The Gifts of the Hordedragons

Roshelle and Phonia slid through the mist covering the forest’s mossy floor. They meandered around tree trunks and brambles, following gametrails and avoiding clearings, just like they did every morning. Most mornings, though, their excited chatter made their careful hiding useless. Most mornings, they arrived at the stream between their respective dens brimming with stories to tell, gossip to share, or theories about their Horderules and set off giggling along their usual route.

Today, though, they drifted along in silence. Today, for the first time in years, they followed the admonishments of their mothers and elders to stay quiet in the forest, though not for the reason they’d been instructed. No humans had lived or traveled in these woods for nearly a century, so they weren’t afraid of being overheard. It was simply that neither of them wanted to be the first to mention last night’s Horderules ceremony.

Roshelle strained to feel Phonia’s thinking – a temperature, a shade, anything – but the only indication of her traveling companion was the slight sound of disrupted air. She willed her Sense to stretch, to reach Phonia’s mind and glean precious data. Was she embarrassed to walk together now? Was she angry? Mistress Canda was disappointed, sure, but did Phonia think that…that…

Roshelle shook her head, startling a bluebird out of a bramblebush. No. She and Phonia had been friends their whole lives. They’d celebrated each other’s first Horde Object, they’d shared every triumph and failure, they’d joked through frustration and fear and never judged each other. Phonia wouldn’t abandon her just because she didn’t know her Horderule yet. Even if she were the last one…even if she never….

Roshelle didn’t reach the end of the thought. Something warm and soft tickled the edges of her mind, catching the anxious whirling and filling her instead with a subtle but ballooning sense of calm. She smiled, blinking slowly, and yawned a slow, stretching yawn. Her whole body relaxed. Phonia could reach her even stronger now, and her influence was so soothing that the thought didn’t upset Roshelle. She basked in Phonia’s warmth, relieved that her friend didn’t think her a failure, though the conscious thought hardly registered through the blanket of calm laid over her senses.

“Thank you,” Roshelle murmured.

Phonia startled and stopped moving. “For what?”

“For…whatever you’re doing. You’ve gotten stronger. I was afraid you were mad. This feels beautiful.” Roshelle rolled her head side to side, stretching her long, slender neck.

“I’m not…I mean, I’m not mad, why would I…I just didn’t want to…but I’m not doing anything, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Phonia’s voice, normally low and smooth, warbled half an octave higher than usual. The mist between them dissipated and Roshelle could see Phonia’s wings squeezed tight against her shoulders.

A tendril of unease slithered in amongst the calm in Roshelle’s mind. Sure enough, the reach didn’t feel like Phonia. It wasn’t just stronger than other times. The signature was different. Phonia’s influence brought with it a sort of grounding quality – not heavy, exactly, but settled, like an old baker kneading bread the way their grandmother taught them. This influence felt lighter, billowy soft. If Phonia wasn’t creating this feeling, then what was it? Where did it come from?

Roshelle didn’t realize she’d begun walking again. Phonia’s questions and then protests didn’t register. She heard them, sort of, but they were background noise, like someone else’s conversation in a shop or the birds chirping outside an exam-chamber window. No signal reached Roshelle’s consciousness to make her stop, or hesitate, or fear what she might be moving toward.

Phonia’s voice faded. The fog grew thicker, and then it disappeared. Roshelle stood in a clearing, bathed in sunlight and carpeted with lavender, a spring bubbling up at the opposite corner and feeding a stream that wandered through the clearing and off into the forest. The feeling of calm had blossomed into something closer to pleasure, like the taste of the first summer strawberries or breathing in the scent and moisture of baking bread. Roshelle basked in the sensation, let it fill her mind and wash over her muscles, stretching her wings and turning her face to the sun. She filled her lungs with the scent of lavender. She released the breath and opened her eyes.

There, across the clearing, splashing in the stream, sat a child.

A human. A tiny, fragile human, barefoot and alone, in the middle of the forest.

Roshelle blinked, shook her head, and looked again. The little creature sat right in the water, flapping her chubby arms up and down, smacking the surface of the water and squealing at every third or fourth splash. Little blonde curls fell over her shoulders and ended in wet unruly clumps straightened by the splashing water. She wore a strange sleeveless frock and had no bangles or chords on her wrists or ankles. Roshelle had never seen a human child before, but the girl was smaller than the smallest elven schoolchildren, so she guessed her to be quite young.

Roshelle floated across the clearing, inching toward the girl as she giggled and babbled and splashed. Her claws skimmed the lavender but made no sound. Her wings felt warm. She stretched them wide, though they served no purpose for this low hover. The sunshine kissed their skin but did not account for the pleasant heat in her veins.

“Roshelle, what–” Phonia crashed through the bushes that bordered the clearing. Roshelle heard the rustling and cracking behind her but kept her gaze locked on the girl. The calm was almost euphoria now.

“Roshelle!” Rustling gave way to the thrumming of wings. “Roshelle! Wait!”

Sunlight glinted off golden curls and trickling springwater. Sprigs of lavender waved in a gust of warm forest air. Somewhere in the forest, an eagle cried. The wind stopped. The dragons froze. The child turned.

Her eyes found Roshelle’s and caught fire inside. Roshelle felt it, too – the euphoric feeling crystalized into an invisible tether from the dragon to the child. The girl stared at Roshelle with timeless intensity, like they’d been together at the birth of the universe. The silliness and giddiness of the toddler splashing in the water seemed a lifetime away.

And then the child smiled, squealed gleefully, and hoisted herself up onto wobbly legs to toddle through the lavender toward Roshelle. She giggled and gibbered with her hands outstretched, and Roshelle’s body settled back between euphoria and calm. The soaring sense of divinely-ordained rightness shrunk to an ember smouldering somewhere beneath her ribcage.

Phonia was here now, saying… something—and Roshelle was answering—but all she could see or hear or know was the child. Who was she? How did she get here? And what was…all that?

* * * * * *

They must have discussed what to do. There would have been questions, doubts—Phonia would have been afraid, or at least concerned. Roshelle didn’t know. She knew only that the child was her responsibility—her destiny. Phonia would have laughed. Roshelle would have, too, if she hadn’t felt the child’s influence. More than she’d known anything in her whole life, she knew.

They floated back to the stream between their dens, Roshelle clutching the child beneath her arm like a teddy. The child stroked Roshelle’s smooth scales and traced their shape with her tiny fingers. Phonia chattered a stream of worries to the trees, but ultimately followed Roshelle to her den.

Roshelle’s mother stood at the kitchen hearth, broiling a venison flank. She lifted a wing in greeting without turning from her task, her breath carefully angled to cook the meat at just the right temperature.

Roshelle intended to ask her mother for advice, to show her the child, to explain the feeling that washed over her in the forest and drew her to the toddler and flared up to block everything else around her and still burned softly in her abdomen. She intended to share what she remembered and ask Phonia to fill in the gaps. She intended to tell her everything.

But as soon as she entered the den, the ember caught fire again, this time drawing her toward her chamber at the back of the den. The child roused from where she’d been dozing nestled beneath Roshelle’s arm, craning her small neck to look toward Roshelle’s chamber. She fussed and fidgeted. Roshelle set her down on the dirt floor, and she rushed ahead around the corner. Behind Roshelle, Phonia hissed words of caution and fear that Roshelle could not decipher. She followed the child into her chamber.

In the center of Roshelle’s room, just like every other dragon’s chamber in the land, sat her Horde – a pile of objects from which she drew her power. For weeks she’d slept in the corner of her room, as far from her Horde as she could manage. This morning, after last night’s ceremony, she’d fought back tears at the sight of the mound of mysterious items, an unignorable reminder of her failure to discover her Horderule. Each item called to her, set off a soft flutter of rightness in her chest, but the pile only felt like failure, mocking her for not knowing why each object belonged, what they all had in common and why they belonged to her.

But now, with the mysterious child kneeling at the edge of the pile, picking up objects with two pudgy hands and turning them over in the dim light, the Horde felt again like power, like magic, like home. The tether between Roshelle and the girl roared to life again, and Roshelle recognized the signature of rightness that had drawn her to each individual object on the pile. The intensity had obscured the familiarity of the feeling – it was as if she’d failed to recognize the ocean as water because she’d only ever seen dewdrops. But the feeling was unmistakeable now.

“Roshelle! What in the realm do you think you’re….” Her mother’s cutting voice trailed off in wonder as she took in the sight of the child, holding a goblet from Roshelle’s Horde. The goblet gave off a subtle bluish-silvery glow in the dim light of the chamber. When the child placed it back on the pile, the light faded and disappeared. She picked up a bracelet next. The moment her skin touched the metal it took on the same soft glow.

Roshelle stared at the girl, only vaguely aware of her mother and Phonia behind her. She drifted toward the child as if the tether between them were on a reel. Phonia began to speak, but Roshelle’s mother shushed her. Roshelle ignored them both. She stepped onto her Horde for the first time in weeks. The objects nearest to her foot glowed a bright, cold blue, and the light spread slowly across the entire Horde. Roshelle’s mother gasped. Roshelle looked down at the child, whose rosy skin now shone brilliant white-blue.

The child reached out to touch Roshelle’s scaly skin. The light coming off her skin intensified and her face broke into a smile. Roshelle lowered her head to the child’s eye level. The child wrapped her arms around the dragon’s neck.

“So is…is this her Horderule? Is this all….its? Hers? Is it…her?” Phonia’s voice had jumped another octave. She jostled her neck in rhythm with her stuttering and shifted from foot to foot as she waited for someone to answer. Roshelle’s mother responded slowly, but with awe, not fear.

“No. I don’t think so. The Hordemagic recognizes some quality of the nature of things. It wouldn’t be interested in simple possession. It deals with essence, or meaning, or significance. Even simple Horderules like “blue things” are deeper than just the appearance. Something painted blue wouldn’t count. The essential nature of the object has to be blue. So, “things owned by the same person,” I don’t think would do. Besides, she’s just a child. How could she have possessed all this?”

“Then what?” Phonia pressed, her voice still high with concern. “Is she a Rider?”

“No, because Roshelle’s not a Steeddragon. I think she’s a Horde Object.”

Roshelle’s trance broke. She whipped her head around to face her mother. “She can’t be a Horde Object. She’s not an object! She can’t….That can’t be right.” Even as she denied her mother’s words she could feel their truth. The feeling was the same as discovering a Horde Object, the same signature. Just because it was one hundred times stronger didn’t change its nature.

“I thought so,” her mother murmured. “You could feel her, couldn’t you? And look at her. Look when you touched her, when she touched your objects. What else could she be?”

Roshelle would have been furious at her mother for reading her thoughts, but she was too concerned about her new charge. A Horde Object sat forever in a Horde, in a pile in the dragon’s chamber, to generate power for their masters to draw their magic. This girl….she was human, and she was so small. Roshelle couldn’t just keep her locked up in her chamber! She couldn’t do that to her! And she would grow! What then?

“It’s going to be okay, sweetheart. Your grandmother told me stories of this kind of magic. It’s very rare, and it hasn’t happened in centuries. We haven’t had any humans in the forest at all, you know. Most dragons don’t believe it’s possible. But powerful magic requires powerful Horde Objects. She was drawn to you, just like you were drawn to her.”

The girl glanced at Roshelle’s mother and flashed a smile, then climbed over Roshelle’s large toe to sit on her foot. She dangled one leg on each side of Roshelle’s curved claw like she was riding a rocking horse.

Roshelle’s mother chuckled and continued. “A regular object only has static energy, held within the object’s essence, and once it’s used up, it’s gone. But a living creature creates energy, grows and shifts and regenerates magic its whole life. Dragons with small animals in their Hordes have rare and powerful abilities. Imagine the power of a human! A creature that has a mind and a will and can partner with your magic, not just fuel it!

“The Hordemagic always calls forth what it needs for the coming time. This girl must mean that whatever is coming requires a very powerful dragon with incredible abilities. Whatever your Horderule, whatever is coming, the Hordemagic chose the two of you to meet it.”

* * * * * *