Dragon’s Fate and Other Stories

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  “The mountain will blow in five days,” her brother had warned. “And the gods of the underworld will bury these seaside villas in dust and ash.”

  She’d asked questions. “Why do you not send the children home now? My seer thrashes and I know they must leave. They must go, brother. And we should not venture to the mountain. Why must we go? Father does not need us. We should run before Mons Vesuvius kills us all.”

  Faustus punched. Mira stopped asking.

  On the other side of the villa, by the stables, a horse whinnied. Mira’s seer told her what-is—Ismene finished their travel preparations. What-was smoothed her riding clothes and admonished a slave for not bringing what-is to her with greater speed.

  Mira of the Jani Prime triad, the most powerful seer of the present in all the Empire other than her father, slid her foot on the smooth stones of the piazza. If she left now, ducked into the side hallway, the slave would not find her. She would have time to tell the children to escape.

  Once she and Ismene left, the children needed to saddle their own horses and ride northwest, along the coast. They’d be safe there, when the mountain exploded.

  The air they’d breathe would not carry the weight of a mountain. They’d be able to sit by the sea, perhaps on a boulder, and watch gulls fish. These three children, one almost a woman and two almost men, would live in a present where they’d be, for a moment, free.

  But Mira wasn’t the only Fate in the villa who’d stopped asking questions. Last night, after she had draped the silk over Minerva’s shoulder, after her smiles faded, the girl wrapped the fabric around her hand and arm—and then her neck.

  Her beautiful sky-blue eyes had clouded. Then she had muttered about her father’s orders. About doing her duty. Because she was a Fate, and fate bound her more than it did any other.

  Mira had pulled her close, holding her to her breast for as long as she would have if the child had been her own. No tears flowed. No scent of fear rose from the girl. Only her shallow breaths moved across Mira’s skin.

  Minerva’s seer, though promising, was not yet active and writhing inside her head, as Mira’s was now. Yet as Fates, they were all bound by their fate—a future Mira’s brother, the child’s father, would not let them escape.

  Mira would try. She’d be stern with the children. Tell them that as the Prime present-seer of their family, they had no recourse. They must listen.

  Then she’d ride for the mountain.

  Four days later, after she’d told the children to go, she knew they hadn’t listened. “You tell us to run, yet you go to the mountain? We are Fates, aunt. We follow the threads woven for us.”

  At the time, she wanted to scream, to turn back, to make them go. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. So she rode with Ismene up the side of Vesuvius to join their brother.

  Now, the heavy air weighed on their seers as much as on their noses and throats. They all exhaled into the harshness of the mountain’s crushing heat. And they performed their duty to their father.

  Mira shuffled through the grit coating the crags of Vesuvius’s cone, and followed her brother down the mountain face and back toward their horses. Time to return home. Time to run from the gods of fire. Her triad walked in shadow; the mountain blanketed each step with gloom and vapors rising from pits. No sun reached this deep inside the mountain’s fractures.

  In a shadow, five paces in front of Mira, Faustus stopped pushing forward—stopped moving completely. Stopped and inhaled and would not look at his sisters.

  Mira’s chest constricted around her heart—a wave from her brother’s future-seer hammered through her skull. She could not see what he foresaw, but she felt the coming violence. The cone, perhaps, was about to explode. They, perhaps, were not to escape the mountain.

  Faustus looked down at his sandals for the briefest moment, and his hand clutched a nub of Vesuvius’s rock face. Then he sighed as if he’d realized the true meaning of what he’d unleashed in their home.

  When the what-will-be her brother saw moved into what-is, the actions within the courtyard, down the mountain, near the coast and in their villa lurched into her chest. She felt the slice to her niece’s neck. Felt the sting radiating from skin to muscle to emptying veins.

  Mira stumbled backward into her sister. Her blonde hair mingled with Ismene’s black, and her pale skin contrasted with her sister’s deep glow.

  “By all the gods,” Ismene whispered, as what-is passed into what-was, and her Fate’s ability saw the truth. She pressed against Mira’s back as unmoving as the pumice and rock surrounding them.

  Ismene’s sons’ triad was now broken. In her family’s villa, down the mountain and toward the coast, the man and the beast—the Dracos—had taken not only a life, but the destiny of two boys.

  Burning radiated off Ismene as it did off the stone and the dust and the coming ash. Heat flashed off her, rising from her core to her neck and cheeks.

  The unmoving Ismene erupted inside herself. She agitated her own guts and the roiling snapped the high cymbals of her past-seer into a deafening rattle inside Mira’s head.

  A hole opened across her triad’s interwoven abilities. A cavernous, gaping crevasse that cracked Mira’s soul with the same power and violence as the mountain’s coming vomiting. The same shuddering in her core, the same pulsing constriction in her throat.

  The present rattled inside her skull once more—the whirlwind of the man and the beast lessened. Ladon and his dragon had been pushed forward for months by both his sister’s gale-force hatred and his own grief. His own niece’s murder gouged across his world and left him on a cliff’s edge. He raged along the precipice, a sword in each hand and a dragon at his back, making sure every last villain went over with him.

  Down into the ash-choked inkiness. Down inside a blistering hole.

  And now his task was done.

  A new moment of what-is danced into her mind’s eye—Junonius and Jupiter finding their cousin. One boy hiccupping. The reek of blood and the bitter stench of shit. Tears streaking cheeks and the backs of hands. The other boy curling into a ball on the sand and rocking back and forth, back and forth.

  Junonius finding the dagger the man had dropped into the crescent of dried death surrounding the girl’s body.

  Then that moment, too, moved into what-was.

  Ismene quivered behind Mira. She screamed.

  Mira raised a hand to block the racking swipe of Ismene’s nails. The other, she used to hold her sister’s wrist and the dagger she’d almost whipped at their brother’s head.

  “Why did you let this happen?” The screams pouring from Ismene deafened Mira’s ears. “Why, brother?”

  In Mira’s seer, new crescents formed around each boy, but they weren’t as practiced at killing as the human half of the Dracos. He’d been quick. Merciful, even. The boys’ agony spread out through Mira’s seer like wastewater thickened by mud and slaughter.

  Ismene’s breathing faltered. “Why?” She blanched as if she bled out, too. But she stopped screaming.

  Faustus let go of the rock face. His hands dropped to his sides. “We are all bound by the fate our father sees.” He didn’t look at them—he didn’t turn or acknowledge what was happening behind him. “Bound by his war, no matter the costs.” He just walked away.

  Chapter Three

  Andreas Theodulus Sisto and the human half of the Dracos rode west, away from the Fates’ villa and toward the sea and the ships of Andreas’s father, with Ladon’s dragon pacing their laboring war steeds. Behind them, Vesuvius smoked. Respite at sea would clear away the acrid scents of both blade and mountain, and bring them back to their senses.

  But Ladon slowed his stallion, and pulled on the animal’s reins as he looked east. He hadn’t spoken since they’d ridden from the Fate’s villa, nor had he given voice to Dragon’s lights and patterns. If they conversed between themselves, Andreas did not sense it.

  Not that he could. His gifts did not include sensing the thought-words of the beasts. Only
Ladon and his sister, the human half of the Dracas, knew the true minds of the dragons.

  Two centuries Andreas had ridden with the dragons. Two centuries watching over both the brother and the sister. Andreas rose to the level of tribunus, the Second of the Legio Draconis, Ladon’s right hand, though he could have been his own legatus. He could have been Emperor, if he had wanted.

  But his mother’s enthralling gifts were both a prize and a curse—every gain cost a portion of his soul, a slice of mind, a splinter of family.

  They turned east—and toward the grove of the grand olive tree that often whispered to the dragons. The tree was three times the size of the other olive trees, and its leaves flitted as if they were birds that were alive and separate from the branches. Ghost lights danced along its twisted, rough bark in much the same way as they danced in great clarity over Dragon.

  The tree, like the beasts, was a wonder of changing colors and patterns.

  The sun lowered toward the western horizon when they stopped under the grand olive tree. Andreas offered Ladon savory dried meats and crisp bread, but his legatus did not eat. Ladon stared down at the meal held in Andreas’s hand, his eyes without need, and proclaimed, once again, that he touched no food when he fought. Neither did the beast, though the patterns circulating over Dragon’s hide told Andreas a different story of hunger.

  Again, Andreas said nothing. A calling scent crept into the back of his mouth and nose—a wave of ‘command,’ which if Ladon breathed in would compel him to eat—but Andreas swallowed it down into his own gut.

  Instead, he set about collecting olives from the singing branches of the miracle tree that glowed in the darkest of nights. The smooth skin of each fruit felt firm between his fingers, their scent sweet and poignant and alive. They shimmered with hidden lights, glimmers which would not become visible until full night, but he knew they were there, waiting.

  Beyond the tree, on the eastern horizon, Vesuvius smoldered. Curls rose into the darkening sky, and under his feet the ground grumbled in response.

  Perhaps he should argue with his legatus. Three paces away, Ladon leaned against his beast, the black of his tunic and leathers as dark as what remained of his hair. He had cut his black hair shorter than was customary for a man of his station when the Fates had murdered his niece, the Dracia. Ladon’s sister had done the same.

  Andreas took this self-mutilation as both a sign of mourning and an omen of danger. The day the Dracia died, Ladon stalked through their villa in Rome, gladius drawn and bellowing answers to his sister’s shrieks. Both Dracae had vanished into the crowded markets shortly after, their dragons invisible and hiding themselves in patterns mimicking the world.

  Many Fates were ripped to nothing more than stinking meat by invisible dragon talons that day.

  One more had died the noon of this day. She had been the final retribution for an evil which made no sense. The Jani caused the death of their own child when they cut down the Dracia and her father outside the Dracas’s villa.

  Faustus knew what would happen. Of this, Andreas was certain. Fates knew the fates of their own, yet he caused the girl’s death anyway.

  Andreas now leaned against the grand olive tree’s twisted trunk holding a satchel of olives. He would not taste the true beauty filling his bag. It was not his place to partake of the tree’s fruit. Barbarians might drop to their knees at his feet and Fates run from his sword, but the sacred was not a line he crossed.

  The setting sun blazed in the grand olive’s branches, and filled its leaves and fruit with the same violence sure to erupt soon from the cinder cone on the horizon. The gentle breeze blew in from the sea full of salt and the calls of distant gulls.

  He glanced up at the wisps above Vesuvius. This far away, they’d probably survive, if the mountain decided to burst tonight.

  Probably.

  “We should move closer to the coast.” He nodded toward the mountain.

  Ladon’s shoulders moved only enough to show he heard Andreas’s words. He did not respond.

  Andreas could compel both man and beast to leave, if he chose that path. They’d bow to his will. Only he and his mother had the strength to manipulate the dragons in such a way.

  Behind him, the beast snorted, and set his big head on his forelimbs as he fully retracted his talons. His colors and patterns slowed and lost their vividness—a dragon response to fatigue akin to the dark patches under Ladon’s eyes and Andreas’s own drooping eyelids.

  They’d traveled hard, once they’d known where the Jani Fates hid. Ridden and run and stalked with nothing more than retribution spinning their minds. The beast needed sleep.

  Andreas stepped aside as Dragon undulated over the tree’s roots. The beast settled himself into the folds, contorting like a giant cat. He wouldn’t stand out when he fell into sleep. He was bigger than a work horse but smaller than some of the exotic animals imported from Africa and the Far East, and would appear as nothing more than another mound built of the tree’s roots.

  Andreas moved away from the trunk as the beast took up his place. “Staying here is not wise.” But neither man nor beast listened to his words.

  “The land may growl but we will face whatever the mountain spits.” Ladon placed his hand on the beast’s neck. “He wishes to rest here one last time, before the mountain takes this place.” Ladon nodded toward Vesuvius.

  He stroked his hand across the back of his shaved head and stared toward the mountain, his thoughts obviously not on his settling dragon. And he rubbed his head again. The faint rub of his too-short hair against the skin of his palm ground through the still air. An omen, it was. Andreas should have understood when both of the dragons’ humans cut away their dark hair. An omen of death.

  “You go, my friend. No need for you to face this problem with us.” Ladon had spoken the same words many times since they tracked the Jani Fates.

  “Where would I go?” Andreas threw the satchel of olives toward Ladon’s face. His mind conjured a reasonable version of his friend, one without this stupidity—the man he’d served these centuries, clear-minded and well-groomed.

  Ladon’s face changed—when the human communicated with the beast, the man’s eyes focused very far away but Ladon saw it in minute and exquisite detail.

  “He wishes me to eat.” Ladon looped the satchel of olives over his shoulder and his gaze dropped from the mountain to the beast’s elongated head.

  They spoke their silent words and a small flame curled from Dragon. Ladon smiled briefly. He patted the beast once more. “I will. Rest, my friend.”

  There’d be no leaving for a full day, if the beast slept. They’d be stuck here as the mountain spit vile fumes and coated their skin with cutting dust.

  Andreas nodded and stepped back. He’d get his pack and tend the horses. He could do nothing else.

  Dragon’s patterns slowed, then stopped. His hide took on the muted colors of the trunk and the gritty textures of the ground. His respiration slowed and his surface cooled to match the land.

  He blended into the tree.

  Ladon stood under the grand olive tree next to the mound of his dragon. No birds called. No animals scurried.

  On the horizon, the haze surrounding the mountain’s crest glowed sick and terrible as the setting sun’s last rays stretched inward from the sea. Ladon would eat now, because his beast requested it. He’d have his fill of olives one last time from this tree that should bring Andreas’s commander calm. This one place in all the Empire where he should be able to think and understand and find his reason again.

  Maybe the eruption would come before the beast awoke. Maybe it wouldn’t.

  Andreas didn’t think Ladon had the will to fight his way through the ash, if it did.

  Chapter Four

  Mira and Ismene rode five hours before the first explosion blew the top of the cinder cone to the southwest, away from them and toward Pompeii. Death snowed down as huge flakes, but more like glass than ice. It sliced as it fell. It crunched underfoot, a
s if Mira and Ismene ran on the broken wares of the gods themselves.

  For once, Faustus had not used his future-seer to constrain Mira and Ismene. He didn’t pronounce their fate or issue orders to force what he saw to come to pass. No, this time, he leaped onto his horse and rode away without them. Without anyone, his back to Ismene’s bitter spitting and unending screeches. He vanished into the wilderness.

  Mira’s present-seer saw nothing of him. Nor did she care to ask it again and again and again for knowledge of his whereabouts. The gods could take his life and behead their triad for all she cared. She’d suffer that fate to see him punished.

  As would Ismene.

  For the first time since they were children, since they’d each clung to their mothers’ legs under the watchful eye of their godling father, Mira and Ismene were left to their own fate, and free of the knowledge of their future.

  Yet here she was, running into the ashfall instead of away from it, dragged forward by what-was instead of what-will-be.

  Ismene pulled her over cracks and between boulders. They moved faster than they should, Ismene demanding Mira use her seer to find the best footing—“Which way? What angle? Tell me!”

  The air hissed like a cornered creature, a sound she felt more than heard. The ash rubbed against itself in little, shattering clicks. The hairs on Mira’s arms stood on end.

  Mira had wanted to go to the villa, to care for the bodies of the children. They should not vanish forever under a thick layer of ash. But Ismene clawed and screamed and raked her demands over Mira’s mind.

  So now, behind them, lightning flashed across the remains of Vesuvius’s summit. Ash hung solid around the split cone as if carved into the sky itself—as if the gods pressed their fury into the clouds like a hoof into mud. Or Ismene’s fingers into Mira’s flesh.

  The two Fates rode until both mares stumbled and wheezed. Then they left the animals crumpled on the ground, legs folded under them, heads bowed. Ismene paid no heed and did nothing to ease their suffering. She ran away into the gray air, leaving Mira behind.