The juvenile fought with the strength of ten, punching with his claws and biting and shaking the larger Dragons off time and time again … but he was tiring. He suffered a vicious bite to the base of his tail, and now another that wrenched his wing, slewing him in the air.
In the space between heartbeats, Lia’s breath sucked into a new, cavernous space. A soul-shift caught her unawares. Suddenly, she knew pain and gasping breaths and the prodigious boiling of Dragon passions in her breast. Blood-thirst! Battle-rage! The inrush of senses so sensitive and all-consuming that her little Human heart feared to burst. A veil slipped over her eyes. Lia saw the world in enchanted freshness, a hiatus of time as she became he, and her Dragon’s neck snaked about with great cunning, spraying fire into the Brown’s face. Enjoying a surfeit of time, she flipped about in the air to strike the Orange Dragon a talon-blow that opened a ten-foot gash on his neck. Her challenge boomed off the cliff-side. She mauled the Brown’s neck and hindquarters with claws that suddenly became his again and she yelped, ejected by an eruption of draconic rage.
How dare you? The Tourmaline’s suns-white fury lashed her mind. All was fire. All was incandescent agony … the connection chopped off as the Brown Dragon thundered back into the fray, striking such a devastating blow with his left forepaw that the young Tourmaline shuddered from muzzle to tail. He sagged in the air before catching himself no more than a decent spear-cast from Hualiama’s position. The breeze generated by his wing-strokes ruffled her hair.
“No,” Lia moaned. “Don’t kill me …” Him? Did she mean him? Confusion and disbelief surge as a dark tide through her mind, underpinning a rising song of grief at the Dragon’s impending doom.
The Orange Dragon’s flame spurted out, lava-like. It stuck to the blue scales, burning the Dragon terribly, a scream of anguish cutting her soul to ribbons … the Tourmaline broke away with a supreme outpouring of strength, flying raggedly … he shot into a cavern in the lower mountainside of Ha’athior Island, and vanished in the blink of an eye.
The Orange Dragon thundered, Bring it down, Yulgaz. Bury him.
Aghast, Hualiama became an unwilling spectator to the enactment of her dream. Her scalp crawled; so surreal the moment, she knew it would be seared on her memory forever.
The Brown Dragon hurled a torrential outpouring of magic at the mountainside. Rock cracked and sagged. With a reverberation that shook the volcano beneath the two Humans, a landslide tore a reddish-black streak through the foliage, wounding the holy Island’s cliff. It buried the Tourmaline Dragon alive.
Sealed, o Razzior, said the Brown Dragon.
Hualiama shook as though she had the fire-fever, which often caused violent convulsions in its victims. Ravaged, broken in spirit, she could only watch as the Orange Dragon scanned the avalanche site with manifest satisfaction. He said, Excellent work, Yulgaz. Teach that flying worm to plot against us.
The scarred orange muzzle began to twist as the Dragon scanned his surrounds.
Every hair on the back of Lia’s neck stood to attention. “No … he’ll kill me! Mercy, no …” Running would never work. The Dragons were too close. Lia felt as paralysed as a rodent facing a cobra’s mesmeric stare.
She gasped at an unexpected contact, skin to skin. Ja’al’s lips covered hers.
The monk kissed Lia with wary, eloquent attention, one eye fixed on the two Dragons hanging in the void between the Islands, just a few hundred feet away. Against her mouth, between the mingling of suddenly overheated breath, he whispered, “A proper kiss, you silly ralti sheep …”
Smart man. If she could not fool that Orange Dragon, she was dead. Shielding her face with a hand she brought up to cup Ja’al’s cheek, Hualiama of Fra’anior set about thoroughly decimating the promise she had just settled upon–please, let her not tempt Ja’al from his intended vows.
Terror screamed its lonely counterpoint to the song of her excitement. Lia realised that this was her first kiss, a sweet, forbidden kiss with a monk–with two hostile Dragons for an audience. Mercy. What could be more ironic, or more perfectly sum up her life? For an unending second, the burning gaze of two Dragons dwelled upon a young man and an Isles maiden kissing on the edge of a volcano.
Ja’al’s heart thudded against her fear-numbed chest.
Bah, Humans, said the Orange Dragon. With a flip of his wings, he rocketed away to the north.