of that scent which had ambushed her perception, aware only of her soul’s craving to draw deeper, of seeking an elusive presence or purpose secreted in the very bowels of Ha’athior Island. The quality of the light stupefied her senses. It was not the ruddy golden light of the twin suns, warming and beautiful, but an immaculate white which was at once as clarion-clear as starlight, yet inexplicably imbued with a warmth that evoked Dragon fire in her mind. Always, the fire eluded her. Lia could grasp but never hold, bathe but never be.
Passing through a complex set of cross-tunnels, Hualiama came to a place of darkness. Weary, she rested her back against a wall of black stone, as if the solidity of stone should become her life-Island’s foundation. Silence descended like a thunderclap. For the first time in hours, she began to listen.
Where was the crystal song? She reached out with her senses. In this place, it was absent. Only the soft sigh of her breathing and the suddenly enlarged throbbing of her heart came to her ears, amplified by the surrounding quietude. So deep and so vast was the hush, the urge she felt to express her burdens bordered on sacrilege, Lia thought. But if she sang for beauty, her song should not grieve the deeps, but meander along their dark corridors and unknown abysses with the air of a soul-lost being seeking the light.
Lia sang a melancholy lay, one she had learned from a music scroll in the Palace library:
Alas for the fair peaks, my love, my fierce love,
Alas for the scorching winds, which stole thee away,
Let my soul take wing upon dawn’s twin fires …
And fly to thee.
It was the song of a Dragon pining for his lost love.
In that instant, Hualiama began to hear more, as though her song had aroused the Island itself. Sonorous, faraway, conducted into her body through the rock at her back, she heard what seemed to be a gigantic heartbeat, impossibly deep and slow. She laid her head against the volcanic rock, marvelling at the heat conducted into her body, warming the huge crescent scar on her back until it stopped aching.
Mercy! There was something down here with her.
Truly? No, of course Lia’s imagination was taking flight, as always. Quietly, she chuckled, “You’re a silly ralti sheep. Come on, time to find your way back to the real world.”
If she could. Unbidden, her laughter swelled. Being lost underground would only cap her misery. As she felt her way back out of that foetal darkness into the world of light-crystals and their elusive, enticing music, Hualiama found her footprints in the dust and sand of the cave where she had wept. Perfect. She could follow her own careless footsteps back. On an impulse, she knelt to gather together a few pebbles, building them quickly into an arrow that pointed down the tunnel to the place of darkness.
“This way to the Dragon.” She giggled merrily, stealing a line from an ancient ballad about Land-Dragons, “Ho, Island-biter, I shall return to speak with thee.”
Well, that was a touch of Hualiama.
She offered the tunnel mouth a mocking bow. “Say, Ancient–”
Quicker than the Roc’s blade, a vision stabbed into her mind. Flicker, facing a huge red dragonet whose eyes burned with a kind of power she had recognised in Ra’aba. Treacherous. Dominant. Flicker collapsed; the dragonet stalked toward him, mouthing words in a language unknown to her, which sliced into her soul as deeply as the forked dagger had penetrated her entrails.
Lia screamed.
Tearing at her face, sobbing, “No … no …” Knowing Flicker was in jeopardy, in pain. She shrank away, at first, but his anguish drew her inward, acting as a lodestone for the loss she had borne. He must not suffer on her account. She could not bear it.
Falling to her knees, Lia reached out for the writhing figure of the smoky green dragonet she pictured in her mind, forming an overarching shield of love. She drew strength from her pain, and clarity from the crystals surrounding her. The light flickered and dimmed. Instinct supplied the movement of her spirit toward Flicker, a single thought placing Lia in harm’s way as she sought to help her friend.
“Come to me, dear one,” she breathed. “I will be your sanctuary.”
Perhaps Human thought could not communicate to a dragonet in this way. Forming her words carefully in Dragonish, Lia said, I am here, Flicker. I will shield you.
His muzzle lifted weakly, his eyes limpid and devoid