by Marc Secchia
The Wyvern’s expression indicated her thankfulness that dinner had just fallen from the sky.
Dinner promptly vacated the nest with a convulsive bound that whipped her past the Wyvern’s slashing fangs, with barely a whisker to spare. Brightness. Sunstrikes casting darts into her damaged fur. Wreaths of golden and burgundy vegetation and protruding gemstone formations flashed past. Battered by a small avalanche of stones, plant matter and the spitting aggression of tiny igneous-dracolithes, but unharried for once, the tumbling Whisper finally lodged in a crack upon the precipice, between the exposed roots of a charred sentikor tree and a protrusion of crystal-studded, deep indigo fandolite.
Safety? Perhaps.
Everything hurt. Her groan burbled with the thickness of blood in her throat. Obeying an animal instinct, she crawled deep and wedged her tiny body between the tangled roots, as far back from reaching talons as possible.
It was all too much.
The Whisper surrendered to unconsciousness.
* * * *
Snuffling breath. She awoke! Loamy scents of dust and detritus trapped in the crack, which over years and perhaps decades had turned into rich, crystal infused loam. The Whisper scrabbled in the dirt, licking urgently with her tongue in search of grubs and juicy, toasty-warm drakkids, members of the teeming subclass of insectoid Dragonkind, from fire-spitting bombardier drakkid-beetles to the massive armoured drakkamantids and other deadly predators.
She needed strength. Bite! Flesh, fats and gristle tingled her tongue so sweetly, the tastes ran down her throat like fiery juice.
The Whisper’s lips had begun to curl into an almost-smile of bliss, when the semidarkness shook. Talons! Whippets! The sound of whippet-draconids hunting was a lustful gurgling deep in the long throat, broken by yips of crooning bloodlust. A pack of at least seven, judging by their distinct scents, tore at the base of the sentikor tree, flaying the rough russet bark into fountains of fragments. She shrank back into her hole, her throat working against its desiccation. She felt blood squelch beneath her body – so much blood!
Cool dawn mists wreathed her new prison in ethereal veils of unreality. The gnarled roots protecting her gripped the cliff with legendary vigour, supporting boughs measuring well over four hundred feet in this small specimen, yet they were not the sentikor’s primary source of nourishment. That was the cool, redolent mists and the sifting nutrients from on high, mostly organic and crystalline grit, stinking of life-bringing decomposition and tangy, energising minerals. The stark juxtaposition entranced her. Death and decay supplied rebirth to life’s ever-renewing vivacity.
I am newness. Individual.
She was under attack.
Suddenly, the tree shook with an impact and the snarling outside turned into a full-scale brawl, shockingly violent. One of the draconids slumped, its throat slit to reveal pale pink flesh, and in its place, far larger talons laced through the maze toward her. The Wyvern! Her pale blue wings folded as she tried to force her forelegs into the narrowest of gaps. Wyverns had four appendages in comparison to a Dragon’s six; a Dragon’s separate wing structures and forelegs would have allowed them to tear the tree apart in seconds. The Wyvern had to switch to quarrying away with her powerful hind legs, while using her claw-tipped wing-forelegs to keep the prowling draconids at bay. Fangs flashed. Three dull green, lizard-like draconids slithered down the cliff from above, while another pair investigated the underside. Their needle-filled grins surrounded the huddled Whisper, hissing and dripping acidic saliva.
She kept still, calculating.
The mother Wyvern was no slouch. Striking out at the boldest draconid, she snapped its bones between her powerful fangs and spat the mess at the others. They backed off, but not far.
Distinctly, the Whisper sensed the Wyvern’s emotions. Hunger. Eggling-concern – would these green draconids attack her nest? Again, the impressions she received sparked thousands of ancillary thoughts in her mind, but the sense of being hampered did not abate.
I am rational.
A rational creature took rational risks, but also considered irrationality.
Barely had this thought swirled into her mind, when the Whisper threw herself forward, twisting her body between the roots to catch the Wyvern’s downward-spearing hind talon behind her back. She worked the ropes frantically against its sharp edge, careless of the point piercing her right buttock. Free her paws, and she might stand a chance.
She had forgotten the ruin of her tail. One violent blow to the stump, and she fainted, then came to, vomiting up the grubs she had just enjoyed. The Wyvern screeched furiously as its prey wriggled away, while the draconids slavered at the stench of her vomit, growing visibly more agitated. No give in the ropes. She still could not reach them with her talons, for her fingers seemed numbed, unable to complete the contortions required. How had Sanfuri’s men known to bind her so well? The Whisper jerked back as the Wyvern curved its toothy maw around the base of the sentikor, searching for a way in. She willed herself to disappear. She willed it …
With a screech of frustration, the Wyvern drew back. Confused? Unable to see what was plainly in front of her ugly reptilian snout?
Again, reaction preceded conscious thought. Writhing through the roots like a hooked fish, the Whisper angled for the only escape route she could see. Sideways. Straight past one of the lurking whippet-draconids.
Her passing was a whisper against the dangling bushes. The green draconid lunged! It missed, but a swerve caused her to slip twenty feet down the near-vertical cliff. Down was easy, into the churning mists. Down meant danger, a hint of mordancy in the churning mists. Odd. What was that whisker sense? Something … helpful. Obeying the imperative of her hazy memories, the Whisper took off again, rustling through the overhanging berry bushes before leaping onto a sentikor branch, then another. Immediately, she sensed a difference in her environment. A gravity inversion! Suddenly, down meant toward the cliff. The Whisper ran freely now at an eighty-degree angle to the vertical, passing neatly beneath an impossible, jutting overhang infested with the crystal dust and spit nests of semitone sandy drakkids, named for the musical notes made by their fluttering wings, and into a cave beyond.
Good, said her directional sense. Normal gravity reasserted itself.
She raced into the cave-darkness, and cracked her head against rock as she slewed sideways.
* * * *
Spitting with frustration, the Whisper found herself sprawled on a sandy cavern floor amidst the bones of an old dracoworm skeleton. The bonds still would not break. Whatever the Warlock’s men had used to bind her, it refused to yield easily to the cut of a Wyvern’s talons. She wrestled and writhed, but could neither reach with her toes, nor bend her finger-talons far enough.
Weak from injury and blood loss, she wandered the tunnels for hours. Many times she stumbled or fell. Her movements steadily became more haphazard and lethargic, for her situation seemed beyond caring about. Only the oath drove her onward, a burning that consumed her mind whenever she considered a goal other than the City of Blue. The oath was her goad, her invisible whip, the dry whisper of the Warlock proclaiming Arbor’s doom. Who was he, that he harboured such enmity in his soul’s putrid depths?
Always upward she coursed, blundering through the pitch black tunnels, frantically dodging the massive coils of a sluggish dracoworm, invisible in this realm where the light of bioluminescent organisms and the occasional glowing columns of mystic blue istorialite were widely scattered and the darkness impenetrable between; her scent organs imprinted the dracoworm’s burned-rock-and-sulphur stench indelibly upon her memory, and she used it to choose between tunnels amidst the honeycomb maze. At some point she remembered stumbling into an underground river, an ankle-deep but swift flow that almost upended her. She drank gratefully and continued for several more hours before collapsing again.
I am dying.
Howls through the tunnels roused her once more. Even dying was not permitted, not while her oath remained. She was a Whisp
er. She must endure.
Supping upon mosses and lichens to still the shouting of her belly, the Whisper continued her journey, step by step, panting heavily. Light blurred about her reeling frame as she entered a cavern of singing crystals, then there was blackness once more, and falling down a chute that led to an underground lake. The Whisper kicked until she found a boulder, and there she slept half-in and half-out of the freezing water, until the raging imperative could be withstood no longer. She was forced to swim again.
The cold numbed her throbbing tail-stump, keeping her walking through a deep crevasse filled with the creaking, buzzing and clicking sounds of night, the voices of many nocturnal creatures blending together in raucous chorus. An interminable time later, she sneaked past a diamond geode infested with feasting dracolithes, which were themselves like walking diamonds of brilliant white coats and black fangs and eyes, and she realised that dawn had arrived again. Which dawn? She no longer knew. Passing through a long, twisting tunnel that looked recently used, she broke out into a sinkhole filled with sentikor trees, and at last, the sweet, belly-clenching scent of fruit greeted her questing nostrils.
Her neck twizzled slowly as she considered the climb. So weak! That flesh born just a few days before amidst hyper-sensitivity and thrilling alertness to every detail of her surrounds, was now as dull and unresponsive as wood. She swayed wearily, unable to focus her eyes any longer, her ears lying flat against her feline skull.
Climb. One branch. Two. Panting heavily. Blood still seeped steadily from the four or five remaining inches of her tail. She left a blue-crimson stain up the branches as she climbed carefully, wary of falling. There was no other way out of this deep sinkhole but up, and that direction was thankfully furnished with a profusion of useful branches, all tangled up into a living ladder. A healthy Whisper would have played in this thicket with childlike abandon.
Was she a child, but several days old?
She inched out onto a branch, her toe-claws trembling in response to a movement as simple and basic as the need to keep her balance. Irresistible, fruity scents teased her nostrils. Nothing else mattered. The Whisper edged onward, out onto narrowness, willing her body not to lose consciousness now.
A vine sprang about her foot. Coiling. Tensing. With a wild yell, the Whisper upended! Waving plant-tendrils eagerly explored her fur, wrapped about her neck and drew her toward a gourd half-filled with noxious green … acid! She struggled violently, choking. The bonds! Her hands could not move. She could not wrench herself free!
“Calm yer furry knickers,” said a voice.
Snick. Snip. Snap!
She fell, but only as far as a gnarled brown paw. The Whisper moaned as her poor, abused tail received another jolt. Darkness roared over her like an unforeseen storm. Dragon! As brown as an old stick, the Dragon peered myopically at her. “Now, done seen none o’ yer purtiness since I were an egg,” he commented peaceably. “Don’cha worry none ’bout my ilk. We Arboreal Dragons don’ eat no meat an’ yer smell rank-like, anyways … what they call yer kind? I done clean forgotten. Quite senile. Happens when yer, er … well … reach summat few hundreds of Sunderings old.”
The Dragon held up a few talons, uncertainly. Centuries?
In his burry, slow voice, the Arboreal Dragon added, “Who hurt yers, lil’ critter? C’mon, let’s get yer someplace nice-ish. We kin partake a cuppa bark-sap and natter on good-like.”
She slumped in his paws. What use fighting anymore?
Except for the pursuit. She whispered, “Whippets … coming. For me. Warlock –”
The old Dragon stiffened perceptibly. “Sanfuri? Should’a smelled his stink ten canyons off. Why, he’s bin trouble since I wore shell on me ’ead. Don’cha worry yer furry lil’ brain none, lil’ fur-kind. Yer smells like ’em legends, them as could like as not whisper up cataclysms. Dangerous, y’are. Right ol’ dangerous. Mark me words ’n that egg-trap yer calls an ’ead …”
His words faded behind the roaring in her ears.
* * * *
The Whisper dreamed of being enfolded in a white, womblike space. She dreamed of a pre-existence where her soul soared in realms of chaotic, exploding colours and lights, and played amidst the tumbling billows of volcanic winds.
She smelled medicinal herbs and fire and a voice like the rustling of dry leaves whispering about her, singing an old draconic lullaby about Dragon eggs laughing in the sky.
Sheer material caressed her cheek. Through the white spider-silk hangings, she saw the dull embers of a fire and a thin brown Dragon sleeping coiled about it, his knotty scales brown on the outside and ruddy where the fire had warmed them, his paws tucked beneath his chin as if he contemplated the deepest philosophical mysteries of the universe.
His snoring belied that impression.
The Whisper found herself hanging from the ceiling of what appeared to be a snug tree-hole, in a comfortable cloth sling. Her nose poked out of one end, her sore feet from the other. Her paws lay comfortably folded upon her belly – her paws! A soft trill of delight tingled her lips. Her wrists were deeply cut, rubbed raw where she had struggled repeatedly with the tough cords, and as she peeked at what she could see of her body, she was startled to discover she wore some manner of covering consisting of trim red shorts, and had been slathered in a herbal mixture of unbelievably pungent odour – healing herbs, her nose declared, but she sneezed five times with increasing violence as a result.
The best medicine always singed the nostrils.
The Dragon cracked open one yellow eye. “Slumberous sunuptide to yer. Feelin’ honko-monko?”
What? She croaked, “Water …”
He stirred arthritically, with many a creak and pop of his joints, before fetching a gourd and raising it to her lips. “Good medicine. Burn the scadmongering Warlock right outta yer.”
The Whisper drank, made a face, and drank some more. “Thank – glub.”
“Sorry.”
She coughed hollowly, feeling every wound on her body awake. “The whippet-draconids –”
“Innt outta the maze yet,” he said. “We travelled on some – what’s-a matter?”
She winced and rubbed her temples. “My oath. I was forced to take an oath to deliver a message to the Human city of Arbor. I must leave.”
“Not before we done fillin’ that scrawny fruit basket o’ yers.” The Arboreal Dragon blinked slowly at her, indicating her stomach. “C’mon down ’ere, yer scruffy-scruffed scruffer. Fruits. Gourds. Stuff yer belly good ’an I’ll ’ave none o’ yer backchat an’ sass.”
When she hesitated, he sniffed, “Youngsters. No manners what-so-like-ever.”
Carefully, the Whisper alighted from her sling-bed, twisting her head over her shoulder to check her tail – bound in leaves, and only stinging mildly now. Turning back to the elderly Dragon, who was stoking his fire thoughtfully, she tried to thank him, but the words choked around a huge glut of emotions plugging her throat.
The Dragon’s yellow eyes lit upon her, as soft as candle flame. “I know, lil’ Whisper. That beasty Warlock done yer wicked sore evils. But yer honko-monko now? Some?”
“Mighty … uh, honko-monko,” she managed. Was he sunstrike-touched?
He gurgled with pleasure, flicking his short, alert ears and clenching his paws. “An’ what’s yer name be?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have a name.” Selecting a ripe margunana, she peeled the orange rind with deft sweeps of her claws, and bit into the tart interior with relish. Now that savour was a taste-bud tickler! “I only woke recently. I don’t remember … anything. Just the Warlock and his message for Arbor, and I hate having to lead them there, because there’s this uncontrollable pressure … my magical imperative.” She shook her head slowly. “I’m just a Whisper. No name. Born because a Warlock conjured me. Running for my life. I want to thank you, uh –”
“Styxor,” he growled.
“Thank you, Styxor. Your kindness means so much … more than I could ever repay.”
&nbs
p; “Ah, all I done’s a few patches an’ smear some goo in yer purty ’airs,” the Dragon said gruffly. “Innt nuthin’. Nah, yer got no name? True-like? Munch up. Don’ yer dare stop stuffin’ yer face or I shall be mighty insulted, yer hear?”
She shook her head bleakly. Such kind-heartedness from the Arboreal Dragon. He clearly delighted in sharing what little he had with her, and had done a sterling job in patching up her wounds. Oh, what horror explicit in the message she bore. How could she remain true to the binding oath and not bring disaster upon the Humans of Arbor? Nothing would spite the Warlock more sorely … but even a half-thought of turning introduced a headache like sunstrike into her mind.
Now, the old-timer turned to her as if from a place of faraway contemplation, his eyes agleam. He said, “I know summat ’bout yer Whisper-kind. Was lotsa yer, once. I know yer bound sore-bad, yer gotta run like nuthin’ kin stop yer. Is a kinda magic older ’n our world, lil’ scruff. But I’s got news yer dunno, or my name’s not Styxor the Brown Arboreal.”
She waited, but the wizened brown fire-breather seemed to lose his train of thought. The Whisper was just about to speak, when Styxor drew himself up and declared in an unexpectedly resonant voice, “Truly, ’tis said, a Whisper shouts louder than thunder!”
Her ears tingled! A shiver ran right down her spine, but stalled at the tip of her tail as if sheared away as abruptly and brutally as the wounding blow which had amputated her flesh. She lifted her paws to find that the old Dragon had indeed stitched her ear back together again, and glued it together with leaves, as best she could tell. His claws clicked softly upon the wood of his cosy home, just ten or twelve of her paces in diameter, and hardly taller than three Whispers or so. The Dragon took her paws in his, and gazed deeply into her surprise-enlarged irises.
