It was deep into the night before the “troupe triumphant” finished their set and was allowed by the crowds to depart. The women were enthralled, the men rejoiced, and the children smiled and cheered. Atop the high cliff above, a dark woman in a thin silken dress sat next to a man who looked older yet younger than he was. They too smiled.
Mareth, Aerendir, and Siegyrd left the stage and made their way to the inn, trudging with heavy steps. Mareth stumbled like a drunken man though he had not imbibed. Aerendir too listed to his right as he walked. Siegyrd had the lightest step, born as he was to the stage, but still moved more languidly than normal.
The two with beds threw themselves upon their beds, and Aerendir sunk first to one knee, then a second on the floor, pulling his sword from his back and setting it beside him. He rolled over onto his back crossed his hands over his belly and began a breathing routine inhaling, pausing, exhaling, pausing, inhaling, pausing, exhaling. The space between pauses and breaths extended, and everything slowed.
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The three men stood atop a high cliff, ankle deep in crystal clear water looking over a waterfall that careened downward for half a league or more into a verdant jungle canopy beneath. The high blue sky was scintillating sapphire burning with the light of two opposing, twin suns. They looked like mirrors of morning and twilight. One hung just above rising, and the other painted the opposite sky on the way to sunset.
“Days of days, brief stints of night,
The elder grove in tireless light,
Here caressing, there scorching,
Oft a blessing, n’er a torture,
Strange still for days of days
As cosmic melody plays and plays.”
The voice that spoke was nowhere. It was everywhere. It was between and around. It was loss hopelessly found. It was the crashing waterfall and the bubbling of the stream, the scent of snow lilies in the high pine forests and deep musk of jungle floors. It was the taste of home and the sound of longing.
Two golden eyes opened in the sky the size of moons between the suns. The irises were cosmic portals. The voice continued.
“True notes with false note carry
The tune of creation, the beat of continuance,
Rally the spheres to desperate conclusion.
A path, a scale, a note, a song, a rest, a resonance,
A sneaking sibilant hiss of intrusion,
This false refrain delivers the dissonance.”
Siegyrd forced himself to speak, though he could not hear his own words through the din of a rising cacophony that shook the mountains, the trees, and sent birds fleeing from the jungle below “What dissonance? How can we aid?”
The cacophony rose louder, and he clapped his hands over his ears flinching away. Mareth buckled to his knees in the water of the stream at the edge of the world.
Aerendir stood firm through the pain, solid as the stone at the very base of the mountain on which he stood. “Where, Zaralai?”
The voice from the sky, the eyes, the whole place flickered at the name, like a mirage retreats at your reproach in the midday sun, then returned, no longer some distant alien thing but solid and in front of them. Zaralai Vox Niki stood in front of Aerendir at the peak, though her feet hovered above the water.
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“I am almost lost, Ossian’s son. Please.” She took his hand, and for the first time he realized that his greatsword was in it with the invocation still etched upon the blade. She stepped back, pointed to the sword, nodded, and then pulled aside her collar just over her heart and put her finger there. Aerendir understood but shook his head.
Siegyrd tried to speak, and she twisted to look at him. Her stare alone forced him to one knee. He gasped but said nothing. Mareth crawled his way slowly away from the edge toward a bank away from the stream, chest pains wracking him any time he glanced in Zaralai’s direction.
“Please, Aerendir, son of Ossian, before there is no Zaralai left, before all I am is swallowed in the rising madness. It must be here and now. You have seen what happens to our kind when it takes hold.”
Aerendir shook his head again, “My father said where life is, there hope is.”
Zaralai smiled, sadly, and then began to weep, to plead, “Please. I don’t want to lose. It. I can’t. Too much. So beautiful, and lost, and I. Kill me!” Her weeping grew frantic and eventually gave way to laughter, first bitter, but soon manic, beyond hysterical.
Aerendir stepped forward and placed his hand on her shoulder and spoke, “Zaralai, hold. We may yet find a cure for you, for our people.”
Zaralai’s laugh subsided momentarily and there was a severe crystalline clarity in her golden eyes as she spoke, “You cannot restore what you cannot know has been lost – it is the yawning emptiness which nothing can fill and the vague sense that it was not always so. As if that which would fill it is all around, yet that these eyes are blind, these ears deaf, this tongue mute. This heart dead. I can see it all shimmering beyond the veil, but I cannot reach it. Kill me, please, before the emptiness explodes from me.”
Aerendir looked torn for the first time. He stared at his empty hand, flexed it, and looked up into Zaralai’s pleading face. Even weeping, her beauty radiated in pulsating waves that passed straight through all his defenses. How could I ever destroy such beauty? “No. I will protect you, as will my brother.”
Her face slumped, and the glimmer of the hope of death faded from her. Her tone grew cold, and the water at Aerendir’s feet froze solid grasping him tightly. The cold spread down the waterfall freezing the water all the way to the jungle floor where cascading waves of cold swallowed up all the heat, shriveling leaves and branches and petrifying trees.
Aerendir looked down at his feet, and when he looked up, Zaralai the woman was gone. Hovering above him was the true from of Zaralai Vox Niki, last of the dragon queens. From the tip of her nose to her tail was more than three hundred paces and her wings stretched their ephemeral rainbow radiance to triple that size. Her upper body was brilliant, almost translucent, golden scales which refracted the light around her giving her an aura of kaleidoscopic color. On her underbelly her scales were a shiny black hematite, polished and cold that seemed to suck in the surrounding light. She had all the regal splendor and terror of a dragon, yet the lithe precision and elegance and delicacies that made it clear she was a woman. Her raw beauty disarmed and pierced without a claw or tooth or implement.
She wounded Aerendir with his own glance. He saw her and deep pains vibrated through his chest as she flapped her wings slowly in the bright sky. He gripped his chest hard with his left hand and closed one eye with pain, then slammed the other shut as well trying to shake her fearfully radiant image from his head.
Siegyrd struggled to rise, breaking himself free of the frozen stream, but could not keep himself from looking up. He too was struck with the glance, and keeled over afresh with wracking pains in his chest.
She swept no claw, nor roared like she had in the cavern. She merely hovered there in all her splendor, and the brothers could not bear to witness her.
Mareth, on the other hand, looked up at her and felt awe and fear, but was not stricken. There was a kind of longing in him, and a recognition of her grace and form and presence, but he could stand it. He looked around, seeing that the two brothers were incapacitated, and thought himself unequal to the task. Zaralai turned her golden gaze upon him and he froze, momentarily, but shook his head and gripped his clubstaff all the harder as he bashed his own feet free of the stream’s ice. As he did so he began to thread a very simple song of air, something that required little of his movement.
Zaralai seemed puzzled when Mareth did not blanche or fall. She swept downward toward him and landed with a graceful series of steps perched at the peak of the waterfall, Aerendir gripped his chest next to her and Siegyrd wept in strange gasps. She walked to within a few human paces of Mareth and lowered her giant golden head to look at him. Under his breath, he wove his simple song. A trickle of wind whipped Aerendir’s sword from its place at his side and lifted it behind the dragon into the air out of her vision.
Zaralai’s voice was still lovely, but a deep and foreboding, almost alien, proceeded from dragon lips around a hot breath that smelled fresh, like new fallen rain.
“Resistance to my particular aura issss,” she let the sibilance linger before she finished, “rare.” Her tone seemed almost curious, almost delighted.
“SSStill, with you three dies my hopes of release. I will take the long death road.” The dragon sighed again, Mareth’s face right up against her giant face, and he finished his song.
He wanted to think of something clever to say as he did it, but fear and awe and wonder and the urgency of action shut his mind down to all but one thing. He tugged on his spell and pulled Aerendir’s sword into a flat point aimed like a spear at Zaralai’s exposed side where she had stepped past Aerendir and Siegyrd to reach him. One more tug. The bonewhite greatsword etched with an invocation Mareth did not understand flew straight as a bow shot into the scales behind the dragon’s left leg digging in the full length of the blade’s almost four feet. A sound like a colossal gong boomed into the space, a single, loud, long, bass note. An explosion of dark light bloomed from the wound and engulfed Zaralai whose face rapidly went through first surprise, then resignation, and ended in a rapturous joy. Her golden scales faded into a vacuous black, and her hematite scales grew darker still, swallowing light. Her basic form remained roughly the same, wings and tail and legs and all, but she shrank to less than a quarter of her original size and all the distinguishing aspects of her faded into a vague, dark shapeliness reminiscent of the essence of dragon without any of the individuality of any particular dragon.
The sky dripped its color like a canvas painting splashed with water before it dries. The forms around the three lost their firmness and everything shifted, flickered, and just before it all went black Mareth saw a beautiful flowing ice statue of a dragon that could have been any dragon, emanating a heat he could not bear.
#
On the cliff overlooking the town, Mathin and Zaralai sat on a small bench, holding each other and watching the stars. Zaralai had gone distant some time ago, as she had been wont to do for some time. Mathin was grateful to be next to her, to hear her breathe. The night was growing cold. Suddenly she shot up, she turned her golden eyes toward Mathin and spoke in a hushed whisper, “Kiss me, my love.” They embraced, and there was joy in the touch of their lips, the warmth and intimacy of the moment. His eyes were closed when their lips parted, and he opened them to see her beautiful face, those golden eyes gleaming back at him. He blinked, and she was gone.