Shadow Dragon (45 page)

Aranya wheeled around to his port flank too rapidly for the larger Dragon to follow. She peppered Thoralian with shots, but even her blue-hot fireballs steamed off his hide without causing any apparent harm. What? Was that a power of ice? Of course, she realised–water or ice being the quencher of fire, she was expending her power in a fruitless exercise. Aranya hunted for a weakness as the Yellow-White Dragon stalked her, wearing her down with attack after attack. Thoralian had responded in fear to her Star power before, being quick to throw her off balance with images of physical hideousness. She knew that her once-adamantine confidence had been shattered; the new Aranya was a more fragile being by far. If only she could be as Oyda, refined by suffering, conversely the stronger for it. How did anyone draw strength from brokenness?

Self-belief was not enough. It was an illusion, though a powerful one. This insight filled her with an unaccustomed stillness. What she needed was a simple, courageous decision. Make it so. All else could follow, if she simply decided. Reality could shape her belief, just as belief in her brokenness continued to shape her reality.

Thoralian harassed her, just a hundred feet separating the two Dragons as they circled over the sinkhole.

Unleashing her storm-powered Dragon challenge, Aranya charged.

Staggered by the sound, or perhaps by a Dragoness less than a third of his size choosing to challenge him in head-to-head combat, Thoralian was slow to respond. Aranya skated over his rising bite and lashed out with her hind claws, slicing open the flight muscle atop his left shoulder and taking a long, trailing strip of his wing with her.

The Amethyst Dragon reversed direction rapidly, waving the flap of wing-membrane as her trophy.
If it has to be one strip at a time …

You freak, you revolting whelp of a–

Aranya hissed,
I’ll butcher you as I did Garthion, that yellow-bellied swamp leech you called a son.

“GRRAAARGGH!” Thoralian bellowed, making her pay for the insult with a blinding flurry of ice shards. Aranya tried to dodge, but his snaking neck tracked her flight path. The ice felt like knives, slicing into the deep pocks on her face, a distinct sensation of chipping away at her exposed cheekbone and tearing into her scarred flesh. She swivelled, suffering the ignominy of taking the attack on her hindquarters as she fled.

Drake! Aranya tangled briefly with an already wounded drake. She punched her way free, only to sense Thoralian right on her tail, rearing up to strike with all four paws. The Dragoness twisted violently beneath his assault, trading another section of his wing for a bite on her shoulder. Aranya broke away again, trying to gain space to reduce the burning in her lungs. She was in no condition to survive an extended battle with a Dragon of his power.

How could she change the odds?

Acid. Ja’arrion’s acid. Her slight transformation shivered through her body, weakening her reserves even further. Not good … Aranya worked her throat, concentrating on regurgitating the contents of the correct stomach.

He spluttered,
You’re a Chameleon?

Thoralian had only just realised what she was capable of. Had he thought her transformation into a Star Dragon perfectly natural?

Aranya controlled the acid-spit just as she controlled her tiny fireballs, firing as rapidly as one of the new-technology crossbows. A neat line of green blobs stitched across his torso, splattered against his left secondary wing-strut. A ghastly sizzle resulted. Thoralian’s howl rose above the din of battle, but not for long. He collected himself. A violent quiver from muzzle to tail gave rise to a mist so cold, it clouded around his body and turned his breath to dust. The acid froze, and dropped off in a rain of green icicles.

So much for that idea.

Nak was right. The Yellow-White Dragon seemed impervious to direct attack–besides, even when she did succeed in a strike, she was too small to inflict serious damage. Aranya fell to trading feints with Thoralian, but as time ticked away, she was also becoming more and more concerned for her friends. They entered a period of standoff. The drakes left them plenty of leeway, perhaps at Thoralian’s command. He chased her. She ghosted away, racking her brains for something, anything, that she could use against him. Her friends trusted her to finish the job, but she was so weak now, so worn out …

Aranya risked a glance around her. Zip, battling, bloodied, diving into a melee of drakes to rescue Lyriela; her cousin carrying Jia-Llonya into battle, who in that blink of time shattered a drake’s wing-bone with her war-hammer. Ja’arrion sprayed his acid-mist in expanding circles, clearing his immediate airspace of two or three dozen drakes. The Shadow Dragon, seizing drakes with his invisible-hands power, hurling them to their doom twenty at a time. But she could not expect help any time soon. They were all too far away.

Suddenly, she remembered what she had done once, very long ago. Launching into another frontal attack, trying to dodge the blasts of cold he generated, Aranya somersaulted over Thoralian’s head, feeling his talons hook into and tear her wings as she passed overhead. So icy! Her breath misted in front of her nostrils. Her muscles had begun to cramp from the cold.
Now,
she breathed. Flaming swords extended from her talons–just an extension of her magic, shaped in a different way. White-hot. The Amethyst Dragon furled her wings and rolled, bringing her weapons down on Thoralian’s back. Strike!

With a roar, Thoralian arched in pain. Bloody, sizzling trenches paralleled his spine-spikes, thirty feet long. Roaring in feral delight, Aranya did not see his tail whipping upward.

A terrible force slammed into her muzzle.

She could have blacked out for only a few seconds. Aranya found herself clasped in Thoralian’s paws, close to his chest, swooping toward a rough landing. The Yellow-White Dragon drove her into the ground with the full weight of his bloated body, cracking her ribs and knocking the breath from her lungs. She was surprised her wings were not torn off by the impact.

With a despairing blast of Storm power, she knocked him off toward the sinkhole, a dark space just beyond her wingtip. That spent the last of her magic. Aranya, powerless and unable to rise, faced the monstrous Sylakian Dragon.

Make your oath to me, and I’ll call off the drakes,
he panted.

Aranya willed her lungs to function, thinking herself unable to speak before she remembered that Dragonish telepathy did not require any breath.
You’re mad. You’d kill everyone and everything.

There need be no more dying.

As if the war was her fault! But the accusation stung. He still wanted her. How could she turn this to her advantage?

Come to me.
Great pincers gripped her mind, squeezing as if she had an Island balanced on her skull. Aranya writhed under the force of his coercion.
YIELD TO ME!

I … will … not.

I see bone through your muzzle. You’re raddled, but that’s not the least of what I’ll do to you.
Ice speared into her shoulder, twisting so viciously that it flipped Aranya over onto her back. Thoralian moved closer, dragging himself across the ground.
I will brutalise you, body and soul. I will destroy your friends, your parents and your Island. The name of Aranya of Immadia will be the ashes of memory, lost forever.

Aranya groaned,
You’ll never defeat me.

His hypnotic gaze drilled into her eyes.
YIELD!

No!

A word she had dared to scream at an Ancient Dragon. Now, from the unknowable storehouses of her magical being, she unleashed a power seen so many times in her dreams. A buzzing sensation ran from the bones of her skull, down her spine, and galvanised every muscle of her body.

Crying,
Fra’anior!
Aranya sprang at her tormentor.

The Amethyst Dragon bowled Thoralian over with the force of her attack, rending with her claws, slashing with her fangs, battering him from every conceivable direction as though she were the great seven-headed Dragon himself. Thoralian scrambled backward, bleating in confusion, turning this way and that only to have scales torn off his muzzle, his wings chewed and holes punched into his hide by more talons than seemed possible for any single Dragon to possess. The Black Dragon’s strength blazed within her. She smashed his muzzle against a rock, flipped the larger Dragon over with a kick and fell upon his bloated torso, her terrible, storm-heightened snarls making him quake.

Terror heightened Thoralian’s powers, too. A wedge of ice shot from his mouth, knocking Aranya aside. His ice-breath hissed over her, so wintry that Aranya felt as though her skin had shrunk about her body. The paralysing cold robbed her lungs of breath. No matter how much fire she produced, the Amethyst Dragon could not break free of his icy ambit. Her strength dwindled.

His paw crushed her windpipe; the bulk of his body rolled over her torso. She was cold, so cold, both from his touch and from the hatred consuming her.

“Aha!” roared Thoralian. “Submit to my power!”

Dimly amidst the freezing pain, Aranya recognised a new imperative. Ri’arion and Ardan had somehow contrived to dismiss some of the nearby drakes, breaking the cycle of bloodlust. The red predators began to flee in small but increasing numbers. Dragons emerged from beneath heaps of bodies, mutilated, bleeding, unable to fly. Dragonships slewed crazily through the sky. The ground troops eyed each other warily. But the bulk of the drakes remained aloft, intent on their terrible work. Even Ri’arion and Ardan’s powers could not reach that far.

None of that matters,
said Thoralian, wheedling, probing for her weaknesses.
Yield to me, lest the lineage of Star Dragons be broken. See? I know the secret Dragon lore. I’ve studied the ways of your ancestors and I know what needs to be done. Cease this pointless resistance, Aranya. If you come with me, you’ll stand a chance of living.

She could never serve him. Aranya did not understand why both Izariela and Thoralian were so concerned about her Star Dragon heritage, but she did know that to have that power fall into his paws, or the power of the First Egg, would spell the end of everything she held dear. She had to hold out. She had to deny him. However, Aranya wavered on the cusp of temptation. Anything to end the pain. Anything to stop the chill seeping through her body, the unbearable assault on her mind, the knowledge that she had nothing left with which to fight him. Surely, if she yielded now, she could find another time and place to bring Thoralian to his ruin?

Too broken, too exhausted even to think …

Thoralian’s foreclaw extended, resting delicately on the hide at the base of her neck, above her second heart.
Do you know what it is to have the blood freeze in your veins and arteries, Aranya? Can you imagine that kind of pain?

The pain you caused my mother!

Despair turned to untainted, searing fury. The hatred drained away, subsumed into a storm of love for her mother. Aranya touched a fragile place of knowing, a potential hidden right inside the threshold of her soul.

She crystallised inward.

* * * *

A speck of starlight drifted between Thoralian’s paws. Soundlessly, it scoured the winds of the Island-World. All before it was insubstantial, as if matter itself had ceased to exist. It searched for what it knew not, for a purpose left far behind in a forgotten place, for a knowledge which had long since lost its meaning.

The beast’s stamping was nothing to that fragment of consciousness. The speck passed through his shadow. The ways of his soul-magic were laid bare before it, and the speck recoiled in horror. It fled toward the presence of one linked, forever, by chains of unbreakable magic.

A precious thread of memory became her lifeline.
Sha’aldior? I’m lost.

A-Aranya? Where … I can’t see you. I’m so hurt, Aranya. Say the word and I’ll come to you.

I’m Aranya?

Princess of Immadia. You’re a Shapeshifter Dragon.
A picture entered her mind.
This is me. This was our promise, to which the twin suns bore witness.

Show me the path.

Here, my soul’s treasure. This is the way to life.

A candle-like flame flickered in her mind, growing to encompass her world. Sweet breath whooshed into her lungs, a cleansing agony. Aranya’s eyes snapped open.

Thoralian, directly across the sinkhole from her, whirled.
How did you …
he flung himself into the air, targeting her prone form.

The ground shook as if with an earthquake.

Aranya steeled herself to grapple with Thoralian as the low thunder increased. Her brain filled with images of smoke and chaos. From visions to misperceptions, now the impossibility of having moved over a thousand feet from Thoralian’s grasp without memory or apparent effort? The hard-packed soil beneath her body reverberated like a drum skin. Cawing, tearing at each other in their terror, the drakes began to scatter. They fled in every conceivable direction, including back down into the sinkhole from which they had emerged.

The Yellow-White Dragon’s wingbeat slowed as he searched the battlefield, his puzzlement clear.

Seeing that Thoralian was not attacking, Aranya tried to roll onto her paws. The sky shimmered at the advent of magic on a scale she had only imagined in the midst of her storm.