The memory dissolved into meaningless slivers as I felt someone lift me from the ground. With my returning consciousness and awareness that I still lived came the pain of the countless wounds I bore, but I barely had the strength to groan.
I forced my eyes open and looked at what had lifted me, and confusion and wonder silenced my groan. It was a wooden man of a sort, one half as tall as me again and crudely fashioned from a solid tree trunk. The bark had been stripped, leaving a honey-coloured wood decorated with hundreds of fine carvings and polished to a lustre by age and long exposure to the raw magic of the nexus. As it moved I saw the spears and swords that jutted from its back.
‘You are the guardian,’ I wheezed at it.
A head that was little more than two smoothed crystals for eyes and an axe gash for a mouth tilted towards me.
‘Wouldnae beest thee?’ it said, the voice oddly piping and wheezy for all of its bulk. The sound of the old human tongue sounded strange after all these years, but I recognised it easily enough. Who are you?
I considered the question carefully before replying, opting for honesty. ‘Ae emm thist wyrm Stratus ep Skeyfeir.’ I am the dragon called Stratus the Skyfire.
It seemed content with that, insomuch that it set me down on the ground next to the smouldering hole left by the Lance. The crystal around it was cracked and dull, much like the guardian’s eyes.
‘What do you want of me?’ I said. It took me an age to remember the words, and longer to fight the waves of dizziness and pain that threatened to pull me back into a dreamless and potentially eternal sleep.
‘Sing,’ it said.
‘Sing?’ It stared at me with its dull eyes but clearly had no inclination to repeat itself. ‘I can’t,’ I said. I looked down at the weeping gash in my side. ‘My sorcery is spent and if I move my hand I think the rest of my guts will spill out.’
Wood creaked as it took a step forward and pressed its crude, blunt hands against my head. I felt a pulse of magic, soft and green, wash over me.
‘Sing,’ it said again, then slowly crumpled to the side like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on the wisp of power it had given me. It was the last vestige of its power, as ancient and gentle as the place it had guarded since before men first descended from the trees. It reminded me of summer prairies, of crushed grass and the cry of river eagles hunting. I inhaled deeply, and smelt flowers and honey rather than decay and blood. I focused on that, and amidst the hum of the bees and birdsong that came with it I heard the pattern.
I hummed it at first, finding the pitch of its magic, then slowly put more breath into it. Pain flared from my cracked and broken ribs but I focused on the idea of the eagles swooping across an emerald grassland and gulls wheeling over cliffs, and somewhere in that moment, I heard the echo of something waking.
I concentrated on that sensation and the agonised mass of my body slowly shifted to the back of my mind. I tilted my head back and raised my voice, putting all of my breath into reminding the crystal of the song that still echoed somewhere deep within it. I felt the sound pass through the crystal and the countless connections embedded in the earth around me, and then the echo returned, stronger than before. I kept singing as the echoes chased my voice, and with every return the gap closed and the scent of summer and sound of wind across the eagle’s feathers grew more distinct.
And then the echo caught my voice and became one with it. I opened my eyes as the first glimmer of golden light shot through the cavern. Another followed, and like the sun rising, the nexus woke beneath me, filling the cavern with amber light as the Songlines reconnected. I could feel the force building, pushing against the remaining barriers imposed by Navar’s foul magics, and it felt like I was standing in a great basin waiting for an ocean to fill it once more. I opened my arms wide as those final barriers splintered and pure, unadulterated power flooded into the cavern with the roar of a thousand waterfalls.
I opened myself to it entirely and felt the response as I sang my true name. There was a distortion in the reply, a corruption caused by the broken enchantments that bound me, and I felt the nexus try to correct itself, to scour that imperfection even as the Songlines washed the taint of dark magic from the node. The power swelled around me, then through me. It felt as if a chain was being pulled through the length of my body, rubbing and scraping my bones as it went, rupturing my flesh as the enchantments were broken.
I screamed, but there was no stopping what I had so carelessly begun. The Songlines didn’t care for my pain, only that the discord within me was removed. The power of the node stripped the tainted flesh from me until I was a raw and quivering thing and then began to reshape my flesh into what my name compelled it to be.
Night had fallen by the time that my senses returned to me, although the soft light that filled the cavern made it seem as if it were dawn instead. I yawned and looked around, only to stumble in surprise when I realised that I was looking down at the cavern from somewhere twice as high as I remembered my head being. I shook my head to clear the fog from it, but the cavern spun around me wildly and I fell to the side, my disorientation complete. I lay there with my eyes shut, just breathing, letting my balance find itself once more.
As I did, I became aware of the press of my hide against the thawing ground. I could feel every pebble and, in some places, bones and fallen menhirs beneath me. I breathed in deeply, and rather than the death and stench of sweet spices that had filled it before, I could taste rain, good earth, and crushed grass. And men. No, not just any men: Tatyana and Lucien. The impossibility of their survival fired my curiosity and I opened my eyes and made to stand up, only to drive my snout into the mud like a peasant’s plough. My neck kept bending, and I was sure I was falling over, but I wasn’t.
I shook the dirt from my face and steadied my stance as I looked down at myself for the first time. At my thick arms and legs, with knees bending back the way they should, and at my proud, horned snout and my tapering tail.
I was whole again. The man’s body was gone, and I was remade. I stretched my wings out and almost laughed when I saw that they too were strong and whole. Even my claws had returned, although they, like my newly remade scales, were softer than they should be. I stretched languorously, enjoying the feel of my great muscles stretching as they hadn’t for almost a millennium. With every breath I took the memories of my human body were slipping away like a dream forgotten in morning’s light, and I let them go without hesitation. I shook myself and stood there, simply laughing at the sheer joy of being me for some time before I lowered myself and peered into the tunnel where the now diminutive bodies of Tatyana and Lucien lay.
She was sprawled where I had left her, her burned hands still clutching the medallion which, from the look of it, had destroyed itself in its attempts to shield her from the intensity of the magics that had been unleashed when I broke the Lance. Its destruction had wounded her, but the remnants of her armour had saved her from the worst of it. Lucien was the one I had expected to see reduced to bone or ash, but instead he lay across her legs, his arms still crossed over his face, as if he had fallen while standing over her. It was a ludicrous notion. As brave as the little summer prince had been, even without the broken bones he’d suffered at Navar’s hand, no mere mortal could have withstood what had been unleashed here, not without protection.
Curious, I reached for my sorcery and felt it respond with alacrity. I closed my eyes and summoned it to me, and for the second time that night I laughed as I felt the power of it flow into me. I had been made whole again in both name and flesh, and with that, the last impediments that had choked the flow of the Songlines into me had been washed away.
I flexed my will and felt the mountain shattering potential of the raw power I now contained rise at my command. I released it and looked back at Lucien, who now seemed so small and frail. I raised a veil across my vision and looked closer. Fronsac’s wards had been broken by what the boy had faced here, and as my gaze penetrated his flesh and will I saw what the wizard had been hiding all this time. Lucien was as I was, a sorcerer, the rarest of gifts offered by nature. The first kings had all been sorcerers, so his blood ran true indeed.
I felt the mote of healing within Tatyana reach for me, but rather than feed her the healing power it wanted, I gave both her and Lucien the gift of sleep. They would need food more than magic when they awoke, but more importantly, I was ravenous, and the long suppressed and irresistible need to hunt and soar amongst the clouds was on me.
It was no hard thing to leap for the top of the cavern, which was now far closer than it had been to me as a man, although it did take a bit of manoeuvring to wriggle out without catching my wings on the edge. I stretched them out a few times, reacquainting myself with the feel of my flight muscles and making sure that they were ready. I called my sorcery to me with as much ease as drawing a breath and wove my wind spells with glee. And then, turning my head towards the pearly crescent of the moon, I launched myself into the night sky with a cry of triumph that set the animals of the army encamped around the city walls to rearing and screaming in terror.
I laughed as the ground dropped away beneath me, the sheer euphoria of flight washing every other thought and concern from me. I had worried that I would not remember how, but nothing could have been further from the truth. My blood thundered through my veins, all but glowing with renewed vitality and power. I drew a deep lungful of air and shouted my name for the sheer joy of it. I hadn’t expected any reply, and none answered me. The skies remained mine alone.
I felt the welcome strain of muscles I hadn’t used in an age pulling across my back as my wings lifted me higher into the night, up through the clouds until only the stars were higher than me. The un-breathed air at that altitude was cold, but it was a clean, fresh sort of cold rather than the insidious, choking kind that still clung to the city streets. I banked and descended, looking down on Aknak and the glittering pinpoints of firelight that surrounded it. It had seemed so imposing when I first approached it and had dominated the landscape, but from the sky it seemed like nothing much at all. I swooped lower until I could watch the camp without exerting myself. They were agitated, like bees whose hive has been kicked, but ripples of Navar’s death had yet to reach them. I smiled in the darkness at the memory of his death, but it faded as I recalled his dying words. I’ll tell you where she is.
That and the vision of her that I had experienced on the other side of the gateway had watered the seed of hope within me. Could it be that she was alive? But if she was, how was it that she had crossed to the World of the Dead to bring me back? And yet, if she wasn’t, would she not have wanted me to join her there?
Unless she was both. The thought was almost enough to spill me from the air. I had seen so many impossible things already, so was it really so unthinkable that she was both, a living creature so corrupted by dark magic and Navar’s worms that Death no longer sought her? If she was, could I purge her as I had Lucien?
The miles slipped away under my wings as the thoughts ran through my head in maddening circles, and it was only the familiar complaint from my gut that pulled me back to the present. My brooding thoughts about death and burning eyes in the dark faded as the idea of food reasserted itself and I tipped my wings into a descending turn that sent me drifting downwards in a long spiral, luxuriating in the caress of wind rather than stone, seeking out farmlands as yet untouched by the war and the fat sheep and cattle tucked away in as yet un-ravaged pastures.
I smiled again when I found the pastures, and roared into the night for no reason beyond the thrill of seeing the panic that scattered the herds below. I wanted them to run, and run they did. It took several attempts before I started getting the timing of my swoops right, but once I did, the feasting began. I burned them and gorged myself on their fat little bodies, and with each that I gulped down I felt real strength return to me, a solid and comforting kind rather than the hollow approximation that sorcery could offer. Like healing, strength drawn from sorcery had a price that needed paying, one that only grew the longer it was delayed. I hunted, if that was what you could call my rampage, until dawn began to colour the skies.
I gathered up a cow and a handful of sheep in my claws and returned to Aknak. I dropped my bounty and a dead tree through the cavern roof before following them down, slowing my fall with an expert snap of my wings. I broke the tree apart and kindled a good blaze before using my sorcery to skin and gut the beasts. It was perhaps a scornful use of such sacred power, but I remembered the mess I’d made trying to do it by hand the first time and didn’t want to waste the meat. I set the meat to roasting on the embers before I carried Tatyana and Lucien nearer to the fire. Lucien’s injuries were many, but now that I understood what he was I could stoke his natural healing through his own gift. Once he was on the mend I did the same to Tatyana, speeding the healing that she needed, but gently so as to soften the price she would need to pay for it. I retreated to the side of the cavern and spun an illusion of shadow around me as they began to stir.
Lucien woke first, springing to his feet immediately and patting his body as if worried parts of him were either missing or on fire. Then he went to Tatyana and helped her into a sitting position before unfastening what was left of her armour and tossing it aside.
They clasped hands as they looked around the cavern.
‘Hello?’ called Tatyana.
‘Hello,’ I replied. They flinched as my voice rumbled through and filled the cavern. I’d forgotten that each of my lungs was now bigger than the whole of my human body had been.
She stood, and Lucien followed her a moment later. ‘Stratus?’
‘You’re a hard person to kill,’ I said. ‘You both are.’
‘I didn’t know you were trying,’ she said, and I chuckled at that, the sound echoing around us. ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m here,’ I said. ‘Though you may not recognise me.’
I felt her fluttering heartbeat gather pace. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Showing you is easier than explaining.’
She was staring at me now, although she would have seen nothing more than a wall of featureless black. ‘Then show us.’
‘Are you certain?’
‘God’s teeth, just show us. Dithering isn’t going to change anything.’
‘As you wish.’
I let the illusion fade as I stepped forward and stretched my wings wide, turning so that the fire could catch the red that chased the midnight hue of my scales.
She rubbed her eyes and stared at me, her mouth falling open, while Lucien fell to his knees and began sobbing like a child. I folded my wings and turned so that she could behold me in my full glory, then settled myself down on the opposite side of the fire, my chin upon my forearms, watching them.
She didn’t say anything for a long time after that, not even after she accepted the roasted mutton I passed her. Lucien wiped his face but, like Tatyana, simply continued to stare at me while he chewed, and I began to wonder if my undiluted magnificence had addled their senses.
Fortunately the combination of succulent mutton and the gut-hollowing hunger that only a healing spell created worked together to pull them from their unblinking reverie. Lucien was a more difficult proposition. His natural sorcery had long been repressed, and having it woken here, at a nexus and in my presence, was no doubt doing all manner of strange things to his mind and body.
‘Eat, Prince Lucien,’ I said, startling him into a state resembling wakefulness. ‘What you are feeling is the quickening of your gift. It will pass, but you need to focus your thoughts, and for that you will need your strength. Feed your body.’
I laced my words with a small amount of compulsion, and he lifted the meat he’d been gnawing on and fell upon it with renewed enthusiasm, tearing into it like a winter-starved wolf until fats and juices ran down his chin. Seeing it was enough to reawaken my own hunger and I devoured the half-charred cow, hooves, horns and all.
While I picked the bones from my teeth I let the healing construct with Tatyana finish its work on her body, and by the time she finished her mutton and loosed a belch that would have startled a troll, her burned skin was flaking away, revealing the new and healthy pinkness below. If she noticed, she gave no sign.
‘I never imagined you would be this magnificent,’ she said, wiping her hands on her torn trousers and walking towards me warily. I couldn’t help but straighten my shoulders at that. After so many years of being squeezed into a cage and bodies that weren’t truly my own I felt magnificent. I tilted my head towards her so that she could stroke my snout with hands that were now smaller than my teeth, quietly marvelling at how helpless she now seemed compared to how vital and strong she had felt when I was human.
‘Can you breathe fire now?’ she asked as she walked alongside my body, the touch of hands incredibly ticklish on my newborn scales.
‘No,’ I replied, watching as her shoulders sagged. ‘But I can fly.’