Aranya Treasury - The Complete Shapeshifter Dragons Series, page 203
With the help of the children, Beran set the great gong ringing with great gusto. He passed the hammer to Aranya for the seventh blow. That was the one that choked her up properly. It really was finished, wasn’t it? What did an Amethyst Dragoness do when she was not flying to war? Or repairing Moons? There were so many new questions to face. So many unknowns.
Aranya set down the hammer. “Friends, it is finished.”
* * * *
When a King returned home, a kafuffle was sure to follow. Having a King return with an Ancient Dragoness in tow brought his entire kingdom to a flabbergasted standstill. Aranya was sure Zankaradia rather enjoyed the impression she created as she delicately tiptoed – courtesy of Ri’arion’s handiwork with kinetic energies to ensure that she did not destroy roads, fields and forests in passing – up to a frozen city that she dwarfed. Settling her coils over perhaps twenty-five fallow fields that Beran indicated to the west of the city, she propped her muzzle upon her gleaming flank, and peered avidly over the crenelated battlements at all the goings-on below her. Squawking, panicking terhals. Exclaiming and pointing people. A couple of trader Dragonships heading out to the villages behind the mountains. Smoke rising gently from chimneys as people rose for the day, and then completely forgot about a warm breakfast as they rushed into the snowbound streets first to gape at a Dragoness bigger than their entire city, and then to cheer for their victorious King.
As he walked unhurriedly through the streets, Beran paused many times to offer pithy explanations. “Aye, the Thoralians are dead.” “Aye, we conquered.” “Aye, Aranya has returned victorious from the South.” “Those lights you saw a few weeks ago, that was the Star Dragonesses fighting Thoralian. The Mystic Moon will heal, aye. It’s only a temporary problem.” “The Corundum Red Dragoness is our ally; she is called Zankaradia.” “You are all safe. There is nothing to fear.” “These are the finest warriors from around the Island-World …”
Eventually, they reached the Palace. Pausing in the doorway, Beran said, “Welcome home, my lovely wife, and all my children.”
“Ooh, heated floors!” cried Pip, kicking off her shoes as fast as she could. “Somebody shut that door and bolt it until springtime. I’m a – what do you call those shiny hanging things?”
“Icicle,” said Silha.
Zip prodded Iridiana in the ribs. “Not half as rustic as you thought, Nyahi?”
Asturbar gazed about curiously. “Iridiana says it’s missing a few rubies.”
“I did not,” Nyahi protested, but she too was rubbing her nose. “This must be twice as cold as the Kahilate. It’s … cosy. I like your palace, uh, Dad.”
Beran’s quirky smile made her blush instantly. “Dad’s the word!”
That probably helped re-warm her extremities, Aranya decided, once more amazed at how different a twin could be.
The walls were thick and in the wintertime, additional crysglass panels were fitted treble thick against the cold, but the interior of the Palace and indeed, many homes in the city, were kept warm by water piped from thermal springs just south of the city’s main gate. Aranya supposed that in comparison to Yazê-a-Kûz, it was a homely sort of palace rather than being ostentatious, but she loved it, and judging by the delight sparkling in Iridiana’s eyes and Asturbar’s contented sigh, her friends and sisters would too. The pictures lining the walls were familiar, the servants’ faces glad, and it even smelled just right.
Silha immediately bustled away, calling gladly to the servants and soldiers as she started to make the necessary arrangements, but Beran turned to Aranya. He made a shooing gesture. “Go ahead, Sparky. All this arriving nonsense can wait.”
She sprinted to her mother’s tomb.
* * * *
Ardan found Aranya with the help of King Beran’s discreet directions. The tomb lay behind the Palace in the formal gardens that abutted the city’s rear wall, which stood hard up against the mountains that appeared from this perspective to launch into the sky. He had seen many views in his travels, but this was one he knew his warrior heart would not easily grow used to.
After a brief glance, he ducked into the tomb’s low entrance.
Here, many generations of Immadian royalty had been interred in grottos carved into the sides of underground tunnels. The very low temperatures combined with unique mineral deposits seeping from the walls and roof combined to preserve the remains with extraordinary fidelity, even though the features or clothing were difficult to pick out beneath the calcifying layers of – well, he wanted to call it crystal, but he was not certain. He walked quickly into the darkness, following Beran’s instructions, toward the more recent remains. Soon he saw a pool of light.
Aranya half-turned, gratitude registering on her face. “Ardan. You came.”
“Of course.”
Aranya’s mother was not originally Immadian, but Ha’athiorian. She rested in a side tunnel in a carved grotto at his chest height, so that by the merest dip of his head, he could gaze upon this woman who had so long preoccupied his beloved Amethyst Dragoness’ thoughts, hopes and dreams.
She was beauty, distorted. Izariela lay upon her back with one hand folded upon her breast in a queenly pose that would have done no poem shame. Her multi-coloured hair lay in petrified waves all about her, as long as Aranya’s and just as lush. But behind her body, indeed, all the right half of her body, was arrested in a grotesque partial transformation. The beginnings of wing struts protruded from her outflung arm, her right leg was misshapen, and her skull had begun to display skull spikes. Her right eye was twice as large as the left, while white-silver scales gently dusted much of her skin.
Izariela was encased in this strange crystalline substance, as though preserved for a museum display. He shivered involuntarily.
Aranya’s hand sought his. “O Ardan, would you …”
“Of course, petal.”
Sending forth his Shadow power, Ardan searched Izariela’s mortal flesh for signs of life.
Almost immediately, he said, “Aye. Aye, Aranya … here, meld with me and sense what I sense. This is her fire life, see?”
“So … sluggish. And abnormal.”
“That’s the signature of the toxins, similar to an Imbalance,” he replied, unable to restrain a rising lilt in his voice as he exclaimed, “Izariela’s alive – oh, Aranya!”
She clasped him fiercely, dabbing ineffectually at the corners of her eyes. “I … I just can’t believe …”
“Softly now, my beloved. There is much work to do. We need to memorise every aspect of her inner and outer appearance, and every effect we can detect, so that we can provide Fra’anior with the fullest possible picture of her condition. Even then the act of reviving her will be fraught with peril – yet I say, Fra’anior speed that day!”
“Aye,” said Ri’arion, from just behind them, holding up a lantern to illuminate the couple. “What can I do?”
* * * *
After a week of gradually melting the crystal encasement, they painstakingly transferred Izariela’s body to a bed in her old chambers. There had been four separate consultations with Fra’anior to try to hammer out the least risky way of attempting what promised to be a fraught, hazardous operation. Even the Great Onyx had been filled with doubt about his proposal.
“Ready?” said Aranya.
Gathered around the White Shapeshifter’s bed, Ardan, Ri’arion, Pip, Iridiana, Asturbar and Silver all nodded.
Zuziana palmed a small vial of tears. “Ready.”
They laid hands upon Izariela.
Shuttering her eyes, Pip drew in a deep breath. O soul of Izariela, o fire life of Fra’anior, o daughter of Istariela, ARISE!!
Izariela’s body quivered.
Simultaneously, the Shapeshifters joined their powers and dived into their work. Silver soothed her mind. Ri’arion and Aranya traced the toxins and effects in her flesh and magic, for as slowly as stalactites growing in a cavern, Izariela’s life and magic began to gather pace. Her limbs writhed. The half-formed bones slithered in and out in ghastly semi-formed Shapeshifter transformations, knocking Iridiana to the floor and smashing Ardan in the stomach.
Her magic’s attacking itself, Ri’arion cried. Shadow!
He grabbed her leg bone – or was that her hind paw – as it smashed against the ceiling, but Ardan was no longer present. Linked with Iridiana, he seared through her flesh and took into himself every malefic influence or substance that he could find, both in her Shapeshifter spirit-form and in her Human body. It was a fight. Izariela resisted. The poisons were a complex cocktail of lethality. Chaos shifted through and around him, battling the poisons on too many levels to count, while Silver tried to hold her near-feral psyche away from the edge of madness with delicate inflexibility.
Aranya poured healing power into her mother. Izariela. Izariela, it’s me, Aranya!
UNNNHH … HURTS!!
Her left forepaw clouted Pip across the room. A swinging Dragoness’ thigh bone smacked open a cut upon Asturbar’s unbreakable cranium.
NOOOO …
Blood and bone exploded from her abdomen, but Iridiana somehow gathered it all up and shovelled it back inside faster even than the Shapeshifter’s transformation could tear itself apart. Wing bones ripped out of her shoulders. Spikes shattered the bed slats. They disappeared again.
Aranya screamed, “Mother!”
Izariela’s body twisted horrifically and arched backward to an impossible angle; bones snapped with sharp retorts. The group brawled with her uncontrollable body parts for several long minutes before suddenly, everything soothed and settled down.
This was their chance.
Ardan and Asturbar gripped her outflung limbs and flung their fullest strength into holding Izariela taut.
Zip! Iridiana cried.
Zuziana squeezed the vial hard, spraying the shattered body with Aranya’s tears, before her best friend threw herself bodily atop her mother and shouted, BE HEALED!!
The room rocked to a brutal detonation of magic. Ri’arion managed to stay the ceiling’s collapse, but a wall blew out, bringing a gust of frigid air and a flurry of snow into the room. Izariela sat bolt upright, her face set in a rictus of agony as though she meant to scream, but had forgotten how to.
Then, her violet-blue eyes fluttered open to alight upon Aranya, who had been thrust onto her mother’s knees.
Puzzled.
Hopeful?
Outraged!
Izariela Dragoness-thundered, WHO BLIGHTED MINE DAUGHTER THUS?
Healing power mingled somehow with the intense agony of Iridiana’s signature iridium-flare magic, discharged in a blinding paroxysm against Aranya’s torso. She screamed as the whiteness roared over her and through her. It seemed she soared over strange billows as in that first experience of flying as a Dragoness. Dreamlike. Faraway. Knowing that she landed in the snow outside the palace building, but not feeling the cold.
Not feeling anything at all.
* * * *
Aranya woke languidly. Thoughts seemed to idle mutely in her mind like trout lazing in a terrace lake at the height of summer. Her nose wrinkled. A thread of cotton tickled unbearably. Something tugged at her wrist as she attempted to scratch the spot. She tugged again. “Hrrr?”
“Petal.”
A hand soothed her fevered forehead.
A hand she had dreamed about too many times to count.
Fingers stroked her forehead in a way that to a person starved for most of her life for such a touch, screamed, ‘Mother!’
She had to be dreaming.
The dream, however, supplied a cooling cloth for her sweating forehead. It added Zuziana’s concerned voice that murmured in a language that seemed to make no sense. Motherly tones replied gently. Her senses swam. Too many herbs to process, each scent as lucid as crystal, in total contrast to the pile of prekki-fruit mush that was her brain. Fresh linens. Astringent antiseptics. Perfume? Was that dorlis flower perfume?
Who did she knew that wore that perfume?
Her bedclothes itched worse than an attack of fire-ants. Again she tried to move, but the voices burbled like an unseen stream trying to tell her watery secrets. She was tied down!
Aranya moaned, “Hurgh – arg – what?”
Finally! Speech that actually made sense. Whose captive was she? Mercy, these bedclothes! This prickling alone would kill her. In desperation, Aranya tried to scratch herself with her foot, and that was a very, very bad idea indeed. She collapsed in a perspiring, gasping, enervated heap. Why so weak? This was ridiculous! Why could she not … see? Or even hear properly? Was there padding over her ears? Great Islands, these captors were devious!
Surely Thoralian had not returned in some other form to plague her?
“Aranya, petal,” Izariela whispered over her. “Be at peace.”
“This is murder!” she growled.
Izariela?
“Ah … Mom? No. Is that truly –”
“And Princess Stuporously Snores-a-lot is awake at last,” Zuziana snorted with typical Remoyan lack of tact.
How could she begin to believe? Yet her pulse danced.
Long-cherished laughter bubbled over her. “Aye, petal. I am Izariela. You are safe, my precious child – well, all my memories insist that you are still my little girl, yet you are a woman grown – but Aranya, you mustn’t move, or scratch, or anything. The healing is as yet at too delicate a stage.”
“Healing?”
Her thoughts seemed muzzled, unable to nibble at any implications.
“Healing, petal. You are healing.” Someone nearby stifled a sob. “As am I, slowly. You are healing all over.” Fingers gripped hers, tightly enough to hurt. No dream? Head and heart, however, simply refused to operate in tandem. “You are in Immadia’s Palace. I am seated in a wheelchair at your bedside. They aren’t sure if I’ll ever walk again. But you … Aranya, it appears you will be fully restored. Nobody’s even quite sure what happened, are they, Zuziana?”
“Something involving crazed Shapeshifter powers, tears, your healing and an iridium flare –” Zuziana’s breath snagged in a way that Aranya knew she was weeping “– and it burned, petal – it burned the scars right off of you. And out of you.”
She heard the words. All her brain could think was, ‘huh?’
Purified? Had she passed through the crucible of Iridiana’s forge-fires, and returned whole? Impossible!
Izariela explained, “That’s why you’re so weak. Your natural healing power is working twenty-seven hours a day to fix … well, everything, as best I can tell.”
“Your Mom’s healing gift is as yet, very weak,” Zip added. For the record, petal, she doesn’t know about Iridiana as yet. We judged her heart too weak to handle the shock. Not until you returned from your coma … it’s been five days, Aranya! We were terrified.
She was numb. Unspeaking.
“Say something, petal,” her mother urged. “Aren’t you happy?”
Someone was making a very strange noise. After a moment, Aranya realised it was her, and they thought she was choking. People were shouting, rustling, checking what she belatedly realised were bandages covering most of her body. She wanted to wave them off, but that was pointless, wasn’t it? She would rather die than wake to her old reality. Maybe this was just too foolish, and far too fragile, to be a dream. Maybe this was the new …
Aranya slumped upon her pillow-roll, and began to laugh.
“Alright, she’s now leaped gaily off the Isle of Sanity,” Zip said acidly.
“Petal?” For a convalescent, Izariela had a grip worthy of her Dragoness’ nature.
She laughed so hard her stomach began to cramp, and that hurt so badly that tears flowed and soaked her eye bandages.
Mother. Thou, Izariela!
Aranya’s whole heart was in those simple words; the nuances of her Dragonish far exceeding in intricacy and intimacy and affection any words she had spoken in her life to date.
Tranquillity settled upon the room.
Thou, Aranya … o thou! Izariela sobbed in exultation.
Aranya rasped, “Take off these bandages. I want – I need – to see my mother.”
Under cover of a doctor arriving to see to the bandages and familiar voices outside the door conversing in low ‘don’t disturb the sick’ voices, Aranya communicated quickly with Zip. No, Iridiana had not revealed herself. She had insisted upon waiting for her twin. Aye, Izariela was weak. Aye, Ardan was charging through the Palace scattering servants to the winds as they spoke. Overexcitement ruled, but her friends were tiptoeing about her bed – and how under the heavens had Iridiana managed to keep her secret from their mother for five whole days without spontaneously combusting … ah, that would be, resuming her Human form?
Chaotically speaking.
Forty endless seconds or so later, she saw fuzzy blobs moving about a blurry space.
Perfect. Aranya cleared her throat. “Ah, so, exactly how much did you burn out of me, Iridiana?” And how in Fra’anior’s name do we break the news of you to our mother? Any clever plans, Nyahi?
Uh … not so much, her twin admitted.
You’re a rotten big sister, leaving me to do all the work.
Listen, you ingrate, who exactly do you think carved up Thoralian for you? That’s right! Me. That sore wrist you’re feeling there? That’s battle fatigue –
Aranya had to chuckle. Alright, you win already. I’m in no state to even start an argument with you.
A dragonet’s paw stroked her foot gently. When did you become such a pushover? I’m deeply suspicious of your motives at this point.
This is my apology for worrying the Chaos out of you for five days.
Her eyes were not the best. They watered badly as she blinked fast, then slow, and the scene faded from unfocussed to severely unfocussed and back again. All she could tell was that someone with identical hair was sitting next to her, and the brown blob wearing a teal dress was Zuziana, and now the dark thing elbowing his way through the crowded doorway was Ardan.
Then, she found a trickle of healing stealing up her spine. Hers? Or Izariela’s? The warmth flooded into her face. Her eyes at last focussed, shifting from Ardan’s agog face – ‘I love you’ she mouthed to him – to her mother’s anxious expression.
