by Marc Secchia
Song of the Storm Dragon
Shapeshifter Dragons Book 3
By Marc Secchia
Copyright © 2016 Marc Secchia
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher and author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
www.marcsecchia.com
Cover art copyright © 2016 Joemel Requeza and Marc Secchia
Map by Joshua Smolders
Copyright © 2016 Marc Secchia & Joshua Smolders
[email protected]
Cover font design copyright © 2016 Victorine Lieske
www.bluevalleyauthorservices.com
Author’s Note
If you haven’t read The Pygmy Dragon and The Onyx Dragon yet, please stop right here! Spoiler alert! You will enjoy Song of the Storm Dragon much more if you read those two books first.
Otherwise, let the Dragonride commence!
Map of the Island-World
Chapter 1: Oaths and Lessons
Aranya SURFACED FROM the terrace lake, gasping and blowing like a beached trout. She strained to fill her burning lungs with the fragrant, dry air drifting down from Yorbik Island’s sprawling coniferous forests. Squeezed beneath Iridith’s lowering bulk and the western horizon, the suns blazed like twin golden cauldrons, casting a gleam that burnished the waters for miles about into a vast, luminous copper lake. The buoyant gleam reflected from the skies above, producing a dome of metallic blue so radiant that a Dragon’s wings must shiver in awe.
Instead, the Amethyst Dragoness champed her fangs in frustration.
She could not cross the lake; could not complete a training course on which Ardan and Zuziana succeeded repeatedly, honing their underwater flying skills in preparation for their assault on the Rift. Her eyes lit dimly upon the surrounding beauty. Her breath was shallow and pained, her body ravaged inside and out by Thoralian’s deliberately induced Shapeshifter pox.
Shame at her debility filled Aranya with dull, mordant rage that made her picture a Green readying her acid for battle. Battle there had been, aye, and the wondrous discovery of her Aunt and Uncle, Va’assia the Red Shapeshifter Dragoness and Ja’arrion, a Green-Orange of surpassing power, also a Shapeshifter. She gritted her fangs until her gums hurt. Victory had been soured by Thoralian’s escape from her paw. Her mother Izariela still lay in poisoned stasis upon Immadia Island, in a chill tomb. Yet she lived somehow, magically, suspended between life and death.
Unbidden, her right forepaw clenched. Thou, shell-mother of my soul. For thee, shall I rise anew!
The waters rippled about her as though a bell’s vibrations rippled through the lake. The Immadian’s eyes popped wide; for a fractured second, her belly-fires flared lambent, and the Island-World’s splendour flowered before her astonished gaze. Then, the shadowy veil descended once more. Partial blindness. She was healing, but with excruciating slowness.
Had eternity’s white-fires breath just trembled her world?
Aranya! Azure wings flashed over the lake.
Aranya! A huge, smoky shadow traced Princess Zuziana’s flight as Ardan raced in hot pursuit, the final snap of each completed wingbeat coming within inches of snagging in the water, yet he retained perfect balance. The Shadow Dragon was a masterful flier, an enigma, perhaps an unknowable danger to all Dragons …
And her beloved.
Could she allow that word? Could she allow a scarified Western Isles warrior, who was also the monstrous, superb Shadow Dragon, sway in her heart? Aranya laughed hollowly. Was not the proud Princess of Immadia more scarred than he, in truth; did the greatest mutilation not lie within her? And if honesty were allowed free reign, might she not question if love left her a whisker of wiggle-room? He was unlike any man she had ever imagined walking out with. He was more–in every sense of the world, more. Warrior. Dragon of Shadow. Powerful, yet tender and true. She longed to know him deeply; to twine her life in his, but Aranya feared she was at her life’s lowest ebb. These dreams were worthless, a foolish indulgence. She must abandon hope, crush her desires, and move on.
When she had first met Zuziana of Remoy in the Tower of Sylakia, how aloof she must have seemed, a true ice-maiden of the frozen North. So arrogant of beauty and heritage. As truly as dragonets laid eggs, she had fought like a demented rajal with the petite Remoyan and had discovered in her, the finest of friends.
These two Dragons winged toward her now, kicking up a trail of spray that caused rainbows to dance over the lake. With all her hearts, she longed to see every detail of those smears of colour on her damaged retinae. She yearned to marvel at the sweep of Dragon wings across burnished waters, and to launch herself into an aerial dance, but she lacked the strength to lift her wings, as if trapped in liquescent spiderweb. Pathetic. Aranya was a fledgling, less than half Ardan’s size. A burned-out Star Dragoness. She had never felt less ‘Sparky’, her father’s nickname for her.
Ardan called, Helping paw, Aranya?
Back-winging sharply, her best friend who had earned the fond moniker ‘Zip’ folded her forelimbs across her chest and scowled at the Amethyst Dragoness, allowing a quarrelsome curl of fire to escape between her fangs. Overdid it again, you silly ralti sheep!
Huh, said Ardan, flexing his mountainous shoulders, this one’ll see sense the day Dragons fly backward around the Mystic Moon. Shall I hold her whilst you wallop her backside?
It’s a deal, smirked Zip.
Her moss-green backside? sniffed the Shadow Dragon.
Oh. By the fires of Fra’anior! Thinking about Green Dragons had skewed her colour, that peculiar, chameleon-like ability that struck haphazardly. Aranya tried to pout, but in her Dragoness-form, that expression dribbled fire between her pursed lips. Ugh.
She said, I don’t want to beg … but I can’t lift even a wingtip.
The Shadow Dragon drew himself up. Immadia’s pride shall not beg. Behold!
With that, the water mounded beneath Aranya, propelling her irresistibly upward. Ardan? No, as boiling white torrents sluiced off a mountain of grey-green Dragonflesh, she realised that Leandrial had broached beneath her. The Land Dragoness’ chuckles generated three-foot waves that raced off in every direction. Roaring rajals! At a shade over a mile and a half in length, Leandrial’s sheer physical size still struck her like a Dragon’s punch to the sternum. A Lesser Dragon could fly down this herbivore’s throat with ease. Leandrial’s single eye, a white orb in the middle of her forehead, was as wide as Aranya’s wingspan. Yet even she swam with freedom in the mighty terrace lakes of Yorbik, the largest unbroken landmass North of the Rift. In places, the lakes touched on twelve miles wide, encircling the entire Island.
You’re back, Leandrial? Aranya asked.
I have fed well, boomed the Land Dragoness, before modulating her telepathic Dragonish. How fares your training, little one?
Aranya, all forty-three feet of her, exhaled moodily.
Evidently sensing this movement, even though Aranya lay plastered to the crown of Leandrial’s flat, spatulate cranium and thus evaded her direct line of sight, the Dragoness said, We must trigger your innate sense of Balance. That is the key. Did your shoulder heal well? What of your other wounds?
Aye, those are good. Not the pox-scars, though. Not those hideous … she mentally banished her thoughts past the Moons. Far too depressing.
You possess magic enough for a mighty oath, little one. I felt the Islands quake.
Ardan asked, That wasn’t my digestion?
In the days of Hualiama Dragonfriend, Leandrial held forth, the proverb was, ‘Thrice spoken, once ordained.’ Thus was made plain the trifold power of the Dragonfriend’s oaths. Of al
l the high-dwelling Dragonkind, it was she who understood Land Dragons best, and she who fought for us. The Dragonfriend taught us the power of oaths. I believe it was she who first set about codifying Shapeshifter lore. You promised to rise anew. This oath-magic holds extraordinary, destiny-shaping power, Aranya. You must speak it, and breathe its soul-shivering fires, with care and forethought.
Aranya’s wings made a sucking, slurping noise as she finally managed to wrestle them back to her sides. The shoulder Thoralian had injured with a bolt of ice twinged, but limited flight was possible.
The Amethyst Dragoness raised her nostrils to the wind, tasting hardwood pollens and grit, and scenting spicy pine and the smoky tang of lake trout sizzling over an open fire. She searched deeper, pressing outward with all seven of her Dragon senses as Va’assia had been teaching her, and with the magical awareness of Harmony, Leandrial’s speciality. Her scales prickled, not uneasily, but with a sensation she could only describe as restlessness.
Come, let us hove to the far shore, said the mighty Dragoness, quoting an obscure ballad she had sung for their group several nights before.
Leandrial swam for the terrace lake’s inner shore with powerful thrusts of her four paws, and an undulating swimming motion she had taught the Lesser Dragons–up and down, and side-to-side movements were essential for negotiating the crushing pressures and super-dense air of the lower reaches beneath the permanent cloud layer. The water pressed ahead of her with a low, sucking roar. Aranya noticed how strenuously Leandrial’s lungs had to work in the atmosphere the Land Dragoness disparaged as ‘gaspingly thin’, a full league above the deathly Cloudlands. Seen from above, the Cloudlands were an endlessly variegated carpet of clouds spanning the horizons, lapping about the skirts of the Islands which Fra’anior and his Ancient Dragon-kin had formed and shaped and breathed into life, but beneath, the Land Dragoness had described a vast wilderness as varied and rich in flora and fauna as the above-Cloudlands world familiar to Aranya, Ardan and Zip.
Squinting ahead, Aranya made out familiar figures on the beach–a sparkling expanse of inexplicably turquoise mineral composition, which made the sand resemble a strip of noon sky touching the backing coniferous and hardwood forests. There, the King of Immadia had apparently appointed himself chief cook, supervised by the geriatric yet always spritely Dragon Rider Nak.
“Mind your wash, Leandrial,” she said aloud.
“My wash? Have I not bathed in your place of wide, clear waters?”
“No, the waves caused by your travelling body,” rumbled Ardan. “Your–what was the term?”
“Pressure surge,” said Zip, with a sassy flip of her wings.
The Shadow Dragon grumbled, “All of my thoughts are rolled up in lessons and scrolls. I hunger for action. When will we depart, o jewel of Immadia?”
He often emphasized their difference in station. Aranya wished he would desist. Perhaps a Western Isles warrior thought himself unworthy of royalty, but she had been taught differently, and felt differently. She held that man on the beach responsible for her upbringing. Aye, King Beran had done a semi-respectable job with her considering he had a fiery, empire-crushing, criminal Shapeshifter Princess for a daughter.
“Soon,” she whispered, knowing it in her bones.
Ardan gave her his quirky, ‘you’re being mystical’ half-smile and rolled his fire-eyes inexpertly at her. “Aye, Aranya? May it be.”
As the wind shifted to bring the scent of shore more strongly to her nostrils, her stomach voiced a guttural howl of anticipation. Beran’s chargrilled, herb-basted trout smelled scrumptious. Great leaping Islands, she was eating like a starving hatchling these days. Human-Aranya was embarrassed beyond words at the quantities of meat and fish her Dragoness seemed capable of packing away. Dragon-Aranya? Not so much. Snout to the feeding trough, lizard!
Ugh. The older Shapeshifters seemed to find her antics amusing, even adorable. Aranya was not in the mood. So, she barely tolerated meat. How was that a problem for the carnivorous fanged beast she had transformed into not so many months ago?
As Leandrial slowed abruptly, her belly scraping the lake-bottom, the Amethyst Dragoness slid down the bridge of the Land Dragoness’ nine-hundred-and-ten-foot muzzle with the grace of a wet rag sliding down the side of a bathtub. Groaning, she spread her wings and used the momentum to heave herself through the air to shore, before staggering to a nearby copse where the ever-practical Oyda was lacing Human-Zip into a simple, grass-green Yorbik gown.
“Eat, petal,” Oyda ordered at once. “Sate your hunger on that buck. Then you can relax and enjoy your father’s cooking. Where’d a man learn to cook like your sire? One of your peculiar, monogamy-grounded Immadian traditions?”
Aranya laughed, “Oyda! Honestly, equality of genders is not the evil you would style it. Besides, did I see you sharing Nak with any other woman? I’m not about to marry thirteen husbands, unlike Zip here.”
Zuziana snorted, “You know very well that Remoy’s tradition is one husband to many–”
“Naked wives!” yelled Nak, who had a Dragon’s hearing when it suited. Sharpening of the senses was a boon Dragon Riders enjoyed, along with vastly elongated lifespans. Oyda was one hundred and seventy-seven summers of age, Nak her senior by the better part of a decade. However, due to the attrition of conflict and war, few Riders reached such august stations in life.
Oyda scowled at him over the undergrowth. “Mind on the job, husband.”
“Ooh, my mind is consumed with far more alluring prospects,” he sneered, whirling his canes for emphasis. The King of Immadia snaffled one of his staked-out trout before it landed in the fire. “I’ve a hunch I fancy your haunches, Remoy!”
“I’ll show you haunches, Dragon Rider,” growled Ardan.
Aranya glanced up. Oh, mercy! Ardan strode over to the fires clad only in a Western Isles loincloth. Between Western Isles culture and the general lack of nudity taboos in Remoy … she folded up laughing as the brawny warrior struck a ludicrously come-hither pose in front of Nak, flexing his pectorals and displaying his right thigh to its best advantage.
In high falsetto, Ardan declaimed, “Come, thou handsome son of the dawn, shall we to Island together?”
Nak’s strangled squeak sounded like a Crescent Islands wild pig.
A Dragon-blush heated Aranya’s entire body from the inside, but Oyda only chuckled, “He has the measure of my Nak, alright. Eat up, petal.”
Aranya could not keep from goggling at the spectacle of a dark, muscular Western Isles warrior making ardent lip-smacking noises, hounding Nak around the cooking fires as the old man fled a-totter upon his canes, crying, “Fie! Away with thee, vile apparition! Cease this–” Ardan pinched Nak’s backside, raising a bloodcurdling shriek “–fie! Back, thou fiend of the nethermost, sulphurous hells! Desist!”
Men. Inappropriate, but hilarious.
Aranya sliced into the buck with her fangs and tried her best to bolt the meat without tasting too much blood. Aye, this victory over the Sylakian Empire was sweet relief. Ardan’s comical behaviour, the unbending of Zip’s darling, the ex-monk Ri’arion, the emergence of over a hundred Shapeshifter Dragons from their enforced hibernation–so much had changed, the very Islands threatened to stand upon their heads. The Island-World practically crawled with Dragonkind beneath a new dawn of freedom from Sylakia’s tyranny, yet Aranya knew this must be a far cry from the heyday of Lesser Dragons–the era of the mighty Dragonfriend, or even the days of the Pygmy Dragon, one hundred and fifty years before.
Roll up the scaly sleeves, Immadia! Work beckoned.
Suddenly, mid-transformation, she startled. That Dragonfriend would be … Aunt Hualiama. Aunt? She had an aunt who had to be–skanky windrocs, her head throbbed trying to work out the timescale–six hundred years old? Seven hundred? How, by any coinage of the impossible, did that make a drop of sense?
Wobbling inelegantly into her Shapeshifter form, Aranya slipped into her undergarments–Fra’anior’s finest lacework–try
ing not to snag the delicate cloth on her rough scars, or to catalogue the grotesque lumps and pockmarks that covered her body. Every breath wheezed in and out of her blighted lungs. Coldly irate, she wound a headscarf around her face, shrouding herself from the neck to above her exposed left cheekbone, and then she arranged a cloth across her forehead as well, leaving only her amethyst eyes uncovered. So conservative? No self-pity allowed, Immadia. Aye, she could not join the celebrations, yet, but that day would come–oh please, let it come!
For thee, mother, shall I rise anew!
Ill-starred oaths.
* * * *
With a contented belch, Nak waved the well-chewed remains of his trout in King Beran’s general direction. “I had my doubts about you, boy, but I find you are an adequate cook, besides being a passable ruler.”
The tall Immadian King’s teeth flashed in the firelight. “I had my doubts about you, granddad, but I thank you for doing an acceptable job of taking my rebellious, runaway daughter in hand.”
“Granddad?” snorted Nak. “Why, you snotty-nosed urchin, you do a disservice to the multiplicity of generations my fertile loins have spawned–”
“Urchin?” snorted Beran. “By my greying whiskers, your eyes grow dim, you senile old rajal.”
Speak, Aranya.
Her hands jerked, spilling half a goblet of fruity Yorbik red over Sapphire’s tail. The dragonet hissed in annoyance and abandoned Aranya’s lap to bathe in the lake, as fastidious as any cat.
Aranya inquired, Leandrial?
The gleaming white slit of the Land Dragoness’ eye widened, casting its natural radiance over the group gathered by the fire. Nak and Oyda sat beside her upon a low, flat boulder. To their left, Aranya’s eyes lit upon Lyriela, her cousin, perched decorously upon Prince Ta’armion’s knee, and Ja’arrion and Va’assia, in their Human forms, a striking couple of indeterminable middle years, both tall and graceful in the Fra’aniorian manner. Ja’arrion’s trim beard was shot with white, but his long dark hair flowed to shoulder length, framing a face gaunt from privation. Those harsh lines softened by the day. His eyes were amber-green, startlingly rajal-like in their depths, and much inclined to blazing with apparently natural bellicosity–but Aranya had observed that his manner masked a tender interior, particularly when he gazed upon Va’assia, his raven-haired wife. For all her self-confidence and physical beauty, Va’assia had seemed bent from the start upon shoehorning a fledgling Star Dragoness into her rightful place. Protocol. Aranya was heartily sick of her Aunt’s pedantic lectures.
