by Kady Cross
His head was the worst of all. A bulbous pink eye sat in the middle of a frill of pink tentacles, each ending in a razor-toothed maw. Bloody pus wept down, crusting the dragon’s throat and chest in a scabrous cowl. An opening below and behind the eye was covered by puckered black skin, opening only to speak and eat. Thick green strings of acid drool dangled from the center sphincter.
Finding his equilibrium, Mistral reached out to draw life-giving creation energy from the dragon. As expected, he met a wall of magic. Ouza laughed, a choked bubbling sound echoed by chittering from the tentacles.
"“Did you really think I’d make it so easy for you?"” He asked, his cavernous voice edged in a high-pitched whine that made Mistral’s ears ache. "“You are mine. My slave, my tool, my weapon. It is time you learned what that means."”
Magic lashed Mistral. It battered his Shield, stabbing and pecking like a thousand steel beaks. Sweat beaded on his skin as he poured energy into the Shield. He knew he’d have to drop it and lay himself open for whatever torture the dragon dished out. It was the only way. But he couldn’t make it look easy.
He gathered creation energy, pulling it in from all around him. The rocks of the cave turned a dead gray, all the minerals that might have provided life in a future eon emptied of fecundity. He shook with the torrent of power passing through his body, his head spinning and gray swirling at the edges of his vision. Behind his own Shield, Ouza remained impervious.
Time to end this.
Mistral thrust power into the dead rocks beneath his master, blasting them to powder. The nightmare creature heaved and caught himself before he plummeted into the newly formed pit. Mistral didn’t even consider using Scripture against the beast. Just the idea of uttering the words of the Most High made him want to burn his tongue out at the roots. This was a battle for his soul—if he even had one—and he wouldn’t dip his wings in the filth of the Dark or the Light to win it. He would be his own man, make his own destiny.
The dragon’s magic continued to pound. Mistral flung bolts of power at the beast, loosening boulders above. The massive rocks tumbled off the monster’s back like wadded paper.
Slowly Mistral let his Shield spell thin and his attacks grow weaker and more wild. It was not like he actually had to fake his exhaustion. He dropped to his knees, fear sluicing through him. What came next—it would be worse than anything he’d ever suffered before. Beyond imagining. His entire being cringed and fought against surrendering to that hell. But it was the only way, he told himself. The only way to win; the only way to freedom.
At last he let his protective magic go completely. Exhaustion laced his muscles and he shook like an aspen leaf.
"“Come get me, you freak of nature,"” he demanded hoarsely. "“Or are you afraid I might win?"”
Magic swept him up and smashed him against the cavern ceiling, pinning him there. He made himself laugh, despite the searing pain of broken ribs. He’d be willing to bet all of them had broken. It wasn’t even the tip of the iceberg of what the dragon had in store for him.
"“No wonder the Most High banished you. You are a coward. You lost the First War, you lost the Last War, and now you hide underground in the dark like a cockroach, terrified of the Light, terrified a seraph will step on you and crush you,"” Mistral taunted.
The dragon screamed fury and flung Mistral to the ground, then snatched him up in his claws, holding the man close to his great eye, shaking him, his talons puncturing Mistral’s flesh and one of his wings.
"“Did you really think you could ever escape me? I own you. I made you. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh,"” he said, then laughed at his mockery of Genesis, the sound twisting Mistral’s entrails into knots.
““Before you were born you were shackled to me. I chained your father and filled your mother to give you life. You will serve me until the end of time.””
Mistral inwardly recoiled. Did Ouza speak the truth. But no. No. It was not true. A captured seraph was his father and his mother was a whore of the Dark. The dragon was merely a farmer of evil. Even so, Mistral’s making did not fate him to serving the Dark or the Light. He thought of Nara. Fix this, she’d said. Because she trusted him to do the right thing, the moral thing, and the Light and the Dark be damned.
"“You are a puny fungus, do you understand? You are nothing. Merely livestock. I have lost many things in my existence, but I am still far greater than you will ever imagine."”
Flecks of acid drool flicked over Mistral, melting through his clothing and skin.
"“You will kneel to me. You will grovel and you will beg for my mercy. I will give you none. Do you understand, worm?"” The dragon shook him again.
Mistral didn’t answer. Couldn’t have if he wanted to. His head spun from crashing against the wall and the shaking the dragon had given him. He scraped together what wits he had left and drew hard, gathering energy, releasing all restraints on his hunger. In that moment he did not care what he might kill, so long as Ouza died as well. In his arrogance and anger, the dragon had had let his protective wall drop in order to grab Mistral, exposing himself. It was the opening Mistral had bet his life and soul on.
Power flooded him, greater than anything he’d ever known before. His spirit caught fire, burning with white energy as hot as the sun, as cold as empty space. For a moment, he touched something vast and alien. It looked at him—through him. He felt himself measured, marked, and then the thing turned away and Mistral fell down and down and down and back into himself.
He lay on the ground, shuddering and convulsing. Weight pinned his legs and his left arm. Blood ran from the hand-sized holes made by the dragon’s talons and puddled beneath him. His heart fluttered madly. He glowed with the creation energy he’d consumed. He was dying. Even so, he didn’t care. Bliss wrapped him.
Mistral tipped his head to see what was left of his former master. Ouza’s body was gone. Sucked dry of life, his husk hadn’t enough strength to hold the dead weight. It had plummeted into the pit and all that remained were broken off legs, like logs. One of these and a set of claws held Mistral trapped.
"“I win,"” he whispered, then chuckled. It quickly turned to a cough that squeezed his blood faster from his wounds.
Shadows drifted across his sight. He could hear death’s footsteps. And then what? Would he meet the dragon in the Hell of Scripture? Or would his spirit fly across the stars? Or more likely, there would be nothing at all.
He closed his eyes. Nothingness would be welcome enough. He’d made his stand on his own terms and he’d broken his own shackles. That was everything.
He drifted, the flow of his blood slowing as his heart stuttered.
Mage in battle, mage in dire . . .
The words whispered through the cavern, repeating and echoing until it sounded like it came from a thousand throats. They netted Mistral, wrapping his brain in steel cobwebs. What did they want? He could not, would not, speak those words. Would not bow to the seraphs, anymore than he would the Dark. He was free now, belonging only to himself. And the mules. Inwardly he smiled. Ben and Buck would not appreciate being forgotten. He didn’t have to worry about them. Nara would take good care of the pair when he was gone.
The whispers went silent. Mistral felt the world pause, as if it had taken a breath.
. . . holy fire.
And then he was alight. The influx of creation energy from the dragon was nothing compared to this. Like he was bathed in joy and washed clean of Darkness. A vastness filled him like the breath of the universe. His spirit sang on an invisible wind made of dreams and wonder. He burned and died. He broke into ash, and then was born again, his bones shining silver, his veins gold ribbons weaving through flesh made of the dust of ages.
5.
He woke to bright sun on a promontory high above Tarrytown. The sun warmed him with gentle rays. Mistral examined himself in wonder. His skin glowed like moonlight on ruffled water, but he felt no pain from the light. He ran his fingers over his chest and ribs. He had no w
ounds, no scars, as if his skin was brand new. He felt strong. He spread his wings. They, too, were healed, and . . . the edges of every feather shone silver, as did every nervure. How was it possible?
He remembered. The whispers. The chant, leaving out the calling of the seraphs and summoning something else instead. Something vast and more powerful than anything he’d ever imagined. Something that could have crushed him, but instead healed him. Remade him.
Holy fire.
Slowly Mistral folded to his knees, unable to hold himself up as realization came to him. He wanted to deny it. To refuse the possibility. But it wasn’t just a possibility. It was the only explanation.
The Most High had come to him, touched him, healed him, remade him.
Why?
Mistral’s heart clenched, anger and resentment coiling through him. Was he now to become a slave to the Light?
Never.
Reason asserted itself. If that were the case, he’d be surrounded by seraphs.
Still, everything he knew of the Most High said the being was angry, selfish, capricious, and unjust. So why? What did the so-called God want of him?
Then again, what did it matter? He’d been willing to suffer and die to be rid of his dragon master. He was more than willing to do the same for the Most High. All that mattered now was that he was free. Alive, whole, and free.
He sprang into the air, spreading his wings and riding the air currents. The hellhole gaped in the mountain, surrounded by a ring of white death. The destruction was smaller than he'’d feared. He flew over the valley. Nothing had breached the protective circle he’d made around the emerald basin. There would still be spawn in the hills. They’d have to be hunted. And then—
And then?
For the first time in his life he had no place he had to go. He looked down at the roof of Nara’s house. Ben and Buck waited for him. He’d been born anew. He could go anywhere. His life belonged to him.
He folded his wings and dropped out of the sky, eager to begin.
DIANA PHARAOH FRANCIS was born, lived, and is not dead yet. She writes fantasy stories with much adventure, romance, and danger. She’s owned by two corgis, has two children and a husband, likes rocks, geocaching, knotting up yarn, baking bread, Victorian England, and Monty Python. She can often be found cackling madly over her keyboard.
Storm Songs
63 PA / 2075 AD
Faith Hunter
The dome of New Orleans above them rippled with energy patterns, a coruscating wave that fractured into a rainbow magnified and brought to life. Protected within a triple circle, the cadre of mages—four Air, two River, and one Sea—worked to steer the hurricane in the Gulf north, where it would drop much-needed rain on the sun-parched land. The incantation was in two parts: The first part was to weaken the storm’s winds; the second part was to move the high pressure cell blocking its passage out of the way. It was a high-level conjure that required both exacting precision and rigid control of enormous energies.
Richter watched the mages from the shelter of a dome of protection—a ward that would keep him safe should the conjure go horribly wrong, killing the mages. As the only Sea mage born in his generation to the Seattle Enclave he was too valuable to the priestess to be risked. But he needed to watch and learn how those of his rare and difficult-to-master gift worked with others of differing elemental talents.
In the middle of the square, in the heart of the New Orleans Enclave, the Sea mage master was sitting on a round mat of sea salt in the center of the other six mages, as if she were the center of a clock. A River mage sat behind her at 12, the other sat at 6, both mages close to the center, but not touching the salt mat, and enclosed by a circle of alternating river rock and freshwater oyster and mussel shells behind them. The four Air mages sat two and two outside the inner circles, facing inward. Behind them was the circle that contained their part of the conjure, an usual choice but one that the Air mages had insisted be used. It was composed of parrot feathers, the bold green and red placed each half over the next. And at the compass point for north was a seraph feather. The rare and amazing feather had been handed down from father to son for three generations, and was used only in the most delicate and important of conjures.
Richter, the young Sea mage, watched as his mentor, the venerable Oh Mai, opened her circle. She put her hands flat on the salt mat, fingers spread wide, and called on the power of the sea. “Water of life, water of death, rollers crest and fall. Water deep and salt marsh sea, mother of us all.” Power gathered in the salt mat, soft aqua and roseate hues, and lifted slowly upward, not like a circle or dome, but like a sea mist, filling an invisible bowl. The glowing fog rose until the mist reached its zenith just over her head.
The River mages opened and stabilized their conjuring circle next, doming it only a bit above the sea circle. Once deployed, their circle was a murky construct that moved like water in a glass. The moment their water circle was in place, the air circle began to rise. The feathers comprising the physical boundary of the outer circle trembled and quivered, as if they were caught in the barest of breezes. It looped up, an irregular dome of energized fog. The nested conjuring circles were hemispheres, really, not passing through the floor, but caught in the boundaries of the feathers, salt, river rock, and shell. They didn’t touch one another, which could have resulted in detonation, but arched over one another—air over fresh water over salt—just as a hurricane was wind driving rain over sea.
Oh Mai looked like a wizened mummy within the hazed energies. When she lifted her arms and began to stir the sea-mist around her, it formed a swirl, just like a hurricane. Oh Mai began to sing. “Water, sea, air and wind, rain and storm pay heed. Move and shift, trade winds guide. Release your bounty o’er land.”
The words didn’t rhyme, which Richter didn’t like at all. Rhymes were much easier to memorize. But then, Oh Mai didn’t need to memorize things. She had done them so often she just remembered them, perfect-like.
As old Oh Mai sang, the River mages whispered to the clouds of the hurricane. “Draw and seek and hold and drop, the tears of the world. Plagues and death and humans gone, the tears of the world.” He knew they were making the clouds heavy with rain, while allowing only a bit of the moisture to fall to the earth, holding it to drop it over the cropland they had been paid to water.
And then the Air mages began a descant in a minor key, pushing at the high pressure that was stalled over the Mississippi Valley, obstructing the hurricane, insisting it move east and out over the ocean. “Hot and dry and entropy, and parched and empty air, break and move and slide to east, to ocean space and free.”
Richter liked that one. He decided that when he cast his first conjure, it would be a complex rhyme and be sung in a minor key. He liked the haunting melody, the way it flowed over and through the River mages’ whispers. He had only come into his gift a few months before. Oh Mai wouldn’t let him conjure yet. Stubborn old woman.
He watched as she gripped her prime amulet, a worn, chipped, megalodon shark tooth as big as her hand and a million years old. Excitement shot through him. Now. Oh Mai was doing it now. The tooth sparkled, shooting flames like the petals of a flower as she pulled the gathered might of the Air and River mages to her.
Oh Mai . . . pushed. Richter felt it in his bones, a shifting of the world, a flowing of forces too long stymied. Ponderously, the high pressure began to slide out of the way. And the hurricane began to edge north, over land. Over crops that humans needed to live. Well, mages needed crops too, but mages had Earth mages to get things growing. Humans didn’t.
Two hours later, the air circle thinned out and began to fall back into the feathers of the boundary. Then the water circle began to slump. Finally, the sea circle dropped away, absorbing into the salt mat. The hurricane was on its way. Younger acolytes would monitor the position of the storm overnight, calling in the more mature, fully exhausted mages should there be problems.
And they would be richly paid for the rain. Very richly.
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Richter ran to help Oh Mai to her feet.
Defiance
76 PA / 2088 AD
Christina Stiles
“Again!” the drill sergeant yelled. The six tired kids ran through the obstacle course for the seventh time, alternately jumping through tires, scrambling under a metal bed of strung barbed-wire with fake rifles held in their arms, crawling up and over a ten-foot-tall wall with the aid of a rope, and then climbing the stairs to the tower to zip-line down over the river and run to the finish line—all while wearing fifteen-pound packs, running through snow, and wearing heavy winter gear in below zero-degree weather. The youngest stumbled more than once, but older squad members grabbed arms and helped them make it through. No man—kid—left behind.
The tow-headed twins, Davey and Colin, collapsed at the end of the course, unable to move further. But Alaska, the only girl in the group, and the three teenaged boys, Ezekiel, Harper, and Jeremiah, had been doing this for years; they were barely winded. Within a few months, ten-year-old Davey and Colin would start holding up better to the exercises.
Behind Alaska’s squad other teams of six were running the same course. Nearby, an elite team of mules was on the hardest course, which included jumping ten-foot-wide pits, climbing a sixty-foot wall without a rope, and combating “hostiles” just past the river—with the occasional firing of live rounds above their heads.
As Alaska bent over to gather her breath, she glanced toward the elite group. They were smiling and roughhousing with one another, while the baddest of the badasses, Jeep and Hog, were singing to the rhythm of the gunfire. Although Mule Team 1, as they called themselves, were captives just like her team, they enjoyed testing their strength and endurance. Their kind were often bred for war, and this all-mule squad would be readiest of all when it came to battle.
