Dragon Fire, Chapter Five

Nearly three weeks after her encounter with the human, Varya still hadn’t told her family what had happened. She’d told Corr a bit, of course–when she’d returned just barely before sunup, he’d been understandably anxious for her safety, and she’d had to tell him that she’d at least found the source of the human tracks that they’d found.

She hadn’t told him that she had spoken with the traveler. That they had shared a fire. She hadn’t told anyone about his parting gift, seemingly given in payment for her assistance with the cur’callim.

She sighed quietly, turning the shell over in her hands. She couldn’t really say why she’d kept it; some days she told herself it was because she didn’t want her mother worrying over her, and that while giving it to Fellal–who hoarded such things preciously–would have made sense, it also would have sparked an unwarranted fear in her parents. One lone traveler was no reason to move their home. Not again.

Most of the time, she believed that was reason enough. But there were some moments–moments like now, when she held the thing and felt the smooth curves of it under the rough pads of her fingers–that she thought her motivations might be more selfish than she would have liked to admit. She didn’t have quite the same fascination with trinkets that the rest of her family seemed to–not so specifically, at least. But she did like pretty things. Stones, flowers, glass, cloth or coins. She would admit she was something of a magpie; but while her siblings and parents kept carefully curated collections, each tailored to their own taste, she often found herself simply…holding on to things that she found pretty. Or even just interesting.

Jax’s shell was both. Cream, pink, and a pale tan twined together in ripples over its surface in a hypnotic pattern that she traced absently as she continued to turn it over in her hands. And if the mage was to be believed about what it could do…

Dragons were inherently creatures of magic, but it manifested differently than it did in human spell-crafters. Varya honestly didn’t know all that much about it–neither her parents nor her siblings were particularly interested in cultivating their natural abilities in that particular arena. She did know the two most obvious manifestations of dragon magic: fiery breath and an impressive speed of healing.

She had never seen anything like what Jax had done. Not his spells that had called and woven the wind, nor the way he had hovered a hand over her own wound and healed it. She’d watched her clutchmates heal from cuts and even broken bones faster than she would have thought possible, but she’d never seen them pass that healing onto someone outside themselves; she didn’t think even the most accomplished dragon mage could manage something like that.

Varya turned the shell over once more, tracing two fingers along the sloping curve of its mouth. Then she gave her head a little shake and reached up to place it carefully back into its newly assigned niche in the wall of her bedroom.

Well…bedroom was perhaps a stretch. As they’d grown, she and her clutchmates had all gradually drifted to preferring their own spaces in the den–due to her comparative “daintiness”, as Valon had once dared to put it, she had found a small room in the hollowed-out shell of what had once been been a grand keep and made the place her own: a sleeping pile of scavenged blankets, cloaks, even a few moth-eaten pillows; a curtain of loosely woven together chainmail that she’d claimed from the armory before Corr could hoard all the metalwork; carpets of hide–those she’d hunted and cleaned herself–and old tapestries pilfered from the walls of the keep, overlaid in mishmash patterns that made sense to no one but her.

Mam called it her bedchamber, as she said that was what humans called such things, and she’d always wanted Varya to feel…a connection, she supposed, with that part of her past. But Varya simply called it her nest, as her siblings did.

“Varya! C’mon, my scales are starting to itch waiting for you!”

Speaking of her siblings…

Rolling her eyes but unable to keep from grinning, she ducked through the makeshift curtain that separated her “nest” from the rest of her family’s den and loped down the half-collapsed hall that led into the keep’s courtyard.

“You could have started without me, y’know,” she snipped at Valon, who only huffed and shuffled his wings slightly to give her more room to slip by as she wound her way through the five sprawled dragons.

“As if Lulu would let us,” he grumbled in response. Lutsey flicked her tail lazily at his nose, earning a halfhearted growl.

“The point is for all of us to be together, you lump,” their sister said primly. Varya gave her a fond look, letting her eyes close in a long blink as they met Lutsey’s. The young dragon returned the affectionate gesture with a croon before rolling onto her side and stretching her neck toward Sydrine.

“I do appreciate the thought, Lulu, but I don’t mind if you lot want to at least get the fire going when I drag my heels,” Varya chuckled, patting Lutsey’s leg as she picked her way around to where Corr was heaving himself to his feet. “It’s not like I’m all that helpful in that particular effort anyway.”

“You do your…whatever it is you do with those stones,” Sydrine put in lazily. “That’s something.”

Varya snorted and rolled her eyes. Quite aside from her sister refusing to acknowledge that she knew what flint was, it was patently ridiculous to mention her very limited human ability to light a spark when compared to creatures who could literally exhale flame.

“Alright, alright, Mam and Da will be back from their hunt soon,” Fellfala cut in. “Just settle and let’s get this done.”

“Well, you’re just a bundle of fun this evening,” Corr snarked at her. Dipping his voice to mimic their father’s lyrical accent, he wheedled, “C’mon, where’s your sense of familial camaraderie?”

“Uhg, stop that.” Sydrine glowered at him. “It’s bad enough when we have to hear it from Da.”

Varya smiled to herself as her siblings devolved into bickering around her. They may complain about it–loudly–but she knew all five of the young dragons enjoyed the little ritual that their parents had instilled in them in their whelp years. With the fulling of the moon, the entirety of their family would gather and share a fire.

Her smile faded a bit at the inadvertent reminder of the most recent fire she’d shared. It wasn’t the same thing, not really, but… Her mind flitted back to the shell, tucked away in her room.

As though sensing her thoughts, Corr caught her eye across the scorched stone that her siblings had long cleared out for a bonfire and cocked his head questioningly. She gave herself a brisk shake and waved a hand at him, telling him not to fret.

He was the only one who knew she’d tracked down the human, and even he didn’t know the full story.

The guilt of secret-keeping settled heavy in her gut, and she quickly tried to turn her mind to something else, eagerly joining the rest of her clutch in their familiar banter as Fellfala adjusted the small wall of stones around their makeshift firepit and Valon nudged them back out of place with the tip of his tail. The lot of them were so engrossed with their task–namely irritating one another–that it took nearly three full wingbeats before Lutsey’s head shot up and she looked toward the sound.

“Oh, Mam–!” the young dragon started, getting her paws under her and stretching up onto her hind legs to better indicate the dark shape cutting a path across the first evening stars toward their home.

A much less graceful path than was usual. There was a staggered rhythm to their mother’s flight, one that only became more stark the closer she came. It was enough to stop Lutsey’s call of greeting in her throat. Her deep crimson eyes narrowed. “What’s…?”

Sydrine was suddenly on her feet, wings already flared as she prepared to take off. “She’s hurt!”

Varya felt her stomach drop down into the stone beneath her feet, throwing herself out of the way as Sydrine, Lutsey, and Valon all took to the air in a massive rush of wind and scraping talons. Internally cursing her weak eyesight, she bolted back to her feet as soon as it was clear and scrambled up onto Fellfala’s back in an effort to get a higher vantage point as their siblings rushed to reach Fellal. Corr was already clearing the area around their bonfire to make an ungainly landing as gentle as possible, while Fellfala reared up as far onto her hind legs as she could go and craned her neck to search the sky.

Her whisper, when it came, confirmed Varya’s fear.

“...Where’s Da?”

***

Three clutchmates and their flagging mother all but crashed into the courtyard of the abandoned mountain keep. Valon and Sydrine had managed to get themselves under each of their Mam’s wings, while Lutsey–still the smallest–had tucked her body up under Fellal’s chest in an effort to ensure she didn’t injure herself further as the four of them essentially dropped from the air. Varya vaulted off Fellfala’s back, hard on her sister’s heels as the silvery dragon began looking their mother over for the source of her injury even as she started spouting questions.

“Oh, stars, Mam, what–can you lift your wing, oh fires preserve me you’re bleeding, Mam, how–?!”

It wasn’t a single source--Fellal’s flank was littered with arrow shafts that Valon was already desperately plucking free, and her right wing bore over a dozen ragged cuts, some that punctured all the way through the membrane. There was a long, shallow gash along the left side of her neck; she couldn’t be sure, but Varya thought it looked like the work of a javelin, one from which her mother must have just barely been able to dodge a fatal blow.

“Lulu, Varya, herbs, we need–”

“I know!” Varya shimmied up onto Lutsey’s back so quickly that her littlest sister actually snorted in surprise, but didn’t break her stride as they cut a sharp line through the courtyard to the half-fallen section of wall in the northwest corner. The scrubby, stubborn mountain plants that managed to cling to life in their home mostly congregated here, in a patch of earth that Sydrine had jokingly dubbed a “garden”. Lutsey began scooping pawfuls of the low-clinging moss off the interior cracks of the rocks as Varya stood up on her shoulders and grabbed for the broad, fluttering leaves of the firewhisp vines that crept over the jagged top of the broken wall.

She just barely managed to snap off a few lengths of the vines themselves for good measure when she felt Lutsey surging back to her full height beneath her and used the motion to twist gracefully off her back and rush in her sister’s shadow back to the rest of their family.

…Almost the rest of their family. She couldn’t stop herself from glancing up for the briefest instant to search the sky, knowing she wouldn’t find her father but desperately hoping for it anyway.

Nothing.

Where is he? Is he–?

No. No, she couldn’t think about that now. Her mother was wounded, and she needed to help.

Sydrine and Valon were already sorting through the herbs and moss Lutsey laid before them, but none of her siblings’ paws were delicate enough to bind the muddled leaves to their mam’s sluggishly bleeding wounds, at least not quickly. She sprang forward, pressing firewhisp to the open cuts first before packing them with moss in an effort to stem the flow of blood. Fellal groaned, eyes tight shut, and Varya winced.

“I’m sorry, Mam,” she whispered as she worked. “I’m sorry…”

“What happened?” Corr hissed as he paced an anxious circle around their huddled group, neck craned so he could search the sky.

“Hunters,” their mother rasped, speaking for the first time since her ungainly landing. All six siblings went silent, dread a heavy pit in their stomachs. “An…ambush,” Fellal continued, panting lightly. “They knew…our hunting grounds… Watching us…”

“Mam.” Varya pressed her palm to the dragon’s neck, staring earnestly up into her face. “Mam, where’s Da?”

Her mother met her eyes for only a moment before she let her head fall to the scorched stone of the courtyard. A long, low moan echoed in her great chest.

“Gone… Took him… Rorich…”

Lutsey gave a short, sharp wail that Valon quickly stifled, gathering his sister in close to his side with one wing wrapped around her, tucking her head against his chest.

Varya could only stare at their mother, disbelief and terror stealing her voice.

Fellfala growled and tossed her head, grief and frustration dragging at the edges of her voice as she suddenly demanded, “Why isn’t this working?!”

Varya desperately shook herself free of her own paralysis and raced to Fellal’s other side where her sister was glaring in a panic at the worst of their mother’s wounds, a wide gash just beneath her left wing. She’d packed the wound heavily with moss, but the blood showed no signs of slowing. In fact…

Corr smelled it first, whipping his head down to stare at their mother in abject horror.

“Dragonsbane.”

Fellal had been poisoned.

It was Sydrine’s turn to wail helplessly, collapsing beside the older dragoness and pressing her muzzle into her cheek. Varya felt her legs trembling, barely able to hold her own weight.

Not even draconic healing could slow the ravage of dragonsbane. The smallest dose would have left Fellal incapacitated for a day, if not more. This…this was…

She wouldn’t heal from this.

“...No.”

Varya turned and ran, ignoring the startled, grieving shouts from her siblings. She all but flew back through the corridors of the keep to her room, jackknifing so quickly through the ruined doorway that her feet slid out from under her and she skidded on her knees across rough stone to her little niche of treasures. She felt blood coursing down her skin and didn’t care.

They needed help. They needed magic she had only seen once before in her life.

Frantic, she snatched up Jax’s shell and brought it to her mouth, hoping desperately that he had told the truth, that he would hear.

“I need your help,” she rasped, clutching the shell as close as she dared. “Please, we--my mother is dying.”

Next Chapter: here