“But how?” another drakkon lamented. “The upright primates are few, but there are still too many to track without trackers available to help us. He could be any flame upon the planet floor!”
“True,” Damianos allowed, his flame burning red with an irritation easily attributed to frustration. “Yet still must we find him. We cannot leave without him.”
All understood this imperative. They would risk almost certain death, including the King’s uncle and cousin if they returned to Drakkon without the Prince.
“Perhaps, he has gone to the uninhabited lands,” one of the red drakkon suggested.
“But why would he go there?” another drakkon asked. “There are no animals of note there. Just a very few hominid groups, and grasslands of little use to us.”
“And gold. The original surveyors report the coastline of the uninhabited lands has enough gold to replace the entire conducting system in three of our rovers.”
“He’s an encoder. What would he need with that much gold?”
That was when the Royal Overlord, who had been silent up to this point, joined the conversation. “Yes, he is an encoder,” their leader pointed out to the mission team, his flame suddenly sparking brighter. “So then where is the Zone 7 fated system?”
Damianos turned to his father, only barely remembering to incline his head in patriarchal reverence before addressing him. “What fated system?” he demanded, not understanding why a fertility portal would be referenced in a conversation on this distant ice planet.
“Did you not read your cousin’s reports?” his father asked him, his flame flaring orange with vexation.
In truth, Damianos had not. He had been too busy training the hunting beasts to read anything as dull as his cousin’s chosen field of study.
“Is it possible he used the fated system, and then found some way to shut it down?” a black drakkon, one of the Technicals, asked. “He and I had a strange conversation once.”
“Once,” Damianos repeated. “When, exactly?”
A few moments later, they gathered around the Mission Geneticist’s rover to listen to his retelling of the conversation he had with the Prince two solar rotations ago. Damianos was so intent on discovering a possible clue that his flame radiated a dark blue of focus.
However, what followed was nothing more than a theoretical conversation. The kind young drakkon frequently had. Right up there with, “Are there drakkon-like civilizations on other planets?” and “Who designed our solar system?”
The kind of questions with many possible answers, none of which were conclusive.
Still, Damianos could not shake the flame of an idea that this conversation might somehow be more important than it at first seemed. Especially after combing through every report Xenon had uploaded to the mission server.
As it turned out, two things were true.
One: there had been a fated system in Zone 7, and now, for some reason, it was gone. Shut down or destroyed—with even less of a trace left behind than Glacier Lab 7.
Two: Though it was philosophical in nature, Xenon’s question about the fating portal was unusual, especially when one considered some of the other research his cousin had been performing. And so… as silly as the question had been, it continued to haunt Damianos as the days they could not find Xenon stretched into moons, and then into solar rotations. If his question had been so trivial, so beyond any provable point…
Why, then, had the Prince asked it?
22
“Blue Papa is back!”
Fensa shielded her eyes against the setting sun and looked up. But as it turned out, she needn’t have bothered. The sun was soon blocked out, and a shadow fell over the group, as the Great Serpent King passed overhead.
Soon after, the snow-covered ground shook with the impact of an overly large prehistoric bison.
When I get back to Arizona, maybe I should major in Anthropology, Fensa thought to herself with a laugh. I’d have all my ice age papers on lock.
But then her laughter died.
“Mama, why your flame weird red?” Eos asked.
Before she could respond, Xenon descended in that way of his. Shifting as he got lower to the ground until he stood before them, a man in a simple pair of smart pants. “Reverence, I do honor you with this meat,” he said, indicating the bison, only to startle when he saw the pack of Group 7 wolves, including Eos’s overlarge pup, already tearing the flesh from the animal’s bones.
“I see you have succeeded in your efforts to teach the Group 7 Wolves to shift on command,” he said, tone as polite as ever, despite the wolves’ animalistic display.
She shrugged at him apologetically. “It’s been a while since they had meat, and the mountain passage was hard.”
That was the understatement of the millennia. Only a few days ago, they’d been set upon by a strange black-furred, cat-like creature. What appeared to be a missing link in the evolutionary chain between sabretooth cats and the American bobcat. Or maybe it was a sabretooth tiger?
As she’d been forced to remind herself over and over on this long journey, what people in her time took for granted as correct about this era, was at best the result of a series of educated guesses based on scant fossil evidence and even rarer preserved remains. Fauna remains from this period could not survive without the help of amber, tar, or ice. And when you think about it, that’s a pretty shitty cataloging system. So yeah, maybe sabretooth tigers did have dark black fur, contrary to how they were frequently depicted by museums and prehistoric animal documentaries in her time.
In either case, Xenon had made short work of the thing. Setting it on fire with a primal roar. But not before the overlarge cat delivered a mortal wound to one of their youth. Not quite old enough to be a father, but just coming out of his boyhood. A precious life cut short.
All because she’d insisted they go to Arizona.
“You think still of the boy,” Xenon guessed.
“How can I not?” she answered. “I feel responsible for everyone on this trip.”
He’d never know how much. Not just because he was a dragon who looked at the Group 7 wolves as just a few steps above lab rats, but because he didn’t know the real reason she was risking all their lives to go to Arizona in the first place.
“In that case, you’ll be glad to know what I found on my southward survey…”
He was right about that. Less than two days later, they came to the most beautiful sight she’d ever seen in all her years on this planet.
Green. Grass as far as the eye could see. And, beyond that…
The opening strains of an old Petite Meller song suddenly sounded in her head, the French ingénue singing, “L’amour, l’amour, America!” as loud as Fensa could see.
She’d made it back to America. Which meant Arizona was only a few months away.
“Your eyes have become wet, but your flame remains yellow,” Xenon observed inside her head. “Are these tears of happiness?”
“Yes, they are…”
She looked up at the man standing beside her. Her mate. And forced a smile to her face. “Thank you, Xenon. Thank you for bringing me here.”
He looked at her for a very long time before saying, “You do honor me with your thanks, Reverence.”
Reverence. The usual awkward feelings stole over her when he called her that. And as they set off into the green expanse, she wished, not for the first time, that the red dragon had never come to their village.
III
“I was wondering when I’d meet you. The dragon beneath all that good sex and reverence.”
23
Nearly a Year Later
The danger of being discovered always lurked in the back of Xenon’s mind as they continued their journey to Fated Mate’s Arizona. The other drakkon would certainly be searching for him. And urgently given they couldn’t make the return trip to Drakkon without him. Which meant he had to remain ever vigilant.
For that reason, he chose to walk beside his mate and chi
ld with the Far Travelers, even though he could cover significantly more ground in his drakkon form. He only hunted in drakkon form when the group was in dire need, such as when they’d passed through the snowy mountains to get to the green of the landmass Fated Mate called America. And even then, he made a circular surveillance flight, scanning the horizon in all directions, before he took to the air to hunt for meat.
Most often, he and Golden Son hunted smaller game alongside the male Group 7 wolves Fated Mate had insisted they bring on their journey. The animals—especially the herbivores—had become both smaller and less dangerous the farther south they traveled. He and the other Group 7 hunters had found a more gracile version of the hooved tundra beasts, what Fated Mate called “deer” in her language. They’d also come across smaller versions of creatures Fated Mate referred to as sheep and goats.
However, size had not mattered as much as it had in Zone 7. For the further south they migrated, the more plentiful the animals became. They found meat roaming in abundance nearly everywhere they went.
Not only that but the rivers they walked along teemed with both fish and birds. There was so much sustenance to be had in this land Fated Mate guided them through, that the Group 7 children soon began participating in obtaining food alongside the adults. They gathered berries and nuts to accompany communal meals and climbed trees to pluck eggs from nests. At one point, one of Golden Son’s fast friends, a male lupin older, but smaller, than Golden Son in humanoid form, even managed to kill two tree birds with the throw of a single stone.
Fated Mate had grinned, much amused when Golden Son and his friend returned to the camp with tale of the boy’s deed. “So you’re where that saying comes from!” she had said to the confused boy, laughing.
It had been an arduous journey, but a successful one as far as Xenon was concerned. They hadn’t been found. And the Group 7 female lupin continued to thrive and breed well, despite having gone from a seaside village of fishermen to a nomadic tribe of hunter-gatherers.
This was thanks, in part, to his fated mate, who the Group 7 Wolves called Great Wolf Mother. Early in the journey, she had established a collection of female-centric ground rules: a quarter moon stop whenever a female went into heat, and a half-moon stop whenever one gave birth. She also examined the pregnant female lupin weekly, and if she sensed a gestating baby was in distress, she put the pregnant lupin on what she called “bedrest.” Which meant the female would be carried by Golden Son and the strongest boys in the group on a stretcher of bison hide and sticks.
For these reasons, along with the relative ease of keeping all pregnant lupin well fed, they had yet to lose either a baby or mother in childbirth. Which pleased Xenon, even if he no longer had the tools or means to upload the valuable data he was collecting to the drakkon survey group.
A few day cycles before Fated Mate’s day of birth, an anniversary she insisted on celebrating every year for both Golden Son and herself, she gathered their traveling group for two announcements.
Firstly, they would set up camp for a quarter moon along the river because Female 7-84 could walk no further due to her advanced state of pregnancy. Secondly, they were only a day cycle from their destination. She pointed to a mountain just a few wingbeats away and told the group this would be their new home, where they would set up the new village they had left behind at the glacier station in Zone 7.
The second announcement flickered Xenon’s flame. Before her announcement, he had not been aware they were walking toward a specific destination. Just the “state of Arizona” as Fated Mate had called it. But they had entered this tropical jungle terrain many moons ago, and Fated Mate had continued guiding them further west, and then south, often subvocalizing to her now rarely used bioware. He had thought she sought warmer climes. Or perhaps a less mountainous area, since the mountains became smaller the farther they walked.
But no, it would seem his mate had a specific destination in mind all along.
He found her soon after the announcement, with the Group 7 females, setting up a special birthing shelter for Female 7-84. Seeing her construct such shelters during the journey had become a familiar sight and just one of the reasons her title had quickly gone from Queen of Us to Great Wolf Mother toward the beginning of their reign.
The Group 7 females had built a god story around Fated Mate, the same as they had around Great Serpent King. Just a little while after Fated Mate’s unexpected full recovery from Golden Son’s birth, Female 7-74 and her mate, Male 7-80 appeared at their glacier entrance, carrying an infant too sickly to shift into wolf form to heal itself. They’d brought the sickling as a sacrifice to the Great Serpent King in hopes of more provisions for the village after their hunters had come back without meat or fish.
Fated Mate’s flame had gone deep red with disgust, but instead of letting her mate explain that he would never eat one of their young, nor take it as sacrifice, she mentally asked Xenon to “go find this poor woman some non-drugged meat” as she washed her hands in the station stream. Then, she took the baby from its mother, kissed the wan thing on its forehead, and carried it into the station. Three days later, she walked out with a pup and handed it back to its now well-fed mother…fully healed.
Xenon could have told her what would follow, even before he agreed to let her use the station tubes to help the youngling. Maybe if she had not washed her hands in the stream, or kissed the baby before taking it away, the Group 7 wolves would not have deified her for her compassionate act. But who knew.
It all unfolded as if they had been looking for an excuse to declare the mate who was delivered from the sky for their serpent god a goddess in her own right. And the Group 7 lupin had started referring to her as Great Wolf Mother after she handed the lupin mother her magically healed pup.
After that, every woman in the village brought their child to her to hold soon after birth. And over the course of their long journey, Fated Mate had somehow become the lupin in charge of overseeing all births.
Fated Mate took her duties very seriously. By Xenon’s calculations, the journey would have taken much less time without her specific heat and birthing rules. But these rules only made the female lupin adore the Great Wolf Mother that much more.
Adore the Great Wolf Mother, if not necessarily the Great Serpent King. As usual, whenever he came within a wingspan of the female Far Travelers, they all seemed to find other things to do. In other parts of the camp. Parts much further from where their serpent king currently stood.
Fated Mate had once tried to explain it to him as smelling wrong. “You smell like fire. And lupin have an enhanced sense of smell, so when you get too close, the primal feeling is that they should get farther away.”
“But the males do not respond to me in this manner.”
“Men set the fires and use them. I think they’re less afraid as a result.”
“Yet you did not run when first we met,” he answered.
“Yeah, because I was naked and afraid, and a fire was better than spears.”
“And now? Do you still feel afraid of me?”
“No,” she answered. “I guess I’m used to fire now, too.”
“Oh, good, you’re here,” she said, when she noticed his presence. “She’s going to pop this baby out by nightfall, I just know it. I think we should have a feast to celebrate. Do you mind searching for a larger animal or two? A bison if you can find one. I know there’s a smaller version living on the plains to the east of here—at least, I think there are plains. I wasn’t exactly expecting to find a jungle when we reached Arizona. But whatever, we need to find them and start gathering their hides. The wooly mammoth skins aren’t going to cut it much longer in this climate. We should find a herd as soon as possible.”
These were all good ideas, but he did not like the way she fluttered about. Giving close attention to smoothing the mammoth hide over the structure, even though it was, to his eye, already set up.
“Of course, I will honor you with this extra hunt, but first I would t
alk with you about your plan to make our home at the next mountain. Why did you not tell me of this plan yourself?”
“Oh, well you know, it never came up. And I kind of knew where I wanted us to settle, but I wasn’t sure if I could find it again, considering I had no real map and my offline bioware can’t deliver coordinates. It only tells me what direction I’m headed in.”
“So you were looking for this mountain all along, then?” he asked.
“Kind of. Yeah, I guess—” She then suddenly broke off. “You know what? I have a mother in labor here. How about we have this conversation later?”
“Of course, Reverence. As you wish,” he had answered, as an acolyte should. But he could not help but note she had not once looked at him directly during their short conversation.
He took the unexpected hunting opportunity to make a scan of the sky. No drakkon. Also, no bison. But he did find one of the small, slope-headed mammoths Fated Mate had referred to as mastodon the first time their group happened upon a herd of the smaller beasts. This one must have been an adult male because he grazed alone, oblivious to his impending death by drakkon fire until the very last moment.
Upon returning to the camp with his kill, he found Fated Mate had been right. The woman had delivered a baby—a healthy one if the hearty squall of its wails could be used as a determinate. After dropping the mastodon next to the river with a ground-shaking thud, he reshelled and went in search of Fated Mate…only to find her still embedded inside the birthing tent with the new mother.
Now was it nightfall. His belly was full of mastodon meat, but he did not feel satisfied as he watched Fated Mate. She stood outside the birthing tent, rocking the newborn pup as she talked with a couple of other Group 7 females. Within sight, if not hearing distance.
NAGO, His Mississippi Queen: 50 Loving States, Mississippi (The Brothers Nightwolf Trilogy, Book 1) Page 32
