A Warrant of Wyverns

by Michael Angel

  Almost all? I put that question back onto the list for a moment. Nagura let out another keening sigh before writing more urgently, making the marker skid across the whiteboard.

  “We did not have the next portion of the Codex put into pictures above,” she said heavily. “Nor the final one. It was enough to live through the second part, and then return to the deepest of sleep with the knowledge of the third hanging over us like a doom.”

  “You mean the ‘Fall’,” Galen supplied. “And the ‘Future’.”

  “Yes. Kyratha wrote it as a fable, one that mimicked the fate of our realms. She thought of our cities as related as we were, as brood-sisters. She wrote how the Eternal Mother promised that the twin sisters of Keshali and Teyana were to remain eternal – so long as they remained faithful to the principles of the Risen.

  “Yet in the story, the sister named Keshali was unfaithful. For her penance, she was blasted into dust. Teyana remained pure and whole, and became the holy center of the universe. But she could not escape her sister’s fate, for they were too well tied, tied by bonds of kinship. Two fell as one, and as one they fell into darkness.”

  Nagura fell silent, deep in her thoughts.

  “It’s a fine story,” I finally said. “And one that I could never have translated, not with my poor language skills. But I’m sorry, Nagura. I don’t know what that story means.”

  The wyvern queen raised her head towards the ceiling for a moment. The amber of her eyes glistened as she groped for her whiteboard and wrote slowly, trying to keep her talons steady.

  “It means that we failed our purpose as queen. That I chose to sleep when the darkness finally fell, and have awoken just as the darkness comes once again.” She let out a reptilian croak, the best a wyvern could do to sob, and spoke just a little more. “We beg you, allow us to eat and rest for just a brief time. The last part can be told away from this place. We feel the weight of memory here, the weight of all our smashed eggs, all our tomorrows taken from us.”

  “I shall bear thee up,” Shaw said, quietly but firmly. The griffin pressed his furry flank to Nagura’s scaly one before she sagged to the floor. Liam and Galen exchanged looks of surprise, but didn’t say a word.

  Together, griffin and wyvern staggered back out the way they came.

  “Shaw may need my help,” Liam declared suddenly. “For his charge is rather large.”

  The fayleene trotted off in their wake, but Galen remained by my side. He stroked his chin as if in deep contemplation.

  I threw him a curious glance. “A golden crown for your thoughts, my friend.”

  The Wizard pursed his lips before answering. “Something rather strange occurred to me. I confess that it is forcing me to re-evaluate my view of this world.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ancient species roamed this world long before human or centaur.” He gestured towards the still-glimmering mosaic of wyverns, dragons, phoenix, and demons above. “This world never belonged to us. It belonged to them.”

  “It was quite some time ago.”

  “True,” he said, with a worried tap of a forehoof. “Yet, I can only wonder.”

  “About what, Galen?”

  “About how long we have, Dayna. Before they take it back.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  A night breeze whistled through Keshali’s crumbled walls. It carried the faint, conflicting smells of carrion and mountain sage as it did so. The scent of an open grave that someone had tried to gloss over with a bag of herbal potpourri.

  The moon had finally risen completely, spilling milky light across the ruined courtyard, casting harsh shadows across fallen blocks of stone. And fallen bodies.

  Taken as a whole, the effect might have been spooky. Might have been, had I not been in the company of three combat-seasoned friends, and a queen-sized wyvern.

  Nagura half-curled by the edge of the fire, her book set to one side as she gnawed on one of Shaw’s roast boar. The griffin slid the second pig off the spit and tore into his own repast. Liam sat nearby with his long cervine legs folded underneath his body, eyes averted from his friend’s enthusiastic dining.

  Galen pulled a pair of green apples from his saddle bag and offered me one, which I accepted gladly. We shared a silent repast, broken only by the sound of tearing flesh or the tart crunch of fresh fruit. It felt strange to have a meal without the usual banter between my friends. But while we all wanted to hear what else Nagura might say, no one wanted to prod her after all she’d been through.

  The Wizard made a surprised sound as soon as he swallowed the last well-chewed bite of his apple. I looked up, curious as to what he had to say. Wrapping the core in a piece of cloth, he tucked it away before he spoke.

  “My mind must be slipping a cog or two with all that has transpired,” he admitted. “I have taken it upon myself to keep the Regent apprised of our progress. He in turn mentioned that the knights of the Order of the Ermine have returned as of this afternoon.”

  “I was hoping we’d get some news,” I said.

  “Indeed. And the news to my mind is good, for a change. They have each set up their ‘bee hives’ and have set the carpenters of their demesnes to work building yet more.”

  “That’s something, at least.”

  The wyvern queen perked up at our words. She set aside the bloody remnants of her meal and canted her spiked head to one side. Despite her fearsome appearance, the movement made her look more than a little like a curious canine.

  “You have made us wonder,” Nagura wrote. “Are your ‘hives’ the reason you asked if we Hakseeka live like bees?”

  “I think it’s just coincidence,” I said. Though, part of me wondered at that. I’d learned that a lot that looked coincidental in Andeluvia was usually part of a larger pattern. “I’ve been looking into bee keeping as a way to pay some old debts. Debts left to me by people long gone.”

  The wyvern looked mournfully into the fire at my reply. Her eyes took on a strange cast, as if she were looking through the flames into something from long ago. The quiet scribble of marker on white board punctuated her words.

  “There are those who said that we did not honor the debts paid by those Risen in times past,” she began. “That as we did not, we were unfaithful. That we did not keep to the old ways, the sacred rituals. But that story, the one of the two sisters, is a lie. We respected the sacred ways, paid homage as due. And the magic still failed.”

  Nagura fell silent again for a long while, simply staring quietly into the fire. The silence was beginning to become awkward when Galen spoke up.

  “I am a fellow practitioner of magic,” he stated calmly. “Knowledge means a great deal to me, Nagura. I wish to know what kind of magic ‘failed’, and how.”

  “The magic we speak of is the kind bequeathed to us from the Hearts of the Mother. It is the source of all Hakseeka magic, the kind we used to weave a protective spell about this city before we slept.”

  Galen looked astounded. “Then your magic has not failed. Through all these centuries, it may have faded, but I could still detect it. It shields this place to this day. This speaks to the immense power you still hold.”

  Liam nodded firmly at that. It did explain the strange magic traces the Wizard had detected and why no insects had arrived to help decompose the wyvern corpses.

  The wyvern queen let out a reptilian snort. “A trifle. The sorcery we speak of is that which sustains anrakira. That magic began failing us only a few short decades after our triumph against the Creatures of the Dark. More and more of the Hakseeka no longer followed the way of Light.”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of Nagura’s last statement. From what I could tell, ‘anrakira’ was essentially an idea of togetherness, that the wyverns could work closely together in harmony. It was how they created a civilization, one based on cities.

  How was magic supposed to sustain the concept of ‘civilization’?

  “Wait a minute,” I said, as a terrible suspicion arose in my mi
nd. “Did your people decide not to follow the idea of anrakira? Was it a conscious choice?”

  “No, they did not make a choice, they were not able to make a choice. As our magic began to fail, more Hakseeka could not practice anrakira anymore. They could not conceive of it, let alone follow it.”

  My voice dropped almost to a whisper. “You mean…they weren’t ‘Raised’ anymore.”

  “They were not.” Nagura’s voice shook along with the pen as it touched the board. “They were lesser things. Wild things.”

  Galen sputtered for a moment before he found his voice. “How might that even be possible? Perchance, say that a centaur foal wasn’t taught to read…that doesn’t make them any less intelligent. And it certainly doesn’t make them wild! Or non-sentient!”

  I kept a poker face at that comment. The Wizard’s first thought had hinged upon his own experience. His sister had been thought less than intelligent due to an unrecognized learning disability. Before I could say anything, my other two friends chimed in.

  “I have never heard of such a thing,” Liam said firmly. “That would be like a fayleene being born as a…simple woodland deer.”

  The Protector of the Forest shuddered with revulsion at the thought.

  “Aye, ‘tis strange,” Shaw added. “Yet to mine own ears, it makes sense.”

  Liam stared at him. “It does? How in all that is green and good does it make sense?”

  The griffin met the wyvern queen’s eyes before he spoke.

  “Thou knowest that I have met creatures with thy likeness in battle many times before,” he said bluntly. Nagura gave the tiniest of nods, so he went on. “Yet they are not like thee. They are cunning animals, to be sure, and the fiercest of foes. But they show no glint of thought in their eyes. They do not make pictures in stone and crystal. Wyverns they may be, but they are not thy people – not Hakseeka. They are feral.”

  “‘Feral’ is as good a word for our fallen children as any,” Nagura finally said, and her spiked head hung low. “In each generation, fewer and fewer Risen were born. Ferals were all that came of our eggs, or the ones from individual matings. This horrible fate began happening to our sister to the east as well.”

  Words from the fable told in the Codex instantly sprang into my mind.

  Keshali was unfaithful…Teyana remained pure and whole. But she could not escape her sister’s fate. Tied by bonds of kinship. Two fell as one, and as one they fell into darkness.

  “I just don’t see how you were responsible,” I insisted, before turning to Galen. “There could be another explanation, couldn’t there?”

  “It is possible,” the Wizard allowed. “Yet I have never heard of magic deserting an entire people before.”

  “We saw nothing but darkness ahead,” Nagura wrote. “So, we sent our sister all of our holiest relics and prepared the Risen that remained for the long sleep. Before we committed ourselves to that deepest of slumbers, we saw Kyratha one last time. She read to us the last part of her Codex, her vision. Of what might come to pass in our future.”

  “Your future,” Liam murmured. “Our present.”

  “Our sister told us that awareness would come to the entire hive at once. But alas, she saw two potential futures. In one, our slumber would be broken when we sipped the air of purity, so that we would awake into a time where Light reigned. But in the other, our slumber would be broken as we drowned in a sea of poison. And so, we would awake into a time where the Darkness had risen.”

  “Oh, God,” I groaned. Those containers of chlorine had contained the most lethal poison that Andeluvia had yet seen.

  “Only once we woke would we know our true role,” Nagura continued. “Only once we tasted the air would we know that it was time.”

  My mouth went dry. “Time for what?”

  The wyvern queen shifted her warm amber gaze from Grimshaw back over to me.

  “That it was time for the world to change. That it was time for the reckoning.”

  Despite the warmth of the fire, Nagura’s words sent a chill down my spine.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The moon continued to rise above the shattered remains of the city. Liam waited patiently until the wyvern queen and her griffin companion had finished their meals. Only when the roast boar carcasses had been consumed down to the bone did he speak up.

  I have a question,” he stated. “Nagura, you have been asleep a great while. Could there not be others of your kind out there? That is, other ‘Raised’ wyverns? Fellow Hakseeka?”

  Nagura’s expression looked as glum as a spike-ringed reptilian face could get.

  “We do not think so,” she wrote. “We feel, deep within our very scales, that the time of the Hakseeka is long past. We would hear it on the wind if there were more of our kind. Only the feral remain.”

  “It just seems…well, you have seen so little of the world since your waking. How can you be so sure that no Hakseeka remain?”

  Nagura paused a few moments before answering, as if gathering up her limited strength.

  “Even before the long sleep, we saw our daughters go feral. Many became queens. Queens of feral hives. All they had left were the basest of instincts. Consume. Ravage. Breed. Some even lost their wings and forgot the sky.”

  “Aye,” Shaw agreed. “The feral hives yet harry mine own aerie and the humans of Kescar.”

  A thought occurred to me. I looked over to Galen as I spoke. His burgundy-wine jacket looked almost black in the firelight, while his bell-shaped silver buttons glowed blood red.

  “If some wyverns lost their wings,” I reasoned, “those could be the creatures that attacked and killed two centaurs on patrol near Bloodwine Holt. The patrol that was led by Sir Yaegar.”

  The Wizard scratched his chin. “A most provocative idea. I shall have to relay that thought to my sister. Rikka’s been promoted to Yaegar’s former position as First Hunter of Bloodwine Holt.”

  “Good,” I said, with a yawn and a stretch. “She’s got a job that’s perfectly suited to her talents.”

  The fire grew low after that, along with my eyelids.

  It wasn’t an easy night. Not for me, at least.

  It could have been the need to bed down in a ruined city near a field of decaying corpses, but I didn’t think that was it. Galen restored his Shield of Turning to block out any odor, for starters.

  Lack of comfort wasn’t an issue either. I had a cloak to use as a makeshift blanket and a handy griffin warrior to lean against. I’d learned from my time at the Reykajar aerie that Shaw’s warm flank made an excellent head-and-shoulder rest.

  All I knew was that my sleep was broken by uneasy dreams. Dreams of monsters and zombies and being hunted in dark spaces.

  I didn’t wake until I felt a warm hand gently shake my shoulder.

  I woke with a start from yet another troubled dream.

  “What?” I gasped, then blinked as I made out the Wizard’s face against the bright sunlight. “Galen, what is it?”

  “Be at ease,” he reassured me. “It is morning. We have fruit and oat cakes for a quick repast, and then we must leave.”

  “Right, right,” I said, as I rubbed my eyes and looked around blearily. Nagura and the Protector of the Forest were up on a nearby battlement, looking off into the distance. To my surprise, where Shaw had rested against my back, someone had slipped in a flat, sun-warmed stone.

  I guess I had slept more deeply than I thought.

  Galen offered me my meal by unwrapping a little cloth bag. I sat up, stretched, and accepted the proffered food. I chewed my way through another apple and a dense, pastry-like mass of grain as he filled me in.

  “Grimshaw asked me to impress upon you his apologies for leaving your side,” he began. “Just before dawn, Liam and Nagura spotted a faint dust trail to the north, so he had to leave and investigate the cause.”

  “Centaurs?” I asked, between bites. I got a nod in reply. “Sounds like Sir Leydelf and his friends moved faster than we thought.”

/>   “Indeed. However, we are in no immediate danger. Shaw was able to ascertain that the centaur war party only carried short bows.” Galen quirked a grin as he added, “So, our resident avian warrior has been toying with them for the last hour or so, until we were ready to leave.”

  I finished the last of my oatcake and brushed the crumbs off my cloak as I got up. “Toying with…you weren’t waiting on me, were you?”

  He shook his head. “I bear sole responsibility for that, in truth. I’ve been using magic to speak with Regent Magnus in detail so that he can get the Royal Court ready for our arrival.”

  I blinked. “Wait a minute. So he can–”

  “Apparently, Magnus is as leery of wyverns as Fitzwilliam. He commanded me to transport Queen Nagura directly to the palace courtyard so that he can ascertain the nature of the threat and decide her fate.”

  I considered that. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that command. It had the ring of finality about it.

  Galen put out his hand again, resting it reassuringly on my shoulder. “I was troubled as well, Dayna. But Magnus assured me that he will treat Nagura as a fellow monarch of rank. That is why he will have much of the Royal Court present, and most certainly without their armed bodyguards. He is aware of the feelings many knights harbor towards wyverns.”

  “Have you spoken with Nagura about this?”

  “In detail. She has decided to trust in the mercy of my uncle. In truth, she feels that she has little choice. Remaining here is not an option. While stronger, she still cannot fly. Nor can she cross this wasteland on foot without our aid.”

  With a tic-tac of cloven hooves and a slither of scale, Liam and Nagura carefully descended one of the half-ruined sets of stone steps and rejoined us. The wyvern monarch bowed to me in greeting, while Liam trotted up and gave me a quick bow.

  “My griffin friend has been having a bit too much fun with the centaurs,” he chuckled. “Shaw’s been leading them in circles out there, enticing them by flying just outside the range of their arrows.”