Usurper: A Spitefic by Torylltales

[torylltales]

You may not be aware of this, but Epistler's brilliant "Sword and Shadow" spitefic originally began as a birthday present for me. In turn, this year Epistler asked me to write a story for her birthday. This is that story.


USURPER

 

 

Chapter 1

 

Branches and sticks whipped at his face as he ran, half blinded by tears, stumbling over rocks and slipping on the rotting leaf litter. He didn’t care where he was going. Anywhere was better than standing on the beach where he had been left. Anything was better than watching the ship, and his last link to his old life, sailing away back to Vroengard, where his former friends had probably already forgotten him. He couldn’t stand it. The finality of it made his guts twist, and hot tears blurred his vision.

 

The thought of wandering penniless and homeless through the trading port of Narda, begging for the pity and charity of mortal humans, turned Galba’s stomach. So instead he was running through the forest.

 

Unbidden, memories of the past few days rose up as he sank against a large tree trunk, gasping. His shoulders shook as sobs threatened to overwhelm him. Galba forced himself to breathe in deep and slow, like his master had taught him. Former master.

 

Thoughts of Oromis lead to the memory of their last encounter. Gone was the ever-present smile that never reached his eyes. Gone were the soft, reassuring voice and patient words of wisdom. Instead, Oromis had stared at him pitilessly, blank face betraying nothing.

 

“You let your dragon die, boy. You are no longer a Rider, and so you don’t belong here. Go home, human.”

 

The harshness of the old elf’s voice had shocked the young man. Of his brothers and sisters, only Morzan had looked at him with sad eyes before turning away with the rest of them. They had all turned their back on him, just like their master.

 

 Galba let out a howl as his thoughts turned to the reason for Oromis’s betrayal. Jarnunvösk. Witty, kind, mischievous Jarn, held down by a horde of urgals as she was stabbed again and again by their spears, her bright purple scales offering no resistance against their sheer brutality. No more would he hear her quiet voice in his head, lending him her confidence and optimism, sharing ideas and daydreams, offering and seeking advice, and somehow always knowing exactly what to say to cheer him up. But she couldn’t cheer him up now. Never again would she curl up with him at night, one wing laid protectively over him like a blanket.

 

He thought too of his friends: fellow Rider trainees, out for a day of hunting and survival training in the northern Spine. So sure of their skills and strength that they never saw the urgal hunting party sneaking up on them. So arrogant that they didn’t even think to keep their guards up as the urgals ambushed them, cutting them down with ruthless barbarism.

 

 He didn’t remember how he got back to Vroengard. After Jarn’s final agonised wail as the urgal shaman’s enchanted arrow pierced her heart, there was only a blur of pain, fear, panicked running, and the bitter smell of blood and gore filling his mouth and nose.

 

He did remember throwing up, later.

 

The sharp crack of a snapped twig shook him out of his misery. Standing up, he palmed the small dagger that the elves had so graciously given him before abandoning him on the mainland. He flexed the fingers of his free hand, preparing to call up his magic. He wasn’t exceptional at speaking the elf tongue, but he had learned a few useful spells.

 

Breathing harshly and wiping at his reddened eyes, Galba stared into the gloomy forest. With a few words, he conjured a ball of light, which floated through the trees, lighting the area in a pale blueish-white glow.

 

A glow that reflected off a pair of eyes.

 

Galba froze as the dragon – a wild dragon! – cautiously stepped closer, sniffing with its huge nostrils and flicking its tongue at him like a snake.

 

Galba stared, unable to move, as the dragon snarled and reared up onto its back legs. Pressing his back against the tree behind him, Galba squeezed his eyes shut, threw his hand up in front of his face, and yelled the elvish words for “please stop!”

 

After a moment of him not being eaten or roasted alive, Galba dared to glance at the creature. The dragon, its scales a dull mottled brown, was sitting still, watching him with intelligent eyes.

 

“Er…” Galba lowered his arm cautiously, watching the dragon for any sudden movements. It seemed to respond to the ancient language, so he tried a different phrase.

 

 “Eka aí fricai un Sh–. Un Sh–” His throat stuck on the last word, so he tried again. “Eka aí fricai un Shur–”

 

His legs gave out and he fell to his knees as the realisation hit him. He could not lie in the Ancient Language. He was unable to call himself a Rider. His mouth wouldn’t let him. The final proof. His stomach felt empty and hollow, and his heartbeat seemed to fill his ears. A new wave of tears threatened to spill out, but the dragon was still watching him. Galba summoned up all his strength to squash the sorrow down, sniffing to clear his nose, and lifted his head to look at the dragon again. “Eka… eka aí fricai.” I am a friend.

 

 The dragon inched closer, tongue flicking. Galba peeled off the glove on his left hand, holding it up to show the faint oval of his Rider-mark, no longer glowing since Jarn had… since Jarn had died, but still visible against his pale skin.

 

The dragon’s eyes widened and it snarled, rushing the last few paces, fangs gleaming in the pale magelight that still hovered over them.

 

 Galba panicked, falling onto his back and scrambling away from the approaching dragon. Suddenly the dragon stopped, tongue brushing against Galba’s silver mark. He froze again as the dragon pressed its nose to his hand, and his mind was filled with a picture of a royal purple egg. Jarn’s egg.

 

 “You.. you were Jarnunvösk’s mother?” he asked the dragon quietly. It blinked slowly, as if to say yes.

 

Suddenly a voice filled his mind, harsh and angry. “My eggs were stolen into slavery, doomed to live as glorified pack-horses for some tiny two-legged elfs!”

 

Glorified pack-horse? Jarnunvösk wasn’t a pack-horse. Not to him. She had been his friend, his partner, his confidant. Galba thought about the years he had spent with her, swapping jokes and stories, playing and roughhousing when she was small, training in magic and meditation, flying high above the rainclouds and bathing in the bright sunlight while everyone down below hid from the storm…

 

The memories were interrupted by a sudden flash, a vision of her bent and broken, roaring in agony as the urgals stabbed her with their spears, again and again… He shook his head violently to chase the vision away, but his grief was joined by another. The wild dragon’s mind butted up against him, a warm weight against his mind that was achingly familiar. Her mind pressed against his the way Jarn used to, winding around him like a cat winding around his legs, or the way Jarn’s tail used to wind around his waist when they wrestled.

 

Friend and mother lay together in the forest, sharing their grief and drawing strength from each other’s mental presence. Galba shared memories of Jarn and he playing together, learning and growing, comforting each other, learning to work together as a team. And the dragon shared memories of her family flying through stormclouds just for the joy of flying, twisting and turning in the air, challenging each other to perform loops, spins, and dives, and chasing after herds of wild horses thundering across the plains.
 

Chapter 2

The next morning, Galba awoke feeling lighter than he had in days. After a foraged breakfast of mushrooms, wild garlic, various edible leaves, and a lucky find of some late-season burdock roots, roasted with a simple fire spell, he looked around to find his new dragon friend. She had settled a short distance away, chewing on the charred carcass of a young deer.

 

Getting her attention, Galba called out, “What’s your name, anyway?”

 

The dragon’s voice filled his mind again, the way Jarn’s used to. “Kaa’ti.”

 

“Kaa’ti.” He tried the word out, stumbling over the strange pronunciation. “Does it mean something in the ancient language?”

 

Kaa’ti snarled. “Dragons do not name themselves after elf words. Kaa’ti is dragon tongue, it means…”

 

Galba got an impression of cool air diving swiftly down the side of a tall mountain range. He blinked. He didn’t know of any word in the Ancient Language with that meaning, which he found vaguely disturbing, There should be a Name in the Language for everything that exists. Otherwise, how can it be the language of Magic and True Names? He cast that thought aside, the obvious answer was that he simply didn’t know the name, but that didn’t mean the true name didn’t exist.

 

Kaa’ti snuffed dismissively. After an awkward pause, she asked, “What will you do now?”

Galba thought for a moment, before narrowing his eyes and scowling. “First, I should build a shelter for tonight. Then, I’m going to find the urgals who killed Jarnunvösk, and slaughter them.”

 

Kaa’ti tilted her head to the side, the draconic equivalent of raising one eyebrow. “Slaughter an entire tribe of urgal warriors, with that little dagger?”

 

Galba unsheathed the dagger and examined it critically. It was, he had to admit, a rather pathetic-looking thing. A delicate elven design, more concerned with design than function. The short, thin blade was barely as long as his handspan, and looked like it would snap if it was used with any real force. He wondered why the Order would have given him such a weapon after they took away his enchanted Rider Sword.

 

A traitorous thought that the dagger was meant as an insult flashed through his mind, but he dismissed it quickly. Perhaps it was enchanted to be unbreakable, the way Rider swords were or perhaps elven steel was stronger than steel forced by humans or dwarves. It was true, after all, that every other craft of the elves was superior to that of humans. It was common knowledge.

 

“Yes, with this dagger. And my magic. I don’t know many spells, but I know more than the urgals.”

“Enough that you couldn’t protect Jarnunvösk, even with several of your friends?”

The accusatory tone cut him, so Galba scrambled for a counter. “That was different, they... they ambushed us, we were unprepared! Next time, I’ll have the advantage.”

 

Kaa’ti didn’t respond, but he felt her scepticism nonetheless.

By the time evening came again, Galba had fashioned a reasonable rainproof hut, and a makeshift bed made of fallen leaves, soft strips of paperbark, and bracken. Now, after another meagre foraged meal of whatever edible plants he had been able to find, Galba was busy recalling his collection of spells. While far from a native speaker, he knew enough of the Ancient Language to use magic in a fight. He felt confident that a few fireballs to the face would take down any urgals, especially if he took them by surprise.

 

As he went over his Ancient Language conjugation lessons again, he felt a growing sense of disdain, or perhaps disgust, from Kaa’ti’s mind. He looked over at her. “What?”

 

Kaa’ti scoffed. “Your dependence on the elf tongue is pathetic.”

Galba frowned. “What do you mean? The Ancient Language is how I use magic.”

“Why limit yourself to a language you can barely speak? Surely magic would be easier in your native tongue.”

Galba sat stunned for a moment. He had no idea what to say to that. “That’s… not how magic works! The Grey Folk bound magic to the Ancient Language long ago, you can’t use magic without it.”

Kaa’ti scoffed again, flicking her tail. “We dragons have never needed elf-speech to use our magic. Dragontongue works for us.”

“But that’s different, you’re a dragon. Dragon magic is… well, different.”

“Different? Magic is magic, no matter who wields it.”

Galba sputtered. “But… but my Master said that magic was bound to the Ancient Language by the Grey Folk! And he was speaking in the Ancient Language, so it was impossible for him to lie!”

Kaa’ti hissed with growing annoyance. “Elves cannot knowingly lie, but if the truth they believe is wrong, they can still say untruths!” She let out a breath, and continued in a calmer tone. “We will speak more tomorrow. For now, chew on this thought: the elves and the Riders do not know everything, and are very interested in keeping themselves at the front of the nest.”

“The front of the nest?”

“Where nestlings are fed first, and fed best.”

With that, she curled up with her back to Galba. With the conversation definitively finished, Galba closed the door to his makeshift hut, and tried to get some sleep. But the bed was lumpy and scratchy, and his mind was spinning with questions and doubts, so it wasn’t until late into the night that Galba finally drifted off.

 

 

When he awoke the next day, the sun was already high, and Kaa’ti was nowhere to be found. His stomach grumbled and ached. He had barely eaten anything for days, aside from a few handful of mushrooms and plants. Late autumn was not a good time of year for foraging, especially in the rocky Spine.

 

And so Galba realised he was faced with a dilemma. The Order had preached a strict lifestyle of avoiding harm to animals. All their food was plants or mushrooms, all their clothes were cotton or linen. Leather, when they needed it, was harvested from creatures that had died of natural causes. Waste not, after all. Killing an animal for food had been unthinkable a few days ago, but Galba’s stomach protested its emptiness, and he was beginning to feel weak and dizzy. Besides, he began to rationalise to himself, there was almost nothing else to eat in the area. Should he steal food from the mouths of innocent animals in his same situation, leaving them to a slow death of starvation as they searched in vain for roots and greens he had already taken for himself? Or would it be a lesser crime to kill a weak animal, or an old one already near death, so that what little food remained in the forest could be shared among the surviving animals?

 

He didn’t know, and the mental effort of thinking about it made his head hurt. What would Jarn have said? Or his new friend, Jarn’s mother? No doubt neither of them would understand his vow not to eat meat. He remembered many times Jarn had tried to persuade him to share in her latest kill.

 

His stomach growled again, and suddenly his mind was made up. He was no longer a Rider, right? That’s what his master and everyone else in the Council had said. So he was no longer beholden to the Rider oaths. Better that one animal suffer a swift death, than for a herd to slowly starve. With that perspective, Galba regretted the handfuls of mushrooms and edible plants he had already eaten.

 

 

 Mind made up, Galba stood up, grabbed his dagger and a short stick he had sharpened into a spear the previous day, and took a few deep breaths to steady his nerves. Justifications aside, he was still preparing to kill an innocent animal. It was one thing fighting for his life against people or urgals who wanted to kill him (and who did kill Jarn), or even executing captured criminals and slave-traders, as the Riders often had to in the name of order and peace. But it felt like a different thing entirely to kill an innocent, unsuspecting animal for food.

 

 Just as he was starting to second-guess his decision, Kaa’ti landed with a thump in the clearing, carrying a dead deer in her jaws.“Are you finished with your moral anguish?”

Galba nodded.

“Good.” The dragon tore off one of the beast’s legs, and tossed it to him. “Now eat.”

 

 

A short while later, Galba was feeling much better. His stomach was pleasantly full of roasted venison, and he was already feeling stronger and more alert. Immediate needs met, he turned his mind back to an earlier question. “What did you mean, the Ancient Language isn’t bound to magic?”

Kaa’ti snuffed again, in a gesture he was beginning to recognise as the dragon’s expression of disdain. “I didn’t say that. The elf language is not the only language bound to magic. Magic is bound to elf speech, dragon speech, your human language, even the grunting of urgals and dwarves. If birds were intelligent, they could use magic in their bird-song.”

Fighting back his urge to immediately deny her point, he instead asked her to explain what she meant.

“The elf language only has one word for ‘language’, and the Grey Elves bound magic to language. Not to their language, or to a language. Just to language.”

Galba blinked. That… made a lot of sense. Especially when he remembered some of the grammatical mistakes he’d made in training, and how it changed the spells he cast. “But how do you know that? Why do the Riders teach that magic can only be used with the Ancient Language?”

 Kaa’ti hesitated. “The elves want to ensure their superiority, so they put human riders at a disadvantage by teaching them that they must use the elf language for magic, and then only teaching them a small amount of the elf language.”

“But how do you know all this?”

A feeling of immense sadness flooded Galba’s mind. “I wasn’t always a wild dragon. My Rider… a human, like, you, was killed when the Order set him an impossible task.”

Galba was silent for a moment. He could feel the weight of Kaa’ti’s grief, less fresh and sharp than his own, but no less powerful. After a moment of shared silence, he dared to ask, “An impossible task?”

Kaa’ti snarled. “Our master ordered him to cast a spell he was not strong enough to cast.”

Galba felt a growing sense of dread. “Who… who was your master?”

At that, Kaa’ti hissed fiercely, showing her fangs, and a dull yellow glow that made her teeth flash, warning of her deadly dragonfire. Fighting to control her rage, she hissed the one name Galba hoped with all his might she wouldn’t say:

“OROMIS!”

Chapter 3

 

Hindsight was an excellent teacher, and revenge was an excellent motivator. For the past month and a bit, Galba had trained harder he had ever trained before, even as a Rider trainee. With guidance from Kaa’ti, he had learned an entirely new way of using his magic. No longer stumbling over the foreign Ancient Language words, Galba had progressed swiftly, crafting spells much more precisely and efficiently than he had though possible. Without the stifling rules and expectations of the Order and his former master, Galba found that his talent at speaking – what his mother had once called his silver tongue – translated to a talent for magic. In addition to his native Broddrish, Kaa’ti had also shared a few dragon-tongue words that Galba sometimes preferred. It just felt more like ‘doing magic’ if he said it in a different language.

“Dah!” A small shrub shook and creaked.

“Ven!” a section of leaves were stripped off by a sudden blast of wind.

Galba narrowed his eyes, and took a deep breath. The next word Kaa’ti had taught him was scary. “Krii.”

He watched with grim satisfaction as the leaves wilted and dropped, leaving a bare skeleton of dead branches. His practice was interrupted when his massive, earthy-brown dragon friend landed in the clearing with an earth-shuddering thump. Kaa’ti may be a deadly apex predator on foot or in flight, but her landings were far from graceful.
“I heard that,” the dragon said in his mind. He hastily apologised. Kaa’ti didn’t respond except to flicker her tongue at him.

“If you are finished, I have news for you.”

That got Galba’s interest. “Good news or bad?”

Kaa’ti swayed her head in the dragon approximation of a shrug. “It is news,” she hedged. After a brief but awkward pause, she continued. “I have discovered a camp of urgals on the far side of the Northern pass,” she said, jabbing toward the mountain pass with her nose. “One of the tents was… decorated with dragon scales. Purple.”

 Galba felt a spike of white-hot rage lance through him, twisting in his stomach and filling his lungs. Jarnunvösk’s murderers would pay. Not only for killing her, but for defiling her body to decorate their tents. “Show me.”

 

 

 

The urgal chief’s tent glittered ostentatiously in the early afternoon light, Jarn’s purple scales sewn in patches on the crude animal-hide tent cloth, dangling from strings like wind-chimes, and worst, attached to the chieftain’s own horns and clothes. From his hiding place in a nearby tree, Galba felt his lips draw back in a snarl. How dare those brutish, savage werswyn disrespect Jarn’s corpse in that way?

Dozens of urgals were scattered around the clearing, engaged in various activities. A pair of young males wrestled under the shade of a stand of cedar trees. In front of the chief’s tent hung a tangled mess of knotted rope that might pass for a child’s first attempt at weaving. A male butchered a deer in the far side of the clearing. A group of urgal children sat or squatted in front of a large seated woman, who grunted at them in their barbaric urgal-tongue. It was almost as if they were attempting to mimic human civilisation, he thought to himself. A brutish, base mockery of civilisation.

And then Galba saw him. The shaman. The old urgal strode confidently through the crowd in his crude animal-skin cloak, hair and horns decorated with feathers, small bones, and more of Jarn’s scales. Suddenly Galba was back in that clearing, watching helplessly as the string of a bow was drawn back. The arrowhead glinting in the sunlight as the anguished bellows of a dying dragon and the boarish hollers of the urgal warriors filled the air.

A sudden mental slap jolted him out of his memories. Galba shook his head to clear it as the mind-voice of Kaa’ti chided him: “Do not lose your focus!”

Narrowing his eyes, Galba pulled a small river pebble out of his belt pouch and carefully focused on his target: the urgal shaman’s throat. With a whispered word, the pebble shot off like he had loosed it from a sling. Galba held his breath. Time seemed to slow down as the pebble whipped through the air – straight to the target – then suddenly veered to the side and thudded into the dirt.

The shaman bellowed, whipping his head around to find the source of the attack. Galba swore. The damned creature had wards! He quickly loosed three more pebbles, which bounced harmlessly off the shaman’s invisible magic shields.

The shaman bellowed again, spinning around to search for his hidden assailant. Galba jumped down from his tree, letting his magically-enhanced elf-made boots absorb the impact shock. With a roar of his own, he burst through the bushes and launched himself at the shaman, dagger raised. The shaman turned to face him, but too late! Elf-steel skittered against dragon scale, and scratched into urgal skin, leaving a thin line of blood. Galba realised with a thrill of bloodlust that the shaman hadn’t warded himself against close-quarters attacks. He stabbed again, but the shaman stepped back, out of range. With a flurry of stabs and slashes, Galba cut at the shaman’s hands and wrists, stepping in and gradually closing in as the old urgal sidestepped and back-stepped away. Stab! Step in, stab! Galba stabbed and slashed at every part of the urgal he could reach.

A burst of exhilarating power burned through him as he saw his enemy falter and stumble. With a cry he lunged forward, aiming the blood-wet blade at the shaman’s exposed ribs.

The shaman grabbed his wrist with shocking speed, squeezing and twisting. White hot pain stabbed through Galba’s arm and he dropped the dagger.

 

Dimly he felt the urgal pull him close, and then new pain lanced through his chest and spine. Galba gasped as the shaman squeezed his chest in a vicious bear-hug, squeezing the breath from his lungs and crushing his ribs. He panicked, hands scrabbling uselessly against the shaman’s chest, pushing powerlessly against the immense pressure. He gasped again as the air was squeezed out of his lungs.

I musn’t give in! He felt eerily calm as the edges of his vision blurred and faded into black.

Mustn’t give in!

Musn’t give…

Mustn’t..

 

Mus…

 

 

At that moment the world exploded into screaming chaos as Kaa’ti swooped over the camp, flames stampeding from her mouth and setting tents and plants and urgals alight. The jeering crowd that had gathered around their battle fled, squealing and grunting into the forest. Galba coughed and wheezed, spitting up acrid bile and gulping down lungfuls of sweet fresh air.

He took advantage of the confusion to drag himself away from where the urgal shaman has dropped him. He crawled, coughing and wheezing, until he had put a tent between himself and the shaman. He whispered a few healing spells, suppressing a groan as several of his ribs slipped back into place with a painful click. Breathing deeply but carefully, he gingerly climbed to his feet, and suddenly realised his left hand was holding on to something. It was a dragon fang he must have ripped off the shaman’s necklace. Jarn’s fang. Galba took another shuddering breath to steady himself as a fresh wave of grief rose up from his belly, followed by a white-hot spear of rage that made blood rush to his head. He bared his teeth in a grimace, and staggered back out into the clearing.

 

The first thing he saw was Kaa’ti, wings fully extended in challenge, perched on the smouldering remains of what had been the chieftain’s tent. Purple scales glittered here and there from the ashes. Several other tents were on fire. The shaman, like the other urgals of the village, was nowhere to be seen.

 

Reaching out with his mind, Galba sent the dragon a sensation of gratitude, which she acknowledged with a slow blink.

Just as Galba was beginning to think about celebrating their victory – or at least, his survival – he saw him.

 

As if in slow motion the shaman stepped out from a nearby tent, bow in hand, arrow already nocked. Galba froze as the bow was raised, the string drawn back. He tried to force himself to move, but suddenly Kaa’ti wasn’t green any more but bright sparkling purple. The tip of the cursed arrow gleamed in the sunlight, but Kaa’ti hadn’t seen it, head turned away in a victory pose.

 

Galba jerked his arm up, with a strangled cry of “no!” He felt his arm warm up as magic flowed through it, and just as the shaman was about to loose the arrow, the string on his bow snapped. Galba sprinted towards the him, raising the fang like a dagger.

 

The two collided in a tangle of limbs, Galba’s momentum knocking the urgal to the ground. Hot blood flooded over his hands, spraying out of the urgal’s neck where the dragon fang had sunk deep. Staring into the shocked eyes of his enemy, Galba ripped the fang out of his neck, and stabbed again. And again.

 

Some time later Galba emerged from a daze, hands and face hot and wet with blood. He dropped the fang, staring at the pulpy mess that remained of the shaman’s throat. He had lost count of how many times he had stabbed the beast, again and again as he watched those jaundiced yellow eyes turn glassy and unseeing. As he staggered to his feet, Kaa’ti stirred from her rest.

“Are you finished?”

Galba had to repress a hysterical laugh. “Yes.”

“You fought with honour,” the dragon admonished. “Don’t do it again.”

“I– what?” Galba stumbled over to a young tree and collapsed against its trunk. He had fought, hard and brutally. The urgal had nearly killed him, choking him like a snake crushes a rat in its coils. But yes, he had fought bravely and with honour.

“Honour is for pretty nobles playing at fighting. When it is your life or theirs, there is no room for such human idiocy!”

Galba’s first instinct was to argue. He had been raised his whole life to value honour and chivalry, first by his parents and then by his teachers in the Order of Dragon Riders.

Kaa’ti flicked her tail in annoyance. “Is death really better than dishonour?” There was a dangerous glint in her eye, so he quickly backed down. “I still survived and killed my enemy.”

“Because I distracted him! If I had not been there…?”

Galba didn’t want to think about that.

 

Cliffhanger

 

He was nearly at the peak. It had taken all of his strength, magic, and survival skills to scale the sheer cliff face. A bitterly cold wind blew around him, lashing the exposed parts of his face. Above and ahead of him, Kaa’ti clung to the rock face with her powerful claws, her green and brown dappled scales standing out against the grey rock like a patch of moss. Inch by inch, he pulled himself up the mountain, until he finally reached a hidden cave near the peak. Galba hauled himself onto the ledge, and sucked in a deep breath of unsatisfyingly thin air. His legs, fingertips, arms, and back all burned, and his heart thumped in his throat.

 

“Watch out,” Kaa’ti said, and he quickly shuffled across to the edge of the cave wall, just as the dragon climbed down into the cave entrance. Galba watched as she sent a ball of flame into the cave, flooding the space with yellow light. A large pile of dried sticks and branches in the middle of the spacious burst into flames.

“Well, we’re here,” Galba said. “Why are we here?”

Kaa’ti turned her head to look back at him. Without saying anything, she gestured for him to follow, and walked over to the bonfire. Galba followed, curious. The dragon had made a big fuss about this trip, and had made him climb up the mountain by himself, when she could easily have flown both of them, and much more quickly.

“Hush,” she admonished. “The climb was part of your test.”

Not for the first time, Galba wished dragons had more of a sense of privacy. “Test?”

“To see if you are truly worthy.”

Worthy? Galba swallowed a sense of uneasiness. “Worthy of what?”

“This!” Kaa’ti gestured with her head at the flaming fire, and Galba suddenly realised with an intense moment of clarity that it wasn’t a mere bonfire at all: it was a nest. In the centre of the gently flickering flames lay a large egg, black as night and smooth as silk.

“This one was cursed by the Riders before I could hide it away,” Kaa’ti explained. “He has been waiting for someone to bond with, so the curse will allow him to hatch.”

Galba started, as the egg jumped and a small crack appeared.
“His name means ‘One who brings with him warning of a coming storm’. ”

Kaa’ti had been teaching Galba parts of the dragon tongue, but that was a phrase he wasn’t familiar with. “Warning of a coming storm?”

Rather than try to explain it, Kaa’ti sent him a mental impression. He shivered as he felt the wind blow cold and hollow, a sudden drop in air pressure and temperature. It was the feeling of the air before a thunderstorm, magnified many times by the dragon’s enhanced senses.

“Shrui,” she explained.

“One who bears shrui?” Galba pondered. “ikan… to be endowed with, to carry. Shrui...ikan?”

 

Suddenly the egg cracked entirely, and a baby dragon as black as the eggshell plopped out into the fire.

A new voice filled Galba’s head, young but full of purpose and determination. “Shruikan!”

 

END.