by Marc Secchia
The whole chamber seemed to be a sea of shocked dark eyes, save for the shining eyes of the Dragons that lit up the gloom. Asturbar knew he must look terrible, yet he forced himself to stand erect, confidently, even though the cut in his abdomen stretched unbearably. A babble of voices rose:
“My wife’s missing!” shouted a man.
“What about the Drakes, Marshal?” cried someone else.
“Will we need to abandon our homes forever?”
“What should we do? We’ll die out there!”
“Marshal, Marshal …”
Asturbar raised his hands for quiet. “Please. I have the Star Dragoness with me. Listen to the Dragons! We will do our utmost to help you – to help this entire House – escape this calamity. May Fra’anior’s favour smile upon us this day.”
It seemed a fey wind moaned through a gap which was never meant to be hewn in the base of an Island fortress as the Island, gradually, began to tilt upon its axis. Most of these people, although born and raised upon a floating Island, would never have experienced this. Islands were solid. Unshakeable. Though many migrated with the seasons and tides covering hundreds or even thousands of leagues during the course of years or even decades, the motion was subtle, like floating in water. It was easy to imagine that no Island would ever be toppled, not even by Nature’s mightiest tempest. Ragions seemed immune to sickness or storm or any other form of death by natural causes, and their sole function appeared to be to float Islands above the Cloudlands whereupon they could live their subdraconic lives in swarming colonies that entirely covered the undersides of Islands.
Now they shuffled restlessly as the Island shifted toward the hole, further and further, and people began to grab onto each other to try to keep their balance. Out there the sky remained that sickly grey-green colour, overcast with a foreboding gloom, yet there was no rain, nor lightning nor wind, just the sense once more of fearful waiting.
The Mistral Fires stared at him.
Asturbar pulled out his best dressing-down-a-recruit voice, and roared, “To the Dragons! Move, people! Men, help your families or walk that way!” He pointed downslope. “Help the elderly. You. Get on your feet, man! Show some spirit.”
Loose packs and household effects were already beginning to slide down the slope as the roll accelerated. Yuaki had another Dragon underway, while a second had perhaps one hundred people clinging to it in various stages of panic and precariousness. “Proper seats!” snarled the Dragon. “Up there. On my paws. Not on my wings, you dolts, I need those for flying.”
They were starting to make sense of the situation and shift now, but Asturbar feared it would all be far too late. Here and there, pockets of order formed as soldiers and Sub-Commanders took charge. One female soldier was having people catch dangerous luggage. Here was a line of families waiting to board, marshalled by a woman carrying one child upon her back and an infant in a sling across her lower torso. Bantukor supervised the loading of two Dragons simultaneously, having them place youngsters and adults in turn between each other’s spine spikes. Everyone would need to be walking soon or people would start sliding and being crushed.
Then, the Marshal’s eyes slid to the hole as he saw a swarm of huge creatures breach the Cloudlands. Leviathans. A single, blazing white eye crowned each head; they were slick and dark as if they had passed through rain, and their muzzles were flat and sleek, as if they dwelled in watery spaces. Yet there was nothing watery about the cannonade of light beams that shot forth from what had to be eyes each a third the size of the average Dragonship, he realised with a shock that turned his abused guts to jelly – he expected them to be silent, but a good second after they began to decimate the flocking Drakes, the reverberation of faraway thunder shook the Isles. What power!
Aranya’s talon jabbed downward. “Allies.”
“Good!” His bark had barely left his lips, when Asturbar’s knees collapsed without warning. “Scad-mongering … aah!”
“With me, Marshal.”
An Amethyst paw snaffled him up. Through clenched teeth, he hissed, “Thanks. Iridiana –”
“Alive,” snarled Gangurtharr.
“Her first.”
“He’s way too curmudgeonly to let a pretty young Dragoness die in his paws, anyways,” Aranya piped up. Oh! Disconcerting – oh, her inner friend! The Star giggled in a completely unfamiliar tone of voice. “Aye, soldier. Princess Zuziana of Remoy, best friend of the Star Dragoness, at your service. And, for the record, Gang is awesomeness on –”
Pain twisted his lips. “Well, best friend who is apparently having a free ride in there, can you not just give Her Starriness strength to heal a few folks out here?”
Aranya’s jaw dropped! “What?” at least two voices echoed at once.
Then her other voice, the mellifluous one, chuckled, “He’s sniffed us out, Zuziana. Why didn’t we think of this before? I’ve been drawing ourselves down to nothingness, but there’s you –”
And Zuzi-me, growled yet another voice!
Stinking murgalizards, how many personalities lived inside of her?
“That’s her Shapeshifter form,” Aranya explained, flexing her knees to keep upright. “Quick-wings, everyone! Let’s get these people to safety. Marshal. Hold your stomach together. Ri’arion –”
“Here.”
“Do exactly as I direct.”
Asturbar pleaded, “Aranya, please, Iridiana needs you more –”
“Shut it!” the Zuziana voice cut in.
“I suggest you don’t bite your tongue,” said Ri’arion. “Bite your gauntlet instead.”
“Gang! Bring the Iridium!” snapped Huari, every inch the Marshal. “Line her up for Aranya’s ministrations. Yuaki! Faster on the loading!”
“Dragonwings rising out of the Cloud – holy Fra’anior!” gasped the Brown Shapeshifter. “What under the suns are those? Hope they’re friendly. And, plenty more Drakes! Alert!”
Three Drakes grinned into the hole, their fangs gleaming as though they anticipated a fine luncheon. Gangurtharr, Yuaki and Huari promptly decorated their grins with a barrage of fireballs.
Faster and faster, the Island tilted in the sky as the lifting power of the ragions toward the western fringe overpowered the straight-up lifting force of those beneath. The Dragons were forced to flap their wings to hold position. People cried out as they squashed helplessly against each other, threatening to crush the smaller and more vulnerable, and Ri’arion was up to his elbows inside Asturbar’s stomach, holding bits together as Aranya’s healing power played over his guts like the flame of a welding torch. Apparently she still had the presence of mind while she was magically stitching up his stomach cavity to be issuing a slew of orders to her incoming forces – either an improbable feat of mental gymnastics, or he’d be wearing his guts for armour in the future.
Then, she laid a paw upon Iridiana’s nose and began doing something there, too!
Frazzle, spark, hiss and spit went the flesh of his abdomen. He smelled the sickly sweet stench of burning flesh, but even that sensation faded. Nyahi’s treatment seemed far more subtle. Strengthening, he imagined. Guiding her home. In a moment, the eyelid he could see upon the near side of her head fluttered, and he saw a reinvigorated gleam illuming the secondary nictitating membrane.
Awake!
“Ouch. Morning already?” she groaned.
Never a more beautiful dawn, even if it was mid-afternoon and the bottom had fallen out of their Island, literally. Asturbar yelped, “Nyahi!”
Her belly-fires purred into life. “Silly Boots.”
At that, before matters grew all too mushy, Aranya declared that she was done healing the pair of love parakeets for now – whatever parakeets were – turned about, and ordered the Dragons to start tossing people out of the lowering hole!
Struggling to find his feet, Asturbar spluttered, “Wait just a –”
“They’re already in danger,” she argued. “The halves will smash together any moment and there are too many insi
de this cavern. People will be crushed.”
With a crash followed by a violent, juddering avalanche of sound, her prediction came true. Hundreds of people were shaken off their feet as the two tipping Islands collided, and through the din Asturbar heard and felt the additional thumps and crunches higher up in the home of the Mistral Fires as stores and equipment, furnishings and Fra’anior knew what else slid and crunched together. Several faraway yells cut off horribly. The hole now faced directly downward, slowly panning over a scene of peculiarly shaped Lesser Dragons bursting free of the Cloudlands from places Asturbar was at a loss to name, backed by the searing white beams of light apparently fired from the eyes of those Cloudlands-broaching monster lizards. Given the distances their attacks seemed to drift upward slowly, white beams marked by puffy grey clouds of expiring Drakes, trailed by the great Dragonwings of hundreds and now thousands of Dragons beating upward. Brighter orange flares marked their progress as they tangled with Thoralian’s forces.
Embroiled in the underground battle, Asturbar had not been party to the arrival of the battlefront. Dragons darkened the skies. The carnage was immense – mostly on the side of the disorganised Drakes, which swarmed in dense packs tens of thousands strong against the tightly-arrayed aerial forces of the Star Dragoness. Where had the Thoralians even kept such an army? How had they fed them?
There went Azhukazi’s creature, still making that hammering motion as it vanished without a trace into the seething billows three miles below.
Yet his concern mounted for the hurting and injured, especially for those already left behind, unconscious, as the crowd rushed the remaining Dragons with an ugly collective roar. Tempers rose along with fear. Fists flew. Elbows. Furious, fearful shouts. Yuaki was trying to corral them, when Asturbar bellowed:
“Just start throwing them out!”
Paws swept handfuls of people into the hole. They fell wailing and cursing and praying; Asturbar fervently hoped that Aranya had primed her forces for the deadly game of catch that would ensue, and that the Dragonkind would reach these people well before the Drakes picked them off. Already the deadly aerial hunters surged toward the falling, twisting few and the overloaded Dragon gliders, their shoals glittering with deadly brilliance despite the gathering gloom.
Asturbar glanced about him. “Bantukor, have your men collect the injured. Yuaki, take three Dragons and try to get to the other half of the Island. See what you can do for anyone trapped there.”
When upward of six or seven hundred people had been helped or launched out over the Cloudlands, the rest did not dare a murmur. Crowd control, Dragon style.
He tried to stride down to the hole, but enervation made him wobble as if he were drunk. Suddenly Nyahi was beside him, walking as badly as he, but her tilted wing steadied him. Asturbar began speaking to people quietly. “Load that Dragon. Is this your family, Tanastukor? Tie your children to your bodies and jump. Hey, T’gansi, can you help your Dad be brave? Yazina! Good. Go supervise loading that Dragon. Quickly, girl. Gangurtharr, gather a hundred to you and fly.” He moved deeper among the Mistral Fires, seeking by his manner to quell their fears. “Byzamkin! Comfort this girl and find her a Dragonride, would you? That’s an order!”
He firmly pushed Silomé and the boy together. Ha. Who said there was never time for love?
Masterful Marshal-ship, if he did not say so himself. Catching Nyahi eyeballing him, however, he smoothed the smirk off his lips.
In short order, four more Dragons dropped away through the hole – and now the chamber was noticeably emptier, but he still shivered at many panicked cries deeper within the Island, echoing through the slowly twisting corridors. The hole was already midway up toward the vertical again, and if he was not mistaken, their altitude had decreased significantly too. The increasing pressure in his ears told that tale. What was that sound, that steady pop-popping against the Island; the slight shivering of the ground beneath his boots as he and Iridiana walked carefully with the people, showing them how to cope with the changing slopes without falling.
“Aranya?”
Her eyes glazed over slightly as she mentally checked with her forces without. Oh no. The Drakes are firing the ragions beneath the Islands …
That tore it. Thoralian’s last orders must have been to annihilate them all.
* * * *
Rapidly, he and Aranya organised a Dragon relay team. No time to fly people out now – the imperative was to release them from the slowly sinking Island. To scour the halls and chambers for any stragglers. To see to the other half of the Island, from which reports were already returning from Yuaki. Drakes had penetrated the halls there, and the death toll was measured in the high hundreds.
When the storage room was cleared at last, Iridiana tapped Asturbar on the shoulder. “Our turn.”
“No, we still need to search –”
“You’re more use out there,” she said softly.
“But … you’re right. Feel like swatting a few Drakes?”
Her eyes gleamed ominously. “Exactly. I’m in a bit of a mood. If Thoralian expects us all just to roll over and die …”
He shared the fiercest of grins with his girlfriend. “We’ll invite him to go first. Even if we have to take him one by one – you were awesome today. Simply awesome. But aren’t you – don’t you need to sleep?”
“Aranya said Dragons could fight on borrowed reserves, but I’ll pay for it later.”
“Yes?” He raised his battle-axe. “Then let’s fly, noble Dragoness!”
Iridiana fled the Island right behind Aranya’s tail, her inexperience almost tangling them up. At once, Asturbar saw a running, swirling battle developing between the Drakes and the Dragons carrying his people. A few of those falling had been picked off, but even as he watched, tiny silvery Dragons shot out of the sides of a hulking Dragoness who was as big as an Asjujian Emoflit, only she was armoured with an insanely thick layer of metal – a Metallic Fortress Dragon, Aranya supplied quickly to his mind and Iridiana’s. Her name was Genholme, and she was using her Bullet Dragons to fetch people out of the air and return them to her personal fortress. The Bullets were quick fliers but not strong, so they worked in teams of two or three at a time to snatch people away from champing draconic jaws.
Aranya added, We’ve lost none to the Cloudlands so far. These are the Dragons of the Lost Isles. Their homes are two hundred leagues behind us, unfortunately. Air Breathers don’t walk very fast.
What under the suns were Air Breathers?
Farther afield, a Dragonwing of Dragon Riders coursed swiftly into the skies, seeking to cut off the main body of Drakes from reaching the stricken Mistral Fires. He saw no sign of the Thoralians or the First Egg, but far to the Northeast he observed a patch of Cloudlands that appeared to be boiling upward in great, luminous grey streamers of moisture. Aranya confirmed that was the location of the First Egg. She did not know how the Thoralians were moving it, except perhaps by manipulating the water in the environment. His eyes scanned the deployment of the Dragons; the huge Land Dragons below appeared to be taking turns to breach the Cloudlands and lend the support of their almighty eye cannons to the battle. What those brilliant beams touched, vaporised – but they were incredibly accurate as well, somehow succeeding in separating friend from foe even at close quarters.
Aranya said, Is that how you two fly – in paw, so to speak?
He’s too big for my spine spikes, Iridiana said.
I did wonder at first if he was some unknown form of Dragon, the Star Dragoness admitted, looking Asturbar over in a way that made the Iridium Dragoness stiffen perceptibly in the air.
The other voice cooed, Iridiana must like her men ultra-chunky. Me, I prefer the lean and scrummy look.
Iridiana’s fires blushed robustly!
With Ri’arion having already flown with Gangurtharr to help the Gladiator Dragon, Aranya and Iridiana swept up the scarred side of the tumbling half-Island, searching for Drakes or survivors. Both were lean Dragonesses built along
very much the same lines and contours, agile fliers that while well-muscled, were noticeably less thickset than the bigger males. Asturbar chuckled to himself. Pity the beefy male Dragon who thought to bully or overpower either of this pair – they would be in for a rude awakening!
“There’s one! I can see! The world … everything’s amazing!” spluttered the Iridium Dragoness. He had quickly forgotten she had not seen well for eight years of her life.
“Gashukan!” cried Asturbar, pointing.
The Amethyst Dragoness immediately screamed over to the other half-Island, pounding a marauding Drake with three ultra-swift fireballs that were so hot, they burned through its armoured hide. With an agonised screech, the creature plummeted. She swept beneath the Head Engineer, who was dangling one-handed from a metal stanchion, and braked neatly in the air to pluck him from his precarious position.
“Ten seconds until the Islands hit the Cloudlands,” said Asturbar.
“I’ll sound the alert,” Aranya called. “The Land Dragons can shield these Island fragments for a few more minutes down there, but we need to extract everyone as quickly as possible. It’s not deep here – only a league and a half or so. Leaping Islands!”
The Amethyst jinked aside as Iridiana darted past her head in stop-start defiance of reality, closing with a Drake which had popped out of a torn-off corridor. Asturbar and the Dragoness struck simultaneously. A wild shriek greeted their effort as the creature pounded into a section of rock, before discovering it was missing a foot and now sported a sizeable hole in its left shoulder.
“You put me off,” Asturbar complained, feeling his stomach. Bad idea.
Back-winging sharply to avoid the Drake’s weak riposte, Iridiana snorted, “I didn’t bring you along to shave their beards, soldier! Aim a little higher next time, would you?”
Aranya fired past them. Pfft!
Perfect strike, right down the gaping throat.
