The Legend of the Lightscale

by A. R. Cook

  “You’re right, Chiriku,” Desert Rain replied. “Who am I to tell you, either of you, what path you ought to take? If this is what you really want to do, Hij-Urawran know I can’t stop you.” She gave the Quetzalin a half-grin. “A whole pack of Zi’Gax couldn’t stop you.”

  At that moment, Desert Rain could have sworn that the corner of Chiriku’s beak lifted a little, into a barely noticeable smile—not a sardonic one, but of the genuine kind. Maybe it was the dim light playing tricks.

  Mac was smiling too. “Glad to see you’ve come around, Gila Gul. Like we Bayou folk-kk say, ‘It’s easier to wade through the swamp with—’”

  Chiriku slapped a hand over Mac’s mouth. “Say one more stupid Bayou proverb and I’ll live up to that name you gave me and peck your eyes out.”

  Desert Rain, learning that Chiriku was more squawk than peck, surpressed a chuckle.

  Mac nodded, saying a muffled “okay” so that Chiriku would release him. He rubbed his hands together in enthusiasm. “So, all we gotta do is go up north, find this magical whats-its-ssck and use it on that-tkk big ol’ Nasty. Sounds-ssck easy enough. What do we do first, Dez?”

  Sounds easy enough? What would Mac consider hard? “It’s not that simple, Mac. The first problem is even getting to the Tiagalands. It’s not exactly right next door from here.”

  “Then we just-tkk sit down and think-kk about it some,” the lizard responded. “I don’t suppose-ssck we could make it a li’l brighter in here?”

  The room instantly brightened as Anthron touched each of the crystals on the table, the dim blue glow becoming a warm yellow radiance. He sat down at the table, not saying anything as the others came to sit around the table with him.

  “Let’s take that big buzzard of Clova’s to fly up there, problem solved,” Chiriku said more as an instruction than a suggestion.

  Desert Rain shook her head. “Gust isn’t ours to take. I’m not going to take away Clova’s Roc from her, and unless you know how to command a Roc, it wouldn’t do much good anyway.”

  “Not-tkk to mention I hear that no birds’ll go near that cursed Inbetween place-ssck,” Mac pointed out. “I heard that birds fly over that-tkk place when they’re ready to go to the Pond of the Beyond.”

  “That’s superstition,” Chiriku retorted.

  “No, he’s right. Woasim the Wind Hijn told me about it a long time ago,” Desert Rain said, shifting restlessly. “He says that there’s a kind of awful smog that hangs high over the whole stretch of the place. It’s the waste of all the dark magic the Darkscale create, combined with the fumes generated by the Bloodburn smelting furnaces and machines. It creates acidic rain, and smoke so thick, no sunlight can fall on the Inbetween. Woasim called it something funny…the ‘Malaise Cloud,’ or something like that. Anyway, he says the few flying animals who dare to go near it are Kidran’s snowbirds, because they’re endowed with protective frost magic. Even they sometimes don’t make it through.” She thought about the snowbird Kidran had supposedly sent out to bring the council a message, and had been lost. She couldn’t imagine what might have happened to that bird in a smog-cloud of raining acid. “I’m not even sure how he and Kidran can travel through that smog—they must ride winds that take them high enough above it or have warding-off spells to protect themselves.”

  Chiriku shrugged. “So, Clova must know some spells. Since you apparently don’t have a clue about how to do any magic tricks when you want to, it would help to have a magic-user along who knows what she’s doing.”

  Desert Rain felt prickles on her neck. She bit her lip and shook her head. “She’s too sick, and we don’t know how long it will take for her to fully recover. Every day we wait, Katawa could be closer to finding the Darkscale clan, and when he does, he won’t hesitate to force the Hijn council to fight against his family.”

  “And I don’t-tkk suppose Clova would feel too good being up in the icelands, where nothing grows,” Mac thought aloud.

  Desert Rain hadn’t even thought of that. Even if Clova was in perfect health right now, she’d have absolutely no power up in the Tiagalands. Everything would be too cold for her to use her plant magic—seeds wouldn’t germinate in ice. She’d be even more helpless than Desert Rain—at least Desert Rain had Silverheart, if anything. Knowing Clova, she would insist on braving the arctic lands with them anyway, magic or no, and Desert Rain would not put her at risk like that.

  Chiriku could tell what Desert Rain was thinking by the expression on her face. “Then what, you want to walk all the way there or something?”

  “Maybe we could get the elf folk-kk here to lend us a few of those deer they ride,” Mac suggested.

  Desert Rain shook her head. “Riding or walking through the Inbetween is even worse than trying to fly over it. Unless we have highly trained bodyguards who have braved the Inbetween before to come with us, we’d never get through there without getting lost or killed.” Great Guerda-Shalyr, the Tiagalands alone will be bad enough for getting lost or killed!

  “Well, is there even a third option?” Chiriku asked haughtily. “Do you know some magical way around the Inbetween, because, I hate to break it to you, we’ll have to go through it to get to the Tiagalands.”

  “If we had a—” Before Desert Rain could finish her sentence, Anthron placed a scroll in front of her. Unrolling it, she found that it was a detailed map of Juka Basin and its surrounding regions, with the Land Ablaze to the south, the coast to the east, and the Inbetween to the north.

  “Thank you,” she said warily to the elf who apparently could read her mind. She spread the map out in front of her, looking at the area of the map labeled the Inbetween, but this area was, of course, blank of any routes or landmarks. The Inbetween stretched all the way from the east coast to the west, from northern borders of the Forest Overlooking the Sea to the opposite end of the Azokind Mountains. By the Divine Beasts, Kidran and Woasim must be the bravest people in the world to be able to cross that expanse of unknown wilderness, as they sometimes had to do. Anyone else determined enough to pass through there always brought experienced guards or Knights with them, as many as they could afford. Even then, they would find the thinnest stretches of the Inbetween to pass through to make it in and out of the territory quickly, but even then it could take days to make it across. It was unfortunate geography that kept northern Noble Cities so cut off from the southern ones.

  “See?” Chiriku said, as she and Mac looked over Desert Rain’s shoulder. “No way around it. We have to go through the Inbetween somewhere.”

  “Or we could take a boat-tkk to go around it-tkk,” Mac cut in.

  Desert Rain and Chiriku raised their eyebrows at him. Desert Rain checked the map again. Sailing by boat on the eastern ocean would be faster than going by elk or on foot, and they would avoid the Inbetween that way. “But Mac, the closest port is all the way south by City Cindrea, and that’s a few weeks’ trek in the wrong direction.”

  “That would take us even longer, muck-eater,” Chiriku said in the way a little sister may mock an older brother.

  Mac put his hands behind his head and smiled, although he had nothing to lean back on. “Not if you got a boat-tkk in the Bayou.”

  Desert Rain went slack-jawed. “There’s a port in the Bayou? I’ve never heard of a port in that territory.”

  “Well, maybe if the Noble Race types-ssck ever came to give us Bayou folk-kk a visit, then maybe you all would know about our port-tkk,” Mac replied, a bit pointedly. “But then I suppose Nobles-ssck wouldn’t want to set foot-tkk in one of our boats-ssck, would they?”

  Desert Rain looked down at the map. “According to this, the Bayou is practically a straight shot east of here, right on the coast! It would take a few days to get there!” She poured over the map for a few seconds. “There we could take a boat, up to the Coast Keepers’ Islands, where we could resupply before crossing over to the mainland, to the Ring of Springs, and from there to the Tiagalands.”

  “Great,” Chiriku sighed. “So we
have to go tramping through a swamp to find a rickety junk boat. Fantastic.”

  “And that’s only our first problem.” Desert Rain slouched, scratching her forehead. “We still don’t know how we’ll find the Elfë Tiagas once we get up north.”

  Mac and Chiriku thought about this, but they both came up empty of any suggestions.

  Desert Rain drummed her fingers on the table, and Kidran popped into her mind. He may have been an Elfë Tiagas born, but he was not like the other elves. He would have been more suited to be an Ahshi with his open-armed, personable attitude, but he was heir to the Frost Dragon, and thus the local Hijn of the winterland dwellers. She knew that if Kidran had any control of his situation right now, he would help her. Maybe he still could help…

  She turned to the philosopher. “Anthron, do you think you could send another Flightspeak to Kidran? If he knew we were coming, maybe he could find a way to sneak away from the Elfë Tiagas and meet up with us somewhere. Then he could help convince them to help us, if we explain to them what you told us.”

  Anthron tucked back the loose strand of hair that had freed itself once again. “I can send another Flightspeak, but it was by chance that Kidran received the first one. I cannot guarantee that he would be the one to receive it again. If the Elfë Tiagas were the ones to sense the Flightspeak first, they might triple their wards to prevent you from finding them. I don’t think they would take to my theory so readily.”

  “Good toads-ssck, those snow elves sound real cold,” Mac said. “Guess that’s-ssck why they like living in the ice-ssck.”

  “With their cities shrouded by warding magic, we could be hunting through the Tiagalands for months…” An idea poked inside Desert Rain’s mind. Her hand shot into her pocket and pulled out the Darkscale compass. She inspected the dents and scratches in it, shaking it to hear a few loose parts clink around inside.

  “Didn’t you say that thing could detect magic?” Chiriku asked.

  “That’s what that Zi’Gax said,” Desert Rain answered. “It might hone in on Ancient Magic, or this compass might detect Hijn…which means we could use this to find Kidran! This could lead us right to him, if it wasn’t busted.”

  Anthron plucked it from her hands without even asking. He looked it over, tapping it in certain places, and then selected one of his books and started flipping through it. He eyed a page and took a small clay pallet knife from a fern-leaf-woven bag tied at his waist. He started prying the glassy top of the compass off. “It’s a fairly standard compass mechanism. I’m sure with a little studying and patience, I can figure out how it works and fix it. There’s probably a specialize crystal involved, if its purpose is to detect magic.”

  “Well, that fixes that, hoping that the stupid compass doesn’t keep pointing to you,” Chiriku pointed out to Desert Rain.

  Desert Rain scratched her head. “Well, maybe as long as I don’t use any magic, it won’t point to me. With the elves’ guarding spells being so strong, and much of the magic is provided by Kidran, it should get the compass’s attention.” Desert Rain paused, mentally running through all they had so far discussed.

  “Sounds-ssck like we’re good to go, then,” Mac said, satisfied. “I guess-ssck the next thing to do is start-tkk heading to my home sweet home. I know the perfect folk-kk to pick up some supplies from.”

  “And get a boat with a crew?” Chiriku asked skeptically.

  “Relax-ssck, Chi. I got it all in hand.”

  “I don’t suppose we can buy coats and hiking gear in the Bayou?” Desert Rain asked. She was already shivering with the thought of that cold, snow-laden place she would be facing, a place that was the exact opposite of her desert home.

  Mac patted her shoulder. “You’re talking to the best-tkk merchant in the Bayou. If I can’t get it-tkk, nobody can.”

  Chiriku stood up. “When do we hit the road?”

  “I advise you to be patient, Quetzalin,” Anthron said, not looking up from his work. “I would assume that you would prefer to gather supplies and food, and have an elven guide and elk take to you the edge of Juka Basin, rather than set off on foot unprepared.”

  “I guess,” Chiriku replied smugly.

  Mac tilted his head at Desert Rain. “Dez, you are going to tell Miss-ssck Clova where we’re gonna be going, right-tkk?”

  Desert Rain’s ears twitched. She lowered her head. “I…I don’t know if I can, Mac.”

  “But she’ll be all worried about-tkk you.”

  “I can’t say goodbye to her. She’ll argue and…” Desert Rain shook her head. “I can’t do it.”

  “Well, aren’t you nice,” Chiriku said dryly. “You’re going to leave behind a sick friend without saying goodbye.”

  Desert Rain didn’t reply, but she knew that she was going to have to face many hard situations soon, and this was one she couldn’t avoid.

  ***

  The desert hermit stood by Clova’s hammock for a good minute, watching her sleep peacefully. She almost didn’t want to wake her up. This was going to be so hard, to tell her goodbye—possibly the last goodbye for a long, long time. What would she do if Clova protested? Given that Desert Rain didn’t want to go on this quest, Clova might convince her not to go. But she had to.

  “Clova?” Desert Rain gently nudged her shoulder. “Clova? I’m sorry to wake you, but I need to tell you something.”

  Clova gradually awoke, fluttering her eyelashes and groaning softly. “Dezzy?” She suddenly shot wide awake, apprehension seizing her. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, nothing’s wrong. Everything’s okay.” She placed a hand on Clova’s arm. “Clova, I’ve been talking with Anthron, and the others and I have discussed a plan for what we should do next.”

  Clova tried her best to sit up. “That’s wonderful, Dezzy. I wish you had woken me up sooner, so I could have joined in. But I know you wanted me to rest, you’re such a sweetheart. So, what are we going to do?”

  Desert Rain gulped silently. “Clova, I want you to get well so badly, you must realize that. And, and I can’t…you can’t…” She couldn’t hide the muddled mix of emotions on her face. Clova picked up on it instantly.

  “Dezzy, you’re not going to leave without me, are you?” Clova reached up to take Desert Rain’s hand. “Give me a few days. I’ll get better, I promise. I’m a little tired, that’s all. Then we can go together.”

  “You don’t understand.” Desert Rain squeezed Clova’s hand. “Where we’re going—where I’m going—it would be dangerous for you. You wouldn’t be able to use your magic, and you might become deeply ill. I can’t do that to you. I won’t let what happened with the Zi’Gax happen again, with you unable to protect yourself.”

  Disappointment crossed Clova’s face. “What are you talking about? Where are you going?”

  Desert Rain released Clova’s hand, turning away so she wouldn’t see the Forest Hijn’s sad eyes. “Anthron told me an important secret of the elves, one that you know, I think. He has a theory, and I know it seems dumb to invest so much in just a theory, but it’s all I have to go on right now. At any rate, I have to go to the Tiagalands to find the Elfë Tiagas and get Kidran’s help.”

  “The Tiagalands? But why would Anthron advise you to go—” Clova stopped, and leaned back in her hammock. She was quiet for a while before speaking again. “The secret…he told you the secret?”

  Desert Rain nodded.

  Clova stared at Desert Rain for a long time, and the desert Hijn wasn’t sure if Clova was looking at her or staring into space. Then the Forest Hijn closed her eyes, sighing. “Dezzy, does Anthron think you can awaken the Lightscale?”

  Desert Rain, once again, nodded. “Yes.”

  Clova was quiet again, but then she made a tiny smile. She opened her eyes. “Anthron does not make theories blindly. I think what he sees in you is truly there. I’ve seen it too, in your eyes, in what you did to save my life. You are right, I would be powerless in the snowlands.” She shifted onto her side, casting he
r eyes down to the floor. “You’re not going alone, are you?”

  “No. Mac and Chiriku are insistent on coming along. Chiriku has convinced herself that she has a personal vendetta against Katawa, and Mac…I don’t know, he likes adventure, I guess.”

  “Good.” Clova looked up at her. “I believe you will find them. I will trust in the spirits of the Hij-Urawran to guide you. Kidran will figure out a way to find you, I bet.”

  Desert Rain couldn’t help but smile at Clova’s optimism. “How is it you can be so hopeful?”

  Clova laughed lightly. “Dezzy, shouldn’t you of all Hijn put faith in hope? They say—I really don’t know who ‘they’ are, but I’ve heard it—that moonbeams are the wings of hope, flying over all at night, reminding us that even in darkness there is light, and that despair will be dispelled by morning. That’s awfully pretty, isn’t it?”

  Desert Rain nodded, but sadness filled her. How ironic that saying was, that in truth it was the heir of the Moon Dragoness who had started this whole mess to begin with.

  Clova sat up again, reaching out and taking Desert Rain’s arm. She pulled Desert Rain to her in a tight, smothering hug. “Travel safely with my blessing. May Nature guide you and show you kindness. Know that I will keep you in my prayers and heart.” She lingered on the hug a moment longer before releasing her friend. She reached towards her neck for her seed pouch, but then remembered she had lost it in the confrontation with the Zi’Gax. She removed a ring from her finger—a simple ring of silver and jade, a circle of teardrop-shaped leaves—and took Desert Rain’s hand. She slipped the ring onto Desert Rain’s slender finger. “This is so you’ll remember to come back after you find what you’re looking for. Then we can save Rukna and the others together, right?” She smiled warmly.