Dragonfriend by Marc Secchia Page A

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 of flame, as though a vital part of his soul had been extinguished. Horror! She gagged. Flicker did not appear to see her, his mind entrapped by a many-headed monster of darkness which snapped at him, gnawing, ravaging, battering him toward madness.
    The chaos tore at Lia, too. Sensing her spirit-presence, it attacked, roaring, BEGONE!
    She bent beneath the red dragonet’s assault with the suppleness of a reed yielding to storm winds, bowed yet unbroken. Lia drew Flicker close with her love. She enfolded him in a cocoon-like space, as though he were the precious chrysalis and she was the silk, a delicately strong thread woven of the fibres of her being and the white fire of the crystals, too many layers for the creature to break through–yet it would not give up, rending her again and again with the shattering blows of a mental giant.
    His pain became her pain. She supplied her strength without stinting. Slowly, inevitably, Hualiama sank to the cavern floor, wholly focussed on the inner battle. Stone had never felt softer.
    Even the light no longer penetrated her eyelids.
    * * * *
    Lia roused with a desolate cry on her lips, “Dragon! No …”
    It had been a dream of extraordinary lucidity, of Ra’aba trapping her beneath a mountain, bringing down a landslide to bury her alive. Only a blink of time later in her dream, she transformed into a he –Flicker? No. A Dragon of a vivid blue colour, like a