by Marc Secchia
“I made you prettier!” she retorted, twisting the blade in his chest.
Her Dragoness crowed evilly within her. Nice one, Humansoul. Now give him my fire!
Shinzen’s boots crushed her calves, her thighs, her hips and stomach as he trampled her like a feral Dragon venting his spleen on his prey.
Then, white-fires drove upward from the pit of her stomach and raced along her arms in a flash, gleefully driving into his flesh. Shinzen thundered in pain! His entire body convulsed with muscular spasms as what appeared to be an electrical discharge played havoc with his nerves.
Suddenly, a great roar rose from a thousand throats. “To the walls! To the walls!”
Without warning, a Dragon’s tail lashed down and smashed Shinzen away, up into the air. He fell into the seething mass of Giants. The noise was indescribable. Bellowing. War-cries. Dragons thundering overhead. Hualiama could not hear herself think. Tottering on her bruised, battered limbs, she collapsed in an attempt to retrieve her red sword. She waved the blue blade aimlessly at Giants as they charged by, but they seemed to have no care for her or her Dragon. All were consumed with the need to assault the walls.
Hualiama staggered back to Grandion. Wake up. Oh my beauty, rise … his hearts beat. He would recover consciousness, but his lips and muzzle were split in four places. No immediate danger.
“Ho! Princess! Grab on!” A rope-ladder slapped the ground nearby.
Escape? She glanced up, seeing Commander Hiro’s flagship floating a hundred feet above. Well, she could not do better for Grandion just now, and with Raiden and Vinzuki making to land nearby, they would see to his safety.
She must conserve her strength, her magic.
Come to me when you awake, she told Grandion, even though he could not hear. Through the oath-connection, he would find her.
Sheathing her swords on her back, Hualiama leaped for the rope ladder. Her left arm could barely lift above shoulder level, the shoulder having taken a heavy blow from Shinzen, so she climbed using her right hand and the crook of her left arm to hang on. Her legs felt like putty. She’d wear bruises for weeks, she realised. The soldiers above heaved on the rope ladder, pulling her quickly to safety as the tide of Giants surged toward the great rampart not three hundred feet distant. Black figures swarmed over the pile of Dragon bodies, leaping for the top of the battlements. Numerous armoured bodies already clung to the wall like flies, using their strange affinity with rock to simply stick to the surface and crawl up on all fours. Lia groaned. How could they fight enemies who simply walked over walls?
ZULIOR! ZULIOR! Bawling a wild, trumpeting challenge, the Red streaked through the fray, through the drifting smoke of torches and Dragon fire, like the clean sweep of a blade. His Dragonwing bathed the lower wall in fire, while smaller, more agile Dragons higher up targeted the Giants already atop the ramparts. They plucked individuals from the wall and hurled them to their deaths from heights of hundreds of feet.
Hands grabbed her armour, heaving her over the forward gantry.
“Welcome aboard my vessel, Princess of Fra’anior,” said Hiro, with his peculiar, twisted smile.
Lia bowed curtly. “Let’s see to the defences, Commander.”
“Aye.” He nodded slightly.
What? She heard a soft footstep. Lia began to whirl, but the strike to her skull was calculated and precise. She pitched forward into darkness.
* * * *
Grandion woke with a spine-wrenching start. “Hualiama!”
“Easy, wing-brother,” said Raiden. “You took a beastly blow to the head–”
“Shinzen? Lia?”
Vinzuki, fierce as ever, cried, “We must blood them on the rampart! Crush their craven bodies! Shinzen assaults the walls, noble Grandion. Already, the first line of defence is overrun.”
Lia? Blue-star, where are you? He could neither feel her, nor sense her presence–where was she? In trouble?
Jin said, “The Princess went with Commander Hiro, noble–”
“Hiro?”
Grandion could only gasp a word of soul-shadowing horror. That weaselling, perverted caricature of a man with his lusts and plans and inner sickness … he was twisted! Hualiama!
“Aye, she’s aboard Commander Hiro’s Dragonship,” confirmed the young warrior. “She’ll be safe there.”
“Safe?” With a roar, Grandion lurched to his paws, but the balance of his inner ear-canals was all wrong. He pitched over on his side immediately, wrenching his outthrust right wing. He bellowed in helpless, furious rage. Hualiama! BLUE-STAR! Hear me!
“What’s the matter with him?” Jin asked.
“Vinzuki, Raiden! Leave me. Find her. Go to that Dragonship. Rip it apart if you must …” The Tourmaline heaved for breath, feeling in his chest a sensation that to a Dragon was foreign–panic so deep, he could barely fill his lungs. “This is what he’s like.”
A picture. Fumiko immediately screamed, raising her Haozi recurve bow. She must have caught the image too. She shouted, “Fly, Dragons! Fly!”
Raging as much with the force of the Tourmaline’s emotions as with their own sense of moral outrage, the mated pair of Red and Green Dragons took to the air, beating dust around the grounded Tourmaline’s head.
Grandion tried to spread his wings again. Hopeless. No Dragon could fly like this. Could he fight Giants? Surely! But the greater danger was to Hualiama, he sensed, and if he could not reach her …
With all his heart, he keened, Hualiama!
* * * *
Hualiama! The cry echoed in her mind. She started. There was a naked man in her room, his back turned to her. He stretched, limbering up for–oh, mercy. Her upraised hands jerked against ropes. She rather suspected his intended sport involved a Princess of Fra’anior, her arms lashed above her head and her feet apart to the corners of the bed.
Her Human’s scream was muffled by a gag.
The Dragoness within regarded this reaction with amazement, cutting off the scream in an instant. Humansoul and Dragonsoul regarded each other with consternation.
What, this doesn’t bother you? gasped Human-Lia.
What, this bothers you? scoffed the Dragoness.
The man turned, holding a small, sharp dagger in each hand of curious design, similar to the fish-filleting blades from Rolodia Island. “So, Princess, it’s just you and me. I’ve waited for this day, knowing it must surely come. The day I draw the magical power of innocence from your maiden body and attain immortality!”
Perhaps her Dragoness did not fear this man, but the Human part of her was definitely underwhelmed by her situation. Hiro’s torso and limbs were a mass of scars. Below the neck, there was no inch of flesh upon him which had not been repeatedly mutilated. Now, judging by the way he ran his thumbs over the razor-sharp edges of his blades, he intended to extend that obsession to her. And become immortal? He must live on the Island of insanity.
Alright. She tested the ropes without hope. These Easterners knew far too much about knots. So, Dragoness, what’s the cunning plan? Me being fresh out of magic?
Hiro’s features twisted again in unnatural, opposing directions as he climbed up onto the bed. “Scream, girl. I wanted to hear you scream as I slowly flay your beautiful skin.”
Dragonsoul! she howled, aghast.
Hiro cocked his head in puzzlement, as if he had heard her telepathic scream.
Summon me with all our strength. I can’t just take–I need you!
Yesterday already!
Hualiama had desisted because she knew there were ropes and surely, a transformation would place her draconic limbs in jeopardy? White sheeted over her vision. Terror. Fury. A Dragoness scorned! Her Dragon-form blasted into being. Snap! Crack! The ropes pinged loose as her polymorphic limbs manifested within the bonds and swelled to a thickness that could not be contained by the knots. Lia’s forelimbs broke free. A Dragon’s anatomy meant that her legs could not be splayed as they had been, so her transformation simply tore the lower end of the bed apart.
/> Hiro froze, a fatuous grin half-twisting his lips as he took in the creature he had meant to assault.
Saccharine-sweet, the Dragoness said, “Shall I disrobe for you, Hiro?”
He stabbed reflexively with his daggers.
She lashed out with hooked talons, and tore out his throat.
A moment later, she kicked down Hiro’s cabin door. The gore-splattered Dragoness punched her way through the Commander’s soldiers and leaped over the gantry. Her wings snapped open.
“Commander. Commander!” she heard behind her.
These soldiers had knowingly abetted their Commander’s madness. The Human within blanched in horror and squeezed her eyes shut, but to a Dragoness, the need for dark-fires retribution burned in her hearts, overpowering all else. She roared at the shrinking-lily girl within. Mercy? Burn that in a volcano! A Star Dragoness must protect the innocents, the lives Hiro and his ilk would in the future scar and bury in the fire of their madness. This was Balance, too.
Spying Raiden incoming, she shouted a curt word to him.
Fire blossomed in the night.
* * * *
She wanted to seek the Tourmaline. Instead, to her shock, the Dragoness found herself back in her starry meeting-place with blonde-Lia. The girl sat upon the bed, holding her knees tucked up to her chest, rocking. Her hair tumbled about her and spread over her back, shoulders and arms like the foamy billows of a waterfall, never more beautiful. Aching a Dragoness’ hearts.
“Humansoul?”
The girl wept.
The Star Dragoness said, “Hualiama, we are one. We need to know that sometimes, justice is best served quick and ugly. And if you need me to be the paw of justice, then let it be so.”
She wept harder.
Lia had never understood her other-soul less. What was this Human response, this power that Grandion sometimes extolled–what did he call it? Strength-from-grief? All she saw was a shrivelling coward unable to make tough decisions, unwilling to give an evil man the end he desperately deserved. Yet this girl had stood against Ra’aba and Azziala and King Chalcion, and against Razzior and Shinzen and more, with audacity the Dragoness could not fathom. How could courage be built on air? How, when war engulfed the Islands and despair rose like the smoke of charred hopes and prayers to the uncaring heavens, could this orphan discover the gift of dance?
Inconceivable.
She had joined her fire-soul to enigma.
She moved to the girl’s side. Perhaps Humanlove felt the same. Perhaps she loathed the Dragon within.
Blue-haired Lia whispered, “Do you hate me, petal?”
Petal. Endearments, when out in the Island-World, Giants overran a city and the Tourmaline wandered, lost and lonely?
Human-Lia gasped between her sobs, “You despise me, Dragonsoul. All creatures despise me already. Yet from you, this hurts most. I can’t stand it. I’d rather die.”
“Despise you? Liar!” The Dragoness fought back her fire. “Nothing could be further from the truth. Don’t you see that I love you? I love us! And if that man would maim and violate my very self, our precious soul, do you see that I could not stand it either? I’d rather die than let him touch a single hair upon our head. I’d die for you, Humansoul!”
Eyes of fathomless blue. Magnified by tears. Hualiama stared at her Human self, willing her, by some miracle that involved every fibre of her body, to understand. Her hearts felt wrung out, beleaguered, yet somehow a nucleus of hope remained. Her Human did not speak.
“I am fire,” the Dragoness blurted out. “Forgive me if sometimes, the fire must burn!”
She fled.
Yet the girl’s cry chased her into the night. Thou, my Dragonsoul. Thou …
* * * *
The Star Dragoness stalked the shadows, searching for her Tourmaline. Searching for relief. Thousands of Giants swarmed over the outer defences, relentlessly slaying the men of Kaolili, and no heroics of Dragon or Dragon Rider could stay their blood-madness. They kept rising from the ashes of injury and destruction and flinging themselves on, and on, and on, stopping only when their legs collapsed or a decapitating talon-stroke flung a head to the ground, or a crossbow-bolt passed through the heart. Smoke poured heavenward as fires razed the battlements. The defenders rallied in tight, well-disciplined units, requiring four or five soldiers to bring down a single, isolated Giant.
Nowhere was the Tourmaline Dragon to be found. Hualiama fought until her wings could barely hold her aloft, mourning the loss of Dragons like Ryuki and Yenuko, stalwarts of the Eastern Dragonkind, and five more of her Riders and their Dragons. She fought with touches of star-fire and rallying-cries to the Dragonkind, reorganising and revitalising the defence where only chaos remained. She led Raiden and Vinzuki in quartering the city, ensuring no Giants penetrated the inner curtain wall to fall upon the populace. Not yet. Not on her watch.
So passed the night in deeds of paw and fang too numerous to recount, and when the dawn broke bloody over a city as besieged as her hearts, she saw Shinzen standing legs akimbo upon the eastern rampart, above the fray, shaking his enormous fists at the sky. “Let my Dragons arise!”
The cry rippled between the waiting Orange Dragons like wildfire. Teased and tantalised all night by the clash of battle and the screams of the wounded and dying, and by the smell of charred flesh carried upon the breeze, the two-headed Dragons were more than ready to take wing against the enemy. And so it seemed to the despairing Star Dragoness that a second dawn rose to replace the first, a dawn of wings that stirred the air like a storm and scaly orange bodies that covered the firmament in a living, flowing carpet of resplendent, fiery beauty, as over thirty thousand enemy Dragons took to the skies.
Giants poured out of the broken fortifications. Still so many!
She gathered a Dragonwing to her side, forced at last by tiredness to ride upon Burliki’s right shoulder. They were pitifully few, gathered like funeral-watchers to witness a storm that would fall upon the city and wipe it from the map. Nigh a million souls thronged the streets, the majority refugees from the Islands already torched by Shinzen’s forces.
Hualiama.
A gravelly voice made her whirl with a squeal of delight. Grandion!
There he was. Blackened with soot, bloodied of paw and muzzle, yet still proud of bearing as he winged up behind Burliki, flanked by Raiden and Vinzuki. There was nothing for it. Her wings fluttered frantically, shooting her over to the Tourmaline; he caught her soft-pawed, then held her to his muzzle. They rubbed against each other’s sensitive scales near the eye.
“Troublesome mite,” he growled throatily.
“My jewel did wander, but he came home,” she replied, failing to remember where the quote came from.
“Quite a few, aren’t there?” he suggested, thumbing a talon at the enemy.
The tiny Dragoness laughed, “Sheep in a pen, my Tourmaline. Shall we shear them?”
Their laughter mingled, sad and fey, as the press of Orange Dragons thickened, rising skyward as if a storm-front effortlessly darkened the sky.
Grandion touched her spine-spikes fondly. “We’d need a bigger marvel than me turning Human. Ridiculous notion! Giving up my wings …” Fire leaked between his fangs. He said, “Yet why such a wing-shiver, little one? I’ll still be–”
“Land Dragons!” Hualiama swivelled her neck, scanning the northern horizon.
She glanced to the buildings below. They had begun to shiver much as she had just shivered, yet she saw nothing on the horizon as yet. What was this? Abruptly a familiar, silvery blur caught her eye. Grunts! The formation of Orange Dragons imploded in numerous locations as a staggered wave of Grunts smashed into bone and wing, spreading devastation.
My, what a beautiful morning! sang Affurion. Dragons, attack!
All three hearts leaped into her throat as in the best tradition of the Lost Islands Dragonkind, legions of Dragons appeared from nowhere, from behind shields honed by generations of fighting the Dragon-Haters. The humming Swarm. The cunn
ing Overminds. The powerful Browns, called the Anubam. And waves of heavy Grunts, rocket-propelled into battle by the Overminds among them.
Affurion! Hualiama’s shriek split the morning, making every Dragon nearby wince and smile simultaneously.
Oh, he looked as pleased as a Dragon with new wings. Need a paw, Blue-star? I’ve a few thousand for you. You need to go head off those Land Dragons before they crush the city.
What?
They’re the bad sort. Some kind of Runner?
Welkin-Runners? Lia gasped.
Aye. But Siiyumiel also sent reinforcements, since we asked. Mist-Runners. Look to the West.
Mercy. Thunder upon the hills. The water remaining in the moat danced a crazy, rippling dance. Trees swayed. Fumiko was shouting something about warning the denizens of the city. Hualiama knew there was no point. None whatsoever. For she saw a posse of Land Dragons come charging over the lush green hills of Kaolili. They were the four-legged lizard-like Runners, standing no less than four hundred feet tall at the shoulder and measuring a third to a half of a mile in length; some individuals were brawnier still. In the morning suns-shine their turquoise, luminescent hides gleamed with spectacular displays of flashing lights. Lia was astonished they could run in the thin air, but perhaps that aided these Welkin-Runners. Turquoise blue, hence the name. Sky-Runners. Odd how dwellers above the Cloudlands thought of everything below the Islands as abyssal, hellish depths. Truly, the Land Dragons dwelled in their own sky.
Now a second round of thunder intersected the first as a further battle-group of Land Dragons poured over the hills from the West; flatter, sleeker, darker individuals sporting poisonous yellow stripes. Their talons were razor-sharp, curved blades that cut tens of feet deep into the sod with every step, propelling them in a curiously tiptoe running orientation.
Hualiama rounded on Affurion. “I’m supposed to head them off?”
“Aye. They all want you, Star Dragoness. Go play the tease.”
Infuriated beyond words, she looked to Grandion for a sign that he understood and would back her up as she told the Brown Overmind exactly which sewer he could shove his insinuations into, but reeled in shock as the Tourmaline touched wingtips with Affurion in a brotherly-regard gesture. What the volcanic hells? Traitor! She’d swim him backwards through the lava-lakes of Fra’anior! She would not turn him into a Human, she’d turn him into a lesser spiny toad, the one with the pink blotches on its warty back! Following which she’d fricassee said toad on a roaring pyre, taking care to stand upwind from the noxious fumes. Of course, of all the betrayals in her life, this hardly rated a mention.
