by Dreagen
“Calm yourselves,” VyMora replied calmly. “I meant no disrespect. Did I, Alpha?” Slowly she turned to face VayRonx.
The big TarBoranx stood in silence, seemingly lost in contemplation. Finally, he met her gaze. “No…you did not. I know what you speak of all too well, and it is not something I wish to discuss at the moment.”
“As you wish,” she said, nodding in turn. “From what I was able to gather, they were journeying west in search of one of their friends. Someone who was taken when the DraGons attacked your village.”
“Yes, but do you know where they went, directly from their meeting with you?” BaRone asked.
“I do not, but if I had to venture a guess, I would say possibly DonGahl. It’s the nearest settlement before you reach any of the larger ones, but I highly doubt they would have pushed on that far without stopping first.”
“They would if they didn’t want us catching up with them,” TarFor grumbled, while his sister nodded in agreement.
“EeNox knows better than to pass up an opportunity to re-supply on provisions,” BaRone said. “They’ve been out here for three days now without stopping at any settlements, which means they’re no doubt tired and very hungry.”
“You don’t teach your children to hunt in civilized society anymore?” VyMora asked.
“Of course we do, but they are still young and have not roamed the wilds on their own yet. There are many things that could make acquiring even the smallest meal difficult. Something I’m sure they learned when they met you and your three-horned friend back there.”
VyMora laughed. “I’m inclined to agree. Still, they seemed to be more than capable of standing up to us. That red-flamed one especially. I have never sensed so much power and fury in one so young. Still, I’m sure I could have managed him had he been brazen enough to go on the offensive,” she said with a degree of satisfaction that thoroughly irritated VoRenna to the point where her feathers stood on end.
“You might feel differently had you seen what that boy was capable of in a fight,” VayRonx said stoically.
VyMora turned and gave him a strange look before taking a few steps back and regarding the group as a whole. She looked long and hard at each of them before standing up tall and rearing her head back in an S shape. “I have told you all that I know. I know not for certain what has happened to the children you seek, but suspect that they are still very much alive. Continue traveling west towards DonGahl and you stand a fair chance of getting some type of word on their whereabouts and condition. That is all I can tell you.”
With that she turned and began walking back towards the plains, leaving the others to just stand and watch as her bobbing tail grew small and smaller in the distance. Finally, BaRone called out after her. “Wait! You implied that there was something different about them! About their flames! What was it?”
“Why don’t you ask your mighty alpha?” she called back. “He knows more than he has been letting on.” And with that she rose up on a hill and promptly disappeared behind it, out of sight.
The others all turned back to look at VayRonx, who still had his gaze focused on where the Ridgeback had disappeared. At last he said, “Come. We have more ground to cover,” and proceeded onward.
The others looked at one another in awkward silence, all of them wondering what she had meant by her last comment and why VayRonx seemed so dead-set on not discussing it. All except VoRenna, who knew all too well why VyMora’s words resonated so deeply with the warrior. He was one of the few in the world who had returned from the threshold of oblivion.
23
NEVER AGAIN
DiNiya stood at the edge of the tower, looking down at the DraGons circling below. They resembled huge scavenging avian DyVorians, waiting for the world itself to die so they could descend and feed upon its carcass. The very thought made her shudder, and she turned her head skyward.
The wind was blowing from the west and gently pushing the grand cumulus clouds lazily overhead. DayKar had been relentlessly clawing his way deeper and deeper into her mind and ripping it open to uncover memories she had tried to suppress. At first she had thought she could withstand it, but as he probed deeper and harder, she felt her defenses slowly begin to crumble. Then he would abruptly stop and leave her by herself. Every time she felt violated and unclean, as if her very being had been sullied or touched in a way that made her feel ashamed. It was at those moments she was glad none of the others were here. She could not bear the thought of them seeing her so exposed, all her shame on display for them to gawk at and recoil in horror and disgust. However, the last time had brought an unexpected reaction: a flicker of life from her flame. The moment was brief, but after years of not feeling so much as a spark, it was like wildfire in her blood, coursing through her veins and rejuvenating her cold, detached existence. It was also at that exact moment that she heard the roar, bellowing furiously inside her head as something inside violently thrashed and pushed its way outwards. However, as quickly as the taste of life came did it turn to ash in her mouth, and was gone once again.
With a deep breath, she took one step forward, bringing her toes past the edge. It can all be over right now, she thought. He can’t get inside your head anymore and hurt you if you just take one more step. DayKar had been called away by one of the other DraGons at the height of what he had come to call “their conversations,” leaving her with an opportunity to make a decision. Too many people I love will die trying to save me. It’s my turn to save them…the only way I can. Tears streamed down her face as she leaned forward and felt gravity began to take her, when suddenly a voice rang out in her head. No! It was at that moment she was overcome by a sudden urge to live, to survive. But it was too late. There was no stopping. She felt the edge disappear beneath her, and the sensation of air rushing up past her. From out of nowhere, a huge tail swooped in underneath and caught her. No sooner had she felt her body come to an abrupt stop, then she felt herself rising. She was turned around, where she found herself face to face with DayKar, who glared at her as an angry parent would.
“It would appear that I can’t even leave you alone for a short period of time without you getting into trouble,” he said, giving her a stern look. “And here I thought I managed to acquire the more sensible of the two of the red flame.”
“Please no more!” she pleaded breathlessly.
“And not even so much as a thank you for saving your life,” he added, shaking his head. “I know BaRone raised you better than that.” DayKar lowered his tail, allowing DiNiya to climb off. “You and Rex are two of a kind, or rather I should say, the last two of your kind.”
“What do you mean, exactly?” she asked curiously. Terrified as she had been of him this entire time, she was also keenly aware that he knew more about everything that was happening than anyone else did. In fact, he seemed to be at the center of it all. “Please tell me what all of this means. You have nothing to lose by telling me. I knew my life was forfeit the moment the other one, LemaRes, took me.”
“Forfeit?” he laughed. “Quite the contrary, my dear, for you are integral to my plans—plans that require you alive, safe, and well.”
“What could you possibly need me for? I can’t do anything! You’ve seen that!”
“You choose not to do anything. It’s very different from not being able to. Still, I need you at your full power for you to be of use. Rex alone won’t be enough. I need the both of you.” He leaned down and gave her a slight nudge with his snout. “Or haven’t you deduced that much for yourself?”
“Rex…but…you’re trying to kill him. You’re trying to kill all of them!”
“The others I will admit are of no use to me and stand the chance of being a problem later on should they truly grow into their power. It is for that reason that I have given my knights explicit instructions that they are not to hold back with any of them. Not even Rex.”
“But you just said you need him alive,” she said, angry at his inconsistency. “What good to you is he d
ead?”
“None at all, but I doubt very much that only two of them will be able to kill the mighty Doom Bringer,” he said with a grin. “However, they will succeed in drawing out his power further. Enough so when he arrives, you and he will be able to combine your flames and use them to finish what was started ten thousand years ago.”
“Ten thousand years ago? You mean the war?”
“Precisely!”
“What does the war even have to do with us?”
“Now don’t play ignorant with me, DiNiya. I know full well the others must have finally told you of your true lineage.”
DiNiya looked down, remembering the shock she had felt when she learned that they were born of flames that were preserved in time. She asked at last, looking up, “How did you come back?”
“You mean how did I become an AmaRanthine?”
“You keep calling us that, but I still have no idea what it means.”
“It is the name given to those of legend who transcended death and arose from the ashes of oblivion.”
“But my father and the others said there were only six flames found in ClyVen.”
“And they were right.”
“So where did you come from?”
DayKar smiled down at her almost like an adult regarding the imaginative inquiries of a child. “Those you have always put your trust in may have finally told you everything they know, but that’s hardly the whole story. What a shock it must have been for you to discover what you are, what you were.” DayKar glided gracefully on four legs, circling her with the same curiosity an OroGon would a rodent. “Even now when I look at you, I see her. Standing there…defiant as ever.”
“You speak of me as if I’m someone else. Someone who you have a history with that exceeds anything I can remember.”
“That’s because I do,” he replied for the first time in a tone that betrayed a sense of pain within, speaking to her as if he was seeing not her, but someone entirely different. “You were always a compassionate flame, an uncommon thing for your kind, maybe even unprecedented. Always throwing yourself between those who would suffer and the hatred of countless DraConic flames. The last TyRanx who stood between the world and the falling sky.” His gaze now turned into one of intense focus. “I suppose that’s the reason you were destined to die.” With that, he lashed out with one hand, grabbing her before she had a chance to run. Bringing her up to his face, he roared furiously, “Say it!”
“Let go of me!” DiNiya cried as she struggled to free herself.
“Say why you buried your flame in shame!”
“No! I can’t!”
“Do it!”
“I won’t!”
Suddenly there was a glow in his grip, followed by a brilliant flash. DayKar shrieked and let go of DiNiya, who fell to the ground on her haunches. Looking down at his open hand, DayKar was surprised to see melted armor. The pain, while brief, had been searing hot and reminded him of another time, in another life. Shifting his gaze to the frightened girl who was breathing heavily and looking up at him with a wild, wide-eyed expression, he said, “Some things never change.”
“Why?” she asked. “Why is it so important that I awaken my flame? And what of Rex? Why do you need him…need us?”
“Very well, DiNiya,” he replied, regaining his composure. “I’ll tell you. I’ve grown tired of keeping this secret all these years. It will feel good to get off my chest, as they say.” DiNiya watched him approach the altar in the center of the platform. “Have you ever wondered why the towers have stood all these centuries with so little decay?”
“I always heard it was something to do with the way they were made,” she replied.
“Not the way they were made, but what they are made of,” he replied, dropping to all fours and running a clawed hand over the surface of the tower. “CarNite.”
“What?”
“It is what this entire tower and all the others are made out of.”
“But CarNite is red, not black, and is extremely rare. To find even a kilo is a rare thing.”
“Not surprising since it’s not from this world. We created it on VoLera: the ancestral world of the DraConic race.”
“VoLera,” DiNiya repeated. “So that’s the name of your world?” The DraGon nodded. “But we’ve been studying the planets in this galaxy for thousands of years and no one has ever found one that could support life in this solar system besides EeNara.”
“That’s because VoLera lies far beyond this galaxy,” he replied with a grin. “In another altogether, in fact, about seventy thousand light years away.”
“Are you saying you sailed across seventy thousand light years of space in some sort of…craft…just to start a war?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then how?” she asked with intensity, desperate to know how such a feat had been accomplished. “To sail across the stars from one world to another has been a dream of astronomers and physicists forever. If your people have managed to do it, then that’s incredible!”
“Trust me, the truth would surprise you,” DayKar said, hanging his low slightly. “It did us.”
DiNiya eyed him warily as she came to terms with everything, and then she was suddenly stricken by a thought. “Wait a minute,” she said, contorting her face into one of confusion, “if this tower is made entirely of CarNite, how is it no one has ever managed to break their way in? It’s far from indestructible, after all.”
“Very perceptive, DiNiya. CarNite that has been processed to such an extreme degree is indeed significantly stronger, hence our ability to forge it into something like this.” He held out his arms to take in the grandeur of the tower. “But without the energy field being emitted by the tower’s system core covering the entire structure, it would have left us all vulnerable.”
“Energy field? So that’s why compasses don’t work within a hundred yards of it.”
“Precisely.”
“So you kept it running for all these centuries?” DiNiya asked in disbelief. “Why?”
“How else were we to keep the beasts at our door from just kicking it down and killing us in our sleep? We couldn’t exactly rely on the honor system now, could we? In time, though, the generation we had waged war against died, and eventually so did the knowledge of our continued existence.”
“That’s why all accounts say DraGons just disappeared.”
“Exactly. You lot were far from sophisticated enough to keep proper records in those days, and by the time you had managed to cultivate anything remotely resembling a civilization, we had already been sealed away out of sight and out of mind for over a thousand years.”
DiNiya was now reeling from all she had just learned. So much of what had been left blank in the pages of history had just been filled in a matter of seconds. It was at that moment that she was gripped by another thought that threw something he had said into question. “But how am I even conscious, let alone walking and talking, if I’m standing on a mountain’s worth of CarNite. I’ve seen how it drains red flames.”
“Oh, trust me, if this was raw ore you would be dead,” he said with a laugh. “Fortunately for you, CarNite loses its unique effect on red flames once it’s been processed, hence the color. Altering its molecular properties is also the only way it can be shaped into such a marvel of ingenuity.”
DiNiya just shook her head in disbelief. “There’s just so much we don’t know, didn’t know. For centuries people have tried to get inside the four towers in the hopes of discovering some new form of science or technology. And all along they were filled with sleeping DraGons, lying in wait.”
“And waiting patiently while literally dreaming of the day when we could stop replaying the same memories over and over again in our heads while we slept and awaken to make new ones.”
“I know it hasn’t been long, but I already miss a world without DraGons.”
DayKar smiled. “Trust me, you have not been as devoid of us as you might think. The war ended so suddenly and erased
so much of my people’s presence on EeNara that whatever we brought of our culture died with most of us. A pity, really, for it was one of great advancement and beauty. Leaps and bounds beyond this primitive backwater world you call home. Even now you feel our long-standing influence on this world in the very words you speak.”
DiNiya looked at him quizzically. “I don’t understand. The words I speak?”
“Of course, you don’t believe this to be the language of your ancestors who came to this world, do you?”
“I…I thought, I mean…I just assumed…”
“Does Rex himself, in addition to this one, also speak a tongue alien to EeNara, one he learned back on that other world?”
“Yes, but he spent most of his life there, so it’s only natural.”
“And where do you think the SaVarians came from?” He watched and delighted as the realization of his words began to creep into her understanding.
“So it’s true, we evolved on Earth, initially.”
“That’s right. SaVarians are the descendants of humans.”
“But how?”
“When we initially started creating gateways between our world and this one, there were certain unforeseen side effects. The methods used were still new and difficult to control. Successful we were at creating a matter bridge, but the outpouring of power needed to maintain it was so great that it created other tears in the dimensional fabric. As a result, smaller, less-stable gates were created in various points around the world. One of these led to Earth, where the first of your ancestors found their way through. An unimpressive species they were: small, weak, and all with dormant flames. Still, where most of us saw merely an ineffectual race of vermin, others saw a potentially beneficial opportunity.”
“Opportunity? I don’t understand.”
“You must be growing so tired of that,” he replied with a smirk, to which she just scowled. Continuing, he explained, “While we had managed to create a gateway large and stable enough to move significant numbers through, it was still not enough to do little more than keep the monsters at our door at bay. We needed all our forces to change the tide of battle, but this would leave us with too few to build our infrastructure. That’s where your ancestors came in. With them, we had unintentionally discovered the perfect workforce. Simple minded, easily controlled, and most importantly, plentiful!”
