Dragonfriend by Marc Secchia

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 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