Dragonsoul

by Marc Secchia

  “Then my lizard-daughter had best work on convincing them, hadn’t she? Where’s that vile Tourmaline of yours, the one who’s always panting around your skirts?”

  “He took off, mother,” Lia said honestly.

  “Ha. I knew it.”

  Hualiama tried to school her expression into that of a demure, dutiful daughter, although the idea itched like a rough monkish shirt. “Aye.”

  Azziala said, “Ready the Dragons!”

  Ready, Sapphurion?

  Sapphurion, leading a team of fifteen Blues and Mizuki in addition, each in turn responsible for a hundred further Dragons, nodded from his position near the Place of Reaving on the peak of Chenak Island. Ready.

  Using her tightest telepathic shielding, Lia added, If you happened to accidentally knock that archway over, noble Sapphurion, I wouldn’t be ungrateful.

  The crimson of battle-fury shaded Sapphurion’s reply. Let no enemy stand!

  “Ready,” said Hualiama.

  Abruptly more awake, her inner Dragoness whispered, You focus on not getting our brain fried. I’ll work on keeping Human-mother out. Did you not perceive her plan?

  Ah … no, she admitted.

  Thankfully, we’ve a few tricks up our sleeve–see? Pretty mental shields.

  Human-Lia’s mind spun. What? Girl-Dragon, that’s awesome … what is it?

  Naturally, I am awesomeness with wings.

  Ugh. Some aspects of being a Dragon were not so desirable. Excessive smugness and boasting probably topped her list.

  An amused thought entered her head that actually, the shield-schematic she perceived was a result of Grandion’s work with Siiyumiel, a multi-layered or multi-phasic shielding methodology. As she examined and began to grasp how the magical constructs interrelated and buttressed each other, her inner engineer was turning mental cartwheels, making Dragonsoul wriggle–as best she could describe the sensation–with satisfaction. Filters. Deflectors. Lockdown protocols. Something called flash-armour. The nuances of environment-detection which triggered different responses or phases, from mental attack to physical jeopardy. Human-Lia frowned. She was unconvinced, particularly regarding the layered responses to the Command-hold which attempted to isolate the basal physiological and emotional processes from the higher mental functions. Efficiencies could be gained. Aye. Given opportunity …

  Siiyumiel had taught her that a Star Dragoness had a skill aside from all of Grandion’s fantastically complex machinations, called a psychic bastion or bastion-ward, and this was the innate power which had rendered her mind impervious to Azziala and her Haters while Hualiama had lain unconscious. Moreover, the psychic bastion actually absorbed magical power directed at it and reflected that power back at an attacker in the form of a highly focussed psychic blast. That was the fate of half of Azziala’s previous Council members. Dragons’ talons! Her Star Dragoness could do all this?

  We need to study this together, Dragonsoul, she told herself.

  What, you think you can better centuries of draconic scientific development?

  Hualiama bit her lip. I wasn’t trying to start an argument with myself, so you can just tone it down in there!

  Great. Her schizophrenia was evolving nicely. And her sneaky Dragoness had turned her hair blue. Or did that mean she was Dragoness-Lia? The Dragoness having supplanted her Human form … oh, honestly. Had the eggling-spirit not protected the Human babe since before she was born? Survival first, another nasty little thought intruded–for what was the alternative? Death. Thereafter, Human-Lia had ignored–or suppressed–the Dragoness for two decades. Who owed whom in this scenario?

  And then, she had no more time for thought.

  She stood beneath a waterfall. Magic pounded through her, such a draw that she crashed to her knees, clutching the metal safety rail instinctively.

  DRAGON, OBEY!

  The monstrous Command, the concerted effort of eight thousand Dragon-Haters supplemented by close to one thousand seven hundred Dragonkind, rolled across the deeps like subterranean thunder. To a beast, the Lesser Dragons recoiled as though struck by an earthquake. Hualiama sensed fully a third of her Dragon array fall away instantly, overcome by the backlash even though the Command was not directed at them. She fed back through the link, through Sapphurion and his Blues, lifting up the Dragons with a warm touch. Be strong. Direct your thoughts here, to the white-fires … unexpectedly, she stood amongst a vast congregation of glittering Dragon minds, as though a constellation of stars had gathered about the Star Dragoness.

  Gravely, she bowed. She had no need to imagine the dark blue wings that spread in honour, the muzzle that bowed in a gesture of the deepest respect. I will serve thee. Arise and burn, my brethren.

  The minds rallied beneath her direction. The ranks reformed, the links between them swelling with strength, glowing with re-established power. Fed through Hualiama, the Empress’ power swelled to incandescent enormity, as if the woman herself grew to a giant’s stature.

  Lining the gantries of five hundred Dragonships, which were gathered so thickly in the skies above Chenak that a preternatural twilight enshrouded the peaks, the blue-clad Dragon-Haters bent their collective will, together with Azziala, to the subjugation of a mighty draconic mind. Lia had suggested her mother should experiment upon a smaller foe, but that clearly offended the Empress. Chenak’s Land Dragon was twenty times the size of any of Burak’s five, a hoary beast with a mind as strong as mountains.

  Under the unbearable strain of mental attack, the creature bellowed her challenge, YIISURIEL-AP-YURON!!

  A Land Dragoness, Lia realised, reeling beneath the minutes-long roaring of her draconic name, the syllables crashing over the massed Dragon Enchanters like tidal waves of Cloudlands darkness. Angered, Yiisuriel sought to simply drown out Azziala’s forces. Several dozen Dragon Enchanters pitched overboard from their vessels, overwhelmed by the clash of powers; a lucky half-dozen fell upon the narrow sacks of the Dragonships flying beneath them, but the balance fell hundreds of feet to their deaths. Many others slumped upon the gantries, insensible.

  To me! Azziala’s mental grip held them; simultaneously, she demanded more of Hualiama. More power, daughter. Rouse those lousy, lazy lizards! I need MORE!

  Her mind was afire. She gripped the guardrail so hard, Lia felt the metal bend. Monstrous, her strength. Draconic. Yet she must not reveal her Dragoness-presence … metallic-tasting blood streamed from the inside of her bitten cheek, yet Hualiama felt her knees lock. She rose. Somewhere near at hand, her Dragoness lifted her, supplementing her strength where Human flesh must fail.

  Her mother’s determination would allow no reverse. Azziala was a creature forged of matter beyond flesh, adamantine and unbending, even as the titanic force she wielded met its match in the Land Dragon beneath them. For her part, Lia still supplied the collective magic of over twelve hundred Dragonkind. Fighting another Dragon. How could this end well?

  Wrong! Traitor! Yet, she must not waver.

  Hualiama straightened her shoulders. Courage, Human girl! For the freedom of the Dragons, one must fall. Here, mother. Take it all.

  As she quarried deep, a picture of a lens suddenly entered her mind. Starlight could not exist in isolation. Dragons said that starlight sprang from the hottest, most unadulterated fires of all, the luminous hearts of stars. Only because of that unimaginable inner furnace, could starlight ever shine forth.

  Her power shifted the draconic magic into focus. Modulating the quantitative draw, Hualiama shone as never before. Try this, mother.

  Her Dragoness echoed, Be incinerated …

  Yeeeessss! cried Azziala, raising her fists to the sky. Oh yes, Hualiama! I knew you would see the Way!

  Yiisuriel quailed. Her song guttered, all effort now given over to shoring up her failing defences. The Empress bore down with an ugly, triumphant cry.

  That was when instinct swung Hualiama about so sharply, she wrenched her neck. A disturbance in the Cloudlands. A swelling of clouds. Two leagues off, closing
fast. The awareness of a huge, familiar magic, and titanic, lashing surge of Dragonsong that washed her vision with crimson. She froze. At that speed, that momentum … the Land Dragon’s mountainous shell surged upward, forging directly toward her position, roughly six hundred feet above the centre of Chenak Island, a stone’s throw East of the Place of Reaving.

  A new, monumental battle-challenge split the late afternoon like an echo of the comet’s explosion.

  SIIYUMIEL!!

  Chapter 11: Of Pests and Miracles

  Squally winds scudded ahead of Siiyumiel’s charge, buffeting the Dragonship fleet. The two hundred-foot balloons swayed violently, cutting across each other’s paths and snarling hawsers and crumpling navigation cabins. Navigators shouted contradictory orders as the four manual propulsion teams of each Dragonship set to working the turbines. Five men per group each grabbed spokes of the wheel-drives, which were horizontal, spoked wheels seven feet in diameter, mounted in the belly of each vessel. Driven by teams of drive-labourers in perpetual revolutions, they provided the main propulsion–unlike Lia’s hot-air-powered solo Dragonship. The cumbersome airships rose and sank and shuddered as the relentless wind bullied and beat them away from Chenak.

  The Dragons’ mental co-operation disintegrated in a heartbeat as the Dragonkind bolted instinctively for the skies, intent on saving their own hides–save Sapphurion. He rallied the Fra’aniorian Dragons with a series of sharp commands and led them skyward.

  Hualiama found herself stranded on the bow of her Dragonship as it slewed slowly, too slowly, onto a more southerly bearing. Siiyumiel’s passage cleft the dirty grey Cloudlands, his progress somehow both stately and unbelievably rapid. His course bent, tracking the Dragonships. No, her Dragonship. His head breached the open air, this time not extended far from his open shell, but his seven blazing white eyes were no less striking. Two miles. One. Relentlessly, he surged from the deeps as though drawn by hawsers flung around unimaginable pulleys attached to the Yellow Moon, higher and higher, driving an oblique course across the nose of his fellow Land Dragon.

  DRAGON, OBEY! roared Azziala.

  Siiyumiel responded with a screech of Disharmony that nearly lifted Lia’s head off her shoulders. She and every soul on her Dragonship crumpled to their knees, clutching their ears in agony. Through tears, she saw his white eye-beam strike out. Vessels exploded, sliced apart as if by perfect, surgical knife-strokes.

  Torched by a brief touch of Siiyumiel’s light, the Dragonship cabin behind her back exploded in a ball of flame, blowing Lia off the gantry.

  KEEERRUMMP! The Land Dragon collided with Chenak. Brutal as that collision was, Siiyumiel’s momentum carried him up and over the Island’s flat nose. As he ground and smashed boulders the size of houses beneath his body, four or five monstrous paws lashed out, corralling vessels and Dragons with indiscriminate abandon, yet Hualiama could not help but conclude that he had one purpose, and one purpose only–to show a Star Dragoness what it was to be a mosquito swatted against a wall. That image beat against her consciousness with alien insistence. Dash the traitor against the Island. Splatter her brains with his paw.

  Above her tumbling body, Siiyumiel’s onrushing mountains eclipsed the suns. Here he came. Falling. Chasing her toward the Cloudlands.

  Hualiama cried out inwardly, Oh Dragon, please–

  Always. Be me.

  For the first time, Hualiama triggered the Shift-magic deliberately. Desperation wrung the needed power from her body. Infolding, her humanity was sucked away somehow into or through a rippling convergence with the simultaneous unfolding of her Dragon-self. Whomp. Air displaced softly around her, as if disquieted by her sudden bulk. Lia made frantic grabs for her precious items–the egg, worn in a small sling-bag beneath her tunic top, her Nuyallith blades and, oh! With the new, elongated thong she had thoughtfully tied to the white scale, the necklace fit her Dragoness’ slender neck perfectly. She had just begun to congratulate herself when a spar of debris pierced her right flank. Pain! She barrel-rolled and ricocheted first against the edge of Siiyumiel’s descending paw, and then off a rocky Island outcropping. Thump. Crash. She somersaulted away, somehow airborne again, inanely preoccupied with trying to decide if she still possessed all of her teeth. Fangs. She would feel these bruises, alright.

  DRAGON, YOU WILL DIE!

  Azziala’s voice rose once more above the battle.

  No! Lia glanced about frantically. Sapphurion, Mizuki–where was the Copper Dragoness in this delightful windroc’s breakfast?

  Her three hearts clenched horrendously inside her neck, chest and stomach as the Empress’ vile magic lashed out, ruzal-like in its twisting of reality, corrupting all that was hale and sound into the antithesis of what should be. Siiyumiel voiced a ghastly, animalistic groan on the vocal, mental, emotional and subliminal levels, freezing the golden blood in her arteries. Injured, even such a beast as he! Never had Lia known power to compare to what her mother wielded. Only … had she learned it from ruzal? From Lia herself?

  Momentarily, the Star Dragoness fluttered free, trying to collect her senses.

  Caught you! Mizuki cried, with a snatch of her paw followed at the speed of thought by, Oh, unholy–

  THUD!

  Two Dragonesses and two Dragon Riders thumped into the relatively soft, flexible Dragon hide just where Siiyumiel’s neck exited the lip of his carapace. Hualiama tried to scramble to her paws, but the corkscrewing momentum of Siiyumiel’s fall pinned her in place. His neck twisted as it withdrew, trapping her left hind leg in the thick folds of his skin.

  Mizuki! she wailed.

  Quickly, to me! cried the Copper Dragoness, but her abortive leap only slammed her against the lip of Siiyumiel’s carapace. She rebounded with a snarl.

  The din sounded as if two mountains had engaged in a bout of fisticuffs. Yiisuriel dipped beneath Siiyumiel’s great weight, rolling his body off the front of her Island–her nose, perhaps, although where exactly that started or ended was anyone’s guess. Try as she might, Hualiama could not break free of her Dragon hide prison. Mizuki pulled desperately at her shoulders, but had to dodge away as her wings came in danger of being similarly trapped.

  “Get out, Lia!” yelled Saori. “Get out!”

  Elki just looked green.

  Siiyumiel’s gnarled, thick neck obscured the sky. Rock spun past them. Now, the bulge of his retreating head pulled them inward, the body parts folding back together like a perfectly-fitting jigsaw, blotting out the blurred scenery as the Land Dragon took action to protect himself. Hualiama screamed and struggled wildly. No help. The folds of tough Dragon hide had engulfed her entire hindquarters and were slowly but surely crushing her ribs–or would have, save that Mizuki thrust her own, much larger leg alongside Lia’s torso to be similarly trapped, securing space to breathe. Just.

  Four or five times, massive impacts shook Siiyumiel’s body. Then there was eerie, unending silence. Falling into nothingness.

  Prince Elki squeaked, “Oh, windroc poo. I think we’ve gone and fallen into the Cloudlands.”

  * * * *

  Affurion the Brown came to stand alongside Grandion the Tourmaline. So melancholy, wing-brother?

  Grandion lifted his clenched right paw, staring at the space left where his talons curled back to the palm. Would you believe, Affurion, that I held a star, and let her escape? Such a fool has never lived, or flown, or crawled beneath the Islands upon his belly like a worm. I am a craven … WORM!

  His thundering echoed around the caverns where the Lost Islands Dragonkind roosted, protected from the powerful, poisonous storms without. Many growled or snorted fire in response; a number of hatchlings chirped in alarm at the raw hearts-fire exposed by that cry, and dived beneath their shell-mothers’ wings.

  Shaking, the Tourmaline added a very undraconic, SORRY!

  After a moment, he felt Affurion’s paw rest heavily upon his shoulder. Odd thing about stars, he said. They cannot shine when caged in a paw, or when enchained by an Empress’ lust
for power.

  Grandion snapped reflexively, nicking four scales off the Brown Elder’s shoulder. The Brown simply accepted the angry display as just and due.

  The Tourmaline snarled, Are you saying I smothered her? Possession is a Dragon’s right–

  Possession? The Brown considered this word. What should a Dragon possess? How, moreover, ought a Dragon to possess his beloved? Does he seize and dominate, or enjoy and keep?

  You’re playing with words!

  How does a Dragon embrace a fire-soul, o Tourmaline?

  GRRRR!!

  By what might or right may a Dragon entrap a living flame in his right paw?

  Philosophy!

  Affurion only chuckled smokily. Ah, wing-brother, would you explain to this ill-informed Dragon, when does a Dragoness burn brightest? Some of us lack the courage of three hearts. They have not so much as fired a promise-oath across their beloved’s flanks.

  He spoke of Mizuki. Suddenly, Grandion felt ashamed of his intransigence. He felt equally irritated at this response. He was becoming positively Human in gentleness–despicable! Wing-brother, would that I could be your strong right paw in this matter, he said. Know only that my third heart is promised to another. Some Dragonesses respond to the subtle play of fires upon the desirous orb–he broke off, laughing aloud. Ah, mighty Affurion, how I stumble into thy trap!

  Raising his left paw beneath Grandion’s neck, Affurion rubbed necks with him, as if they were roost-brothers and not Dragons who had barely known each other for a month. He whispered, Aye, so you released a star. Shall the dawn skies not extol her advent, which outshines even the twin suns in the nascent radiance of her presence?

  You’re a warrior-poet.

  Aye, a poet. But a warrior? The Copper is a warrior wing-born. I lead so many, my fires shadowed with portents of struggles and winging to the eternal fires to come …

  Grandion held the Brown fiercely. Does a Dragon juggle destiny, or does destiny juggle the Dragon?

  What? Is this Fra’aniorian wisdom?

  Is a leader’s work to burn and fall like a comet, or to hold a course unswerving, with the strength of volcanoes?