The War to End All Wars

“There weren’t always dragons in the Valley.”

The words have repeated in Pyria’s mind for days. They are louder now that she has reached her destination.

Pyria thinks she hides her apprehension well. Beneath a layer of sweat and saltwater, her face feels like a mask of serenity.

“Shit yourself yet, Pile?” asks Braern as he shoves past her. Automatically, her hand launches out for the ship’s railing. Laughter from the surrounding crew ensues, and she grits her teeth.

“Not before you,” Pyria quips back, stumbling over her words half a second too late. Blast this language-

The Outriders from Dalir – a name that makes Pyria cringe every time she hears it – have ignored their foreign shipmate for the length of the voyage. Except, of course, to mock her name or her clumsy use of their tongue or perhaps all the other small, inconsequential ways she behaves slightly differently than all of them.

She forces her mask of calm back into place and watches the shoreline. She thought she’d see the dragons from here. Wickram Cay – named by the Dalinese, and Pyria cringes at this name too – is a string of islands in a vast sea of nothing. The islands had been their own microsystem, completely removed from the reaches of civilization. Well, mostly removed. Mapping vessels had spotted the islands centuries ago. An expedition or two had come up with little to slake the enterprising thirsts of the Dalinese or the Buqans or even the otherwise backwards Enritions. Pyria remembers only one piece of information about the Cay: the largest island, named after some Dalinese god Pyria cannot remember, is sliced nearly in two by the Valley. Equal parts fjord and lake, the Valley had been catalogued by early adventurers as the heart of the island. Perhaps of all the islands.

And the last vessel to disembark had come limping home to Dalir, with naught but a skeleton crew left to tell the tale of the island.

Dragons. Dragons in the Valley.

“There weren’t always dragons in the Valley,” the papers had written. “So where have they been hiding? Where might they have come from?”

Pyria boarded the next vessel to the Cay.

* * *

Pyria is on the last dinghy to shore. She watches the three others bob on the surf ahead of hers. One man sitting in front of her leans over and vomits into the foam. She wrinkles her nose and clutches more tightly at the talisman around her left wrist. Her fingers are clumsy, particularly here at sea, but she always manages to find the trinket.

A trinket in remembrance of her people. It is no more than a leather cuff to prying eyes. But she feels the uncut lapis lazuli dig into the sensitive skin of her inner wrist.

As if all her skin isn’t sensitive-

She is not offered a hand to disembark when their dinghy scuffs into the sand of the shore. Nor do the Outriders count her in their total before checking their weapons and weighing their arrows and trudging off toward the jungle. Pyria lingers behind, eyes on the palm trees and the mist-shrouded green peaks beyond.

Her gaze falls last on the backs of her reluctant crewmates as they slip into the trees. She grinds her teeth. Apparently their hospitality, if ever it existed, had reached its natural end here at Wickram Cay.

But she decides that it’s okay. There are a great many things they might do to make it up to her.

“Hunters,” she laughs under her breath, in a clumsy attempt at her native tongue.

* * *

The jungle renders passage slow. The crew hack away at vines and tree limbs, but a clear path is not a safe one. Already one man was bitten by a jewel-toned snake. It had only sunk its teeth into the leather of his boot, but the man had gone deathly pale with fright and nearly insisted on returning to the dinghies. At this, Braern had laughed.

“All the way here and you’re done in by our quarry’s lesser kin,” the captain chortled. Pyria had waited for the others to move on, the attacked man shaking so hard his teeth were practically rattling in his skull, and then whispered a small prayer of thanks to the now-scarred jungle.

Behind her, a few of the vines had sprung back together, sealing as though never parted.

The sun is just beginning to dip behind the peaks ahead, cracking like an egg across the mountains, when finally the Outriders stop. Pyria catches up at once and peers between shoulders. Her heart skips a beat.

The Valley.

Beyond Braern’s boots, the jungle vanishes. A green-sided cliff descends toward the Valley lake, which sparkles now with the reflection of the setting sun. From this great distance, the waters seem eerily still. But Pyria can see the river which feeds the lake far to their right. Where the great pond empties into another river, and subsequently back into the sea, is blocked from view by the soaring cliffs. Pyria’s gaze combs the lake’s shores, where green-blanketed rock descends right into the water. Then she scans the skies whose intermittent clouds caress the peak across the Valley from the Outriders.

“We’ll camp here for the night,” Braern says, attention fixed ahead. The other Outriders seem equally unconcerned by the volatility of their captain’s chosen site. Never mind the mound spewing fire ants and the sheer drop into the Valley. Pyria sighs quietly to herself.

She had considered a change of plans, hadn’t she?

“Wait, wait,” Braern says abruptly as the Outriders begin removing packs. Pyria also stills. She follows the captain’s gesture, and right away her attention is snagged on movement in the trees beside the lake below. Her heart springs up into her throat.

Moments pass in agonizing wait. The stirring of the trees seems to be approaching the shore, struggling ever closer with each breath Pyria expels sharply.

The trees part, and out steps a zebra.

The sight is so incongruous with the backdrop of green, the steep drop toward the water, that at first silence continues to reign amongst the Outriders. Pyria glances at Braern’s back, then returns her attention to the zebra.

“Alone?” Braern says quietly, as though to himself.

“Captain?” another Outrider asks.

Braern only shakes his head. “Set up camp.” And, after a confused pause, the Outriders obey. Only Pyria dares linger to watch the zebra bend its nose to the surface of the lake, apparently ignorant of the eyes on it.

Or, perhaps, indifferent.

* * *

Pyria sits at the edge of the cliff long after dark. Above, the moon is fattening towards full. A few feet to her right, the Outrider assigned to first watch had drifted off hours before in a drunken stupor. When she first rose from sleeplessness to join him, she had prodded at his foot to ensure that she would not be blamed for some untimely death. He had stirred but not woken.

Now, she sits with her feet over the edge, her heart expanding with the moon. She almost smiles up at the stars. The weight of air beneath her is a relief she has not experienced in so very long. She drinks it in with every deep breath, letting it fill her lungs if nothing else.

When she hears the crackle of twigs in the underbrush behind the crew, she does not stir.

Nor does she stir when the tropical bird lands beside her with an almost audible sigh.

She takes another deep breath. She nods at the bird in greeting, and it dips its long beak.

Then she rises, bare toes at the cliff’s edge. Behind her, the first of the Outriders are stirring.

“Flinar?” comes Braern’s voice. Pyria assumes Flinar is the man beside her, though he still does not stir at the sound of his name. There is a pause filled with only the scuffle of tiredly rising Outriders. And then Braern draws a sharp breath. “Pile? What are you doing?”

Pyria turns to regard him. “My name is Pyria,” she says.

Braern, in a rare moment of lucidity, casts his gaze around. Surely, he feels the presence of the predators in the jungle behind him. The hairs on his body going erect had most certainly woken him. He holds out a hand, and the Outriders accustomed to these random bouts of leadership at once fall still.

Pyria casts her eyes over the crew. Counting.

Fourteen. Though, two must be spared to supplement the four left behind on the ship.

Someone must take the story back to Dalir, of course.

Behind Braern, a zebra steps from the jungle.

The Outriders spin, several of them just awake enough to draw knives. One man drops his hand axe and does not move to retrieve it.

Braern’s hand is out again, halting his crew. The zebra approaches him, the clop of hooves on stone over loud in the suddenly pregnant nighttime silence. It halts when its nose is only a handspan from Braern’s. Its eyes flash as it regards Pyria over the captain’s shoulder.

They flash, like a wolf’s. Like a predator who stalks in the dark.

The zebra snorts, and then it speaks.

“Thank you Pyria, the Eternal.” The language is at once Dalinese and Pyria’s native tongue, the two languages twining like enemies turned lovers. She relishes the sound of it. It has been so long.

The Outriders are not so relieved. At the sound of the otherworldly voice, most of them draw back, sketching their useless symbols of protection in the air before them. Braern is one of them, hefting a sword Pyria knows is dull with disuse. Its tip shivers, though the captain makes a valiant effort in stepping between his crew and the zebra.

“Abomination,” Braern hisses.

The zebra laughs, and the sound is like ice and fire at once. “What is it you have come to my island to hunt, human?”

With his back to her, Pyria cannot see the turmoil on Braern’s face. She hears it in his voice, though, when he responds, “Who says we are hunters?”

Again, that laugh. “A fair point. I’d not go so far either.”

Pyria smirks. Inside, her fire has been lit. She stokes it with glee, that warmth beneath her heart. She has spent so long living in the cold.

Eternal, indeed.

“Take it,” Braern commands. There is only a brief pause before the two men nearest him take careful steps forward.

The zebra holds its ground, eyes coming to Pyria.

“Spare only two,” she says, her human tongue clumsy over her native language.

Braern turns to look at her, as she knew he would. “Pile, keep your mouth shut.”

She scowls at him, and for a moment, real fear flashes in his eyes. The mirror image of the flames in her own.

“You are no captain of mine,” she says.

He makes as though to charge her, momentary fear forgotten. The tropical bird which had come to roost at Pyria’s side squawks in its closest approximation of a warning.

When Braern pays it no mind, the bird explodes.

Feathers burst into flame, a contained ball of rainbow fire. It expands and expands, and as it feeds on the oxygen around it, the cliff edge goes remarkably cool. Frost shrivels the grass, and Pyria’s too-warm breath puffs into the air before her, an angry fist of steam. She watches the Outriders collapse in fright, falling back and tumbling over one another in their haste to outrun the mosaic sphere of heat and malice.

The flames begin to take a shape, like the shadow of logs in a hearth. The shadows build and form, the reverse of wood crumbling with consumption, stretching into a wraith-like figure swathed in a cloak of running, licking, dripping flame.

And when the flames wink out, spent, a dragon stands in their place.

The silence which ensues does not last long. The first of the Outriders to whom sense returns has whipped around on his heel to run into the trees.

“Hunters,” Yazar hisses sidelong at Pyria with his reptile tongue.

Pyria scoffs under her breath, watching Braern and the others finally fall still. Thirteen pairs of eyes drink in the glory of Yazar the Swift. He allows them this moment, ever one for show. Dragons are a proud lot, and Yazar the proudest of them all. The moonlight glints on his rainbow scales, the color of spilled oil in the midnight glow, and his emerald eyes narrow to slits on the Outriders. He takes a step forward on the claws of his wings, the filament between shimmering like silk. A tail twice as long as Braern is tall sweeps the cold, dead grass, an echo of Yazar’s own hiss.

“Yazar,” the zebra says, startling the Outriders. “I’ve selected the two that shall be spared, and the man who abandoned his comrades is not one of them. Fetch him for me, please.”

Yazar gives a feral grin, teeth longer than a man’s fingers dripping with golden spittle. “With pleasure,” he says, then springs over the Outriders. Each of the thirteen cries out, whimpering for home or for their gods. Yazar, with a speed and deftness which seems impossible for his size, tucks in like a spear and cuts into the woods near-soundlessly.

“You,” Braern says almost at once. Pyria drops her gaze to him, and to his credit, he does not shrink from the embers in her ordinarily lapis-blue eyes. Indeed, he staggers to his feet and approaches her more slowly, as if expecting at any moment another tropical bird might transform before his very eyes.

When none does, he swallows hard and levels his sword at her. “You’ve led us here. And for what?”

“I’ve done nothing of the sort,” she says.

He seems not to hear her. “You would lead your own people to slaughter?”

She is too stunned for a moment to speak.

“He is more dim-witted than I supposed,” says the zebra, who has begun to prowl the space behind the Outriders, looking more reptilian by the moment.

“My own people?” Pyria hisses, and it takes a monumental effort to speak his tongue. To speak in both Dalinese and Draecon, to hear her hidden and learned voices twined together as the zebra’s had been. Braern visibly flushes at the sound. “I have seen how you treat, ‘your own people,’ Captain Braern. I have lived amongst humans now for centuries. I stepped foot in your wretched Dalir before your ancestors started building castles. And do you know why?” She can no longer remain still. She begins to pace, the fire in her heart and in her veins becoming almost unbearable. “Because those very ancestors hunted my people to near-extinction. We fled the continent, and we learned ways to survive in plain sight.” She exhales, and smoke drifts through her parted lips. “We’ve rebuilt. The Valley gave us the power to do so. I returned to the continent, a refugee among the enemy, and waited for news.”

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley.

But there had been birds and zebras and lizards and snakes and a myriad other species. Species the dragons could hide inside, sustain off of, hide in plain sight.

And when Pyria had heard the news, she knew the time had come to return home.

“The time of humans on the continent has ended,” she says. “My people – my people – will take back what was stolen from us.”

At the Outriders’ backs, the zebra bursts into white light and black shadow. The dragon which takes shape is beautiful, scales of white diamond interspersed with black onyx. Here and there the glint of internal organ shimmers through the diamond.

Aurald the Holy, the Proclaimer, spreads his wings and roars across the heads of the Outriders. Braern collapses amongst his men again.

“Two of you will take the story,” Pyria says, and she feels her fragile human skin begin to crack and shred, blue fire leaking out between, stenciling her skin like lightning. “Your ship will return, and you will tell your people to be ready. Because war is coming. And you have already lost.”

Pyria turns and leaps off the edge of the cliff as her skin bursts free.

She falls, feeding her lapis lazuli fire with wind she hasn’t breathed herself in an age. Her wings form first, slowing her fall and growing pregnant with air. Her powerful limbs come next, her claws, her hook-ended tail. And then, at last her teeth. Her nostrils, which flare with the need – the ravenous hunger – for the free air.

Her eyes blink open. Lapis lazuli gems, at the center of which slitted pupils expand to see the world as it ought to look. Colors layered upon colors layered upon warmth and cold shadow.

She banks her wings, parts her jaws in a sigh, and levels out just before she crashes to the Valley’s lake. She skims a claw along the water’s surface, then reaches her clawed wings up and slices them down hard.

This strength. This power. In half a heartbeat she has speared upward again. Toward the moon, toward the stars, all of which she might reach out and pluck right from their silken black canvas.

She whips her tail back and forth, feeling the weight of wind at her disposal.

And the oven of fire deep in her belly.

She finds the Outriders, trapped between cliff edge and Aurald. She lands silently, front claws slicing into rock as easily as a warm knife through butter. She relishes at the feel of cold stone against the membrane of her wing.

So, too, does she relish the feel of human eyes on her true form for the first time in lifetimes.

“Captain Braern,” Pyria says. Braern begins to cry. She smiles her wicked reptilian grin. “You are no storyteller. So you shall feed me first.”

She breathes in, feeding that flame beneath her heart.

And then she exhales, and the deadliest weapon in all of human history roils out from her throat.

Dragon fire.

When her breath is spent, the remaining Outriders blink blindly in the sudden dark. Their tears have evaporated on their cheeks.

“You,” Aurald says abruptly. His neck strikes out like a snake’s. He seizes hold of the nearest Outrider to him, dragging the man by an arm from his fellows. Though one other Outrider attempts to hold onto the man, Aurald is merciless. He drags the man to his side, and pins him to the ground between the shoulder blades with one front claw. “Lie still, you fool. You will live to tell this tale. What an honor, no?”

The man does not obey, mind broken by fear. Pyria watches Aurald snag hold of one more man, this one short and oddly still. Also broken.

At that moment, a scream goes up from the jungle.

“Yazar is out of practice, it would seem,” Pyria says.

“He simply enjoys the sport of it,” Aurald says. He takes hold of the first man by the back of his shirt, lifts him cruelly to his feet, and thrusts him toward the trees. “Go. Your cohort will be along behind you. And if you see Yazar, leave him to his meal. We greatly desire your survival.”

The two men run blindly into the woods, ignoring the cries of the crew left behind, sparing no parting glance for their friends who would not fare so well.

And the cooked slab that had once been their captain.

Pyria admires her handiwork. Then she lifts her gaze to Aurald’s and dips her head, acquiescing the meal to the alpha’s choice.

“The others will be waiting for word,” Aurald says. “Let’s not keep them waiting.”

Pyria smiles. With lightning speed, she lances out and clamps her jaw on the nearest Outrider’s leg.

He has hardly opened his mouth to scream before she flings him over her shoulder. He disappears over the cliff edge at once.

The others follow shortly.

“It’s been too long, Pyria the Eternal,” Aurald says. “I have long desired to hunt with you again.”

“And I you, Aurald my Proclaimer.”

“Soon we will be unleashed on a continent of men who believe they stand a chance,” Aurald says coolly.

Pyria smiles, beating her wings once in joy. “Then, the real hunt may begin.”