THE HULKING HYPERDRAGON’S ALLEGED maternal instincts extended as far as threatening to hug Yaarah to death if he chose to get ‘frisky’ with her, whatever that meant. Allory slipped into a new addition inside the Felidragon’s travel pack, a padded metal tube meant to protect her body should the pack be squashed or dropped. She tucked in her wings and drew the lid over her head, clicking it into place. Now she could peer out of near-perfect concealment through a built-in slot in the side. Turning upside down, which was no hardship at all for any beast of the air, Yaarah cuddled up to the huge female Hyperdragon’s muscular belly. Adjusting her four paws, she clamped him in place with an implacable air and a decidedly discomfiting chortle.

“Comfortable?”

“Perfectly,” he wheezed.

“I’ll keep you safe, little furry Dragon. We carry our young like this all the time – we call it ‘the maternal missile.’ Now, shut your muzzle lest you inhale something nasty.” A massive chuckle shook her passengers. “I’ll start you off nice and slow.”

Maternal missile? Allory found herself clenching her jaw until a muscle twinged nastily in her neck. Relax, girlfae. This was only supersonic travel. Nothing to it.

Despite her heavy-pawed teasing, Henzaroseflash was as good as her word. She winged away from the volcanic cone with a series of lazy wingbeats, making sure her passengers verbally confirmed their safety and comfort before she really turned on the speed. Peeking out from her hiding space inside his travel pack, Allory watched the light pink morning sky begin to scroll toward her as the sense of extreme velocity intensified and with it, the wind’s buffeting. She sensed, along with the physical forces playing upon the Dragoness’ body, another element that she could not identify for the longest time, an interpretation of magic that pervaded the airstream crowding over her increasingly circumscribed wingbeats and fully elongated body. In her view along his left flank, Yaarah’s fur flowed toward her like a living, rippling carpet.

“Ready to go all out, little ones?”

“Always ready,” Yaarah purred at once, acting as if his entire body was not as stiff as a tree trunk.

This wasn’t fast enough? Hyperdragons had to be mad in their own special way.

Allory began to duck and had to remind herself that she was fine right where she was. This mental picture of the bag tearing away under the ferocious wind shear and her falling to her death somewhere in the freezing mountains was just that, a picture. Which she refused to think about. At all.

Bellowing over the screaming wind, the Dragoness added, “You don’t hear the boom when you’re the one making it. We Hyperdragons do love to scare one another, however, in a game called Booms. Now, let’s go chase a few sunbeams!”

With that, acceleration pressed against Allory’s body like a heavy hand. Constant. Immense. Unending, as if her head and wings suddenly weighed many pounds each. Her spirit sang at the way Henzaroseflash bent the magic of storm winds about her body and passengers to catapult them far, far across the mountain peaks at an insane and ever-increasing velocity. Her eyes watered despite the magical aerodynamic protections she and the Felidragon enjoyed, but she did not want to close them. Yaarah’s entire body vibrated so fast his fur was a golden blur, but if she could have seen through the back of his head, she knew a feline grin would be forced across his lips and his whiskers plastered back against his cheeks by the raging windstorm.

This was the way to travel! Why walk or flutter along on sparkly wings when one could blast across the surface of Spheris with the help of an extreme speedster like a Hyperdragon?

It seemed that mere minutes passed before the Dragoness eased into her deceleration routine. Allory could not understand how it had come to be, but the colours of morning had advanced and the distinctive cleft talon mountain peaks of the Talon Quad had leaped to their left flank. Time travel? Not quite, but the sense of discomposure was evident in Yaarah too as he tilted his muzzle and blinked several times in quick succession to reorient himself.

“Fine ride, Henzaroseflash,” he said urbanely.

Rascal. His galloping heartbeat told a different story. Hers was no better, a wild burbling rush in her throat. What did these Hypers do for fun? Go faster still?

The Dragoness steadied him in the air with a deft touch as he overdid his barrel roll, bringing Allory and him back to a normal orientation in regard to the world. “My pleasure, Felidragon. Our territories end here. I would have taken you on to the Human dwellings of wood and stone, but an ancient pact prevents my transgression upon their realms. We do not hunt their kind nor plunder their dwellings, while they agreed not to hunt our egglings or plunder our lairs. Flash travels to you.”

“Flash upon your wings.”

Leaning close to him, she breathed in a voice clearly not meant to be overheard by the Faerie, “Take care of Allory Fae, or I will find you and skin your pretty hide myself, Felidragon. I shall relish the deed and take my leisure over it. Understood?”

Not exactly subtle when it came to her threats, that Dragoness.

He nodded soberly. “Upon my honour.”

Wheeling smoothly about his flank, she gestured toward the travel pack. “Flash travels to you, Allory Fae.”

She reached out to wave from beneath the flap and yelled at the top of her very tiny voice, “Thank you, Henzaroseflash!”

“May your talons carve justice upon the entrails of whomever would harm your family,” she continued, flashing one of her predatory smiles. Oof. Whatever worked, Allory told her squeamish stomach. “We have spread word of your noble quest among the Hyperdragons. We are not many in this region, but we have begun to scour the lands in search of these evildoers. Rest assured, no stone or leaf shall be left unturned – and wherever you find Hyperdragons, you will find yourself among friends. That is the vow of my Dragon hearts.”

Touching her heart, she wished she could make a full Faerie obeisance to the Dragon. She had to content herself with expressing her heartfelt thanks and dabbing at the corner of each eye.

With that, she and Yaarah took their leave. He spread his golden wings upon the breeze, took his bearings from the angles of the shadows cast by Middlesun and a magnetic sense he muttered about for some obscure scholarly reason, and set off between the peaks. He flew lower than Henzaroseflash, who for their sakes had also not flown as high as she was able. Her kind were not for nothing celebrated as the greatest sprinters in the magical kingdom. She had covered over six hundred miles of their journey in a matter of little over an hour. Unbelievable. It would have taken the Felidragon the better part of four to five days to cover the same distance in straight flight, slow and steady, as he put it. She caught him grumbling something about flying rings about the pink speedster if needed.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

A touch disgruntled there, Yaarah?

No mind. As the weather was fine but nippy, Allory decided to practise entry and exit of her new travel accommodation. She climbed up to the Felidragon’s shoulders to assume her usual perch. With a couple of modifications, her warm clothing now featured a kind of double-pouch arrangement at the back to protect her wings from the ravages of frostbite. The Pixies had never heard of a Faerie suffering wing-fracture from cold, but the learned dust-heads had all nodded in concert and agreed it must be a theoretical possibility, unknown only because her kind usually kept to the stifling jungles and did not travel over wintery mountains. To keep warm, she practised with her cepril tusk daggers for an hour, trying to groove in the warrior movements she had disparagingly been taught along with the other, larger and far more capable Faelings.

She missed her family, especially those scattered bodies she remembered…

No. She refused to think about what the Marakusians might have done to them.

Wanting to keep busy to sorrow-proof her day, Allory next restrung her Momfae’s bow and lightly rewaxed the bowstring. Practice another time.

Although the Marakusian Slavers had killed many, she could only hope that the general plan was to keep the Scintillant Faerie alive to exploit their mysterious powers. Dead Faerie did not heal much. After that, she cleared her mind and meditated, trying to find the song of ariavana even amongst these austere peaks. The belief had always stuck with her that it must be everywhere, but today all she heard was her own deafness, her tininess in comparison to this overwhelming vista, the sobering knowledge that the air up here was so clear, she could see farther than ever before – far enough to detect the natural inward curvature of Spheris. This was how intelligent creatures must first have established the nature of their world. Yet, could they have imagined it was so different to others? Where did knowledge of the outside universe even come from? She peered downward. Drill through the mountains, as deep as the roots of a Sentinel Tree, and one might just find … empty space? And stars?

Could there be other Middlesuns out there? Was each one sentient, an entity of soul, history, thought and even personality?

Shading her eyes, she raised her gaze to the heavens, murmuring to herself, “So, I suppose we’d describe your character as warm and your personality as sunny? What sparkle, what shine, what a star you are. Why, your very language is the radiance of …”

Her voice trailed off as she realised that a pair of golden tufted ears had oriented themselves toward her silly monologue.

“Finished being weird yet?”

Allory kicked the Felidragon lightly. “Speaketh the rug in prosaic verse?”

“Frrr-harr-HURR!” he spluttered in delight. “What were you doing, snoozing with your eyes open?”

“Meditating.”

“Aha. In other words, summoning up the mysterious powers of she who envisions dust souls and the like? Very good, trrr-purrr. So tell me, little Fae, of an unfinished conversation we had early on in our acquaintance. Evolution. You suggested I might believe in ‘standardised’ evolution. What did you mean? Some form of design or creator hypothesis?”

“Perhaps,” she said, scrambling to formulate a sensible response to this unexpected question. Every time they travelled, the Felidragon’s mind seemed to reach for new vistas and new ideas. “Remember how some early Faerie legends hold that the world soul must have essentially formed Spheris as a hiding place or cocoon to guard her verimost essence, a safe space in which a greater or transcendental form might develop over aeons?”

“Quite, mrrr-frrr, little Fae,” he agreed.

How condescending are we?

Swallowing back an unaccustomed spurt of anger, Allory wondered how one made a learned Felidragon take a ‘little Fae’ seriously. She could not help her size! One way to shovel that attitude back right down his throat was to fizz and fuddle his furry mind. Thoroughly.

Inward snigger. O wicked sparkles …

Even if she harboured doubts about this world-soul hypothesis, mischief beckoned.

Sweeter than jungle honey, she replied, “Those same legends hold that the ariavana is essentially a beneficent presence – a force for healing, growth and good, rather than the opposite, being evil, atrophy and death. Yaarah, it does not add up. If the ariavana in some broader sense wants good for Spheris and its creatures, then the transition to transcendence and attendant destruction of all life within Spheris surely would be anathema to this entity, even if we assume its purposes might be greater than ours, its ways opaque to our level of understanding. The Fae Elders always spoke of the Song of Spheris in terms of beauty, advance and custodianship, perhaps implying that this almighty intelligence designed a world and creatures about it to suit its particular needs – but I don’t know about that.”

His feline eyes lidded slowly over his shoulder. “And why not?”

The Scintillant swallowed in annoyance. Hypnotic jolly cat-Dragon! Every now and again, his beautiful fiery orbs reminded her of who the predator was in their relationship.

No. This was a no-snacking relationship.

She pictured swatting her irrational fears right back over the Russet Jungles. Swat! Wheee …

Allory continued, “Well, it seems to me that the nature of magic itself lends itself to a process analogous to what you call evolution, but that it does not progress in some linear fashion through physical beings, substances or flora and fauna, for example, but expands via multiple dimensions at the same time – physical, magical and spiritual, to name but a few. The ariavana is expressive, just as magic is expressive. It is animate, self-modifying, alive, not only driven by a first cause, but able to be its own first cause or spark, to be vital and to vitalise other things in its own right. That … I think this is what I was trying to grasp when I spoke about standardised evolution.”

She checked her companion visually. He appeared to be frozen in thought or outrage, she could not tell which. Onward, o Fae?

Wicked little beastie, that’s what I am!

“My personal perspective is that there is no one song, no single evolutionary path that follows a strict, logical progression. There’s more. Some speak of this as a touch of intelligence, even meddling or a godlike imprint upon the natural world perhaps, others as a song that follows its own melody … I don’t know, Yaarah. I just feel there’s something incredible and miraculous out there and it wants to make itself known to us, but we just don’t quite grasp what it is saying. Maybe we can’t ever, but that doesn’t stop us from trying. We listen because … because we have to.”

He purred, “I’m fairly sure I’m flying but I can’t quite feel my wings just now. Allory Fae, is this truly how you see our world?”

“I do. I feel it. Sometimes. Imperfectly.”

Either this, or a convincing hallucination underpinned the core of her deepest beliefs. She wriggled uncomfortably. Thanks to the Pixies, the morass of her inner doubts, recriminations and self-loathing now had so many new directions to explore. Important directions, she reminded herself. Directions which she must explore in order to discover their truth; matters she had, under the guise of bamboozling her scholar friend, just managed to talk herself into!

Wonderful result. Like pushing aside a branch only to have it whip right back and slap her mouth full of leaves. Straight from personal experience.

“Well, mrrr-prrr,” he offered noncommittally. “I shall have to do some meditating of my own, I fear.”

“You … uh, aren’t going to argue with me?”

Wince.

Her companion purred soberly, “With my own eyes, I watched an eleven and a quarter inch Faerie pull a doomed Pixie’s dust back from oblivion. I’m not sure I know what to believe anymore.”

“I … I didn’t mean to –”

“You didn’t.”

I didn’t intend to wreck your beliefs. Talk about guilt. Double guilt.

That was all he said for the rest of the day. Utter silence from the voluble Felidragon was not a concept she was accustomed to. She had achieved her intent and now felt bad about it. When would she stop being so tangled up by what others thought of her? Allory watched as the peaks slowly passed by, each as splendid as the next, and wondered if a person ever grew weary of seeing the world.

She also knew that her personal journey of learning to listen had only just begun.