L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future 34

by L. Ron Hubbard

  I opened my mouth to agree with him. A mental image of Tyrell being tortured stopped me. “We can’t let them keep getting away with it,” I said instead. “If we’re defeated, it could be generations before people rise up again. Maybe never. I can’t live in that world.”

  Aiden stared at us, a fire in his eyes. His breathing came heavier. His hands clenched into fists.

  “You unbelievable idiots. You’re damned if you go down this path. You’re all damned, and you’re doing it to yourselves.”

  “Aiden, we’re losing. We have to try.” I extended a hand, not used to his opposition. He jerked away from me.

  “No. The hell with this. I’m outta here. Damn yourself by yourself.”

  He turned and stormed out. The door creaked slowly in his wake, as if buffeted by the fury of his passing.

  “He’ll come around,” I told the group, ignoring the pinch of doubt in my guts. “I’ll bring him over.”

  Zoe and Marcus murmured agreement.

  Liam began the summoning. He knew exactly what he was doing; he’d been preparing for weeks. Within minutes the athame sliced over my palm. The blade split the skin neatly, drawing a perfect red line that wept into the bowl. It mingled with Liam’s, Zoe’s, and Marcus’s. I stared at it as Liam worked, a buzzing in my head. Or was it in the room? It shifted, doubled, spawned low hums.

  The gold ring thinned, evaporating, and the air grew heavy with an alien presence. Not just the air. Everything grew heavy—my clothes, my body. Breath came hard. The light from the bulb distorted and played over the walls as if filtered through choppy waters. A foreign mental process shoved against my mind, pushing my thoughts in unwelcome directions.

  I glanced at Zoe. Under the distorted light her spiked hair looked like tarantula tufts. Strange shadows shifted behind her, giving her the appearance of having extra limbs. I saw a spider whose life consisted of the constant knitting of webs of emotional dependence, until her entire identity was a tangled social net and the upkeep it required. She crept into the lives of others, insinuating herself under the guise of extroverted friendship. Only by manipulating people did she accomplish anything.

  This was the first gift of the dragons—the dragon sight. It strips away the facades we monkeys erect to make ourselves feel noble and pure. It reveals that we are simply biological constructs, responding to incentives, executing crude survival strategies. I looked to Marcus. I saw him whither into little more than a fluttering shadow. Unable to make his own way in a confusing world, he leached vitality from his brother’s desperation. Dark tendrils slipped from his lethifold form, grasped after Liam, hanging onto another’s life since he couldn’t direct his own.

  Liam had become a shimmering mirage in the wavering light, almost not there at all. His defiance paled into the flailings of a man who couldn’t compete with his peers. He was plain, so he mutilated his face with pounds of metal. His voice couldn’t soar, so he screamed and growled instead. Everywhere that he couldn’t excel, he carved out his own pool of excess. He couldn’t even fight the revolution with his natural talents, so he’d do it as a dragon-summoner.

  I’d lived in a dream world where people ran on ideals. The dragon sight stripped that away, showed us our true motivations. I refused to look at myself.

  As we gazed at each other, the light stabilized, and the droning hums and buzzes shifted. Wove together. They coalesced into a scratchy whisper—the dragon’s murmurings, the second gift. The invisible presence hooked its claws into my psyche. From now on, a part of it would be with me, always. My chest swelled with power as the creature spoke. It began—

  If you wish to prevail against dragons, this is what you must do …

  We kept our dragon sight suppressed most of the time. Permanently living in a world stripped of its masks would have driven anyone crazy. I did use the dragon sight on Aiden later that week, though, after five days of him refusing to take my calls or respond to my texts. I’d have done it sooner, but I had trouble tracking him down. I saw an insubstantial, hollow-boned thing that lived vicariously through the emotions of others. He rejoiced when I took my pleasure from him. He exulted in my passion when I raged against the dragons. But above all, he was addicted to the concentrated distillation of emotion that made up primal music. Soaring high in that jet stream was the only time he felt alive.

  Immediately I found a new drummer for Against Dragons. As we released new music, Aiden spiraled in closer around me, pulled by a gale of desire, until all I had to do was reach out and pluck him back in. I got what I wanted, but it left a sour taste in my mouth. I’d seen him as a biological construct responding to incentives, rather than a person. I didn’t use the dragon sight on him again.

  Months later, I sat on the remains of a couch in the remains of an apartment, my guitar in my lap. I fingered the strings absently. Sunlight streamed in from glass sliding doors, still intact, that led out to a balcony twelve stories above an alley strewn with trash. From the kitchen came the smells of Aiden frying us eggs. I pondered, examining the dragon problem, again. For their entire existence, dragons lived only as long as they produced wealth for their summoners. Failure to do so meant “banishment.” Death. A single unprofitable year could kill a dragon, regardless of how great the rewards for sacrifice would be five years down the line. With incentives like that, no wonder they scorched the earth to achieve the results we demanded. They were only responding to the survival pressures humanity had placed on them.

  A pang of regret cut me, knowing that I couldn’t discuss this sort of thing with Aiden anymore. He wouldn’t even talk about our Dragon-Eater. He couldn’t rejoin our cell, not being a summoner. Fortunately he was extremely valuable as the leader of my sub-cell, as our part of the resistance had flourished in the months following the summoning. Recruiting had skyrocketed. It became so much easier when we saw what motivated people, what kept them loyal, what they could be pushed to do. The dragon sight let us estimate what each member could contribute, how much they were worth. It brought us successes—devastating guerrilla strikes with very acceptable losses on our side. Success was the biggest draw of all. I couldn’t believe how quickly our ranks swelled.

  Even the smattering of recent failures were easily turned into rousing stories of sacrifice. Nothing fired up our people like a strong martyr.

  Aiden emerged from the kitchen carrying two plates loaded with greasy eggs and sausage. A niggling irritation scampered in my mind, scratching away at the corners of my brain like a rat. It nipped at my thoughts, but every time I looked for it, there were only tattered worries and rodent droppings.

  Aiden’s eyes caught the sunlight, sparkling cerulean blue. I smiled. They brought me back into the living, breathing world. He didn’t smile back, but I didn’t mind.

  “Hey, sexy boy,” I greeted, and set my guitar aside. He sat down by me mutely and handed me a plate. I finally noticed his distant expression, his troubled brow. A weight of guilt smothered my hunger. How long had he been like this? I’d been ignoring him again, fretting over last week’s barely-salvaged disaster.

  “Did I keep you up too late last night?” I asked.

  “It’s not that. I woke up dreaming of Zoe again.”

  “Oh.” I crossed myself. “Crap, sorry.”

  “I keep trying to picture her last moments.” His voice came timid, as if scared to confide in me. That hurt. I pushed down the urge to use my dragon sight. “I wonder if she was terrified when she ran for the explosives. Was she already shot and bleeding out? Or did she detonate them defiantly, triumphantly? I think I like that better. I can see her with a detonator in hand, yelling at the top of her lungs that they’ll never take her alive.” A slight smile twisted his face. “Took a hell of a lot of pigs with her.”

  I nodded and ignored the piece of me searching for an answer that would make it better. Instead I forced up the core of dread that had been smoldering inside me for weeks, hot coals
of regret. They burned me when I spoke. “It wasn’t a fair trade.”

  A strong knock startled us. The front door swung open and Liam stepped inside, eyes hard. His brother Marcus followed, as well as a man I didn’t recognize. The dragon whispered inside me—he’s brought along extra muscle. Something is going down.

  “Liam?” I asked as he closed the door behind them. “Who’s this?”

  Liam pursed his lips. His eyes moved to Aiden, his face darkened. That pestering rat at the back of my mind started scurrying again.

  “Jo, why haven’t you been freaking out about our failures over the last month?”

  I hesitated, felt the dragon’s cunning prodding my thoughts. “Our estimates are off. We’re absorbing the data and adjusting our probabilities. It happens. We’ll just have to be more conservative for a while.”

  Scratch, scratch, scratch. Gnaw, gnaw, gnaw.

  “They’re off in a consistent way,” Liam said. “It looks like chaos at first, until you change a simple basic assumption. Then it becomes a predictable flaw.”

  Aiden’s hand came to rest on my hip. “What are you trying to say?” he asked.

  Claw, claw, claw. Bite, bite, bite.

  Liam pierced me with a stare. “You should be able to see it.”

  The rat in my mind leaped at his words, and rapidly everything tumbled into place.

  Don’t look at the data in one pool—split it into two populations. The operations I’m not involved in, failing and succeeding roughly at the rate expected.

  The operations I do have a hand in still succeeding often enough, but at a lower rate. Those that do succeed get us less supplies, less info, or cost more lives than expected. Enough success to keep us in the game, but costly enough to slowly bleed us dry.

  He was right, I should have been the first to see it. The data is explained if I’m a mole, working with the old dragons to rot us away from inside.

  But if they were convinced that I’m a mole, I’d be dead right now, came the whisper. The fact that they were here, appealing to me, was evidence they’d reached a different conclusion.

  A chill spread from where Aiden’s hand rested on my hip. Ice crept up my spine and sunk claws into my chest. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe. I turned around to look at Aiden.

  “What’s up?” he asked, confusion in his eyes.

  I looked through the dragon sight. Before me sat a man who only ever saw my hunched back as part of what made me who I am. I wasn’t ugly to him. That was rare enough, but out of all the men who weren’t turned off by me, how many would I be compatible with? How many took sex the way I loved to give it? How many would be caring and sweet, and love my bitchiness and aggression? How many could know all of me, and love me anyway?

  No one else. I couldn’t lose him.

  So when I’d realized what was happening, I’d suppressed that knowledge. I knew, somewhere, what he’d done. The knowledge skittered in my mind like a rat in the walls. Hiding from sight but sometimes heard fleetingly, hatefully.

  I didn’t see Aiden below me. I saw my own lies. I’d endangered the resistance with my selfishness. Destroyed resources. Lost advantages. Killed Zoe.

  “Oh, God, no.” The words escaped like smoke rising from my lungs, trickling from my mouth. I stepped back, back, until I stood pressed against the wall.

  “Jo, are you okay?” my lies asked me, concern in his voice. He sounded ignorant, innocent. He lies well.

  I closed my eyes and banished the dragon sight. Around me the sounds of three men stepping forward, laying hands on Aiden. A brief struggle I couldn’t watch. My eyes burned.

  “Jo, help me! What the hell? Get off me!”

  I opened my eyes and gazed at Aiden, bent over, arms wrenched behind him. Confused, pained.

  “Why?” I asked. But I already knew. Biological constructs running off simple incentives. Aiden secretly working with the dragons for months? That kind of bitter dedication only came from someone deeply wronged.

  He drew a shallow breath. “Like you care,” he said quietly. “You declared humans don’t matter. Dragons are the true players in the world, humans are just the pieces they play with. Even you admitted it. Even you. I hope you burn.”

  We studied each other. He looked so fragile, bound up by angry friends. It hurt to see him like that. To see that in the end, he had been driven to the dragons, too. Aiden had realized that you could only seek vengeance upon a summoner by turning to a dragon of your own. When it came to something he truly, desperately wanted, even Aiden had succumbed. And I had set that precedent.

  “Get him out of here.”

  The other three wrestled him out the sliding door, onto the patio. It overlooked a dozen floors of empty space, terminating in concrete far below.

  Aiden struggled, thrashing. “No! Jo! Stop them! Please, Jo!”

  Slowly I shuffled up to him on the balcony. My hands trembled. The words scraped my throat on their way out:

  “Death to all collaborators.”

  They heaved him over the edge, and for one infinite split-second he hung in the air, surprise still on his face. Then gravity took him.

  He fell, screaming, shattering the serenity of the sky. As he plummeted something bulged under his shirt, something large and swelling. The shirt shredded at the shoulders and downy growths burst from his back.

  Long graceful wings, thick with snow-white feathers, erupted from the flesh. They snapped open, spanning yards across, and caught the air in a full embrace.

  Flee, My Pretty One by Alana Fletcher

  I should have been terrified. I should have recoiled in horror at this invasion into our material realm. The dragons had found a way to affect physical reality. The war was escalating, and there was no knowing where it would go now.

  Instead I sank to my knees in gratitude, choking on sobs of relief. Tears spilled down my cheeks. I watched Aiden through a liquid blur as he swooped up, up into the endless blue sky, free of me finally and forever.

  I haven’t seen him since. I am grateful. The war grows bloodier, and our world grows bizarre. Yet I still craft the most volcanic music I can at night. I scream it into the sky, my personal siren songs. Sometimes I think I can see Aiden’s figure far above, suspended from outstretched wings. I imagine he can hear my violent hymns, and I wonder how he would answer my rage. My accusations, my inquisitions.

  When the dragons are finally ground to dust, I fear I may snare him and find out.

  Passion and Profession

  by Ciruelo

  * * *

  Ciruelo Cabral was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His formal art training was limited to a few courses in drawing and advertising design, after which, at the age of eighteen, he immediately found work in an ad agency as an illustrator.

  At twenty-one, he became a freelance illustrator and started a career as a fantasy artist.

  In 1987, Ciruelo traveled to Europe and settled in Sitges near Barcelona, Spain. He then embarked on a search for publishers for his “worlds of fantasy,” eventually finding them in Spain, England, the United States and Germany, reaching an international audience.

  His US clients include George Lucas, for whom he illustrated the book covers of the trilogy Chronicles of the Shadow War.

  Ciruelo illustrated the cover for the tenth anniversary’s edition of the book Eragon, by Christopher Paolini and, in 2016, did over forty ink drawings for The Official Eragon Coloring Book. He also created a number of album covers including Steve Vai’s The 7th Song and The Elusive Light and Sound, and Adam & Eve for the Swedish rock band, The Flower Kings. He collaborated with Alejandro Jodorowsky on a comic story published in France and in the US. Other clients include Wizards of the Coast, TSR, Berkley, Tor, Warner, Ballantine, Heavy Metal magazine, Playboy magazine, etc.

  Another branch of Ciruelo’s art is petropictos, the art of painting on stone. He create
d this technique in 1995. It consists of painting on stones where he is able to discover three-dimensional images and create something halfway between a painting and a sculpture. The work captures the public’s attention in international exhibitions.

  At the beginning of 2017 he was invited to the judges’ panel for the Illustrators of the Future Contest.

  Passion and Profession

  When I’m asked the question, “When did you start drawing?” I like to answer with another question that makes more sense to me: “When did everybody stop drawing?”

  Everyone draws when they are kids because art is a natural form of self-expression. But most people abandon it at some point because they are prompted to do a “real” job within a society that considers art just a hobby and a leisure activity.

  I just continue to do the same thing I’ve been doing since childhood. After many years with a professional career, I still maintain the same passion for playing around with lines and colors that I had when I was a kid.

  Preserving that primal joy is a constant task I try to accomplish every day as well as stimulating my curiosity and my capacity for wonder.

  Those are exercises I advise for everybody in general.

  That may sound very romantic for someone who wants to start an artistic career in a world where the financial aspects are a priority, but that’s the way I approach my work.

  Let’s establish up front that professional artists are part of those few privileged people who love their job. I’m convinced that doing the job you love is more rewarding than anything. And that ultimately happiness leads to success. So, that’s an unbeatable factor when considering the pursuit of a career passion.

  For somebody who wants to be a freelance artist, this profession provides many other satisfactions, like the possibility to manage one’s own time, the opportunity to have a studio at home and the advantage of being one’s own boss.