by Marc Secchia
A rope-like curl of flame promptly leashed her tail and dragged her ignominiously backward across the stone, talons screeching, as Flamgurtharr set about roasting the Princess’ scaly, tethered buttocks with volley after volley of the hottest Dragon fire Aranya had yet experienced. Shielding frantically, she recognised in horror that he was just warming up, the temperature of his fires rising through oranges and yellows to an ultra-hot yellow-white. His flame could vaporise rock.
But Flamgurtharr voiced a gurgle of surprise as the fledgling Dragoness emerged from his assault smoking from every scale, literally aglow; bruised yet otherwise unharmed.
Pfft! Pfft! Aranya announced her intentions with a double-strike of her own.
Her fireballs burst against his chest and upper left thigh, knocking him awry just enough that the Fire-Breather missed his attempted stomp on her neck. That could have been ugly.
The Amethyst backed up as Flamgurtharr inhaled cavernously, stoking his furnaces. Mercy! The crowd’s roaring washed over her ear-canals like a vast waterfall. Aranya’s talons flexed. This Dragon seemed unwilling to close with her, because …
GRRAAARRRGGH! The Grey-Green let rip with everything he had, a firestorm that chased her around the arena like an animate Storm Elemental, and not just fire, but a blistering wash of wind that swept her off her paws, churning and rolling her in a maelstrom of heat that lapped up to the mesh cage topping the arena and–KABOOM!! Dragoness or not, Aranya felt as though she had been struck by a sledgehammer the size of Fra’anior’s paw. The backlash through her shield stunned her.
Black, white and crimson speckled her vision as she came to beneath Flamgurtharr’s forepaw.
I don’t kill fodder when they’re unconscious, he growled. Ruins the fun.
Aranya tried to writhe against the talons gripping her neck, but she was no match for all that tonnage and strength. Not after an explosion like that. The cage must have amplified the blast. Amplified? Her eyes bulged beneath the pressure as the small Dragoness twisted her neck desperately, searching for an angle. Any angle. Her ears rang with aftershocks.
“Shall I kill her?” roared Flamgurtharr.
The crowd roared back.
“SHALL I KILL THE FODDER?”
Shrieks and strange hoots of delirious joy resounded from the crowd.
Aranya formed a tiny, tight fireball in her throat. She’d have just one shot, or this beast would grill her royal behind to cinders. Bending his neck slowly, Flamgurtharr pursed his lips a mere foot from her face. His throat was the white heart of a furnace, filled with Dragon-fire.
Her own throat-muscles worked. Pfft!
A blue-hot spark shot seventy feet across the arena, whanged off the rounded base of a brazier, raced upward, and rebounded off the cage-magic–exactly as she had planned. The cage was some kind of reflective-magnifying construct, doubtless designed to heighten the entertainment value below. At the same instant, Aranya shielded with everything she had learned from Leandrial, Ri’arion and Va’assia, and even the Wisps–not a hard-shelled shield, but a slightly yielding, aerodynamically shaped shield that would allow her to ride the resulting detonation.
GRRAAA-BOOOMM!!
In a flash, her tightly concentrated fireball, massively magnified, blasted Flamgurtharr’s right foreleg, shoulder and wing off his body. The concussion hurled the Amethyst across the arena in a spray of charred flesh, scales and bone fragments, splattering her muzzle and wings with gore. She fetched up in a heap three-quarters of the way across the arena; the Amethyst Dragoness instinctively flicked the severed remains of the Dragon’s forepaw off her head.
The Grey-Green stared at her. His throat worked. How …
Like a felled tree, he collapsed.
Aranya was appalled.
Roar your victory, said Humansoul, in a small voice. Show them we’re no fodder. We’re a royal Shapeshifter of Immadia, and we give quarter neither to Man nor to Dragon.
This isn’t me, Humansoul.
We know, precious petal. But necessity is a brutal taskmaster. I love you.
I … me … too! She what? Her? Me? Loved herself in a battle’s aftermath? Aranya shook her head in confusion, trying to find a way to balance on all four paws without falling over once more.
Mournfully, her Dragoness howled, GRRAAARRRGGH!
* * * *
Leaving the arena, Aranya came nose-to-nose with Gang. He snorted like a dyspeptic volcano, “Freaking hookworms take it, another promotion?”
A slow wink of his good eye appraised her of his joke, and the fires of his vast, ground-scraping belly were more purr than roar. He was pleased? Aranya kept her reaction well-guarded, choosing to wag a brow-ridge by way of reply.
He growled, “Alright. I dub thee, ‘fresh kill’. Satisfied?”
Aranya bared her fangs at him. “They’re still scraping up the mess I left behind. Don’t step in anything nasty.”
Gang flexed his shoulders, making the strangely smooth muscles roll like wineskins full of soft fruit, as best Aranya could describe it. Clearing his throat, he snarled at the guard-Dragon, “Take this fresh kill to a portal so that she can watch a real Dragon fight.”
The Amethyst Dragoness watched the match from behind a magic-armoured porthole in the arena wall. She had not realised that the Gladiators could watch other fights, but it made sense. Knowledge was advantage. She was soon gaping and wincing as Gang turned his opponent from another Pit into his personal punching-bag. She had never seen a Dragon fight like him, leveraging his bulk with breathtaking skill. By the end, he was swinging the hapless Dragon–who was no stripling, being a fifty-tonne veteran of thirty-nine successful combats–about by his tail and body-slamming him against the walls and floor of the arena to the rhythm of the audience’s rapturous approval. Awesome. Horrifying. Stylish in a way that made her vacillate between admiration and wanting to hurl the queasy contents of her stomach into the nearest midden.
She doubted there was a whole bone left in that Dragon’s body.
Finished playing with his victim, Gang swaggered back down the corridor, grunting, “Hey, fresh kill. Been taking notes?”
Smartly avoiding a guard-Dragon’s kick aimed at her tail, Aranya fell into step with Gangurtharr. She cooed, “Does your shell-mother still masticate your food for you, big fellow?”
With a roar of laughter, he shoulder-slapped her so hard, her teeth rattled in her head. “Good one! I like your spirit, fresh kill. Let’s go bathe. Spoils to the victors.”
Life as a Dragoness was odd. The Princess of Immadia was not exactly accustomed to bathing in steaming pools with five husky exemplars of the opposite gender. Part of her wanted to run to fetch clothing, or slink behind the nearest pillar to conceal her modesty. She chuckled inwardly at Humansoul’s antiphon of glee, ‘who’s a bashful little Dragoness, then?’ She submitted to the indignity of having to listen to various gruff and lecherous comments, fired across the pool with apparent respect for Gangurtharr’s subtly protective manner. Aranya wondered at this. Ardan might have clawed out his own liver in a jealous rage, but amongst Dragons, this communal behaviour seemed normal.
After Gang moved to another room, the vast hot-oil pool, several of the others cracked jokes about his being a eunuch; that she could sleep cosily in his roost without due service. They chuckled coarsely so as to remove any doubt regarding their meaning.
Damaged–like her? She had observed Gang’s scarring, but had no idea his injuries had been so severe. Was that one source of the camaraderie she sensed between them, so at odds with his gruff, socially inept manner? When she asked, the Dragons told her of an abusive Green shell-uncle who had tortured Gang as a fledgling for a period of four years, as part of his nursery hazing, with the avowed intent of ‘strengthening’ a chubby youngster. In Gang’s culture, one of the males added, with dark-fires indicators shading his low speech, excess weight was abhorrent. Somehow, Gangurtharr had survived cruelty, endless physical abuse, and even a deadly attack by five of his Dragon Elders, after w
hich his kin had sold him to the Gladiator Pits as fodder. A dangerous beast, they warned.
Meantime, Aranya observed her environs closely. Where could a Dragoness Shapeshift safely? There were smaller doors for Human-sized servants around the rooms and corridors, and even serving the individual Dragon holding-cells. There was no need for locks, for no Gladiator Dragon could hope to fit much more than their paw through a Human doorway. An option? Yet she sensed much magic about the place. She would have to watch her wingtips.
As her days in the Pit stretched into weeks, Aranya’s patience thinned commensurately. Montorix seemed content to build her reputation by careful degrees, pitting her against Gladiator Dragons every two or three days, packs of spiky red drakes or other fodder, and once, three ‘glamour-entranced’ Dragons which had fallen prey to a mysterious magical illness native to Wyldaroon, that drove Dragons insane. During their periods of mandatory training, Gang taught her how to ‘fight messy’, or inside fighting, as he called it. She learned points where Dragons were vulnerable, and the tricks of a Gladiator who had spent three-quarters of his lifetime in the Pits. Gang described how the cage amplified magic tenfold and how to turn that to her advantage. She also learned how the Pits were built and secured. Few Dragons had ever escaped, because her magical imprint was tied to the House Wards, meaning that the only way to avoid triggering pursuit and protections was to change her fundamental nature. Oh, for Ardan’s powers!
The oath-magic remained mute.
She kept winning. After several weeks, her new friend promoted her to ‘scrap’. Great.
News filtered through their bars like the most excruciating drip-torture. Disturbances among the Land Dragons. Rumours of the First Egg controlling the mighty denizens of the deeps. War swept across the Southern Kahilate, led by legions of Dragons loyal to the ‘old Marshal’. Thoralian, Gang spat. Evil on wings. Yet their area of Wyldaroon was so remote and little-regarded, he saw no reason war should approach them; still, the conversation triggered Aranya’s nightmares. Every night, she suffered Fra’anior’s endless roaring, battled nameless enemies or Thoralian, and for variety’s sake, myriad white-hot flame-drakes nightly laid waste to her soul.
Occasionally, she caught Gang glancing strangely at her, especially after she transformed, sneaked out during one of his fights and returned to their cell with her Human fed and watered. Had Gang sensed something? Aye, she had literally come within an inch of being caught by several servants, but a Ri’arion-special opaque shield had protected her.
She felt so thin inside. Aflame. Friable of mind. What was the matter? Why could she not understand the detail of Fra’anior’s warnings? Perhaps it was that the fate of her friends consumed her every waking moment. She worried herself into queasiness. Ardan. Zuziana. Precious Sapphire–she dreamed of them often. Leandrial had not come for her. All that Ardan had been to her before, was a void, now. Echoing emptiness. Why? Why should she hide while the Island-World teetered on the brink of destruction? What, by the fiery, Island-raising breath of Fra’anior himself, was she waiting for?
Then, there came the day the announcer-Dragon bellowed a new title, and she learned the true impact of her mistake in revealing her name to Gangurtharr.
“Aranya the Assassin!”
Chapter 23: The Thunderous Thirty
ZUziana The Azure regarded her monk archly in the semidarkness of Leandrial’s cheek-pocket. “So, we’re agreed? No less than fifteen children …”
Ri’arion’s eyes cracked open. “I’m listening. I do need to meditate to keep these poisons at bay, and to try to figure out a way three powerful but essentially isolated creatures can break through the urzul-tainted ranks of Thoralian’s under-Cloudlands army. Still, I’m weary of being beaten, Dragoness-love. I am, quite frankly, bored rigid of running and skulking and having to apologise for my failings to my volcanically gorgeous wife!”
“Who happens to think you’ve nothing to apologise for, volcanically or otherwise.”
He made a gargling noise in his throat.
“I do love your spontaneously pre-planned compliments,” she said, preening while contorting her mouth to make a range of outrageous, come-hither lip-smacking noises.
A grin cracked his oftentimes forbidding visage. “Zuziana, if you know me this well after just a few months–”
“Tremble, little Human!”
“Ah, thou pyretic beauty, that the conflagration of thine eyes shouldst ignite mine heart!”
The Azure Dragoness purred happily, “Ooh, shall I call you Nakarion?”
With studied dignity, the monk unfolded his legs and approached his Dragoness. “I’ll admit, Nak did suggest that phrase as a kind of poetic shield against the depredations of certain sky-blue Dragonesses.”
“Depredations?” Her eyes brightened perceptibly, deepening Ri’arion’s shadow against the wall of Leandrial’s cheek. “A word with a fine ring, I’ve always thought!”
“Dictionary words turn Dragoness-hearts to prekki-fruit mush?” inquired the monk. “Duly noted, you recidivistic rapscallion.”
“Flatterer.”
“Intemperate thermogenic quadruped.”
“Aw, yours forever, witnessed by the people and warranted by fifteen royal signatures and seals upon an official scroll duly lodged in the secret vaults of royal Remoy–”
“How’s about I stage a raid on your vault?” Ri’arion interjected.
“Ri’arion!” The Azure blushed furiously.
“Oh … I didn’t quite mean … uh …” The monk’s entire pate turned a fine shade of crimson. “Mercy.”
Coyly, the Dragoness suggested, “Actually, I rather hope you did. Fifteen’s a big number.”
“Zuziana!”
Once they had finished blushing, and laughing at each other’s blushing, the monk said, “Leandrial and I did make a breakthrough in identifying the mental signatures of Theadurial-infected Land Dragons, the other day. We were able to identify that for all practical purposes, we’re prancing about on the wrong side of an army of ten thousand hostile, parasite-toting Land Dragons and every time we try to break out they pummel us worse than the granddaddy of those Storm Elementals. Our allies lie in the Southern Kahilate and we’re in the North. Stranded. Fabulous scientific advance. Utterly useless. This would be why we’re running for our lives and I’m being more miserable than a monk’s soggy blanket.”
He sounded so despondent, Zip wanted nothing more than to snuggle him–which was unlikely to be received well. She remembered First-mother Yuhina’s detailed lecture on the responsibilities of a good Remoyan wife, the day before their wedding. Good? Be a good little Shapeshifter Princess?
Faced with images of floury baking, flawless hostessing and popping out babies according to a regular schedule, Zuziana snorted, “I should think not!”
Ri’arion patted her neck fondly. “You think not what, o pride of Remoy?”
“Without disrespect to your rather intimidating intellect, monk-love, I fear we might be going about this problem entirely too logically.”
“Logically?” He stroked his beard. “You have a feeling?”
He contrived to iron any hint of sarcasm out of his voice. Zuziana loved him fiercely for that. “I think I do. I think I can test it on Leandrial. Aye. We should test my feelings.”
Gripping her jaw in both hands, Ri’arion peered inside, musing, “Feelings? Indeed, violent inner turbulence. Oodles of sulphurous mischief and a clear hint of future hijinks …”
This time her hearts, Dragoness and Human, leaped about inside of her like overexcited dragonets indulging in aerial acrobatics. Swoon-worthy leopard-man! Her knees were in serious danger of collapse in four different directions at once. The only thing that saved her was a Dragoness’ sense of incipient humiliation, and Humansoul alternately chortling at her and demanding to be let out for some ‘love-birding’. As if!
Quietly, Zip said to Leandrial, Noble Dragoness, during these weeks of running, there was one occasion when you claimed you felt a hin
t of Balance drawing you somewhere. That’s the place I’m feeling we should go. Do you still feel the same? Do you remember?
The Land Dragoness lay silent for a long time, rocking gently due to the constant upwelling action of the fumarole-ridden area where she had chosen to hide. Hiding an eight-thousand-foot waltzing nursery took some doing. There were Islands smaller than Leandrial. But with Thoralian’s allies patrolling northern Herimor twenty-seven hours per day, the companions had soon concluded that there was a strong reason that Thoralian did not want them to penetrate the Southern Kahilate–or perhaps, he expected Aranya?
Finally, Leandrial said, “The star over the Rift is gone.”
Zip and Ri’arion yelped simultaneously, “What?”
Cue pandemonium. Ten minutes passed before everyone found themselves on the same piece of scrolleaf. In that time, Tari had to shoo away five hatchlings who wanted to play with Zuziana, Ri’arion explained thirteen times to twenty curious Dragons what they were trying to do and Leandrial lost her temper the fourth time the monk asked her to clarify exactly how and when one lost a star.
Finally, Zuziana extracted from Leandrial the admission that there was a Balance-trail which by some fiendishly complex Land Dragon metaphysical speculation led her to conclude that Aranya–if the star had indeed been their friend–had departed her station seven days before, and with a seventy-one point six four three percent probability had ended up somewhere in Wyldaroon, the largest, harshest and most dangerous realm in all of Herimor. Besides, it was also famously inaccessible, being hidden behind a mountain range so massive, it shaped the primary weather-cycles across the breadth of its five-thousand-league, permafrost-capped ramparts.
