by Marc Secchia
He said, “Yer listenin’ good, mizz purty malachite-eyes?”
“My eyes are … uh, aye?”
“Malachite,” the Arboreal reiterated. “Gonzo-monzo purty.”
She chuckled faintly. Well, that was one detail she had not considered, but his description introduced a small, tight curl of happiness into her chest. “Thanks. I’m listening.”
The Arboreal drew himself up with a weighty huff. “In ancient times our world were called a different name-like. Now, ’tis Xisharn to the Dragonkind, referrin’ to the total destruction of Sundering, an’ Yanzorda t’ Humankind, meanin’ the world o’ fractures. But afore all this an’ that nonsense-fires, it were called Whisper. That be truth as clear as sunstrike itself. Yer kind was first ’ere, the first an’ the finest. An’ yer a Whisper, an’ a right purtier lil’un I innt never seen. So, gimme permission?”
So moved was she by his bluff, thoughtful manner, the Whisper could only stare into his burning eyes. “Permission? What for?”
“Just say yes.”
What of it? He seemed insistent; she was curious.
“Yes.”
“All … righto-mighto!” he crowed. “From this day, I name yer, Whisper. ’Cause yer done got reborn for all o’ us, and yer name means that nuthin’ – an’ I mean no power between Ocean nor Sky, not Sundering nor nuthin’ else in all creation – kin be so mighty a Talisman as a Whisper!”
Chapter 3: Whisper of Light
BEFORE THE VISCERAL quivering produced by his outcry had finished shaking her bones into figurative dust, the Arboreal Dragon cocked his head. “They’s comin’. Fast, them nasty whippet critters.”
Suddenly, moving with a fluidity that belied his great age, the Dragon began to root about his cave. He tossed a flurry of items at the startled Whisper. “Sling – catch. Water gourd. Medicine, don’cha take more’n one mouthful twice a day. Woozy yer out. Fruit – pick yer fill. Bone knife. Now run, Whisper, run!”
She stuffed the rough green sling, fashioned of tough woven leaves, rapidly. “But, Styxor …”
“But acid spit, Whisper. Get yer gone!”
“I’d fight –”
“I know. Yer ever done seen Arboreals fight, purty Whisper? Don’cha worry ’bout me.”
Judging by the hissing and spitting rising from somewhere below, the whippet-draconids were rushing upward in numbers. Did they gather more to the cause as they tracked their mark, she wondered?
Styxor clapped her roughly on the shoulder. “Yer run an’ bamboozle that depraved Warlock, Whisper. Now go. Find the beacon innit Canyon of Light. That’ll lead yer Arbor-ward. Go!”
“Thanks!”
She darted out of the tree-hole, finding herself an unknowable distance up the main trunk of a Bracer-giant. These great trees were renowned for growing, from a single trunk, upward and downward and in every possible direction, planting additional trunks as they slowly filled a canyon or crack with their apparently illimitable ability to propagate. Extending the talons of all four paws, she raced five hundred feet up the first trunk before leaping sideways to a second. A wild howling resounded in the narrow chasm Styxor had chosen for his bolt-hole, before multiple voices choked off, rattling their death-coughs. She glanced down briefly to see a purple-faced whippet slammed against the trunk as if it were the flimsiest of rags by a khaki tentacle. Yet the dirty green draconids poured up the trunk in their hundreds, overwhelming the speck of brown that was the brave Arboreal Dragon.
The only way to honour his sacrifice was to run. Flinging her tears to the afternoon winds, Whisper raced away, yelling to summon the whippet-draconids to the chase.
She had a name. She would prevail.
* * * *
Whisper ran for an hour before she reached the outer branches of the Bracer-giant tree. By this time, she was wheezing hard and the leaf-bandages upon her tail were stained with fresh blue-and-crimson blood. Fresh blood seeped from the deeper whip weals opened by the stress the fast travel placed upon her body. Not much of a runner, was she? Or was her exhaustion due to the greatly increased altitude? Here, the world unexpectedly opened up, and she had her first sight of Sundering – such, it must be. What she had beheld before was only a wide canyon. Whisper eyed the spectacle of destruction with a gasp of repulsion. The Warlock had hinted that Arbor had been cut off. The reason was perfectly clear to her watering eyes. Whisper blinked against the eyeball-blistering glare, trying to see properly. Just ahead, sunstrike!
She stood a mere ten paces within the shadow of an overarching sentikor – no, an aromiko tree, its higher-growing cousin. Ahead, the land had been carved and blasted into a barren canyon that scored across her path. Melted. Devastation on an unimaginable scale. Given a mere second’s observation before the dazzling white sunlight became too strong to bear, she thought she saw hazy columns of dusty green shimmering somewhere miles across the barrens. Twenty miles? Thirty? She scented smelted ores and trees reduced to ash, sulphurous, still-burning fires and molten gemstones. Heat shimmered off the blighted, slumped columns of rock, the remains of burned bulwarks and cliffs shrouded now in veils of white ash, like death’s own mirror. Whiter than white. So pure and ghastly, it stunned the senses. Inescapable. Lower down, lava flows snaked across the open ground like bleeding wounds. Instinctively, she shaded her half-blinded eyes from the intense glare, peering through the furry fringes of her crossed forearms. The brunt of direct sunlight – sunstrike – was so formidable, rock itself melted and smoked under its unmitigated gaze. Even where she stood on the fringe, the heat was a physical blow.
Sundering. A Whisper-instinct informed her that Arbor lay somewhere beyond these smoking, scarred barrens, and her heartbeat became strong yet muffled in her ears. Whisper sank to her knees. Flabbergasted. Just one image popped into her mind, supplanting all others. A sky-spanning white sword of sunstrike reaching out to lick the topside and bulwarks with its searing blade, gashing a terrible wound with the ease of the Warlock’s sword slicing into her body, cleaving even the bones of this land.
What caused a Sundering?
Why had the Warlock sought to sunder her heart?
Again, she scented the air lightly, recoiling at the heat sucked into her lungs, searching with more than just her nostrils. Arbor lay beyond the Sundering. This must be a Whisper-sense, to scent her goal though she knew nothing of the city save its name and approximate direction.
She sipped cautiously from the gourd, savouring the restorative sweetness. Might the Arboreal Dragon have escaped? Concealed himself in the environment of which he was master? Sanfuri’s words had been truth, at least, in some part. Arbor was cut off from this direction. Safe from the Warlock’s army of Dragons and Humans. Well, safe until a Whisper forged a path, or died trying.
Her eyes moistened, but not because of her hurts.
She stood so high! Deliberately, Whisper turned her back on the smoking, deathly wasteland to scan her surrounds. Behind her, great ranks of bulwarks, comprised of emforite-shielded granite and shendite, rose in serried defiance against the glare of sunstrike, their precipitous slopes shaded with the life-sheltering green of sentikor and aromiko growth. How did those trees survive sunstrike? Above was the topside, home only to Dragons. They alone could bear the furnace-blast of unrestrained sunstrike, and that not for long, she understood. Below these mighty bulwarks lay the maze of dark cracks, crevasses and yawning canyons that harboured life. Miles deep. A navigation challenge of byzantine proportions. Ignothax had aptly described the landscape as a ‘three-dimensional maze’. She could not pass above. She must pass though, finding spaces and passages only a Whisper could sniff out. Press on. Bypass the Sundering. Deliver her vindictive message.
Mainland, her senses whispered as she gazed toward her right paw. Openside, came the whisper in the opposite direction. Neither was navigable. Yet to her left, as she squinted against the ruinous brightness, her retinae detected a slightly different quality of light. A hint of something extraordinary, drawing the regard of her h
eart as though the land itself had spoken a guiding word. In an instant, her decision was formed. That way.
I am tenacious.
Shouldering her light sling, Whisper set off.
* * * *
Her unhealed wounds forced her to travel slowly. Twice, over the following four days, she narrowly escaped from the whippet-draconids as they ambushed her with all the cunning of their kind. The second time, they mauled her left knee badly before she managed to slip away through a thicket of carnivorous brambloid protodragon plants. The following day, infection had already set in. The Arboreal’s medicines did make her woozy, but she persisted and the masticated herbs at least dampened the agony of her tail, which still shrieked right through her body with every jouncing step or bump.
If the first imperative of survival was to run, the second was to learn. As she foraged and opportunity allowed, she sniffed and tasted and observed. Whisper learned that her senses were excellent, smelling out food from miles away if the conditions were right, able to tell harmful herbs from good. She travelled steadily parallel to the Sundering, occasionally breaking out into the barrens, whereupon she had to turn back or seek another route. Her quick paws purloined berries from bushes and allowed her to navigate vertical rock faces with relative ease and security. Her injured knee ballooned.
She slept wherever her head could find safe rest, high up in trees or secreted away in tiny caves. One evening, she slept on a dusty ledge high above the Sundering – so high, she saw she had crested the uppermost layer of aromiko trees. The crystal dust lay as soft as dammis-duck down in the hollows up here, ten inches deep, and its scent was an opus of complex origins and aeons of erosion, the tale of the land itself. Whisper did not know why, but she snuggled down into the crystal dust, enjoying the harmonic resonance the crystal grains and fragments made in her fur every time she moved.
Then, she stargazed.
Stars were a rare sight from the mid-reaches of eighteen-mile deep canyons, but it was rarer still to sit a mere two miles below the topside itself and gaze upon a sky-dome filled with a blazing glory of constellations and bright galaxies, some seen edge-on, some at an angle, and some displaying the full ambit of their spiral arms, a glowing centre appearing to spray sparkling crystal dust across the trackless reaches of outer space. Above her stood the four-armed spiral galaxy called the Twirling Dragon, and further afield she saw the Blue Twins, their intertwined nebulae reaching from the openside horizon to a point close to what astronomers called the outer octet, or one-eighth of the possible azimuth, as measured from the direction of true openside to an observer’s right hand or paw. The twins were so dense in their centre that they masqueraded as a static yet beautiful celestial cloud, lit from the inside by a mysterious indigo radiance, with many brighter points scattered throughout.
A night ablaze. She sighed softly, entranced.
An interminable time later, Whisper began to notice the play of auroral lights toward the stongside horizon, and she wondered if this might be the monstrous Wyrms at work. The display mounted higher and higher, however, until the ethereal display of waves and wisps of light, this night drawn in eerie amethyst and flaming pink, seemed to rush toward her, calling and frothing and sporting as they came. Her heart cried out for wonder at the Dragon-like heads and wings flitting above, swaying, teasing and dancing, and she realised that there were creatures of crystalline transparency living in the spectral flow of cosmic light, Dragons of a nature never imagined by her inherited knowledge – ethereal Dragons that whispered across the night skies in ephemeral splendour.
This world of hers whispered magic.
Clambering down into an apparently bottomless canyon that fourth day, travelling deeper than usual due to an unbroken, impassable mesa above, Whisper happened upon an old, well-worn route that smelled fascinating. She eagerly inhaled scents of leather and sweat, animal droppings and oil, and shivered as the glittering white flakes of memory reconfigured in her mind. A trade route. Men shouting and driving rolling tunnel-wagons drawn by octo-draconids into a great, bright place where many Humans lived … swarming in startling numbers … the cacophony of commerce … scent-memories of spices and forges and great metal-bound walls, shouts of anger and love and death mingled in her reeling mind …
She slipped.
Scrabbling and flailing at the rock face, Whisper arrested her momentum but still landed awkwardly on the surface of that old trail. She gasped as her wounded knee collapsed beneath her. Her left paw gripped a stone convulsively. A talon dangled from its roots. Throbbing pain washed her being with enervation, yet still, her sharp ears oriented to a scratching sound. Talons. Leathery hide.
Draconids!
Whisper dashed up the tunnel, limping and stumbling as the knee refused to take her weight. Oh – the scent was different. Not her chasers? These were much smaller, burgundy and green draconids, no bigger than her. Vegetarians? They had double rows of teeth and neat, upward-pricked ears; lean bodies optimised for running and climbing, clad in their dusty stripes. The draconids paused to scent her just as she did them. Tension trembled the air.
Wrong assumption – pack-hunters! The quick gleam of bared talons and a chorus of toothy snarls appraised her of that fact as the draconids charged.
Sprint! She raced up the sandy tunnel, its hand-chiselled markings rushing past her in a blur of different substrates – grey and pink and speckled green, in places damp where water had filtered through from above. The flooring was regular, perhaps fifteen feet wide and ten high, making the tunnel a veritable highway to a wayfinder, but also allowing the draconids freedom of movement. She could not sustain this pace for more than several minutes. To her dismay, her endurance was growing worse rather than better.
Too much running. Too many miles and climbs and scrambling descents, an uncountable number of paths tried and discarded … why this loss of self? Why a past of unremitting darkness, and a rebirth which was no more than a blank slate upon which a destiny chosen by others would write its tale? Why did she sense that there was more, eerie whispers of sentience lingering about the bulwarks, buttresses and the mighty depths of canyons, that eluded her senses? She had lost her tail-senses. Perhaps that created this quandary of incompleteness. The lack of physical tail. Yet so much more was lost …
Suddenly, her alert ears identified the sounds of the green whippet-draconids giving tongue upon the chase. They were much further back in the tunnel, but catching up quickly.
Spying a cave-in ahead, she smiled for the first time – grimly. Perfect.
Scrambling up the rock pile, hissing up a storm as her injured knee throbbed terribly, Whisper searched alertly for her chance. A gap. A few loose boulders. The musty, long-settled scents of old rockfall. Hot draconic breath huffed right behind her in the tunnel. Whisper scrabbled over a large boulder, kicking out desperately with her legs. The boulder rocked and toppled.
Sqqueeee! shrieked the draconids as the cave-in suddenly turned into a mini-avalanche. Boulders and stones crushed limbs and bruised muzzles.
She spun atop the pile. Grabbed the nearest stone. Another. “Go away! Get lost!” Fury made her arm strong and her aim vicious. Stones pelted the milling draconids accurately – how, she did not know, but the action seemed to slow in accordance with her need, so that she could fling stones into eyes and down throats, smashing fangs and bruising necks. Yelping in pain, her pursuers turned tail as fast as their stubby legs could carry them. Straight toward the incoming whippet-draconids.
Pandemonium. Animal snarls and tussling! Yelps of pain and fury … Whisper grinned in satisfaction, and set to pulling down the roof behind her departing tail-stump.
* * * *
By the time her nostrils detected sweet aromas at the end of the ventilation tunnel leading vertically out of the main trade passage, Whisper knew something was desperately wrong with her bitten left knee. The way the pain throbbed, the way the infection had spread – she suspected she had been poisoned. The flesh was hot and extremely tender. Ho
w did one treat this? For once, her knowledge was silent, and she wondered how a Whisper could carry such knowledge effectively from birth? Did it stem from the womb, from her probable ancestors? Or was it a by-product of the Warlock’s conjuration, of knowledge filched from the conjuror?
Here, almost immediately, she came upon a jade-green brook gurgling through a ruddy sandstone cleft, protected by a curved shendite overhang far, far above and the ubiquitous, outward-reaching chrysoprase sentikor growth, these blossoming with their dangling tubular mauve flowers that sifted pollen as the winds stirred them. The base of a bigger canyon? Whisper allowed the cool flow to carry her for what seemed to be several miles, hoping the waters would wash away her scent and fool the pursuing draconids.
What chance? She grimaced. All my life, I have been running.
Literally true. Whisper paused at the head of a hundred-foot waterfall, sipping cautiously at the Arboreal Dragon’s medicine. An odd pattern of splashing behind her sprang her hair-trigger reactions.
Go!
An azure head snapped the bandage off her departing stump. Dragoneel, her unreliable internal knowledge informed her. Another of the vast class of semi-intelligent draconids, these numbered among the primarily aquatic denizens of the many rivers, ponds and pools of water trapped amidst the chaotic landscape. So complex were the canyons, there could be multiple levels of rivers running in different directions, seen the viewpoint of a single vertical section taken through the landscape.
“Why don’t you eat your cousins?” she called, and splashed down in the plunge-pool at the waterfall’s base. A rush of bubbles whisked her past another pair of dragoneels, their long, silver-azure bodies writhing in the water as they hunted for fish, their main prey, and fallen fruit. Were rivers truly this dangerous?
Whisper held her breath, willing the draconids not to notice her. I’m a leaf.
