ALL THE BEAUTY, THE calm, the afterglow of hearing the song of the world’s own soul uplifting her being, everything crashed in around Allory. What an unbelievable assertion! Beyond ludicrous. A ruthless pounding drumbeat filled her ears, stifling thought. How dare he lump such a charge upon her frail shoulders; her, the least and worst and most useless of any kind of intelligent creature who had ever lived? She who was lucky beyond measure those Rippers had not snapped her brittle bones like twigs and scattered them across the jungle floor! Fortunate she was not now digesting in bits inside various stomachs.
The very idea made her nauseous.
Twist it about as she would, her poor brain could not process this bizarre claim. For the longest time, words failed her. Distress seared her heart. Her? Her? This could not be. Never.
“Did you not hear?” he rumbled cheerfully. Despite her distress, she clearly heard the ebullient bubbling of fire somewhere within his torso, while electrical sparks played along his tail – clues as to his animated state? “I said, little Fae, that you were born to –”
She choked out, “Save the what?”
His lips peeled back so far, she feared his whiskers might split right off his face.
“Are you insane?”
The lunatic grin only widened.
Waving her hands quite uncharacteristically, Allory squeaked, “What did you just – how did we get from – that evolution discussion – to my clothing – and … huh?”
A gurgle of laughter resolved into a half-swallowed fiery burp, for which the Felidragon apologised absentmindedly. One should not be distracted by fire dribbling off one’s lower lip, apparently, like a Faeling gorging themselves on nectar.
At length, Allory peeped, “You are not merely a nut, you’re the entire nut tree!”
Reckless insults that served only to pin his weird grin in place. She had seen stranger things in her life, but none weirder nor more discomforting. No mad fire-breather was dropping the fate of the world in her lap. Not today. Not without some serious explaining and even then, no.
Just … no.
She hesitated, fearing he might snap her head off for her temerity, before continuing, “Are you feeling … lightheaded, perhaps? Maybe you should lie down, friend Felidragon. You have some injuries which are bleeding, I see –”
“I am lying flat on my stomach, I am wholly in my right mind, and I am not befuddled in the – well, I am whiskers-over-tail, mrrr-hrrr …” He shook his muzzle slowly from side to side, before drawing himself up into an inch-perfect cat pose, sitting very upright, front paws neatly placed beside one another, tail impeccably arranged to curl from his hindquarters to the fore. “Did I just see what I thought I saw? Real scintillance drawn from –”
“Aye? I believe you just equated clothing repair with saving the world. Totally sane and rational.”
The whiskered quivered in disbelief. Then, he cracked upon his jaw and thunder-guffawed, PRAA-HARR-HARRR!!
His paroxysm blasted Allory head over heels off her lilypad and summarily dunked her beneath the water. Just as well, because a burst of searing flame slithered briefly over the surface before she broached again. Despite her annoyed sputtering and coughing, the spectacle of a large Felidragon capering about in a manic, tail-lashing, springy-legged dance over on the shore did cause her lips to quirk upward in amusement. Eccentric? That was one word. Miaowing mad would be another. Yaarah acted unable to stop laughing, which soon made her chuckle too.
How ridiculous was he?
How peculiar to cause another creature to erupt in paroxysms of undignified jubilation!
She touched her chest. Strange things stirring inside. Unfamiliar things.
Nor did he stop.
BBRRRAA-HARRR! the Felidragon thundered, spinning about in pursuit of his own tail. Sparks skittered about the rocks, threatening to set his map rolls alight. MRRR-HRRR-HARRR! HO-HAA-HARRR!
Dipping beneath the surface to avoid being deafened and wary of another flaming outburst, the Scintillant kicked carefully with her good leg and paddled to the shoreline a little aside from all the kerfuffle. After all, fire was fire even if a Dragon was dribbling it helplessly due to uninhibited laughter. Clambering out, she found a pair of white flaming eyes staring down at her from a mere two inches or so. She yelped and fell backward with a splash. That tweaked her wing injury, but less than she might have imagined. Nerve damage?
MORR-HARR HURR! he chortled, shaking the cenote pool with his blast. “Too cute for words! So cute, yet what power … fur and fangs! What an hour! What a day!”
Duck!
Another careful rising – oh, he was back to the ridiculous dancing. Quite mad.
Remind her never to try to run away from a Felidragon. He could leap thirty vertical feet with ease. With a mildly hysterical chuckle of her own, Allory settled in to watch the show.
Decent dancing, mind. Like her – before this injury – the winged feline could execute many aerial dance forms as well. Eventually, Yaarah ended up on his back, wriggling with pleasure and scratching an urgent itch at the same time, before his head flopped sideways to regard her and he declared that his ribs ached and he had not laughed so well in years. By now, Allory had effected repairs on the rest of her clothing and dressed herself again. She smiled at him, ruing the loss of her dagger – her only weapon.
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Diffidently, she murmured, “Cleared out a few cobwebs over there, Yaarah?”
Ooh. Dangerous talk. She found herself making a wriggle of guilty pleasure and stopped the movement at once.
He said, “You have no idea what it means to be the only Felidragon who subscribes to the old beliefs about the Faerie, Allory, to be the one who is ridiculed and sniggered at and dispatched on the most impossible quest any Dragon could imagine …”
Blinking very slowly, the pupil slits widening as if to take in her response, he added in a gentler tone, “Or, mrrr-grrr, maybe do you?”
“Ridicule? Every day since I can remember.”
“Why?”
“It’s – I’m a runt, alright? The runt of my litter of pupae-siblings. What do I look like to you? Big and brave and strong? Skilled? Competent?”
“Misidentified? I think not.”
At this, Allory folded her arms deliberately, quaking at the mere thought of disagreement. Yet she was right. She had always been weak and sickly, stunted in size and, as her Dadfae had said, a waste of good Fae life.
He added, “No living Felidragon has ever met a Scintillant Faerie before, so …”
“Congratulations. You’ve just met the tiniest, puniest, most insignificant member of our species. I’m afraid the world would be better off without the likes of me trying to save it, whatever that means. It’s a ridiculous notion – by definition, a non-starter.”
The Felidragon made a hissing sound between his fangs that suggested withering, fiery disapproval. Before she could blink, he whipped over onto his paws and hunkered down, peering at her with that intensity she found so unnerving. “I am serious about my claim, Allory Fae. Deathly serious.”
“Well, I am in all seriousness a whole eleven and a quarter inches tall, Yaarah. See these muscles?” She flexed her scrawny biceps. Definitely no feeding a Felidragon on these. “Here I come, world. Watch out, Miss Excessively Compact is in the cocoon.”
“Eleven?” he purred drolly.
“And a quarter.”
“Forget the quarter inch at your peril, Felidragon?”
Despite her misgivings, Allory chuckled, “I know exactly where you’re going with this nonsensical argument.”
“Indeed, you do, hurrr-hurrr,” he agreed, twitching his whiskers comically, first the left dozen, then the right. Each golden whisker was as long as she was tall. She wondered briefly what additional senses they might enable. “In fact, I’m starting to discover such a wealth of intelligence hidden behind this timid exterior, I suspect you’d be utterly inedible – reference earlier comment. Get stuck in the old craw. Probably prattle your way right back out of my stomach.”
“Excuse me!”
“I mean, did you hear Spheris crying, ‘I need the biggest, baddest Faerie that ever lived to save me, nothing less will do?’ No?” Allory tried not to smile and failed. “Besides, I’m hardly the greatest or best-regarded among my kind, either, and my reputation – ahe-rrrrr-mmm. Hairball!”
He made a loud gagging sound.
“Cat joke?” she giggled.
“Quite, hrrr-prrr. I mean –” he flicked out a talon from its sheath and pretended to measure it against her seated height “– what exactly passes for big and tough amongst your kind, titch? My fleas could probably wrestle you to a standstill.”
“Yaarah! You’re terrible!”
“There now, that’s better. As I told you, the Felidragon is always right. Size check?”
“Others? Well, up to about seventeen or eighteen inches tall, I suppose, and at least twice my bodyweight. Maybe three times?”
“How many featherweight was that, did you say?”
She eyeballed him speculatively. “Do any of your wounds need stitching? Got a nice blunt needle I could borrow?”
“Miniscule, fragile and a tongue like a cantankerous viper. I see how it is.”
He’s barking mad. No, that’s too canine. Mewling madcat?
Who was this Allory who dared to joke with a Dragon? She felt dislocated, scared stiff, a person who did not know herself anymore yet found the realisation alarmingly freeing. Realising he had been joking to set her at her ease was no help, for that freedom conversely alarmed her.
Even with her feet on the ground she felt as if she were falling. Meantime, her tongue had clearly mislaid any form of discretion.
After a long, awkward pause, they both seemed to remember who they were talking to and they glanced away at the same time, embarrassed. Allory found her heart standing in her throat. Yaarah discovered a patch on his gorgeous fur that needed a thorough cleaning. For her part, the Fae gave her clothing an unnecessary brushing-down and ran her fingers through her spiky blue hair, making the style less wild. Marginally. The Felidragon sharpened his talons on a handy lump of granite. Really, did he have to? She was quite sure they were more than sharp enough to give her an unsolicited haircut.
Wandering over to his open map, Allory pored over it for a few minutes, trying to make sense of the markings. No-one had ever bothered to teach her the likes of her the art of map reading, which warriors and scouts would know, but she could make out a few details she thought might be familiar, such as a winding river and a towering stand of semi-sentient Sentinel Trees which must be the ones near her colony – where her colony had been. She bowed over the spot for the longest time.
As for Yaarah? Back to the vigorous fur licking, this time across his stomach. One could only imagine the hours of painstaking care his gorgeous coat must require.
You’re such a pretty boy.
For a second, even her private temerity astonished her.
Snick! Gnarrr! If she ever voiced so much as a whisper of that errant thought, one less sprout to bother Spheris with her insignificant presence.
Compared to felines she had seen about the jungles, the caracals and sabretooth panthers and deadly nocturnal lymanx, Yaarah’s body shape was not significantly different. He was strong yet sinuous through the torso, with a wedge-shaped head crowned with golden ears furnished with dramatic sable tufts that always oriented toward her when they conversed. To her eye, his skull exhibited a more swept-back outline than most felines, perhaps adapted for improved flying aerodynamics. The head crowned an unusually long neck – at least, any Fae with that neck would have looked rather bizarre, but it suited a Felidragon perfectly. His tail was proportionate to his body and neck, perhaps four feet long, thick and lush – and a reasonable zapper of a weapon in its own right, she recalled. The great paws were wider than her height and perhaps twice as long, their built-in sheaths concealing no less than five retractable dagger-like talons to the fore and two to the rear. In all, he struck her as lithe, powerful and supremely suited to acts of destruction.
The obvious differences to normal felines were the fire breathing and the wings, now folded neatly back along his spine, their tips crossing above the base of his tail. His wing texture appeared to be slightly furry or mothlike, but delicate they were not. In fact, the mid-elbows of his wings came furnished with a pair of forward-facing hooks each that could conceivably be used as weapons in battle.
The Felidragon’s face was strong and wise, his nose a startling dot of sable amidst all that rich gold, and the fires of his eyes appeared to change colour and texture at random times, almost as if mirroring his thoughts or emotions. She noticed that his whisker pads were speckled with black, as were the additional whiskers that sprouted from above the inner corners of his eyes. Still, those fangs … no cat had ever owned such an arsenal in their mouth. That part must be pure Dragon, she imagined.
Reaching behind her back, Allory explored the deep gash behind her shoulder with a delicate fingertip touch. Four inches long and bone-deep, it had even nicked the upper curve of her behind on the way down. Not good. If the total numbness was anything to go by, stroke appeared to have severed several of the main muscle and nerve bundles serving her right wing-cluster. If it was not seen to, if the muscles did not knit back properly, the likely upshot was that she would never fly again.
Simple. Simply maimed.