by Marc Secchia
“Barbarian. Cloud-scraper. Memory-looting lout,” complained blue-hair.
“Twins?” Aranya spluttered.
Twins, save for the hair. Her eyes flicked rapidly between the pair of Human girls. Shapeshifters, or she missed her mark. Ears tending to Fra’aniorian points were almost hidden beneath the mass of their locks, which had an oh-so-familiar quality and consistency; both possessed terrace-lake eyes, one framed in deep blue hair, the other in a wealth of white-blonde. The identical set of the twins’ jaws … she had only ever seen that expression in a mirror. Oh, mercy! Shapeshifter royalty, precious images of her heritage …
“Aunt Hualiama!” Aranya sank to one knee. “Uh … which of you … is my Aunt?”
“I am,” they chorused.
“But you’re so young,” Aranya swallowed, the dipped her head to hide her embarrassment. “I’m sorry. Am I dreaming? Are you alive? I need your help, please, I beg–”
“Oh, petal!”
Again, the twins spoke in perfect concert, then looked at each other and laughed. “Alright, Hualiama, you tell her.” Aranya could not tell which of them had spoken. “Allow me.”
Slim, petite hands slipped around her neck from her left. The blonde girl leaned close, and kissed her cheek tenderly, notwithstanding its ruin. “I am Human-Hualiama, called the Dragonfriend,” she whispered. “I am one aspect of my fire-soul. In this place, which I call my soul-space, we two can always be together when we want to be. This blue-haired bundle of mischief is my Dragonsoul. My second-soul, if you like. Also, Blue-star, the promise-star. Hualiama.”
A second pair of arms clasped her gently, and the other twin’s breath warmed her cheek. “She’s my Humansoul. I call her Humanlove, dear Aranya. And I am her beloved Dragonsoul. I like this form because identical twins have many parallels with our existence. Together, we are Hualiama–your mother’s shell-sister–and we invited you into our soul-space because thou art kin, and we have loved thee since before thy star was born, Aranya of Immadia, and from beyond the stars, we have loved thee across the ages with an abiding and incendiary and fierce love! Thou art beloved–thou, Aranya!”
As the Dragoness’ passion rose, Aranya noticed her speech changed to more ancient, more draconic patterns. Like Fra’anior, she realised.
“Isn’t it my job to do the weeping?” asked Human-Hualiama.
The other chuckled softly, clutching Aranya to her bosom. So strong! “We’ve waited an eternity for thee, petal. Now. Doubtless, our father the mighty Onyx has roared at you the ways of fate, that the future must not be troubled by any meddling paw?”
Aranya’s head shook slightly. Unbelievable! This manner and excess of love alarmed and staggered her; could she have risen of her own volition? She must hold her head above the flood, must gather her wits to ask the right questions … what had Hualiama just revealed? Harmonies and fate itself could be modified by interference from Fra’anior, or his legendary Shapeshifter shell-daughter? So many questions burned upon her tongue! She must demand answers …
Blonde-Hualiama said, “No, petal. If we answered all your questions the future would change, and not for the better.”
Mind-reader! Aranya wet her lips. “Mercy.”
“Mercy indeed, my fierce shell-niece!” cried Dragonsoul. “Did your shell-grandfather not teach you these things? No mind. Question him when next you meet. And ignore all the thundering and fulminating awesomeness. Typical, overweening draconic ego, that’s all.”
The Princess of Immadia laughed at this spirited declaration, but the other twin added, “We have gifts for you, Aranya. Mine is the gift of dance.”
“Dance?” Flying monkeys, now her voice cracked and wobbled?
Dragonsoul said, “Mine is the gift of hope. We will show you the place in your vision. Indeed, you saw Sapphurion and Qualiana’s roost, where we grew up. Hidden in their roost is a storage chamber wherein you’ll find two further gifts–a collection of lore-scrolls, and–”
“Hurry, Dragonsoul,” interrupted Hualiama.
Aranya’s head felt as if it were spinning freely on her shoulders. That Hualiama? Or that one?
“Arise!” commanded the twins.
Her knees obeyed, even if the rest of her was rather less certain. For the first time, Aranya looked about, finding herself in a realm beneath a starry sky so close, she could reach up to touch the white-spangled velveteen trappings of the night. All was warm. Cosy, not bleak. Her bare feet trod a smooth surface of what appeared to be endless white marble; nearby stood a small platform surrounded by a colonnade of tall white pillars that incongruously, appeared to vanish amidst the stars. Hualiama’s soul-space? Why was her visualisation of being a Shapeshifter so very different to Aranya’s own?
Beside the platform lay quite the most breathtaking male Dragon she had ever seen, apparently asleep, his muzzle curved to embrace a tiny, white mite. She smiled unconsciously. Wow. He was the handsomest heap of gemstone scales, the awesome, celebrated Grandion! He was … alive? And the dragonet–that must be the fabled Flicker!
Aranya gave in to the need to rub her eyes in sheer disbelief. “What is this place? How can you be two? And talk to each other? Why am I here, Hualiama and … uh, other-Hualiama?”
The blonde girl said, “You must learn to listen to your Dragonsoul, Aranya. She is with you even now. Will you do that for me?”
“Of course.”
Aye, I’ll bake my brains in a furnace for you, Aunt. Because I don’t understand in the slightest.
Aranya chuckled as her feisty companions turned equally dazzling, empathetic smiles upon her. They knew. Peculiar perturbations wracked her soul. She had a sense of waking, of knowledge seeping into her at thoroughly discomfiting levels–unconscious, magical, spiritual, she had no idea.
When the girl-Dragoness reached up to touch her wounded face, however, Aranya flinched. “Don’t.”
The depth of understanding in the girl’s gaze snared her more surely than any hunter’s trap. Again, the petite hand reached up, the girl’s tears flowing freely. How thou hast suffered, mine soul-daughter. Yet beautiful are the wounds of thy heart. I shall not speak a monk’s curse upon the hand that wrought thy afflictions, for that oath is wrought, immutable. My gift is benediction.
Hualiama was tiny. Aranya gazed down from her height of more than a head taller than the twins, yet it was she who felt smaller, by far.
Dragonsong garlanded her soul, incongruously, in the heady scents of flowers intermingled with the rich cinnamon-vanilla scent of draconic magic, as her companions sang a harmonious duet in soprano voices of surpassing depth and clarity:
Thou art beautiful to me, to me, to me,
Thou art beautiful to me,
The truth within shall rise anew, soul-incarnate,
For these chains cannot bind flesh and spirit forever,
Thou art beautiful to me, to me, to me.
Each time the Hualiamas repeated that triplet of ‘to me’, Aranya heard promises enfolding promises. Though she could not believe, could not grasp that truth for herself as yet, she looked within and found a seed of hope burning in her breast. She wept for the longest time.
Then, the twins seized her hands with cries of irrepressible joy. “Come! Come, Aranya; beloved Aranya! Run with us, laugh with us, dance with us!”
Her feet tickled unbearably! Flinging aside her tears, she ran through the night until her loss fell away in tatters, as if she sloughed the rags of desolation off her newborn, shining body.
* * * *
A Dragon-sense woke Zuziana when Aranya chuckled in her sleep.
The musical sound had barely finished washing her vision with white when her friend flung aside her coverings and skipped, barefoot and clad only in her sheer linen sleepshirt, around the roost! Twice! She frisked and danced like a young girl, perfectly navigating the roost’s steps and hollows without recourse to opening her eyes.
“Uh … Aranya?”
Madness? Flame? She was accustomed to Aranya’s peculia
rities, but this took the proverbial purple windroc. Her body shone, not so much with flame as with an inner light Zuziana did not recognise and felt she should fear, yet all she felt teeming in her own breast was Dragon-fire. A wondrous song of fire.
When Aranya broke for the door, Zip followed.
Helpless.
* * * *
Light passing the roost’s crysglass outer window woke Ardan. A prickle of premonition brought him smoothly to his feet, sword in hand. Warrior-ready. Yet he was not ready for the sight of a glowing Princess of Immadia skipping past his window like a lamb feeling the joys of growing legs and fresh pasture, nor for the surprise of Zuziana following up the path with Sapphire performing her usual aerial acrobatics around her shoulders.
Swift as thought, he stepped over to Ri’arion’s pallet. The monk slept right on the wooden slats, eschewing any form of padding or blankets. Moons-mad ascetic.
“Wake up, Ri’arion. Something’s afoot.”
When he turned for the hallway, which had a door sealed by a magical word, Ardan found King Beran already standing there, armed too. Ha. Habits of the warrior-born. The tall King grinned fiercely, understanding the tenor of his thoughts.
Ardan said gruffly, “Are you with me?” Both men nodded. “Then let us stalk …” he chuckled quietly. “As Nak would say, let us stalk a couple of scantily-clad ladies.”
Beran’s expression suggested the Shadow Dragon had better behave himself around his daughter, or the King would be moved to very un-Immadian forms of torture. Aye. Ardan bade his lolloping heartbeat behave itself. Now was the hour to move with draconic stealth.
* * * *
“Faster,” laughed Hualiama. “This way.”
Aranya’s feet tripped lightly up stairs which had miraculously appeared before her. She followed to a door, where Hualiama spoke the secret code-phrase and disarmed a number of magical wards, taking care that Aranya understood each one. Her soul soared in undeniable lightness as she stepped into a place so precious to her Aunt, the roost of the eminent Dragon Elders Sapphurion and Qualiana.
“I grew up here. I learned to dance here,” said the blue-haired twin. “Qualiana loved that couch, and the pedestal is Sapphurion’s work, his perch.”
Aranya stared at the finely-crafted block of agate crystal for a moment before she realised she was seeing an artwork. A masterwork. Lighter and darker blue agate crystals had been sculpted and fused, perhaps by Dragon fire, into a statue of water lilies growing beside a flowing river. The vivid patterns of the agates swirled and curved so eloquently that it was hard to imagine the artwork was not alive. The whole pedestal was shaped to support a Dragon at rest, she realised. It had to be twenty of her paces from end to end, perhaps more. It would dwarf a fledgling Amethyst Dragoness.
“Because I am me,” said blonde-Hualiama, “dance is the key to opening our secret chamber.”
“Formal dance? I can do formal,” said Aranya.
“No, free dance. Come. I will teach you the movements.”
“I … I’m not much of a–”
“You will do as you’re told,” Hualiama commanded, but her eyes twinkled as she made a shushing motion toward Aranya’s lips. “You’re an artist. That creativity is within you, dearest Dragoness, and it is far from dormant. I will simply show you how to release those silly Immadian inhibitions that keep your feet rooted to the floor.”
“Uh-um!” spluttered Aranya, blushing up a decent suns-set colour.
“Humansoul’s an incorrigible tease,” said the other twin, twirling so that her knee-length blue locks spun in a wide arc around her body. “She hasn’t changed in six hundred years.”
Aranya glanced from one to the other, noticing that they wore identical Fra’aniorian dresses, although the skirts were cut unfamiliarly short, above the knee. Gracious, how scandalous! The Human girl wore a deep blue that set off her eyes, while the blue-haired girl-Dragoness was garbed in pure white. The lacework was unmistakably Fra’aniorian. How on the Islands did her Shapeshifting manage to preserve those clothes, she wondered inanely?
Her heart felt squeezed with a beautiful ache. Aranya essayed a mischievous grin, accepting the Human girl’s outstretched hand. She inquired, “What will dancing do to those six hundred year-old, arthritic knees of yours, o most antiquated Aunt?”
Dragonsoul fell over in a heap of gasping, hiccoughing hysterics.
* * * *
Zuziana startled as the sleep-walker, having not even blinked as she neatly burgled the most hallowed roost in Gi’ishior and disarmed half a dozen violently lethal magical traps, burst into merry peals of laughter. She bowed to an unseen partner, extending her arm elegantly.
They danced.
She blinked. Aranya had never been ungraceful, but she was six feet and two inches of whisper-thin Princess, so she moved with the care and pride of a taller girl. She was no wren, more heron. Plus, she had her native Immadian reserve to overcome, not to mention the entire weight of a conservative, isolated Island-culture.
Now, she danced with an artist’s form and a child’s abandon.
Flame incarnate. Flickering, falling, rising, burning. Zuziana giggled as a lissom leap and flare of the muscular legs exposed Aranya’s very proper cotton undershorts to the world. She wept as white-fire filigree traced her friend’s limbs and flying, flowing hair. Throwing back her head with unconstrained joy, Aranya danced as if the Island-World should ignite and dance with her. Faster. Freer. A gloriously wild leap landed her lightly atop the Dragon-pedestal, which rose eight feet above the sunken seating-area in the main chamber of this famous roost. She twirled upon the air! Feather-light, Aranya spun and pirouetted on a bed of air toward a dark archway that led to Sapphurion’s sleeping-chamber. How–was this a case of the mythical Dragon power of Telekinesis at work?
Zip almost cried out as a hand gripped her shoulder. Ri’arion. He gaped at Aranya in a way that made her imagine clawing his eyes out, yet she understood. “Exquisite,” he breathed in her ear.
Just behind Ri’arion’s left shoulder, Ardan looked on with admiration at least equal to the monk’s, and a pleading light in his eyes. Through the roost’s crysglass windows, they saw lightning playing madly about Gi’ishior’s peak and gushing in multi-coloured streamers off the huge gemstones within the volcanic pipe.
Zip whispered back, “No, I didn’t know she could do this either.”
“Who’s that dancing with her?” asked King Beran, crowding into the roost-entrance with the others. He pointed. “Look.”
Indeed, a breath of flame lived in the air, now; a hint of an arm, the curve of a leg whirling impossibly high in the air. Silvery laughter delighted their ears, making Sapphire chuckle in response. She had perched on Ardan’s left shoulder, curving her body around the back of his neck so that she peered past his right ear.
Ardan said, Do you know anything about this, little one?
Sapphire’s laughter trilled around the chamber. Silly Humans. Hoo-lee … Hoo-a-lee-yah-mah, she sounded out the syllables carefully.
Hualiama? Zip gasped.
Aranya twirled through the twenty feet tall and wide, richly engraved archway into the Dragons’ sleeping chamber, built to accommodate even the largest Dragon. By unseen means, light flared within. Of one accord, Zip, Ri’arion, Ardan and Beran rushed across the roost, just in time to observe Aranya making an intricate, complex series of dance-movements before she stepped through ostensibly solid rock, and vanished!
“Aranya!” bellowed Ardan.
Beran was fastest. He sprinted for the wall where his daughter had vanished, alongside the sleeping-pallets. Everything seemed undisturbed, not even covered by a layer of dust. Zip accidentally bit a hole in her tongue as the men slammed up against the wall, kicked it, felt this way and that for an opening. Ardan moved to Shadow, but the wall denied even his power.
Sapphire launched off Ardan’s shoulder, squeaking in a miniature rage. She called, Stop! Ari all good.
* * * *
When she
pressed back through the magical barrier, Aranya found she had gathered an avid audience. “Uh … good, help me with this,” she said, deflecting their questions. “It’s heavy.”
Ardan and Ri’arion immediately bumped into each other, laughed, and helped Aranya lug a painting some eight feet tall by seventeen feet wide out of a solid wall. Zip peeked around the edge, almost tripping her monk. She gasped. “Why, it’s … uh, not you, Aranya.”
The men set the painting carefully against the nearest wall and stood back in awed appreciation.
Beran growled, “Family likeness, eh? Look at the ruff, the arch of the neck, the neatness of those paws and musculature. And he’s–”
“Breathtaking,” said Aranya. “That’s Grandion, the Tourmaline Dragon. Hualiama’s Dragon.”
The artist, probably a Dragon, Aranya thought, had done a masterful job in capturing the gemstone gleam of Grandion’s scales. He had a fantastic ruff of skull-spikes, giving him a raffish, almost piratical air, but the artwork depicted the strapping Tourmaline tenderly curving a wing over a much smaller, midnight-blue Dragoness, who was so identical to her, Aranya felt as if the artist had simply painted the wrong colour, blue for amethyst. So ineffably tender, the way Grandion and Hualiama nuzzled …
“Freakish likeness,” said Ardan, his tone belying his ill-chosen words. “They’re … legendary in love. She’s said to be the mother of all Shapeshifters.”
Zip said, “Petal, your face is shining.”
Aranya rubbed her cheeks briefly, feeling the roughness. “Nothing’s changed. But everything has. One moment.”
She ducked back into the chamber, breathing hard. Mercy, her friend had raised a fragile hope that she might be restored in body after that mystical dance, but she was not. Forget it, Aranya. She had the word of the promise-star; she must not be impatient, no matter how it hurt. She had work to do.
Picking out the scrolls Hualiama had listed, and a most precious necklace, Aranya re-emerged into the roost-chamber. Ardan’s dark gaze gleamed upon her, draconic. Zip looked pensive. Beran seemed on the verge of popping with pride, while Ri’arion seemed on the verge of drooling at the sight of an armload of scrolls.
