Zandra's Dragon: Dragons of Telera (Book 6)

by Lisa Daniels

  “Because I don’t trust you.” Echo concentrated, and the headache formed in her skull. Magic coursed through her blackened veins, and she delved into herself, into the darkness that was a part of her and tore it out.

  The darkness coalesced into a monstrous, shadowy form, growling ominously. The trader made an odd squeaking noise.

  “If you try to contact any of the authorities, you traitor, I’ll set my friend on you. It’s not too picky about flesh, bones and clothing. Echo felt momentary relief upon separating the evil, in giving it a form, rather than letting it nestle inside her. Just a shame she couldn’t control it for long.

  The trader began to sweat profusely, knowing he’d been caught. “They have my wife. They said if I didn’t cooperate, they’d turn her into a Shadow. What choice do I have?”

  “Easy. Give me the pills. You can take this vial. Don’t breathe a word about this to anyone. And I’ll tell Helena you’re compromised.”

  The trader shivered, but did as she asked, goaded by the threat of what Echo had dubbed as Monster. Monster crept after the trader as he hastily dug up the flagstone of his stone floor, and pulled out a bag of pills. He flung them her way, refusing to go near her.

  Echo wondered if he’d try to follow her after they departed, since she knew the desperation he must be feeling, missing the love of his life. She had no time for that, though. If need be, she’d kill the trader to cut out the complications in her life. The last thing Helena needed was a Supreme and upper class raid upon their hide outs. Not before they had secured everything in order.

  The underbelly, the heart of the resistance, had scooped up Echo as a baby. No one knew the parents of the body she possessed, but the resistance relished the chance to train an upper child. Given a normal life, Echo would have grown up in the dense spires of the Fractured City, learning the ways of the Shadows, spouting the ideology that humans had taken everything from them.

  Helena changed that.

  My soul came from the origin land. I am a Shadow in a human body. A body that has emotions, conflicting with a Shadow that does not.

  With the bag of pills, she left the trader’s ruined house, letting Monster dissolve. The headache throbbed, but she kept a calm, almost sedate pace, as if nothing scared her, and she didn’t feel the desperate urge to get as far away from the outskirts as possible.

  She glanced back a few times along the snow-flecked street, but saw no peep of the trader. Just as well. He would have been moon-cursing foolish to do so.

  Soon, she left the main trading slums of the outskirts, heading for the ruins to the south-west, where the caves and the villages accumulated, next to the great chasm that split the land.

  I get tired of living on scraps. Of always fearing a Shadow’s whim, of letting them see the humanity in me. If there’s one thing they hate more than a human, it’s a traitor.

  Echo smiled darkly to herself. Abomination. I belong to nothing.

  She kept up her jaunt, taking around three hours to approach her destination. The snows whirled bitterly around, and she tucked her hands into her fur robe pockets, and buried her chin into the lump of fur by her collarbone. She stared resolutely ahead, that same empty feeling inside – the conflict of the Shadow which did not feel emotion the same way a human did, and the human body which served to override the hollow.

  Still, if she didn’t cast Monster often enough, her emotions slanted over to empty. They made her do atrocious things at times and feel no remorse.

  A memory flashed. A child, pointing at the chasm, laughing. Teasing Echo with his friends. Echo the loner, with her quiet, diminutive nature.

  She still remembered the precise pitch of his scream, the hint of despair it embodied, as she shoved him over the abyss, then listened curiously to hear if his body would make a crunching noise as it hit the ground.

  About a day after that, Helena discovered her.

  Abomination. That’s all I am. I belong nowhere. I don’t fit in.

  Still, even an abomination could be useful. So that was something. Out of a secret thrill, Echo edged herself close to the chasm’s vast drop, so she could peer down, and look at the jagged rocks, or the murk that obscured the bottom with the lack of light below. Nothing penetrated the deepest cracks, and sometimes, when Echo had nothing better to do, she explored them with Monster.

  Shadows, for the most part, left her alone, sensing her as one of them.

  She wasn’t, though.

  She stopped. Something seemed out of place in the gloom. In the spidery embrace of the chasm, with the jutting crevices that punched into the sides like wide yawns, she saw something. A body? A skeleton? She continued walking, dismissing it as another unfortunate accident, when she saw it stir.

  Oh. Hello. She crouched by the gap, noting the feeble movements of the person she’d mistaken for a corpse. Whoever they were, they looked seriously messed up. From what sort of height had they fallen from, as well? This whole area surrounded the basin of one of the mountain range that soared about eight thousand meters each. She bit her lip for a moment, contemplating. With her recent use of Monster, she felt more empathetic than usual, though the headache rang in the back of her skull.

  I won’t be able to reach them from here or from down there. Reluctantly, she let the Shadow magic trickle through her veins again, and Monster formed beside her.

  Fetch the one who has fallen. They would likely be too weak to try and lash out at her abomination. Monster’s form undulated down, its blue eyes glowing with that icy chill which unnerved so many people. Monster bobbled through the walls in places, until it reached the body. Monster grasped the body in tendril-like arms, then slithered up the cliff face again, shivering from the snow that hit it. Shadows did not like the cold, Echo included.

  Let me see this one’s injuries. Monster set the body down, and Echo observed the male form, the thick robes, the snow caked all over him. He’d most certainly come tumbling off the mountain. She moved one of his eyelids, then cursed and snapped it back.

  Yellow eyes. Werewolf. Of course. Only a werewolf or witch with their robust constitutions could survive such a sheer drop. But blasted skies and broken teeth, she didn’t want to be responsible for a werewolf. Even if there were still missing members of Erlandur’s scouting party floating about.

  Curses! The headache grew. She ordered Monster to carry the werewolf, and clambered onto the creature herself, mentally directing it to chasm surf, so she could stay out of sight from any prying eyes upon the surface.

  Again, the darkness unburdened from her mind, Echo drank in the crisp cold air, and appreciated the view she endured, even if the horrors it contained would give anyone second thoughts about living in such an area.

  They arrived in sight of the town a short while later, with Echo mildly irritated by her headache. She examined her werewolf as he groaned, checking out his iron gray hair, his pale, wintery skin, his strong, muscular body. A fine specimen in human form. Probably a fearsome presence in werewolf form. Echo examined the taut muscles, the high cheekbones, the rapier curve of his face to a noble chin. She wondered if she’d need to knock him out. She highly doubted the werewolf would enjoy being held by a Shadow aberrant.

  Thankfully, he stayed unconscious. Her headache pounded insistently at her skull, trying to tempt her to drop Monster – but no way was she carrying that great lump of flesh by herself. Just a little further. Then I’ll be with aunty Helena.

  Aunty Helena. Helena wasn’t related to her in any shape or form, but the Supreme rescue baby Echo all those years ago.

  “I called you that name because you would repeat anything I said, but you’d get quieter with each iteration. It was such a weird characteristic. Well, it was either that, or Surprise Baby.”

  Echo felt glad that Helena did not call her Surprise Baby.

  Finally, within the town, she saw a few figures in the distance, who clearly recognized Monster, and came scampering to her.

  Broth and Vallug of the underbelly greeted her,
two traders of the resistance with a main focus on food supplies for the town.

  “Ah! This must be one of Erlandur’s scouts,” Vallug said, helping to take the unconscious werewolf with Broth off Monster. Echo released her darkness with a sigh of relief. Monster dissolved into nothing, returning to that corner of her mind where it would slowly build up over time, overwhelming her ability to empathize.

  The two black veined traders, those of the few who had managed to resist the Shadow corruption, smiled at her and draped the werewolf over their shoulders.

  “Did you get the supplies, then?”

  Echo nodded in response to Broth. “Yes, but we can’t use our former contact anymore. He’s been compromised. I had to spook him so he wouldn’t grass on us.”

  “Blast.” Broth’s needle thin face screwed up in disgust. “Always knew Carlok was craven at heart. Probably trying to sell you out for a bite of coin.”

  “He claimed the Shadows had his wife.”

  “Nonsense,” Broth said, though Vallug immediately sympathized.

  “Not a good day to be a citizen of the Fractured City,” he said.

  “When is it ever?” Echo scoffed. She loved her home in some ways, though. Parts of the Fractured City had gone through revitalization projects, recreating flower-choked meadows in green biomes, though the energy it took to heat them up drained itself off the tax payers of the central city. The slums, the ruined and abandoned parts of the city due to neglect and the creeping fingers of the Lunar Wastes, mostly got ignored.

  Sometimes, Shadows would organize little hunting parties to try and track “scum,” but for the most part, they left the bedraggled survivors of the wastelands alone.

  She liked the massive underground network they had created over the years, hiding in plain sight, locked beneath the body of a rundown town. The black veined people who made their lives above ground provided a perfect buffer to avoid detection of the activity below.

  Only so long they could keep it up, though, until people started opening up on their position. The upper echelons of the Fractured City sensed something on the wind, but as of yet, felt unthreatened by anything humans and werewolves could throw at them. Part of believing yourself as superior and other species as inferior tended to cultivate gross underestimation.

  Which worked in the human’s favor.

  Echo sighed relief as she dipped through the trapdoor concealed inside a broken building, and ended up in a warm, heated corridor, carved out by the local miners and stone masons, heated by pipelines that ran under the town.

  She dropped off her fresh batch of pills to the med bay, and briefly greeted the witch known as Faith.

  “How’s the hole in your stomach faring?”

  “Better,” Faith responded, her dark eyes hooded. Her fingers drummed on the side of the bed, agitated and bored. “There’s a lot here to wrap my head around. I never thought the Fractured City would be so blasting huge.”

  “Or that there’s an actual society in it, corrupt and messed up as it is, right?”

  Faith smiled. “Well, it’s not like anyone ever returns when they come over here.”

  “True. They get converted or they assimilate. And werewolves on this side of the mountain are very noticeable. If the Shadows get wind of them, they’ll eradicate them as soon as possible. They consider werewolves as a threat.”

  Faith scrunched her brow, processing the info. The unconscious werewolf was placed in a bed nearby, and Faith’s attention turned to him instead. “Ah! That’s Nox. He’s the son of the Spine chieftain.”

  “Son of a chieftain, eh?” Echo examined Nox in renewed interest. “Pretty risky to send him on a scouting mission.”

  “He wanted to come. He’s the only one found so far…” Faith’s voice trailed off. “I’m fairly sure one of our scouts is dead. He fell unconscious in the death zone.”

  Echo chewed the inside of her cheek as she regarded the round featured Faith, her plump lips. “I can offer to you and Erlandur later to look around and see if we can find anyone else. It’s not been that long. They might still be alive.”

  “Good idea,” someone interrupted behind them, and Echo spun to face Helena, in all her terrifying glory. Faith narrowed her eyes distrustfully at the Supreme, with her black aura flickering about her form. “We’re going to need all the help we can get.”

  Echo wondered if Faith could feel the darkness that resided inside. Not everyone identified Echo as a human Shadow, but then again, not many human Shadows had survived the process of initiation.

  “You got the medicine? Ah. Excellent. We’ll need that for Faith and her wolfy friends when we find them all. Including this one.” Helena wrinkled her nose at Nox. “When he starts coming to, you and Erlandur will need to break the news to him directly. Otherwise he may not react kindly to any of our presences here.”

  “Noted,” Faith said dryly. “Who are you?”

  “Echo.”

  “Are you a witch?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Echo replied. “I have an… ability.”

  Helena smiled grimly, but said nothing. She knew Echo’s secret. Not even the black veined humans knew who Echo was, really. They just assumed she was contaminated, like them. They didn’t feel the constant, encroaching darkness like she did, where her thoughts and feelings gradually drowned out in a tide of hate and death.

  When Helena and Echo stepped out of the room, Helena said, “Vallug mentioned that we were betrayed. I’d like you to brief us on this.”

  “Sure.” Echo told her about the trader, and picking up the werewolf. The Supreme, one of eight that worked in the underbelly, nodded thoughtfully.

  “Our numbers grow every day. But still, twelve thousand of us versus over a hundred thousand Shadows is heinous numbers. We’ll have to act soon, though. There’s only so much longer we can keep this up. We’ll need to visit the Island with Erlandur as the final stage in the operation.” Helena paused then, her eyes infinitely sad. “If my people were more peaceful… we could have worked this out.”

  “Why do we hate humans so much, actually?” Echo had thought about it before, but never fully understood why Shadows held such seething disdain for other races. She just knew they hated, and they blamed humans for the destruction of the origin planet. But how?

  Helena twirled one strand of her white hair absently in her fingers. She had the same hair color as Echo, but there, the resemblance to a Supreme ended. Supremes pulsed a dark, noxious aura about them, had chilling, empty eyes, an ashen tint to their skin, and a pervasive feeling of death.

  “The story goes with our kind is that the humans wanted to utilize powerful magic. The witches found a source in the origin world. They tapped into our world, fought their little wars, not realizing that they were killing off our entire planet and bringing our people to mass extinction.” Helena walked around a corner of the underground, lit by softly glowing braziers, adding a smoky infusion into the air, which got filtered out through patches in the walls.

  “So, the humans started it?”

  “Yes. I believe they were ignorant, but they destroyed the origin world, so only scattered fragments of that place remain. Our method was to fight back using our magic. We staged a huge takeover, and enslaved all the humans in the Fractured City – then the biggest human civilization on this planet.”

  Echo imagined the conflict now. She saw Shadows pouring out of a rift in the sky, flooding down to a busy, shining city, full of humans minding their own business, perhaps unaware of the darkness the witches manipulated. She pictured the screams, the terror, and the savage vengeance of the Shadows, as they possessed, then converted other humans around them into mindless, making them tormented slaves.

  She shivered.

  “We wanted to take over the world as vengeance for the damage brought upon ours. But we couldn’t spawn anywhere else but at the Fractured City. And… well. When we invaded, we decimated cities, towns and people in the northlands. Right until the thousand and one witches oblit
erated themselves to create the Lunar Wastes, trapping us in a blanket of cold, and mountains of ice. Crippling our movement when we stepped into the cursed wasteland.”

  Helena hesitated outside her sleeping quarters. “Ever since then, the Shadows worked on forming a proper society here, subjugating the remaining humans, and seeking a way to bypass the Lunar Wastes, to complete their objective of taking everything over.”

  One thing occurred to Echo, as she listened to the Supreme’s words. “How do you know all this? You sound like you were there. When… the Wastes happened. But that was a long time ago. Wasn’t it?”

  Helena’s smile then turned dark and pained. “It was,” she agreed, before promptly closing the door on Echo’s face.

  Rude.

  Sighing, Echo went to her room, to reflect on the day’s events, on the werewolf, and on Helena’s words.

  Chapter Two

  “No,” Nox said. He clutched his healing ribs, scowling at Erlandur and Faith. They shared the med bay with him, explaining the fantastical tale that somehow, somehow, they had Shadows on their side. “How could you keep something like this away from us? You never said once that you were in contact with this… Supreme. You simply told us that you had made some friends. My father trusted you.”

  Erlandur smiled thinly, his eyes strangely hollow. For once, he didn’t don his helmet, so his southerner features stood clear in the flickering light of the room. “What do you think will be the first reaction I’ll get if I even attempt to explain about Helena?”

  Nox paused. “That doesn’t matter. You can’t hold onto something like that. It betrays the trust of those who choose to follow you. What if none of us wish to forge an alliance with such a creature? Why not let us have that choice?”

  “As far as I’m aware,” Erlandur replied, his voice cool, “we’re not winning this war. They’re reaching the south in more numbers each day, even with the brave resistance of your people. And once they get through the south, there’ll be nothing to stop them devouring all the humans of the world. Also… I’d known for a while that not all Shadows were evil.”