by Marc Secchia
Without being bidden, Illume said, “There’s no telling what damage all the crystalline particles in the air might wreak upon Human physiology. That’s one reason the Beyond has always been forbidden to your kind. In the summer, after mating, the Dragonesses swim the Crystal Sea, laying their eggs in the endless crystal waters – which are not water as you know it, but a fluid crystal containing many particles and chunks of different solid crystals. In that wash, the eggs take on their particular properties, and the growing larvae feed. Unlike your carbon-based biological systems, as you surmise, Dreamer, ours are organic crystal. Even from naissance, a Dragon’s life is inextricably tied to crystal. So it is said, a Dragon is magical fires focussed through the lens of crystal.”
“Would you take us a little closer?” asked Zaranna.
“As you command.”
“Illume, why were the Dragons dancing around those islands?”
“Islands?”
“The floating landmasses out there, where your Dragon army is gathering.”
Suddenly, Illume was watching her with both eyes and not looking at where he was flying. “So, now that you know our intent, Dreamer, what will you do about the Dragonkind?”
She patted his scales. “I haven’t decided yet. Releasing you – ouch! Drat this stupid ring!”
“You chose to wear a Dragonstone. It will not easily relinquish you.”
A warning she was coming to appreciate more and more. Why had Whiz not clarified the dangers of using a Dragonstone? “Keeping promises is critical to me, Illume. Tell me about those islands. Please.”
“Once more, you trespass on deep Dragon lore. Unless you command me, Mistress, I have no obligation to reply.”
Zaranna rolled her eyes much as Illume’s eye-motes rolled at her. “Please tell me what you can without your wings dropping off from unadulterated shame. Illume, I’m not that kind of person –”
“What you are is a shrivelling little hypocrite, picking and choosing morals and behaviours to suit the moment.”
“I am not!”
“Your character is devoid of integrity.”
Shaking, she whispered, “Illume, you judge me for crimes I haven’t committed or even contemplated.”
“The blood of Wizards never ran truer than in your Earthen Fire-cursed veins.”
Just behind her, Sanu made a grunt of agreement; that tipped Zara over the edge. “Fine! Be it on your stupid, crystal-stuffed head, Dragon. I command you.”
The grinding of his teeth shook Illume’s entire frame. At length, he muttered mutinously, “What you call Islands are the Foci. Dragons return to the Foci throughout their lives to refocus their crystal energies, to be purified and renewed, and the old or unwanted to be burned away. What you saw is a cultural dance.”
“The Foci are Dragonkind? Animate? Intelligent beings?”
“What you saw was merely a Clan-gathering of the Bluewing Clan. Contrary to your belief, not all Bluewing Clan are blue. The Dragons take many more forms and kinds than the Equine-kind. Along the shores of the great Crystal Sea, which we Dragons call our mother and father, you will find many such Clans, of many colours and designations.”
“Yet you seemed changed.”
Zaranna suddenly compared Illume’s state of the night before to Mom’s – Suarienne’s – infirm mental state and drew an unlikely yet chilling parallel. Once again, the Dragon had carefully chosen to deflect her question. Even the Dragonstone could not … sparks of magic erupted out of the ring in perfect concert with her thought, diving with effortless ease into the Dragon’s hide and ears and eyes. A tremor struck Illume the Stars, seizing up his wingbeat for a moment.
“Answer my question, Dragon.”
“The Foci are … are repositories … gnnnarrr … of our lore and histories and cunning …” He writhed in the air, gasping like a fish out of water. “They are child-minds … GRRRAAARRRGGH!”
“Stop! Stop, Illume. It’s alright.”
The Dragon panted fire and smoke from his nostrils. Hurt, yes. The smoke smelled like burning engine oil rather than his usual fragrant jasmine. But how much of his behaviour was subterfuge? Apparently, Outland Humans had a proverb that they would trust a Dragon only when the lizard’s corpse struck the bottom of Azoron’s Gorge. Yet – child-minds? If the children had the power to manipulate or brainwash thousands of Dragons each, what of the parent? Where was that beast?
Sweeping down toward the sea, she began to feel smaller and smaller, a mere insect overshadowed by the monolithic majesty of the panorama it surveyed. Up on the cliffs, they passed a colony of spider-like Dragons tending the crystal forests, pruning and cleaning debris with precise movements of their claws. The colony consisted of what Zara took to be massive, pale green queens, easily ten times Illume’s wingspan, herding a posse of much smaller workers of exactly the same colour that swarmed over the living crystals – pollinating? Dusting? Polishing? She could not decide. But as they whizzed past, two of the queens rushed at each other, screeching like banshees. The clash blasted crystal shards and worker-Dragons hundreds of feet through the air.
Illume dodged smoothly. “Very territorial. They’re called Nurturer-Dragons.”
The low soughing of the ocean swelled into a faraway booming and roaring, rising and falling, as they descended toward the mighty swells. The air grew steadily warmer, but not unbearably so. She noticed that Illume took care to keep a good distance from the shore, where waves she estimated to be three quarters of a mile tall flung themselves at the cliff’s base with a deep, thunderous drumbeat that seemed to shake the world. The wavelength was slow, miles long, but when the surge came, it shivered her bones with awe.
The water was not water. It gleamed like azure mother-of-pearl and had a different – well, Yols was the scientist – viscosity or cohesive property that her brain insisted was wrong. Spray should not quite spray like that. Waves should not be so vertical. As the water raced along, she saw insubstantial, fish-like Dragons charging along within the wave, frothing and fighting and clashing together. How many Dragons lived in their ocean, she wondered? The power of the Crystal Sea was Dragon life, just as the power of equinoctial storm appeared to take equine forms. She was still on Equinox, the sun and a hint of the asteroid belt seen across the sea-mist made that clear. What made this Beyond so different, the forms of life here seeming almost to belong to another world? Or was crystalline life just another expression of Equinox’s innate magic?
“Would you show me a Dragon egg, Illume?” asked Zaranna.
“Your wish is my overriding obsession, Mistress.”
She winced. But the Dragon swooped at once, bringing them closer to that slowly-surging surface, so close that she could make out the crystalline foam gleaming in impossibly large bubbles, the size of her head, and watch some of those seemingly weightless bubbles flying past her on the wind, each reflecting a tiny, insubstantial inner dragonet. They flew through a world of shimmering bubbles, searching, a world of rich jasmine scents and not a hint of the saltiness her brain insisted must accompany an ocean. Then Illume lurched in the air, snagged up something in his paw, and tossed it at Zaranna.
“Catch.”
A fantastical, jewelled egg tumbled toward her, all complex facets gleaming with their own inner radiance, an egg she could perhaps have reached her arms around – just. But she had to shift her foot smartly off Illume’s shoulder to avoid her ankle being crushed. The audibly sizzling egg bounced away.
“Oh, how careless of me,” smirked the Dragon.
“Dragon, please be –”
“Wizard Zaranna, allow me to instruct you in the proper use of the Imjuniel,” Illume interrupted. “Forget about your dainty manners. You need to learn arrogance apposite for your new station in life. Say, ‘Dragon, you will do this,’ or ‘Dragon, I command you to do that.’ The results are much more predictable that way.”
Gritting her teeth so hard that Zaranna feared a few fillings might pop loose, she replied, “Oh, so you’re a predict
able sort of Dragon, Illume? Is that predictably treacherous, or treacherously predictable?”
He suggested, “Say, how’s about a swim?”
“No. We’re heading to the Hooded Wizard’s encampment. Where is it, Illume?”
“Near Amorix. That’ll be the first Vale he wipes out.”
“Expound.”
“Ah, good. You’re catching the gist of the art of command there, Autumn Wizard. The Hooded Wizard is staging his troops in a hidden Vale near Amorix, a veiled Vale, if you’ll excuse the pun.” He chuckled nastily. “It is called False Amorix, and offers a direct route across the mountains to Amorix proper. It’s a sound strategy, an unexpected vector of attack revealed to the Wizard by another helpless draconic captive, the Red One you model your perfidy upon. Once they have razed Amorix and made their precious rivers and waterfalls run crimson with Pegasus and River Horse blood, they will sweep through the Safeways like wildfire, laying waste to the lesser-protected Vales.”
“And where is Prince Jesafion now?”
“Your other dupe is a captive with the Wizard’s army at False Amorix. He’ll be delighted to discover that you’re a long-lost Wizard. Over the asteroid belt, I’m sure.”
Sanu said, “When is the Wizard’s attack due, Dragon?”
“Last I heard, the army marches tomorrow at dawn. We’ll probably be a bit late. You know, by the balance of the two days’ travel it’ll take me to fly there.”
Blast his burning soul, the Dragon sounded pleased!
“May he perch upon a boiling hot geyser!” Sanu swore.
Zara asked, “How far to the Safeway?”
“We’ll be there by noon. The Constructor Dragons of old didn’t want non-winged creatures being able to move easily from entrance to exit,” said Illume, rising to avoid an incoming wave.
“So the Safeways are a Dragon invention?”
Illume turned a discomfiting, hundred-fanged grin upon Zaranna. “Aye, and we know them better than any other creature on Equinox.”
* * * *
Zaranna spent a frustrating half-hour figuring out that either there was no faster way to reach Amorix Vale, or she was not clever enough to phrase the right questions. So she slapped Illume’s haunches with a few wind-Pegasi, which certainly got the old geezer moving – both his body through the air, and his jaw in an endless litany of complaints. Sanu suggested a few strategic locations where an enthusiastic Wizard might conceivably apply the Pegasi to greater effect, which had Illume billowing smoke over them like a poorly lit furnace.
As they whistled along upon a galloping equine airstream, the Dreamer set her mind to considering the environments they had seen and passed through, particularly the world of Dragons in the Beyond. Beyond what, exactly? Not just the reach of the Pegasi. There must be more. There must be a key insight she was missing, a way of linking these disparate magical elements together.
A few flares past a hairy horse-mane later, or an hour later in something other than Zaranna double-speak, they sighted the area where the main exit portals were located. Record time, Illume sniffed. Heavily guarded, Sanu noted.
Zaranna peered in a completely different direction. Uneasiness prickled down the back of her neck and settled in her gut as if she had swallowed a cactus. Strange. The world seemed to have tipped. She peered at the cliffs and the Crystal Ocean, trying to work out the angles. Her mind kept retreating to the idea that the ocean’s smell had changed to a dank, engine oil smell, and the day’s heat had taken a leap toward the unbearable. Below, the swells had become preternaturally calm. No, the crystal waters were sucking away from the cliff …
Oh. No.
Speech deserted her tongue for an endless, panicked moment. She stammered, pointing, “W-W-What’s that?”
“It’s either a wave or an approaching cliff,” Sanu observed. Then her hand flew to her mouth in realisation. “Ancestors! Dragon? What’s happening?”
Illume stalled violently. “By my wings!”
As he spoke, thunder boomed from the rising wall of water, which mounted steadily toward the skies, bulldozing over a smaller swell with majestic unconcern. The wave-crest had to be three miles high and climbing, overshadowing the two Foci near the portals and the blank cyan entrances to the tunnels themselves. Zara saw myriad Yellow Dragons panicking, beating for the skies in terror. The scale was unreal; that sense of the world tipping had been the ocean’s rising, slipping away from the cliffs to join and augment that impossible swelling mountain of crystal water and detritus. Rumbling. Shaking. A gathering of storm-surge power making a mockery of the trembling of her tiny limbs.
Then, she saw a sight she would never forget.
Five draconic heads and shoulders broke through that wall of water as an almighty beast surged through the wave – almighty was even too small a word, for the grey-green jaws sheeting opalescent water were the height of Table Mountain and half as wide, capable of swallowing a goodly chunk of an entire Vale in one bite. The water seethed about the creature in a swathe thirty miles wide. She saw wings the width of that tsunami, sweeping up the ocean. Paws thrashing the water like islands dropping into a sea. Rows of triangular teeth each larger than Illume himself, glistening scales of glorious hues, eyes as dark and fiery and mysterious as the deepest portals of night …
“Fly!” yelled the girls, in concert.
The beast’s thundering pounded Illume through the air, miraculously increasing his speed as the Dragon instinctively drove for the safety not of the heights, but of the nearest portal. Zaranna saw the ocean’s bottom, exposed by the receding tide. All manner of bizarre and wonderful draconic creatures thrashed about down there, gasping in the dearth of their natural habitat. Glance at the portal. Closing in. Doom! Destruction! The entire ocean, it seemed, turned on its side as the Dragon-God raised his own tsunami and rode it toward the motes fleeing his majestic presence.
A concussion shook the world. TRESPASSERS!!
Illume’s mouth hung agape. He pumped his wings to their utmost, but even he could not withstand that blast. He slammed into a crystal spar. Crack! His right wingtip hung askew. Bellowing, the Dragon sideslipped, caught himself and shot past one portal.
“That one!” howled Sanu.
“Fake!”
“Faster, Illume! Faster!” yelled Zara. “We have to make it!”
The wave’s roaring combined with the Dragon’s breath-taking rage as wave and beast loomed over the threesome. He was primordial. A force of Nature, far beyond comprehension.
Zaranna’s terrified mind wrapped Illume in butterflies, and they leaped.
Whap! Through a portal, into darkness. Whap! Whap! Into a Dragon-capable Safeway, Illume slewing with every wingbeat now, clearly injured; her butterflies bubbled around them again and suddenly, in the distance, they heard a sound like an earthquake. Dust and rubble exploded out of the Safeway from behind, wrapping the speeding Dragon in gloom. He groaned and flopped upon the narrow strip, skidding along on his right knee and elbow, striking up a comet-trail of sparks, before shuddering to a halt on the Safeway.
Silence.
“What …” Zaranna croaked, her voice, shattered.
“A legend no Dragon has seen in a hundred lifetimes,” Illume replied, evidently even more shocked than either of his riders. He pressed gingerly onto his paws. “You summoned her, Dreamer.”
“Me? Her?”
Zaranna stood abruptly, slipping her cloth tie off Illume’s spike. Balancing carefully on his lumpen shoulder muscles, she walked down to the damaged wing-joint, the second of five joints on that right wing.
“Don’t touch me!” Illume tried to fold his wing back, but subsided with a terrible groan. “Broken my wing-secondary, you …” His voice trailed away in a stream of invective, through clenched fangs. “That was Artax, also called Artax the Artificer – I think. Must be. Our legends call her the Firstborn of Dragons, the designer and progenitor of the Dragonish races.”
Somewhere a few miles down that tunnel, the roaring struck up
anew. BOOM! BOOM! Was the Dragon trying to break through the barriers that separated the Beyond from the rest of Equinox? BOOM-BOOM!
Zara growled, “Enough accusations. I did not summon that … thing!”
“No, Artax just happened to appear when you just happened to be present and just happened to be performing Equine magic in Dragon territory! Astonishing coincidence.”
She sucked in her lip. Mercy! Her impatience had wreaked … that?
“Wouldn’t you agree, Wizard-girl?” said Sanu.
“Go dismember a pony-rat somewhere!”
“That’s mature.” But Sanu walked up to Zaranna’s position next to the broken wing-bone. “How can I help?”
Illume bellowed, “I refuse to have two spineless, incompetent bipeds wrestle with a Dragon’s broken wing!”
“Lie still!” snapped Zaranna. Funky! It actually worked, thanks to the Dragonstone. “I’m sorry. Alright? I had no idea about that Dragon-mountain-thing. No idea a living creature that large even existed. Um … I command you, Illume, to feel no pain while we set your bone.”
He burped an involuntary fireball. “What – that did it! You’re incred – for once a good idea, Wizard,” he finished awkwardly.
Zara wanted to laugh. “Good, Illume?”
“Fine,” he snapped. “I will now direct the ineffectual flailing of your inferior appendages.”
She said, “Nice to have the real Illume back.”
He growled something acerbic and unintelligible, then began to direct the two Humans in setting the splintered bone back to rights. With Illume carefully providing the required tension by pulling on his own injured secondary wing-bone, the equivalent of a Human forearm, they managed with their deft fingers to pull the splinters straight – the hollow bone appearing much more like splintered bamboo than a straightforward fracture – and to press two of the splinters back inside his crystalline flesh. Then, Zaranna gave him all the horses that she had left.
