by Marc Secchia
Through the mental network, Hualiama addressed her people; with his and Flicker’s assistance, she told them tale after tale of Dragon lore and the histories of the Islands, dance and ballad, tradition and folklore. She built Islands of belief in their hearts and minds, he realised, allowing them to envision a world and a way of life different to what they had known. By adamantine will and force of character, she forged a nation anew, and called all to rally to her banner. There came a time when in the halls and roosts of the Air Breathers, the Tourmaline began to hear different sounds. Neighbourly laughter. A subtle change in the tenor and rhythm of the working day. Children playing with Dragons. Even … joy.
Joy from the ashes of grief.
Her simple gift, staggering in its rawness and power. Strength-from-grief. Aye, she spoke of loss and rebirth and rebuilding, but as Dragons would say, this hatchling was growing into her wings, and how beautiful upon the volcanic winds were the wings of one who brought healing to the nations.
Forging into the granite-grey Cloudlands beyond Mejia Island, they began to see changes. The first hint of ashes drifting on the winds, changing the colours of suns-rise and suns-sets into displays as ethereally beautiful as the fabled volcanic suns-play of Fra’anior Cluster. The suns became hazy in the distance, and the footing beneath the Cloudlands, ever more fractured. The Land Dragons expressed an impatience and concern to proceed, and strangely, Yiisuriel began to speak of visions.
This is the dark-unseen of the future, she told Grandion early one morning, two hundred leagues south of Mejia. Not in nearness. It is a place of supreme darkness, a place that calls strangely through the Balance of the Harmonies. A place of tarrying and protecting. A place from which enormous evil might issue if we, the Lost Islands nation, do not discover it and … I don’t know. Shield others from it, I sense.
The Dragon said, You’ve shared this vision with Hualiama?
Aye, my friend of hasty fires. Ours will be to tarry; yours, to travel. To share. Amaryllion’s legacy shall move you for many a long year beyond what we shall travel.
What of the substrate?
The beautiful psychic fortress of Yiisuriel’s mind inclined toward him with what Grandion recognised as the fondness of a mighty draconic Elder for a fledgling’s questions. He did not protest. These were right-fires to which every Dragon must incline the paw of respect. We shall tell your Hualiama of a sense of inner pressure, of wrenching of rock from rock, of tearing forces slowly twisting and raising the bedrock upon which we walk. A foul taint arises from the depths. Hualiama has even been working on shields and filters for our kin – this is the taint, a physical-magical toxin lethal to all known forms of draconic life.
Winging slowly ahead of the Island formation, the Tourmaline sampled the trace indicators Yiisuriel showed him. Akin to the S’gulzzi taint, but subtly modified, he agreed with her unspoken assessment.
Numistar’s signature, said the Land Dragoness.
How do you conclude –
Thus I posit. It has an … Ancient-Dragon-like flavour. It seems too subtle for these mindless S’gulzzi life-guzzlers. A shift of magical potentials.
What is Numistar plotting, great Dragoness?
The Tourmaline sensed a mental shaking of a head the Dragoness did not possess. What I know is apprehension as I carry the First Egg into that place. There will be battle. I’ve voiced my concerns to the Blue-Star, but she is adamant – in this she is right – that we will require the Egg’s might to cross this unstable Rift. Our longwave measurements detect tall mountains ahead.
Mountains? he gasped.
Aye. Not terribly Rift-like, my wingéd brother, is it?
Grandion snorted at her dry humour. We will find a viable path.
We must.
Mountains would stop the Air Breathers in their tracks. They themselves were mountains, but they required the buoyancy of the Cloudlands in order to move. They could not themselves climb mountains, for Yiisuriel estimated the shallowest limit of their capability to be approximately two leagues’ depth – unless, with the Star Dragoness’ help, they could work out a way of wafting mountains standing a mere twelve to eighteen miles tall, across the Rift.
Grandion had no doubt she was working on a plan involving swinging Land Dragons about using immense hawsers hooked to the stars above.
Close enough.
* * * *
Another week and five hundred leagues slipped by, broken by many visits to the wild, mounded Islands they sailed past at the westernmost edge of the Southern Archipelago, characterised by khaki and tan jungles sparsely populated by Humans and Dragons alike – Green Dragons in the main, and small, lithe Humans who were often jungle hunters and trappers, or enterprising merchants operating between the small towns in this frontier country. Lia hunted Shapeshifters, those with the potential of fire within them. She initiated a giant community project to modify and agree the Protocols developed by Jin, Isiki and Makani, who had still not entirely worked out the knotty problem of their tripartite relationship.
Slowly, the scattered, roughly-cast Islands of the South rolled by, and in a further sixteen days, became just a dappling of colours on the horizon. Then, it seemed they sank into the Cloudlands, and the Rift fires began to rise before them.
First came a smudge of darkness spreading beneath a rising Jade Moon, stretching from East to West as far as the eye could see. Then, the Cloudlands changed from a light bronze in this region to a muddy brown-grey colour, evidence of the mighty disturbances beneath. The Runners scouted ahead, working out a safe route for the Air Breathers, while the farsighted Lesser Dragons flew high, seeking a first sighting of the impossibility of a Rift somehow risen from the deeps, of new mountains buckled upward under unimaginable pressures to create what they eventually spotted, four days later – range after range of jag-toothed mountains of jade and onyx, steaming and smoking with the molten heat simmering upward from their roots.
An upside-down Rift?
“Well, that’s a problem,” said Grandion, hulking over his tiny Human wife as they flew two leagues above Yiisuriel’s steaming topmost peak that morning.
“Kiss me,” she demanded.
The kernel of her inner grieving was palpable, not masked by her outwardly playful response. Dragons valued true-fires; he would have been tempted to withdraw and brood, nursing his sorrows and his grudges. This Human quality of laughing in the face of fate was a mode of defiance the Tourmaline did not entirely understand, but he was coming to appreciate in his treasured companion. The oath magic revealed some, but not all, of these byzantine layers of her personality and emotions. Her intricacies drew him deeper, always deeper – just as starlight was never white, for even white itself contained all the colours of the visible spectrum, but to draconic senses, it was always nuanced by the natural variability of the wavelengths passing through the atmosphere and Fra’anior’s great bulwark of enclosing magic.
Only a fool thought of Hualiama as froth, a heedless dancer of but one colour and one dance.
Thus, the Tourmaline Dragon puckered up his lips and played along. “Mind the fangs, my darling o’er the Isles.”
Swooping past his muzzle, she aimed a kiss and hit her target a slightly more glancing blow than she had intended. “Ugh, that’s some serious sulphur breath, mister halitosis.”
“I do not have –” Grandion chopped off a growl as her teasing inevitably stoked what she had just accused him of. Instead, he leered at her. “Mind I don’t capture you for my hoard, little girl.”
“Ew, you debauched draconian –”
“Aaaarrggh, I’m a fearsome Dragon pirate!”
Dodging his teasing snap adroitly, Hualiama delivered a sociable punt of her heel against the jawbone. “Away, thou fiend!” Even in her Human form, she generated surprising power, but Grandion was not exactly about to appraise her of that truth!
“I shall start with the toes –” snap! “– before I rearrange your nose!” Grrrarr!
Lia twirled away gracefull
y, pursued by her Dragon to the tune of the smoky chortling of Makani and Jin, in his Dragon form, nearby.
He rasped, “I am the strongest Dragon in the Island-World!”
“Prove thy claim, thou covetous behemoth,” she teased, giggling as the archaisms of Dragonish clearly interfered with her Human mental processes.
“Watch as I part these mountains for thee with strength born of Onyx!”
The young woman jerked back toward him, wreathed in the multi-coloured beauty of her hair, her sapphire eyes ablaze with realisation. “That’s it, Grandion. That’s the solution. We must part these mountains to pass through – but how?”
Chapter 30: A Nation in Action
Prodigious Columns of soot and smoke assaulted the scarred, churning late afternoon sky. Beneath the roiling, ashen-grey Cloudlands, Lia knew that cracks a league wide jagged away from the rising mountains – literally rising, for since the Dragons had scouted them five days before, they had already rammed a further half-mile upward.
Someone was indulging in a spell of radical geological engineering, in the vein of Fra’anior’s mighty world building exploits of old. Someone – some paw – wished to rearrange the Island-World to her liking. The culprit was not hard to guess. Only, as Lia surveyed the data gathered by the dogged Land Dragons, something did not add up. Her suspicions only deepened by the hour. What was the cause and objective of this disturbance? Just an insane Numistar Winterborn creating mayhem, or was a murkier, more malign purpose at work?
She did not understand her inkling of deep Imbalance.
Below, the cornucopia of fauna and flora comprising the middle and middle-upper layers were more than disturbed. They were churned up like a pot of stew which had been vigorously stirred. Plant and fungal matter slowly roiled about in vortexes as broad as Fra’anior’s caldera. Visibility was zero. Toxins leached at a phenomenal rate from those crazy-paving cracks on the world’s floor, where the Earthen-Fires intermingled with the native magic of the higher realms. The Air Breathers stood upon what was essentially a toxic, unstable volcanic plain that shook every few minutes with tremors and earthquakes; the earth groaned and cried out as if caught in the throes of birthing something … immense.
The Star Dragoness shivered. Dramagon?
She rotated by degrees in the air, sampling the drifting veils of smoke which in a small mercy were pressed back by a northerly breeze. Devastation. Strangeness. To her left paw, a ten mile-wide mesa of salt-and-sulphur formations in ivory and lime green colours had been pushed above the clouds. To her right paw, the line of disturbance meandered to the horizon, marked by great billows of ash-laden grey clouds and open volcanic activity in many places, sharply demarcated against the pristine azure skies further North. What if this overwhelming pressure, this cracking and buckling of the world’s crust, simply exploded? Or would she see Numistar’s progeny arise from the Rift, shrugging aside the mountains … no, but whom would she have mated with? Did the Ancient Dragoness even need to mate? There were no other Ancient Dragons left in the Island-World – were there?
What had changed?
One thing was certain. She would not confront this challenge by drifting about in circles thinking about – Infurion. The name popped into her mind. Crackle had mentioned a being that ‘distilled’ these dark fires of magic. No Dragon lore she had read and learned made mention of his name. A rapid mental query of the Air Breathers, relayed to all of their Land Dragon kin, also returned a null result.
Perfect. Smiling grimly, the Dragoness said, With me, Grandion.
Where to? Volcano sitting?
He pictured her Dragoness perched atop a petite volcano with a perfectly constipated look on her face – Grandion!
He said, Indeed. That’s your ‘contemplating the mysteries of the Universe’ expression.
Grandion! Perilous airs –
Aye, my beloved wing-song, he said, altering the Dragonish nuances to turn her gentle threat into an endearment. This Dragon faces peril without flinching. Asking Yiisuriel to initiate a draconic presence-trace to find Numistar, or this other presence you suspect. Four Runner and Shell-Clan exploratory teams dispatched. Dragonwings above? Overfly the Rift and explore East and West?
She replied with smoking nostrils and a mental caress for his insistence on trying to cheer her up. Would you like to care to leave a smidgen for me to do? Lead my nation whilst you’re at it?
Bah. Demanding.
Who is leading the Lost Islands Dragonwings?
You know perfectly well. Janithyor of the Tynukam – she calls herself an unprecedented crossbreed, both Grunt and Overmind. One of a kind. Ridiculously clever beneath that three-foot-thick metal cranium.
Beneath the banter, the Star exchanged flurries of data with her Tourmaline, and resonated within her mental network. Where was the enemy? What was its nature? The Councillors reviewed their battle readiness, homing in on the slightest flaw or problem and dealing with each one. Yiisuriel and Tiiyusiel of the Shell-Clan led their Land Dragons in a review of all that was known about the nature of these fey draconic powers of the deepest dwellers of the Dragonkind; sifting relentlessly though the information Hualiama had gathered during her journey beneath the crust.
Interesting. I thought her body shape was unusual for one of the Tynukam. So, the inbreeding effect can be broken?
As you theorised, o supreme Empress, the injection of carefully planned diversity into the Lost Islands genetic pool is a pressing necessity to ensure the survival of our nation.
Hualiama laughed aloud as Grandion mimicked the exact, dour tones and wording of her Council. You do keep me sane, Dragon. Just about. What the –
GGGRAAABOOOM!!
Both Dragons whirled in shock as a magical shockwave almost pummelled the fires right out of their bodies. Hualiama staggered aerially into Grandion’s left forepaw, unable to keep flying as she leaped to defend the mental network of Lost Islands Dragons and Enchanters. Yiisuriel was bellowing, drawing her kin together into that extraordinary bond of the Air Breathers that allowed them to build shields of matchless magical density and resilience; Lia erupted almost without thinking, infusing many souls with a glint of pure starlight, healing and strengthening her charges through a manifold amplification of her capabilities grounded in the First Egg’s power.
So many perished in a single detonation of magic …
She cried, Yiisuriel!
The First Egg’s responding. The magic … it burns! Mighty a mountain as she was, the Dragoness groaned in agony.
Shield it.
Cannot contain … for long …
Grandion, help me draw off the First Egg’s power!
To what – that?
Janithyor rapped, Is it friend or foe?
Don’t know. Hualiama stared to the southwest, in the direction of the disturbance. Twenty-five leagues yonder, a series of massive, concentric waves of perfectly black clouds rolled down the flanks of the new mountains and across the serrated peaks, burying them in an avalanche of awesome magnitude. Foe, until proven otherwise.
Honestly, Dragonsoul – you think that might be a foe? her Human interjected caustically.
From the centre of that … whirlpool? The Star Dragoness blinked as the centre of the phenomenon appeared to suck away, as though the mountain range beneath had been vaporised in the blink of a Dragon’s secondary nictitating eye membrane. She had expected an eruption. Grandion roared what she already knew, that the torrent of invisible but to a Dragon’s sixth sense, clearly palpable magic arising from that black hole, dwarfed anything she had ever experienced. Their apparently illimitable First Egg was a mote in this cosmos. A firefly about to be swatted by a Dragon-sized paw.
The Air Breathers and Land Dragons roared as the physical shockwave raced beneath their paws and the mountains rocked but remained upright; Lia locked together with Grandion into the mental network, shoring up their shield with every ounce of white-fires she possessed. Batten down the –
INVADERS!!
; The magi-physical attack smashed into them in a titanic wave of disruptive force, rocking every Dragon and disintegrating the vaunted mental constructs faster than the mind could imagine withstanding. Lia blacked out momentarily. Dragons flailed in the air. Grandion dropped a mile but spread his wings, absorbing the force of his fall. Then, she recovered rapidly due to the resilience of her Shapeshifter duality, healing, responding, fighting – rallying her Dragons, calling to the Air Breathers, checking Grandion with a mental touch. Seven of the younger Air Breathers had been knocked over. Their brethren could lever them up again, given time. Fires erupted out of that hellhole to the southwest, a column of flickering black laced with crimson, as if all the infernos of the underworld spat through a nozzle far too narrow to contain them. Segments of jade rock hurtled away, pieces as big as Islands, as the dark fires roared impossibly high into the azure heights of the atmosphere, miles and miles upward in a single unbroken jet. Higher than any Dragon could hope to fly. Thunder rattled the portals of the skies as oily black swirls peeled away from that column, mushrooming outward in swells and undulations that from a distance of many miles appeared languid and tiny, but Hualiama knew was a conflagration of indescribable proportions. Ten miles in circumference. Fifteen. The hole continued to blow open, expanding at an alarming rate.
The engineer within marvelled at the explosive thrust required to shoot molten lava six or seven leagues into the air, while the smoke continued to billow many miles higher still, way into the stratosphere. Better in some sense to discharge than to remain bottled up, but launch enough ejecta into the air and the climate south of the Rift would be impacted, the lore of Fra’anior Cluster informed her reliably. Her Balance sense, however, knew that this was only the proverbial tip of the Island. Ripples and convulsions drove far, far deeper than she had imagined. Hundreds of leagues. Thousands, perhaps. She perceived, dimly, the fire-life of Magma Dragons or S’gulzzi – she was not sure which – fleeing beneath the crust, the terror of their cries striking as mere pinpricks against her senses … which folded inward now, her magic unable to sustain that reach for longer than an eye blink.
