SABLINE RECOVERED CONSCIOUSNESS IN the early afternoon. The first Allory knew of it was that Yaarah strolled over to relay a message that the Dragoness would like to speak privately with her. She wondered what had passed between the two Felidragons, because the first words out of Sabline’s mouth were a gruff, sincere but epically awkward apology. Had she ever apologised before in her life?
Perhaps marauders of the night had no need?
Whatever the case, she said she was working on being grateful to be alive. Perhaps a small lesson in that for all creatures? This Faerie could certainly relate.
When Allory recounted what she had sensed inside her body, Sabline responded by informing her that during her youth, she had been diagnosed with an incurable degenerative condition peculiar to Felidragons. She and the tribe’s healer had hidden the truth for as long as she could. When she became too sick to dissemble any longer, her tribe had ostracised her and cast her out to die. It was their way to cut out weaknesses, she said bleakly.
Sabline had tried to perish in combat, but she had failed due to the unending pain she suffered daily and had ended up with an invitation to Durc’s favourite dungeon. Since her tribe had refused to pay any bounty to have her back, there she had been left to rot while Durc’s staff tried to work out how they could still turn a profit from a rogue Felidragon on her last legs.
Abandoned to die, she had set her stoic warrior will to the task of dying as she felt fit. One sparkly interruption later, her desired fate had been whipped out from beneath her paws. No quick ending to her pain.
“I was infuriated,” she admitted. “I’m … once more, trrr-hssst, I am ashamed I vented my fires upon you. It was undeserved and dishonourable.”
Allory said gently, “I am sorry to hear about your travails, Sabline. I am starting to learn how important tribe is, well, to all of us. Belonging and identity matter so deeply … I’m not explaining myself very well, but I have an idea. It’s a bit illogical and odd and I suppose very Allory Fae, but could we become your tribe?”
The black ears pricked up sharply. “Mrrr-hssst?”
“Well, us. We’re none of us perfect – except for Yaarah’s fur, of course – and you’d have to put up with the constant sparkle which annoys even me, at times …” She glanced shyly at the Dragoness, drawing an aimless circle in the sand with her foot. “If you’d have us?”
“Fur and fangs! How do you do that?”
She winced, “I’m sorry –”
“No. Not that, I didn’t mean to frighten you. Sorry.” Sabline waved the smoke away from her fire-leaking nostrils. “I mean, you’ve made me cry for the second time today. How?”
“I’d imagine …” Tears pricked her own eyes in response to Sabline’s expression. Allory choked out, “I’d imagine it has something to do with being alive, against the odds, when in your deepest sap you know that all you truly deserved was death.”
The gorgeous eyes filled with flaming cerise colours. Realisation?
Very softly, the Dragoness inquired, “Death, frrr-prrr? You’re not talking about me anymore, are you?”
“No …”
“You never deserved death.”
“I failed to help my family when they needed it most,” Allory rasped in a throat that suddenly felt like old, knobbly bark. She could barely force out the words for fear that the Dragoness would loathe her forever for what she had done. “I hid while they fought and died for me. Part of me even exulted that I’d finally be free of being babied, bullied and constantly put down – you see, I came to I believe the very worst about me, all the weakness and cowardice and fear became who I was. That’s another matter. The important thing is that they loved me, Sabline, and I abandoned them when it mattered most.”
“Hrrr-mrrr.” The Felidragon nodded slowly. “I see your heart, Allory Fae.”
“Er …”
Turning her face to the sky but closing her eyes, she said, “This is a new day beneath Middlesun. The old is gone, yrrr-ssst, never to return. Now you must decide – and I believe you have decided already – what to do with the days given to you.”
Allory nodded, feeling uncharacteristically sombre. “I have.”
“Good. Now they have a chance and so do you, to redeem this wrong between you. Allory Fae, I will join your tribe, if the others will have me. Go speak with them.”
“I’ll do that.”
Ashueli was not easy to convince, but in the end, she decided that if Allory wanted to give Sabline a second chance, then she would as well. After all, she was only running away from her father’s plans for her future. Who was she to judge?
New tribe. Perhaps the strangest beneath Middlesun? Two misfit Felidragons, a runaway Princess and one insignificant Scintillant who could not for the living sap of her work out what it actually meant to be Scintillant. Just that minor detail.
This new arrangement was not exactly a place of comfort for anyone either, as their tongue-tied dinnertime made clear. Allory snacked hungrily on that patch of flowers, while the Princess chopped up a root tuber very finely and ate it roasted Felidragon-style. Yaarah groused about being such a mighty hunter all he had rousted up was a tough old canyon rat. When he shared the beast with Sabline, Allory discovered that the filthy brown rat was twice her size and ten times as fat. Its scummy yellow front teeth were each the size of her entire hand. She would not be fighting one of those in a hurry.
Fly away, little Fae!
By the day after the next, the canyonlands had dried up enough that they could restart their march. Winding between many wide, muddy red puddles still baking away to dryness, the companions set their course by whiskers-sense or wingtip-sense, as the Faerie would say. Naturally, Yaarah therefore felt compelled to expound upon the nature and research history of the magical ley lines that made navigation by these senses possible under Middlesun.
To Allory’s surprise, Sabline listened uncomplainingly.
Hmm.
Toward the end of their third day, the weary, footsore and mud-splattered companions entered Giant territory proper. The terrain had been rising slowly but steadily toward a jagged ridgeline perhaps half a mile taller than the surrounding canyon landscape, still in the ubiquitous greyish-red colour which blended in and made its actual height difficult to judge. What little greenness there had been ran completely dry, as did any sign of water or animal life. Allory told herself to be tough and uncomplaining, and not to picture abundant nectar pouring upon Middlesun’s thick sunbeams every evening. Not helpful. Ashueli told them that this dryness was expected. The central badlands region just ahead was renowned for tricky navigation, regular rockfall, a broken surface underfoot that could crumble in an instant and drop a creature into a twenty-foot rock pit, nesting Wyverns and not least, the Giants themselves. This region, where the gigantic wild creatures called argumasaurs roamed, was the place their young hunters proved themselves.
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Enter at your peril, little ones.
And littler ones.
Her twice-daily amateur medical checks revealed that both Sabline and Yaarah were recovering with pleasing speed, at least from the wing break and the poisoning respectively, for the Dragoness’ underlying condition remained baffling and contrary. The golden wings stretched and tested the airs. The sable tread became lissom and menacing once more. It also, subtly but unequivocally, Allory observed with secret delight, leaned more and more toward the tread of her fellow Felidragon. Hail Allory the matchmaker! She bounced a touch in the air, clapping her wings together with a satisfied giggle. She would never have guessed it immediately, but it appeared that Yaarah’s initially befuddled admiration of the Sable Sabrefang had graduated into real attraction. Mutual attraction.
Not that Sabline would admit as much to anyone before the end of Spheris or time itself, but there it was.
Taller than Yaarah by a head and half again as bulky around the shoulders, the warrior Dragoness took to training him daily in combat. ‘Exercise stimulates the scholarly brain,’ she averred, walloping the breath out of his lungs. ‘A healthy body means a healthy mind.’ He took a peremptory nip at her haunches, panting, ‘Then, exercise this!’ She glided aside, tapping him beneath the chin with her fore-talon as she swayed back again. ‘Be glad I like you, Felidragon. Fatal strike.’ He crashed, ‘Gnarr!’
Sabline talked him through how not to leave his throat vulnerable during the strike. She was good. Good with necks. Knew twenty different ways of slitting them in a trice. No trouble imagining her pinching a little Scintillant’s head right off her shoulders.
Like plucking a ripe fruit off a branch.
Good and unspeakably terrifying had apparently become synonyms in this new Allory vocabulary.
After spending a sweltering afternoon of uphill hiking, apart from Miss Sparkles-slightly who played in the frisky thermals above the short but challenging escarpment sections, the companions surmounted the ridge toward early evening and gazed out over a new land from a vantage point of nearly a mile above.
“It’s green?” Allory squealed in delight.
“Down below, aye, but would you look at those vivid mauve and indigo rock striations?” said Yaarah, pointing at the thick clusters of precipitous, heavily eroded rock formations ahead. “Gorrr-geous colours, mrrr-prrr hrrrm. Quite the geological phenomenon. One can immediately appreciate the titanic scale of the water erosion activity that tore out the softer parts of the rock strata, leaving these magnificent stone column and pillar structures. Truly a natural wonder to make the whiskers tingle.”
“It’s a column forest,” she breathed.
Nectar! Oodles of nectar! Her stomach growled fitfully all around her spine even though with the breeze from behind, all she could smell was dryness and dust. Cough. Sneeze. An imagination like hers could supply all the detail required, however. It had her paddling backstroke through rivers of nectar. Drinking it until her antennae curled and her tummy was as tight and round as a gourd.
“Natural quartz and sandstone with mineral tints,” Ashueli agreed meantime, rubbing her hands together. Elf and greenery. Of course. “Some of those pillars stand nine hundred feet tall. You can already see traces of vegetation clinging to the rock faces and cracks, and it only gets more spectacular and overgrown as we proceed toward the Gates of Saradoom. See that line?” Her finger traced a thread of red visible down in the grasslands at the canyon’s base. “That’s a Giant hunting trail.”
Allory said, “Fae would love it here.”
“Faerie used to live in this region in abundance,” Yaarah supplied softly. “Come. I scent a trickle of water nearby, prrr-frrrt. Sabline –”
She purred, “I will hunt for us. Yarrr-rraarrgh – uh, join me?”
Nice recovery. Allory flipped upside down in the air as she chirped, “I’ll have a fresh bouquet, please.”
“Your food literally grows on trees,” Yaarah chuckled, winking slowly at her. “Nor does it bother to run away, camouflage itself, burrow in the ground, try to fight back –”
“Frrr-prrrt, and you most certainly can’t talk prey into your paw,” Sabline noted wisely, with a knowing wink at Allory, “not for want of trying by some highly educated Felidragons who, despite their aptitude with words and extensive vocabulary, really ought to know better.”
Yaarah scurried after the Dragoness, the tilt of his whiskers betraying a sheepish grin.
As sable and gold prowled off together, licking their fangs in anticipation of a bloody carnivorous feast, Allory observed how her tail-tip snuck sideways to curl jealously about his. Yaarah’s tail itself told a tale – first it jerked straight, stiff with surprise, then it tried to abscond before he clearly thought the better of riling his companion and purposely dropped it back into a relaxed, still-intertwined posture. However, a white spark leaped from his tail to hers, easily visible in the fading light.
Betrayal.
Sabline’s throaty chuckling purred away between the boulders.
Yaarah’s gait suggested he had unexpectedly found himself stepping upon clouds.
A sapphire eyebrow quirked toward the Princess.
“We called it,” Ash grinned.
“Sparks sure are flying.”
“Purrr-fect.”
Laughing together, they traipsed off in search of that water. A couple of dozen Elvish paces or so downslope, the canyon carved away in a single, dizzying vertical, a cliff several thousand feet tall. Just above the drop-off and a short ways sun-spinward, they found a tiny spring bubbling from a natural crack in a huge obsidian boulder. It fed a pristine pool a mere four feet in diameter and a foot deep, which overflowed a narrow rim to fall away into the canyon below in a series of gurgling drops.
Ashueli sighed and stretched lazily. “As Yaarah would say, frrr-hssst …”
“Oh – er …”
“Come on, you have to catch the joke.”
“Oh aye! Spectacular view, I agree. One must accordingly appreciate, mrrr-frrr, the distinctive multihued striations in these ancient rock strata and note how the canyon was shaped by immense geological processes spanning the last bazillion years – oops.”
Splash.
“You did that deliberately,” Ashueli chuckled.
“Maybe I did. Get over here, Stinkblades.”
“Ouch! As subtle as Durc’s battlements, I do declare – Pricklefae Minima.”
“You take that back!”
Allory splashed water at the Princess’ legs. Ashueli ducked down to splash a handful back. Very soon, a one-sided water fight developed – quite unfair, given the relative disparity in the size of their hands. The Scintillant tried to spray water in Ash’s face using fast flicks of her wings. After a good battle, they both undressed and washed out their clothing, laying it out to dry before relaxing in the shallow pool, gazing out over the Giant lands as the Dragons put Middlesun to sleep for the night. Glorious. Crimson, burnt umber and golden hues streamed over the tall columns that stretched right out to the horizon, so unfamiliar to Allory. She breathed in the extraordinary colours and thrilled to the tingling of her antennae. Something out there, right?
Sometimes, a scent of magic drifted on the breezes.
Ashueli said lazily, “You know, for a titch who can make Elves walk on water, you sure lost that water fight rather easily.”
Sometimes, it swatted one over the earhole.
“Only because I was being half drowned by this tyrant who’s twenty times my size.”
“Aww, go suck on a lemon. My heart bleeds with sympathy,” the Princess said, with such utter falsity that Allory slipped, sank and came up spluttering. She added solicitously, “Poor little Fae. Aww, shame. Need a handie uppies, my darling sweetums?”
Fighting talk!
Fifteen minutes later, her incessant piping caused the pool to bud a great number of watery but perfectly formed jungle blossoms.
“How’s this, Sweetblades?” she asked excitedly.
“Ooh, pretty water sculptures,” the Elf yawned. “Wake me when something actually … you know, happens.”
Diminutive she might be, but her indignation could fill whole canyons!
Ten frustrated, wordless seconds of wrathful singing later, the entire contents of the pool absconded skyward – minus the two startled bodies left behind, high and dry.
Allory chirped, “Well, that’s a refreshing – oh, suggids!”
KERSPLOOOSH!!
The Elf resurfaced, hooting with surprising freedom as if she found this mishap quite the funniest thing beneath Middlesun. The surge of water knocked Allory right over the edge of the cliff, but she also came out smiling, shaking water out of her hair and flicking it off her busy wingtips in a misty shower. Rainbows played through the water droplets. How joyous! For a few seconds, the impulse to dance crept into her toes, tingling treacherously. She pirouetted several times and dipped gracefully, before she noticed the gleam upon Ashueli’s face peering up from the pool and her dance stuttered in embarrassment.
“Sorry.” Allory folded her arms crossly. “I was just … enjoying the sparkly effects around here.”
Liar, liar, wings on fire …
“That’s you. Don’t stop.”
“Er … the sunlight, don’t you mean?”
“Girlfriend,” the Princess said with great dignity, “for the rest of us mere mortals, the evening happens to be growing old. Have you considered that you and your girly-sparkly magic might have a closer relationship with Middlesun than you’ve ever imagined?”
Realisation socked her in the gut. Her wings hitched so hard, next the Fae knew, her Elf friend had thrown herself forward to catch her before she dropped down the cliff.
Allory gasped, “Don’t scare me like that!”
The Princess checked a nicely skinned elbow, a result of her timely catch. “Fine, just as long as you don’t scare me like that.”
“Right. On that note, shall I see to your awful wound?”
“How kind you are, my pet. I mean, pet Sparkles.”