by Marc Secchia
“Softly now, my beloved. There is much work to do. We need to memorise every aspect of her inner and outer appearance, and every effect we can detect, so that we can provide Fra’anior with the fullest possible picture of her condition. Even then the act of reviving her will be fraught with peril – yet I say, Fra’anior speed that day!”
“Aye,” said Ri’arion, from just behind them, holding up a lantern to illuminate the couple. “What can I do?”
* * * *
After a week of gradually melting the crystal encasement, they painstakingly transferred Izariela’s body to a bed in her old chambers. There had been four separate consultations with Fra’anior to try to hammer out the least risky way of attempting what promised to be a fraught, hazardous operation. Even the Great Onyx had been filled with doubt about his proposal.
“Ready?” said Aranya.
Gathered around the White Shapeshifter’s bed, Ardan, Ri’arion, Pip, Iridiana, Asturbar and Silver all nodded.
Zuziana palmed a small vial of tears. “Ready.”
They laid hands upon Izariela.
Shuttering her eyes, Pip drew in a deep breath. O soul of Izariela, o fire life of Fra’anior, o daughter of Istariela, ARISE!!
Izariela’s body quivered.
Simultaneously, the Shapeshifters joined their powers and dived into their work. Silver soothed her mind. Ri’arion and Aranya traced the toxins and effects in her flesh and magic, for as slowly as stalactites growing in a cavern, Izariela’s life and magic began to gather pace. Her limbs writhed. The half-formed bones slithered in and out in ghastly semi-formed Shapeshifter transformations, knocking Iridiana to the floor and smashing Ardan in the stomach.
Her magic’s attacking itself, Ri’arion cried. Shadow!
He grabbed her leg bone – or was that her hind paw – as it smashed against the ceiling, but Ardan was no longer present. Linked with Iridiana, he seared through her flesh and took into himself every malefic influence or substance that he could find, both in her Shapeshifter spirit-form and in her Human body. It was a fight. Izariela resisted. The poisons were a complex cocktail of lethality. Chaos shifted through and around him, battling the poisons on too many levels to count, while Silver tried to hold her near-feral psyche away from the edge of madness with delicate inflexibility.
Aranya poured healing power into her mother. Izariela. Izariela, it’s me, Aranya!
UNNNHH … HURTS!!
Her left forepaw clouted Pip across the room. A swinging Dragoness’ thigh bone smacked open a cut upon Asturbar’s unbreakable cranium.
NOOOO …
Blood and bone exploded from her abdomen, but Iridiana somehow gathered it all up and shovelled it back inside faster even than the Shapeshifter’s transformation could tear itself apart. Wing bones ripped out of her shoulders. Spikes shattered the bed slats. They disappeared again.
Aranya screamed, “Mother!”
Izariela’s body twisted horrifically and arched backward to an impossible angle; bones snapped with sharp retorts. The group brawled with her uncontrollable body parts for several long minutes before suddenly, everything soothed and settled down.
This was their chance.
Ardan and Asturbar gripped her outflung limbs and flung their fullest strength into holding Izariela taut.
Zip! Iridiana cried.
Zuziana squeezed the vial hard, spraying the shattered body with Aranya’s tears, before her best friend threw herself bodily atop her mother and shouted, BE HEALED!!
The room rocked to a brutal detonation of magic. Ri’arion managed to stay the ceiling’s collapse, but a wall blew out, bringing a gust of frigid air and a flurry of snow into the room. Izariela sat bolt upright, her face set in a rictus of agony as though she meant to scream, but had forgotten how to.
Then, her violet-blue eyes fluttered open to alight upon Aranya, who had been thrust onto her mother’s knees.
Puzzled.
Hopeful?
Outraged!
Izariela Dragoness-thundered, WHO BLIGHTED MINE DAUGHTER THUS?
Healing power mingled somehow with the intense agony of Iridiana’s signature iridium-flare magic, discharged in a blinding paroxysm against Aranya’s torso. She screamed as the whiteness roared over her and through her. It seemed she soared over strange billows as in that first experience of flying as a Dragoness. Dreamlike. Faraway. Knowing that she landed in the snow outside the palace building, but not feeling the cold.
Not feeling anything at all.
* * * *
Aranya woke languidly. Thoughts seemed to idle mutely in her mind like trout lazing in a terrace lake at the height of summer. Her nose wrinkled. A thread of cotton tickled unbearably. Something tugged at her wrist as she attempted to scratch the spot. She tugged again. “Hrrr?”
“Petal.”
A hand soothed her fevered forehead.
A hand she had dreamed about too many times to count.
Fingers stroked her forehead in a way that to a person starved for most of her life for such a touch, screamed, ‘Mother!’
She had to be dreaming.
The dream, however, supplied a cooling cloth for her sweating forehead. It added Zuziana’s concerned voice that murmured in a language that seemed to make no sense. Motherly tones replied gently. Her senses swam. Too many herbs to process, each scent as lucid as crystal, in total contrast to the pile of prekki-fruit mush that was her brain. Fresh linens. Astringent antiseptics. Perfume? Was that dorlis flower perfume?
Who did she knew that wore that perfume?
Her bedclothes itched worse than an attack of fire-ants. Again she tried to move, but the voices burbled like an unseen stream trying to tell her watery secrets. She was tied down!
Aranya moaned, “Hurgh – arg – what?”
Finally! Speech that actually made sense. Whose captive was she? Mercy, these bedclothes! This prickling alone would kill her. In desperation, Aranya tried to scratch herself with her foot, and that was a very, very bad idea indeed. She collapsed in a perspiring, gasping, enervated heap. Why so weak? This was ridiculous! Why could she not … see? Or even hear properly? Was there padding over her ears? Great Islands, these captors were devious!
Surely Thoralian had not returned in some other form to plague her?
“Aranya, petal,” Izariela whispered over her. “Be at peace.”
“This is murder!” she growled.
Izariela?
“Ah … Mom? No. Is that truly –”
“And Princess Stuporously Snores-a-lot is awake at last,” Zuziana snorted with typical Remoyan lack of tact.
How could she begin to believe? Yet her pulse danced.
Long-cherished laughter bubbled over her. “Aye, petal. I am Izariela. You are safe, my precious child – well, all my memories insist that you are still my little girl, yet you are a woman grown – but Aranya, you mustn’t move, or scratch, or anything. The healing is as yet at too delicate a stage.”
“Healing?”
Her thoughts seemed muzzled, unable to nibble at any implications.
“Healing, petal. You are healing.” Someone nearby stifled a sob. “As am I, slowly. You are healing all over.” Fingers gripped hers, tightly enough to hurt. No dream? Head and heart, however, simply refused to operate in tandem. “You are in Immadia’s Palace. I am seated in a wheelchair at your bedside. They aren’t sure if I’ll ever walk again. But you … Aranya, it appears you will be fully restored. Nobody’s even quite sure what happened, are they, Zuziana?”
“Something involving crazed Shapeshifter powers, tears, your healing and an iridium flare –” Zuziana’s breath snagged in a way that Aranya knew she was weeping “– and it burned, petal – it burned the scars right off of you. And out of you.”
She heard the words. All her brain could think was, ‘huh?’
Purified? Had she passed through the crucible of Iridiana’s forge-fires, and returned whole? Impossible!
Izariela explained, “That’s why you’re so weak. You
r natural healing power is working twenty-seven hours a day to fix … well, everything, as best I can tell.”
“Your Mom’s healing gift is as yet, very weak,” Zip added. For the record, petal, she doesn’t know about Iridiana as yet. We judged her heart too weak to handle the shock. Not until you returned from your coma … it’s been five days, Aranya! We were terrified.
She was numb. Unspeaking.
“Say something, petal,” her mother urged. “Aren’t you happy?”
Someone was making a very strange noise. After a moment, Aranya realised it was her, and they thought she was choking. People were shouting, rustling, checking what she belatedly realised were bandages covering most of her body. She wanted to wave them off, but that was pointless, wasn’t it? She would rather die than wake to her old reality. Maybe this was just too foolish, and far too fragile, to be a dream. Maybe this was the new …
Aranya slumped upon her pillow-roll, and began to laugh.
“Alright, she’s now leaped gaily off the Isle of Sanity,” Zip said acidly.
“Petal?” For a convalescent, Izariela had a grip worthy of her Dragoness’ nature.
She laughed so hard her stomach began to cramp, and that hurt so badly that tears flowed and soaked her eye bandages.
Mother. Thou, Izariela!
Aranya’s whole heart was in those simple words; the nuances of her Dragonish far exceeding in intricacy and intimacy and affection any words she had spoken in her life to date.
Tranquillity settled upon the room.
Thou, Aranya … o thou! Izariela sobbed in exultation.
Aranya rasped, “Take off these bandages. I want – I need – to see my mother.”
Under cover of a doctor arriving to see to the bandages and familiar voices outside the door conversing in low ‘don’t disturb the sick’ voices, Aranya communicated quickly with Zip. No, Iridiana had not revealed herself. She had insisted upon waiting for her twin. Aye, Izariela was weak. Aye, Ardan was charging through the Palace scattering servants to the winds as they spoke. Overexcitement ruled, but her friends were tiptoeing about her bed – and how under the heavens had Iridiana managed to keep her secret from their mother for five whole days without spontaneously combusting … ah, that would be, resuming her Human form?
Chaotically speaking.
Forty endless seconds or so later, she saw fuzzy blobs moving about a blurry space.
Perfect. Aranya cleared her throat. “Ah, so, exactly how much did you burn out of me, Iridiana?” And how in Fra’anior’s name do we break the news of you to our mother? Any clever plans, Nyahi?
Uh … not so much, her twin admitted.
You’re a rotten big sister, leaving me to do all the work.
Listen, you ingrate, who exactly do you think carved up Thoralian for you? That’s right! Me. That sore wrist you’re feeling there? That’s battle fatigue –
Aranya had to chuckle. Alright, you win already. I’m in no state to even start an argument with you.
A dragonet’s paw stroked her foot gently. When did you become such a pushover? I’m deeply suspicious of your motives at this point.
This is my apology for worrying the Chaos out of you for five days.
Her eyes were not the best. They watered badly as she blinked fast, then slow, and the scene faded from unfocussed to severely unfocussed and back again. All she could tell was that someone with identical hair was sitting next to her, and the brown blob wearing a teal dress was Zuziana, and now the dark thing elbowing his way through the crowded doorway was Ardan.
Then, she found a trickle of healing stealing up her spine. Hers? Or Izariela’s? The warmth flooded into her face. Her eyes at last focussed, shifting from Ardan’s agog face – ‘I love you’ she mouthed to him – to her mother’s anxious expression.
Sweetness.
This was real. This was the smile that she had been treasuring up in her heart all these years. Radiance flooded the room. Her dream had come true.
“Oh my … stars,” Izariela laughed. Leaning dizzily out of her chair, she kissed Aranya upon the forehead. “My little star.”
“Mom, I see you.”
* * * *
Dawn had barely brushed the horizon with its first flush of fuchsia and crimson when the servants set Izariela’s wheelchair upon the stonework at the top of the fully restored tower named after her. They withdrew discreetly.
Moving behind his first wife, King Beran grasped the handle rail and gently manoeuvred the chair forward, toward where Aranya stood at the edge of the battlement, watching the dawn. Her unbound hair flowed down her back, tousled by the breeze. Her newly smooth skin tingled where the lesions had been cauterised; excised as if they had never been, and reclothed in new flesh. Aranya, reincarnate, had chosen to wear the royal purple for this occasion, but in a Ha’athiorian lace-train style. For her part she knew Izariela would be wearing a soft Helyon silk gown, with thick wrappings added against the early chill. Daughterly orders. Without turning, Aranya discreetly checked her temperature and supplied a trickle of additional warmth.
Inwardly, she gathered her courage.
“A beautiful morning for a surprise,” Izariela query-commented.
Aranya wore Iridiana upon her right wrist, right against her pulse. The diamonds quivered in perfect time with her own speeding heart rate. So much hinged upon this moment. Fear and hope commingled; plugging her throat with hot emotions. Was this harder than fighting Thoralian? Maybe.
She whirled impetuously. “So Mom, Dad and I have a surprise for you. Glad you’re sitting down for this one. It’s so huge, you might just fall off your chair. Ready?”
Izariela said, “You’re trembling, Aranyi.”
“I am? So I am.”
Bite the lip. Find words, any words, to express her heart.
Aranya said, “While I was up at the Mystic Moon, I spoke to our ancestors. You have great-stars, Mom – grandparents called Astralior and Quinesstaralia, and I know that’s going to take a great deal of explaining, but that’s not what this morning is about.” She stole a glance. Izariela sat motionless, but Aranya could read thae shock in her eyes. Oh, Mom! Tenderly, she said, “Here’s the thing. Do you remember when you exclaimed, ‘Oh my stars’?” She emphasised the plural a second time. “Stars.”
Izariela’s brow furrowed. “Ah … aye. Aye, I do. I thought – a slip of the –”
Bending down, Aranya picked up a small leather satchel she had left beside the battlement. She opened the top flap and slipped out a second dress, identical to her own. She said, “In the battle with Thoralian, as we told you, Pip took part. She came into her heritage as a Star Dragoness and that is why our family adopted her.”
“Right,” said her mother. “I understand the lore – and I fully welcomed her, as did Silha. I stand by my words. I will treat her as my own. She is mine.”
“Thank you, Mom.”
Beran’s hand clasped her shoulder. “Aye.”
Aranya whispered, “What if there were three stars up there that day?”
She shook out the dress, holding it up to the light. Her mother smiled a wan, puzzled little quirk of the lips, but said nothing.
“It took three Star Dragonesses working together to defeat Thoralian. What if that third star were here with us, right now – right on this battlement? It is so.” Aranya touched the diamond bracelet meaningfully. “Mom, she is a Chaos Shifter – a Shapeshifter of many forms, just as I am a Star Dragoness of many colours.”
Izariela’s jaw dropped. “What – what are you saying, Aranyi?”
“Mom, I would like you to meet Iridiana.”
Nyahi. Nyahi, now.
Her mother stared at the dress as if she beheld her own displaced soul.
The bracelet shivered. Then, with a whoosh of displaced air, the fabric fluttered as though caught by a warm zephyr, only this zephyr was called Iridiana and she was as real, and whole, and beautiful as she had always been.
“Mom, I have a twin sister.”
&nb
sp; Izariela’s hands flew to her mouth. “Oh! Oh my … she’s … oh my soul!” Her gaze searched Nyahi up and down, and she knew. Just as Aranya had known, so the truth struck her mother like Fra’anior’s own paw. “It … can’t be true!”
Yet her voice, her eyes, her heart all said the opposite.
“Iridiana, this is Izariela, your mother.” Aranya had to pause to catch her breath. “Mom, about twenty-two years ago, someone paid an uistarikolalion egg stealer from Herimor to steal an eggling from your womb. I found Iridiana in Herimor. She’s the third of our trio, Mom. She’s also a Star Dragoness. Do you remember, maybe …”
Izariela wailed, “Oh! Oh! I always thought – I had dreamed – my baby – how – oh my baby, my lost one, I –” I GRIEVE … OOOOOOOOO!!
A Star Dragoness’ heart-rending cry split the very fabric of the dawn, causing even the twin suns to shiver.
Izariela flung out her arms, tottering to her feet before anyone could stop her. “Come to me, my – I’m so sorry, my precious, precious baby – oh, forgive – oh Fra’anior, what have I done … and lost … my baby!”
In a flash, the sisters caught their mother as she collapsed.
Almost insensate, Izariela moaned, “I heard a second – in the womb. A presence. So tiny, unformed … but I didn’t believe! My baby, my eggling, my love, how can you ever –”
Aranya strengthened her with a tender caress.
“Because I choose to forgive you. I have already,” Iridiana said simply, but tears tracked down her cheeks. Their eyes locked as if they never wanted to let each other go. She sobbed, “You are my mother. Mine! I’d cross the Universe for you, never mind this little world. Mom … I love you, forever.”
“My treasure, how I adore you …”
Iridiana breathed, Thou, Izariela! Thou, mine beloved shell mother.
Thou, art the beloved radiance of mine heart. O precious daughter, home at last! Ah, how mine soul rises …
Aranya held her so close. “Mom, now it’s you who is shining.”
Beran said, “That’s what stars do.”
The End
The Shapeshifter Dragons series ends here. I hope you’ve enjoyed a shining Dragonride!
