The Last Dragon Chronicles: Dark Fire (2 page)

“Grandfather!” he cried, but his voice seemed deadened and did not carry far. Yet the mist extended as though it had been punched, before flowing quickly back into his mouth, stroking the walls of his throat and lungs. In an instant he could feel it riding through his blood, reaching into his fingertips and toes. A living fire.

As if it had possessed him.

Then, from a few paces west, he heardthe faint rise and fall of chanting.

Apak unclipped his rifle and crepttowards the sound. The old man’s

silhouette came into view. Taliriktug was sitting in the manner of a baby, swaying slightly, looking as if the merest breath of wind would topple him.

“What do you see?” Apak asked nervously, jerking the rifle to emphasise his fear. The old man was clearly wrapped in a trance.

Taliriktug spread his hands in a welcoming gesture. And then a wind
 
did
 
come, with such unexpected ferocity that it was Apak who was quickly blown over, to his knees. Terrified, he quickly rolled

onto his back and tried to open fire at the source of the wind. Several  thoughts crossed his mind in that brief unstable

moment, but the strangest of them all was this: that the wind had risen from the

beating of wings, as if a great bird had

landed.

The trigger locked hard against itsclasp, but no sound or bullet emergedfrom the gun. Apak squealed and triedtwice more, before clumsily turning theweapon round, thinking he might use thebutt like a club. Ashes of snow began tofall around him. Then the mist parted anda beast emerged. It was five times largerthan a standing bear, with stout clawedfeet and a rounded chest covered not in fur

but in frosted scales. Its head was shaped

like the skull of a dog. The eyes set into it were as violet as the brightest winter aurora. Before Apak could think to scream, two streams of light flashed out of the eyes and drilled into the centre of his grandfather’s palms. Taliriktug glowed for a moment, then his spirit rose out of his body. Apak saw the apparition separate cleanly, before it broke into a thousand fragments and was sucked into the light as the eye beams retracted.

Taliriktug’s body slumped to one side. And Apak knew that what physically remained of his grandfather was dead.

Shaking with dread, he stared at the creature. It tilted its head and studied him

a moment, as though it was  trying to evaluate his worth. A plume of white

smoke   drained   out  of  its  nostrils, crystallising slightly in its own flow of air.   It  took   one   pace   backwards, gracefully for its size, then lifted two enormous wings and with one beat summoned up another great wind that blew the gun out of Apak’s hands and drove him several metres along the ice. When at last he summoned up the courage to rise, the creature had gone and tears were frost-bitten onto his cheeks. His lank

black hair was frozen stiff. A trail of urine

had iced itself against his thigh.

In the distance a yellow light pierced the gloom, followed by the sound of an engine starting. The snowmobile had come back to life. Apak gave a thin wail of disbelief. He hauled himself across and

walked around it several times, kicking snow against it, afraid to touch. But when need overcame distrust he climbed aboard

and set the thing into motion, stopping twice momentarily, first to pay homage to his grandfather’s body, then to pick up the rifle.

Only once, emerging from the edges ofthe mist, did he glance back over hisshoulder. The clouds were folding freelyagain, tucking their mysteries in. Apakspat sideways out of the wind andpowered the snowmobile’s nose into theair. He raced it back to Savalik, there totell the people that Taliriktug’s  predictionof the bird at the top of the world wastrue. This story he would come to sharewith all who would listen, though many

would dispute his description of the creature. Yet, in time, as the story would start to filter south, the rumours would begin that the Inuk who had broken through the great north mist had seen not a bird, but something from the far side of human mythology.

And they were right.

Christopher Apak had seen the past and the future.

He had looked into the face of the ice

dragon, G’Oreal.

Part One

Wayward Crescent

Lucy’s journal

OK, this is weird. I don’t know why I’mdoing this. No, hold the backspace. Isort of do. I need to get things clear. About me and what I am. Why I’mdifferent.

I want to understand.

My   name   is   Lucy.   Lucy Pennykettle. I’m sixteen. I turn heads. I get noticed. A lot. Mainly for thebright green eyes and mass of redhair. I live in a leafy little town called Scrubbley with my mum, Liz, and herpartner, Arthur, and my part-sister, Zanna, and her sweet kiddie, Alexa. My cat, Bonnington, is the weirdest

dude in fur you’ll ever meet. We share the house with a bunch of
 
special
 
dragons, like the one sitting next to my keyboard, Gwendolen. Dragons. More about them in a mo.

Arthur (wise stepdad, sort of) toldme once that people believe whatthey see in print. So here are a fewsmall truths about me, just to getthings into perspective:

My favourite food is vanilla-flavouredyoghurt.

I’m slightly scared of moths.

Squirrels break my heart.

I think I’m in love with a guy called

Tam.

I’m totally in awe of the author,

David Rain.

I’m worried about the mist that’s

covering the Arctic.

I’m haunted by the shadow of

beings called the Ix.

But there’s one thing that keeps me

awake most

nights, and lately I can’t wrap my

head around it:

I look like a girl. I think like a girl. Iwalk and talk and act like a girl.

But I was not born the way othergirls are.

I hatched – from an egg.

I

AM

NOT

HUMAN

We all want to make our mark. We all

want to feel that we’re some kind of hero, ready to stand up and change the world, ready to fulfil some kind of destiny. Mostly, we stumble onto our path, but if what my mum has always told me is true, my destiny was laid down way, way back.

So here it is, like I heard it in my bedtime stories, ever since I was a dot of a kid. I want to see it in little

black  squiggles  on   paper.   Then maybe my life will begin to make

sense.

Once, there were dragons on thiswarm, blue world, persecuted, huntedto complete extinction. People say

they’re a myth, that they never existed. No archaeological evidence to support them. I know better. I know the truth. I know what happened to dragons at the end.

When a dragon died it cried a single tear. It’s known as a fire tear. Trapped inside it was the dragon’s life force or
 
auma
. With the dragon’s last breath, the tear would fall tamely off its snout and find its way to the Fire Eternal, right at the core of the Earth. When that happened the dragon’s body simply melted away and its spirit became one with the spirit of the Earth (what Zanna, the ‘hip’ one amongst us, calls ‘Gaia’).

So far, so good.

Tick.

But where do me and Mum and

Gwendolen fit in? Well, that’s to dowith our ancestor, Guinevere, whowas there when the last known

dragon in the world, a male called Gawain, shed his tear. His tear didn’t make it to the centre of the Earth.

Guinevere   caught   it   in   heroutstretched hands and took it north,to  what was then just a giant ocean,where she kind of…
preserved
 
it inice. I could write a whole essay aboutthis affair, but let’s just stick with meand Mum for now.

If you touch a dragon’s fire you’regonna know about it. By rights, Guinevere should have been fried. But

because her heart was pure and her only intent was not to see dragons die out, she managed to absorb some of Gawain’s power. It changed her, in lots of ways. One of the things she inherited from him was a dragon’s ability to self-replicate. I don’t know the whole procedure. It’s complex. Scary. Not of this world. It involves the production of a suitable egg and a process called kindling, which has to be overseen by a wise-woman or sibyl. Guinevere did it. And so did my mum. One day, maybe I will too.

This is strange. I feel cold. And I never feel cold. Not in this house. Not

around my dragons. Yet now that the truth is here at my fingertips I find I

don’t want to write about it. It’s all so

huge. So ridiculously
 
daunting
. And this is just the beginning. What Mum inherited from Gawain, for instance, was the ability to make dragons, like Gwendolen,   from  clay.   OK,   any amount of sculptors can shape a blob of clay. But how many can make it come to life? Or talk to it in

dragontongue?
 
Hrrr
. A long time ago, before I was born, Mum was given a snowball   by   a   stranger   called Bergstrom who told her it would never melt in her hands. Since then we’ve discovered that Bergstrom was part man, part polar bear (part Gaia, even?) and what he’d actually given Mum was a little of Gawain’s auma

sealed in ice. When Mum put a pinch of the snowball on her dragons it created a little fire tear inside them. That’s right, Frankenstein groupies,
 
they live
.

And now we have lots of them, all around the house, all with different quirks or abilities. They can heal. Do spells. Grant wishes. Shape-shift. The one on the fridge in the kitchen receives messages. Gwendolen, my dragon, is good at IT. They are all little mirrors of the great Gawain. All of them fly his genetic flag. But the one, I suppose, we admire the most is called Gadzooks. He can make things happen just by writing words on the notepad he carries. He was made for

our lodger, a man we came to know as David Rain. Well, I call David a man. Arthur has a different theory entirely. He thinks David was sent to us from a race of thought-beings called the Fain that exist in
 
a higher state of consciousness
 
and only make themselves known when they inhabit a physical body. The Fain are good. They seek beauty in creation. They worship dragons. Their aspiration, according to Arthur, is to become one with a dragon and be ‘illumined’ to it. How that explains the existence of a single Fain being in Bonnington, my cat, I’m not really sure, but it’s fun watching him change into other catty species (his favourite is a black

panther!).

The flipside of the Fain is not so good. They are called the Ix. They invaded Arthur once, leaving him blind. I know
 
exactly
 
how scary the Ix can be. Not long ago they got into my mind and took control of me. They made me attack Mum, almost killing her and the unborn baby inside her. She’s recovered now, and though there is nothing to forgive because I didn’t really know what I was doing at the time, I still have nightmares about that day. I still struggle to come to terms with what happened. That’s part of the reason I’m writing this, I think.

I’m hungry now. Time for a bag of

crisps. Chilli-flavoured. (Call it the dragon in me.)

So: because of what we are, because of what we know, because of our connection to the dragons of old,   Arthur   believes   that   the Pennykettle clan have  a role to play in the ‘changes’ this world is about to face. What changes? I don’t know. I can’t predict the future. You can talk about global warming all you like but nothing does my head in more than the thought that dragons might be coming back to this Earth. A few weeks ago, a mist descended across the Arctic ice cap. According to the news, all the polar bears migrated into it and disappeared. No one can

explain it and people are saying something
 
alien
 
has taken them. All I know is there’s something weird going on. Something that involves David Rain and Gadzooks. Five years ago, I saw David die at the hands of the Ix and fall into that very same, very cold ocean. Two nights ago, he turned up in the public gardens near Scrubbley town library. Zanna saw him. Alexa
 
touched
 
him. He’s not appeared since, but his dragon has. Last night, Arthur took a call from an old university friend in Cambridge. The guy – a professor – wanted advice. He told Arthur  that   a
 
creature
, not much bigger than a bird, had flown into his study carrying, of all things, a notepad

and pencil. That was Gadzooks. We haven’t the faintest idea why he was there. We’ll find out tomorrow.

When we go to Cambridge.

The road to Cambridge

It is now twenty-two days since the so-called ‘Northern Fog’ arrived, and stillno one has been able to comprehend it,analyse it or in any way explain it. Meteorologists are baffled. If this is asign of the immense climate changewe’re being warned about, why is the Earth’s environment stable? Where are