Song of the Storm Dragon

by Marc Secchia

  Corkscrewing pugnaciously past Gangurtharr, the Star Dragoness cleaned his back and shoulders of drakes with thirteen precision blasts in the space of a quarter-second, leaving the startled Dragon gaping amidst a cloud of drifting grey ash. She whirled into the midst of Huaricithe’s beleaguered command, disappearing for a moment behind the huge, closely-packed Dragonesses.

  Hsst! Hsst! Ka-ka-ka-kraaack! This was the seductive voice of her amethyst-tinged lightning. Strike after strike raged from her claws, racing through the narrowest gaps and around wings and between startled, tucked-up legs, as though the Dragonesses themselves flew within a storm, only that storm was the fledgling in their midst; they bugled in shock and amazement as the enemy imploded, burned, shot away on the wings of a sharp puff of Storm-wind.

  Having cleared the nearby skies, Aranya swirled away. Retribution-sorrow! Rage! She roared, KNOW THE TASTE OF FRA’ANIOR’S WRATH, THORALIAN!

  Three Yellow Shapeshifters broke for cover. Aranya raced after. Lightning thundered between the Islands. Only one disembodied head fell into the void of the Cloudlands below.

  The Amethyst Dragoness, burning so heatedly that the air itself seemed to flee from her presence, swooped beneath the Island-Cluster, gathering her wrath for the drakes massed beyond. Where was Thoralian? Where was he? She sensed his presence, somewhere. Somehow. He was here in Wyldaroon, and she burned suns-bright against him … for he had broken her. Marked her. Tortured her with all the vicious pleasure of an insatiably evil Dragon.

  Together with thirty Dragonesses of Huaricithe’s Dragonwing, the Star Dragoness fell upon a pack of five hundred vicious drakes, raging, burning, weeping, knowing now her own inanition, the expenditure of battle-effort from wasted lungs, that she could not breathe yet had no need to, for the starlight was her life and her song, the elemental power of her heritage.

  Aranya’s wings folded.

  Drakes mobbed her, shocked into a feral rage, but her Dragon-kin blasted through with a massive volley of fireballs, acid spit and Huaricithe’s own blue-chased fireballs … and a Dragon’s paws gripped her falling, flaccid body, hissing with shock at the extreme heat radiating from her white-hot scales, shifting to clasp just with the talons so that his Dragon-scales would not melt. Gangurtharr bore her aloft, already bugling the victory.

  The Amethyst slumped in his paws. Job … done, Gang? Did we do the job?

  Thou art the Assassin, he replied.

  For long moments, cool winds soughed across her scales, slowly relieving the awful heat and reviving her senses. Aranya felt a trickle of magic slowly returning to her spent being. She heaved and rasped for breath. Thanks … rescue.

  Softly now, Scrap, he whispered, and there was a light in his eyes Aranya did not understand. Bearing her up tenderly, the massive Dragon brought her to the place where Huaricithe had re-gathered her Dragonwing.

  Aranya smiled tiredly. Good battle, mighty Dragon-kin!

  They stared at her, fixed of eye and motionless of wing. Several Dragons even dribbled fire between their fangs. A bunch of hapless ralti sheep, she thought uncharitably. Or, was there something else? No-one seemed to be talking or boasting, and where were the celebrations due a notable victory?

  What’s the matter? We won, didn’t we?

  Gang breathed, Did you know your scales are white, Scrap? Pure white?

  Whaaaaat … Aranya stared at her paws; her wings. As white as Immadia’s freshly-fallen snows. Betrayed! Oh, Gangurtharr …

  He bowed his muzzle. Art thou Aranya, pluckéd from the starry host?

  Huaricithe extended her wings in the most formal of genuflections. Star Dragoness.

  Following her example, all of the Dragonesses of her Dragonwing lowered their muzzles and made humble obeisance, whispering, Star Dragoness. Star Dragoness. We worship thee. We worship, we worship …

  Aranya gasped, You wor–what? You can’t do that! No!

  Only the wind answered her plaintive cry.

  Chapter 26: Thoralian’s Bequest

  IN TWO Further days of rapid travel, Leandrial led her group to Entorixthu’s Cleft. Here, the Mesas had been deeply split, giving rise to a dark cleft flanked by two even darker pillars at the entrance, black metallic statues depicting two heads of Fra’anior himself. Those forbidding statues stood a mere five times taller than Leandrial was long, thought Zip, hovering on the wing as she eyed the Land Dragoness judiciously. Sure, she filled a low mountaintop as few Dragons might. But those peaks ahead–they would test Land Dragons’ capabilities to the limit.

  Ri’arion, naturally, was swapping notes with Leandrial. “You say the pass is eleven miles high?”

  “More, depending on the snow and ice,” she replied.

  “That’s high, even for a Lesser Dragon,” he noted. “Not much of a pass, is it? Better than crossing the real highlands on either side, suppose.”

  “A mere fifteen to eighteen miles tall, according to my trigonometric calculations,” agreed the Welkin-Runner. “Alright, how shall we organise ourselves, monk?”

  Ri’arion said, “Bigger Runners at the front, you in the middle, Leandrial, and the rest close behind. I’ve worked the shield-constructs as best I can, given our differing levels of ability. The Blast-Runners will stick close to their ‘buddy’ Welkin-Runners. Halfway up the pass or so, we’ll have them settle inside mouths because of their lack of resistance to extreme cold. The Lesser Dragons will scout to try to keep the Ice-Runners at bay.”

  “They’re hardly Runners,” complained one of the younger Welkin-Runners, Jelladrial by name. Their group had now swelled to include eleven of Leandrial’s kin, as they had found a few more individuals taking refuge in the Sea of Dragons’ Tears.

  “Sub-intelligent Dragonkind,” the monk agreed smoothly. “Pack hunters that delight in warmly welcoming visitors to the Mesas, by all accounts.”

  “Furry Dragons? Ugh,” sniffed another Welkin-Runner.

  “No point in jawing the day away here,” Zuziana said wanly, willing her stomach to stay firmly in place. “We’ve plenty of daylight hours left. No rest for depraved, Princess-despoiling recalcitrant excuses for religious men.”

  Ri’arion kicked her shoulder, chuckling, “In my defence–”

  “Defence? I don’t believe I’ve made that particular allowance in your case. I like to keep my husbands on a short chain.”

  “Husbands, plural? I’m no schizophrenic Shapeshifter–realising suddenly that I have two wives, one scaly and cuddly, and the other a petite thorn bush.”

  Chuckling with her monk, the Azure Dragoness winged toward the great, weather-beaten statues guarding Entorixthu’s Cleft. Certainly, she had a new appreciation for Aranya’s healthy fear of the Great Onyx. Imagine having a clutch of those heads champing at your tail-end all night?

  A chill breeze tugged at her wing membranes, a harbinger of things to come. This was undoubtedly a job for an Immadian, not a girl from tropical Remoy. Zip silently beseeched Fra’anior to return Aranya to them. And when he did, she would so take the Amethyst to task for daring to slingshot them out of the Rift-Storm! Whatever had she been thinking–self-sacrifice? By the Black One’s own belly-fires, that best friend of hers needed some common pragmatism thoroughly beaten into her armour-plated skull!

  She knew just the girl to do that, too.

  The Welkin-Runners emerged from the cream-fluff Cloudlands in a dense, damp-slick wedge. The lowering suns brought out the vibrant blues of their scales as never before. Gigantic chameleons, she thought. Leandrial was more than twice the size of any of her kin, a giant among giants, and the Blast-Runners clustered above her neck seemed little more than tiny children clutching their mother’s ruff. Two eggs had hatched inside of Leandrial’s mouth the previous evening, sparking joyous Dragonsong amongst Tari’s Dragonwing, who were resting until they entered the Cleft itself. Zip had held one of the wobbly hatchlings in her paws, and wondered how her triplets might come out–Human or scaly? Was there a rule for Shapeshifters?

  Triplets? Leapin
g Islands crowned by dancing rainbows, in triplicate!

  The Land Dragons rapidly sloughed off the last of the Cloudlands as they ascended a hidden slope protruding from Entorixthu’s Cleft like a long tongue, the result of centuries of erosion. A surprisingly turquoise river filled much of the mile-wide gap between the statues, with white floes moving briskly in the slurry of its evidently chill flow. That was no barrier to the Welkin-Runners. They surged upslope gusting steaming puffs of air over their labouring bodies. With a combined mental touch, Ri’arion and Leandrial checked their pressure-increasing, osmotic and cold-reflective shield-layers and helped several of the younger Land Dragons make adjustments. Then, they poured up the long, winding cleft into the heart of the Mesas.

  The route wound gently into a broad, temperate valley lined with forests of a local gum tree, with distinctly blue, teardrop-shaped leaves; these covered the valley’s slopes alongside the river in a dense, hundred-foot forest canopy. A menthol-like tang came to Zuziana’s nostrils. She inhaled appreciatively. For this part, the Land Dragons elected to swim-wade upriver. After all, the deep flow barely covered their bellies. Several hours later, the valley opened into ostensibly uninhabited riverine pastureland, where the wavy bluegrass was a summery azure with white tufts backed by faraway ranks of jutting mauve and grey mountains, capped with white snowfall. The size and quantity of the animal droppings led Zuziana to wonder where all the denizens had vanished to.

  They aimed for a second set of black statues, easily visible over the flat blue grassland from a distance of over a hundred miles, and by nightfall, passed onward into the mountains proper. Leandrial called a mid-evening rest as, having climbed a steep slope to a height of perhaps four miles above the Cloudlands, the mountains revealed … aye, more mountains, and more beyond, until the serried ranks of purple and white peaks seemed to touch the sky itself. The Land Dragons performed health checks, indulged in a little forest-crushing wrestling match, and Leandrial let her coterie of fledglings and hatchlings out of her mouth to play and feed in the icy night air.

  An hour later, taskmaster-Ri’arion called the Dragons to order.

  Zip tried very hard not to giggle at the prospect of a dashing six-foot-plus Human calling their monstrous Land Dragon companions to heel. Most would not even have noticed had they trodden upon him by accident.

  Now, the trail climbed relentlessly, forcing the heavy Land Dragons to push themselves hard. To the Lesser Dragons the air became bitingly cold and thin as they climbed; far worse for Land Dragons, accustomed to the great air pressures and comfortable warmth of their middle and middle-lower layers. They huffed and panted as they walked over the permafrost, pressing into a steadily worsening breeze that swept down from the heights, bringing a tang of moisture and new smells–draconic smells.

  Leandrial said, “They’re waiting for us up ahead.”

  “Couldn’t be Thoralian’s handiwork, could it?” asked Ri’arion.

  They had earlier discussed intelligence detected from a patrol of Gem-Runners that suggested one of the Thoralians might already be in Wyldaroon, recruiting Gladiator Dragons for his armies.

  Leandrial shook her muzzle resolutely. “Seems unlikely. But we must be alert. He might well have forces watching the mountains. He seems to have covered most of Herimor with his spies and patrols. Good thinking to lay a false trail yesterday.”

  The monk pointed with his chin. “Do you smell a storm?”

  “Perhaps beyond the pass,” she rumbled, testing her eye-beam with a brief shot into the sky. “Onward and upward, my friends.”

  Crossing a ridge, they descended for an hour before traversing a flat, isolated plain. Dense, low-hanging cloudbanks obscured the farther peaks. Leandrial oriented them on a third set of statues and they walked doggedly into the first flurries of snow. The ground was ice and red stone, unrelieved by any green, growing thing. Shortly, the Blast-Runners made their retreat into warm and welcoming mouths, and the group pushed up another climb into the teeth of a freshening gale as the weather closed in. Tari the Red passed overhead, calling a warning.

  The landscape was like a series of huge steps leading into leaden skies. Zip reckoned the time must be around dawn, but there was no relief from the snow whipping into their faces. She began to wonder if the climb would ever end. The Welkin-Runner youngsters had their heads down, clearly freezing and miserable, plodding along with no thought other than to reach the top and begin the descent. Even shields could only achieve so much.

  They were two and a half leagues above the Cloudlands, deep in a realm inimical to their kind, when the first attack came.

  Zuziana heard a low rumbling approaching from the flank; Leandrial sounded a warning as two dozen or more Ice-Runners rumbled over a nearby rise, moving rapidly in a tight-knit group, all horns pointed to the front and armoured skulls lowered for the charge. They undulated along like the sometimes toxic, furry caterpillars of Remoy, Zip decided, only these beasts appeared to possess eighteen or twenty sets of legs, and beneath their flowing white fur and oddly bearded, broad faces, she suspected they were little more than five hundred feet of bone, muscle and belligerence.

  Voicing a primal howl, they swept down on the foremost Welkin-Runners. Eye-cannons flared, blasting half a dozen of the Ice-Runners into the next kingdom, wherever that was. The balance slammed into one of the smaller Welkin-Runners positioned just ahead of Leandrial, and bowled her over in a concerted rush. Shields vibrated like bells. Paws scrabbled. Ri’arion charged in like a fireball in his own right, shoring up damage and helping the youngsters pick targets that were not each other. Tari and Brityx roared in above the tussling group, igniting the Ice-Runners’ long, luxurious fur like torches.

  Watch the horns! They’ve shield-penetrating magic, called Ri’arion. Tixi–

  On it like choleric lightning, snapped the Red. Dragons, fan out! Warm them up before they get here. Brityx, take ten and scout ahead. I’m on port. Hulzar, starboard. Leandrial, have your Runners fire early–we’ll give you nice bonfires to target.

  Zip realised that the Welkin-Runners somehow had not seen the incoming Ice-Runners. They were well disguised, certainly–was it the cold? The sleeting storm? Magic?

  No time for that. She banked to follow Brityx’s group, ignoring Ri’arion’s hastily swallowed desire to forbid her to fly into battle. She was pregnant, not helpless! She threw back over her shoulder, Leandrial, can those Blast-Runners fire from inside your mouth? How can we use them?

  Her thought was only half-formed when fire erupted ahead of her. A dense pack of Ice-Runners split apart as if hacked by an axe, voicing guttural howls. Leandrial’s eye-beam speared through the semidarkness, gouging a mile-long trench of destruction. Smaller beams lit upon the Ice-Runners at the forefront of the charge, blasting away with concerted pulses of Harmonic magic. The massively powerful creatures still broke through, despite flaming fur and severed limbs, whereupon Leandrial and her kin fell to the old-fashioned method of chopping with their flaming talons, but their power seemed weakened in the thin atmosphere. They suffered heavy damage before the charge broke up.

  Zuziana shot overhead, wishing she could do more damage than just her fireballs and lightning. She could lead. Zipping past Brityx and her group, the Azure Dragoness and her monk searched for the way forward, for the best path that would take them out of range of the Ice-Runners. There were many, approaching as though drawn by the sounds and scents of battle, by the clash of magic and the muted thundering of the Land Dragons. Yet the top of the pass was not far, perhaps ten miles distant.

  KAAABOOOM!! The Blast-Runners’ contribution lit the gloom, spraying body parts as far as a mile up the trail.

  Aye! Whirling, she cried, Leandrial, rouse your kin to run as you did before, upon talons of penetrative shielding! Follow me!

  The Dragoness did not hesitate. She roused her charges with urgent bellowing. One young male Welkin-Runner was too injured to continue; overriding his protests, Leandrial slung him bodily over her shoulder, s
taggering under the additional weight.

  Zuziana heard her roar, I will not lose another! Not on this airless, forsaken mountain!

  Riding the whistling storm winds, Zuziana sensed her monk growing distant in his mind as he lent his mental strength to the great Dragons–encouraging, cajoling, scorning if needed. Anything to rouse their fires. The Welkin-Runners gathered momentum. Their paws began to tread lightly, cushioned by air, and she relayed a message through Ri’arion to bid them be as quiet as possible. How did one still the breathing of a half-mile behemoth? With auditory shielding, of course, grunted the monk. Meantime, she had Tari and Brityx mount diversionary attacks away from the main trail. The simple stratagem worked. The Ice-Runners milled about in confusion, sensing their prey disappearing while attacks materialised from other sources. They charged toward the enemy-apparent, only to discover their own kind; wild snarls developed as the Ice-Runners vented their fury on each other. Brityx called to her Dragonwing, helping the confusion by fire-bombing the wild Dragonkind from above.

  What … when reach … top? Leandrial wheezed.

  She was growing light-headed, ready to drop as she powered up to the summit of the pass. The Dragoness staggered as though she were drunk–oxygen deprivation, Zip realised. Unbelievably, they still travelled through a distinct cleft in the immense mountain-range. Though the flurries of snow, Zuziana caught sight of peaks miles taller still, which acted as a natural funnel for the storm’s blast.

  Unaccountably, the wind dropped as though hacked away by a sword.

  The Ice-Runners gathered on the slopes turned with one accord toward the faint rumbling raised by the Land Dragons.

  Help! cried two of the youngsters.

  There’s a plan, Zuziana called smoothly. Trust me and do as I command.

  General Zuziana, Ri’arion chuckled, you are undoubtedly the most adorable general I have ever had the pleasure of–tell you later. Luckily for him, he stopped mid-proposition.