by Marc Secchia
Simply, because she must.
Hualiama reached out with her mind and heart, and felt the dark-fires lance deep, burning as she had never been burned before. Arise, Infurion. Rise … live! You must live – BEZALDIOR!!
* * * *
Her cry struck a clarion note that rang so sweetly through the conflict, even battle-maddened Dragons raised their heads to give heed. Numistar roared an answering battle-challenge, but that was directed toward the retreat of tentacles and creatures around her rather than at Hualiama, Grandion realised, sweeping his forces at once with an experienced eye. He readied them with a single touch of his mind. Be alert.
Across the peaks Numistar loomed, her hoary muzzle raised skyward as if she too had sensed a change in the air, and her remaining paws rested upon mountaintops as she slowly inclined her head to regard the Lost Islands forces trapped in the canyon. Very slowly, a grin of pure draconic malice cracked open her lips, until every Dragon and dragonet and Rider saw the white columns of her fangs, and the intense cold steaming off them, as Numistar considered her foes. Not a creature present could have missed the ice riming their veins as her hooded gaze rested upon them.
“SO, LITTLE ONES. THE TIME OF RECKONING IS AT PAW.”
With that, the mighty breath of Numistar whitened the Island-World, spreading hoarfrost across peaks which had been blisteringly hot an instant before, and she charged.
“Dragons, to me!” Grandion thundered.
Now, he would see Fra’anior avenged. Not even an Ancient Dragoness should dare to spite the citadel of his forefather, Fra’anior the Onyx. Summoning his power, the Tourmaline winged upward. A song of battle raged in his veins.
Wind whipped the peaks as Grandion’s Storm shrieked against the Winterborn’s ice-blast, and he realised that she must have used the intervening months to grow in strength and cunning. Fists of tourmaline were met with directed blasts of ice that sapped or misdirected the power of his blows. Even with the support of multiple light cannon blasts, Grandion could not knock her back as before. Still, he was more than game for this battle. As the Ancient Dragoness hurled paws full of ice at him, Grandion battered them into shards and punched harder and faster, throwing in the complex combinations of a natural-born brawler. He dodged, weaved and worked different angles.
A sneak attack on the Egg! Distracted by the sight of tentacles once again attempting to snaffle the Egg away from Tiiyusiel’s grasp, he felt the force of Numistar’s ice attack smash him across the sky. A Dragonwing of Grunts hurtled into the fray like burning missiles, striking Numistar amidships in a flurry of impacts that appeared to rock the Dragoness momentarily. She entombed them in ice and flung them away.
“I SHALL DESTROY YOU LIKE SO MUCH CHAFF – HEAVENS, HEARKEN TO MY CALL!”
With that, the Winterborn raised her paws and summoned a lightning storm out of nothingness. It seemed that one titanic lightning bolt struck all about him at once, although Grandion knew there must have been hundreds of simultaneous strikes. His Dragonwings were decimated. Nine of the Air Breathers smoked at the breathing spiracles, mortally wounded by discharges which must have travelled down into their bodies. Even the reflex shield which Yiisuriel and the Dragon Enchanters had tried to throw up, shattered beneath the impact and now the mind-meld was shifting as it attempted to recover.
Numistar Winterborn’s eyes glittered as she stalked him. “REVENGE SHALL BE MINE.”
The Land Dragons drew together around and beneath him. Retreat for a moment, Yiisuriel advised. We have withstood aeons. This Dragoness is no match for us.
Grandion hung his head.
Nay, not for shame, Yiisuriel chided him. For honour. Speak now with the Dragonfriend. We have established contact.
* * * *
In the confusion of awakening, Infurion blindly attacked his tormentor, roaring, YOU CANNOT – SHELL-NIECE! NO!
She was utterly unprepared, and defenceless. The concussion knocked her away, deeper, while down the long, dimming tunnel of her perception, it seemed to her that Infurion stared after her before turning toward the linked progeny of Dramagon. He launched his attack.
* * * *
Humansoul. Sweet petal, wake up.
Bl … ooo, I feel terrible. Uh, where are we?
A well-loved face smiled down at her. You know. You’re napping when we should be off saving the Island-World from certain doom.
Soul space. Of course, she should have known. Folding her arms crossly, blonde-Lia sat up in her bed which could not possibly in any right-thinking interpretation of the universe actually exist, and gave her blue-haired twin the twin barrels of her best glare. Now’s the time to wax mystical and tease me with new insights about our heritage? Now? Amidst a battle?
No, now’s when this Dragoness kicks your allegedly cute behind – Grandion thinks so, anyhow – and returns you to reality. Go fix it, engineer girl!
Blonde-Lia stared at her twin for several long seconds, before allowing a slight smile to quirk the left corner of her mouth.
What? said the girl-Dragoness, folding her arms in her turn. Was I not intimidating enough?
Go fix it? That’s your advice?
Well, as far as I can work out, we’re embedded up to our neck in solid meriatonium or something worse, you’re fairly well beaten up courtesy of our shell-uncle who just knocked you unconscious, and the entire Rift is about to blow sky-high. So, aye. You’ve been unconscious for over an hour. Go fix it.
She waved her clenched fist beneath Dragonsoul’s nose. How’s about we fix your head first, pretty-scales?
* * * *
Hualiama awoke, blenched and screaming, from a violent nightmare of the mouth within Azziala’s womb; the kind of nightmare that clung and refused to end even as she wrenched herself awake. Mercy! She sprawled on her back, entombed in a place of the uttermost darkness, save for the slight sparking of her skin as something prickled against it. No other hint of light teased her retinae. Had she drawn arcane protections about herself at the very last, as she launched Infurion skyward in a dark eruption of his power, and she tumbled away in the opposite direction, down to what must be the Rift’s floor?
Similarly to her fate while chasing the First Egg, she felt welded to the warm surface she lay upon. She had landed, burning yet shielded, and melted down into this metallic substance. Her fingers tried to wriggle. Not even the slightest crook of her knuckles for movement. The pressure of mountains rested upon her chest, but she realised she must be maintaining a static barometric shield within the environs of her flesh, or something equally impossible. She would not otherwise be alive.
Could she just once in her lifetime, dispense with the impossible?
Right. No movement meant no dance. No singing, for she could shift her diaphragm but not produce physical sound. She had her mind and could think her way out of this.
The darkness shifted.
A teasing tap triggered a small cascade of sparks from her left big toe.
The pain was sharp and immediate, but brief, as if she had stepped upon a shard of crysglass. Whatever the thing was, it made no sound – not even breathing – for the immense atmospheric pressure ensured also that sounds conducted perfectly to her hearing. She heard every skis and plink of the sparks falling upon her ankle and around it, and the touchdowns created a music of the tiniest metallic notes. In the very slight radiance cast by those slowly-fading embers, her downward-rolling eyes saw the thing move again. Deliberately. With intelligence.
Hualiama drew breath. Oh no.
Tentacle tips tapped their way up her body. Each touch was a nerve centre of pain. In seconds, more tentacles joined in the torture, tapping away and then brushing against the ensuing sparks. Lapping them up with bestial hunger. Torture! Cutting, piercing pain like white-hot lava searing along her nerves! A huge squabble and kafuffle began above and around her. Now Lia heard the scraping of metal against metal and the wrestling of mighty bodies as the scale-armoured tentacles writhed against each other, knocking each other asi
de in their haste to sup from the font – her.
She groaned behind her gritted teeth. No. Too much. She had already been trampled by Dramagon’s hordes, her willpower and courage tested to their limit, and now this helpless torment? She had nothing left. No magic to transform or cry Amaryllion Fireborn’s secret name once again. If she could just husband her resources, rest and recover for a few minutes … but they wanted her magic. Her starlight. The creatures gorged and fought and slammed their appendages around her body, the dark-fires seething off them now as they became angered, and her only relief came in the hiatus as the creatures lost track of where she was amidst their brawling. She was tiny; each of their bodies was ten times Grandion’s size, and their tentacles several thousand feet long.
Wham! Her stone-hard skin flared. Pain stabbed deep. Blam-da-blam!
Waves of pain assaulted her fatigued person. Hualiama heard someone squealing like an injured windroc, and realised belatedly that it was her making that raw, ugly sound.
She forced the magic, drawing deep from her bonded soulmate, and Dragonsoul willingly offered all she had. For a second the light flared, burning and disintegrating the tentacles, but as her light faded a thousand more took their place. Lia slumped mentally, unable to do so with bone or flesh. Curse it! Was this her fate? To perish in the place Infurion had identified, correctly it seemed, as the tomb of Star Dragons?
Blam! Blam! Agony sparked off her skin.
Why would he not help her? Could he not? For she realised, by the sounds travelling languorously to her hearing, that her shell-uncle was embroiled in a battle somewhere further away, but pictures from his mind flared sporadically in her fragmented awareness. She lay pinioned many leagues beneath him against what to the Rift was analogous to the keel of a Dragonship, her dim radiance occasionally sparking like suns-light reflected off water, but she glinted through a seething pool of monsters swirling about her, assailing the light. She saw Infurion’s greater awareness of knots and strings of these loose, undulating creatures gathered throughout the gloomy, translucent Rift, from one edge of the Rim-Wall to the other. Thousands of leagues, racked by the ethereal, flickering dark-fires that made such a mockery of physical substance! Mighty swarms of Dramagon-spawn, innumerable! How could she ever hope to fight so many? In another splinter of alertness between racking bursts of pain, she saw them drawing together. Preparing their magic. Pulsating with forbidding, opaque torrents of power that somehow both contained and exacerbated the unimaginable storms of magical potentials pent up within the Rift.
Awareness froze Hualiama’s marrow. This was why Fra’anior had reacted so strongly when she spoke about Imbalance in the South! This was the true threat; Dramagon’s plan to gain the First Egg!
Infurion had called his home a magical garbage dump.
She saw it as a bomb.
Chapter 34: Tessellations of Reality
NUMISTAR’S ATTACKS were laced with desperation. Grandion hurled his Dragonwings against her. He rose up, again and again, to pound her with magical fists and tourmaline whirlwinds and blasts of lightning worthy of a son of Fra’anior. Ever, the refrain sang in his mind. Strength would not win this battle. Cunning would. The Star Dragoness must rise!
Raising a screaming corkscrew of wind, supplemented by a thousand Dragon Enchanters and all the power of the First Egg and Yiisuriel’s kin, Grandion waded into battle against the Ancient Dragoness. With a feint he cuffed her muzzle sideways, slamming it against the cliffs of their narrow defile – narrow only when compared to the sheer physical size of Numistar – and then he struck with all his speed, twisting her upraised forepaw with amplified, constricting winds so powerful that the air moved like dense, oily blue water across her scales. KRAAACK! The wrist joint popped under the unbearable strain.
GRRAAARRGGH!! Numistar howled, peering at her broken paw in disbelief.
If it be one paw at a time, Numistar! Grandion roared.
She hurled all the power of ice mingled with fiery magic against them, but the yellow-white shield shimmered and held. Grandion flew amongst crackling lightning bolts of discharge and backlash from the terrible impact, but the Land Dragons were already siphoning off and sharing the load, turning the magic to clearing their flanks of the dangerous encroachment of debris and helping their Runner brethren deal with Dramagon’s creatures, which continued to attack in greater and greater numbers.
Why did his hearts not sing with battle? Why did he sense this was all, somehow, fake?
He must breathe. Gather more magic. But was that magic being turned to the right purposes? Grandion swivelled his aching neck momentarily to consult the heavens, as if he might find the answer written there by Fra’anior’s own paw. Numistar was no sham, but her purposes might be. What if she gained the First Egg? Would that grant Hualiama the relief she needed, if the fearsome, subdraconic spawn of Dramagon gave her relief to chase the Egg? Were they servants of the fabled two-headed Red, or his eternal fire-soul seeking reincarnation much as Numistar Winterborn hankered for a second bite at immortality? For despite the clangouring silence of their oath connection, Grandion knew she was in trouble. In pain. He just knew. And no amount of battling here on the Rift’s surface would release his star to shine.
Time for a massive decision.
If the Blue-Star was mad, then he was ten times crazier.
Aye, said Flicker. Listen, Yiisuriel agrees. She says –
Grandion gasped, I’ve been thinking aloud?
No, but any right-thinking Dragon can see your thoughts scribed upon the very air about your wings. Flicker lifted his paws, and signed, Egg. Chase. She gain?
He signed back, Aye. Risk?
Awful gamble.
Aloud, Grandion said, “Change our communication. I mean, have them drum out, ‘Discover your past’. That’s the key, wing brother Flicker. The key is who she is. None of us know whence she came. And up here, we will play a most dangerous game.”
The dragonet nodded once, and flickered away.
Grandion turned to the mental network, and triggered a code phrase he had hoped they would never have to use. He said, You’ll have to trust me to the stars and back, my kin. Hear now my every command, and obey …
* * * *
Who would hear the cries of a star trapped beneath the Island-World? Who would heed her tears? Despite her anger and bravery, wetness born in excruciation streaked her cheeks. The tentacles sampled even the glistening droplets as they raged back and forth, sparking fresh agony with every touch; but now, they raged off into the distance, and for a second she enjoyed calm.
Breathing.
Communing with her Dragonsoul; drawing strength from oneness.
How did she even draw oxygen from this environment? Could it be leaking through her shields? She had not even thought to check the cocoon that sheltered her life. Such tranquillity. Never had she imagined a realm this far removed from the creative masterwork of her shell-father. His bulwarks surmounted the skies. She lay at the roots of the world, and in this ancient place, the weight of ages pressed in upon her mind as inexorably as air pressure and magic entombed her body.
Here, a soul could hear the song of her Island-World, a gentle soughing of fires languidly churning in its belly, a tinkling of magic, the dull, dreamlike roaring of Infurion as he took the battle to his foes.
Remember … your … past.
The drumbeat startled her. Grandion?
No, still no sense of her beloved. The oath magic may as well have been severed. But the mighty drumbeat returned, conducted through the meriatonium into her spine, and from her spine to her brain. … past. Remember … she tried to frown, but the pressure smoothed even the wrinkles off her skin. That word was not ‘remember’. What was it? Her past? Most of what she had to show for it was parental treachery, sorrow and death. And dancing. For just a few moments in her life there had been irruptions of glory, when the truth of her heritage shone unadulterated from her soul. Istariela had taken the burden of ruzal, freeing her shell-daughter.<
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Discover … your …
Discover! Her heart beat against its prison of flesh and blood. Discover what? She knew who she was. The terror and wonder of those mysteries had been laid bare, the womb and the eggshell lay vacant, and but three of her parents – adoptive and blood parents – still lived.
Discover your past, the drumbeat insisted.
Anger flared in her breast. If that Tourmaline Dragon knew her situation, if he truly understood the shadowed halls of grief that her past indwelled and the pain she was currently experiencing, he would not dare – without warning, her shell-mother’s song slipped to the fore, shimmering like the aurorae of Immadia:
What is a droplet of starlight?
Fire unfathomable,
Liquescent esotericism of life.
All that was Hualiama, stilled.
This was the same anger she had nursed against Istariela when she was being her most inscrutable. Discover your past. Not her direct past. Her heritage.
So much Dragon lore had been lost in what scholars assumed had been a traumatic, talon tip-of-death getaway from whatever danger had threatened the Ancient Dragons, somewhere in the infinite reaches of space beyond her world. Somewhere beyond the stars. Fra’anior had discovered Istariela in what she had called a ‘liquid droplet of starlight’. Not an egg. A droplet. Why that language unless it framed the truth, that the birth of a Star Dragoness might be akin to stars … weeping for joy?
Different tears warmed her cheeks, now, for the wonder of the wild, unreasonable hope that flooded her breast.
How to touch the stars?
Instinctively, in the seconds of tranquillity afforded her, Hualiama attuned her purpose to the great yonder. She reached beyond the Rift and its paws-cupped framework of meriatonium; diving not farther but deeper, far deeper than ever before, out into the constellations of stars that lived in outer space, and though she stretched and shivered and strained as it seemed that she passed beyond Fra’anior’s great shield, she gathered her mental resources and all her courage to drive deeper, far beyond what the travelling spark of her consciousness could even name as the beyond. As she travelled, she cried out, an inchoate, wordless cry for help.
