by Marc Secchia
The Land Dragoness said, “That’s my understanding. Herimor society is arranged very differently to what you might be used to. There is a complex class and caste system, ruled by the Marshals and Sub-Marshals at the top of the pile. Marshals can be Dragonkind, Shapeshifter or Human, but it’s generally agreed and historically demonstrable that Shapeshifters are preeminent in Herimor. They place great emphasis on good breeding and selection of potential mates. Often, royal young are thrust into year-group nurseries where they are expected to survive various trials or even to kill all of their siblings in order to demonstrate their worthiness to rule. Murder is not only tolerated, it is encouraged.”
“Unlike Remoy’s slightly different emphasis on breeding,” Ardan observed dryly.
The Azure Dragoness gnawed playfully on his left secondary wing-bone. “Aye? I was very selective, Ardan. Enchanter, powerful warrior, brain on legs–”
“Sexy sack of rocks for abdominals,” Aranya offered.
Zip just laughed. “Oh aye, that was my first and only criterion. You understand me so well, Immadia.”
“Can we not insult a man while he’s hibernating?” suggested Ardan.
The Land Dragoness said, “I approve of Aranya’s synthesis of ideas regarding Thoralian. Only I would add and emphasise, we must discover how Shurgal and Thoralian came by similar powers to conquer the Rift. I posit that urzul, the foul magic of the Theadurial, is our crucial clue. Further, we know not if Shurgal and Thoralian be foes or allies.”
“I’d generally assume the worst regarding those two,” Ardan growled, half-heartedly shoving the Azure Dragoness away. “Can I have my wing back, please?”
Aranya checked Ri’arion and Sapphire’s health, making the dragonet wriggle and squirm in her grasp. The monk seemed almost dead, but she found her magic could detect his deep life-processes. “Detox needed, all. Leandrial, do tell us more about this Herimor class system?”
“Below the ruling class of Herimor comes the warrior caste of battle-ready Dragons. Again, the more powerful rule the weaker,” Leandrial told them, as the Lesser Dragons worked through their exercises. “There are specific subclasses of Dragons and Humans bred for war–Granite Dragons, Lightning Dragons, scouts and spies, hunters, assassins, even Dragons that specialise in heavy haulage. There are all the usual merchants and artisans you’d expect, but they’re typically organised into Guilds, as I understand it. The Guilds command all practice and lore relating to particular skills, ranging from masonry to developing poisons, from farming to scholarly pursuits, and the like. A code of chivalry and honour commands much of daily life. I do not understand its many nuances, but I believe that war is often conducted in a staged fashion in order to minimise the impact on life. Champions fight champions, and suchlike.”
Ardan said, “All very good as long as we actually manage to reach Herimor. Can’t we just fly over the Rift-Storm, Leandrial?”
“When we arrive, you may make your own assessment,” said the Land Dragoness. “Perhaps Shadow power is the key to conquering the Rift. Think upon that, noble Dragon.”
As usual, the appellation ‘noble’ made the Shadow Dragon appear as if he were developing another infestation of the unmentionables. To her intense surprise, Dragoness-Aranya drew herself up and roared at him–with a fine mini-rendition of Fra’anior’s storm of thunder, lightning and smoke, “You are noble–you’re a Dragon, not a ralti sheep! Islands’ sakes, Ardan!”
Having skittered a hundred feet off with battle-ready reactions, the Shadow Dragon came thundering back with, “What’s the matter with you, Amethyst–”
“You! Will you just grow into your oversized paws for a change?”
Aranya did not flinch before the rage of a Dragon the better part of two and a half times her size. Suddenly, she collapsed in a fit of giggles. Ardan coughed and spluttered as he swallowed smoke into the wrong stomach, then burped up an outraged fireball.
Aranya flicked his nose pertly with her wingtip. “Aren’t Dragon arguments such fun, Ardan?”
“You … Dragoness!” His eyes bulged with all the pressure of fire and brimstone roiling inside of him.
“Dragoness indeed, noble Dragon. And don’t you forget it.”
* * * *
Departing the eerie ocean beneath the clouds at what passed for morning in this realm, Zuziana made a grim discovery. The far shore was littered with bones–Human-like bones. The three Lesser Dragons descended to examine them, with Leandrial trailing just behind. The obsidian shoreline seemed to merge with the opaque waters, rippling with wavelets half a foot tall. No doubt greater storms kicked up waves, Zip thought, spotting the high-tide marks further up the beach. Many of the bones had been smashed or splintered, but all the evidence pointed to a remarkable resilience to time’s depredations. Left and right, the bones littered the dark sand as far as the eye could see.
“Streamlined skulls with especially wide and deep eyes,” Ardan said, pointing delicately with his fore-talon. “I wish Ri’arion could see this. Take mental pictures, Zuziana. Look. They’ve strangely shaped thigh bones and, could these be fins in place of feet? Aquatic, water-dwelling Humans–down here?”
Leandrial said, “I’ve never heard of such a tribe or people group, yet the likeness to Human skeletal structures is unmistakable. Note the deeper and stronger chests, probably adapted for breathing water or at least, air under great pressure. They’d be nine or ten feet tall, including additional leg joints and tail structures, even though the torso is roughly of Human dimensions. And see here? This one was killed by a spear.”
The Azure Dragoness reached down to delicately pluck the spear-point from its lodging-place between a pair of ribs clearly cracked by the impact. “What a peculiar design. I’ve never seen the like.”
“We’ll put it in your packs for safekeeping,” Aranya decided.
“Careful with my bag-man. I don’t want a shield-breach.”
“And you call me soppy, Zippy?” The Amethyst fussed with Zip’s Dragon-friendly buckles. “I’ve tucked it in here with my grandmother’s scale.”
“Don’t stand on the bones, Leandrial,” Ardan cautioned.
She paused mid-step, one great paw hovering three hundred feet overhead. “They’re bones, little one.”
“We don’t desecrate bones,” he said. “Nor do the Lesser Dragons above the clouds. No mind, Leandrial. Shall I tell you a few of our traditions regarding bones?”
“How astutely you judge my desires, mighty Shadow Dragon,” rumbled Leandrial, stretching her legs to take a monstrous step out of the ocean, over the beach and a goodly ways beyond. There was something mind-blowing about not measuring up to this creature’s ankle-bone, Zip decided. It certainly kept Lesser Dragons from thinking too much of themselves!
Yet a pensive mood overtook her that day. Perhaps it was the fate of a people lost to time and memory. So many deaths. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands had perished upon that dark shore. Could it mean that people had once lived in deeps like this? That they had been overcome by an unimaginable doom?
They flew up and over a deep purple mountain range that towered three and a half leagues above the beach of bones, yet did not come close to breaching the opaque Cloudlands. Zip might have imagined they simply flew beneath a permanently overcast sky, were it not for the pressure, eerie landscapes and distinctive predators. Perhaps Aranya thought the same, she observed. Her friend suffered from severe, constant headaches, and there was an inexplicable turmoil in the Immadian Princess and around her that kept Leandrial complaining of disturbances in the aether and baffling storm weather.
Daughter of Storm? Zip’s wings shivered lightly. Aye.
The following day, the four companions launched out over an impossible deep; a canyon so profound, the blue merged into blackness far below their steadily-descending flight. The cliff they left in their wake was the greatest the Lesser Dragons had seen yet, a jaw-dropping, unrelieved precipice of roughly eighteen miles, and the impossible deep shelved off still further
below that. In several places, water from the ocean they had left behind jetted through tall cracks, creating slow-falling, plumy white waterfalls of a stature that beggared belief.
Leandrial quickly dropped two leagues, conserving magic and energy as she allowed the air density to stabilise her weight, before they paddled out into the vast blue world, travelling three to four leagues below the shadowy heights. The patches of shihurior were few and far between and visibility poor, so that it seemed they travelled through a dead, gloomy realm shunned by living things.
After crossing the impossible deep, Leandrial walked up a five-mile cliff carpeted in slowly waving yellow ferns, whereupon they launched out once more into a blasted wilderness of poisonous, luminous fungi and lichen-like plants that furred every crack and surface of the deeply fissured landscape. The smell of rot and decay permeated even their shields. Repeatedly, Leandrial urged the Lesser Dragons to check their shield-filters and magical protections, and to combat the sharply escalating levels of toxins in the environment. Sapphire stuck very close to Aranya, having mislaid her typical dragonet zip and bounce.
Progress became a steady push against contrary breezes. That push developed quickly into a struggle as the weather took a turn for the dangerous–currents, counter-currents and wind-shear attacking the Dragons from every conceivable angle. Leandrial might have been large, but even she was not immune. Shoals of giant, marauding crustaceans were the main menace. The dull yellow Spider-Crabs, as Zip dubbed them, attacked the Dragons with flurries of grapnels attached to silken ropes and sharp pinpricks of their native magic, propelling themselves rapidly through the air with bursts of their flat tails. Leandrial’s paws and talons soon became clogged with dangling crustaceans; losing patience, she occasionally turned to clean them off with irritated blasts of her eye-cannon. Aranya, Zip and Ardan had to keep a sharp watch for the perennially aggressive pests.
During their sixth day’s travel from Remoy’s shores, Ardan began to sniff about suspiciously.
Zip said, “You smell that–strange magic?”
“I don’t smell anything,” said Aranya. “I feel peculiar, though.”
“Has the pox affected your sense of smell?” growled Ardan.
“No!” Aranya glared at them both, before her head dropped. “Alright, maybe–don’t ruddy well stare. It’s just another side-effect, one I didn’t grasp until now …” Zip’s hearts, three in concert, turned over as Aranya muttered, “Curse that Thoralian! Must he take everything?”
Zip made to wing over, but Aranya jinked away. For the first time, Zuziana felt a stab of anger at her friend. Was she the only one who had suffered? No! Her own torso was a shameful mass of scar tissue; Ri’arion had treated her tenderly, but Zip had requested that the lamps be blown out before he saw her–besides, her best friend should be more gracious. Right then, Zip just wanted to belt Aranya and shout, ‘Get over your misery!’ Worse, the way Aranya treated gallant Ardan! Although, did she detect a thawing of the Northern icicle in that territory?
Right. As her mothers would say, she who aimed her forefinger in accusation, had better heed the three fingers pointed back at her own heart.
Leandrial said, “Little ones, what you sense is the disruptive magic and Disharmony of the Rift-Storm. I would value your analysis of this phenomenon before we attack it. I suggest that tomorrow morning, you three take a trip to view the Rift-Storm from above the Cloudlands. Wake your monk; demand his inputs. We need to develop the best possible strategy, and employ the Nameless Man’s powers during the crossing.”
Zip had a high opinion of Ri’arion, but she was surprised the mighty, self-sufficient Land Dragoness would admit her need so openly. Could she protect Ri’arion enough inside a shield-bubble? Worrying about him caused a reflexive flurry of lightning to greet the next attack of Spider-Crabs. Ardan jumped fifty feet sideways before catching himself with an irascible, choked-off battle-roar.
Aranya, observing this, said, “Interesting. Do you think it’s possible for a shield to absorb magical energy and reflect it, like Hualiama said in her scrolls?”
Leandrial immediately bugled her approval. “Aye! A noble pursuit!”
And she fell at once to discussion with Aranya. The small Azure peered ahead, sharing an apprehensive glance with the Shadow Dragon. That rumbling. Aye, they were starting to feel the presence of the Rift-Storm, and they were still more than three hundred leagues distant.
She bit back a few choice expletives. Ri’arion hated swearing. What he would appreciate, was the input of every draconic sense she had. Together with her companions, she began to catalogue what she sensed, and was soon embroiled in the rapid-fire telepathic communication of Dragons as they tossed ideas about with stormy abandon–only their storm was all in the mind.
The Rift was physical, inimical and deeply disquieting.
* * * *
Together with the two Dragonesses, Ardan raised his head above the ash-grey Cloudlands that evening, just a few minutes before suns-set. They drew sharp breaths.
For a moment, it seemed to Ardan that the world had tipped on its side, that he was seeing a crazy replication of the Cloudlands in the vertical plane. Then, Zip whispered, “The Rift-Storm.”
His neck-vertebrae protested as Ardan looked left and right, then up. And up. And up.
“Unholy, spitting windrocs!” the Azure spluttered, vocalising all of their thoughts.
A wall of crimson fire and sooty black cloud spanned the horizon. Seen from this close vantage-point, the Shapeshifter Dragons perceived how the fabled Rift-Storm curved gradually southward in a vast, shallow arc, just as the scrolls had noted, making Remoy one of the closest Islands to the Rift despite it lying at a latitude hundreds of leagues more northerly than the Southern Archipelago. The visceral shock was the way those sinister, red-tinted clouds billowed continually toward the sky, creating an unbroken rampart of tempest from the roots of the world to the skies above–attaining heights of between fourteen and fifteen leagues, Ardan estimated. Over half the height of the fabled Rim-Wall Mountains, and three times and more a Dragon’s maximum flying altitude.
The oily fires raged upward without pause or reason, bespeaking the unthinkable, hellish underlying volcanic activity that must spawn this phenomenon. Disturbing magic chilled his spine-spikes; judging by Aranya’s paw-curling reaction, she sensed the same. The Amethyst winced as peals of thunder resounded from the otherwise clear skies. Storm.
Ardan bared his fangs in concern. The storm grows within you, Aranya.
Aye. Something is amiss. The Amethyst Dragoness examined the Rift-Storm pensively. Could it be our proximity to this abnormal magic? Or is it me, Ardan? Last time …
We’ll work it out, Ardan and Zip growled simultaneously.
Aranya chuckled at their expressions. Alright. Is either of you my friend, perchance?
Just then, Ri’arion stirred in the saddlebag Aranya had opened for Zip, and peered out. He blinked. Slowly, the monk’s head tilted over to the side as he stared at the storm for several minutes, unblinking. No-one spoke.
He groaned, “What is this?”
“Alright, monk-love?” Zip crooned. “Awake and …” her voice trailed off.
The monk continued to stare as if he had seen his own soul walk out of his flesh. His cheeks lost any hint of colour. Eventually, he hissed, “Right. Confession time, you motley band of jokers. Who dumped the sky on its backside?”
Chapter 14: Riding the Storm
GRIMly, the six travellers conferred that evening after viewing the Rift-Storm, and examining it with every sense and technique at their disposal.
Sapphire chirped, Bad magic. Scared. Sapphire help Ari?
Thank you. Aranya stroked the dragonet’s skull-ruff with her fore-talon. Why did you ever choose me, Sapphire? Aren’t I a pain?
Big Onyx order, claimed Sapphire, then fell about in a fit of trilling giggles at Aranya’s choked wheeze. Jokey-jokes? Good joke?
Aranya could only splutter incoherently, for
she realised the dragonet might be speaking more truth than she knew.
“So we’re agreed?” asked Ri’arion. “We go in hard and fast, trying Ardan’s Shadow magic first. We’ll also work with Leandrial to counter the disruptive magic we’ve all sensed in that storm. The Rift-Storm is said to be a mere–” his smile flattened into an even dourer line than before “–two hundred and fifty leagues across. Like chewing a piece of sweetbread.”
“Funny,” Ardan grunted.
“You and Leandrial will work together in the mind-meld to perform countermeasures?” Aranya asked.
The Nameless Man made an inviting sweep of his hand. “Aye. We haven’t talked about your contribution, Aranya. If you have any Star Dragoness tricks up your scaly sleeves–”
“–like re-Balancing the entire Rift, say?” Zuziana quipped lightly.
Starlight purify shields, the dragonet said unexpectedly. The wry chuckles around the group stuttered as everyone turned to gape at Sapphire. She preened immodestly. Sapphire best-brains.
“Never underestimate the manifold wisdom of the smallest!” Ardan said feelingly, tapping Sapphire with his right wingtip. Awesomeness on wings, you are. He added, “What do you think, Amethyst-eyes? Fancy infusing our shields with starlight, or having one of your mystical conferences with the Great Onyx?”
“Both,” she replied, still staring at her dragonet. Holy smoking … whatever! Sapphire, you’ve given us hope.
Yet she knew that they needed more than hope.
* * * *
Ensconced once more in the pocket of Leandrial’s cheek in order to save her strength, Aranya set her mind to dreaming about the greatest Onyx Dragon of all, Fra’anior. He was no nightmare. He had bellowed at her because she had avoided listening to his voice.
This night, however, she spent tossing and turning as the raging thunder of Fra’anior’s voices merged with the nearing roar of the Rift-Storm. Her dreams were tormented. Endless chasing. Endless falling through storms where the voice of the Great Onyx battered and bruised her body without respite. Try as she might, Aranya could not understand his bellowing–a caution about oath-magic? Betrayal by starlight? His voice rose and fell like a furnace’s song. Throbbing. Growling. Crackling like rock giving way beneath the brunt of an earthquake’s force. She screamed, cried and fought …
