Dragonoak

by Sam Farren

  I'd been wrong about the weather.

  But all the while, I was overly aware of where we were heading and what awaited us. I was anxious, but none of my muscles tensed and my chest hadn't tightened; there was nothing I could shake out, nothing for me to focus on.

  The wall came into view. A valley a mile-wide stood between us and the Bloodless Lands, space between the mountains filled in by my ancestors hundreds upon hundreds of years ago. The scale and age of it were the only impressive things about the wall. From a distance, I could tell how crudely it had been put together. It was more a pile of rocks than any wall I'd ever seen, as if meant to serve as more of a warning than an actual obstacle.

  “Why did you pull me off that rock?” I asked when we stopped by a stream to refill Kidira's waterskin. “I mean, you must've known what I was, otherwise you wouldn't have bothered.”

  “I knew what you were because Claire told me what you were,” she said, handing over the waterskin.

  Which didn't answer my question. I kept my eyes on her as I drank, having softened, hours ago, at the thought of her saving Claire. But now, all I could think about was the first time I went to Orinhal, and how the necromancer had been dragged from his home.

  “So you saved me because of Claire? Is that it?”

  She met my gaze and stepped towards me, saying, “I saved you because you were clearly not dead, not completely. You were suffering and I saw how best to put an end to that.”

  Kidira took the waterskin from me but didn't break eye-contact. I expected her to say something more. Expected her to shout, to put me in my place, but she just waited. Waited for me to say whatever it was that was driving me to clench my hands into fists and grit my teeth at her.

  “But you—you're asking me to go into the Bloodless Lands with you and I don't even know why! Maybe you just want to...” I paused, throwing my hands out to the sides. Kidira didn't flinch, didn't step back. She seemed patient, if anything. “The first time I went to Orinhal, they took a necromancer from his home because of you, and you made a spectacle of his execution for the Agadians ...”

  “Why is it so very important to you that I am some manner of monster?” Kidira asked. “I save your life and instead of thanking me, you demand to know what my ulterior motives are. Kouris has had your ear for too long.”

  I would've told her all about burning necromancers, if not for her comment about Kouris. It seemed more pressing, somehow, that she had spent all this time thinking Kouris had turned against her. I let my own frustration slip away in favour of defending Kouris, and doing that only brought anger around in turn.

  “Kouris has never said a bad word about you,” I said, and it drew a stony silence out of Kidira unlike anything I'd said before. I flinched at the thought of what was swirling behind her eyes and so said, as quietly as I could without murmuring, “... thank you for pulling me off that rock.”

  Because I'd still be there, if not for her. I'd still be blacking out and coming to, a little more aware of my surroundings each time; maybe I would've been able to pull myself off the rock within day, but I doubted my mind would've recovered as it barely had. Kidira turned with a sharp nod but all I could think of was the necromancer tied to a post, burnt over and over until only ash remained; all because the woman before me had willed it so.

  I didn't ask her why she'd done it. No explanation could've excused her actions.

  We carried on towards the wall. I had divided the last few years equally between the ocean and sand and had trouble finding my footing on steep, rocky inclines. More than once Kidira turned to me, offering out her hand to help hoist me up, and each time I took it, looking away from her as I did so. I didn't want to resent Kidira, but I didn't want to fall into the trap of trusting her, either. The fact that Kouris and Akela loved her did nothing to sway my thoughts. So many of us had loved Katja, and that had done nothing to shield me, in the end.

  We stood side-by-side at the foot of the wall, and without turning to me, Kidira said, “What you said earlier, about Kouris—is it true? Did they really execute her?”

  “Yes,” I said, and knew I needed to say no more. Kidira was looking down at her open hands again, fingers curling, very slightly, towards her palms. As if she was seeing something she'd once held.

  She cleared her throat and I looked towards her. Her eyes focused on her surroundings as she returned to the present, staring up at the rubble that passed for a wall. Throughout the fifteen hundred years that had been and gone since the end of the War, moss had grown atop the rocks and creeping vines and gnarled tree trunks had twisted free from between the chunks of wall in search of sunlight. Birds had made their nests there, and a handful of goats had beaten us to it. They were already halfway up the wall, chewing contentedly on leaves.

  I squinted up at the top, but the sun rested along the edge of the wall, brighter than I was. The glare punched holes of light into my vision that I had to blink away, but I was certain that nothing grew or lived upon the top of the wall.

  Kidira went ahead, leaving me to follow her lead. We could walk across the wall in places, hop from one rock to the next as easily as taking a single step on solid ground, but in other parts the moss had made the rocks slippery. We clung to low-hanging branches and gripped onto rocks above, Kidira never looking back at me in the same way I never looked back at the ground below. The rocks made my hands dusty in places, dug into my palms in others; I expected that Kidira's feet and hands were being torn as mine were but didn't dare to offer to heal her.

  The thought of the Bloodless Lands awaiting us behind the rock kept me in a trance, kept me moving. I could feel it. What's more, I could hear it; it sounded like every note Kondo-Kana hadn't sung to me. As we neared the top, I reached behind myself, making sure Claire's dragon-bone knife was still there. Tracing my nails across the grooves of the pattern, I meant to conquer the last stretch of the climb, meant to pull myself up across that last layer of rock, but Kidira took hold of my shoulder, stopping me.

  “Rowan,” she said calmly and clearly, looking right at me. I pushed myself back against the last of the rocks keeping me out of the Bloodless Land, terrified, for the first time, that I'd look down and wouldn't be able to help but return to the ground. “Rowan, I am going to ask a lot of you. I am going to ask to you be strong, to be what others cannot, to be brave—”

  My mind screamed jump! jump! and Kidira put a hand on my shoulder, grasp firm but not tight.

  “But especially to be brave,” she added in more of a murmur than anything else. “Do you understand? I won't stop you from turning back, from heading to Kyrindval.”

  Head back to Kyrindval. Take the easy way out. Never know what was in the Bloodless Lands, never know what Kidira needed of me. Have fallen all this way for nothing, have run my heart through just because I could.

  “I've come this far,” I said. “Might as well keep going.”

  Kidira didn't wait for hesitation to take its place upon my expression, nor did she ask me if I was certain. She carried on to the top of the wall, eyes fixed on the rocks as she climbed into the Bloodless Lands.

  I should've faltered, but my hands were grasping at the rocks, even as I told myself that I was woefully unprepared for what I was about to see. The destruction that hollowed out half a continent, three entire countries, was certain to have left scars scorched across the landscape; there would be crumbled ruins, angry read marks across the ground, and beyond all that, emptiness.

  When I pulled myself up over that last rock, emptiness was what I saw.

  Cities and cities of emptiness.

  My eyes scanned the horizon and I took it all in without processing any of it. The Bloodless Lands were pristine. From a distance, I saw spires and towers rising towards the sky, twisted into bizarre shapes, but far from warped; the architecture was strange to my eyes, familiar but all at once removed from anything I'd seen before. Nothing had cracked or crumbled; it was as though the cities had been frozen in time when they'd fallen out of mem
ory.

  If darkness and shadow had fallen across the Bloodless Lands, they would've been perfect. If night could claim the Bloodless Lands for its own, I could've been fooled into thinking there was life there. All I saw before me was pure, brilliant white, as though the light that surged through me had been made solid, tangible. I'd seen it before; the rocks I'd fallen to had been drenched in it, the floor of Katja's apartment had been riddled with the same, and before, the bridge of Isin's castle had cracked with the first signs of it.

  A single person was responsible for this. A person like me.

  I had died, I had been tortured, and yet the emptiness had not spread much further than my arms could reach. I couldn't fathom what Kondo-Kana had been forced to endure throughout the war. What had driven her to this.

  Kidira climbed down, back to the Bloodless Lands. I went on ahead, leaping from one rock to the next with no sense of caution, making each jump purely because I didn't think it through, because I let adrenaline push me down, down. I landed hard on the stretch of dirt that hadn't been touched by the corruption or cleansing that had taken the Bloodless Lands and charged off the very edge of it, where the ground abruptly turned white.

  “Do not stare into it,” Kidira called from behind me.

  “It's fine,” I murmured, unable to take my eyes off it. “Kondo-Kana said...”

  I crouched down, hands pressing to the border of the Bloodless Lands. It felt—it felt like nothing. I should've been touching dirt. The dry, untouched ground shifted beneath the toes of my boots as I knelt, but all that was white refused to shift. It wasn't made up of individual grains anymore. I ran my fingers across it and knew that every tree, every building and every book that had been whited out would feel the same.

  Kidira grabbed my shoulder, pulling me back.

  “We don't have time to waste,” she said, not letting go until I was on my feet. She was looking away from the Bloodless Lands, blindfold wrapped around her forehead, pulled down over her left eye, ensuring that nothing of the Bloodless Lands slipped into her vision. “Now,” Kidira snapped, and I realised that my feet were being uncooperative, body trying to drift into the Bloodless Lands. There were answers out there, I knew it. All that silence had to be burying something.

  But I marched on alongside Kidira, because the pull of her fingers wrapped around my collar was stronger than the pull of the Bloodless Lands.

  “How far do we have to go?” I asked, miles in.

  We were walking along the edges of what must've once been Myros; everlasting indeed. How curiosity didn't eat Kidira from the inside I couldn't say. Cities and towns came into view, along with the roads that once led through the mountains. We passed a village that I could've run to before Kidira thought to shout at me. From the path we took I could see characters carved into the gate at the entrance to the village. I wanted to grab Kidira's shoulder and ask her to read it to me, but even if she could stare into the Bloodless Lands, she still wouldn't have been able to read Myrosi.

  “Far,” she eventually said. “We need to reach the mountains behind Thule. It'll take us weeks and we'll have to cross back over for food, but this is the quickest way.”

  Somehow, the prospect of spending weeks in the Bloodless Lands didn't feel like any real stretch at all. They hadn't changed since they'd been frozen over at the end of the War, and in the same way, time around them seemed to have slowed to a stop. We could've spent an hour or a month there and I wouldn't have noticed a difference.

  I wondered if Kidira felt it too. I couldn't comprehend walking along the edge of Myros and noticing nothing but the way the mountains all seemed eager to stand out from one another without ever crossing into the Bloodless Lands. I couldn't understand being unable to tear disease and rot from a body either, and that was an impossibility to most people. I didn't linger on it, didn't ask Kidira how she bore it all. In the silence of the Bloodless Land, her words were of no comfort. They rose up into the air, scattering out into cities that were neither living nor dead, spreading out as if to drive in how immense the Bloodless Lands were; greater than all of Felheim, the territories and Agados put together.

  The words slipped away as though they'd never been spoken. When I heard a low rumbling, a pounding in the distance, I thought I'd imagined that too, until the noise remained, ricocheting off the mountains. Kidira came to a sudden stop, arm held out to prevent me going any further, spear at the ready.

  We held our breaths, watching the edge of the mountain we roamed close to, noise growing ever-faster, ever-louder. I convinced myself that it was soldiers, a hundred or more, all marching in unison, knowing there was only one place a necromancer would run. I didn't breathe a word of my suspicion, for Kidira only would've sneered at my paranoia, and with good reason; a strangled cry twisted itself into the air and a series of claws cracked into the mountainside, splitting the rock in its grasp.

  A wing stretched out, and for a moment, I was back in Isin. A dragon as large as any fishing boat that had ever pulled into port spread out its golden wings, crawling around the mountain that warped into a castle tower, ready to crumble.

  CHAPTER XIX

  Kidira raised her spear as though it would do any good, then looked to me to banish the creature. The kraau had its head tilted back and a screech of a roar pierced right through me. I couldn't think, couldn't raise my hands to send death surging through the dragon. I had barely put myself together; my heart wasn't in the right place. I met Kidira's gaze and slowly shook my head.

  We ran. We charged towards the mountains, fuelled by some half-formed plan of being able to duck and take cover, but it was no good. The kraau was smashing its knuckles into the ground, using its winged arms to drag itself along after us, while we were heading towards mountains that would pose no obstacle to it. Stupid, stupid. Why was I leading it away from the Bloodless Lands?

  “Keep going!” I shouted to Kidira, gritting my teeth and regretting all the momentum I'd built up as I ground to a halt, flying in the opposite direction like an arrow let loose.

  “Rowan!” Kidira called after me. I could imagine the way her eyes were flashing and knew she expected to be able to order me back to her side without another word. But I kept running towards the dragon, hoping I could confuse it for long enough to slip under its wing and head into the Bloodless Lands. Surely its mind wouldn't be able to withstand what resided out there.

  I ran as fast as I could, but the dragon was two steps ahead. It slammed a boulder of a fist into my path and I stopped too sharply, losing my balance in narrowly avoiding it. I skidded across the dirt on my palms and knees, grit in my wounds, skin growing over it, tearing back open. I rolled onto my side, and my head cracked against the ground. I meant to push myself up, but the dragon peered down at me, smoke coiling from its nostrils. Smoke that would never lead to a fire; why incinerate what it could eat? It sneered, jaws creaking open, tongue flicking into the air between us.

  The dragon lashed out at me and something finally pounded harder than my heart. A crack of a thud filled the air, covering the kraau's cry of pain, and I was convinced a mountain must've thrown itself against the creature to send it off balance. Still on my side, I saw a blur of a shape fly towards the dragon for a second time, sending it toppling over the border of the Bloodless Lands. I pushed myself back to my feet but didn't run. I just watched, doing what I could to catch my breath, staring until I suddenly realised what I was seeing.

  Another dragon.

  My dragon.

  He was small, but the kraau recognised him as a fhord in spite of all that. In spite of the shroud of death that kept his wings beating. They scuffled as stray cats for as long as it took Kidira to run to my side, and the dragon that had attacked us hissed out a thin stream of fire between its front fangs. Oak needed to do little more than huff, sending the other scampering back off with a beat of its wings.

  I ran towards him, panic seeping out of my system, clearing the last of the fog that had formed when I'd tumbled and hit my head, and saw
that he wasn't alone. A figure climbed from his back, dark horns stark against the white of the Bloodless Lands behind them. Kouris! I could've thrown myself into her arms, but I wasn't given the chance. Oak leapt towards me, head knocking against my chest.

  I laughed, arms wrapping around his horns. Kidira, not knowing what to make of the situation, still had her spear raised, but her eyes were fixed on Kouris. I leant against Oak's head, glancing between the two of them. My mouth went dry to look at Kouris, yet I ached for Kidira more than her. I buried my face between Oak's eyes, where the scales were discoloured, perpetually going to rot, and felt the reverberations of his soft, comforting growls rattle through me.

  I couldn't bear to watch them reunite. Not again.

  “Kidira... ” Kouris pleaded more than said. All of the laughing she'd done upon learning Kidira was alive, all the joy and relief that had rushed through of her, all of it was for nothing; she sounded as I must've when I sobbed Claire's name out on a bloodied floor.

  But something more remarkable than a dragon arriving in time to save us happened: Kidira responded.

  “Kouris,” she said quietly, evenly. If only she'd spoken to the dragon in that tone: it would've roared and whined its way into its own grave.

  They said nothing more and they said it too loudly. I kept my head down but the air was thick with all that continued to go unsaid between them, and I wished that they'd shout and scream at each other and be done with it. The words would float up into the air, finally free, yet they said nothing.

  I looked up and saw that Kouris' eyes were more moonlight than silver, and Kidira stared not at her, but off to the side, into the Bloodless Lands. I had to clear my throat twice in order to drag their attention towards me, grasping for something to say once they were looking my way. Kidira shook her head, pressing the heel of her palm against her temple, and I wrapped my fingers around one of the dragon's horns.