Aranya Treasury - The Complete Shapeshifter Dragons Series, page 163
Nak would have muttered about smelling a rat – or worse, his own mouldy socks.
That old Dragon Rider was a master of the unpredictable, however. He would have goggled at Iridiana with such flagrant … she paused. Of course!
Aranya breathed, Iridiana, are you there? Mercy, my petal, can you move?
Asturbar, came the whisper. Boots, you must safeguard the Star … The Dragoness’ concern was for her, whom she barely knew! Tears pricked her eyes. This poor girl and her mighty soldier – what had they done to deserve to run into the demented, power-hungry Thoralians in the first flower of their love?
She lay with her right paw outstretched, frozen in the act of reaching out to the Marshal to rescue him from a heavy fall, there at the last, as she had attacked with unbridled power. Black patches on the pair of Thoralians’ hides still smoked from the searing power she had unleashed. Not enough. Barely a foot separated her from Asturbar. While her ear canals were transfixed by the exhibition of cannibalisation, Aranya’s concentration focussed upon the Azingloriax warrior. Scheming. Analysing the odds. There were possibilities as yet left untapped, here. He hid the Jewels in his stomach. Was that how he had stolen them from Chanbar, or perhaps even from this Necromancer?
Ari touch big Boots, Sapphire ordered.
Uh …
Treasure, she declared self-importantly. Treasure got wings on. Flip-flap fun!
Had she been able, she would have dangled her jaw. As it was, Human Aranya, Zip and the Azure Dragoness gasped simultaneously at the import of her words. Could this man have hatched dragonets within his substantial stomach? She spluttered, He’s … really …
Preggie! Like Zippy-Zappy! Full of lovely-lovely babies, like my Zippy.
Oh, darling petal, I could just kiss you, Zip cooed.
Asturbar’s expression at this mental interchange wobbled between astounded, bemused and insulted. He must think her schizophrenic at best; perhaps if her mind had been spitting rainbow-coloured fireballs, he would have been less disturbed.
The soldier growled, Suffering murgalizards, what’s a Zippy-thing?
With a clear mental image of screwing up her tiny muzzle in disgust, the dragonet said, No smoochy Zip. Nice-nice Marshally – Ari hurry!
Asturbar clearly chewed back on a few flavoursome soldierly words and reached for his Dragoness instead. He’ll turn to me next, came the muted, despairing thread of Iridiana’s presence. Strength, Boots. Protect … birth him …
Help the Marshal give birth? She could do that, if only she could touch the man. Summoning her utmost power, Aranya began to scrape her paws across the warm stone floor toward him. Thoralian’s hold was immense, but lacked the absolutely unbreakable structures of a Word of Command. Her paw scraped and shuddered to a halt. Enervated.
An answering quiver from the soldier. Aye, come on, you big lump! Zip carolled. Do it!
Asturbar’s thick fingers resembled muscular caterpillars as they combat-crawled across the stone in response to her tiny, abortive attempt. Aranya smiled at him. Well done, soldier.
He seemed very capable in Dragonish, enough that he enjoyed telepathic communication with his Dragoness. Their bond also spilled into the emotional and cognitive realms, it appeared, for the soldier jerked painfully the instant Iridiana snapped into action in Ardan’s paw, trying to create a diversion to deflect attention from their slight movement toward connection. She sped into that crazed multi-transformation capability she possessed, her rattletrap quasi-draconic assault of lightning-spitting violet eels first unnerving the Shadow Dragon into trying to escape through Shadow space, and then in the instant he reappeared, she smashed him perhaps fifty times in succession in the jaw with what Aranya could only describe as silvery fountain of exploding Dragon paws, before burning his throat and spearing his chest with a spiny … thing. Ardan thundered his fury!
Kill! His talons sieved a pawful of dust. Rend! His jaws closed upon a pyre of flame that sprouted fangs and sliced his lips and tongue in a dozen places as she wriggled free of his bite. Grapple! She fizzed free with a giggle and a reflexive swipe at his snout.
The fingers twitched like a dying fish. Closer.
Azhukazi lay in a convulsing heap before the Thoralians’ paws. Gobbets of fire mixed with golden Dragon blood spurted out of his mouth and gaping chest with every laboured heave of his final death rattles. The incongruity of split Dragon sight speared her sorely. With her left fire eye, she saw the Thoralians sigh with deep satiation as they finished leering over their victim. Now they glanced up with unmistakable scorn to regard the frustrated Shadow Dragon’s antics. To her right flank, Asturbar’s obstinate finger-march continued. Five inches. Four. She forced her quivering paw over a smidgen. Just a touch … more …
The Thoralians sneered, Very well. Shadow, stop playing with the fledgling. Bring me this treasure the Iolite Blue valued so dearly.
Ardan said, I can’t –
You are weak, Shadow. There. She is held.
The Shadow bawled out a horrific laugh as he tried to smash Iridiana between his forepaws. The power he released was a thunderclap of darkness, a terrible detonation exacerbated by his towering anger. Aranya and Asturbar cried out in concert; her reflexive mental counterstrike forced him to partially miss his first attempt, making him look like a juggler comically fumbling a lively lilac baton, but the triplicate’s power swelled and the second blow struck the pretty fledgling far harder, driving her with a bone-jarring impact against the unyielding blockade of Ardan’s chest. She slumped into a strand of indigo-coloured flowers, pouring out between the Shadow Dragon’s talons as he struck a mighty pose that declared the destruction of his enemy. He disdained even to look upon the Iridium Dragoness, but Aranya detected a flicker of life in her uncanny body. Unconscious, but alive.
Flowers? A dracofloral form? This girl was either the greatest master of physical Shapeshifting she had ever encountered, or her fey power was rooted in the forbidden madness of Chaos. Either way, she was not about to allow the Thoralians free rein with her new ally.
Later, she must consult Fra’anior about the conundrum Iridiana represented.
Ardan! Fire eyes ablaze with a majestic, seething fury such as only the Dragonkind could summon, the Shadow Dragon rent the stones with his smoking onyx talons as he returned her gaze. Aranya shuddered at the malice she beheld in his demeanour.
Hurry up! Thoralian hissed. Fetch the Jewels out of his stomach, you fool!
Ardan’s grin was a study in the enigma of draconic ferocity.
Not while I live, she snarled.
The Shadow Dragon roared, AS YOU WISH, STAR DRAGONESS!
She knew his purpose with prescient clarity. She saw the vindictive clouds of Thoralian cognitive-magical calculation that poisoned his mind. Vengeance. Solace. Release! The soul power which he held and rightly feared, now rose to prominence as he curled and sprang like a dark, blurred bolt of lightning across the chamber at her. Yet in the touch of the Marshal’s fingers, she found herself connected to a most unforeseen sensation, the six-fold fires of draconic life embracing this man’s soul. Little ones. Tiny flame hearts possessed of a pearlescent purity she had only ever encountered in a few fragmented scintillas of time, when it seemed that she touched or tasted a hint of the most intimate, searing mysteries of white fires truth.
O precious infinitude of draconic life!
Aranya enveloped the egglings in a flash of brooding, maternal protectiveness, staggered by the wealth of emotion triggered within her breast by this instant of bonding. They imbued the matrix of her existence with intertwined, ethereal threads of nascent eternity.
The Shadow’s impact struck her mortal soul – that was the only word she had to describe the ghastly, distressing sensation – such a crushing blow, it should by rights have torn her verimost essence clean out of whatever hold or link of flesh or mind sustained it. The impact shook her to the core. Distinctly, she felt a frisson of flame ricochet from her paw into Asturbar’s hand, but her battered mind was preoccupied with an image of Ardan, stymied and traumatised, tumbling over her prone form as though he had tripped over an immovable obstacle during a flat-out sprint.
The Thoralians voiced an echoing bugle of disbelief. They must have known the import of that power, savouring the sweet moment when the Shadow must perforce murder his beloved – yet, she lived, and was conscious of the absence of one soul, bereft of its home … Sapphire? No! She could not bear another loss! Sapphire! O darling, where –
Here, giggled Asturbar’s stomach.
Aranya screamed!
Chapter 12: Underestimation Woes
SMOKING of SCALES, bellowing and smarting in ways and places for which he had no words, the Shadow Dragon shakily picked up a paw here and a wing there and tried to work out if everything was still connected as it ought to be. Every magical pathway of his being reverberated as if he were a gong struck by an amethyst paw, yet above all this, the sight of Aranya staring Moons-eyed at the Marshal roused his fires in the ugliest possible way. That was … the longer he stared, the more pyretic the darkest expression of draconic hubris-jealousy trembled every magical pathway of his being, burning like the exquisite application of a neurotoxin. Mine. MINE!
He cracked open his jaw, only to have it clacked shut for him. An unknowable force dragged him backward around the chamber. His talons gouged trenches in the granite, generating notes of shrill, stabbing protest. Next, a maelstrom of Dragoness-flavoured insanity fizzed past his eyes in a ludicrous, frothing blend of mauve, windswept bubbles and the flapping, tangled wings, limbs and tails of Fra’anior alone knew how many Thoralians, Gangs, bleeding corpses and blue-hued Shapeshifters. He himself was slung about by his tail as though he were a dishrag of insignificant heft, completely at the mercy of this bamboozling phenomenon, which trout-slapped his head against a wall here and casually demolished a catapult there. Any engineer possessed of half a brain must long since have fled to safety. Ardan’s aggrieved bellows emerged from lips mashed against the stone floor as he was dragged three hundred feet backward at such high speed that sparks skittered off his scales, and then his sensitive underparts smashed into a staircase. End of staircase. Reason eclipsed in blinding pain.
The Shadow collapsed in a pile of debris, stunned, trying to work out what had just hit him.
All he could think was that he had occasionally considered Aranya to be illogical or downright contrarian, but she was always, ultimately, focussed upon her goals. This was epic madness on a different scale.
Then, his debris-obstructed view of an Island-World’s reality blasted to pieces took another turn for the worse as an avalanche of Dragonflesh arrived in the chamber. Untold tonnes landed in a corpulent, quivering heap not ten feet from his nose and started splintering a solid granite floor with bone hammers the size of Dragonships.
He blenched. Azhukazi’s creation!
Ardan had never been gladder to be tucked out of harm’s way. Now, what was Aranya – she had her talons buried in the Marshal’s belly!
His neck twizzled again as a brain-frazzling stench assaulted his nostrils. The two Thoralians, one limping heavily from his earlier pasting by the Gladiator Dragon, reversed course ahead of a thumping monster of a woodpile – a perfect mountain of pretty, mauve-coloured wood that appeared to have the consistency of draconic scales and out-bulked Genholme, he estimated – and the fully-grown Dragons were shaking their muzzles and mewling like distressed newborns as the wood Dragon sprayed them with a kaleidoscopic scent barrage. That gorgeous iridium sheen. It had to be Iridiana, but how by all that was holy was she producing pseudo-draconic forms that boasted such incredible accuracy, presence and power? Her pugnacious stench hit him full force now. Immediately it seemed to him that the stink set about quarrying sizzling acid holes inside his sensitive nostrils, stinging with such raw aggression that Ardan leaped to his paws, clawing at his own muzzle in a welter of torture that out-screamed even his throbbing, bruised male parts. Flaming talons! Eye-watering pain! Ugh, he wanted to vomit …
His reflexive battle challenge emerged as a shocked squeak, however, when he saw what had just happened to Asturbar. Ri’arion sat behind him, supporting the big man as Aranya delicately extracted something living from a deep incision across his abdomen.
A dragonet!
Man birth? Never mind the end of sanity! Ardan feared the world was about to crash down around his ear canals.
* * * *
Stuck somewhere inside Asturbar’s stomach, Sapphire was being her usual sassy, rambunctious self. Aranya shook her muzzle. Playing midwife to dragonets plus her tiny dragonet friend amidst a battle with the Thoralians? She had thought Ardan singing her free of a Word of Command was zany. This beggared belief.
“Pucker up, big boy,” her inner Zuziana provoked Asturbar, drawing a double-take from the beleaguered soldier. With talons buried within his belly, snipping his guts apart, the man had reason for his confusion. “It’ll only hurt for a second. Aranya’s very, very good at –”
Time to see the world, Sapphire burbled enthusiastically, evidently more than prepared to play shell mother to these tiny, blood-streaked white dragonets. Come, my lovely brood. Let’s clear this cesspit of nastiness –
Insolent pest! snorted Asturbar.
That’s me, Sapphire chirped back. Your bowels are no warren, soldier. They’re foetid and uncomfortable.
My pleasure to return life to you, Sapphire, he replied.
Oh … spluttered the sapphire dragonet.
Rightly, that tempered the mite’s cheek. Aranya was nonetheless shocked. Had he so clearly understood the miraculous transfer, identifying Sapphire’s origin as within her being? Astute! As for Sapphire, she had apparently re-embodied full of every grain of her former vim and vivaciousness, because the dragonet was calming the clawing hatchlings now and helping them escape through the incision. Blue paws even passed them out! Now, there was a sight.
The dragonets were white at first glance, blood-streaked from their journey out of Asturbar’s stomach, but she noticed their scales evinced a delicate translucency that hinted at the subtle chrysoprase colours she had once or twice observed when exploring one of Immadia’s permanent glaciers. What would their powers be, she wondered? As the fourth evacuee emerged, the tiny dragonets gathered together into a tight-knit group as though seeking the warmth and security of a warren, and began to lick and groom each other. The fourth was a couple of inches larger than the others, an achingly slender mite barely one foot across the wingtips, but he already displayed the awareness and capability that the Dragonkind enjoyed from the instant they broke the shell.
Sapphire squeezed out now! Aranya could not speak for the infernos of love igniting her being.
Embodied!
The Marshal blurted out, “Oh, she’s so cute!”
The shameless queen of dragonet-ish drama instantly began her familiar preening routine, addressing the Marshal with a coquettish whirl of her fire eyes. I’m starting to like you too, man-mommy … oh, Aranyi! I missed you!
You’re alive, my darling! wheezed the Star. Oh mercy, thought you were gone forever … and now such hope ignites my Dragoness’ hearts …
WILL YOU KINDLY HELP US? Gangurtharr thundered.
Oh! She had been responding automatically to this unfolding drama, but Dragoness Aranya now realised that her Human and both Zuzianas had meantime been taking care of matters battle-oriented. The conflict was heading into the abyss at pace, Beran would have said. As the triplicate drew untold power from the Egg, her Humansoul continued to interfere, blockading and shielding to the best of her waning ability, but the Thoralians’ strength grew apace even as she grew weaker. It was impossible to replenish one’s resources as rapidly as these successive battles demanded – even the Thoralians knew this, and were forced to support each other, constantly bellowing orders at the Shadow Dragon as if he had no mind of his own. She thought she saw darkness moving beyond the toad-beast’s immense paws. In a moment they would have another problem of the nature of Ardan, for she knew she could block him no longer. The filled-in shield had been fragmented in the fray, and now Azhukazi’s creature impeded its implementation still further.
How would the Dragonfriend have solved this problem?
Dance? Be quick! Yet she could not tear herself away from the drama unfolding around Asturbar, not for all her vaunted prowess at dividing her attention between many tasks at once. High sentiment held her in the present, and in that moment of unalloyed focus upon her friend’s renewed life, she discovered the beauty of a miracle unfolding before her entranced eyes. Its beauty soaked into her soul, slaking her cry for purpose, for restoration, for healing.
Her Humansoul carolled, Sapphire reincarnate!
One soul, one Shapeshifter, two living entities. How was that phenomenon even possible? How Aranya yearned for greater insight into these precious mysteries.
The Amethyst Dragoness gasped, Sapphire, you embodied! And Zuzi –
Still inside, girlfriend, her friend responded with the sensation of a paw-slap of encouragement. Time to go finish that job we started back in Sylakia.
Aye.
Dig deep. Her first dance step was to taste and know the adamantine purpose which had brought her this far. As she found her paws, Aranya focussed passionately upon the powers which seemed to have come last to her, but represented the most quintessential fires of her soul. Injured, battered, frustrated, marred – a Star must still shine. That was her ultimate purpose; one she had been wont to abnegate because her self-belief had been so sorely tested, Aranya realised now. She was trying to accomplish everything in her own strength, by rational endeavour, when the dance should be as simple as child’s play and as profound as the mysteries of star life.
She might not possess the resources, but she knew one who did.
One who, despite her fey and unconventional nature, might just be persuaded to annoy the Thoralians to death. Literally, her Dragoness laughed, even while her Humansoul clucked her tongue in faux annoyance at the dreadful pun.
