Dragonsoul

by Marc Secchia

  Dearest scale-brain? Lia teased herself.

  Well, you are my very dear Dragon.

  Possessive. And cheeky. Who’s ten times your size, I ask you? Besides owning the wings?

  My soul, magnified. O wingéd jewel of–

  Stop, Dragon-Lia cut in uneasily. That’s just embarrassing.

  Therefore, I shall call you Dragonsoul. My Dragonsoul.

  Joy incarnate.

  * * * *

  Literally aglow with elation, the Star Dragoness tucked up her wings, experimenting with the speed of descent. Her Human had just turned a Dragoness’ insides into a mixture of sloshing nausea cut through by red-hot lava. Was she supposed to be able to knock herself out of the sky like that? Roaring rajals! Also, slightly creepy. Like this place.

  She must be far below the level of the Human fortress by now, but the aperture showed no signs of changing, or opening out into caves, or doing anything she had imagined. What did strike her, was that the walls were growing less rocky and more organic in nature–shifting toward rock-infused flesh? Strange veins of bluish, bioluminescent material appeared to snake through the substrate, but when she touched them with a curious paw, they felt no different from frozen rock. Most peculiar.

  As she descended, the pressure increased noticeably. Grandion had taught her that Blue Dragons could work out their altitude to within ten to fifteen feet of accuracy by closely observing changes in air pressure. What she was most concerned about was the effort of flying all the way back up again. Lia hovered briefly. Continue, or return?

  Without the slightest warning, the air suddenly sucked away beneath her wings.

  Panic! Lia tried to flare her wings to slow herself, but the downward gale was far too powerful, buffeting her wings until she feared she’d tear a muscle or a few wing struts. She plummeted. The walls rushed by, faster and faster, the bright vein-like features leaving streaks on her retinae. What had Grandion taught her? Recalling his instruction, she shifted her primary wing-bones, the equivalent of the Human elbow or secondary wing-joint, outward while keeping the more delicate ‘wrists’ or tertiary wing-joints, tucked firmly against her sides. She flattened her body and forced herself into a more horizontal orientation, increasing the wind resistance. Surely, a body could fall only so fast? Aye, her engineer wailed, but that was somewhat in excess of one hundred and twenty miles per hour. A collision at that speed would be fatal.

  Oh no. The passage divided at last!

  Hualiama had no choice in the matter. With a roar that reminded her of an almighty inhalation, the tempest sucked her away into the rightward passage and she glanced off the wall, thankfully at an acute angle. Thump! She spun helplessly. Instinct made her tuck into a ball–any flailing, and she’d break a limb or wing instantly. Whack! Her left shoulder took the brunt of the blow, but again the angle saved her a worse injury. Lia tumbled tail over muzzle, or whatever the Dragonish saying was, skidding along and yelping in concert with the increasingly frequent, bruising impacts as the passage opened up at the same time as flattening out.

  She spied a gorge ahead. Screeeech! Her talons made a sound like chalk drawn across slate as she employed twenty talons and even her tail-spikes to slow herself down, but she could find no purchase on the super-hard, seamless stone. With an unhappy wail, Lia slewed about as she approached the edge of the gorge; the freezing wind howled over the lip, growing perversely stronger as it tugged at her wings and curled treacherously beneath her body, prying her grip loose.

  “No! You … will … not!”

  Her soft hatchling talons bent beneath the force of terror. The cliff-edge appeared to be lined with large teeth, or at least, protrusions, perhaps twenty feet long, and dangling from the very end of one of those, Lia spotted something she had never expected to see again–her old necklace, apparently frozen to a knob of ice. She could not have aimed more exactly for the spot had she spent months practising, for she slid along that frozen spur, tail and muzzle drooping either side as she scrabbled for grip. The gusts kept knocking her about. Finally, with a desperate wrench, Lia twisted her long, serpentine neck backward over her shoulder, and tried to sink her fangs into the rock.

  She slipped, and the wind died as suddenly as it had risen.

  The Star Dragoness dangled by her teeth, with a certain paucity of elegance and sophistication, above a huge gorge filled with a strange purple carpet at its base, along which moved a steady procession of the most enormous plants she had ever seen, neatly segmented as though chopped purposely into three hundred foot lengths. Great leaping Islands! What was this place? Her eyes slowly twizzled upward. The vaulting roof of the cavern was ribbed like the supports of the ballroom of Fra’anior’s Palace, each support picked out by a violet colour, while the main surface was a pinkish grey which faded into the violet where each section intersected. The gorge was a good quarter-mile in length–no, not a gorge, but rather a roughly oval aperture below which the carpet rippled along with peristaltic regularity, transferring … food … along a tongue? Into a gullet?

  Lia stiffened. No!

  Yet she had seen the inside of Amaryllion’s mouth. This was larger still, but she could guess roughly that she hung somewhere at the back of a monstrous throat, where the nostril-openings connected with the start of the larynx–if only she could believe her instinct. Despite the blasting cold, she felt and smelled a hint of warmth from the purple tongue. This was a living creature, surviving somehow in temperatures that must be unimaginably inimical to life as she understood it–and even as this thought formed, so Hualiama became aware of the pulse of magic surrounding her. She sensed the signature of draconic life, as slow-moving as basal rock itself, indeed so sluggish that she had entirely failed to identify its true nature during her ride down–Lia snorted with laughter between her clenched fangs.

  She had slid down its nostril.

  Chapter 7: Deeper

  Alright, tiny brain, picture this. A Land Dragon as large as an Island. No, it was the Island. This was a beast of such imagination-sizzling magnitude, it stood on the base of the Cloudlands and breathed clean air from the world leagues above. It ate chunks of plant matter each three or more times the size of Sapphurion. The Land Dragon had to be thousands or even tens of thousands of years old, and its brain apparently worked so slowly, that she might have to wait days for a thought to form. The whistling wind was its breath, and her Reaving had been the product of the Dragon’s night-long exhalation.

  “Excuse me as my head implodes!” she gasped.

  In the ultimate irony, Azziala and her Dragon-Haters lived Dragonback. They had burrowed into a Dragon’s shell.

  She knew another fact. Affurion’s tale was true. These Islands had not sailed. They had walked. Even more bizarrely, the Fra’aniorian saying, ‘Great leaping Islands’ held more than a grain of truth. How many other Humans unwittingly lived atop Dragons? Long may their Islands sleep!

  Treacherous, disbelieving giggles forced their way out of her throat, beating back the fear.

  Now, she sensed the warmth of her breath melting her perch, enough to loosen the White Dragoness’ scale and to warm the peculiar, egg-shaped protuberance which must have snagged there months or years before.

  Her inner voice snorted, Right, Dragoness! We’ve claws and wings. How’s about doing something sensible with them?

  Like squishing cheeky Humans?

  With an ungainly scrabble, Hualiama clambered atop her perch and reached for her treasure. Naturally, her brain was still flitting about like an excitable dragonet. Wondering, why the relatively brief inrush of breath?

  Never wake a sleeping Dragon, the Human-presence teased.

  Dragon-Lia huffed, You’re such an annoyingly right straw-head!

  I’m the brains, you’re just hot air and magic.

  Grr!

  No mind. Her forepaw seized the prize. A weak tingle against her hide. Had Lia not been engaged in trying to understand her environment with all of her Dragon senses, she might have missed it. Magic. Her
eyes widened. Very, very gently, she blew warm air over the protuberance. As the casement of ice melted and dripped away into the void, she sighed. An egg. Aye, a dragonet’s egg. Just a tad larger than Humanlove might easily cup in her hand; an oval of pearlescent white, unlike the multi-coloured, jewel-like dragonet eggs of Fra’anior. The egg felt frozen solid, but had she sensed a flicker of flame within? Glancing about, clasping her perch three-pawed while her right forepaw held the white scale and worried at the egg, trying to loosen it, Lia saw a few mounds of what might be other eggs scattered about the huge cavern, all rimed by frost. Yet, this one felt special.

  Beware a change in the wind, her scales informed her.

  A hoarse ‘GGHHAAAA!’ booming through the cavern rattled her fangs and almost shook her loose from her perch. Puffy cream clouds boiled across the purple tongue, seeming to move sluggishly at first, but that was only a trick of enormous scale and perspective. Hualiama thought she had been cold before, but the chill that diffused over her body now was more than the absence of heat. It was a piercing frost that blighted her bones, stealing heat from her body like a thief running rampant in the night. This was the cold which had Reaved her. It was the memory of a nightmare that woke one sweat-soaked in a haunted room, so terrified that even a scream would not form in the throat. A sharp whistling sound began deep within the stony halls of the creature’s body. A blast must come.

  Attack! Chip-chip-chip with the claws! Lia frantically worked at summoning her inner flame, despairing that she had only a hatchling’s fires to work with. The clouds bulged grotesquely toward her as if bent on surging out of that throat to utterly consume a feckless, trespassing Dragoness. Concentrating furiously, desperately, she produced a tiny flare of white-fires. Grab! She palmed the slippery egg ineptly, given her inexperience with paws. It squeezed between her talons like a lump of wet soap.

  “No!”

  Flaring her wings, Lia leaped and executed a catch quicker than the thought which had launched her downward. Before she could start to address the snarky sense of ‘congratulations, what a clever little Dragoness we are’ deep in her mind, the wind thumped her like a fist to the belly. She snapped her wings shut. Too slow. Pain stabbed into her left secondary wing-joint as the bone smacked against one of those protuberances, but the hurt was rapidly numbed by the cold lifting her toward the cavern’s roof. Before the mist closed overhead, she spied the long, narrowing trumpet-shape of the nostril, and Dragon reactions took over. Flick the wings. A hummingbird-like flutter corrected her flight and speared her body into the opening, mere inches from braining herself on one of those protruding ribs, perhaps the palette of the Land Dragon’s throat.

  The cold! So intense, she could feel the blood vessels congealing in her wings; surrounding her like a dense blanket, suffocating her ability to resist, to break free. Hualiama fought with all of her strength. Growling, groaning, her willpower tearing from her muscles the power she demanded to rise above those billows, the rush intensifying as the vertical tunnel narrowed …

  Fires, Dragoness! Ride our fires!

  How? She did not care to insult her ridiculous Human side, but the question was the snap of a Dragon’s jaws.

  Must I show you, you poor lamb? Apparently, Humanlove had no such qualms.

  GRR!

  Remember how Ra’aba cut us? How he laughed, yet that memory ultimately fired us to our victory? How the blades danced, wreathed in the flame of Dragon fire forged metal?

  She remembered Azziala’s hate. Razzior’s attempt to murder her. The inferno of a feral Dragon’s attack. Her belly ignited as if she had tossed oil into a bonfire.

  Brutal, molten passion coursed through the veins and arteries of her Dragon form, pooling in the three distinct locations of her hearts, the upper throat, the chest and deep in her belly, before radiating toward her extremities. The already-frozen wing membranes thawed, stinging her sensitive nerve endings into renewed life. Hiss! To her surprise, she noticed moisture steaming off her body. The pain invigorated, driving the Star Dragoness into a searing vertical ascent. Grandion’s voice played in her mind, correcting her posture and wing-form, until she rocketed up the narrowing nostril barely ten feet ahead of the surging cold front.

  Endlessly she struggled, her ears creaking and popping as what she realised had been a potentially dangerous pressure, lessened. She drove her wings to their maximum, until the wingtips met beneath her lower tail. Stretching out, she became as sleek and compact as a falcon plummeting toward its prey.

  Pinpricks of light above! The aperture leaped toward her, magnified. Starlight–had the storm already passed over?

  With one final surge and a bugle of triumph, Hualiama shot out of the Land Dragon’s nostril like a crossbow bolt sprung from a highly tensioned bowstring. She raced for the open skies, seeing clouds billowing out of at least ten similar orifices on this side of the Island alone. How many nostrils? How many mouths might it take to feed such a behemoth?

  CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

  Dragonship! Back-winging frantically, Hualiama slapped obliquely into the underside of a Dragonship’s air-sack.

  “Dragon, obey!”

  Blackness streaked her vision, but the laugh that raged out of her throat, stunned her. FOOLS! I AM HUALIAMA!

  * * * *

  “Dragon, obey!” yelled the Enchanters, a clear edge of panic infecting their voices.

  “No. Not today.”

  Instinct made her lash out with a psychic blast; the female Enchanters screamed and one fainted. Lia spiralled past the Dragonship’s nose, hunting a familiar presence.

  DRAGON, OBEY!

  Azziala’s power was monstrous, seizing her as if her head had been wedged in a vice and a sadistic torturer slowly ratcheted up the pressure. Yet the steely core of her psyche would not yield. The terrible grip could not find purchase.

  “Mother.”

  DRAGON, OBEY!

  Despite an instant migraine that sheeted darkness over her vision, Hualiama found a way to raise her left forepaw in a cheeky salute to the crysglass window behind which her mother’s blue-in-blue eyes burned, baleful. She said, Make me.

  The Empress made a cutting gesture with her hand. Her lips moved. “It’s Hualiama.” She added, in her mind, Delighted to see you returned to full health, Hualiama.

  Only her mother could make a welcome sound like an invitation to the gallows.

  Delighted in equal measure, mother.

  Azziala beckoned. Come. We need to have another time of mother-daughter bonding. Share with me all the intelligence you gathered from Sarzun Dragonhold. I sense you have much to relate.

  Hualiama jutted out her chin.

  Obey, or I will flay your precious Tourmaline and turn his hide into a rug for my throne-room.

  For a long, long moment, fire-eyes burned into blue. This was the issue. As long as Azziala held hostages and Hualiama was unwilling to let her loved ones die, what could she do? Which would she choose when the stakes became higher? When the fate of Kaolili Kingdom’s innocents must be weighed against the destruction of Grandion, Sapphurion and all the Dragons, and the eventual enslavement of all Humankind? Evil must not win the day.

  Then again, she was not the one whose kingdom ambitions rested upon the backs of the very beasts she sought to destroy. After glancing up at Numistar’s comet, burning ever closer and brighter, Hualiama made her decision.

  Time to ally herself with the Empress. The Balance must be shaken.

  * * * *

  Part of her wanted to spring upon the odious woman who had despised the babe in her womb, celebrated her apparent death, and taken the first opportunity to bargain her life away to Ianthine, the mad Maroon Dragoness. Dragon-Lia pictured quarrying out her mother’s intestines and throwing them to the windrocs. Human-Lia quietly reminded her that the Empress had her magic defences on hair-trigger alert, and one of those constructs was an escape via teleportation. No, Azziala did not trust her daughter. That made the feeling entirely mutual.

  All
this, she hid beneath her finest psychic shielding, enhanced with Juyhallith mental techniques. No doubt Azziala could read her far better than she cared to admit. The Star Dragoness prowled around the navigation cabin with every ounce of menace she possessed, making the quintet of Azziala’s stooges draw back in alarm.

  Humansoul reminded her that a Dragoness must play a deeper game. She thanked her inner presence.

  The Empress leaned across the Navigator’s table, wetting her golden lips with the tip of her tongue. “Aye, I had sensed the strangeness of that comet, but you claim it’s an Ancient Dragon?”

  “The spirit of an Ancient Dragon. Just as the spirit of a Dragon possessed my Human body, and manifests itself from time to time, as you see. That is what Siiyumiel taught me.”

  Within, Lia apologised to herself for the lie.

  The Empress raised one bony forefinger, and thrust it across the highly polished jalkwood surface as if she wished to ram her hatred right through the Star Dragoness’ hearts. “Draconic subterfuge. When you show me how you change back into a Human body, I will see the truth in your eyes. I will read your mendacities like an open scroll.”

  Hualiama knew she must not rage like this, her thoughts rendered ungovernable by the toxic brew of loathing and desire for revenge coalescing in her Dragon-hearts. The Dragoness yielded to her Human mind, yet still, the transformation shocked her. The scale and the egg dropped, but she caught them with extraordinary reaction-speed, despite the unexpected switch to Human digits and limbs. It worked? Panting with a rush of adrenaline, Hualiama faced her mother, tangentially noting the tenderness of her left elbow. Did injuries also replicate between her two forms?

  Azziala leaped out of her chair with a volley of wild curses.

  This uncontrolled form-shifting magic was bound to cause problems. Lia smiled grimly, pushing a few blonde strands away from her face. “Aye, mother. I can’t control the beast. But I am Hualiama, and I need you to understand the threat facing us all.”