The Fire Ascending

by Chris D'Lacey

  I cast a glance at the stool and slowly sat down. The ice crunched as it took my weight. Far to one side I heard the whole field creak.

  We are floating, said the Fain. The Great Sea is below us.

  I moved my foot through a gentle arc, scraping loose crystals into a ridge. Can we use the ice as a weapon?

  Your power to imagineer is not as quick as hers. It would be dangerous.

  The snap of her fingers called my attention.

  “That’s better,” she said with a testy frown. “Anyone would think you didn’t want to know about the legend.”

  “I want to know what happened to Grella,” I said. I glared into her wrinkled face.

  This made her grimace and fidget in her seat. “What is it with you and your awkward questions? This is not the way I planned it. Not the way at all. You’re supposed to sit and be humble and be awed in my presence.”

  “Forgive me,” I said. “Evil always makes me impatient for a fight.”

  “Save your energy,” she spat, leaning forward. “I won’t disappoint you in that ambition. Your greatest challenge is still to come.” She thumped back, clawing at the arms of the chair. “You remind me so much of him.”

  “Him?”

  “Yes, him. David Rain.”

  “Rain?” I said, genuinely confused.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake! Further down the timeline, in the Earth’s progression, humans usually choose two names to address themselves by. He, David, adds the name ‘Rain.’”

  “And why am I like him?”

  “Because you constantly get in my way!”

  The ferocity of this statement blew a thin cloud of mist in my direction. As I wiped my face dry, I had an idea. Can we cloak ourselves? Blow the ice into a storm and escape within it, hidden?

  Our calculations indicate the ice field is immense. There is nowhere to run. She would track you with ease.

  “Then David thwarts you — in the future?” I asked.

  “Thwarts me? No one thwarts me, boy. He’s just an irritating dog that won’t give up its bite. David Rain will never defeat me.”

  “But you have clearly not defeated him.”

  Her eyes grew as dark as the hollows of her face. “You forget, I have the tornaq now. Thanks to you, I hold a distinct advantage. I can visit any place I choose in the timeline and soon, because of what I have learned, I will be able to change it at will. Time is like water; it finds its own levels. One little stir can cause endless fluctuations. This meeting, for instance, was never meant to happen. As a result of it, related events are becoming unstable. Some connections are starting to fade. Can’t you feel the unhappy ripples in the universe? How big a ripple would it take, do you think, to eliminate David Rain for good?”

  For the first time since my initial shudder, the cold of the Icelands seeped into my bones. There was so much venom in her eyes. So much desire for power. I moved the dialogue sideways a little. “He is kin to Gawain. That must make him a challenging foe.”

  “Kin,” she snorted, kicking one foot. “Of all the undeserving twists of fate that should have been confined to the back end of history that was the one that should have brought up the rear.”

  “It was … an error?” I said, trying to understand. I frowned and felt the frost cracking on my eyebrows. Not an unpleasant sensation, just strange.

  “It was a mockery,” she said. “Useless Ix assassin.”

  Assassin? This was not a word I knew.

  Killer, said the Fain. There is a division of the Ix known as “Ix:risor.” They kill without feeling. In the future, they must have been sent after David.

  “So David is … was … killed by the Ix?” I prompted.

  “Should have been,” she said, squirming her reedy frame against the seat. “Swatted. Wiped off the nexus for good.” She struck the arm of the chair with her fist. A small piece, the size of a rock, broke off. It slithered toward me, stopping near my feet. “Instead he lived again and took what I should have had, what I will have — when the moment is right.”

  “And what was that?”

  “The auma of Gawain, you fool.”

  And there was her ambition, as Rosa had warned me: She planned to be illumined to the last dragon on Earth. Glancing at the ice chunk, I said, “Tell me how David came to be so … fortunate. I want to know all of it. Right from the beginning. Did Guinevere reach the island with Gawain?”

  “That was the easy part,” she said, puffing air. “The dragon needed no persuasion to settle there. He commanded the island and the regions all around. He grew and became a creature of legend. That was his attraction — and his downfall.”

  “He was killed — by hunters?”

  “Hunters,” she snorted. “What are men against the power of twelve dragons? He was pursued, it is true — mainly by farmers tired of losing their sheep to his gut. A large bounty was put on his head. Anyone who tried to grow rich from it is now just a pile of ash, blowing in the wind.”

  “Then he died naturally?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” She paused for a moment and let her gaze shorten.

  While she mused, I quietly extended my foot and dragged the ice chunk closer to my hand.

  Unwise, said the Fain, guessing my intent. It will be hard to pick up or throw accurately from the glove.

  We must try. She has to be stopped. I mean to stun her and steal back the tornaq. I will need all the power Galen can offer.

  She looked up suddenly. I had no time to pull my foot back, but flexed it as if I needed to stretch. Her gaze narrowed a little but she made no threat. “You were telling me — about Gawain?”

  Her lips were blueing, showing the cold, but they still had the power to drone. “He gave up his fire tear because he was alone. This world, with its ghosts of dragons gone by, had nothing to offer a solitary beast. In the end, he was simply tired of the struggle.”

  “Struggle?” I said, to keep her talking. Again she looked away. Long enough to let me drag the ice within reach.

  “He wanted to be loved, not feared, by men. In the final days, only Guinevere remained a friend to him.”

  “And me?” I asked, before the pause grew too great. “Was I not also a friend to the dragon?”

  “You weren’t there,” she said harshly, close enough for me to smell the fungus on her breath. “You somehow disappear out of the timeline before Guinevere reaches the island.”

  I let my fingers loosen in my glove. I had a chance there and then to make my strike, but her words had made me itch with curiosity. “Why do I disappear? Is it because of you?”

  She made a sound like a skogkatt and sat well back. “For once, I had nothing to do with it — though that will change when our lesson is over.” She drummed her sticklike fingers on the chair. “There’s something rather odd about you. You’re a freak. A hiccup in the waves of time. Your name pops up all over the future, but no legend ever speaks of the heroic cave dweller, running to the aid of the last known dragon. You weren’t even on the island the night Gawain died.”

  “Were you?”

  “No. But Guinevere was. She would go to his aerie and sing to him when the moon came up. It was his only comfort in his final days.”

  “She helped him sleep,” I muttered, remembering the time I’d collapsed near the goats, listening to Guinevere’s lullaby.

  “She calmed the beast, yes, when it shed its tear.”

  “Then … she must have been close to him at the end.” The danger she must have faced was immense. “Was she consumed by the fire tear’s flame?”

  “Questions, questions, questions,” whined the sybil. Nevertheless, she gave me an answer. “No, Guinevere did not die then. She spread her hands and caught the tear.”

  “Caught it?” My mouth fell open in shock.

  “Some silly desire to preserve the auma of dragons on Earth.”

  I remembered us walking away from the caves, talking about my encounter with Galen. Her words of awe came swimming back. You caught his fire
tear? You actually held a dragon’s fire? Now, on this island, she had done the same. I was at once excited and terrified. Twelve dragons. There, in the cup of her hands. I forgot about attacking Gwilanna for the moment. This I had to know more about. “She was exposed to him then? To all Gawain’s power?”

  Gwilanna sighed. “This is tedious, boy.”

  Not to me. “She must have his auma. She must have absorbed some, just like Gideon. That makes her kin to the bird — and to David.”

  The sibyl immediately tightened her stance. “Do not mention that name. Why does everything come back to David? The fire tear had no effect on the girl. It simply … spilled from her hands and went back to the Earth.”

  “You’re lying,” I said. It was clear from the way she’d broken her words.

  “Oh, very well. What is it going to matter that you know?” She pinched her lips together in a line. “The tear was carried here, across the Great Sea.”

  “By Guinevere?”

  “Yes.”

  “She took out a boat?”

  “No, not a boat. She was aided by that lump of blubber and fur that led her toward the island in the first place.”

  “Thoran?”

  “Yes … Thoran. Whatever he’s called. Somehow, she managed to extract my thorn and save his miserable, grunting life. He swam, with Guinevere on his back. Out to sea. Far out to sea.”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind why!” she snapped.

  But I had to know. “What happened to them, sibyl?”

  “This did,” she snarled, pointing at the ice. “She was carrying the tear in a drinking vessel. When the bear grew tired and could swim no more, she opened the vessel and poured Gawain’s fire tear into the water. This is the result. Here. All around you.”

  The ice sheet formed from his fire, said the Fain.

  And we, in effect, were sitting on his grave. “Did Thoran drown?”

  “Unfortunately not.” She ground her misshaped teeth in annoyance. “He climbed onto the ice and his fur turned white. His kind have been a plague to me ever since.”

  Ice bears. Now I understood. Thoran, like Gideon, had been altered by Gawain, creating a brand-new species of bear. “And —?”

  “Stone,” she interrupted, “before you ask. Gawain’s tear did not return to the Fire Eternal, therefore his body turned to stone. For once, the old myths were actually correct.”

  I vaguely knew something of this. In my boyhood fantasies I had often imagined climbing up the tail of an old dead dragon and sitting on its back as though I might fly. But Yolen had quashed this in a few words. When a dragon’s tear falls upon the Earth, he had said, its body dissolves into the stuff of the Earth, there to replenish the spirit of Gaia.

  But if the tear had not gone back …

  “Where?” I asked her. “Where did it happen?”

  “On the peak of the island. Where do you think?”

  I glanced at the distant point of rock. It had to be the Tooth that Guinevere had talked about, the place we’d been heading for. “He’s there still?”

  She snorted, scornful of my aspirations. “Don’t waste your time thinking you can bring him back. I tried once, well into the future. That idiot David got in my way. It was a particularly chilling experience, which I will take pleasure paying back to him one day.”

  “Gawain is gone, then? Lost for good?”

  She licked her lips. Sadly, her tongue didn’t freeze to them. “I did not say that. There is one way the dragon could rise again.”

  “How?”

  A sharp Caw! Caw! split the air.

  She smiled, but there was nothing pleasant about it. “I do believe you’re about to find out.”

  I looked at the island again. Four black dots were on the distant skyline. Ravens. I readied Galen for combat. But there was one more thing I had to know first: What had become of Guinevere?

  “How far along the timeline are we?”

  “Far enough,” she sniffed. “What is it to you?”

  “Is Guinevere alive?”

  She took this question like a slap in the face. A noticeable judder troubled her lip.

  “What became of her when the ice was formed?”

  “I am not in the mood to speak about —”

  “Answer me, sibyl. I want to know.”

  “She perished,” she snapped. “There is nothing else to say.”

  “Perished?” That seemed an odd word to use. All the same, it sounded final. My young heart tremored. And even she, Gwilanna, looked bitterly deflated.

  “My perfect construct … gone,” she said. “Lost, like a breath of wind, until …”

  “Construct?” I almost fell off my stool. “You mean … Guinevere wasn’t human?” The girl I’d befriended, the one I’d milked goats with, had simply come out of Gwilanna’s mind? My thoughts flashed back to the moment by the woods when David had touched her long red hair. The sudden look of surprise on his face. He’d read her, and known. “She told me you found her, abandoned, by the sea.”

  “A tale, to ease her childhood,” she muttered. “I made Guinevere. I imagineered her.”

  “No,” I said. “I do not believe you. Even for a sibyl, how could such a thing be possible?”

  “If you had suffered like I had suffered, you would not be asking that question, boy. Auma is energy. It can be shaped like clay. All it takes is extreme intent and some knowledge of the secret workings of the universe. I didn’t understand the ability myself until I learned I was born from unicorn blood….” She gave me a pompous grin of gratitude.

  I was still struggling to take this in. “Are you saying Guinevere was born from your grief?”

  Mockingly, she clapped her hands.

  “From human auma? From the death of another?”

  “Enough, boy. Cease your tiresome prattle. I do not wish to be reminded of this.”

  But I was on the tail of an old riddle now. This time, I wasn’t about to let go.

  “She’s Grella, isn’t she?”

  “I said guard your tongue!”

  Guard it? I was almost chewing it off. “Say it, sibyl. You killed poor Grella and from her auma you fashioned another. A perfect child who would always do your bidding. What was the skull for? More of your magicks? A charm to control her eye color by?”

  With a whoosh that felt like a kick in the chest, I found myself landed on my back. I roared in anger — or Galen did — but for all that dragon’s native strength I could not react fast enough to gain an advantage. With a speed so unnatural I did not see her coming, the sibyl reared over me like a demon, holding a spike of ice to my heart. “Guinevere is all that is precious to me. You will not speak ill of her. It’s because of your quest that she dies out here. I visited the timepoint. I watched her body break into fragments and fly away into the northern wind. In the future I trace those pieces of her and watch over every child they spawn. Elizabeth Pennykettle. Lucy Pennykettle. All the other daughters of Guinevere and Gawain. And what do I get for my knowledge and vigilance? Interfering idiots like you and David Rain. Don’t … try anything.” She pressed down, denting my clothes with her spear. “This is how David Rain dies in this timeline. Killed by the work of his beloved dragon.”

  “Then I would be like him,” I hissed. “In death, I would gladly commingle with Gawain. Kill me, sibyl, that I might be illumined. Kill me, that I might live a better life.”

  I closed my eyes.

  Her craggy hand trembled.

  I said my good-byes to all I had loved and prayed that Gawain would ascend into my heart.

  But all that ascended was Gwilanna herself. With a cry of frustration, she stood up and threw the ice aside. “Get up,” she barked.

  I rolled onto my knees, but not in any hurry.

  “You think I want another bear ruining my plans?”

  I thought about this as I gathered my thoughts. The broken piece of chair was still within reach. Its appeal now was very great indeed. But my endless quest for knowledge was stay
ing my hand. “You told me David was kin to dragons.”

  She sank into her chair, sucking air through her teeth. “Yes, but his dominant form is a bear. One of them was with him when he ‘died.’ I’ve seen it, in the future. It calls itself Ingavar. David commingled with its spirit.”

  Out of nowhere, a cold wind stirred.

  “Ingavar?” I let the word drift into it.

  Ice spicules ran across the space between us. I thought I felt the ice field tilt a little.

  Just then, three ravens settled on the chair. They folded down their wings and eyed me with distrust. The fourth bird landed on Gwilanna’s shoulder. Although one raven looked much like another, I was quite sure this was Crakus. He hopped to the chair arm and opened his mouth. A dragon’s claw dropped into the sibyl’s lap.

  She picked it up, laid it on her palm, and stroked it. “About time,” she said, eyeing it greedily.

  Craaark! went Crakus, demanding payment.

  “Oh, very well.” To my disgust, she imagineered worms on her chair. The ravens plucked them off anywhere they wriggled, gulping them down their black throats, whole.

  “So, boy, I suppose you’d like to know where this came from.” She lifted the claw to the level of her chin, testing the springiness of its point.

  “It’s Gawain’s.” His auma was unmistakable.

  “Correct,” she said smugly.

  “How did they get it?” The claw was too developed for a wearling’s body. It had to have come from him when he was grown, though it seemed unlikely that a cowardly raven could get close enough to rip it from a dragon’s foot. And wasn’t he supposed to have turned to stone?

  “They stole it,” Gwilanna said, matter-of-factly, “from the Inook community near to the island.”

  I looked at each of the thieves in turn. One of them scraped its beak against the ice, leaving a smear of blood against the white. Another was shaking and holding up a foot, probably injured during the raid. Crakus was grooming his sleek black feathers. But the raven on the highest part of the chair had turned its round eye into the breeze, as though it was aware of something approaching. It paddled its feet a couple of times, uncertain of whether it should raise an alarm. I swept the ice with Galen’s sensors. The wind was quickening, the ice field rumbling. Something was coming. Something … heavy.