“So, these two, then?”
“Yours is shorter!”
Vadaralshi grinned at her brother. “You wanna switch? I’m down for that.”
Vanimax arched his neck, baring teeth. “Oh, I bet you are. Then when you lose you can complain endlessly about how it wasn’t fair. No dice. It isn’t that much shorter.”
“Are you sure? Look, this one is definitely a little—”
“Pah, that’s barely a mouthful’s difference.”
“Are we forgetting who was the one to complain first?”
He hissed at her. She hissed back.
A short distance away, Kaln sighed.
He had pursued them out in an arc just beyond the greatest reach of the cactopus, and positioned himself as close as he safely could without being in range of whatever violence was about to ensue. The others had followed, and now straggled to a halt around him, watching the squabbling dragons.
“They really are…” Isabet trailed off, then shook her head. “I know you said so, but it’s hard to credit. But there they are. Just so…so very…”
“We all know what they’re like, everybody’s met teenagers,” Zhiiji said, grinning. “Damn, though. Not what I’d’ve pictured.”
“Mm,” Naaren grunted noncommittally.
Kaln glanced down at Zhiiji as she stepped up next to him. “You’re pretty brave, with the way you talk to them. Most people wouldn’t be so…casual with dragons.”
“Yeah, well, power is power,” she said with a shrug, watching the two young dragons squabble. “Some people with power are real prickly about being questioned; others sort of crave being talked to like a normal person, by normal people. Deal with enough kings and queens and you learn to spot the difference.”
“Well spotted,” he acknowledged. “That sounds like a pretty high-stakes game, though. How’d you know they were the right kind?”
Zhiiji turned to look up at him, raising one eyebrow. “Same way I can recognize you as somebody with the same knack. It’s experience and instinct, and I think you know it.”
“I suppose so. I always like to hear how others get to the same ends, though. An old teacher of mine used to say that nobody is so good at anything that they have nothing to learn.”
“Smart teacher.”
“He was,” Kaln murmured. “Smart enough to make a potential problem disappear…”
Zhiiji gave him another thoughtful look, but said nothing, perhaps because the dragons appeared to reach an accord at that moment.
“Count of three,” Vadaralshi declared. “No fire, no magic, no flight.”
“Agreed.”
“Alternatively,” Kaln called out, “do all of that and have this done as fast as possible with a minimum of mess.”
Both of them swiveled their necks to look at him, then at each other, then rolled their eyes in unison, turning back to their chosen cactopus vines. Kaln heaved a sigh and Naaren reached up to pat his back soothingly.
“Three…”
“Well…at least they’re doing it,” Isabet offered quietly.
“Two…”
“Hells, I don’t mind,” said Zhiiji. “This’ll be a better show, I bet.”
“Wait!” Vanimax said suddenly. “Do we start on ‘one,’ or a single count after that?”
Zhiiji burst out laughing so hard she apparently had to sit down.
Vadaralshi looked at her brother in pure disgust, and opened her mouth to answer, but Kaln yelled before she could.
“JUST GO!”
That, at least, seemed to be a good enough signal. Both dragons lunged, savaging the cactopus vines with fangs and claws. The first seconds were a blur of movement as shredded vine fragments were flung in all directions, the slender outermost reaches of the tendrils too delicate to be even a momentary impediment to the drakes.
All of them backed away, mostly due to the fact that some of the cactopus shreds which became airborne were also suddenly bristling with spines; fortunately none made it to the onlookers’ location. Isabet continued backpedaling rapidly until she tripped on a rock and Naaren had to lunge and grab her hand to keep her from falling. She didn’t acknowledge him, keeping her pale face trained on the spectacle of two dragons unleashing explosive violence upon their target.
It really was something to see.
The cactopus wasn’t fighting back, exactly, since it couldn’t, but the effect was close enough. Every touch triggered that coiling reflex, resulting in both of the tendrils under attack curling themselves up into constant loops—so constant that they were thrashing wildly due to that and the repeated impacts of dragon claws and teeth. The vines twitched and whipped about, never relaxed long enough to uncoil so they bristled constantly with their enormous spines, which thus inadvertently clubbed repeatedly at their assailants like enormous spiked flails.
Those spines were no more effective against impervious dragonscale than the tough flesh beneath was resistant to dragon talons. Vadaralshi and Vanimax ripped and tore, repeatedly having to pounce as the vines’ unthinking attempts to ensnare them just jerked themselves away time and again.
“Wow,” Zhiiji murmured. “Always a hell of a thing, when you can watch it unfold and see in advance exactly how it’s all gonna go tits up.”
At her other side, Naaren nodded. Kaln just kept watching the drakes, tense and worried. He’d seen it too. The wild thrashing of the cactopus vines and the dragons’ efforts to chase and shred them were going to lead to one inevitable conclusion.
Vanimax was the first to get snared. He let out a trumpeting roar of pure outrage as a cactopus loop closed on one of his forelegs and clenched, trying to haul him forward toward the central body and shred him with spines. It actually succeeded, for a short distance, before he resorted to the undignified but effective measure of flopping onto his side and savaging it with all three of his other limbs, ripping the tentacle apart before it could pull him any deeper into its grasp.
Vadaralshi paused in her own battle to laugh derisively at him; he didn’t bother hissing at her, as that misstep had already cost him seconds and allowed her to pull noticeably ahead. He did spare her a baleful look, though, as he ripped into his own vine with renewed fury.
“There, see? It’s fine.” Zhiiji reached up to pat Kaln’s lower back. “Dragon scales are just nonsensically tough. Not even tough like a cactopus, they’re more magic than matter. Nothing that thing can possibly do would really hurt them.”
“I am…theoretically aware of that,” he murmured. “One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that dragons are more fallible and more vulnerable than they’re likely to admit, even to themselves.”
“Yeah, I guess you would know that, huh. But that’s a plant, not a very specific kinda godling.”
“And those are two drakes, not Atraximos the Dread.”
She rolled her eyes and threw up her hands. “Okay, fine! Stand there and tense yourself into a knot, see if I care.”
Kaln couldn’t help cracking a grin at that, looking down at her. “Sorry, Zhiiji. I appreciate it, really. I know they’re not in danger, it’s just…something about this puts me irrationally on edge.”
The chef smirked. “Is it the thought of what their mothers will do to you if you come home and tell ‘em you let their kids get eaten by a big flytrap?”
“You know what? I withdraw my apology, you smug harpy.”
She cackled gleefully and punched him in the hip. Lightly. Relatively lightly.
Vadaralshi was the next to get snared, and she got it worse than her brother: the cactopus vine bent as it whipped toward her, accidentally evading her claws, and wrapped fully around her neck. The sight of it made Kaln take a convulsive half-step forward, but luckily the vine had attached itself to the base of her neck, leaving her ample room to bend the rest of it down and rip into it with her teeth, swiftly freeing herself. The momentary impediment to her balance coupled by the pull of the coiling effect did yank her off her feet, though.
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It was Vanimax’s turn to laugh mockingly at her, though his sounded somewhat forced—a little too emphatic to be believable. Vadaralshi hissed at him, and lunged after her vine with renewed vigor.
Seeing this, Vanimax bounded forward and to the side, attempting to steal a march on his sister by attacking the thrashing tendril from the side, further up its length, rather than at the end as they’d been doing.
“Watch it!” Kaln exclaimed.
“Cheater!” Vadaralshi shouted.
Vanimax had seized the section of vine in his jaws and grabbed it to either side of his mouth with both foreclaws, easily ripping it apart, even though the vine itself at that distance was bigger around than his own tail. Green sap dripping from his fangs, he grinned at her.
“I don’t recall we agreed to a rule against it!”
Then he squawked as the flailing length of fully severed vine touched and snapped around his leg, bristling with spikes. It was a reaction mostly of surprise; those spikes obviously weren’t doing any damage, and without the connection to the central plant it couldn’t even pull him. He reflexively shook his leg before having to tear it loose with his teeth.
“Don’t—and there she goes,” Kaln finished in exasperation as Vadaralshi took advantage of Vanimax’s momentary distraction to repeat his maneuver.
It was then that Kaln decided he’d better prevent them from getting into spats like this in the future; he had already picked up the impression that Vadaralshi was the more physically adept of the two of them, and now learned that that went right out the window when her competitive ire was raised.
If anything, she was less careful in her lunge than her brother had been, actually skidding on the sand as she fell upon a middle section of the flailing tentacle in a fury of talons. Unsurprisingly, this enabled her to cleave through it in half a second; equally unsurprisingly, she immediately paid the consequences.
Just as it had with Vanimax, the newly severed vine whipped around and wrapped around her body, prodding thorns in all directions. Vadaralshi turned her head to grimace at the length of detached cactopus arm entangling her tail, hips, and one leg, still convulsing reflexively as it tried to coil toward a base it no longer possessed. She shook the afflicted leg stiffly, clearly gauging whether this would impede her enough to be worth taking a moment to tear it off, and in that momentary distraction, the still fully-attached arm whipped in and struck her right at the base of the throat—almost exactly where it had snared her before.
Instantly she was coiled around the neck and this time, yanked off her feet before she could begin retaliating. The vine dragged her across the sand, creating a ditch marred by clawmarks where her squirming failed to catch purchase in the loose earth. Once more, Vanimax laughed derisively at his sister as she was rolled over and pulled further, the vine managing to loop her body fully into a huge coil and compress her.
Vadaralshi bared her teeth in fury, both at him and her predicament, now clawing at the loop of vine around her neck with her foreclaws while her back legs continued to try—and fail—to dig into the ground and stop her forward momentum. By this point she had actually been pulled forward past Vanimax, fully ensnared by the efficient coiling of the cactopus—which meant there now remained a length of intact vine behind her.
In seconds it had wrapped around her rear half, tangling up in her tail and legs, and on top of the rest of her predicament Vadaralshi found herself being twisted painfully in the middle as the vine tried to coil and drag her in two different increments. This, finally, brought a noise of anger and pain from her that might have been a roar were it not so strangled.
It also prompted Vanimax to pause in his own attacks to turn and look at his sister, not managing to paste an expression of mockery over one of alarm before anyone saw.
“Pay attention!” Kaln shouted, too late.
Then Vanimax was also being hauled forward with a cactopus vine snaring around his neck, chest, and one foreleg, dragged nose-first along the ground right after his sister.
“Okay, enough!” Kaln exclaimed. “Game’s over! Both of you, make with the magic—get out of those things.”
They were either stubbornly ignoring him or too distracted by their present debacle to notice, it was impossible to tell. Right as he was about to reach out with his mind to glean which it was directly from their emotions, Vadaralshi let out a noise that, while half-throttled, was a shriek of pain.
Dragon blood was vivid crimson, faintly luminous, and smoked where it splattered to the sand.
“Oof,” Naaren hissed in sympathy, wincing. “Of course—no scales on the wing membranes…”
Vadaralshi thrashed as cactopus spines ripped into her pinned wing, shredding its sails.
“GAME IS OVER!” Kaln roared. “So help me, I will not hesitate to tattle on you to your mothers!”
“Er, pardon me if this is a stupid question,” Isabet said hesitantly, “but…do dragons need to breathe? Because… I mean, it’s got both of them by the neck. And once it hauls them over the ledge, they’ll be underwater…”
Kaln flung his consciousness outward, seizing and assessing their conditions as thoroughly as he could.
Anger, pain…stubbornness. But also…yes, dragons very much did need to breathe. Even as he tried to sort out whether they were still holding off magic on purpose, Vanimax emitted a brief puff of fire that barely singed one of the ensnaring vines, effectively voiding the contest.
It no longer mattered. Incredibly, they were both still so consumed by stubborn fury that Kaln couldn’t sense for certain whether they were deliberately withholding magical retaliation because of their stupid contest, even as he realized both were starting to lose consciousness from oxygen deprivation.
Kaln was dashing forward before he was aware of moving his legs.
Yelling and waving their arms, both Hiiri and Isabet charged into his path.
“Are you nuts? That thing is manhandling dragons, do you know what it’ll do to your ass?”
“Hold still, let me freeze it!”
“Get off,” Kaln snarled, pushing Zhiiji away as she grabbed at his belt. “Those are my kids!”
All four of them froze, himself included. It was impossible to say whose expression was more incredulous.
One of them had no time to dither about it, though.
“You heard me,” Kaln snapped, stepping forward again.
“Okay, fine!” Zhiiji said, again grabbing his belt. “But use your damn brain! Use your magic. You can’t do anything physically, so use your power.”
Isabet had already stepped as close to the thrashing vines as she dared, gritting her teeth in effort as she directed two torrents of blue-white energy toward the vines ahead of the two dragons, right where they dipped over the cliffs. It did seem to be slowing the plant’s convulsions, at least by a bit.
“My magic does nothing against—”
“It only works on dragons, right? So use it on the dragons!”
On the dragons? He didn’t know any… Teleporting to them wouldn’t help here.
Kaln forced himself to stop. To breathe, to think. As the Lord Scribe had taught him. He could hear the echo of his old mentor’s voice: You can always spare a moment to think. There’s no crisis so great you can’t make it worse by doing something stupid.
Think. He had power over dragons. How was that useful here?
Well, now that he was thinking, it was obvious. Kaln seized both their bodies with his will and locked them in place. Against that power, even the gigantic strength of the cactopus was nothing—it was as good as trying to break Timestone.
Unfortunately, that meant all its pulling power was, instead of moving the dragons forward, compressing them against its coils. Vanimax emitted a pained squeak.
Kaln almost let go, but made himself stop again. And think.
Okay, it just needed subtlety. He was the master of dragons; they were extensions of his will. He reached out with his mind, reached deeper, made himself feel every detail of their condition and position. The way their bodies were being twisted and yanked, squeezed…
And he set them right. The vines were mighty enough to contend with a dragon’s own natural strength, but not with the will of a godling—a godling who now felt that rising surge of energy, that gathering glow and deepening connection as he did something that further advanced his burgeoning godhead. Kaln ignored that for now, concentrating on what he was doing.
He repositioned their bodies, expanding their lungs and throats, putting their limbs back into less painful configurations. Both dragons gasped frantically, air rushing back into them as the combination of their impervious scales and Kaln’s will overcame the plant’s power.
Closely aligned as they now were, Kaln could feel their minds reawakening as blessed oxygen rejuvenated their blood. It seemed almost wrong that such intrinsically magical beings could have such a plain, mortal weakness, but he could give some thought to that later. For now, he focused deeper, and deeper still.
He could sense their being, beyond the level of blood and scale and even magic—sense their existence, the weight of their presence upon the world, the resonance of every cell and fiber with magic and life and reality itself, all laid bare before his growing divinity. It was just like it had been with their father, in his final moments. Kaln could feel the reality of them, feel the power in it… See exactly how he could push his well into their very existence and do as he had done to Atraximos. Expand them until they dissolved on the wind.
Never in his life had he so carefully refrained from anything.
Instead, he pushed…ever so gently. Barely more than a brush, a caress. And then, with painstaking slowness as he observed how much they could take, a bit more. Then a bit more. Turning up the flow iota by minuscule iota, he matched his energy with theirs—not injecting them with divine power, but bolstering their own. Making them more dragon, until…
With a roar, Vanimax braced his claws on the ground and reared up on his hind legs, the massive cactopus vine entwining him rending in multiple places. With the augmentation of Kaln’s divine power blazing in him, the drake flexed his muscle and ripped the vines away in hapless fragments. Vadaralshi was only a moment behind him—behind, and slightly more restrained, given that one of her wings was still half-shredded. Kaln could feel the sharp, bright pain of it, a sensation that was all the more keen to her, unaccustomed as she was to actually being hurt.
Pulling in a deep, careful breath, he let it out in an exhausted rush, finally pulling back his mind and power. Both dragons stepped a lot more gingerly away from their erstwhile prey, dividing wary looks between it and him.
“Thanks, Zhiiji,” Kaln said, his voice shaking slightly. “That was exactly the reminder I needed. So…thanks. And sorry.”
“Hey, no worries, I totally get it,” she assured him, patting the small of his back. “If it was my kids being eaten by a cactopus, I wouldn’t care one damn bit that they were terrifying monsters, not in any real danger, and also not even my kids.”
Both drakes had returned to the group now, on mincing steps, looking uncharacteristically chastened.
Vanimax cleared his throat. “So…ahem. Thank you, Kaln, for your assistance. If we could perhaps refrain from mentioning this to—”
“Anyone,” Vadaralshi interrupted. “I can do without what my mother will say, and I can especially do without hearing Pheneraxa bring it up twice a week for the next thousand years, please and thank you. Um, I don’t suppose…”
Slowly, wincing at the motion, she extended her right wing to the side. It was dripping luminous blood, hanging in veritable tatters.
Could he? Kaln hadn’t tried, of course, but…
Well, logically speaking, of course he could. Why in the world wouldn’t he be able to?
He concentrated again, feeling her entire state—including her uncharacteristically subdued emotional state, pride and mischief muted by embarrassment. As he had before, he felt out what she was or should be: that which made her herself, made her a dragon.
And with that image so clear in his consciousness, it was the simplest thing in the world to put her back as she should be.
White light flowed across Vadaralshi’s wing as reality shifted in response to Kaln’s will. Her body was magic and matter, and all of it flowed right back into its proper configuration in a second.
Vadaralshi raised her neck, grinning and flexing both wings now. “Ooh, nice! Damn, that was even cleaner than when healing magic does it. I’ve never had a shot of raw divinity before.”
“Really?” Vanimax craned his neck to study her recently-mangled wing in interest. “I could almost regret not getting a chance to experience that firsthand.”
“Just keep being yourself, kiddo,” Zhiiji suggested. “You’ll get there.”
“I bet we could experiment,” Vadaralshi said cheerfully. “Hold still and I’ll do you with my claws. Pants doesn’t mind, do you, Pants?”
Kaln took one step forward, planting a foot on the ground in a stomp that made the fabric of creation shiver ever so faintly. Faintly, but that such a thing happened at all immediately seized the attention of both dragons.
He pointed one arm at the huge plant looming in the center of the river.
“FIRE BREATH. ON THE CENTRAL BODY. FROM A SAFE ALTITUDE. NOW.”
He didn’t get “now.” Both of them cringed backward from him, and for the next handful of seconds he didn’t need to attune to their emotional states directly to fully recognize the sight of a pair of rebuked adolescents dragging out their response. Just to emphasize that doing it was their decision, and not because he’d told them to.
But then, in silence, both dragons turned and took wing to do the rest of it, and he decided that was not a battle worth picking.
Naaren patted him on the back. “You’re a good dad, Ar-Kaln Zelekhir.”
Kaln just sat down hard in the sand and flopped onto his back, staring up at the sky and listening to the nearby roar of concentrated dragonfire killing a giant cactopus.
And that was when he remembered he could’ve just teleported them.
Maybe…it would be best not to bring this up with their mothers after all.