AROUND THE TIME THAT she expected the usual existential thump around the earhole, Allory came awake. Not a nice awake. Rather, it was that sort of preternatural awareness, betrayed by one’s own body, when every grain of her being screamed that falling back asleep was an absolute no-go. Sighing unhappily, she crawled out from beneath Yaarah’s furry ruff and stretched widely. Sandy eyes, aching body, buzzing brain.
Totally the wrong hour for this nonsense.
She scratched her antennae, remembering a brief but eerie dream about the Wraith which she must have just woken up from. In this dream, the Crimson Raptors had been arrayed before the entity like an army, all standing rigidly to attention in a way that struck her as improbable for any such draconic creatures. The Wraith had harangued them at length about unquestioning obedience to his commands, clearly seeking to dominate their fiery minds. The Raptors roared and hissed and broke ranks, squabbling with one another. Allory had thought this a lost cause, but then the creature reached out and gripped them with renewed power – an echo of which still caused the inside of her skull to burn like acid – and the creatures had, as one, risen upon their hind legs to salute the black form and thundered their allegiance.
Eerie. That degree of sway, of control moreover, of other creatures’ minds …
Allory shook out her wings lightly. Back to that horrid ache in the scar. She would never be able to forget those Ripper Baboons, would she? Oh. Oh! Putting that dream together with what she had Yaarah had observed of the Rippers’ behaviour – could it be they who had been primed to hunt and track down her people? Assuming that the Marakusians reported to someone or something who badly wanted plenty of Scintillant Faerie to use for their vile ends and would stop at nothing to rip them out of the jungles … who must surely know the history, an ancient evil with the patience of aeons …
Like a Wraith? Shudder!
A tang of ozone mingled with moisture teased her nostrils as she glanced about the cosy space, trying to re-centre herself, to calm down and think clearly. Suggids, rain? Out here? Did it ever rain in these canyonlands?
Aww, just look at the sweet Princess, curled up beneath an Elven travel cloak that doubled as a blanket. How innocent she appeared – until, upon closer inspection, one noticed the point of a blade glinting beneath her right cheek. Her fingers must be curled around the hilt, although the way she lay, it was hard to tell. Her nose wrinkled as Yaarah’s tail twitched nearby. Perhaps a stray hair. He must be having a feline dream, for his eyes flickered rapidly beneath his shuttered eyelids.
Allory murmured, “Dreaming of Sabline?”
“Mmm-prrr … who’s been a wicked kitty, then?” he murmured, without waking up.
Chortle! Thank whatever one wished to swear upon that the midnight marauder was not about to overhear this comment. More than she had wished to know!
Allory peered at her outstretched hand, with which she had meant to calm him. How odd. In the very deep cavern gloom, she did indeed detect a slight radiant patterning beneath her skin. Ephemeral and breathtakingly delicate, the whorls and motes of an indefinite lighter blue colour played beneath the deeper-hued skin surface, undulating from her fingertips toward her heart. The effect was so near translucent that she blinked several times to try to clear her vision, but it persisted, teasing her attempts to quantify it. Actual scintillation? Blow her down with a puff of jungle pollen!
Wow, I am an actual Scintillant Faerie after all. Surprise!
Yaarah, bless his pretty fur, had suggested that this effect appeared when she sung her best magic. Good thing she always kept her eyes closed, right?
Thankfully, she had not contrived to flatten her nose against a boulder in the process.
Without the slightest warning, the familiar pressure gripped her temples. The migraine came on fast, but not so fast that she failed to notice how the scintillant colours and the effect beneath her flesh strengthened at the same time, allowing her to trace the fractal-like, infinitely recursive complexities, leaves and shells, sap-froth and music in unending diminuendo.
She collapsed to her knees. “Uhhh, suggids …”
“Sing!” Yaarah growled, suddenly right in her ear.
Pest! Another heart-stopping fright. How did he keep doing that? And how could she sing with this headache squeezing her brains for sap?
The next non-existent thump flipped her over onto her side, turning her yelp of fright into a pained grunt. Allory tried to sing, but what she produced came out somewhere between a caterwaul and a wobbly whimper. Not pretty. The pain doubled, quadrupled, shot right off the scale and kept going, but for the first time, perhaps driven by desperation or despair, she discovered a counter-vibration in her throat that drew her into a safe haven of sorts. Melody clashed with disharmony, with an almighty force she sensed rippling through the fabric of the world, but it was a backlash from somewhere else that generated the agony she felt.
This music – Allory clawed about in desperation, so powerful was the urge to seize it – I’ve heard it before, this eerie magic plucking upon soul-strings …
Having fought back for the longest time, groaning a parody of the glorious songs she had sometimes been able to produce before, she juddered as a titanic peal of thunder shook their small cavern. With a rising roar, the rain arrived. At once, the episode abated as if somehow the presence of storm, lightning or water filtered its effects.
Indescribable relief.
Panting harshly, her throat afire, Allory found herself slumped like a wet rag over Yaarah’s outstretched paw. “Thanks, friend.”
“That was a bad one, hrrr-nrrr?” he purred, querying her with his eyes.
“I’ll survive. Just like I survived you sneaking up behind me yet again.” She glanced up as a few rivulets of rainwater came running down the boulders into their tidy yet poorly sheltered cavern. “Quite the downpour. I love that smell –”
“Petrichor,” he said.
“It has a word?”
“Of course.” Twenty fangs celebrated his cat smile. “Petrichor is that particular smell of fresh rain, that delicious earthy, clay-like scent –”
“Blow me down with a parrot feather.”
As if her words had opened the deepest spigots of the heavens, the water came sheeting down with redoubled force. No, sheeting was no longer the word. These were raindrops the size of Dragons. One struck Allory right between the antennae as she glanced upward and smacked her clean off her feet, as if she had been swatted by a Dragon’s paw.
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Yaarah whirled. “With me! Princess, wake up!”
“Why?” Allory gasped.
“We’re a bit dippy down here,” he yelled above the rain’s thundering. “If I’m not mistaken, it’s going to get very drippy.”
“Dippy – drippy? Eh?”
“Stony ground. Rainfall doesn’t smoke in, zrrr-frrrt! Honestly, don’t you know diddly drabble, you glamping glitterbug?”
Smoke? What’s he been smoking, more to the point?
Putting two and three together, Allory swung toward their Elven companion and ran slap into a hand that plucked her up deftly. She wriggled madly. “I can fly! Honestly –”
“Not through this.”
The floor of their bolthole was already awash.
Someone may have been guilty of some high-speed complaining and several gratuitous abuses of the word ‘suggids!’ before Ashueli squirmed out of the entryway tunnel, already sloshing through water up above her knees. As they broke out into the open, a barrage of fat raindrops slammed down upon her head and shoulders, stinging with every strike. Allory could barely make out the difference between the sky and the rising groundwater, but her companions clearly could, because they exchanged nearly inaudible yells and bolted together for higher ground.
Ash was right. A miniature Fae could never have flown anywhere through this deluge. She would have been smashed down and drowned.
How could there be this much water in all Spheris?
Clutched against the girl’s chest, her viewpoint swung wildly from water to sky – make that more water – as they bounded along. The racing floodwaters tore at her footing, but Elven agility and a nifty high-stepping gait kept Ashueli on the move until the Felidragon’s sleek golden head vanished from view without any warning whatsoever.
“Yaarah!”
Setting her stance in an instant, Ash’s bronzed hand shot out. How she knew or sensed his location among the tumbling, reddish waters, Allory had no idea, but she managed to snag him by the tail. He came out howling and spitting, half gratitude and half affront.
The Elf leaned into his face and howled, “Up! Go!”
What he did not hear, her stabbing finger made perfectly clear. The Fae, somehow upside-down now and hanging onto her black hair near Ashueli’s jaw, could barely hear above the roaring, the whole world rushing and foaming and crashing and thundering, but she heard her own scream rise at a piercing pitch as she recognised now what the Elf must somehow have sensed. A wave of water curled toward them – a thing she had never imagined, not even in her worst nightmares. Twice the height of Elf or Felidragon, it shook even this tempest with a formidable, guttural roar. Yaarah had the girl by the scruff of the neck and was frantically trying to pull free from the surface, but with his half-healed wing and her weight there could be no chance of escape.
He had just lifted her feet free when the dirty wave thundered into his flank and hauled them down with terrible force.
As the Felidragon’s wing folded and a sharp crack emanated from his previous injury site, a sweet, lilting song rose from Allory’s throat. The Elf’s neck muffled the sound, but it still pierced the thundering with curious efficacy, like a child’s laughter piping through the devastation of her cocoon she so clearly visualised from before …
Had she seen something that day? Something out of place amidst the chaos, carnage and dying?
Her song stuttered as the sudden insight failed to clarify, but the effect of her magic did not. The water slipped away from her companions as if they wore fish scales. Yaarah’s stuttering, broken-winged flight peaked before slewing helplessly toward his wounded side as Ashueli dangled beneath him, awkwardly clasped in his talons.
They skimmed above the gushing waters for the longest breath and then began to fall, but now Allory’s horrified laughter did indeed choke forth, somehow torn from the grief, her response to the unreality of a barren canyonland being transformed into the first lake she had ever seen. Proximate death, or perhaps an overreaction to the terror threatening to drown her soul, sharpened her magic. As the radiance strengthened upon her sodden limbs and even began to shine through her light Faesilk clothing, Allory wrapped her extraordinary song in the lightness of an Elven foot and the delicate swirl of Faerie wing-magic. As they touched down upon the heaving floodwaters, Ashueli instinctually stretched out her feet and began to run.
She skimmed across the surface.
Amazed!
Giddy mirth gripped Allory’s being. This was what she had sensed about the awakening of her Scintillant magic! Anything – almost anything – must be possible if only belief could unite with imagination to bring it into actuality.
Only the best sort of insanity.
The Elf gaped at her flying feet, almost stumbling as the reality of what she was doing clearly hit home.
“Keep going, MRRR-GNARRR!” Yaarah roared.
The Felidragon extended his wing-and-a-half to provide additional lift as Ashueli danced like an Elf through shady sylvan halls, crossing a tumultuous, thundering torrent none of them could ever have navigated and lived to tell the tale, toward a rugged highland not far off. All the while, the deluge continued to lash down as if it fully intended to wipe the entire land out of map and memory. Through the driving sheets of iron rain, Allory spied the black, craggy length of what must have been a ridge above the once-barren flats.
The girl’s racing feet plashed upon the heaving floodwaters like a pond-skater skittering across a puddle at high speed. She did not sink. A parakeet’s laughter cackled from Ash’s lips all the while. Allory understood perfectly. This kind of madness was infectious. Beautifully infectious, like a cluster of wings for the soul.
When the Elf touched dry land and came to a shuddering halt, she helped Yaarah to alight. His desperate clutch had driven his talons into her shoulders in at least five places, Allory counted unhappily, but the Princess had never flinched.
Suggids, could I ever be a tenth as tough as her?
“Yaarah?” Ash yelled above the continued hammering beat of the rain. The storm was frenetic, lightning ripping through the massed storm clouds and mighty, near-continuous crashes of thunder booming over the land as if seeking to flatten anything that dared to remain standing.
“I’m fine, frrr-ssst! Let’s find shelter!” he roared back. “Higher up!”
She lifted his broken wing and helped to arrange it upon his back. “No, you’re not.”
“Shelter first,” he argued.
After regaining their feet, the companions explored a higher up the ridge and found a rude shelter in the wind-hollowed lee of a boulder. Here, the drenching rain would not hit them if they all cuddled up together. Couple of inches to spare, but not entirely out of the splash zone.
The floodwaters continued to rise, but they seemed to be safe at this level.
Sigh. To work.
To work, before she lost her nerve and knack and the buzz of this miraculous magic.
Allory bent over Yaarah’s wing, settling the bone fragments in place with a combination of voice, touch and the help of an Elven hand here and there. Her muscles twitched. Traitorous body. She eyed her toes distrustfully. Was that a dance step? How could she ever knowingly dance again? Instinct was one matter. To dance of her own volition, when the sky roared and the rain pelted down … she laboured until her throat hurt and her magic was spent.
“How does that feel, Yaarah? Better?”
“Thank you,” he said wanly. “You’re getting better, too. That was impressive.”
“No more hauling friends out of floods for a few days,” she admonished with a wry grin of her own. “Sorry about the pain.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever walk on water again,” Ash joined in, casting one more disbelieving glance at the waters visible between several clumps of the dark, shiny obsidian boulders that dotted this ridgeline. “Does the awesomeness just come with the package, Sparkles?”
Allory tried a baleful glare, but since she was so tiny, Ash’s expression suggested it had been taken for outrageous cuteness. Great. Not quite the point.
“We still need a nickname for you,” she riposted. “Show me those shoulders, Elf.”
“I’m fine.”
“Alright, Sabline, I believe you.”
“Ouch.”
“I’ve got it!” Squeaky-Fae special.
“Oh no.” Ash produced an exaggerated eye roll. “Fine, fine. Pray tell, what delightful nickname do you wish to inflict upon me?”
“Sweetblades.” The Elf’s mouth dropped open and stayed that way as Allory added excitedly, “Aye, Sweetblades is perfect, it’s got just the right ring –”
“You wouldn’t dare!” The Scintillant eyed the other girl’s hands, raised in a defensive, blade-like posture. After a second, she dropped the pose sheepishly, probably realising she had just sealed her fate. “Suggids! Look, I’m just not very good with the – aargh!”
“Fur and fangs, zrrr-mrrr, that throaty gargling sounds ominous,” Yaarah purred, giving the nonplussed Princess a slow wink.
“Almost terminal,” Allory agreed. “Consider it a badge of honour.”
“A seal upon our friendship,” the Felidragon added.
“As in, you’re not just an annoying Elf, you’re our annoying Elf.”