Dragon’s Fate and Other Stories

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  One day, the Dracae will tell their children a story:

  * * *

  The Fates are bound by the winds they ride.

  The Shifters by the mercurial flow of their abilities.

  The Burners—they spark and flicker and incinerate.

  But you are dragon.

  You are Legion.

  You are the world.

  The story continues in

  Games of Fate

  Prologue

  I’m sorry it starts this way. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there to keep you from drowning.

  That’s not how the science works. I can’t reach back in time and lift you out of the riptide of power that is about to pull you under. I can’t help you tread water inside the whirlpool that is your attention issues.

  You need to do this yourself. I did. We had—have—no choice, you-who-will-be-me. For you, fate is about to trigger a new pass through these cycles. Fate is about to hand you yet another chance to make things right.

  Keep your head above water. Breathe. And always remember what a wise man once said: “Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” There are no gods at play here. Only you.

  And in you, I have faith.

  * * *

  —Prime Fate Rysa Torres of the Jani, Rock Springs Refugee Relocation Center, Wyoming, North America, January 29, 2087

  Continue the story with Games of Fate….

  Or with WORLD ON FIRE universe

  Series Two

  Witch of the Midnight Blade Part One

  Continue reading for a special Northern Creatures story….

  World on Fire

  The Universe

  Series one

  Fate Fire Shifter Dragon

  Games of Fate

  Flux of Skin

  Fifth of Blood

  Bonds Broken & Silent

  All But Human

  Men and Beasts

  The Burning World

  * * *

  Dragon’s Fate and Other Stories

  * * *

  Series Two

  Witch of the Midnight Blade

  Witch of the Midnight Blade Part One

  Witch of the Midnight Blade Part Two

  Witch of the Midnight Blade Part Three

  * * *

  Witch of the Midnight Blade: The Complete Series

  * * *

  Series Three

  World on Fire

  Call of the Dragonslayer (coming soon)

  Northern Creatures

  PICTURES OF YOU

  A Special

  Northern Creatures

  Bonus Short Story

  Pictures of You

  SEER ELLIE JONES COMES TO ALFHEIM…

  Pictures of You

  Magic moved the world. It started with a sway, then a rumble, then a twist in my guts as gravity moved sideways. I tried to speak. I tried to tell Chihiro—the one human who dared step across the boundary of my enchantments and extend her hand in friendship—to run. To turn away now and to never look back.

  She realized what she was looking at the moment I handed her the photographic plate. She didn’t need me to explain, or to point out where magic intersected with her reality.

  Death stared back at my friend through the sepia tones of the daguerreotype in her hand. Death as a shadowy mist over what should have been a happy image of her placing a lovely, sweet-scented bouquet of magenta roses on my side table.

  Death’s hands signed the truth. Death’s head floated over hers. Death would not leave her alone.

  Chihiro Hatanaka, friend to a lowly, enchanted seer, was about to die.

  She tossed the daguerreotype plate onto the table. The midday Tokyo sun caught the warm, copper shimmers in her black hair as much as it caught the plate’s mirror-finished sepia.

  “You need to go,” I said.

  She needed to run out of my cottage’s door, under the canopy of the garden tree beyond the small waterfall, and through the gate. Magic was about to move the world, but only one of us would survive the resulting road rash.

  She lifted her chin and smoothed her t-shirt. “Ellie, no.”

  The twisting of the world yanked on my torso, my hips, my chest, and I buckled over. My own t-shirt restricted like a straightjacket. I pawed at the neck but it did no good.

  Chihiro inched toward me, but I held up my hand. “Go…” I mouthed. She had to run. Magic didn’t care who it hurt when it moved the world.

  She shook her head.

  My cottage’s smooth, plastered walls shimmered as if rivulets flowed down their surfaces. The stones of my hearth and mantel rounded more than their flagstone should have allowed. The high-backed chairs leaned forward, and away, and toward each other.

  Magic warped reality so it could squeeze my world through a pinpoint in the universe.

  “Can you make it stop?” Chihiro asked. “Slow it down?”

  Magic had never heeded my pleas. Magic did what it wanted, no matter how I screamed or bargained. I was nothing more than an ant under the heel of the universe.

  Chihiro pulled a rose from the vase and pricked her finger with a thorn. “What of my blood?”

  “Chihiro is not a sacrifice!” I yelled more at the cottage than at her. “For once, please don’t do this!” My house was as complicit in this magic as the woman who had placed the original enchantments.

  The house was doing my mother’s dirty work for her.

  Chihiro wrapped her hand around her pricked finger. “I will not die!” she yelled. “I don’t care what the image foretells!”

  My own blood touched my tongue and its hot metallic stink filled my nose. There was nothing I could do now. No way to stop what was happening. No way to fight it. “Chihiro, please go.”

  I would come out the other side of this spell, as would my cottage. But my friend would not. My friend wasn’t part of the enchantment.

  My melon-sized camera obscura sat on the table under the roses. Chihiro swiped it up and held it out with both hands. “I can do this for you,” she said.

  I’d been her neighbor for three years. Somehow, she’d perceived my presence in spite of my mother’s enchantments, and she’d asked questions.

  How much detail had I given Chihiro about my existence? I no longer remembered. Perhaps my mother’s concealment enchantments worked on me, as well. Perhaps I only remembered bits of my life.

  The scarred parts, when magic moved the world, I would never forget.

  “Put it down!” I panted.

  Chihiro thought that this one time, this one instance, as my friend, she’d help. She’d take a photo so I would know the truth of the enchantment. I’d have evidence.

  Because that’s what true friends did.

  “Get… out!” I screamed. Magic would kill her for this.

  She wiped away a tear yet held her back straight. “I will survive this.” She inhaled. “I will do my best to remember,” she said.

  She wouldn’t, no matter how iron her will. No one remembered me after the world moved. No one remembered me day-to-day other than the truly determined. Forgetting was part of the enchantments.

  The twisting moved from my gut and chest out through my limbs. I gagged and staggered, one hand grasping at my t-shirt and the other grasping for anything to give me stability—the high-backed chair, the table with the silver vase of her gifted magenta roses, Chihiro’s extended arms.

  But the world moved, and Chihiro moved with it. My hand passed through her elbow.

  She screamed. Her knees buckled. Her arm hung at her side but somehow she continued to hold my camera obscura against her belly.

  My camera was carved from the limb of an oak in the courtyard of my mother’s estate. A dwarf master craftsman had forged and fitted the mirrors. One single slot in the back allowed me to place the enchanted silver-coated plates. One dial opened and closed the aperture.

  The camera was as solid and heavy as its purpose. The camera was my seeing stone.

  I tried to take
a picture every time the world moved. I tried to understand the currents of each new place into which magic tossed me. If I could understand the eddies, maybe I could stop the flinging and the twisting. The camera gave me a sense of connections. And the fleeting, illusionary, photographic ties were all I had.

  But I never captured the evidence I sought of the enchantments themselves.

  My knees gave way and I dropped to the rug. We were both on the floor, Chihiro and me.

  “Please…” I whispered. Gaining understanding of the enchantments was not worth Chihiro’s life. Nothing was worth inflicting this pain on my friend.

  Nothing.

  Chihiro’s mouth slackened. Her face contorted, as did her arm and her shoulder. My guts twisted the other direction—counterclockwise, this time. Chirhiro lifted the camera and somehow opened the shutter.

  My house lifted up off reality and the universe moved under it.

  No real breath entered my lungs. No air filled the space between the here and the now, the space into which magic kicked me when it moved the world. No water, no earth, no fire. I froze and I boiled and died again and again and again.

  Was Chihiro ripped apart as well? She held my camera, yet I no longer believed she saw me. For her, I was now simply an absence. But for me, her absence would always tear. For the rest of my days, losing her would pull and gnaw.

  Gravity reached out its icy hand and wrenched me off my cottage’s stone floor. It flung me toward the universe proper—toward the blistering sun and the sandblasting stardust—and collapsed my body into the slice between the here and the now.

  Muscles tore first. Fire burned just below my skin and screeched deep into my core. The puzzle pieces that were me rearranged. Some organs moved up, some down. Some to the side. Bones fractured, or snapped, or simply vaporized.

  What should be me—my body, my mind, and perhaps my soul—became the resonance of a scream, the power and the energy I would have released if I had still been a body, or a mind, or a soul.

  All in a moment of pure, blinding magic. All in a flash, or perhaps an eternity. All while magic moved the world so that, once again, my mother’s desire to keep me safe could manifest.

  She never told me why, or from what, I needed safety. She just kissed my forehead and painted the spell that crushed me through a sieve of magic and molded me back into a whole on the other side.

  And under me, under the crushing and the burning, a new part of the world moved to my reforming feet.

  My camera obscura dropped from hands that no longer existed in the space I inhabited. The wood of the camera’s box, though smooth and polished, still had points. Its corner bounced against my reforming flesh. Blood vessels broke. Tissues screamed. I’d have a deep bruise on my thigh in the morning—a dark, tender reminder of the ripping, tearing, and sudden infliction that was moving-through-magic.

  The camera bounced up. I snatched at it even with the searing in my not-quite-together finger joints, and caught the side of the box before it fell to its death on the unforgiving floor.

  I quickly closed the shutter.

  I gasped real air inside my real cottage, in front of the real fire Chihiro and I had set before the world moved. Wood smoke curled from the hearth. The logs popped and crackled, and the glow spread yellow light over crocheted and knitted blankets. The roses Chihiro had loved so much shimmered with clear pinks and with a clear, sweet scent. Chihiro, who was likely dead. My friend.

  Moonlight filtered through my lace curtains. I’d moved from day to night, which meant a new continent, a new land, new people, and a different language.

  I clutched the camera to my chest. Would the photo tell me if Chihiro survived? Did I have the stomach to investigate?

  I vomited onto my cottage’s stone floor.

  “I hate you, Mother,” I said into my empty cottage, and perhaps, into the closing moment between the here and the now, where she tossed me when her spell moved my cottage to a new land.

  For my safety, of course.

  “I hate you!” I yelled. My stomach heaved again, and all that hadn’t come up the first time came up the second.

  My thigh, where the camera’s corner had hit my reforming body, alternated between a deep, sucking throbbing and a sharp, icy raking.

  I gripped my leg and pressed gently. The pain only increased.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” I whispered into the cool, new night. “I can’t.” No more shifting from location to location. No more maybe-dead friends. No more lonely evenings, and by all the good the universe could give, no more deathly bruises.

  Each move left me—and anyone who got too close—more damaged than the one before.

  I slowly lifted myself off the floor. I’d been sucked out of Tokyo. I never knew why the spell clicked on when it did. Was it celestial movements? Earth tremors?

  I didn’t know.

  “I’m sorry, Chihiro,” I whispered.

  When magic moved the world, it moved my world out from under me.

  I limped into my cottage’s garden.

  Each daguerreotype plate carried its own enchantment. I polished the silver-coated copper myself to a smooth, mirror finish. I set each plate under a full moon between seasons—equinox or solstice, each brought out slightly different details—while preparing the plates with the incense and spells that made them magic-sensitive. And I placed each into its own sigil-marked sleeve.

  The camera and the plates followed the rules of daguerreotype photography from preparation, to image-taking, to finished plate. I had no true understanding of—or access to—the camera’s internal workings, but like all photos, plate development required a deep red darkness. My plates, though, needed the fumes of enchanted quicksilver.

  The final images shimmered with a holographic layering only a daguerreotype created. Photos lifted off the copper-silver and altered as the viewer changed angle, and would sometimes change from a positive image to a reversed, negative one.

  The negative was what I sought. The negative showed me magic.

  Magic could not be seen by the naked eye. It could be felt and it could be wielded, and it slipped across the skin like electrified silk, but it gave no visual impressions. Not to the fae. Not to the elves, werewolves, or vampires who walked the Earth. And certainly not to a half-human seer such as myself.

  Yet, somehow, the camera and the plates captured something. Movement, maybe. Lines of force. Energy. Some aspects of an image lifted off the plate more than others—shadows thrown by trees, some animals, a person here or there.

  Magical, all of them.

  And once, with the help of a plate, I was able to touch the magic of a waterfall in one of Japan’s deep forests.

  To touch it, and to wrap it around my soul like a safety line. That waterfall would have kept me in Tokyo, if it had been the one within the walls of my garden. But it was not, and my mother’s enchantments snapped the connection the moment I returned home.

  Chihiro had postulated that a photo of the cottage’s enchantments—my mother’s rope around my neck—might give me a way to touch the magic that moved the world. That, as I had been able to do with the outside waterfall, I might be able to form an anchor instead of a noose.

  But never had I been able to capture an image of my prison’s enchantments. On the plates, the cottage stood slotted between other cottages on a country lane, or a busy Tokyo street, or by itself with only its small garden and its wide, chiming tree.

  The garden wall changed from location to location, to match the new land, as did the tree. But the building and I—we showed no magic.

  I stood on my kitchen threshold, in my open garden door, and stared out at my new-but-not-new tree.

  The waterfall and the koi pond were gone. Gone, like Chihiro, and the small life I had built in Japan.

  My hands gripped my camera so tightly my knuckles whitened. I didn’t remember cupping the wooden box, or willing my fingers to latch on so tightly, but I did.

  I let go. The box rolled through
the fresh loam of the lavender bed next to the door.

  I shook out my fingers. Chihiro’s plate still rested inside the box, undeveloped and undisclosed, and it would stay that way, at least for the time being.

  My red hair and freckles had stood out in Japan. I’m shaped differently than Japanese women, with wider shoulders and hips. I am, my father used to tell me, “my mother’s daughter.”

  Isolated. Protected. Different. Chihiro had helped me not feel like the outsider I was.

  I choked on a sob. Crying helped no one. Not me. Not Chihiro. Yet the sobs wouldn’t stop.

  I stumbled toward my garden’s tree. A new breeze rustled its vast leaves and filled the air with a sweet, soothing chiming.

  I yelled and slapped the trunk. I hit it, grabbed handfuls of bark, spit at it, but it withstood my assaults. It withstood magic’s assaults, so why did I think my clawing would have an effect?

  I slid down the trunk and stared up at the canopy. “Are you an ash now?” I asked.

  The tree did not answer.

  Under the stars, a squirrel ran the branches. He stopped and looked down at me, then scurried toward a large bird of prey perched toward the top. Lower down, two ravens cocked their heads and flapped their wings.

  A large buck stood in my garden wall’s open gate. He tossed his head and walked away, his lovely white tail fluorescing in the moonlight.

  A snake slithered by my foot.

  I pulled away from the tree. The snake vanished into the roots. The great bird of prey took flight with three great swoops of her massive wings, and her head shimmered in the moonlight.