wearling and said, “Is this true? You share his auma?”

  Gawain stood up and yawned. He beat his wings forward to stretch their muscles, sweeping debris and smoke at Gretel. I watched her spit a bright orange cinder off her tongue. She wrinkled her peculiar snout, unamused.