YAARAH WAS WOUNDED TOO, Allory saw, with baboon bites marring his fur with puncture wounds and matted runnels of black blood. His wings had been shredded in places.

Suddenly, she knew what to do. “Yaarah?”

He glanced up so quickly, she could only conclude he must have been waiting for her to speak. “Aye?”

“If you don’t have medical supplies, maybe we could source some from the Faerie colony? They probably won’t be needing them … anytime soon. Some of your wounds look deep. I could at least clean out the worst ones? I’m not too awful at stitching. Small hands, see?”

He watched her wriggling her blue fingers toward him. Actually, weren’t felines supposed to chase cute, wriggly little things? She quickly stowed her hands behind her back lest his instincts overcome him.

The whiskers scrunched toward his nose in a rather droll expression. “Is that so, mrrr-frrr?”

“I … I’m a sort of … healer. Maybe healer-ish?”

“Excellent idea, grrr-mrrr,” he declared, all hearty as if seeking to infuse her spine with much-needed confidence. “Plus, see where you lived? I should find such an excursion most stimulating. Did you find the location on the map?”

“I think so. Here, near this stand of Sentinels.”

He flicked a wing expressively.

“Scouts and warriors learned such skills. It was never my place to –”

Yaarah snarled, “Never your place? Your place? Prrr-ssst! I’ll show you your place and then some.” She ducked, expecting a cuff over the pointy ear at the very least as repayment for her impudence, and so it was a second or two before she processed the import of what he had just added. “Up on my back. That’s your place.”

Not inside his stomach. On his back.

Allory suddenly felt very small and very silly indeed. So many fears. Not one was well-founded or rational.

Since the Felidragon acted openly narked by her statement, flicking open his travel pack and stuffing it full of scrolls while muttering something beneath his breath she did not quite catch, Allory opted not to make a fuss. Most definitely, the disbelieving chuckle in her heart found no voice. When edible Fae snacks dealt with large, excitable predators, it did seem prudent to keep a wise head upon one’s shoulders lest it not grace one’s shoulders for long.

Was he kidnapping her? What choice did she have?

Did a creature as irredeemably flawed as Allory even consider herself to have a right to make choices? All her life, choices had been made for her. Now, her life flitted rootless in a realm more deeply rooted than any other. Such irony.

“Suggids?” she offered softly, at last.

No official response from the furry one. Having bullied his scrolls into some opaque sort of order, the Felidragon proceeded to strap the pack to his lower right hind leg.

A talon crooked toward her. “Up.”

Allory scrambled up his foreleg and onto his back, having to drag her injured leg along. The wound threatened to stiffen up already. The sooner she could work some cleansing antiseptic sap into the cuts, the better. No telling what quantity of rotting meat those Ripper Baboons had stored beneath their talons. Even a few bits of hers, no doubt.

Kneeling just behind his tall ears, she took up handfuls and toes-full of his long golden fur. The tugging drew no comment. All macho toughness, this scholar. Giggle.

This cenote was a much tighter fit than the last, but her companion negotiated the tricky, narrow entrance with aplomb, timing his wingbeats to take them rocketing through the gap without ever threatening to clip the granite protrusions. Yaarah caught onto the same sarembis tree as before, all talons splayed, and proceeded to stroll vertically up its trunk. Casual as a lark. Yet when his long fur tickled her nose and she muffled a sneeze, an instant tremor betrayed his alertness.

Even the Dragonkind must remain alert here in the gloom of the deepest jungles.

Shortly, the familiar burgundy boughs surrounded them and the Felidragon pushed through to find space to spread his wings. Yaarah glided away, whisper-quiet but swift, like a vast golden moth bearing a sapphire butterfly upon his back.

The crenelated trunks were a deep ruddy purple in colour, while the lighter burgundy leaves formed an impenetrable thicket both beneath and above the layer where they flew. Brilliant jungle birds, lurking lizards and lazing serpents scattered before the Dragon’s advent, oftentimes belatedly. How strange to be feared by all! The animals they encountered raised raucous cries of protest or simply fell silent, trembling as death winged by.

Not a familiar feeling to an Allory Fae.

Soon, Yaarah said, “If you have the location right, you came a ways in four days.”

“I fled until I was exhausted,” she said. Memory stirred despite her desperate attempts to forget. “Beyond exhausted.”

Aye, she had tried to outrun the trauma, the things she had seen but blocked from her mind. Always, her reaction was to bolt. Hide and hide deep, was the Fae saying. Allory had made an art of it until she had nearly become Ripper Baboon art.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Similarly, there were things stolen from her by the strange, debilitating nightmares she had suffered since her childhood. Migraine dreams. Nightmares so terrifying and physically agonising that for years, her Momfae had dosed her with amsinthe nectar, a powerful sedative, in order that the family could get a few nights’ undisturbed sleep. She remembered little of them save the extreme pain and the recurrent visions of herself standing in a boneyard, some of which she had written down in a vain attempt to exorcise the terror.

The nightmares always returned. They had become inextricably intertwined in the sap of her life.

Her Momfae and Dadfae had argued over the treatment many more times than she could remember, with her Momfae insisting that amsinthe stunted growth. She remembered how their furious, sometimes violent arguing had frightened her, how she had promised in her mind: If I was only healthy, not such a frail and broken thing, they wouldn’t have to treat each other this way. Stop the hitting. Stop it! I’ll do better, Momfae, Dadfae – I promise, I’ll be a good girl.

Yet she could never be good enough. Not in the way they wanted.

“Why did they leave you behind?”

She buried her face against his silken fur. “Yaarah, I … I can’t …”

“Oh. I’m … nrrr-mrrr, I’m sorry.”

“My family protected me to the last.”

And I betrayed them at the last. Coward! A tiny, cruel part of her had wished for them to go, to be forever absolved of having to care for a shrivelled twig like her. Happy to be alive and free, little Allory? All alone. Happy others were taken in your place?

What a mess her heart was. What a disaster.

He said, “The Men of Marakusia are not known for their mercy. Have you thought to try to find them?”

“Aye, but what could I ever do to save them? Such an undertaking, it would be as far beyond my capabilities as Middlesun lies above the jungle – not that I would know, of course. We Faerie hide ourselves well.”

“Too well, prrr-rrrt,” Yaarah agreed. “Yet, how could you not know?”

“Know what?”

“Middlesun. Have you never seen the sun?” When she made an affirmative noise, he exploded, “They never let you see the sun? Gnarrr-frrrt! This is inconceivable, a travesty; it is abuse!”

“I’m far too weak to fly centrally,” Allory protested, eyeing a massive emerald boa constrictor as they sailed by. One white eye opened a crack to follow their progress. “Besides, it is too dangerous for Scintillant Fae – for any Faerie – to venture up there. I was always taught that the middle-lower canopy is as central as we should go.”

“I agree, little Fae, it is dangerous. But it is also beautiful. Would you like –”

“No. No, please … I couldn’t.”

“Not even in the company of a rambunctious Dragon?”

“Rambunctious was your dancing earlier.”

“Murr-harr-grrr. Good one.”

Deliberately, she loosened her death grip on his fur. Brave? Maybe another time. When she did not feel that the trip would kill her as she undoubtedly deserved.

How could she wish ill upon those who had cared for her all her life?

This was all her fault.

She was the weakest. It was always her fault.

Skirting a sarembis thicket overrun with the scratchy fruiting-tips, Yaarah flew over a very large, oval cenote Allory remembered passing the day before. This pool was inhabited by shoals of carnivorous fish. Woe betide any unwary animal that took a swim down there; the layer of white bones beneath the gently rippling blue water paid testament to the extreme danger. Choribi monkeys fed the fish by regularly dropping in small marsupials and rodents and in turn, helped themselves to fish eggs unmolested. Now, how did a relationship like that develop?

Recalling their conversation from before, she asked quietly, “Yaarah, what’s the matter with the world? Why does it need … saving?”

“I’ll tell you if you allow me to fly you up above the jungles and show you.”

“Eep! Please no, I beg you, don’t torment me so,” she whimpered, despising the note of panic in her voice. “It’s unkind.”

She shuddered against his neck.

They flew on in silence for a time that approached forever. Allory kept her eyes shut except for the moment he dodged a swarm of highly aggressive Biter Beetles, fighting the panic, the fear, the knowledge that she must soon lay eyes upon the cosy colony where once her peaceful, happy village had stood before the Slavers ripped it all away. How could she tear open those memory-scars once more?

Where lay the juxtaposition between memories and dreams, and the difference between lost nightmares and these fragmentary visions which had risen like diabolical jungle vines to try to entrap and drag her in? She must resist!

At last, he said gruffly, “We’ve reached the Sentinels.”

A warm purr vibrated through her body. Comfort? Not to a creature in her state of disarray, this emotional and mental wreck.

Her fingers and toes refused to uncurl. Scrunching up her face, Allory managed to unpeel her eyelids and found the golden wings had brought her up close to one of the almighty rose-coloured trunks. The behemoth swept upward and out of sight with awe-inspiring grandeur, so broad in this section close to ground level that even the Felidragon might take several minutes to fly around it. He had not alighted as he had on other trees. He had not dug his talons into the bark – if bark it was. Allory understood why. The surface itself had a downy quality that reminded her more closely of Fae skin than bark, yet it was the sensation emanating from the living colossus that struck her most forcibly.

At once, she was transported into that tiny Faeling of years before when her Dadfae and Momfae had brought the seven pupae-siblings to this place. Even then, she had been physically the smallest by wide margin, the one who needed her Dadfae’s especial support to fly this far from the colony, while her brofae and sisfae did not. They had stopped here with a group of warriors and hunters who had been searching for Vayrine Spinners, caterpillar-like animals the Fae used to spin their cocoon homes.

She remembered flying into the awesome presence of this life-force, the way it made her wings tingle to their very tips and her hair stand on end. Reaching out, she had touched the –

“What are you – careful!”

Blink. She knelt upon the Felidragon’s paw, her pointed ears burning with embarrassment.

He peered uncertainly at her. “You can’t just walk off my back without the use of your wings, remember?”

“Ariavanae,” she breathed hoarsely. “The air’s thick with it, Yaarah. I’ve never … never felt it so intensely. It’s as if I’m a lightning rod, a storm’s own home. Would you take me closer? Please? I need to be nearer, to feel this … more …”

More something. She had no words, only yearning.

“Are you certain, frrr-hrrrm?”

“Never more certain,” she said, all the while thinking, feeling and fearing exactly the opposite.

This was her lodestone, her true centre.

This was a lifetime’s phobias and desires rolled into one. She could not deny it. Where such a degree of recklessness stemmed from, she could not say, but Allory knew it was not courage. Nor strength. It was the countenance of her deepest need, and it owned her heart, wings and soul.

She tugged her antennae in mortification, before touching the place at the base of her neck where her ariayaenvul soul locket had always rested. Gone. No! Where … where could it be? How could she have lost that priceless gift?

‘You must remember!’ The eerie non-shadow creature stirred in the back of her mind, causing darkness to crowd in about the edges of her vision.

I must do this. Dragon, can you not sense these infernal echoes? I must, or I shall die.

“If you say so,” he purred, raising his paw and working his wings to bring them up to a velveteen surface that filled her world, thrumming with invisible power.

Allory stretched out a trembling hand.

KERACK!!

Whiteness smote her into eternity.