Liquid Fire (43 page)

The skull and thighbone were her mortar and pestle.
Yuk.
I turned away as the noise of grinding filled the cabin, unsure why that left me so unsettled. It was touching, in a way, and probably magic of great potency. Arcturus, Zinaga, and I all sat around the Grinder’s hearth.

“Never met him,” Arcturus said, “but his student initiated me. Good man.”

“Charming,” I said. “What is this initiation going to involve?”

“We are going to give you the Skindancer Gift,” Zinaga said.

“But first,” Arcturus said, “we’re going to let you in on the Skindancer Secret.”

———

“Before the first life,” the Grinder said, “before the first death, there was the first
fire.
”

45. Born in Flame

In the gloom of her cabin, the Grinder flicked the contents of the skull toward the fire. Glittering powder sparkled out, the fire flared . . . and then the air above it grew dark, though still sparkling, like a night sky full of stars. Slowly, I realized the pinpricks
were
stars.

“A view of space?” I asked. Then the view expanded, moving in upon a star that grew into a sun,
the
Sun, with outsized planets curling around it in elaborate crystal tracks. My brow furrowed. “Scale’s off. So . . . a magical planetarium, showing me what you want me to see?”

“You think,” Arcturus began, “that
only
scientists know
anything—
”

“Be silent,” the Grinder said. “Yes, Dakota, the Eye of Truth only shows what you would call a reconstruction. But is a ‘scientific’ reconstruction is better because you’ve seen it on TV? They’re just special effects, cobbled together by thieves and liars and fools.”

My skin prickled. A whispered voice said this was . . .
true but inaccurate—broad brush.
But still, something raised the hackles of the Dragon on my skin, and soon I nailed it—the Grinder had called people who worked in television fools, and
I
was now in that category. And Alex—

“I’ll give you thieves and liars. But I’m working to change the fools on TV part.”

“My point is, the Eye of Truth is not half-truths tarted up with a little flash,” the Grinder said, tossing another pinch of powder at the fire, apparently not seeing the irony as the magic made her own image flare. “Like false color images of planets from NASA, magical lore seen with the Eye of Truth is a
view
of truth
as we know it
. As we learn more, the view expands.”

“This lore isn’t that different from science after all,” I said. “Tell me the story.”

“You were probably taught the Sun formed first and all the planets grew around it,” the Grinder said, waving her hand. The planets whirled backward, blurring into a glowing, knotted red cloud. “The opposite is true. The Earth and its sister were ancient,
ancient
bodies—”

“The Earth . . . and its
sister,
” I said. I
knew
this, and not just from the cryptic murmured assent of the magical dragon on my back. I knew it from a more prosaic source—a cover story in
New Scientist
. “You mean the planet that stalked the Earth . . .
Theia.
”

“Yes,” the Grinder said. “Greeks told muddled tales of the titans Theia and Hyperion, the parents of Helios, the Sun. They were not far off. The proto-Earth and the body scientists call Theia are the nucleus around which the solar system formed. The Sun is an Earth-child.”

The image ran backward further, stars spinning, the cloud expanding, evaporating, leaving two tiny planets sailing alone through the dark. The Grinder released her hand, and the stars moved forward again, the icy twin worlds dancing around each other in the night.

I felt my forehead furrow. “How did that work—”

“Theia and Hyperion traveled long in the dark. Perhaps they were orphaned in the death of another star; perhaps they date back to the origin of the universe. No one knows—because of the First Cataclysm. When they fell into the Cloud, its dust stripped them to their bones.”

Abruptly, a glowing gold column swam up at Theia and Hyperion. They impacted in a flare of light and a growing shock wave, the ice boiling off their surface, streaming away like planet-sized comets as they slowly came to rest . . . and the gas began to collapse on them.

“Theia and Hyperion were the nucleus of the solar system,” the Grinder said. “In that sense, we owe them everything: the light, the water, the very core of our world. But we do not know our parents. Whatever they were like before the First Cataclysm is all but lost to us.”

“But not completely lost, or how would we know what we know?” I said, with a little smirk—then my eyes widened. “My God. Not all lost. There are traces. What kind of traces? Was there a civilization on Theia? Were there . . . artifacts?”

The Grinder grimaced and cocked her head, not precisely a no.

“Unclear,” she said, nodding at her column of smoke and its magic images. The cloud was reknotting again, its central core thickening, thick sweeps forming in inner and outer orbits. “But what is more important is that, before their child killed them, it gave them new life.”

The Sun lit up in the center of the cloud. It boiled away the gas at its core, leaving arcs of pebbles that coalesced into Mercury, into Venus, and, farther out, into Mars. But in the orbit of the Earth . . . Theia and Hyperion danced around each other, covered with oceans of fire.

“I . . . know this,” I said hesitantly. “From geology . . . this is the
Hadean
era?”

“When stones fell like rain,” the Grinder said softly. “The ground flowed like water, glowed like sunset. But Theia and Hyperion had already cleared their orbits. Their skies calmed. Rock cooled, froze, floated like pack ice. And under that dim new Sun, life began again.”

In the cracked rock of a broken continent, under the looming red moon Theia, the caldera of a volcano swelled in a heaving mass. The veined red surface bulged outward like an egg—then burst, birthing a burning creature with teeth of stone, scales of steel and wings of fire.

“Oh my God,” I said, shifting in my seat. “Dragons are . . .
Hadean
life.”

“Life, born in fire, powered by
magic
,” the Grinder said. “Perhaps jump-started by the remnants of what came before; perhaps not. We do not know. We
do
know Dray’yan life ruled for an eon. Longer than the dinosaurs, the flame-beasts basked under the young Sun.”

“On their twin worlds,” I said, “doomed by the very star they created.”

“Why doomed?” Zinaga asked. “
I’ve
heard the story, but how did you just
know?
”

“College physics,” the Grinder said, tilting her head. “Explain it to them.”

“Things need speed to stay in orbit,” I said. “Theia and Hyperion were doomed as soon as they hit the cloud. It stole their velocity, made them fall toward each other. Even if they didn’t impact right away, the Sun would eventually jostle them into each other.”

“It’s the three body problem,” the Grinder said. “It isn’t stable.”

I glanced at her. The Grinder
also
had training in science before she joined the Guild.

“Life as we know it began beneath the feet of the fire beasts,” the Grinder said. “As the worlds cooled, Vai’ia and Ni’iva began to flourish in the embers of Dray’ya—”

“Vai’ia? Ni’iva?” I shook my head. “I keep hearing those words, but I don’t understand them. I don’t care whether you think of them as midichloreans or the living Force or whatever, I always just thought that stuff was woo-hooery. Now you’re telling me all of this is real.”

“Vai’ia is the spirit of
life,
” Arcturus said. “Of the first life that formed on Earth—”

“A layer of bacteria, born in the cooling crust of proto
-
Earth,” Zinaga said, and Arcturus scowled. “Living in the coals of Dray’yan life, but not consuming that life—thriving in the embers, living off magic. The first—what’s the word you used, Grinder, auto—”

“Autotrophs,” I said. The Grinder was twisting her staff, showing me a layer of sparkling moss beneath the feet of dragons, like a bed of pearls. “Life that feeds itself given a source of energy. And Ni’ivan . . . let me guess. The first heterotrophs, the first life eating other life.”

“The first death,” Zinaga said. Among the jeweled moss, mushrooms began growing—strange, glowing and fantastic, some as large as mountains. “At first, magical fungi which ate the decay of other life forms and turned it into more life. Later, it became more aggressive.”

“On both worlds, I take it,” I said. In the magic window into the Grinder’s supposed past, rocks hurled into space by impact on one world landed on the other . . . then flowered into green moss and silver threads. “So that’s not why you have a third word. Vai’ian and Ni’ivan are fancy words for autotrophs and heterotrophs, defined by their source of energy. Vai’ian draws energy from the environment, Ni’ivan from other life, so logically, Dray’yan life would be . . . life that provides its own source of energy?” Then all the pieces clicked. “Life built on liquid fire.”

“Precisely,” the Grinder said, smiling in triumph. “Life that is its
own
source. Life that is more than just fuel for magic, but feeds on it, consuming only the tiniest fraction of real matter in the cycle. A nearly infinite, practically endless source of magical power.”

“There’s no way forms of life based on that would ever fall to predators or disease,” I said. “You said the First Cataclysm. I’ve already guessed there was a Second, when Theia finally impacted Hyperion. Did that kill off the dragons?”

“No,” the Grinder said, twisting her staff. Theia impacted Hyperion, shattering both worlds. A ring of silvery material formed, then coalesced into the young moon, but on the newly formed Earth, new dragons were born in calderas. “It was the cooling that killed them.”

As the new Moon cooled, it glowed with a shimmering silvery light. But the new Earth just cooled and cracked as the red seas of lava faded. Impacts ceased, volcanoes became rare, and the great flame beasts began dying, falling and crumbling to dust, one by one.

“Even the fire that seems to burn forever may one day go out,” the Grinder said. “As the surface grew cool, Dray’yan life retreated underground. Vai’ia and Ni’iva followed, digging into the mantle, a thick layer of life woven through with silver threads of death.”

“I know the next part of the story. As magic died, non-magical life flourished on the surface . . . and Vai’ia and Ni’iva
infected
it,” I said, steepling my hands. Beneath the dark crust, green and silver threads warred, then reached up, twisting life. “Making werekin and vamps.”

“And drakes are the same kind of thing,” Zinaga said. “Magically infected creatures—”

“So this
is
the Saurian Drake hypothesis,” I said, and the Grinder grinned. “Dragons in the fossil record are just infected dinosaurs, mutated by dragon organelles. There
are
no real dragons—none, at least, in recorded history. Or even in the fossil record—”

“Oh, they’re in history
and
the fossil record,” the Grinder said. I stared at her. I’d been a chemist, Arcturus an anthropologist; I was becoming convinced
she’d
been a paleontologist. “And I’m willing to bet, as sharp as you are, you’ve already guessed where.”

“No,” I said. “You’re talking about things the size of mountains stomping over the Earth before the days we’ve even got fossilized
pond scum
. If creatures that powerful, that vast, had survived for any length of time, we’d notice. There’d be traces—”

“Mass extinctions,” the Grinder said.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” I said, crossing myself.

“What killed the dinosaurs?” the Grinder said. “Not mammals nibbling their eggs, I’ll tell you that. Did they teach you giant impacts? Volcanic eruptions? Let me tell you how the most successful mortal creatures in history died, Dakota—there was a
hatching
.”

“No,” I said
 . . .
but from the thing on my back, I felt,
this is truth.

“The last one in recorded history was . . . Krakatau, perhaps?” the Grinder said. “Pompeii, almost certainly. Mount Saint Helens . . . may have been a failed one.”

“Erupting volcanoes are dragons hatching?” I said.

“Not
every
volcano,” she said. “But
any
volcano. A hotspot might be mating sign. A magma pool could nurture an egg. And even if there was none of that . . . a hatching would definitely cause a volcanic eruption. Even if it failed—”

“Please stop this,” Arcturus said sharply, and the Grinder fell silent. “You’re getting into the rationalist weeds. Magical power is derived from the spirit, not organelles or eruptions. The Skindancer Secret is that there are three sources, not two: Vai’ia, Ni’iva, and Dray’ya. If you rationalize things too much, you miss the energy, the meaning, the wholeness—”

“I
think
I understand you . . . but do you really think anything she’s said is wrong?” I said. “Either from a perspective of skindancer lore, or from our scientific interpretations? Because I gotta tell you, I found her little magical Powerpoint pretty damn convincing—”

“No, she’s not wrong,” Arcturus said, frowning. “Dakota . . . I’m sorry.”