The Dragons of Ice and Snow

by J. J. Thompson

  “I didn't know that there were mountains that far north,” he said, still keeping his voice down.

  “There aren't,” Aeris answered softly. “You are looking at an artificially-made construct.”

  “Artificially-made by what?”

  “The primal white dragon, I would assume,” the air elemental said a bit smugly. “I believe that this is the nest it created to hold its supply of eggs.”

  Simon leaned forward with wide eyes.

  “You found it? You actually found it?”

  “I did indeed. However, credit would have to go to the red dragons who led me here. All of them are up there somewhere. I haven't gone up to spy on them yet. I was waiting for you to call first. Maybe you can see what is happening using the mirror spell.”

  “I'll give it a try. Better my way than you risking yourself.”

  “That was basically what I was thinking,” Aeris said a bit meekly.

  “Do not be embarrassed by not taking chances with your life,” Kronk spoke up strongly, but kept his voice low. “Our master does not want you to be discovered. And neither do I.”

  “Thanks for that,” came the reply.

  Simon tilted the mirror away from himself and the view began to move forward, as if he was a bird flying toward the high mesa. As the scene changed and the top of the flat mound came into view, the scene began to fade and mist started to creep in from the edge of the mirror's surface.

  “Hey, hang on a second,” Simon exclaimed. He tilted the mirror back and the view reversed itself. The mist disappeared as the mirror backed away from the mesa.

  “What's happening?” Aeris asked, sounding nervous.

  “Nothing. Don't worry. But at a guess I'd say that the top of that nest, or whatever it is, is shielded against outside magic. At least, as soon as the view got close to letting us see what's up there, it began to lose the connection. It kind of reminds me of what happened when I tried to contact Shandon and was blocked.”

  “Yes, I was afraid of that,” Aeris said with a resigned sigh. “I guess I'll have to do this the hard way.”

  “You don't have to do anything, Aeris,” Simon said firmly. “This is entirely voluntary. Heck, you may have already found the eggs and that's more than I could have hoped for. There's no need to do more if you don't want to.”

  “Don't you want to know what red dragons are doing this far north?” the air elemental asked.

  “Yes, of course I do,” Simon replied reluctantly. “But...”

  “But. But. But. I know all of the buts, my dear wizard. I've repeated them to myself for the past several hours as I've waited for your call. And I have already made my decision. I'm going to take a look. I will ask for a favor though.”

  “Anything.”

  “Keep this connection open. I know you won't be able to see beyond the edge of this thing, but you can hear me. Once I take a peek, I would very much appreciate you summoning me home. I think I've had enough of scouting for quite some time.”

  “You've got a deal, my friend,” Simon assured him. “Just say the word, and I'll have you back before you know it.”

  “Good. That's good. Okay, I'm going up. Please don't make any noise. I don't know if there are guards up there or anything else that might hear you.”

  “Got it.”

  The mirror followed the invisible elemental up along the side of the cliff, his progress painfully slow and cautious. Simon's nerves were beginning to fray as the tension level rose, and rose again.

  As the top of the mesa inched into view, the mirror began to mist over at the edges again. Before he lost the connection, Simon adjusted the scene so that the mirror stayed focused on the cliff a few feet from the top.

  “I've lost you, Aeris,” he whispered carefully. “But we're still connected.”

  “Okay,” Aeris breathed back.

  Both the wizard and Kronk exchanged worried looks and then stared at the unmoving picture anxiously, waiting for whatever was about to happen.

  Simon heard an odd scuffling sound, quickly silenced and then an odd, rhythmic pounding. Footsteps? He couldn't tell.

  And then he heard Aeris gasp.

  “By the Four Winds and all that's holy, what are they doing?” he murmured. “Simon, quickly. See what I see. Look through my eyes!”

  “What?” Simon muttered. “What are you talking about?”

  “No time. Look! And then get me out of here.”

  The wizard was slammed back in his chair, his eyes suddenly burning as if someone had stuffed them with hot coals. He bit down on his tongue to stifle a scream and then he was...elsewhere.

  In front of him was a panorama that was so incomprehensible that he couldn't quite grasp what he was seeing.

  A group of red dragons about a hundred yards away were standing together, wings fluttering nervously. Near them were several white dragons, also shuffling and flapping their wings, occasionally hissing at the reds.

  In front of them, huddled dejectedly and shivering in the cold, were dozens of people. They were staring at the ground, hunched over dispiritedly. Men, women, children. All were bruised and filthy and not paying attention to each other or anything around them. They exuded misery.

  But what caught Simon's attention was the being that stood near the center of this bizarre gathering. It was a winged creature, similar to the dragonoids that the wizard had seen in Daniel's pictures.

  But this monster was a pure dazzling white in color and towered over everything around it. Forty feet tall? Fifty? It was impossible to tell. Its wings stuck out from its back, but they were scrawny, misshapen things; twisted and useless.

  It was a horror. Heavy, brutal features and glaring yellow eyes reminded Simon of every bully he had ever known. Its scaled skin was corpse-pale and it wore a heavy, iron breastplate.

  In a moment that was to come back in nightmares later, Simon watched as the brute reached down with a massive hand and picked up a person seemingly at random. It was a little girl, perhaps eleven years old, who hung limply from the clawed, scarred hand.

  The monster gestured and a red dragon stepped forward with seeming reluctance. The creature laid its free hand on the head of the dragon and its eyes burned even brighter. A series of grunts, some sort of spell, issued from its lips and both the dragon and the child were engulfed in a greenish light that was too bright to look at directly.

  And then in revulsion, as the light faded Simon saw a dragonoid standing in front of the leader. It threw back its head and roared, its muscular arms raised in triumph.

  The huge brute pointed to its right and the wizard saw a pulsing round portal rimmed in lightning at the far edge of the mesa.

  A Gate, he thought numbly.

  “Damn it, Simon. Get me out of here!” Aeris hissed in his ear.

  The huge leader's head suddenly whipped around and it pointed directly at the wizard. It shrieked in rage and took a massive step toward him and...

  Simon was sitting in his chair again, breathing in great gasps.

  “Aeris, I need you!” he managed to choke out.

  A moment later, the air elemental was standing in the middle of the table, trembling in terror.

  The wizard grabbed the sides of his head, a sudden stabbing pain making it difficult to think or move. He sat as still as he could and tried to catch his breath. His muscles were twitching with little spasms and his headache made his recent hangover seem mild by comparison.

  When he could finally speak, Simon carefully opened his eyes and stared at Aeris.

  “What the hell did you just do to me?” he asked breathlessly.

  “I invoked a rarely used connection between summoner and summoned,” the elemental said weakly.

  He was barely visible, obviously drained by his experience. He looked the way that Simon felt, faded and exhausted.

  “I didn't know you could do that.”

  “It's an ability that only we of the air realm have, and we use it rarely, for obvious reasons.”

  “Y
eah well, let's avoid doing that in the future, shall we? It feels like someone hit me with a frigging brick and then tossed me off a cliff.”

  “I feel the same way, believe me. But you had to see what was going on up there for yourself. It was an abomination against the laws of gods and men.”

  Simon stood up shakily and went to the sink. He pumped out a stream of cold water and splashed it on his face. The he massaged his temples and waited for the pounding to fade a bit.

  “Yes, I saw. My God, I never imagined anything so horrible.”

  “What was it, master? What did you see?” Kronk asked urgently.

  “You tell him, Aeris. I want to take a walk for a few minutes, clear my head and think about this.”

  The wizard walked slowly to the front door, opened it and then looked back.

  “Welcome home, by the way. I'm glad you're still in one piece.”

  Aeris ventured a small smile.

  “Thank you. Me too.”

  Simon nodded at the elementals and walked outside.

  The afternoon was windy and a bit chilly, but the sun was warm and only a few wisps of clouds drifted across the sky.

  The wizard walked around the tower and let himself out the back gate. He wandered down to the lake, found a dry spot on the grass and sat down with a thud.

  As he looked across the restless surface of the water, he reluctantly let himself think about what he had just seen through Aeris' eyes.

  The entire scene had lasted no more than a minute or two, although at the time it seemed to go on forever. He tried to recall every detail of that nightmare.

  There had been red and green dragons, true. But behind the group of reds, had he seen the head of a brown dragon. He sifted through the memory. Yes, he decided that he had.

  Near them had been a bunch of white drakes, writhing and tumbling together, but the wizard hadn't paid them much attention. Mindless killing machines is all that they were.

  So, three kinds of dragons, white drakes and a group of captured humans. Changlings, almost certainly. Simon doubted that there were very many mundane humans left, not since the dragons began hunting them down in earnest.

  And that horror of a being who was obviously running the show.

  My God, what a monstrosity, he thought with a shudder.

  The dragons had been the standard size of lesser dragons, about fifty feet long. When the leader had melded the dragon and the human to produce a dragonoid, the new creature had stood around twelve feet tall, twice as tall as the largest of the captive men who had been huddled nearby. Daniel had been right about that.

  But the leader, the huge dragonoid, had been four or five times that size. It had been wearing armor. God only knew who had forged that heavy breastplate. And instead of a dirty gray, like the dragonoid Daniel had shown him, or the brownish-red of the altered red dragon, it had been a blazing, pure white.

  Where did it come from? Had the dark gods created it for their purposes?

  Simon shook his head. Impossible, he thought. There were a finite number of dragons. Their queen had produced the five primals and had laid a certain number of eggs for each one of them to replenish their ranks. And that was all there was. Everyone was agreed on that point, even the elementals and the elves.

  So what was that...thing?

  Something else intruded on his thoughts. There had been a stable portal, a permanent Gate, set up on the mesa. He assumed that it transported the altered dragons to the battle at the dwarven capital. But he hadn't seen a wizard up there. Had the dragons used him or her and then killed them? Or perhaps the magic-user had been elsewhere?

  “Simon?”

  He sat up with a jerk and turned to see Aeris floating above the ground a few feet away.

  “Sorry, I didn't mean to startle you.”

  The wizard lay back on his elbows and looked out over the lake again.

  “No problem,” he said as the elemental moved forward until he hovered next to him. “I was just lost in thought.”

  “I'm not surprised. And since you saw what I saw, what do you think?”

  “Think? Besides the fact that that scene was something out of a nightmare? I don't know. I'm just trying to put the pieces together. I mean, I never dreamed that there was a way to...fuse dragons and people together like that. It's truly monstrous. But even worse is that gigantic dragonoid. What is it? Where did it come from? Is it something new or have we just not run into it until now?”

  He sighed and stared at the ripples dancing across the lake.

  “Did you happen to notice the people that were being held there?” Aeris asked hesitantly.

  Simon looked at him in surprise.

  “Of course I did. Didn't I just say...”

  “No,” the elemental interrupted. “I meant, did you actually look at them closely?”

  “Well, no. I mean the vision lasted what? A minute, maybe two? They looked dispirited and broken, the poor bastards. And there were some that were so young. Changlings, of course. Horrible.”

  “Look, my dear wizard, I don't want to upset you any more than you are already, but perhaps we focused on different things while sharing a single vision. Because I did look at the captives. And I recognized at least two of them.”

  “What? From where?” Simon asked, sitting up again.

  “From Moscow. When you spied on Liliana after we were ambushed, she had a half-dozen people with her, remember?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Well, I do. And I saw two of them today, on that mesa. We all assumed that they were eaten by the drakes who attacked them. But apparently they were caught and transported to the north, to be used in this horrible transformation.”

  “Oh damn, this just keeps getting worse,” Simon said. He closed his eyes, trying to remember the faces of the captives, but he couldn't. All he remembered was their total misery. They had to know what was going to happen to them and they obviously held out no hope of a rescue. It was heart-breaking.

  “It gets worse than that,” Aeris said, his voice shaking.

  The wizard had never heard the little guy sound so frightened and he looked at him closely.

  “How could this get any worse?” he asked, not sure that he really wanted an answer.

  “Simon, drakes answer to only one master; their primal dragon. And only one kind of dragon can open a Gate, like the one we saw today; a primal dragon. Now, add those two things together, wizard, and answer your own question about who and what that abomination we saw was.”

  The wizard stared at him in horror.

  “You're saying that...thing was the primal white dragon?” he whispered as he felt the blood drain from his face and his belly go cold.

  “That is exactly what I am saying,” Aeris replied. “The coloring alone gave it away. The purest color of any type of dragon can only be found on the primal of the species. That beast was as white as pristine snow. It commanded the lesser dragons, even those not of its own kind, with sure authority. Yes, that was the primal white dragon. Why it allowed itself to be changed is a mystery, but it has.” He paused and added, “And it has to be stopped.”

  Chapter 24

  When Simon entered the tower again, followed by Aeris, he spotted Kronk adding a few sticks of wood to the fire. As he sat down, the little guy jumped up on to the table to join the air elemental and looked at him gravely.

  “Are you all right, master?” he asked with some concern.

  “No, I don't think so,” Simon said. “I think things are about to start moving very quickly and I have no idea what the outcome will be.”

  He gave himself a shake and then tapped the back of the mirror on the table in front of him.

  “But we have to get started. Okay, you guys, I need some help here. I need at least two more mirrors, maybe more, about the size of this one, and I need them quickly. Any suggestions?”

  The elementals exchanged a puzzled look and Aeris shook his head.

  “I'm afraid not. I mean, you could use that long
one in your bedroom, the one in your clothes cupboard. Break it into several pieces maybe?”

  “Uh, I don't think we need any more bad luck right now, do you?”

  Aeris only shrugged and Simon looked at the earthen, who was frowning in concentration.

  “Kronk?”

  “You need something with a highly reflective surface, do you not, master? It does not have to be an actual mirror, correct?”

  “No, that's true. As long as it can act as a mirror, I don't really care what it is.”

  “Then give me perhaps fifteen minutes, master, and I will have something for you.”

  The little guy jumped off of the table and tip-tapped toward the door.

  “Hey, wait a second,” Aeris called after him. “Where are you going?”

  “Deep,” Kronk answered cryptically over his shoulder and skittered out of the door.

  “Typical,” the air elemental muttered. He looked at Simon curiously. “Why do you need so many mirrors anyway?”

  “I want to speak to some of our allies about what we saw today. And I don't want to have to repeat the story over and over again. So I figured I could cast Magic Mirror on several mirrors at once and they could not only speak to me, but to each other as well.”

  Aeris looked at him in admiration, a look the wizard couldn't remember seeing on his opaque little face before.

  “Clever, my dear wizard. Very clever.”

  “If it works. First though, I need those mirrors.”

  He stood up and pumped water into the kettle. As he was hanging it over the fire, he stopped and looked at Aeris.

  “You've been away a long time and you've been through a lot. Do you need to rest or have some quiet time or anything?”

  The little figure snorted with clear disgust.

  “You know better than that, my dear wizard. What I want is an end to that twisted alchemy up north. What will make me feel better is seeing the body of that grotesque white dragon lying broken in the snow. That will cure any exhaustion I may be feeling.”

  Simon hung up the kettle and then crossed his arms and leaned back on the counter, staring at Aeris.

  “Bit blood-thirsty there, aren't we?” he asked, trying to make it sound lighter than it was.