Yet the moment he thought of the loneliness of tearing himself away from the warmth and companionship of the warren, a smiling image of the straw-headed Human entered his mind. His soul resumed its stillness, burning inside of him with a contentment that seemed neither warranted nor entirely sane. This was his fate. If he was to carry out the Ancient One’s will, what he knew to be right in every fibre and flame of his being, then let his wings flare with courage, and his paws be quick.
Flicker’s spine spikes tingled with renewed resolve.
Come, Shimyal, he said, softly. Come, and I will show you such wonders–
She retreated, quivering with horror, tiny mewls of distress escaping her mouth. You’re mad, mad, mad …
In his eagerness to follow her, Flicker stepped beyond the bounds of his confinement. Shimyal, my egg-sister, it doesn’t have to be–
The dragonet stumbled away blindly, wailing the death-cry. It wounded him; Flicker knew he would bear the scars for the rest of his life. Muzzle lowered, he turned side-on to her, a gesture of apology.
Movement troubled the periphery of his vision. Lyrica.
An image of the warren-mother stood in the corridor just behind him, her expression bleak. So, you have chosen, Flicker.
It is not a choice, he replied. Surely, a dragonet could both be friends with a Human, and true to his kind? Why did he have to give up either, or both?
The Mother’s voice swelled with power. Even now your mind refuses to embrace the paths of goodness. You are blind, Flicker. Thus you have been since breaking the shell. Lyrica’s eyes grew hotter than the twin suns. This, I will not allow! Failure does not exist in this warren!
No, he thought, failure was discarded like the shell-shards of a dragonet he had once seen born disabled, its wings too malformed to fly. The dragonet had been thrown off the edge of the cliff, the memory of that egg wiped out–except in those like him, who remembered more than the hive-mind would permit.
Lyrica reached out with her thirteen-fold power, wrathfully immense, and struck him down. You dare, little one! I will teach you such a lesson … I will annihilate the old and remake you. And you will never disobey me again.
Flicker’s world collapsed amidst dark, mocking tongues of fire.
* * * *
A girl, once a royal ward of Fra’anior, walked beneath the mountain, penetrating the roots of a world she thought she had known. Magic whispered in her veins. Wonder weaved filigree thrills inside her soul. She had long forgotten the setting of stones and scratching of arrows on tunnel-mouths, intended to mark her route. Tiny fragments of crystal song entered her mind, striking like droplets of fine rain upon a parched Island, sucked ravenously into a soul desperate to know its identity, to grasp truth in a world which had cast her off not once, but many times. She knew, as the weight of a miles-high Island above her settled upon its foundations, the crushing weight of loneliness and despair.
Somehow, one learned to walk even when wounded.
One limped. One drew from grief the expression of dance. One tore it forth, and dangled it in the faces of those wondering how it was possible that beauty should rise from ashes blown across the Cloudlands.
Queen Shyana, for all her love, had failed to protect her adopted daughter. She had paid the price. Hualiama remembered trying to pull King Chalcion off her as he beat his queen in a drunken rage, but she was too small and weak, just nine years old. He had chased Lia off with the roar of a beast. She had never forgotten the sight of her mother whimpering in that corner of her bedchamber, her battered right eye already swelling shut.
“Go, my darling,” the Queen whispered. “I will come to you later. I’ll be fine.”
Did it take courage to suffer like that, or merely acquiescence?
In a cave filled with light, a pure, reaming, magical light emanating from a million crystals, clustered so thickly upon the walls that the basal rock was not even to be seen, Hualiama wept for her mothers. One, doomed to be unknown. The other, who loved her imperfectly yet unstintingly, and was infinitely the more precious for it.
Her limbs jerked in a parody of dance, the heaviness in her soul mirroring the slow suffocation of untold millions of tons of rock bearing down upon the caves.
She wandered the crystal-bedecked hallways, stumbling along in pursuit