Dragonlove

by Marc Secchia

  Grandion had fumed, “You’ll have me wearing a saddle, next!”

  “Is that an offer, Dragon?”

  “Nooo–AAAARRRRGGGGHH!”

  Double mercy slathered in rotten prekki-fruit peels–so the entire senior command of the Kingdom of Kaolili now knew the state of her maidenhood. They thought her a rebel and Grandion a lawbreaker. Which was worse? She sighed heavily.

  “We’ll find a man for you yet,” said Grandion, breaking in on her thoughts.

  And now her Dragon had become a sensitive, caring soul? “Just point me in the right direction,” she chuckled. “I’ll hunt him down Dragonback …”

  “And lash him up there in place of your saddlebags?”

  “Aye, and for laughs, I’ll teach him how to pamper my Dragon every day.”

  “Perfect. Although, this mysterious man will have his work cut out for him to beat the efforts of twenty cute little servant girls of Kaolili Kingdom.”

  “Grandion!” she huffed. “That’s quite enough!”

  The Dragon held out a foreleg for her inspection. “I’ve never gleamed like this before. I find the idea of Human slaves highly appealing. They were so … frisky.”

  “Frisky?” Hualiama’s voice took on a dagger-sharp edge. Sensitive and caring? Slug spit and stinking windroc eggs! “That’s because those poor chicks were too frightened to stop working once the King suggested they continue! I’ll have you know, Grandion–”

  “Apparently, you’ve monetary value,” the Dragon continued, conversationally. “Commander Hiro thought your innocence worth at least a thousand gold drals, if not two.”

  “He … what … that’s a ridiculous fortune!” Lia spluttered, blushing furiously.

  “Underpriced?” Grandion inquired, archly.

  “I’m speechless.”

  “Why do Humans say that when they’re clearly not?”

  The toxic brew of fury and embarrassment had not rendered her speechless, but it did make Lia momentarily able to breach Grandion’s mental defences to retrieve the memory foremost in his mind–Commander Hiro’s vile calculations, and more, the damage done at the speed it took for an image to transfer between their linked minds.

  “He thought my hair worth a two hundred dral bonus?” she yelled. And then it struck her. Lia’s hand flew to her throat. “He wanted to … to … oh, m-m-mercy, Grandion …”

  “That’s the trouble with reading minds,” he said, with a crackle of helpless rage that echoed hers. She would never forget that image. Never.

  Throwing back her head, Hualiama howled at the skies with such raw, animalistic ferocity that the Tourmaline Dragon answered with a thundering cry of his own. Yet she barely heard him. Her hands rose slowly from her sides. Lightning blazed forth from her fingertips in great arcs, as if she crooked fingers of lightning to beckon the storm on, defying it, challenging it to blast its mightiest load of wind and hail into her face, for her rage was greater still. The Island-World seemed to shift. For a moment, Hualiama saw black, ethereal Dragon heads materialising within the embracing thunderheads, heads greater even than Amaryllion had been in life. Fra’anior! The legendary Black Dragon for whom her Island-Cluster was named.

  The sound of his roaring came distinctly to her ears as Dragonish speech, multiplied sevenfold. Majestic. Crushing. Mesmerising her soul. YOU SUMMONED ME?

  Summoned? From where?

  I … I … No coherent speech was possible.

  How could she continue to exist, when she knew that he was the tyrannical power from which the Dragoness of her vision had fled; that White Dragoness’ scale scalded the skin above her breasts as though set alight, and that she had seen a tiny eggling defy the mightiest of all Dragons, spiriting the beautiful mother Dragon away from Fra’anior’s wrath?

  Who are you? The titanic black heads searched the skies as though the Dragon could not see her, as though every guile of his Ancient Dragon magic simply passed over or through her, like sunlight passing through water to dapple the bottom of a terrace lake. Why do I recognise your spirit, little one?

  Hualiama fled, screaming in mortal terror.

  * * * *

  “Lia! Princess!” The Tourmaline Dragon shook her flaccid body. “Stupid girl, you cannot just run off my back and expect a blind Dragon to catch you.”

  As if shaking her would help. Grandion shook too, mostly from the surprise of his Rider burning a neat hole through the membrane of his left wing–hardly a fearsome wound, but the sensitivity of his wing nerves made it smart sharply. What smarted was his pride. It had taken him four catches to snag her, at least one of which had added to the cuts on her body, which the medic had jokingly referred to as, ‘lost a fight with a thorn bush?’ How true. ‘When I’m not fighting with Dragons,’ Lia had riposted dryly.

  “Lia, have you gone feral?”

  She made no reply.

  Despairing, Grandion tried to use his magical senses to appraise the storm. Over, or under? Could he manage a safe landing by bat-like echo location, as he had practised back in the Dragon cage? Magical detection of non-living matter was an imprecise science at best–Brown Dragons could probably do it in their sleep, but this was one instance where a Blue Dragon’s powers were mismatched to the task at hand. Flying half a mile aloft into the teeth of a storm was no place for a blind Dragon.

  Grandion powered higher.

  Soon, icy northerlies brushed his scales with a deceptively feathery touch. The Tourmaline Dragon deployed his magic to keep Lia warm and oxygenated. Unseen air pockets buffeted him. He scented clammy moisture, which soon collected along his spine-spikes and wing-edges, streaming over his smooth scales with the speed of his ascent.

  An hour later, the wind was a cruel beast, grappling with him like a Dragon seeking to batter his wings and drive him to the ground. Grandion kept his aerodynamic shape with the help of his magic. When last had he flown in such foul weather? This was one of the legendary beasts of the north, monstrously fickle, laden as much with hail as it was with spite; Nature grown wrathful at the doings of creatures upon Her Isles. Nature was often personified in Dragonsong and legend as a White Dragoness called Numistar, an Ancient Star Dragon as light as Fra’anior was dark, and as merciless and unthinking as the Black Dragon was majestic and cunning. As the tempest buffeted him with powerful updrafts that flung him miles into the air and peppered him with hail seemingly shot from a million war crossbows, Grandion began to wonder if the legends were not true. Time and time again, his great strength could not avail him against Numistar’s all-conquering might. Ice smashed against his shield. Electricity crackled all around him. The sharp smell of ozone was nectar to his Dragon senses, setting them abuzz. He rode bolts of lightning between the thunderheads, his body stinging even as he laughed in commingled trepidation and delight.

  Grandion flew storm-entranced, for many hours a creature almost as insensible as Hualiama.

  Unnh, she moaned softly. Unnh–Grandion? What hit me?

  Lia? Wing and claw check?

  The Dragon could have thrust a fang through his tongue, but wry laughter entered his mind. No wings. No claws but yours, and a headache worthy of this storm. Where are we? I’m wounded.

  My fault, he admitted. You rose and ran off my back. Just like that. When I caught you, you were unconscious.

  I saw Fra’anior … a vision … in the clouds, Grandion. Didn’t you see him? The Dragon lost his wingbeat in surprise; his fires boiled massively, forcing him to expel a steady, controlled stream of fire. I was so afraid.

  Will you show me?

  I–I’m too scared. Let me just dig some courage out of my pockets. Grandion, you tracked and caught an unconscious person falling from the sky–how?

  Grandion squirmed, curling his claws with care about her delicate frame. Delicate? When this girl had power to speak to a storm and find an Ancient Dragon in it? Not for the first time, the Tourmaline Dragon knew unease. This was why the prophecy had terrified the living soul-fires right out of Ra’aba. This was why Sapphuri
on and the Dragon Elders had debated the subject for over a week and come to few conclusions. He remembered the fragment of the prophecy they had found, aye, with the clarity of a Dragon’s eidetic memory, and it darkened his fires no less now than it had then:

  A life birthed in fire,

  Star Dragons sing starsong over her cradle,

  The Cloudlands rise up to bow,

  And the Islands roar at her name.

  … third Great Race will emerge from the shadows,

  And take their place at destiny’s helm.

  A time of rebirth, struggle and …

  … a multitude of stars plummet …

  Sapphurion had convinced the mighty Dragon Elders not to destroy Lia out of ignorance and wing-shivering fear. Grandion’s chest swelled. His shell-father’s work was nobly done.

  At times, the Human girl seemed so frail. She spoke through quiet weeping, You’re awesome, Grandion.

  He bugled his pleasure loudly and long.

  At other times, even poetic language failed to compass the powers surging within her. Draconic powers such as lightning or her grasp of Juyhallith techniques, he could understand. But her powers were also otherworldly, and that kept Dragons like Tarbazzan the Brown Dragon Elder, Razzior and Yulgaz and many others, gnashing their fangs.

  Turning to the storm, the Human girl’s vision revealed a tumult of cloud ramparts and lightning-chased chasms between them, great thunderheads looming miles overhead, and a momentary flash of the White Moon through the clouds marching by upon their right flank.

  “Turn your muzzle five points to the west,” she said at once, having reckoned their heading. Grandion agreed with her assessment, and adjusted his flight path. “Will you continue above the storm?”

  “I don’t know how long I can protect us,” he said. “Those thunderheads and updrafts carry great loads of ice, which burden my shielding.”

  “Go higher?”

  Raising his paw, he rumbled, “Up to your seat, Rider. Dragons can fly up to heights of four leagues–a mighty height, where the lack of oxygen or low pressure can kill. I don’t know if Humans can stand those conditions, not even with a Dragon’s aid.”

  “Especially the low pressure,” Lia agreed, scrambling over his banded flight muscles. “I can’t say I wish to experiment. But I can stand a little more, I suspect. Come, take us over that thunderhead, o mighty wingéd serpent, and we shall survey the way forward.”

  “Aye.”

  “The meriatite and mineral ores the King of Kaolili supplied us with have not improved your sight?”

  “Nothing detectable, although–” he bounced suggestively in the air “–I do feel stuffed with goodness. There’s a work to be done by someone to understand proper draconic dietary needs. Usually, we just eat meat. Mountains of it.”

  She noted, “All that internal heating. The energy has to come from somewhere.”

  Above the thunderhead, Dragon and Rider found themselves embroiled in a storm of oceanic proportions. There were no Islands to be seen. No land of any description. Just another, even taller army of clouds poised to crash down upon their heads. The quiver of Lia’s muscles disclosed to Grandion that she feared the Black Dragon’s presence. Visions, he thought. Past, present or future? His Human had always experienced visions of Dragons–strange dreams of flying, of nesting, even shell-dreams of being a Dragon eggling. He rolled that sacred word across his tongue. How could a Human have such insight into the deepest Dragon lore? Who could fathom the purposes of an Ancient Dragon in pouring his soul-fire into a mere girl?

  Mere? Grandion growled softly. Merely a fool, the Dragon who thought that.

  Thy fate will rise not from what I do, but from who thou wert born to be. So the Great One had claimed–her power rose from her natural being, not from any interference. He shook his muzzle. Dark-fires and egg-stealing villainy! Was he simply jealous that Amaryllion had chosen to befriend Lia, and not him?

  “Those wispy clouds ahead,” Lia said. Her finger rose into Grandion’s vision, pointing upward at an angle of roughly thirty degrees. Odd, seeing the Island-World from a Human’s perspective, he thought. Most instructive. Their mindset, from the outset, was fundamentally different to that of a Dragon. “Their structure suggests an opposing wind. Could that be a Dragons’ Highway?”

  She even navigated the skies like a Dragoness.

  “Oh, poor darling, did I burn a hole in your wing? I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s nothing,” he grumbled. Could she not focus on one task for more than five seconds at a time? Always flitting from one thing to the next, as busy as a butterfly trying flowers in a sunny meadow. Grandion grinned at his mental image.

  “A butterfly?” she chuckled. “Dragon, you’ve a heart filled with prekki-fruit mush.”

  A fireball roared out of his gullet.

  “Good to clear out a few cobwebs,” Lia teased. How she vexed him! “Any other bits and pieces you wish to burn to a crisp while you’re at it?”

  Now the girl rooted around in her pack for a bandage for her leg. He had indeed scored a shallow, four-inch cut in her hide above the right knee. He wished she would concentrate on their surroundings. Not that there were trees or mountain peaks to avoid up here. Pumping his flight muscles with the deep joy Dragons always enjoyed while airborne, the Tourmaline Dragon soared into the heavens with his Rider. Aye, the wind would come, blowing almost directly from the south. He sensed the airstream, heard its roaring tremble the skies at a different note to that of the storm.

  Hualiama said, “So, when were you going to take me to task for lying to the King of Kaolili?”

  Another butterfly-hop. “Task? Oh, there are so many things for which your hide deserves a meticulous roasting,” he riposted. “No, I was going to teach you that by using Juyhallith, there is indeed a way for Dragons to lie openly, without detection. Blue Dragons learn this skill. It–”

  “Grandion, stop. I don’t want to know.”

  “What?”

  “With all possible respect, no thank you. I don’t want to learn how to lie.”

  Grandion struggled to subdue his irritation. “Lia, there’s a line between your precious conception of morality and the skills needed to survive in this Island-World.”

  “Then I’ll keep my conscience clear.”

  “Listen, you don’t have to do it. Just accept the knowledge.”

  “No!” She shrank away from him, mentally and physically, rejecting the thoughts he offered openly in his mind. “Crafty Dragon, don’t you try to trick me. This is not a game of draconic manipulation. When I say I don’t want to know, I mean, I don’t want to know! Not even if you think it’s a survival skill, or simply of academic interest, or whatever you think.”

  Grandion roared, “I think it’ll save your stupid, conceited hide!”

  “Which part of ‘no’ don’t you understand, you arrogant, fire-stuffed flying furnace?”

  To her quivering indignation, Grandion began to guffaw. “Very well, o Princess of peevishness. I’ll let you win this battle.”

  Lia stomped on his shoulder by way of reply.

  He said, “I was wondering if, drawing upon the Nuyallith expertise in that arrogant, lore-stuffed mental madhouse teetering atop your shoulders, you could conceive of a way of teaching a Dragon how to navigate when blind? I’ve been using a primitive echo-location technique, but I sense there must be a better solution.”

  “A bit of magical engineering?” Hualiama was instantly intrigued.

  “Magic is far more than a mere art, o esteemed biped,” Grandion continued loftily. “It’s a science. The building blocks of great magic can be broken down into their component parts. Each element must be perfect in composition and execution. We Dragons love to study magic in all its endless variety and subtlety.”

  “Magic is a technical pursuit,” Lia agreed.

  “Aye.”

  “Yet instinctual.”

  “Aye. And where is this argument leading?”

  “The eleme
nts of dance are innately technical–the precise placement of the feet, the angles of the limbs, the training of the muscles and ligaments to support the dancer, the aerial movements, and much more. Yet if dance does not flow from the heart, it is a stiff and ungainly thing, of little beauty or artistry. Thus, my fine quadrupedal reptile, is magic. Lesson ended.”

  The Tourmaline Dragon snorted, “You might as well have described Dragon flight.”

  She responded:

  Dragonflight is the Dragonsong of a Dragonheart.

  Grandion sighed a hundred-foot sigh which conveyed the burdens of all three hearts as her impromptu composition faded on the breeze. “Just when I was brewing up a fine fireball to express my exasperation with a Human presuming to teach a Dragon his magic … you! You’re incorrigible!”

  What he did not express was the reason underlying his melancholy. The Tourmaline Dragon wondered if she knew how cruelly the Island-World could chew up a creature, and spit them out. Surely, her sufferings should not have conspired to produce this … he struggled to find a word. Deep joy? Exuberance? When he remembered his captivity, he should be consumed by proper dark-fires and righteous, burning fury. Nothing could be more Dragonish. Yet all he could think now, was that this girl had broken into the darkness, cheerfully wrestled with the spectre of death, and drawn him as if by the paw into a place of glorious light, where all became fresh and possible.

  It was too good. Too sparkly and sweet and noble. Was that his problem? That he kept looking for the shadows behind the light?

  Then, his wings fluttered as a harbinger of the Dragons’ Highway ruffled the membranes.

  “Hang onto your hair,” he warned.

  * * * *

  The Tourmaline Dragon winged nonstop through a starry, one-moon night. The Blue moon lit the endless cloudscapes below, giving the impression of hovering in a vast stillness, even though they were making a tremendous velocity of close to forty leagues per hour, by the Dragon’s best estimate. The airstream roared from several points west of a direct southerly, providing the most frigid, uncomfortable experience Hualiama had endured in her life. She was a child of a volcanic Island! Ever-hot, ever bubbling, the vast caldera of Fra’anior kept the Island’s climate tropical all year round. This was no weather for a Fra’aniorian Islander. Despite Grandion’s attempts at heating the air within the oxygen-rich shield he maintained for her, Hualiama wore every scrap of clothing she possessed, and still shivered uncontrollably. Her fingernails had turned blue. Huddling close to the Dragon, she wished wholeheartedly for belly-fires of her own.