Fan Fiction ❯ Dragon Dreams ❯ Chapter 1

Notes: This is something of a departure from my usual style, and I've allowed myself to indulge in far more descriptive language than I usually leave in final drafts. This was originally a whole lot of description with some story tacked on so I could stretch it out longer, and the plot is still not spectacular. But it fulfills the goals I had for it, let me play with some notions that I found interesting, and in the long run I'm rather pleased with the result.

Backdating: I wrote this way back in the fall of 2004; I put it through a final edit and posted it in December 2005.

A soft whisper of magic wound its way into Maelstrom's dreams, gently but insistently tugging him away from the swirling embrace of a decades-long sleep. Slowly, he rose from the misty depths of his dreams, following the irresistible pull of an alien spell. He drifted back into his body with reluctance, sorrowing at the ascension to consciousness and life.

Breath whooshed into his body as his great lungs heaved; deep within him, two powerful hearts began to beat. Maelstrom laid still for a long moment, restoring life into his immense and ancient body. Steel-hard scales pressed against the rock beneath him, huge armor plates as black as pitch and gleaming like newly-polished crystal. More lightly armored wings were pulled tight against his strong back, and his long, flexible body was curled around itself within the depression he'd long since hollowed into the cavern floor. Bone-white talons dug into the rock, their tips gouging the hard granite. His enormous wedge-shaped head rested between his forelegs, twin bone frills arching upward where his skull met his elongated neck. This was the living body that sheltered his mind and the home he returned to upon awakening, but his soul yearned instead for the gentle mists of the dragon dreams.

One eyelid slowly swept upward, revealing a cat-like eye of such a dark red that it nearly blended with the slit-shaped pupil. Darker than blood, darker than rubies, though it had been compared to both in ages past, it fixed itself firmly upon the source of the alien magic.

She was slight, not even tall enough to look him in the eye, but Maelstrom knew that physical strength meant nothing to a sorceress. Her hair was long, falling almost to her feet, and as pale as his scales were dark. She was young, too, nervous and uncertain, but there was a determined set to her shoulders, and her ice-blue eyes were calm and focused. He noted and approved.

His patience was infinite; he was willing to wait for years before he reacted to her. But she, like all humans, was spurred to dangerous haste by a regrettably short lifespan. It was another sad result of her humanity that her first words were irritatingly inane.

"I thought you were dead," she breathed, her voice soft with awe and fear. He heard it easily, flavored by human passion and violent emotion.

Quieting the rumble of irritation that threatened to rise from deep in his chest, Maelstrom stared at her evenly. [I slept. The sleep of dragons is not like that of man.] The answer was given with unseemly speed, as he manipulated the rhythms of his slowly awakening body and mind to come nearer to the human's frenetic biological haste. It was not wise to hasten oneself so recently after an awakening, but he had always tried to be considerate of short human lifespans. If he moved at a more suitable pace, she would be long dead before her weak mind could interpret a single note of his reply. [Why do you awaken me?]

The human's spine stiffened, and she stared at him with remarkable courage. "I am Therry se Koriel, descendant of the sorcerer Aaron se Koriel, who once healed you of a mortal wound. I call upon the boon you promised him then, and ask your aid." Her hands, clasped in front of her, now opened to reveal a deep red stone cupped between her fingers.

Maelstrom recognized the bloodstone; he had forged it from his own ichor, a symbol of his vow, to be held in trust by Aaron's descendants until they had need of his aid. Its power, added to the weak magic of this human sorceress, must have been the true strength behind his call from sleep. [I remember Aaron se Koriel, and the boon I promised him in exchange for my life.] He had not asked for his life, nor freely offered the vow, but the sorcerer had been within his rights to demand it, even if it had been in exchange for a gift he had not desired. But the concept of a grudge was alien to the draconic mind, and he felt not even a glimmering of resentment at this reminder of the long-ago incident, only a few wisps of surprise that human memory extended that far back in time. [What do you ask of me?]

Relief tinged the scent of her breath as she made her request. "A dragon ravages our people, and all of our magics cannot hold it back. My parents died in battle with it, and I am not strong enough to fight alone where both of them have failed."

Alarm and curiosity slowly trickled into Maelstrom's mind. When he had last been awake, humans and dragons had been at peace; it had been known as pure disregard on the part of his kind, and seen as a truce by the humans, but on both sides the rule had been to avoid interaction whenever possible. Surely that had not changed during his slumber, not without some provocation or benefit to his people. What possible reason would a dragon have to bother attacking humans, when there was so much wild prey and so little of interest among the weaker race? [Tell me more of this ravaging dragon.]

She nodded as if granting a request, her scent calming as she assumed his aid to be assured. "It is white, and huge, though not so large as you. It descends upon villages and farms, crushing and destroying buildings when it lands, and rends people and livestock to pieces without, insomuch as I have seen, devouring them. Humans, horses, sheep, or dogs, it seems to matter not to it what it slays."

He laid silent and still, his only movement the slow, slight rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathed. Such things were extremely uncommon among his slow-living kind, even in pursuit of food, for any dragon that needed to eat more than twice in a decade was mortally ill. To do such without feeding bespoke a deeper, more dire illness, sickness of the mind rather than the body, so rare among dragonkind that only thrice before had it ever been seen. He was loathe to do battle with another of his kind when there was no reward for the contest, but it was best for all if such a one was destroyed, whether the human desired it or not.

Alternately tensing and relaxing his wings, Maelstrom reluctantly flexed the flight muscles, making them warm with blood and ready for flight. His heartbeat sped to the pace necessary to take to the air, though he could feel in his bones that doing in a few short hours what by rights should take several months would cost him in deep strain and fatigue. Shoulders and haunches tensed as he rose fluidly to his feet, every small motion as smooth as silk, the whole movement so imbued with beauty and grace that the human girl's breath caught. The light scales armoring his wings scraped against the rocky ceiling as he stepped forward with the same fluid elegance. The human scrambled out of his way, though he had placed his feet with care to refrain from stepping upon her, and a mist of amusement briefly shrouded his mind.

Both red eyes open now, he looked past his own long, hooked snout to the skies outside. The sun standing in the cloudless sky marked the time to be early afternoon, though upon thought he recalled a star-studded, moonlit darkness being framed by the entranceway when he had woken. Taking a deep breath, he focused on the scents drifting through the air. First and strongest was his own scent, like that of woodsmoke and hot metal, joined with a tang of sea salt and the unmistakable dark cold flavor of dragon magic. Beneath that was the sharp, reedy scent of human magic, acrid and bitter, overpowering the odors of the human herself but only a faint shadow of a smell next to his own. From outside the cave, a warm breeze brought him the scents of summer in the hill country, growing crops and flowering plants, and the odors of wild game and humans and their livestock intermixed into one sweaty, meaty smell. The air itself had a scent, fresh and warm, but carrying in its higher reaches the flavors of distant lands - a clean chilliness from the north, a rich loam-and-clay mixture from the east, scoured desert heat from the south, sweet plains-grass and a hint of the sea far to the west. It was easy to forget, in the seductive pathways of the dragon dreams, the joy of using his own physical senses to take in the vibrant living world.

Sunlight played against his jet-black scales as he stepped out of the cavern, banding them with shifting patterns of iridescent red and green and gold. As rainbows shimmered upon the surface of oil, so they shone upon his polished armor; he seemed to glow with etheral colors and reflected light. The unfurling wings created another shimmering of hues, guided by sunlight as they glided across his body. Two powerful wingbeats shattered them into a maze of refracted color, and then he leapt into the air like water arching upward from a fountain.

Flight! This was the primary reason that dragons did not sleep their lives away in the depths of dragon sleep, without thought or care for their empty bodies. There was flight in the dragon dreams, but it could never give the same physical thrill as true flying, the joy of flexing muscles and dizzying height and the sensation of wind flowing beneath his wings. Spiraling upward until the air was almost too thin to breathe and even the human habitations below were merely miniscule dots, Maelstrom took the time to luxuriate in the joy of flight.

This high, the scents of the earth below fell away, only traces surviving the upward struggle to mix with the smell of the air and the tastes of far-away lands that teased his tongue. Without the overwhelming miasma created by the teeming life upon the ground, he could sense other odors, some familiar, some strange. From the northwest drifted the scent he'd been searching for - deep and dark and as cold as space, its flavor both like and unlike the one that melded with his own personal scent. Dragon magic, unique to his kind and impossible to hide. With powerful wingbeats, he swerved northerly and followed the delicate trail. As he drew closer, the odor of the other dragon became clearer, wound about the smell of her magic. Females were rare in these days, but she was undeniably one of those rarities. She smelled of ice and cold gales and flying snow, a child of the northern skies.

Maelstrom knew she had scented him long before she came into view. Her scent-trail twisted wildly where she had turned to flee, perhaps guessing his purpose, perhaps so maddened by whatever had driven her to ravage humans that she was no longer rational. She fled like a fox before hounds, dodging back and forth, laying false trails, doubling back on herself, and it brought a new gust of alarm sweeping through his mind. This was not the behavior of a dragon, one of the ancient rulers of the air, unparalleled in strength and magic. This was the behavior of a prey animal, frightened beyond reason by the predator that pursued it.

For all her tricks and cunning, her scent was unmistakable, and she could not hide from him. Soon he caught the smell of her directly, and did not need to follow her convoluted path, but instead flew straight while she continued to twist and turn in vain. His wings carried him unerringly toward her, and he found her circling above an isolated farmstead, bright red blood staining her talons and the stench of death lingering in the air.

Like him, she refracted light off her gleaming scales, blue and violet and green painted onto the snow-white planes by the morning sun. There was beauty and grace in every line of her body, in the curve of her neck, in the play of light and shadow on her thinly-armored wings. The brutal red splashes of blood staining her talons and hooked muzzle and spattering her white scales only made her more magnificent in Maelstrom's eyes, and his heart yearned to possess that beauty, as the hearts of dragons always do when presented with something as glorious as themselves.

Her head turned towards him, jaws gaping in a primal roar of fury and fear and aggression. Being female, she had blue eyes rather than red, but they were as dark as his own - no, darker, the color of the sky at midnight, seemingly black unless one knew otherwise. Locking gazes with those beautiful dark eyes, he returned the roar, bellowing a challenge to the female. Their magic met, joined for a fraction of a second, identities flowing between them in a wordless exchange of feelings and impressions. She was Solitude, her name rich with endless serenity and a silence so deep and profound that he was overwhelmed by it even as he embraced it with all of his soul. Then they disengaged, drawing their magic back into themselves, the separation almost painful. He further hastened his body's internal rhythms, preparing for the speed required in battle, then surged towards Solitude with his muscular form braced to attack.

She met him halfway, sharp beaked mouth snapping at his wings, blood-stained talons slashing at his scales. He dodged adeptly, hurling her back with a powerful swipe of his tail, snapping fruitlessly at her neck. Magic powered him, as it doubtless did her, lending strength to their muscles and scales. Maelstrom should be questioning her, demanding an explanation, unearthing the reasons for her erratic actions. But something about her name and the meaningful, bottomless silence inherent in it held him back, urged him to respect her lack of communication. They circled around and above and beneath each other, striking and withdrawing, each seeking to gain the advantage, whether it be altitude or a wing-strike or a blow to one of the elusive draconic blind spots.

Her jaws closed on his tail, and he bellowed in pain, raking at her head and neck with his powerful hindlegs. Both pulled away bleeding; red-black ichor seeped from the wound in his tail, while blue-black dripped from the gash in her neck. First blood had been drawn on both sides, now, and there was no turning back. Pivoting on a wingtip, he turned back towards her, and they clashed again, grappling talon-to-talon as they lashed each other with their tails and wings and fought to both bite and avoid being bitten.

Tucking his wings in close to his body, Maelstrom scented Solitude's surprise and alarm as she was suddenly forced to support them both in the air. Her wings snapped outwards to their full extent, flashes of red and gold light from the setting sun reflecting off them as she beat frantically against the air. As she fought to break his grip and avert their fall, she dropped her guard, and he seized his chance, letting her bite down on his left shoulder as he snaked his head forward and clamped his jaw down on the place where her right wing met her shoulderblade. The sharp sides of his mouth sank deep into her scales, the wicked hook at the tip of his muzzle tearing viciously through muscle and sinew as he jerked his head back.

Her scream rent the air as she writhed in agony, the flavor of her pain so strong that it overrode the bitter-sweet taste of ichor that lay thick on his tongue and pervaded his nostrils. Releasing her from the grip of his talons, he twisted upright as he fell and spread his wings, arching upward to rise level to her once again. She bled freely from the great tear he'd caused, a whole stretch of wing violently separated from where it had been rooted to her body, and though she struggled gamely to stay aloft, the white dragon was slowly sinking downwards, unable to regain the altitude she'd lost. There was a touch of sorrow in having caused such great, crippling pain to something so free and wild and beautiful, but there was pleasure, too, satisfaction at such a clear assertion of his power and dominance.

Maelstrom did not attack again; there was no need to, as she could do him no harm, though she raged fruitlessly at him once she realized her plight. Rather, he harried her, glancing blows with tail and talons, light nips at her wings, driving her downward and northward as the evening faded into night. Solitude actually did herself more harm than he did, twisting and thrashing in the air in futile, repetitive attempts to land a strike on him, knocking herself into a downward tumble every time and roaring her pain and frustration as she fought to stabilize herself with her damaged wing. Only when they were far from all human habitation did he cease his harassment, wings pumping in a steady upward climb, moonlight flashing off his scales as he cast his shadow over her pale form. She craned her neck to peer up at him, wildness and fury and pain in her dark gaze and strong in her scent - and Maelstrom dove at her, wringing another pained scream from her elegant throat as he crushed her wings against her with his weight and the force of his attack. They plummeted downwards, Solitude fighting in vain to win free of his grip, his half-spread wings barely slowing and certainly not stopping their descent.

At the last moment, he unfurled his wings completely and beat them in rapid, powerful strokes, just soon enough to slightly cushion the impact as they struck the ground. The force of it jarred his very bones, and tore a third agonized scream from Solitude. She sprawled beneath him, and he could feel the tension in every muscle of her body, his own muscles taut in both reaction and sympathy. Then she shuddered, a massive movement that shook her entire body, and went limp in his grasp. Through the scales of his chest and belly, he could feel her trembling, tiny rapid-fire twitches that bespoke absolute exhaustion. Moving his talons carefully so as not to cause any more harm to her battered wings, Maelstrom rose from where he was presed against her and slowly slid away.

Her head tilted slightly, one blue-black eye fixed on him, but aside from that dark regard and her erratic trembling, Solitude didn't move. The wildness was gone from her eyes, leaving only pain and anger - whatever had compelled her to her undragonlike behavior had passed. Cautiously, he extended his magic, meshing with hers and lending her a trickle of strength to help in healing her broken body. He wouldn't give her much aid, of course, but to leave her at the mercy of wild beasts was repugnant to every instinct he possessed. Such beauty should not be ravaged and then callously abandoned, not when he might claim it as his own. [What ailed you?] He finally broke the cold, clean silence that had reigned over their battle with the harsh demand. [To flee like prey, to attack humankind, to kill so often and to not consume the dead, that is not like a dragon.]

A more visible shudder swept through her body, and he felt her mind gathering itself to answer. When she did, it was in a broken manner that spoke of a deep and crippling injury to her mind and consciousness. [Alone. All alone, wind, snow-cold, ice-cold, alone. No dreams. No sleep. No rest. Awake, always. Body-quick, always. Life, always. As fast as the world. Could not sleep!]

Maelstrom couldn't hold back a tremor of his own, rocked by the flood of passionate emotion he scented from her. Pain, loneliness, yearning, a long and soul-deep exhaustion, the agony of knowing that there was an escape just beyond reach, and madness that had festered and turned to hate. He could understand only too well. To be deprived of the slow peace of dragon sleep - and worse, the beguiling beauty of the dragon dreams - would be intolerable. Stronger dragons than he or she would have gone mad under the terrifying onslaught of swift, vibrant, constant life that poisoned the world outside of the dragon dreams. Life was bearable in small doses, to be killed and eaten, to be observed for a decade or a century, but it could not be borne forever. He had broken her from the madness for now, but it still lurked in her mind, for only the dreams could wash a dragon's mind clean of this sort of insanity. He must either bring her to the dragon dreams, or kill her, and while he had no compunctions about taking her life, as dragons had done to those they defeated in battle for eons, the brutal truth was that females were painfully rare. Dragons had no civilization or organization as lesser races might reckon things, but they also had no need for them. The dragon dreams, among countless other purposes, served as a melding of minds, and it had been tacitly agreed that females would not die without just cause. There was no point in hastening the decline of their already dying race. [How is this?]

At his troubled interrogative, she shuddered again. [Young. Searching for dreams. Felt the world. Touched the world. Curious. Too brave. Explored - trapped. Made life.] In a form of communication that was almost impossible to infuse with more than a breath of emotion, she managed to make her revulsion and terror powerful and palpable as no dragon's feelings should be. [Lost in life. Couldn't sleep. Couldn't find dreams.]

"Made life." It was disgusting, horrifying. Life was of the sun and the earth, warm and bright. Dragons were of the black night and the frozen places beyond the sky, cold and dark. To be forced into the racing rhythm of life that surrounded humans and wild beasts and prey, to be torn from the darkness and thrust into the brutal light of day, was a horror that no dragon could possibly bear. The nauseating emotions it had inspired were only a mild zephyr at the back of Maelstrom's mind, but from the extreme physical reactions she displayed, Solitude must feel them in full force, as humans and other lesser intelligences did. Without the numbness and distance that the dragon dreams imposed on the mind, how could she have any self-control at all? The fear of death alone - the regrettable disease of most lower life-forms - must be overwhelming. He wondered, detached, if she was far enough gone to expect pity or kindness, or if she still remembered that such things were alien to dragonkind.

Even without those emotions, however, he felt the necessity of aiding the white dragon. She was beautiful, even violently emotional and ichor-coated and wing-crippled, and like all dragons he held beauty above every trait but power. That, too, she might possess in abundance, if not for this cancer within her soul. Stepping closer, he wound his magic more tightly around hers, deepening the connection further as she realized his goals and moved to mesh her power with his. [Can you find the dreams, if I guide you?]

[Can try.] She locked her magic with his as he pressed himself against her, smoothly lowering his immense black-scaled form to the ground by her side. There was danger in doing this here, far from the safety of his home cavern, but this was an isolated place, and it had already been proven that humans could enter his cave and put him in danger even there. Closing his eyes, he carefully detached his soul from his body, stilling each muscle and organ one by one without taking the years-long precaution of slowing his internal rhythms beforehand. Hoping that his body would prove strong enough to survive the shock, he pulled himself entirely free, feeling Solitude's loosed soul follow their meshed magics and link with his own. With the ice-flavor of her soul following his own woodsmoke and sea salt, he surged into spiritual skies, seeking the star-essence of the dragon dreams. Solitude clung to him, her desperation dragging him down, but he was stronger than her and knew his way into the stars. The dream hovered ahead, just beyond them, and he felt her soul-wings join his own as she recognized the heart and core of every dragon's being.

Pain! It rocked through him as he touched the edges of the dragon dreams, channeled through the lost child who sought to follow his path. The dreams were rejecting Solitude, feeling the twin taints of life and emotion upon her soul. But he had come so far already, and her beauty, even in this realm without sight, was still dazzling. Maelstrom swept back, folding his soul-wings about her, then shot forward again. Dull pain buzzed along his edges, but he shielded her with his own aura, winning through the ghostly borders of the dream-world.

Then they were through, and he released her, feeling the lazy breezes of the dream take over as the need for effort vanished. They drifted away from each other, their neutralized magic unmeshing as the dream-winds bore them to their own slow, peaceful places. The dragon dreams wrapped around him, comforting and gentle in their calm dark spiral, and he gave himself up to their embrace.

Rising slowly from the misty calm of the dragon dreams, Maelstrom followed the winding upward path from their depths back to his body. As his soul reattached itself to its earthly home, he felt his lungs heave with the first, deep breath of restored life, triggering a slow double beat of his hearts. The changes of temperature that he could only barely feel through his gleaming jet scales told him of the passing of seasons as he gradually hastened the rhythms of his body, this time at a proper pace. When he finally opened his dark red eyes, he had to rise to his feet to see anything but darkness, the motion still smooth and fluid despite the dirt and rock that cascaded from his back as his movements dislodged them from his scales.

The mountains had changed while he had been in the depths of dragon sleep. The slow motion of the earth over the years, the steady sweeping of wind and rain and ice, had ground them down and tumbled the debris into the once-deep valleys between them. Only the sky was still the same, the sky and the beautiful white dragon still sprawled beside him. He could see only flashes of white through the rock and earth that had covered them, but even those few exposed spots gleamed in the sunlight, reflected colors shifting along their lengths as the sun moved across the sky.

His scales were whole again, having slowly healed as he slept. There were no scars to mar their glowing beauty, as there would be none on Solitude, nor any other dragon who had once been wounded. An injured dragon healed completely or never healed at all. The dried ichor had turned to red stone and fallen away, as every speck of dirt had fallen away when he rose, and as anything but blood or water would fall instantly from the smooth surfaces of dragon scale. Sunlight caught and refracted on his gleaming black armor, painting him with an iridescent pattern that changed with every movement of his muscles.

As Maelstrom stood, noting the changes in the world around him, his magic flared of its own volition. Eager to know the cause, he followed it outwards with his mind, meeting the source of the odd flare as he felt the spark of a soul returned to the alabaster form half-buried beside him. Trying to extricate his magic from the link it had formed with hers, he tugged gently at the intertwined threads, then harder, but they remained bound. He realized what must have happened; when they entered the dragon dreams together, already linked and with their auras meshed, their magic and auras had fused together. It might very well be a permanent arrangement.

It was another few decades before Solitude stood and touched her own magic, though he barely noticed the passing of the years. Feeling the tug, he rose from where he lay in his new, much larger cavern, scales glittering as he stepped into the evening light. Spreading his thin-scaled wings and throwing lances of refracted color into the sky between bluestone peaks, he surged skyward, a subtle pattern flowing through his magic. She met him in the air, gleaming even more brilliantly than he in the moonlight, blue and violet and red chasing each other across her scales. Her beauty sent a new pulse thrumming through his body, heat rising in his belly in response to the silent invitations inherent in every twist of her neck and flick of her tail. Desire flowed through him, the longing to possess that ice-born beauty, only intensified when he realized that his yearning was echoed in her desire to possess him.

They danced among the clouds, black dragon and white glowing in the shifting light of sun and moon and stars. Magic and power surrounded them, joined by an undefinable sense of some ancient and incomprehensible ritual, the patterns they created in the sky alien to earthly life and meant only for these children of the stars. It was battle, dance, race, and game, all those and more part of the ancient courtship rituals of a race that had grown to maturity before the first fledgling world was born from the darkness. Dragons did not love; they did not understand the concept, as alien to them as their emotionless passions were to a thing of life. Dragons possessed, and courtship was a challenge, a measurement of who would own and who would be owned, while being mates was a constant shifting and reassessment of that prized status.

As the dance wound to an end, Maelstrom and Solitude flying at such an altitude that there was barely air to breathe and neither found it worth the effort, the black dragon surrendered with exquisite grace to the female he'd once defeated. Dragons only desired that which was their equal or superior in beauty, after all, and for them there was no shame in being possessed by another of their majestic race. And always, there was the knowledge that things would eventually change... the next time they woke from the dragon dreams.