The Onyx Dragon
D
RAGONS DARKENED THE
skies above a burning city.
Great veils of oily black smoke drifted across the scene. In the distance, vultures and buzzards gathered to slaver over the feast, but they did not dare to approach while the Night-Red Dragon legions wheeled overhead. Every few seconds, a Dragon swooped upon some sign of life and exterminated it with raking blasts of Dragon fire. This was no longer battle. It was annihilation.
Pip moaned in her sleep, tasting blood from her bitten tongue. The visions! Four nights running, powerful, lucid visions had assailed her sleeping hours. Without pause or respite, her point of view swept rapidly toward the final fortress crowning an unfamiliar mountaintop, a solid dark bastion, commanding the area of the devastated city. She had never seen this place before. Yet the clarity and comprehension of a Dragon’s vision was hers, bringing every detail vividly to her awareness. Flame snaked up sandstone fortifications. Once-picturesque terraced orchards blazed like neat ranks of torches planted in blackened soil. Here, a troop of five soldiers wearing unfamiliar banded armour stood frozen in perpetuity inside a column of ice, the snarls upon their faces, their white-knuckled grip of their maces, forever etched in ghastly death. She saw a woman flung against the battlements, mercifully dead before she dropped two hundred feet to the ground. Charred bodies littered a marketplace. From far above, her host’s sight narrowed upon a few dozen pathetically small, red-robed bundles of children lying motionless amongst the blasted ruins of what must have been a school building.
She wept. Her tormentor, the harbinger of her visions, did not. Pip sensed puzzlement, the counterpoint of her Human emotions leaching into the furnace-blast of a Dragon’s battle-madness.
A huge, black-taloned paw rose into her field of vision.
Destroy that fortress wall! Crush these feeble rebels, my Dragon-kin!
As you command, mighty Zardon!
Zardon? Dimly, amongst the snarl of Pip’s blankets, awareness penetrated. She was with Zardon? How? Was he alive? Could it be that the Dragon Rider oath she had once inadvertently sworn, still exerted power enough to connect their … souls? It must be.
A monumental chorus of Dragon-challenges belled out from behind Zardon, the once-Red Dragon who had stolen Pip from the Sylakian zoo. He turned slightly to check. Breath snarled in Pip’s throat. Mercy! At least five hundred massive, hundred-foot Night-Red Dragons, the Marshal’s legion of Dragon-thralls, winged behind the experienced Zardon as they approached the huge fortress, still defended by a hundred or more Red Dragons and several Blues. Was this the Southern Academy? Two or three miles to the West, she saw an Island floating above the Cloudlands void. Dragons circled above and around it like a corona of living death, each an identical sooty black in colour, bearing the imprint of the Master they served steadfastly, thanks to his mysterious ability to control Dragon minds.
A blur of white caught her vision. A beautiful White Dragon, gleaming silvery-white beneath the noon dazzle of the twin suns, shot down toward the blocky fortress from over a mile above, seeming to gather impossible speed, the inrush of his magic sucking the very life out of the skies as he fell. He was the largest Dragon Pip had ever seen, easily a hundred and fifty feet from wingtip to wingtip, as slender and deadly as a spear. His scales were white tinged with the slightest hint of blue, she realised. Magnificent. Breathtaking. Yet all that beauty was a cloak for vast evil, betrayed by the eyes, flaming blood-red with uncontainable battle-lust and power.
Beneath his charge, the pentagonal fortress stood outspread like a flower. Thousands of soldiers manned the battlements and ramparts, standing firm against a besieging army many thousands of men strong, bolstered by animals and implements of war Pip could not even begin to recognise.
The host of her dream viewed all this with a vicious snarl of approval.
Hold for the Marshal, Dragons. We will feast upon entrails this day.
For a moment, the battle seemed to fall silent, suspended between earth and sky. The Marshal of Herimor plummeted. The fortress waited. Pip sucked in a terrible breath, which seared her throat as if she had drawn in a lungful of Dragon fire.
The opposing Dragonwing began to react, drawing toward the threat of the White Dragon, but it was too late.
Blue fire blossomed from his throat in an unending stream, streaked with jagged spits of white lightning. It swelled like an upside-down mushroom ahead of the speeding Dragon, roiling and burning like a fireball, yet strangely silent. Suddenly, the mass coalesced as if sucked together by an unseen set of lungs, forming into a ball of impossibly concentrated magic and flame. Fire so cold it burned the air, rocketed downward into the centre of the fortress.
KRRRAAAABOOOM!
The earth rang like a bell. Entire sections of fortifications crumbled into frozen dust. In a single, shattering blow, the Marshal of Herimor reduced the defenders to mounds of frozen, bloody jelly and the walls to piles of powder. The defending Dragons reeled in the air as if they had lost all sense of balance and reason.
With a mighty roar, Zardon spearheaded the assault.
Leave no Dragon alive, my kin!
Gasping and sobbing, thrashing at her blankets, Pip fell out of her bunk bed to land painfully on the floor. The Dragon Assassins had struck …
Bang! Bang!
A fist shook the door of … phew. Her dormitory. Relief surged, dousing her with mild nausea. Nightmare. The horrific images–she could never forget. She must report this to Master Kassik.
Bang! Bang!
She was alone in the room, which ordinarily housed forty First Year girls. “Coming!” Pip called, trying to pull her battered mind back from the brink of dream-insanity. One thought eclipsed all others.
She had seen the Marshal. He was unstoppable.
* * * *
Pip scowled up at the three-man contingent of giant Jeradian warriors as they invaded her dormitory. Embarrassment and fury churned her heart into an inferno.
She snapped, “You’re here to escort me? On whose orders?”
“Master Kassik’s orders, my lady,” said the foremost warrior, ducking beneath the lintel. Islands’ sakes! They towered over her like the colossal jungle trees of her long-ago home in the Crescent Isles.
Her frown deepened. “The Master?”
“Ay,” rumbled the second warrior, gazing down at the pint-sized Pygmy girl from his apparent perch in the clouds above. Like the others, he wore Jeradian plate armour and the war-hammer dangling from a leather belt-loop at his right hip was so large, it appeared suitable for demolishing volcanoes. “Our brief is to be your bodyguards, lady–uh, Dragoness. That means–”
Pip made a cutting gesture with her left hand. “I know why.”
Roaring rajals, what did they feed these Jeradians? Bamboo? Dragon eggs? Her eyes practically had to scale a mountain to measure the trio’s third member, half a head taller than his companions and as chunky as the average Dragonship. She stood eye-level with his belt buckle. Only just. Unbidden, a snarl vibrated in her throat. Pip clamped her teeth together lest a fiery accident occur. Dragon emotions? She had been warned.
If she was riled enough to spit fire, did that not prove her Dragon still existed? That Telisia’s treachery and her Shapeshifter poison had not destroyed an Onyx Dragoness forever? Nothing in her experience compared to the soul-deep shivers this fear produced in her being. For just a few weeks, she had enjoyed the glorious freedom of the skies. Pip had imagined she could never be caged again. She had won a significant victory against the Silver Dragon, although the greater threat of the Marshal of Herimor and his Dragon Assassins still loomed over the Academy and its inhabitants–people Pip had come to hold dear. She could neither forget all the Dragonkind already slain, nor keep from shuddering at the hordes of battered, traumatised Dragon refugees daily pouring up from the South.
War convulsed the Island-World.
Pip bit her lip. Could she not hide? Become a simple student for a few days, not a marked Pygmy troublemaker? She had to shake off this Island’s weight of duty fate had lumped upon her shoulders–and tame her fears before they grew claws and shredded her gut.
“Look, lady,” said the third soldier, “when my daughter juts out her chin like that, I know she’s being stubborn. Argue all you want with Master Kassik, but let us do our job. Clear?”
“Certainly,” she smiled, liking his directness. Of course, she had to crane her neck so far backward to find his answering smile that a muscular pain shot through her lower back.
Pip read their names off their stylised belt buckles. “Faranion, how tall are you?”
“Seven feet, five inches, lady,” said the first warrior.
“Barrion?”
From a place of concealment beneath his shaggy beard, Barrion’s voice rumbled, “Seven six.”
Pip cocked an eyebrow at the third Jeradian Hammer, whose craggy, bearded face split into a broad grin. “Barefoot, I measure seven feet, eleven inches.” Jerrion’s voice was so deep, she imagined an earthquake emanating from the region of his belly. He reached into his breast pocket. “Please read our orders, lady.”
Only
double
her height? Unless a Pygmy warrior had contrived to grow a few inches, which was about as likely as a jungle snail sprouting wings and transforming into a laughing-dove.
“Actually, I’m the second-tallest man I know,” Jerrion added. “My little brother takes the honours, but we say he outgrew his brains. Ralti-stupid, he is, and a whisker over eight feet tall.”
Pip scanned the message scroll. “The three
tallest
warriors? Signed by Master Kassik?”
“Ay,” they chorused.
Ooh, she smelled a fat, stinking jungle pig by the name of her alleged friend-turned-tormentor, Maylin! Or, judging by the perfection of this work of forgery, should she blame Chief Monkey Yaethi?
She swallowed an urge to crisp the scroll with Dragon fire. “I’m going to kill someone.”
As one man, they shrank back from the tiny teenager.
Mercy. She had to force a change of mood, to refocus herself on the present–anything to forget the visions she had experienced, anything to chase away the spectre of Marshal Re’akka’s shadow looming over the Island-World. Everyone believed her destiny was to face that White Shapeshifter in battle and defeat him. Where would she find her courage now?
She must steal back her hope and sanity. Take an everlasting breath. Laugh. Create mischief. Beat away the hideous windrocs of doom …
“Not literally kill,” Pip drawled, taking in their mistrustful expressions with a wicked chuckle. “Look, if we’re going to work together–Islands’ sakes, is there any way I can talk to you three trees without breaking my neck?”
Jerrion swooped, encircled her waist with a pair of paws better suited to a giant rajal, and deposited Pip on top of a large, covered rain barrel standing just outside the entrance of the First Year Girls’ dormitory. “How’s this, little lady?”
“Perfect.”
Pip sighed. She’d look ridiculous. Kassik’s orders would make her the laughing-stock of the entire school when she joined the other students in the dining hall for dinner, due in a quarter-hour’s time. At least she could look the Jeradian Hammers in the eye, now.
Almost. Grr! Gritting her teeth, she said, “Gentle-mountains, I think we need to establish a few ground rules. Firstly, I despise short-person jokes. Right now I am feeling overshadowed and rather feisty as a result–not a pleasant sort of feisty, either. Secondly, you will stop calling me ‘lady’. I’m a jungle girl, born of the Crescent Isles Pygmy tribes, like Master Adak. My friends call me Pipsqueak. What’s that smile for, Barrion?”
Barrion instantly compressed his lips into a straight line. “Your nickname is singularly appropriate, my–Pip.”
“Oh?”
Her waspish tone drew an audible gulp from the warrior.
Pip said, “Thirdly, unlike you Jeradian behemoths, I stand three feet, eleven and a
half
inches tall according to Mistress Mya’adara’s measure, but I’ll still beat the stuffing out of any of you twenty-nine hours a day–even with my right arm wrapped in this absurd sling and five half-healed holes in my stomach–because I used to wrestle Oraial Apes for fun.”
“It helps that you’re a Dragoness,” Faranion pointed out.
“So it does,” Pip grinned, conveniently forgetting to mention the fact that according to Silver, her deadly enemy-turned-boyfriend, she would be unable to transform into her Onyx Dragon form for at least a month yet. On cue, the wound beneath her right collarbone twinged. Telisia’s poisoned crossbow bolt had punched right through Pip’s body, miraculously missing anything vital, but despite the best efforts of Rajion and Shimmerith, the two healer Dragons, that wound in particular refused to heal up. Had it been just a week? Surely not.
“Don’t forget the all-important half-inch,” Jerrion teased.
He had just earned himself first place on the menu when she found her Dragon form again.
Barrion’s pained expression suggested her feelings were all too plain. “I apologise on behalf of my comrades, lady Pip–”
With a wry grin intended to soften her words, she interrupted, “Listen. You three will help me get even with my lovely friends, or I shall indeed dish out a beating. Understood?”