Thaydra studied him for a moment before returning to eat. He appeared grateful for her distraction, and Nyra wondered where his thoughts were now.
Chapter 2: The Gathering
Gatherings were both loved and disliked by the young, the latter sentiment being unspoken by most. At first, the thought of an ignorant Sperk guard pacing just a few lengths above the communal den was enough to burst a giddy draggling’s heart. Then the meeting would start. After several stories, they’d come to a familiar realization; they were attending a history lesson, and a redundant one too.
They had not always been boring. Once upon a time, the tales met new ears, bringing answers and igniting curiosity. How did the Sperks declare reign? Who were the Zealer Dragons the adults whispered about? To each of these questions was a captivating answer, often with gaps where the imaginative mind could weave whimsical tales of betrayal and deceit. The most elaborate conspiracies centered around why the Sperks left their native home and came to the Northern Coast in the first place. It had wiggle room for creativity, as not even the oldest dragons knew the Sperks’ origins. Such speculation gave the stories new life. But fantastic dreams often died under the drone of history.
“Finish up, now,” said Thaydra, swallowing loudly. Nyra watched her mother’s mood carefully. It had improved. A full stomach went very far indeed. Moving to the den’s eastern side, Thaydra came upon a divot, congested by a pile of smooth river stones. One by one Thaydra removed them, revealing a yawning chasm of darkness.
“You know,” she said, “I remember when we first made these tunnels. I was quite small, but I remember. Of course I was living in what is now Aunt Dewep’s home.”
Snorting dust, she drew further into the growing hole. There came a light buzzing. Thaydra stepped back to admire her work.
“Anyway, your grandfather had Dewep and I take turns digging, so we could get the feel of it. We weren’t much help at two years old. But he had a special motive.” Thaydra dislodged a boulder, coughing as her head vanished in a cloudy swirl. “There was a lot of loose dirt. So, he had us take a small clawfull every time we went out to play. We could drop it anywhere, so long as it differed each time. The Sperks never noticed! Of course, security wasn’t as serious back then. We wouldn’t have our first escape attempt for another… what, thirteen, fourteen years? I’ve told you this story before, haven’t I?”
“Yes,” said Blaze. “But not as often as that Zealer Dragon story. Fuhorn tells that one every Gathering,” he whined. “Mummy, why do we have to hear the same stories over and over again?”
“You’ve told me this before,” Thaydra retorted.
“I know,” Blaze sighed.
“Indeed, you know everything,” said Thaydra with a hint of mockery. “But the stories, old as they are, give us hope. I don’t know about you, but it makes me feel mighty great to know we have friends out there. And when we’re reminded we become more motivated to get out.”
Blaze pursed his mouth.
“And besides,” persisted Thaydra, “our younger herd members need to commit them to memory. Memorization is essential.” She emphasized the word ‘younger,’ looking at her daughter. Nyra was not the youngest of the Agrings, and had a habit of making it known.
“Foremost, it’s good bonding time. And you need to expand your horizons,” added Thaydra.
“We bond,” protested Blaze, still whining, but his focus ebbed away on some hidden distraction.
“With dragons other than your cousins.”
A dissatisfied look overcame Blaze. But he let the subject drop. As always, he didn’t need the last word. He had quite enough of his own and, at his best, he dispensed each with the same care as footsteps on ice.
Thaydra withdrew from the hole, tossing the last rock to the back. “We’re all set.”
Blaze jumped through. Nyra sulked behind. Accidentally, she glanced up at her mother, and their eyes met.
No!
Nyra turned away. She had not spoken since Aisel and Fidee arrived. Her mother’s mouth broadened into a warm grin.
“You can’t stay angry with me forever, Little Shadow.”
Nyra recoiled at her nickname.
Up ahead the buzzing materialized to speech, becoming clearer. Blaze disappeared below a threshold, dipping into an immense den. All around Agrings scurried from their respective tunnels, channeling to the warren’s heart like dutiful insects. The room, though large, was much darker than home, making only the closest figures identifiable. Together, they formed an arc.
A middle-aged male stood where the den opened to the sky. Leaning against a smooth boulder, he nosed out to the night, periodically checking for prowling Sperks. After a moment he drew back in and pushed the boulder over the entrance. Like a shutting eye the moonlight snapped out, leaving just a few lashes of brightness. He squished the seams with mud.
“Hello, Aunt Dewep,” said Blaze as they shuffled through family members. Each was a shadow in the dimming light, a cornucopia of profiles. Almost everyone had arrived before them. There were few places left to sit in the arc.
“Where’s Uncle Thistle?” he asked Dewep.
“He’ll be along in a moment,” came the reply. The voice was like Thaydra’s but with more staccato. “Your cousin thought it would be funny to suck a fish eye up her nostril.” Dewep trembled jubilantly, vacillating between sadness and guilty smirks. “Thistle is helping her snort it out. Jesoam will be fine.”
Nyra could not help but grin. Casting an eye warily to Thaydra, she hoped her glee went unnoticed.
They spent the next few minutes greeting the others. Nyra had a lot of family members. With a stepbrother, she was connected to many related and unrelated dragons, whom she and Blaze would each call grandma, aunt, uncle, or cousin whether or not a blood tie actually existed. Sometimes a plain name was good enough. In the end it didn’t matter, for through the thick and thin of the wonderful and awful, they were all family.
Finally, Blaze found a spot. Rovavik, an uncle, had saved it for them. He was one of Thaydra’s favorites. As the brother of her deceased mate, she cherished his company. Perhaps she saw a piece of her lost Shadowed Fire in him. Or maybe it was simply Rovavik’s lonely nature that grasped her attention. Wounded, as Thaydra called him, for both of his parents had passed on, along with his only brother. To solidify his heartbreak, his first and only mate, Tesset, left him for another male (a fiasco long before Nyra’s birth, and one she was glad to have missed given the drama it conjured). Thaydra despised Tesset ever since, for the broken relationship was a root of turmoil among the Agrings. But Rovavik would turn his shoulder in the face of dispute, never conflicting, never raising his voice. Thaydra believed he lived inside himself, drowning. Only his son, Vor, had a gift for lifting his spirits. Perhaps Rovavik saw Tesset’s features in his handsome offspring.
Muddling, thought Nyra. A mesh of opinions and names. It often made her angry. But seeing Rovavik’s sad eyes, Nyra’s irritation crumbled. She loved Rovavik as much as she hated romance.
“Hello,” she said, dropping to his side and nuzzling his flank. She wondered if he had the same smell as her father. Raw seed cones and a lick of bee honey.
“Well, my brother,” said Thaydra, “you’ve made my daughter speak again.”
Nyra winced.
Rovavik looked down at his niece. “Why the silence, my Nyra?” He had such a sweet voice. Whispers set to melody.
Nyra tapped her tail against his back. She said nothing.
Blaze cleared his throat. “Nyra accidentally opened her wings today.”
Nyra glared at her brother.
“Sh-she doesn’t remember doing it,” Blaze stammered. “But Darkmoon saw us.”
Nyra had a sudden urge to reenact the incident, needing Rovavik to understand. He would. He was easy to talk to, when she chose to speak, of course.
Because he can’t punish us, Blaze once inferred. He was right, she had to admit. But Nyra had kept that to herself.
Her uncle
sighed long and deeply. “Just one more year, Little Shadow, and you can fly with the rest of us.”
“And freely too, one day,” reminded Thaydra, sitting down.
Rovavik made no comment.
“We will,” she insisted. Nyra found Mother’s sanguinity, in the midst of her own frustration, exhausting.
“Indeed,” replied a new voice.
Nyra looked up to spot a much-aged creature. The Agring Alpha Fuhorn. Even in the darkness Nyra knew that particular shade of color, red like all females but with touches of mottled gray. Fuhorn’s eyes wrinkled at the corners, while her limbs sagged with excess skin. At almost seventy, Fuhorn more than doubled Thaydra’s age, putting her easily into the ‘ancient’ breadth delineated by draggling rules. But besides afternoon naps and arthritic twinges, Fuhorn had the energy of a dragon much younger.
“You’ve had some adventure today,” stated Fuhorn.
Good-Light! How had the word spread so quickly?
“Just a little,” mumbled Blaze.
“Ha!” Fuhorn blasted, her belly-bulge jumping to the beat of heavy chortles. “It’s always a small deal, isn’t it? The bigger the trouble, the quieter the draggling. I swear, if the sea rose to meet us at the claws of a youngling, I’d not know about it ‘till I was drenched!”
Only after Fuhorn finished laughing did Nyra realize how still the room had grown. Warily she looked around the den. Heads flitted downward, feebly uninterested. Who’d heard their exchange?
As quickly as she’d come, Fuhorn moved away, evenly spacing herself at the room’s back-center. In unison the Agrings pivoted in the Alpha’s direction.
“Ready now?” called Fuhorn. The middle-aged male shifted in the back of the room, clogging out the last bands of brightness. A needle of moonlight, then all went pitch. Not a single dragon could be seen. Steady breaths and warm bodies coalesced into a reverent atmosphere. The Agrings waited, listening.
Someone toppled on Nyra. Blaze.
“What are you doing?” she hissed.
“You have to move, I can’t see.”
“No one can see!”
“Shh,” Rovavik soothed, unperturbed.
A shuffling resonated from where Fuhorn vanished. She was digging. Suddenly, a new luminosity came like a splash of cold water, bathing everyone’s faces and blue-green light. At Fuhorn’s feet shined a many-faceted object, its contours projecting long fingers of radiance. It was a stone like no other, a thing of mystery. For unlike the rocks on the Northern Coast, this one had a strange transparency which glowed brightly in darkness. The rock was foreign and old, and a fixture of Gatherings. They called it the Zealer Stone.
“My Nammocks,” she said, addressing the Agrings by their herd name. In her elderly, authoritative voice, Fuhorn began a story Nyra had heard countless times before.
“Many generations before our children, long before my great grandparents were eggs, young Agrings from this herd embarked on the most important journey in our history. Eons old, these stories are sewn together with stale details and forever lost motives. To an outsider they are the stuff of folklore. But sure as I inherited my father’s patience and mother’s wings, we are the descendants of great creatures, and because of them, are connected to a race akin to our own.”
The old dragon fused from a casual speaker to a storyteller, a metamorphosis that few embodied well. Slogan became verse, much as myths were often sculpted in poetry. Would Nyra grow to speak like that?
“For reasons unknown, perhaps to quell the restlessness of adolescence, these Nammocks left our herd for the north. Gone were these Agrings for days upon months, encountering creatures which were once fabled. Great, great beasts!” she said, raising her voice and slashing her claws through teal light, shredding it to fine threads splintering over thirty-one faces.
“Or so my grandfather used to boast,” she added jeeringly. Thaydra chuckled at Nyra’s side, jostling her wing. Nyra withdrew, pressing against Blaze on her left.
“Yes,” said Fuhorn. “According to him, these ancestors battled Onaperce dragons, Hawks, even the legendary Aquadray, which followed them over the sea, jumping hundreds of lengths from the water to snap at their tails. ‘But their greatest accomplishment was not borne upon the ocean,’ he used to say. ‘It was upon our sister continent, Garrionom; the land of ice.’ Nyra and Garrionom were once one. And with their divergence came the rise of two species. Fire and Ice. Agring and Zealer.
“The travelers found ice cliffs across the ocean, and in the midst of heavy snowfall, a creature emerged. Though descended from the same distant mother, this new dragon looked nothing like the Agrings. It stood three times their height with wings as thick as tree trunks. Its skin was a pale blue, iridescent like the surrounding locked water. Most bizarre of all was the serrated plate upon its flat head, spiky, like an upside down fir tree. You might have run away, but not our heroes. For this bizarre creature was in need.
“Moments before the Agring’s arrival, there’d been a cave-in of ice and rock, blocking the entrance to the Zealer nursery. Dozens of younglings cried beyond the wall, trapped, suffocating. The Agrings were brought to the scene. Innately, they knew what to do. Much like two continents meant to connect came the mingling of two powerful elements. The Agrings’ fire melted that icy blockage to the ground, reuniting the frightened dragglings with their relieved parents.”
Proudly, Fuhorn boomed as she took on a mighty Zealer voice. “‘You are a blessing,’ said the Royal male, speaking through the thankful cheers of his followers. A thousand voices spoke at once, offering gifts, rewards, and glory. The chivalrous Agrings refused them all, wishing only for the continued safety of the Zealers. Nevertheless, the Royal, moved by their nobility, insisted on two gifts. The first you see now.” Fuhorn’s claws hovered over the glowing Stone. “‘May this Stone remind your sons and daughters of your courage. May it shine timelessly in your colony.’”
A few Agrings shivered, invigorated.
“And then he spoke of the second endowment. A promise,” continued Fuhorn. “He said, ‘Let this Stone represent our everlasting friendship, and our pledge. And therein shall lie the second gift. Should a day come when your kind has lost its peace, remember your kinfolk in the north. We will be your ice as you were our fire. We will be your waiting allies.’”
Nyra caught herself mouthing the last bit. Blaze was doing the same thing, eyelids drooping.
“These friendly words were just that for a long while; words. Nothing more. The heroes returned home, they lived, they passed on. The subsequent generations lived in peace. It was the Sperks’ arrival that gave the Zealer pledge new meaning.
“Not a day goes by since our enslavement that we are not plagued. From the moment the Sperks landed and Darkmoon’s father murdered my mate, to that evening when I retired to my den, resting aside four unhatched eggs that would never know a father, we’ve suffered. To the following mornings, where we dammed the water and turned our lake into a reservoir. To the afternoons where we dug homes for the Sperks in the dried bed, watching our dilapidated river rush to the ocean below and scar our landscape. Through all this and more I’ve heard the Zealer Royal’s words.
“I hear it in my mind, of course. I was not there when the promise was made, old as I appear.” A few giggled weakly. “But the words existed. In tragedy and hope, they keep us going. Twice we have tried to reach the Zealers, twice we have failed, and twice I’ve lost a son.” Fuhorn looked in Thaydra’s direction and a few others in turn. “But we have always found the strength for another try.
“The first escape attempt was nearly two decades ago. I remember it well, and the Fishers are reminded of it daily. During every hunt, you see the congested hole on the cliff face.”
Nyra couldn’t tell for sure, but it seemed that Fuhorn glanced in her direction. The old dragon spoke of the hole Nyra had tried to spot earlier that day. The draggling shrunk on her shoulders.
“Three months’ effort went into that hole,” said Fuhorn, “alwa
ys digging north, scarring paws and battering claws. But no ache was so great as the one which would gobble our hearts. On escaping day, my four sons were to dive seaward, silently, and swim north until they became nothing more than specks. North until they reached the Green Spot.”
The Green Spot, mused Nyra, that undefined puddle of light on the horizon. Only at night did it shine. Today, Blaze saw something leap from the waters near this luminescent point, or so he claimed. Nyra had seen nothing. Shaking her head, she went on listening.
“My sons were to fly North across the island chain, all the way to Garrionom and the distant promise of our Zealer cousins.
“Nearly foolproof were our plans, but reality is not the breath of dreams, not even the noblest ones. Darkmoon happened to the cliff edge just as my eldest son, Crimson, readied to leap away. Darkmoon crashed upon him, then both were gone in the far below sea. Only an imprint of white foam stung the water, with gargantuan bubbles tingling the waves. I waited. I waited. Then the surface broke, and Darkmoon’s head thrashed, eyes ablaze. But not my son. It was the greatest abhorrence I’d ever felt. To lose my mate had left me wounded, but losing my child was an arrest of living.”
Somberness swallowed the herd. Nyra felt excitement. She knew which story came next, and was especially fond of one of the characters. Me. Me, the egg.
“Still, as a herd, we pressed on. In good time, another tunnel was in the making. The Four-Year tunnel, the one that reached south. If the Sperks expected us to fly to the open ocean, we would run opposite into the trees and mountains.
“But once more our loved ones were spotted, mere paces from the forest’s refuge. Three rings of flame—Sun Fire, Blazing Fire Sr., and Shadowed Fire perished at the claw of Darkmoon and his beloved that night,” said Fuhorn. “The bucks fell while defending their does and unborn, but managed to bring Darkmoon’s mate down with them. But Sun Fire was perhaps the bravest of all, for though ridiculed her whole life for being timid, she died shielding Thaydra from the monster’s seething flames.”
The Waters of Nyra- Volume I Page 4
