Eerie

Echo chamber

Faeling fingers tip-tap-tapping

Castanets clacking like

Brittle bones

THE ENTITY SHIFTED THROUGH time.

Or, was it time that shifted to adjust to the agedness of that memory?

The rainbow colours she had seen at first bleached into endless, dazzling white. White sands. Heat that shrivelled her skin instantly and made her tuck her wings down her back lest they melt. Silly, Faeling fears, but real enough. Where was she? How old? When …

Allory found herself creeping across the top of a mound of hot sand on her belly, spying on the entity as it scrabbled across an endless vista of scorching white sands, searching and searching. A heat-haze caused the air just above the ground to shimmer unreliably. Hard to make out any details farther than a mile or two. She shrank down and kept motionless as she sensed its attention shifting in her direction. Safe. Her head rose warily. Spying from cover. To her surprise, Allory noticed she wore an all-white serami and long white leggings that blended in perfectly with the white sand. A touch of fingertip to nose reminded her that for this mission, she wore white face paint.

Mission? Who was this Allory Fae who undertook secret missions?

Certainly, this manifestation felt like her. Not a whisker taller than eleven inches, either. Ahem. She should not short-change herself of that vital quarter inch. This was definitely her if mischief bubbled in her nectar, even at the most inappropriate times.

Allory snooped on the entity’s endeavours for a time that had to be longer than a day – at least several, judging by the extremes of thirst she endured as she tracked it over rolling dune and through valley, always careful to stay out of sight. What had become of day and night? When she peered up at Middlesun though a veil of cloth to reduce the unrelenting glare, she saw no Shyraiama Dragons – only unimpeded heat and light. Should that veil be burned up, this was what Spheris would become like.

A wasteland of sap-boiling heat, unbearable glare and a waterless desert. Not a jungle-dweller’s favourite combination.

In this time and space, the Wraith appeared curiously lesser in form, substance and strength; while it drew radiance to itself as if it were somehow able to consume pure light, it was not with the facility she had observed before. Was this a younger Wraith? Could it have stumbled upon Spheris or been immature or injured when it had first penetrated her defences? Yet it already displayed the hallmarks of the dominant force it would become, its eerily fluid movements suggestive of a corrosive liquid seeping through reality to corrupt everything it touched. The Scintillant recoiled from the subtle draw of its power. It wanted evil, seduced it to its bidding, cast a shadow over her attentive mind and conjured her deepest nightmares.

I must guard myself. Even now, it is a lethal force and not to be trifled with.

This creature searched far and wide, league after league. It never detected her presence.

Long, crawling hours of waiting afforded Allory plenty of opportunity to regret her decision to reveal the resting-place of the boneyard. Somehow, in this place where past and present collided, she knew that the entity must already have found it – yet many doubts remained in her mind. Was this even a real place? Or could this whole dreamscape be a figment of her defective imagination, as the soul locket had turned out to be?

So very, very mystical and mythical, it did not exist. Period.

To her mingled annoyance and relief, it was at the same instant this dire thought blistered her sap that her hand wandered behind her back and discovered a nectar gourd. Half full. How had she not noticed? Despite that it was tepid to the point of nastiness, Allory took a large, grateful swig and heard the Wraith scream.

A sap-chilling, sweat-inducing, heart-thrashing scream.

Discovered!

Or … not. Rolling back out of the sand with which she had inadvertently tried to bury herself, the Scintillant Fae peered into the distance and willed her heart to stop beating up her ears from the inside. Nauseous worry churned in her gut. About six hundred feet away, the Wraith danced an alien, jerky dance that caused the sunlight to flicker more strongly than ever before. It grew more solid! It … feasted? Changed?

The entity had discovered a single onyx spike about eight inches tall protruding from the white sand. The proverbial fly in the nectar. As she shrank down into cover lest her silhouette be visible – well, white against the blinding sand backed by an azure-white sky, was that even likely – Allory watched the Wraith gather itself to create a magical inhalation. What – oh! Immediately, it exhaled with the roar of a minor storm, blasting a small cloud of sand aside.

Amazing! A whole foot uncovered.

Yet, she knew that obsidian stone as well as she knew her own wings. Her fists clenched painfully tight beneath her torso. This was the beginning of so much. Did she spy a faint yellowish-green tinge in the air around those spikes as the eerie stone reacted with Middlesun’s radiant energies for the first time in millennia?

She swallowed hard, struck with the reality of what she saw. Where had that thing come from? Was it even part of this world, meant to be here, or was it an artefact of a dark time and a darker purpose? She had always imagined the boneyard to be the Wraith’s possession or creation. Was that untrue?

The entity hived off dozens of smaller worker creatures that scampered across the gentle, rolling sand dunes like busy hamsters eager to complete a monumental task. It would take years to uncover an edifice as large as her boneyard. Many years. Allory touched the soul locket. She felt it; no other did. Connected. Intimately connected – or a spiritual representation of this physical place, perhaps? Reminding herself of the long, infamous history of the boneyard being used by necromancers as a platform for their dark arts as she watched the creatures begin to uncover the tip of a second spike, Allory considered the nature of the ancient radiation that poured from its core. She tasted that trickle now, caustic to her magical senses. Something tainting, a fey contaminant beyond her understanding, it would permeate and pervert all in its environment.

So, all she was doing here was aiding and abetting the spread of necromancy around Spheris?

Nice one. Totally the result she had been after.

No wonder she faced such opposition from her own people. They did not know what was good for them – but, did she? Could she honestly and with any kind of confidence make that claim? Especially since Allory of the now was aware that this Allory of the past must therefore know things her present self did not, which was backward. Crazy and illogical. Product of a fragile mind; surely, some swill of self-aggrandising nonsense. Doubt fractured the edifices of understanding she had begun to build. What if this secretive history was all sprung from herself? The psyche’s reaction to trauma and abuse? A prideful scenario in which Allory Fae alone became the heroine, where she saved the day?

Wouldn’t that be just like an incurable runt?

Flopping over onto her back, she stared up at the white-hot point of Middlesun, deliberately trying to keep her eyes open for as long as possible. Is this as you purposed, o light of my soul? To unleash horrors upon the creatures who eke out their lives within your protective shell? To sleep through the longest day while evil prospers and parasitizes your magical essence?

So bitter.

Bitter toward the one who gave all things life, who was the breath of her scintillance and the sap of her soul?

Right. Impossibly deep sigh.

She breathed out a second sigh to chase that lament up into the sky. I’m so very sorry, Middlesun. Nothing this runt does ever turns out well. For all I am not, all I can never be … forgive me. I am too little –

The sand shivered beneath her back.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Allory thought nothing of it the first time. Maybe a local tremor, maybe the Wraith sandblasting its way across the dunes. How unnerving she found this place, white sand beneath a whiter sky, with not a green, growing thing in sight. On the second tremor, she frowned. Hmm. Now another, a little further away. The sand jumped and jiggled. Her eyes roamed the undulant surface of the sand … suggids! That was not just her stomach being queasy. The sand really was moving from beneath!

The shimmying and shaking had not escaped the Wraith’s attention either. The entity bundled up all its budlings with a grotesque slurping action and rose into the air. The dense blackness palpitated in all dimensions as it cast out its alien senses. Allory immediately stilled despite the danger of the quivering sand pool she lay upon sucking her down, and wrapped scintillance about herself to misdirect all light and magic not as a shield, but as if she were a smooth pebble in a stream allowing water to flow around and over her with barely any impediment.

A shadow flicked lasciviously against her mind, seeking, querying and defiling.

She breathed, Nothing but sun and sand and air …

The touch receded.

As the shaking intensified, Allory observed how the sand shivered in individual oval puddles as far as the eye could see, and Faerie sight was sharp indeed. Each puddle lay about fifty feet from the next. Her wings and antennae prickled to the presence of new magic. Swelling beneath the sand. Heat greater even than the day’s warmth radiated upward, somehow cancelling out the mirage and allowing her to see for miles across the flat desert – momentarily, at least. How many disturbances? Across how many square leagues? She needed to move. Fast. Choosing her moment, Allory flicked her wings to take her skimming away from this patch she lay upon, scattering the sand grains which had already covered her legs and sifted across her back without her noticing. Just in time.

Silent as death yet as if responding to a world-shaking cry, the white sands from horizon to horizon fountained upward and young black Dragons began to emerge, some kicking aside shards of eggshell or struggling to free themselves from the heavy, clinging sands. The Dragons were huge for hatchlings, already fifteen to twenty feet in length, their bodies whippet-thin yet beautifully muscled, every striation and ligament showing to best effect through their soft young hides. The nature of their eyes arrested her. Fully white, they burned with the fires of Middlesun herself.

Recognition struck like a bolt of lightning unleashed inside her gut. Alloy’s jaw almost dislocated itself. This was a hatching ground!

These were the missing Shyraiama Dragons!

She bore witness to one of the most phenomenal, magical, breath-stealing natural events in the history of Spheris. Allory swivelled slowly, taking in the millions of hatchlings stretching, shaking out their wings, yawning, rubbing their eyes and testing the sands underfoot with hilarious, high-stepping antics. Silly games developed here and there – mock-biting tails or belting a friend over the head with a wingtip appeared to be favourites. Knots of hatchling-play developed as they discovered each other and the fun they could have together. Giggle. Dragon hatchlings behaved a great deal like Faelings.

A sensation like a psychic whiplash sliced through her enjoyment of the moment.

Across the entire breadth of her vision, the hatchlings pulled up and inclined their heads to stare directly at the Wraith. It consumed one of the hatchlings! Another! She expected the pack to snarl, to spit, to descend upon the entity with ravaging maws. Instead, they simply stared. The entity reached for another, its dark interior seeming to unfold and brush through the creature. A chill unlike anything she had ever felt entered Allory’s spirit as she sensed how the creature fed upon the young Dragon’s soul-magic. The pack lifted their heads skyward as if hearing a call – if there was one, Allory did not hear it. Their eyes began to shine as they drank in the glorious, unadulterated radiance of Middlesun. Brighter and brighter. Dazzling now, far too brilliant to gaze upon.

Even though she had placed her hands over her eyes, Allory could not have missed the moment the Dragons turned their blazing gazes upon the Wraith. It screamed. The utterly alien sound tore at her mind. It ripped through the psyches of the young Shyraiama Dragons, slaying them by the thousands – but hot on the heels of this instant of soul-shaking realisation came another insight. The Wraith, in trying to absorb their combined power, had taken on far too much.

Blink. Vaporised.

Unfortunately, her half-cough half-cry of elation was all too short-lived, for the entity’s rapid getaway thereafter smeared a greasy-feeling streak across the scintillance of her magical senses as she tracked its leaving and the Dragons did the same. United focus. Ravaging power. Black specks like a swarm of gnats hurtled into the distance at an infeasible velocity, savaged all the way by the Dragons until it passed out of their reach.

That had been the Wraith’s cry of pain, she concluded, but the entity would survive to fight another day. Allory puffed out her cheeks. A shame it could not have been vaporised for good, but the uncanny alien magic or forces that governed its form of life were not so easily defeated.

She played back the brief encounter in her mind, trying to pinpoint what it was that bothered her about the way the Wraith interacted with light and scintillance. Yaarah said that the reigning Felidragon theory held that light was a kind of particle called a photon because it interacted with physical substances such as prisms, breaking up into component parts and changing direction. A Scintillant Philosopher the scholar had read, however, had held that light was pure energy enhanced by magical ariavanae which in turn, interacted with physical substances and laws in predictable ways. The blacker-than-black substance of the Wraith’s being, however, behaved differently. Were light a river, it was a depression the light appeared to flow into. Gravity attracted physical bodies. The Wraith’s mere presence pulled in light – so was light its means of accessing ariavanae, an unwitting carrier of magic to feed its monstrous appetites?

Eerie silence surrounded her.

Distracted from her contemplations, Allory glanced up. “Eep!”

The Shyraiama Dragons watched her with unblinking focus. Every last one. The combined immensity of their gaze struck her with real physical force, coming from every direction. Squeezed. Tickled. Tingling from her antennae to the tips of her prehensile toes!

Not burned up?

Ha. By her sap, a shock for the ages!

Swivelling slowly to take in the vast sweep of their congregation, she called out, “Well, it’s lovely to meet you all …”

Nitwit. These Dragonkind did not speak, as best she knew. Bowing her head respectfully, Allory called in her mind, Hail, o great ones, o sons and daughters of Middlesun herself! You must rise …

Could they?

Who would show them the way?

Who would raise their kin, slain by the Wraith this day?

Inspiration! A knowing chuckle built in her throat. At last, this foolish Faerie understood why she was here, present in this place at this time. It was nothing to do with necromancy. The Shyraiama hatchlings needed a spark, that was all. A tiny blue hand to wave them off in the right direction.

Probably helped that the Wraith had not consumed them all.

The shining Middlesun entity was beautiful beyond description, but Spheris needed day and night. Without the eternal cycle of night and day, life as she knew it could not exist.

I am here. There is no other.

Folding her wings behind her, she bowed to the heavens and promptly fell on her backside!

Giggling madly to herself, Allory shifted her body just the tiniest bit, for the force of the Dragons’ regard continued to press in from all sides except above. As she drifted upward, she commanded her outer clothing to fall away, leaving her clad in just her undies. The Dragons wouldn’t mind. Nor would her blossoming scintillance. Flicking her wings open despite the counterforce, she imagined sliding upward upon a slick sunbeam. No need for flying. The Dragons’ unblinking stares conveyed enough existential and physical weight that a tiny butterfly Scintillant began to ascend without any effort whatsoever, accelerating as the angles changed. The Dragons’ muzzles lifted as if they were one creature possessed of one mind.

Remembered harp music buoyed her soul.

In a burst of inspiration, the Scintillant flung her hands wide, inviting the ariavanae to join her dance.

Gasp! Sunlight beamed down upon the dancer, her sentient awareness conveyed by a complex series of oscillations in the intensifying sunbeam that spangled through Allory’s wings and ignited her body’s ecstatic, luminous response. The sensation became unbearably ticklish. She could barely dance for the laughter that kept folding her up and even more so, the hilarious consternation of the Shyraiama Dragons as they gaped at this pirouetting, giggling living sparkle who receded into Centresky. The more they ruffled their wings in stupefaction, the more their jaws dangled, the more she laughed.

So liberating. Silly and beautiful and irresistible. After the distressing incident which had brought her to this place, glee was her catharsis, her cocoon and her freedom.

In this wink of time, she could be.

Glimmering threads of laughter-gilded light spun off her wings, fingers, toes and antennae, a substance seemingly spun of pure gladness. The scintillance spread out over the enormous audience of coal-black Dragons, falling like the softest drizzle to illume their wings and spiky spines and upturned muzzles with dust born of her delight in this elementary service. Yet the greatest thrill was to perceive Middlesun’s response. The daylight flickered from bright to unbearably brilliant, several times. After a conspicuous pause, a sound like thunder shook the blue-white dome of Centresky. The reverberation rolled over the desert in endless echoes, so mighty she wondered that they did not shake the foundations of Spheris itself. Thunder from the blue!

Echoes rolled across the barren sands. It took Allory the longest time to pinpoint the emotion she sensed from the Middlesun entity. Exultation. Like a Faeling’s first experience of a proper belly-laugh. Not just an antennae-jiggling titter. This was a full-on sap-shaker, as the Scintillant Fae would say.

Laughter. She’s just discovered laughter!

The twin shocks arrived several seconds apart again, light followed by a mind-numbing concussion of sound. Allory sensed the pressure changes in her eardrums and sensitive wings. The Shyraiama Dragons craned their necks to regard the skies with what could only be adoration.

A lesson in unbelief for this Scintillant.

She danced, tingling all over.

A third time, the skyfires of Middlesun’s radiance bathed the world in sunny mirth, before an indescribable warmth suddenly bloomed in Allory’s soul. An embrace. As whiteness began to crowd into her vision, she heard and saw the hatchling Shyraiama Dragons taking off from the sands, their fresh young wings beating hard as they began their journey to the centre of the world, where they would surround Middlesun and begin their great, eternal migration.

Bless your rising with the sunup and resting with the sundown, she thought, wanting to send them with … well, something. Little strength she had, but as the Dragons fluttered skyward, she spied traces of scintillance streaming off their wingtips and talons.

Giggle! Another vagary of destiny. One day, she might even understand its workings.

This girlfae would not hold her breath waiting for enlightenment, however – enlightenment? To a Scintillant?

Double-giggle with sparkles on top!