Wind swirled between the doors as they swung open. Howling mixed with growls, chirrups, and roars blew in on the wind as if surfing along the gale. Garaghan stood firm against the force of the air as if he expected it, but the three elf maids, me and Alaric had to brace ourselves against the maelstrom lest we topple over like paper dolls. Tia was strangely unaffected.
“Behold, the military might of the Crystal Orchid!” Garaghan swept his hands wide and grinned with a hint of the joy he’d shown on Fasinmas a few days ago.
Black stone columns rose up to either side of us, taller than a three story house. The growls and chirps grew in variety and volume as we processed into the massive black chamber. For all of twenty yards, I hadn’t seen anything to justify the title of “aerie” for this place. But after the first alcove the sides of the ship opened up to expose a blue, cloudless sky.
The view was incredible, but I instinctively grabbed Tia incase the winds picked her up and swept her out of my grasp. Alaric stumbled and One caught him with a wry grin before he fell onto the deck. “What is this place?” my voice sounded small and childlike compared to the yawning void on either side of us.
Garaghan circle his hands to indicate both open spaces. “This is the Aerie. Wait a minute.”
As if summoned by his voice and the promise of their appearance, a pair of bright amethyst and turquoise heads appeared at the side of the left alcove.
They were reptilian and spiked with various horns, but I paid their adornments only cursory glances. Their eyes held mine with a tractor beam’s force. Black spiraled with the colors of their hides spun into the creatures’ pupils as they tracked me from the side of the wall. They peeked around like children spying on the adult’s discussion until pairs of sharp claws grabbed the side.
Dragons.
Each one was larger than a city bus as they crawled on over the other toward us. My chest froze as they slithered toward us like serpents, their wings pressed against their bodies to avoid lift. They made sounds like giant birds, each one chirping and hooting at us rather than hissing or growling. The growls came from farther down the hallway.
“Are those…” Alaric’s words ran out on him.
At the same time as Alaric faltered, Garaghan waved to the two beasts with a smile and a hearty “Hello friends!” His hands traced runes in the air and a pair of the flighted six-legged sheep appeared near him. He tossed them out toward the left, the sheep failed to orient themselves before the dragons hooted and snatched one each from the air. They didn’t even need to flap their wings. Long necks stretched out like slinkys into the air and chomped down on the sheep.
“Holy fucking shit.” Alaric stammered out again, but Tia didn’t correct his language.
She was too busy trying to free herself from my arms. With the viciousness of the dragons’ feeding, the paralysis that had taken my motor control released itself. I clung to Tia with a firm grip and said, “why are they here?”
Garaghan smiled back over his shoulder. “Because this is their home and we are technically the intruders here.” Alaric’s face paled and Garaghan waved him down. “Do not fear, the dragons respect human and elven life too much to sully their homes with our blood.”
With those alarming words, he moved his hands in loops before him, circling in the opposite direction with each. A coo erupted from his mouth and the dragons hopped down to the platform at the edge of the openings.
The rotated their heads like parrots and cooed back at Garaghan as they extended themselves to sniff him. The gust of air from their nostrils as they exhaled smelled of blood and sulfur, but also something like the sea.
Garaghan growled and chirped at the dragons more and they considered him with the flexible, twisting heads. After a minute, he turned back to us and said, “Olerandera and Balminazer indicate that they do not have any griffons, wyverns or pegusae to spare at the moment.” His smile belied his words, as if something pleased him more than he let on. “So they have agreed to carry us themselves upon our mission.” Nothing would have surprised me more in the moment than for Garaghan to kick up his heels like a traveling jester. He did exactly that.
The two dragons walked like gila monsters onto the central course of the hall and lowered their heads to us. Their shoulder’s sank and they bleated like one of the sheep they’d eaten. Garaghan looked between the two with this hand on his chin. “Olerandera is the more gentle flier between the two, so Tia, Harriet, and Two should fly upon her back. Balminazer will carry myself, Alaric, One and Three.”
He pointed to the amethyst hided dragon first and to the turquoise dragon second. Balminazer was a little bit larger than Olerandera, but the difference was only clear with the two side-by-side.
Tia raced toward the dragon once she was out of my arms and placed her hand by its head. My little sister moved too quickly for me to stop her in the moment. “Hello Olerandera. My name is Tia. You’re very pretty and um, ma-jest-stick. Thank you for taking us to find our friends.”
The pink dragon purred at Tia and shook its head. Garaghan raised an eyebrow and said, “well, she’s just made a friend for life.”
I approached the pink dragon with my hand outstretched and shaking. She raised her eyes to mine and met me gaze to gaze. Without warning I fell into the void. A strikingly tall woman, taller even than Garaghan stood before me, a shadow superimposed over Olerandera’s form. Scales like unto plate mail covered her body, stopping at her hands, feet and neck. Like pink skin covered the scale-less parts and exposed a beatific grin.
“You can see into the No-place.” The dragon-woman nodded to me. “That means you are an Ancient.” She bowed to me with a hand over her chest. “I am honored to carry such a one upon my back. It has been many millennia.”
Millennia… I held my tongue in check by clamping down with my jaw. When I’d gathered my thoughts properly, I said, “Thank you. The honor is all mine.”
“Garaghan tells me we seek his daughter and your lost friend. My brother and I shall help you in this endeavor. So feel free to take to my back at your leisure.”
In the void, I could see the shapes of the others already mounted up. “I’m sorry this is taking me a while, I’ve just never seen anyone like you.”
Olerandera’s laugh was high and uninhibited, she threw back her head and said, “I appreciate that you did not imply I was a thing. And I am honored to provoke awe in one such as yourself. But I promise you safety while you fly upon my back. There is nothing to fear.”
Was I afraid? In a sense, I was. The dragon was large enough to eat me in a single bite with room for another two people at least. But such thoughts did not stop me as I stared between the spiritual form of Olerandera and her physical form. Plumbing the depths of my own psyche, I found the answer in short order: I was awed, stunned from the sheer impossibility of dragons. There could be no greater confirmation of my parent’s insane ramblings than this titanic creature. And yet here she was, speaking to me with confidence and invitation.
“Sorry, I’m a little in shock. Thank you for carrying me.” I tried to follow the course Two had taken, avoiding stepping on the smaller bones or ridges of Olerandera’s wing.
Upon the crest of her back, I found purchase with a pair of horns. Tia giggled and patted the dragon’s side while Two held herself low and clutched at a spike with a shadow of the discomfort I felt in her eyes.
Magic shimmered over us as Olerandera honked like a massive goose. A half-second after the magic bubble formed, she hopped into the air and my body felt weightless for a moment as the dragon turned in midair, expanded her wings and shot over the edge of the aerie.
The lurch of momentum was gentler than it should have been and at no point did I fear losing my grip. Still, I wrapped one arm around Tia, who squealed with joy as we descended below the belly of the Orchid.
Dozens of colorful, winged beasts danced among the eddies and currents of the air around us. Some of them looked like smaller dragons, who chirped greetings to the pair of larger dragons we rode. Some of them were the impossible combination of lion and eagle, large as a horse. Many of those bore elven riders atop, armed with lances, bows, and even rifles. The latter made my shoulders itch from bad memories.
Creatures who looked like giant eagles themselves carried even more elves astride their backs. These monsters were smaller than the lion-eagle hybrids, but they were also far more common. I lost all sense of scale as we descended faster toward the earth.
My breath caught from the speed and from the sight. What should have been a massive wall of air pushing us off of Olerandera’s back was little more than a gentle breeze. The world blurred at my periphery and we dropped faster than free fall.
Far to the west, in the direction of the sun’s incline, the pacific ocean loomed like a great blue wall. But below us the beaches and deserts of the American West made a quilt of possibility for us. Cities dotted the coast, connected by dark strings in the forms of massive highways. We veered away from the more populous areas, which had a grey cast about them, like a miasma of smoke formed into a bubble over them.
Olerandera flew us to a small patch of territory untold miles from the western shores of the US, but far enough from the Rocky Mountains to make them invisible from our current location. Dust blew around us as Olerandera arrested her descent and brought herself down without so much as a crash.
From the airship high enough up in the skies for me to have trouble making out her outline to the desert floor, our flight took less than five minutes. I had to take several deep breaths before I could process the entire journey. While I did so, Alaric fell off of Balminazer’s back and vomited into the sands.
Garaghan got off on the other side of his dragon, avoiding my cousin in process while I came to my senses and tried to step off of Olerandera’s back. Tia had other ideas. “No! I wanna ride the dragons forever! Please let me stay, Harriet,” she looked down at Olerandera who’d extended her neck so she could face Tia, “please Miss Olerandera?”
The dragon chuffed at her with a sound I knew to be laughter. I plucked Tia up from the dragon’s back and hoisted her in my arms down, with my sister protesting loudly the whole time. When the last of the riders had dismounted, the dragons shimmered and lights that matched their bright hides covered them. In moments the dragons had faded to be replaced with the tall figures I’d seen in the void.
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Balminazer was taller than his sister, but only just barely. Both of them were taller than Garaghan or Lord Elerren. Tia’s mouth dropped open. “Ooh, you know magic!?”
The dragons snorted and their skins shimmered again as they shrank down closer to human size. Their armored hides transformed into plates of brightly colored mail. Olerandera spoke with a mellifluent voice. “We do,” she winked at Tia, “for it was dragons who taught elves magic.”
Garaghan covered his mouth and gave a classic elven laugh. It was one the few times I’d ever heard him make the tittering covered laugh. “Every dragon I’ve ever met tells the same story.”
“Which is why you should believe it.” Olerandera grinned as if she’d had this argument a dozen times with Garaghan.
Balminazer rolled this eyes as he moved between them and addressed the rest of us. “Yierie’s team last reported they’d found some caves in this area and intended to search them.
“How long ago?” What little I knew about this from TV suggested that the time the person had been missing for mattered.
“At least a week.” Garaghan darkened. “I was not told of her fate, ‘because they wished to confirm her absence.’ If not for the Ancestors, I might never have been told until they found her body or gave up looking.”
All of us went silent. Even Alaric and Tia appreciated how dire Yierie’s situation was.
Flying or magic should have revealed caves in the area, but those methods had already been tried, including magically locating Yierie. Magic made the impossible possible, just not in this case.
“Should we spread out or something while we search?” Alaric whined as we walked a line from west to east. Toward the caves made more sense than the other way.
“No, stick to the pattern and let me know you find something amiss.” At Garaghan’s insistence we broke the terrain into a grid and used that to search. We would have had more hunters with us, but elite troops like hunters were not common and could not be spared for search and rescue operations, meaning all of them had been deployed elsewhere.
Olerandera spoke frankly between Tia, Me and Two, her riders. At the same time Balminazer watched over his group with the same concern,
We burned through daylight and as late into the night as the elves could manage. Tia had fallen asleep in my arms and I’d returned to sit at the fire with the others. Olerandera started the fire with her breath in human form while I watched.
Rather than sleep with us, both dragons took to the sky that night. Two was out of her tent and watching with me when the dragons took off. “They have a weird thing about protecting their charges, dragons. When they accept riders, they usually defend them to the death or until the riders return to their homes.”
“Huh. They’re gonna watch over us all night?”
Two yawned with her hand over her mouth. “Yup. We’re some of the safest creatures on Earth right now.”
“Yierie didn’t bring dragons, did she?”
Two laid her hand over mine as she swung her legs over the bench. “No, I’m sorry. I think we only got these as our rides because Olerandera has a crush on Garaghan.”
“Really?”
Two laid the tip of her finger against her mouth. “Or Balminazer does, I’m not sure which.” She pointed her other hand into the sky and rotated it. “And when a dragon falls in love, it does so forever.”
“Huh, so I lucked out with my sensei.”
Shaking her head, Two pointed back at Garaghan. “No. He sees something in you, maybe even the same thing the rest of us see: potential and virtue. The three of us wouldn’t be following you if we didn’t trust you, if you hadn’t treated us so well.”
“And if Lord Elerren wasn’t such a total shit, right?”
Two shrugged. “Maybe. I can’t really say for sure.” She turned to meet my eyes close enough we almost bumped noses. “You never made a romantic advance on any of us, you never made us take over horrible chores, and you treated us like people. Despite the fact we were your Ualno. You’re not just kind and generous compared to One’s father, you’re kind and generous compared to The People.”
“Thanks.” I blushed in the night, my face warmed from within as much as from the fire.
Two leaned next to me and kissed me on the cheek. “You know, if you ever wanted to make a romantic advance, I’m pretty sure two out of three of us would accept.” With those words, Two hopped off the bench and sprinted off to her tent.
I didn’t get a chance to ask her which two of them would accept. And though I was already chasing two lovers, I wasn’t averse to chasing two more. What’s happened to me? I’d turned into some kind of magical Lothario and I had little to no guilt about my pursuits.
“We will not be splitting up today either.” Garaghan folded his arms and shook his head when I asked.
“But why not? We could cover twice as much ground!”
“That is not even close to how this works.” He pointed to the written chart in his hand. “We cover the most ground with the pattern and if our group splits up, we might not be close enough to each other to lend a hand.”
It was still before dawn. After weeks of living at the elves’ schedule, I’d discovered I had a really hard time sleeping longer than a few hours. And never later than an hour past dawn these days. None of the rest of our team were awake yet, which was too bad for them as that meant they didn’t get to argue with me and Garaghan. He’d defeated me anyway and in the end, was probably right where I was certainly wrong. “I would like to do something more to find both Yierie and Malia.”
“You still haven’t told me much about your missing companion.”
Once again, the urge rose in me to press Garaghan or one of the other elves about Djinn. After the way they felt about Kain, I didn’t want to provoke the elves’ ire. Especially as they were the ones helping me find Yierie and Malia. They might still help me with the former, assuming they let me search, but they might not help with the latter if I let them know about Malia’s nature. “She’s just a friend of mine.”
Garaghan sniffed and said, “Well, it would help if we had her description or knew anything at all about her.”
“I’ll try to draw up an image when I get a chance.” I nodded at Garaghan and said, “But Yierie is the priority anyway, right?”
He mumbled under his breath and waved me off. “Yes. I’ll insist on details once we’ve found my daughter.”
These days Garaghan rarely dismissed me outright, so I didn’t stand around and force him to do it. I knew where the maidens slept and that Tia had crawled into bed with them last night after they finished doing her hair.
The three elves had braided a little crown of leaves and dried twigs into Tia’s hair the night before and to my shock, the crown had stuck. She lay on her back, her chest heaving and her arms spread out over the three elves who slept in their tent like an oddly fitted mattress beneath my kid sister.
I poked her cheek and whispered her name until Tia woke up. One snorted and turned, but she stayed asleep as Tia blinked and me and said, “Hi Harriet! Good morning!”
“Good morning squirt. Did you sleep well!”
Tia sprung onto her feet and raced out of the tent as if something caught her eyes outside. Skidding to a stop, she turned and cupped her mouth. “We don’t want to wake them up, One, Two and Three are very tired right now.”
“Really? Why do you say that?”
Tia pointed to them and said, “They stayed up all night talking and giggling between each other. I didn’t get involved or whatever, but I woke up a few times and caught them.”
“What were they saying?”
“Oh just stupid adult junk about which one of them liked you or whatever. I didn’t pay that much attention, but they were up all night.”
I opened my mouth to press Tia, but she’d discovered Garaghan was awake and tackled him with her seven-year-old enthusiasm. Rather than turn back and give him a chance to either dismiss me or give me a task, I walked back into my own tent and quickly dismantled the shelter. It folded itself up around me, leaving me standing in the entrance with a long flap attached to a little pocket of cloth. The moment I stepped off the flap, the tent finished folding itself up.
Magic was awesome.
Last night I’d learned how to use these things and where they were stored. I pressed the square of tent fabric into my shawl and the whole thing sank in as if the white cloth fabric of my shawl were made from pale tar. It would float back out of Roo if I just called for the tent and pressed my hand anywhere against my shawl. This was apparently one of the many abilities granted by the tassel I’d attached to Roo, none of which I knew the nature of yet. I wasn’t especially clear on what the storage function did in terms of securing my equipment. I couldn’t wait to learn the details, but Garaghan was cagey about the magical equipment.
Tia wore her armor through the night and never once complained about be uncomfortable or about her armor pinching. Either this was the result of the construction or this was due to the magic, maybe it was both.
As the rest of the camp woke and took to dismantling their tents, the two dragons circled lower overhead and eventually drifted down outside the perimeter of our group. They shifted twice, eventually settling into humanoid shapes just a little taller than the average human and shorter than the average elf. If not for their hair, which matched the color of their scales, I wouldn’t have known they were the dragons in the first place. That and the fact that I watched them transform so I had an unbroken line from human-like to dragon and vice-versa.
“Our skies remained clear last night.” Balminazer address the whole camp, but kept the bulk of his attention on Garaghan when he spoke.
“I suspect you two might have had something to do with that.” Garaghan clapped Balminazer on the shoulder and laughed good-naturedly. “Thank you again, friends.”
Balminazer never took his gaze from Garaghan, as if the dragon were burning Garaghan’s image into his mind for all times. He nodded without letting his eyes shift.
Garaghan waved to the rest of us and had us gather close to him and the center of our camp. Once we were all in place, he said, “Today we are going to go over the near-west with our grid pattern. Keep in mind that we’re looking for anything that might be a clue to the location of our lost hunters, even a hair might help.” He clapped his hands and the ground split up to covert their quadrants.
I chafed at this boring, systematic way of checking the scrub. But I couldn’t sell Garaghan on another option and I wasn’t confident there was another option that would actually work. So I just kept walking my line and checking the ground as if I were searching for a pin lost in the carpet lest I step on it later.
My attention grew so focused that when I heard someone cough not far from my position, my mind hopped into the void and stared at them. It was Alaric, and he seemed to be having some trouble breathing.
Roo drifted out in the void and made her way to my cousin. The moment she connected with his skin, she began to trickle energy into Alaric. He hadn’t looked diseased exactly, but something had been wrong with his body of light. A tiny amount of power later, his eyes cleared up and he looked like he’d gotten a full night’s rest. My shawl slithered back to me, being as unobtrusive as any scarf might be as it snaked its way through a light brown desert.
When it crossed over into my grid, it toppled something between the lines of my search pattern. I’d wandered out ahead of the others, impatient to find any sign of Yierie. The object that Roo disturbed looked more like a little pinnacle made from branches than something belonging to Yierie.
But as it fell, it glimmered in the sunlight in a strange way. I could have ignored it, but I refused. This might have been a clue. I stooped to look at it, but stopped when Roo’s surface moved past. The little triangle glowed in the void, and I knew better than to mess with strange magic out here.
“Garaghan, I’ve found something!” I raised my hands and waved. My sensei made a note of his position in a little bound notebook and hustled over to where I stood. His void body flickered and danced with excitement as he ran to me.
He danced to a little skipping stop before he reached my grid square and bent over. In the void, his eyes glowed and I could see that something in his form shimmered through him as he peered at the twig pyramid nearby. “Stems and thorns, that’s perfect!” Garaghan got down on all fours and stared at the simple construction, craning his head around to view the object from several different angles. “Very clever my daughter!”
Garaghan reached out with a single digit and tapped the top of the pyramid. A dot of light floated up from the tip of the pyramid and rose into the sky. It unfolded into a mass of shining squares as if unpacking from some kind of extra-dimensional space. Yierie’s figure appeared, hovering above the pyramid like a hologram. If not for being in the void, I would have thought she’d appeared herself. But the image looked hollow, two-dimensional in the void and lacked the animation and movement of the authentic Yierie.
“Mila, I don’t think this is the right way.” Yierie’s projection shielded her eyes from the light over head. No one else answered her as she frowned and shook her head. “I want to leave a sending behind. I’m not sure this is a good idea…” As she spoke, the image began to shake and rumble. Sounds echoed from the image that played a total counterpoint to the soft wind and sound of crickets in the plains around us. Then, with no warning, Yierie fell away from her image, as if she were pulled into the earth.
Garaghan froze as the actual ground began to rumble. He looked around himself and opened his mouth, “we might consider flight at this…”
Whatever else he’d planned to say ended as a man-sized sinkhole opened up beneath my feet. Something flexible and yet tough wrapped itself around my feet and pulled me fully into the pit.
I didn’t have time to scream or even breathe as the world disappeared around me.