Liquid Fire

by Anthony Francis

  A blast of mana swept over me as the infinity lens charged with magic, overloaded, and then discharged itself onto the waiting cauldron far below with a crack of thunder. Smacked down to the earth again, I lay there, gasping, as liquid fire fell down around me like rain.

  Wherever droplets landed, puffs of magic burst forth, and more than magic. Roses and jewels and butterflies blazed into existence and disappeared into whiffs of flame. There was too much mana for anything to take hold, but I could see how dragons had sparked life on the Earth.

  Droplets splashed around me, hot as sparks, but did not burn me. They touched my skin, warm as coals, but did not burn me. They fell into my lips, fiery as chili peppers, but did not burn me. The hot liquid fell down my throat like liquid honey, quenching a thirst I never knew I had.

  I lay my head back against the rock, content.

  “I always did have an affinity for fire,” I murmured.

  I don’t know how long I lay there, dazed, as life was created and destroyed around me in a rain of magic flame. At last, the fall of liquid fire ceased, and still I lay there, smiling, breathing in a delicious smell half between wet grass in the rain and the ozone tang of lightning.

  But then I heard another slow intake of breath, and raised my head.

  My original Dragon perched on the edge of the crater, fully materialized, solid as the rock that it sat on. It was something entirely new—not a projectia, not a drake, not even a real Hadean Dragon. This was a dragon of human legend, brought to life by an immense blast of mana.

  It drew in a breath, and I tensed, wondering whether it planned to roast me—or merge.

  “Soon Pele will fly,” my Dragon said. “And you must flee.”

  My eyes bugged. I got to my feet. And if I’d thought I’d run before, I flew now. I skipped down the hill, running, tumbling, slipping, falling. More than once, I fell on my face. More than once, I bloodied myself in pain. Not once did I stop. I just scrambled on.

  I’d read the stories of Krakatoa. I knew what was coming.

  The fireweavers were recovering as I barreled down the hill toward them. Even from a distance, I could see the cauldron glowing with a blaze of golden light—apparently, the spell had worked. I didn’t know whether to cheer or curse; I just ran down into the circle.

  The spell had worked, but the fireweavers were still a mess. Someone was helping Molokii to his feet, Zi was helping Yolanda, and the twins were sitting with Jewel, who was holding her nose and head gingerly, a bit dizzily. She saw me and jerked back in shock.

  “Dakota!” she said, confused and appalled. “My God. What happened up there?”

  “Get in the cars,” I shouted. “Get in the cars and drive! Now now now!”

  “Frost,” Zi snarled. “You’ll pay for . . . for . . . what’s happened?”

  “Pele’s not dead. She’s hatched, and rising,” I said, running past them, scooping up Jewel and running toward the knot of cars. Fireweavers began falling in around me and we ran down to their trucks, a Range Rover and Jeep Cherokee. “Get in the cars and drive! Now now now!”

  “Damn it, help us!” Yolanda said, struggling with the cauldron.

  I looked back, thought about it for half a second. It would serve them all right, to lose their lives because they were so concerned with that liquid fire. But that fire was life, centuries and centuries more life for people like the Grinder or the Warlock. It was worth the risk.

  I dropped Jewel by the Range Rover. “Open the trunk!” I shouted, not waiting for her response, running full tilt back toward the cauldron. I seized one handle, Zi seized the other, and we lifted, and screamed, hot metal burning our hands as we ran, but we kept running, the hot liquid splashing us until we sloshed the cauldron into the back of the Rover, already packed with passengers shocked and astounded at what we’d shoved in the trunk. “Jewel! Drive!”

  I slammed the gate, and the Range Rover started off, splashing the glowing fluid around the inside of the car. Briefly, I wondered whether it would seep down and set the car on fire, but I had no time for that. I ran over to the Jeep Cherokee and practically leapt in the open door.

  It squealed off. Zi was driving, Molokii was half-unconscious in the passenger seat, and two more fireweavers were crammed in next to me. Everyone was tense, breathless, and scared as the hillside shook beneath us . . . then seemed to slide out beneath us as the earth moved.

  Zi barely kept the car upright, following the glowing taillights of the Range Rover and the unearthly light streaming from its back window. Then light from behind us reflected off that window, and I turned to look back behind me.

  Pu’u o Maui was rapidly becoming not a cinder cone, but a glowing crater, explosion after explosion hurling concentric rings of rock away as golden liquid bubbled and boiled out. Cracks appeared in the earth around it, spreading over the floor of Haleakala caldera.

  “How big is that egg,” I yelled. “How big is it—”

  No need to ask, though. I found out straightaway.

  All of Pu’u o Maui, five hundred feet high and two thousand feet across, crumbled apart and fell into the glowing, spreading crater. From it, a terrific cloud erupted, billowing out like an oncoming sandstorm, alternating between churning moonlit black and burning red.

  “That’s a pyroclastic flow!” I screamed. “Get to high ground! Get to high ground!”

  “We’re getting! We’re getting!” Zi screamed back.

  The cinder storm swept past us, rattling the car windows, plunging us into darkness, then into fearful swirls of cinders and flame. Hot gas poured out of the vents and Yolanda whacked the A/C off. The rattle of gravel below was drowned out by staccato drumming on the roof.

  A titanic fragment of debris screamed over us and impacted the hillside. Cinder sprayed out and the jeeps swerved out into the rough hills. Rocks tumbled around the vehicles as they bounced over the rutted hills and we passengers bounced around inside the cabin.

  Somehow we found the road, a zigzagging asphalt path climbing up the inside of the crater, but it didn’t help. As the cloud roiled up around us, alternately white and roaring, then black and rattling, the road was soon inundated with rocky debris.

  Driving blind, Zi struggled to keep it on the road, fishtailing in a cloud of dust that mixed with the clouds so it seemed like the car was swimming through gravel. Light blazed around us, the cloud went dark again—and the headlights of the Range Rover loomed out of the fog.

  The Cherokee impacted the Range Rover, throwing us all forward in a blur of bumps and screams. Golden fluid splashed over the inside of the Range Rover, now canted forty-five degrees away from us, and Jewel staggered out of the driver door into the wind.

  “Everyone out,” I said, kicking the door open, dragging the closest fireweavers with me out of the car, then reaching in and pulling out my stunned companion in the back seat. “Everyone out, and get everyone out of the Range Rover! The gas tanks may blow!”

  Zi stumbled out of the car and ran toward the passenger door of the Range Rover. Then I lost him in the roiling clouds. I ran to the passenger door of the Cherokee, pulled out Yolanda, then helped her over to the roadside, where the other fireweavers were climbing atop a rock.

  Half-blind, I ran up to Jewel. She was coughing and spitting, eyes squeezed shut against the stinging wind. I seized her and pulled her to me and drew her up onto the rock above the road, holding her tight, as the rattling wind covered us with hot spattering mud.

  An enormous thud pummeled my ears.

  I drew a breath, then coughed as I inhaled volcanic crap. I tried to breathe through my hand, but a wave of crushing pressure tried to force the air back down my lungs. A second enormous thud rippled across the valley, crackling into the distance like thunder.

  Another thudding. A fresh hot wind blasted us on its heels, a renewed sandblasting of razor
-sharp particles on near-burning wind. The dented cars creaked and shimmied in the new breeze, and I squeezed Jewel tight, shielding her face from the worst of the gale.

  A dark shape crossed the sliver of moon. I looked up. Could it be Pele taking to flight?

  But the dark shape whipping overhead was not an entire dragon. It was just her wing, sweeping across the heavens, brushing the clouds aside like dust bunnies chased by a leaf blower. Another stupendous downstroke, and for a moment, the whole crater valley was clear.

  From Haleakala Crater rose the craggy head of the Dragon Pele, a red and gold crag of rock and metal easily as large as the cinder cone destroyed by her birth. Her snaking neck twisted up with her, followed by the massive body whose throes of rising had destroyed the crater floor. Curved black wings, ridged and rippled like black plains of lava, whipped down around her as the neck craned up and that massive head screamed its birth cry.

  It was a fearful sound. It began as a pebble-rattling vibration in the ground, rose into a deep resonance in my gut, then hit audible as her enormous maw opened to the sky. It was the cry of Godzilla, of T-Rex, of a hurricane, rising from the deepness into a trumpeting high-pitched exhilaration that rang my ears as Pele released an absolutely titanic gout of flame into the sky.

  I flinched from the fire. My eyes watered in its light. My face stung with its heat. The column of dragonfire climbed into the heavens, crackling with thunder, sparking with lightning, illuminating the whole of Haleakala Crater and the breadth of the Pacific as bright as noonday.

  As the roiling blast of flame curled into the sky on wings of thunder, the shaggy head inclined downward slightly, a glowing eye seeming to stare straight at us as the two black dragon wings whirled back up into the air at what must have been close to the speed of sound.

  Lightning crackled beneath those wings as they cut through the air. My hair stood on end, and green foxfire rippled over the cars as electrical discharge surged out over the landscape. I flinched, but no explosion came—then I gasped, staring up into the sky.

  Pele had spread both of her wings wide, an enormous V reaching to the heavens. The inside was not rippled black stoneflesh, but a spectacular rainbow patterns, fractal and wonderful, that simultaneously recalled and shamed every butterfly I had ever seen.

  Pele leapt into the sky, wings still spread, forelegs relaxed, hind legs thrusting in titanic earthquake jolts, a snaky tail uncoiling behind her gracefully as she sailed far up into the sky, a white-hot fluid trailing after her, droplets of dragon yolk spattering out over the devastation.

  Then the downstroke of those beautiful butterfly wings came, smacking us to the ground with a hurricane force of wind and mana. My ears were squeezed, then popped. My tattoos flared, then went dark. Then Pele flew up into the night.

  I stared up after that unbelievable creature, watching her wings beat, trailing twin spirals of magical color behind her as she ascended out of the atmosphere. Jewel had fallen with me, her head on my stomach, and gasped suddenly as Pele trumpeted one last triumph of fire.

  ———

  Then Pele disappeared into the stars.

  62. Aftermath

  We all stood there, dumbfounded, before the awesome devastation of Haleakala Crater. What had been a vast, sloping valley dotted by cinder cones was now a giant chasm of fire and lava, collapsing in on itself, as roiling black smoke climbed up into the sky.

  The collapse stopped just short of our wrecked cars. Not fifty feet behind where the Range Rover had spun about and the Jeep Cherokee had rammed it, the road simply dropped away, its asphalt jutting into the air over the edge of the chasm.

  I shuddered. Had the accident happened seconds earlier, the giant sinkhole would have swallowed us whole. Even so . . . we barely survived. The cars were jackknifed together, gasoline seeping from the Cherokee’s tank and liquid fire seeping from the Rover’s trunk.

  Abruptly, the Jeep Cherokee caught fire. We all watched as fire wreathed it, as the gas tank squibbed out in a half-hearted explosion, and then as the Jeep rolled backward toward the ledge, tipped back, slid off . . . and anticlimactically stopped five feet down, lights still on.

  Cautiously, I hopped down and limped over to the Range Rover, which was half-impaled on a rock, going nowhere. The danger of electrical fire was over, the gas tank looked sound . . . but the back cargo area glowed . . . where something had splashed out all over it.

  I cautiously limped closer. I wasn’t just shuddering now—I was shivering, my whole body erupting in aches and pains as the adrenaline left me, and my brain started to feel that perhaps we were safe. I wanted to go lie down . . . but not as much as I wanted to see that glowing liquid.

  “Is . . . did it?” Yolanda asked, hobbling up next to me as I peered in. She looked almost as bruised as I felt after the climb. And my ears felt funny, like I’d been to a rock concert without earplugs, and when she spoke, the words seemed to come from far, far away. “Did we—?”

  The back cargo area of the Range Rover was splashed with liquid fire. It flowed like milk and glowed like sunrise. Even recreated through the distorted echo of the infinity lens, the mystic power of the dragon created constellations of sparkles dancing over the interior of the Rover.

  The back glass was etched in arcane patterns where the magical liquid spattered across it. At points, the hot droplets had penetrated all the way through the glass, running down both the outside and the inside, which was curling with acrid smoke from charred cargo area carpet.

  Most of the liquid fire had splashed out of the cauldron, chewing its way through the car, leaking out onto the pavement, oozing into cracks in the asphalt, lost.

  But in the dark heart of the cauldron . . . there remained a visible glow.

  “Congratulations,” I said, grimacing. My throat was unexpectedly raw, and I was again having trouble breathing in the chill night air. “You have your liquid fire.”

  “We did it,” Yolanda said, incredulous. “Princess . . . we did it!”

  The fireweavers gathered. Jewel ran forward with a squeal . . . then stopped as she saw me turn toward her. At first, she said nothing. We just stared at each other, scowling and angry. Then, slowly, her face softened, looking me over, seeing my burns and cuts and bruises.

  “Oh, Dakota, I’m . . . sorry,” she said. I glared—my inner pain was worse, and she looked away. But something worried her, and she asked, “Your dragon really is gone, isn’t it? You were the herald, and the dragon flying around was just hatchsign. I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “You were right,” I said. “The spirit of the dragon was on my back.”

  “If you are the herald, then . . .” she said, looking up. “Where is she going?”

  I looked up after Pele, now just a tiny speck in the sky. She had nowhere to go on Earth; she had to be flying into space. How was that even possible? Using her dragon breath like a rocket booster? Using the solar wind, magnetic fields . . . pure magic?

  And even then, where would she go? I racked my brains for knowledge of the solar system, and oddly flashed back on my Close Encounters moment with the pizza, but not eating pizza with Cinnamon and Vickman—the older memory of me and my mother.

  Eating pizza and reading National Geographic . . . and then I had it.

  “Io,” I said. “Pele’s going to Io.”

  “Eye . . . oh?” Jewel said.

  “One of Jupiter’s moons.” I was certain not only that I was right, but also that Pele had told me. I’d felt homesick looking at that pie, not because I had great memories of mom and pizza . . . but because Pele was homesick for that image. “Looks like a great big pizza.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously,” I said. “Crust constantly flexing in Jupiter’s gravity, churning with inner heat, covered with sulfur pockmarked with volcanoes. It’s the only body i
n the solar system which approximates Earth’s early environment, the only place a dragon could call home—”

  “Oh, quit showing off,” Jewel said, shaking her head. Then she looked up at me, and her face fell. Her breath caught in her throat. “Oh, God, I’ve—”

  “You’ve stepped in it, decisively,” I said. “Give me your phone.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can call Philip,” I said.

  Jewel’s lower lip trembled. Then she pulled out her phone.

  “What are you doing?” Yolanda said, reaching for it. “Don’t—”

  “Don’t interfere,” Jewel said sharply, jerking the phone back. “Dakota . . . don’t.”

  “I have to,” I said. “I can walk up to the nearest ranger station while the lot of you run like hell, or you can give me your phone and take your medicine.”

  “What . . . what do you think I should do?”

  “Take your medicine,” I said.

  “You’re such a hard woman, Dakota,” Jewel said.

  “Oh, spare me,” I said, shaking my head. But she sounded sincere.

  “Dakota,” she said, eyes tearing up. “Doesn’t what we had mean anything to you?”

  Zi laughed roughly, but I kept my eyes on Jewel.

  “Everything,” I said, “but you said it. It’s what we had. It’s what we had before I knew you were lying to me. Before you kidnapped me. Before you touched my stuff, smearing this awful crap all over me so you could use me in your scheme with no thought of all the hundreds or thousands of people who would have been killed so you could protect a virgin mountaintop. And I like virgin mountaintops, but tell me—don’t you think you did more damage?”

  And I held my hand out toward the glowing crater, the torn-up mountainside, the massive chunks of debris still falling from the sky—and, far in the distance, the lights of the observatory, untouched, because as vast as Pele was, a shield volcano was larger.

  “We didn’t even get the damn thing,” she muttered.