Aranya Treasury - The Complete Shapeshifter Dragons Series, page 149
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Dragons were not able to sweat, but by the time the mental machinery of the entirety of the Lost Islands, spearheaded by the ancient fortress mind of Yiisuriel-ap-Yuron, had finished meddling with his brain, Ardan felt as if he’d been run over repeatedly by a team of excitable Land Dragons, before they handed him over to the Thunderous Thirty for a salutary cannonade that rattled every bone in his body. His memories of comfortable lava baths and oil treatments had vanished like pollen on a breeze. He would rather have faced ten rounds with that rogue Gangurtharr in the arena than undergo an interrogation that seemed bent upon drilling ten thousand precision holes through his impervious skull.
Maybe he should clash heads with Thoralian. Mash that flying slug’s brains out through his ear canals. A thought wrapped in pure Dragon fire!
What Human Ardan longed for more than anything was to take a decent swing of his scimitar at an honourable enemy. Now, his paws were his scimitars and the enemy’s malevolent ambitions knew neither bounds nor principle. What motivated a creature like Thoralian? Greed? Madness? A craving for absolute power? The vile pleasure he took in humiliating his foes before executing the crushing finale?
If he could only get close enough … somehow, he sensed, their understanding of the Yellow-White Shapeshifter’s purposes was lacking. Aranya was too high-minded to think in the way of ruthless beasts. He unsheathed three talons thoughtfully, examining the steely blades as if his regard might constitute a final benediction prior to gutting that worthless perversion of a Dragon like a hapless ralti sheep. Warriors could afford few scruples.
His soulmate possessed an unshakeable nobility of spirit, for which he loved her so fiercely, it hurt.
He had Shadowed and Unshadowed more times than was good for a Dragon whilst being scrutinised via 9,422 disparate vectors and techniques, and had run through more of Ri’arion’s monkish brain-frazzling exercises than he could count.
He was finished.
No, he could not sustain a mind-meld with Aranya, which would allow them to Shadow and travel as a team into the farthest depths of the Island-World. He could not fathom how Hualiama had managed it. One legend had her travelling beneath the Island-World’s crust. Physically impossible. Existentially nonsensical, practically ridiculous – clearly the provender of the worst fabulists. Only, Aranya’s many-starred relatives seemed wont to dump common Isles sense upon its protesting cranium nine days a week, and had a galling habit of laughing their way through life’s impossibilities with confounding effortlessness. Contrarian sanity muddlers, the lot of them!
He snorted wrathfully, Principally, your conclusion is that I don’t actually have a brain.
An entire nation of brains, Dragon and Human alike, gasped. Hesitated. Then, a storm of laughter erupted around him. Yiisuriel and her kin voiced basso thunderclaps of mirth. The Humans produced a strangely synchronised volley of guffaws. Above them, the Dragonkind bugled and hooted their amusement and the dragonets’ uproarious chuckling skittered over the cacophony like a flight of joyous birds carolling the dawn chorus.
Ardan roared, Aye, that’s the result of all your monkeying about!
When a further explosion of hilarity had subsided, Yiisuriel queried, What, by my fumaroles, is a monkey?
Another brainless creature? scorned a voice Ardan knew belonged to Brityx.
Null skull.
Hollow as a drum.
He has a valid point. The wilful abnegation of reality serves no Dragon well.
Argument piled upon mirthful jest until Yiisuriel-ap-Yuron clamped down on the hullabaloo with a firm, ORDER IN THE MENTAL SPACE!
Her mental voice out-boomed a thunderclap.
Yiisuriel added, It was the Dragonfriend who first taught us the incorporeality of the Shapeshifter existence. Have any detected the presence of the second-soul, the Shifted form? Have the phase-Shifters and the Chaos Beasts and all creatures birthed of the Star Dragoness’ incomparable fires ever been identified apart from their embodied form? Has the endpoint of transformation been mapped?
Respectful silence pervaded the mental space.
Only insofar as event-horizon phenomena have been observed, but I hold to an additional postulation … the young Dragoness who had blurted this out pulled up with a throaty gurgle as she evidently realised she addressed the entire nation.
Elucidate your research, noble Yistarill, Yiisuriel said warmly.
A mental picture of a shy, slim young Red Dragoness, with the characteristic double set of wings in the Eastern mould, appeared in the shared mind.
She spluttered, I … my research remains lamentably theoretical, noble Elder – she genuflected in a mental representation of a wingtip deprecation – but I believe that the second-plane theory cannot be discounted, despite the logical fallacies inherent in its current formulation. The Dragonfriend’s writings hint at a second plane of existence, essentially undetectable from the material-physical-psychic realm of our experience. In my thesis, I attempt to demonstrate that the very existence of the event horizon in Shapeshifter transformation endpoint mapping, corroborates a metaphysical truism that such a realm or plane must indeed exist. As you are aware, this argument originally arose from the nonexistence law, which states that it is impossible for material substance or fire life to emerge from nothingness. My additional speculation is that this theory may explain the current location of the Ancient Dragons. They are here, with us … but not. I count the Amethyst Dragoness’ personal account of her interactions with the Great Onyx amongst my reflections.
Aranya’s link with Ardan unexpectedly fizzed to life as the Dragoness spoke. She had not considered this conclusion. Always, she had sensed Fra’anior’s distance. He was faraway, somewhere across the cosmos. Could the young scientist Dragoness have identified a key intention of the Great Onyx – that his mighty paw was nearer than anyone had imagined? At the very least, her speculation about an additional plane was intriguing. Ardan’s Shadow power appeared to do exactly what Yistarill had just noted, and was concisely laid out in the data the scientist presented to the mind-meld now. He vanished, slipped through reality like a shadow slipping between two parallel panes of crysglass, and returned unharmed and fully embodied – yet, he remembered that other Dragons appeared to have enjoyed power over his Shadowed form, most notably his recollection of the way Gurdurion the Brown had seized his tail at the Shipyards of Yorbik and prevented him from Shadowing away. His tail still ached in that spot.
Burning with shame, Ardan wrapped up the memory and presented it to Yistarill. I believe that this data may corroborate your excellent hypothesis.
Very good, cherished Shadow, Aranya approved softly.
Ardan flushed fierily as her unshielded thought echoed into the public space. Arrrgggbb, he grumbled before cutting off the sound. Should they not court? He purred back, Thou, mine treasury of starlight incarnate.
Aranya’s fires burbled like a boiling brook running merrily over stones, and her expression turned pleasingly bashful-cross-provoked. Ardan! By the mountains of Immadia –
Grinning broadly at her, he said privately, My specialty is molten Immadian Princess. Like it?
You’re incorrigible.
Do I hear Nak gnashing his teeth in a jealous rage?
You’re like a male terhal strutting down a street.
Admit it, you prefer scales to feathers.
I’ll admit nothing for fear that your grossly swollen vanity might spark a messy explosion, Aranya protested, but her eye-fires seethed as she considered her Dragon with fierce pride. Returning to more important matters – well, other matters –
The discussion, in the way of the Lost Isles, proceeded at the speed of thought. They efficiently hived off mind-cells to examine different aspects of the problem, including nine separate teams to puzzle through counter-arguments and pick apart Yistarill’s work – positively but aggressively, following the custom of the Dragonkind – while Aranya meantime dealt with three urgent disputes. Ardan was unconvinced about the way the Princess had summarily been promoted to Star Empress of Herimor, but she showed no signs of growing overly fond of worship. Contrariwise, she seemed to grow more inward-looking and pensive the more attention she garnered.
A Shadow Dragon could only wish he might one day feel worthy of this woman’s love. How he longed to see her fully healed!
Stars were meant to shine, not to weep starlight tears.
* * * *
In the night’s uttermost stillness, Aranya awoke from a chaotic dream, her heart thudding in her throat like a drumbeat run amok. In her life she had not often experienced such an overwhelming awareness of dread, so as she lay in the semidarkness calming her frantic, muted wheezing and swallowing down the tang of blood in her throat, she attuned her consciousness to the nearby rhythms of life.
First, her own heartbeat and the tenebrous presence of lives slumbering within her soul. Second, the ever-present Land Dragon minds, maintaining the shields and constantly at work with their badly injured brethren. Now, her ears caught a subtle fluctuation in the gentle rasp of Ardan’s breathing as he stirred on the wide couch opposite her low, rounded bed. He lay face down on the edge of a blue orrican-wool pillow, his left arm dangling upon rush tan mats woven through with blue-dyed strands that traced runes recounting a legend of the Dragonfriend. So many traditions here. The rushes and plush woollen coverings were a holdover from the days Hualiama had written about, when the Human Lost Islands had been snowbound winter fortresses not unlike Immadia’s castle, she supposed, and the Dragon Islands had been temperate. Yiisuriel’s vivid memories had shown her the comet bearing Numistar Winterborn’s presence smashing into the midst of the Isles. Through indomitable willpower Hualiama had forged two nations into one. Yet she wrote also of the quest to ascertain their destiny – the quest which had brought the Lost Islands to this location, the resting place of the First Egg.
Their story was far from complete.
How far the shadows of history reached, like great Island massifs looming over the Cloudlands of the lives that swooped so briefly into and out of their ambit.
Her eyes lingered upon her husband as she tasted the strange, delightful echoes of that word upon her tongue. Husband. My Dragonlove, my man Dragon, my shield and warrior heart. Roaring rajals! Aranya’s hand rose unbidden to explore her ruined cheek, examining the achingly slow creep of new flesh growing into the wound. Filling the lesion; slowly consuming the scars. Tender new flesh clothed the previously exposed bone, only thinly as yet, the wound was unquestionably on the mend. Perhaps by plumbing her healing powers, her oath-declared husband had snatched a miracle out of the darkest stronghold of hate and despite, and in so doing had reignited hope’s flame in her heart. Leopard. A dark, beautiful flame of a man wrapped in the innocence of sleep. The power of his Dragon form more than hinted at in the mounded muscles of his shoulders and arms …
Aranya dried the scarred corner of her mouth with a stifled giggle. “Drooling is so unbecoming in a Princess of Immadia.”
With that, she turned to Hualiama’s lore scrolls, and began to read.
Questions swam languidly through her brain like Dragons gliding upon thermals with stately grandeur. Why could she not heal herself, yet the exquisite expression of Ardan’s wish had touched this wound – and no other – with uncanny effect? Why had Hualiama not written about these most profound issues? She spoke neither of the fabled Word of Command, nor of the heritage of Star Dragons. The lore scrolls were silent on that point. Suspiciously silent? Perhaps. Hualiama’s relationship with her birth mother had been one measured in war, overweening greed and ultimately death, as related in the annals of the Dragonfriend. Izariela’s fate was a living death, framed in a darkness of not knowing, of loss yet not-quite-loss. Hers was a life arrested on the cusp of eternity.
Her gnarled fingers cramped painfully upon the scroll, until Aranya feared to tear the vellum. She forced herself to unclench her clawed digits, to roll up the tale of Hualiama’s rescue of Grandion from the lair of Shinzen in the East, and to place the warm scroll within the folds of her night shift. She would read more later.
Rising, she belted the soft turquoise garment purposefully at her waist, and padded barefoot to the arched doorway.
Upon the supplest breath of magic, she departed.
For hours, Aranya roamed the hallways of the Land Dragon behemoth who carried the better part of a nation upon her back. Sore wounded, Yiisuriel would survive. Yet she was elderly for one of her kind, and others of the deepest-dwelling Dragonkind had older memories still, stored in a kind of communal mind archive accessible to all members of their subspecies. Some remembered the days when the terrible paw of Dramagon smote the Island-World with fire and fury; some had even confirmed the legend of Amaryllion Fireborn, the shell brother of Fra’anior who had lived thousands of years beneath Ha’athior Island – her mother’s birthplace!
Enigma within mystery within … life itself.
The Shapeshifter Princess pressed on with her jaw set and her hands clasped behind her back, pleased to examine her readiness for the mission to the Suald-dak-Doon and to find it undaunted, her mettle strengthened by the forges of battle and failure, and her commitment adamantine. The Thoralians would know the measure of her vengeance. They would combust before the purity of a Star Dragoness’ fires. He had made a mistake, infecting her with the Shapeshifter pox yet letting her live, for while she yet drew breath, she would learn and struggle and dance and grow until she found a way to excise his evil from her Island-World!
Grand dreams juxtaposed with grim reality.
At length, Aranya’s footsteps echoed in the tunnel to the surface, to the peak where it was said Hualiama had been Reaved by the Dragon Haters, and had died only to be reborn as a Star Dragoness. Were the scrolls accurate on that point? Or had the fire always burned within her, as it did within her niece? And why a fire distinct from that of all other Dragonkind, a starlight fire that was as unprecedented as it was esoteric?
Dawn had not yet begun to glimmer in the East, where the elusive blue star for which Hualiama was famously named shone in the tales, so Aranya slowly swivelled from that horizon to scan the sweeping, intricate traceries of starlight overhead. Dragons had come from the stars. Perhaps they still existed out there, watching their tiny, distant, unimaginably different cousins sporting and living and warring and dying in an almighty impact crater that, though it scarred the face of their Island-World like her own cratered cheek, must surely appear tinier than any grain of sand to their sight. Somewhere, somehow, in a time before knowing and under deadly threat, the Dragonkind had found no better alternative than to launch their precious egglings across the void between the stars.
Was she such as one of those, shining above? Drawn from one? A precious – well, what did one call the child of a star? Twinkle? Minitwinkle? Aranya giggled quietly as Zip’s dream-sleepy thought filtered up to her awareness. Gleam? Sparkle? Mellow, rippling streams of light poured across incandescent portals, the awakening of dawn. Each drop of starlight infused with life, the verimost essence of her being. A heritage she might never know.
So profound was her yearning, she groaned against her gritted teeth, I wish … how I wish …
A heart wished beyond imagination, for what she did not know.
/O stardrop! Precious … peril …/
Her neck twizzled about so fast, the Immadian Princess tweaked a shoulder muscle. Ouch! Who spoke?
The silence was immense.
At length, Aranya sighed. Disappointment. Her overactive imagination, no doubt, or an echo of these arcane powers swilling about her insides. Sometimes she longed for simplicity and a return to innocence – yet she could never allow that. Too much rested upon her shoulders. She must continue.
Stardrop? What an odd word choice. That wisp of sound had not been any voice she knew. It was definitely a male voice – indistinct, as if emanating from an incalculable distance, and its mysterious inflections were entirely unfamiliar to her ken, yet it triggered a memory of a voice of similar timbre. The accent she recalled had been far closer in every respect to Gangurtharr’s pronounced Wyldaroon burr. When had that been? Neither voice had belonged to Izariela, nor Hualiama. Intriguing! Turning rather more gingerly than before to face the West, Aranya reached out with her Dragon senses on their highest alert. The first voice was mystical, the second, tangible. She had been training in sensory techniques with the Lost Isles Air Breathers the better to detect Thoralian’s nefarious doings, but here was a better application, she wanted to propose. The memory was of a mysterious feminine presence she had … she had once called to out of her Storm! Aye! That was the detail which had eluded her at first.
Excitedly, she reached afar. Westward. Past the Straits and deep into the territory through which she had passed in a welter of trepidation and vengeful focus upon the Thoralians’ doings. There. As she attempted to hone the precise trajectory of her farsight, Aranya sensed part of the immense consciousness of Yiisuriel responding to her instinctively expressed needs. The great Air Breather’s mind was her bulwark, strength and mentor. Wakening immediately, Yiisuriel showed her how not to overreach, how to separate out that elusive psychic scent trace from the myriad fascinations the floating Isles of Herimor had to offer. She bypassed great rafts of sleeping Dragonkind and the profound, redolent life traces left by the unnamed denizens of the deeps, her cognizance awakening to the immense play of life forces across the leagues, their fires like delicate stars glistening in the sable folds of Islands, hidden in cracks and fumaroles and soaring, aye, way above the upper clouds in those ethereal Wisp Dragons, undulating like the most delicate silken cloth of Helyon.
They rippled to the slightest nuances in the aether.
More sensitive than a spiderweb.
Entranced, Aranya observed the play of the delicate, insubstantial threads of their magic. As thin as gossamer, yet as strong as the binding forces of life itself. That was the nature of the sensitivity she required. That presence was coy, apparently not amenable to persuasion. It seemed to shift and morph the more closely she tried to focus upon it. Was this the one she had imagined speaking? Or another voice altogether?
