Allory Fae and the Dragon's Whiskers

ALLORY DRIFTED BACK TOWARD consciousness in a place she had not expected. She lay upon a bier in a gilded hall, yet could not feel the coolness of pure gold beneath her body. Voices echoed in a vast airy space, some querulous, some conciliatory, some bitter and grieved. One stood apart, a regal voice which commanded a quality of resonance so astonishing, it reminded her vividly of the owner of a voice whose harp playing had thrilled her from the outset.

"Jerksap," she murmured, stirring.

Unfortunately, she picked one of those instants when a vigorous multiway conversation had just fallen completely silent.

The regal voice snapped, "Who profanes my hall with vulgarities?"

She froze. No, the dream had not returned her to Hansanori, to that time and place where she understood she lived. The voice was not Hansanori's, yet it seemed so achingly similar that her mind wanted to paint him as one and the same.

Something inside of her sighed at the loss.

It must have been that everyone glanced at everyone else in bewilderment. Then, the querulous voices fell to demanding justice for the slaying of their precious son, Jandazari, and to know how it was that the General had vanished from the midst of a congregation of over one hundred Scintillants, leaders of the Fae nation. They had been assigned to her protection. The dishonour and grief was unbearable.

A voice she recognised as that of Annioli Fae said, "We do not know, o King Haslazori. As I explained, this is a matter of the most abstruse Scintillant lore. I cannot reveal more without betraying the deepest secrets of my people and I beg you, my King, not to issue such a command as you have suggested. I am your faithful servant. Please do not make of me a pariah and a traitor."

Such a silence followed her words, it felt to Allory as if the very weight of time itself sat upon her chest. She could not breathe, but she need not. Why?

King Haslazori? She had never heard the name before.

Unexpectedly, she heard Councillor Tolimon's reedy tones chime in next. "My King, I must add my voice to Councillor Anniori's. I too wish no schism to develop between the Scintillants and the throne, but as you know, my tribe is as bark-bound as they come. This vector will not fly well."

Never had she known the two Councillors to speak as one; this was also how she realised that she had returned directly to her General Allory mind. It seemed that this scene – wherever and whenever it might have been – had yet to play out.

Intriguing. So whimsical, her existence.

Yet her heart's sap stopped up in grief over the memory of Jandazari's dying agony.

"Councillors," the King said heavily, "I also have been placed in an untenable position and cannot divine another branch upon which to act. You Scintillants met in secret, in my own palace, in direct contravention of my decree to the contrary!"

Annioli began, "Your Luminance –"

"Let me finish! I understand the conditions of the Scintillant Rite of Ascent. That is not at issue here. Your own kin have approached me formally to demand justice; I have been presented with one dead body in my hall, my best General has apparently evaporated into thin air and I have seventeen Scintillant captives who with one voice refuse to acknowledge if they have been turned to serve the Wraith who besets our people and our kingdom most sorely … if I must balance the survival of all Faedom against the honour of one, then as Middlesun is my witness, Annioli Fae, as the leader of the Scintillant Fae, I will demand it of you!"

Now the silence seemed to breathe fire like an invisible Dragon. Allory knew she had caused this. Precise memory failed her, as ever, but the situation had every hallmark of another of her failures.

"Let it be as Your Majesty wishes."

Defeat framed Annioli's low-voiced reply.

"No, I most emphatically do not wish it thus. Darksap and foulness forefend! We have known each other all our lives, Annioli, but –"

"But you are my King and I am your loyal subject."

Distinctly, Allory heard an unroyal phrase trip from his lips.

Annioli muttered, "Do it. Ask the question."

How could she even begin to hope to change this fate? Jandazari, o Jandazari! Sickness pooled in her being, a crushing, suffocating thickness of sorrow.

At length, the royal sucked in a ragged breath. "Therefore, in accordance with the demand of life-sap debt lodged before the Crown this day, hear my irrevocable decree whereby I, His Luminance Haslazori Argentate-al-Ahrtumi, King of –"

"Wait," Allory piped.

"What the – what? Where's the ventriloquist, I swear … guards! Guards!"

"Back, my King!" someone shouted.

"Guard him!"

"Where's the threat?"

Allory scraped her sparkles together, at least as she saw the matter, and tried to work out how one could possibly feel nauseous to the point of vomiting when she was apparently invisible and disembodied and therefore ought to be experiencing no physical sensations at all. All the Faerie in the chamber gazed about in evident befuddlement.

Snicker.

"Wait upon sap's falling! I'd know that voice anywhere," Annioli hissed. "General Allory?"

Generally speaking. The title still made her itchy.

Gathering her alleged wits with an irritable flexion of will, she chimed, "Aye, this is General Allory. I apologise, my King, for my lack of actual appearance –"

"As you should," he growled. "Show yourself this instant. Where are you?"

"Your Luminance, I am trying."

"Exceedingly trying, you are," he growled, grimly yet in agreement. "Since when was invisibility a Scintillant skill? Guards, stand down. This voice can be no other than Allory's. General, much as I'll be the first to say that your troublemaking drives me up the jungle bough, I was not prepared for you to die on me just yet – and that is a royal order backed by the full power of this throne."

She warmed to his evident relief. A strong physical resemblance to Hansanori momentarily threw her, however, as if her brain dwelled in two realities simultaneously. An older, more seasoned Hansanori. Rather pleasingly, it appeared that she could get away with ogling her King's handsome silver muscles without censure … and now her brain was engaged a round of teenage drooling and General-level evaluation of the situation simultaneously. Right. Shake self toward self. Eyes off the breadth of His Luminance's stalwart shoulders. Make a plan. As he spun about, her treacherous gaze promptly dropped to the snugly outfitted royal derriere. Mmm, sweet nectar – oh, for saps' sakes, behave! She'd be forced to stow her tongue, if she still had one.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Where had she mislaid her social decorum? Her decency?

Too many conflicting currents of time. Too many imperatives. She would find the true integrity of her sap and she would behave accordingly.

"Suggids," she hissed aloud.

"Aye, that's my General," the King said heartily, thankfully unaware of her distraction and subsequent spurt of self-loathing. "Now, since you apparently aren't quite as dead as some had hoped and many more have feared, would you care to explain what's going on in my halls? Without betraying … everything?"

"A – Aye, I think I can," she said.

That was the moment her gaze fell upon Jandazari's prone body, shrouded in a white ahyluri burial cloth, and all hope of speech departed in a shattering instant. Horror shredded her being. This was her doing. She had disembodied just in time to see him struck down by the full power of that cowardly attack, that assassination attempt. His parents, Jazyluki and Yennary, stood alongside the golden bier with his six pupae-siblings, their faces stricken by grief. Her eyes slid aside to touch the smallest of their six living children – Iyenory, at fourteen inches tall, the runt of the siblings. Allory and the girlfae had always shared an instinctual understanding. Queen Shenmory, an Argent Fae like her husband, stood beside them with her head bowed.

How could a soul bear this woe? It was a travesty that Jandazari should have served her more than well, and Jazyluki before him, only for the son to be struck down by the cowardly kinship-avengers right in the heart of the Scintillant congregation. Revulsion rose within her at this demonstration of Scintillant power that had led to this tragedy. What had led her people to dabble in such darksap, twisted forms of magic? Surely they knew better?

Undeniably, the attack had been aimed at her, the despised runt – and it had failed.

Could the King's intuition be on the mark? Could the inner council of the Scintillants have been compromised by the greatest foe of all?

Now that she finally knew what she had come to Ahm-Shira to do, Allory also realised she would need to find a way to keep her mission secret. Absolutely secret. Not a breath of a rumour must reach the Wraith. Nay, even less than a breath. She must somehow conceal or wipe out its memory forever; she must bring about her purposes here, in this time, with nothing but the greatest cunning ever conceived beneath Middlesun.

One way or another, word of the ariayaenvul soul locket must never leave another Faerie's lips, nor even remain present in their thoughts or memories.

Perhaps there was a way. Purpose clarified in her mind. The nectar of knowing, her people would say.

First, a necessary misdirection.

Quietly, she said, "Your Luminance, I am an Elemental."

He sighed between his teeth, an outbreath nonetheless as eloquent as an entire royal speech. The King's mien proclaimed that a great many elements of conjecture and doubtless, deep frustration, had just fallen into place for him. "A Scintillant Elemental?"

"Aye, that is correct." Her perception touched the family which was so precious to her. Clearly, they neither knew where to look nor what to think. This revelation must come as a huge shock to them. She said, "Even for an Elemental, my powers are most unusual. This reality is sound basis for some of the wilder rumours about me, of which you are doubtless aware."

The King nodded. "Aye?"

Haslazori wore a simple sleeveless silver tunic and darker silver leggings. As was his habit, the only item of apparel which proclaimed his station was a handsome silver torc he wore about his neck, the Ahrim-al-Argentate, the symbol of kingship. He touched it now as if seeking to reassure himself that speaking to thin air was a common enough occurrence about the Deepwoods.

At length, he added, "I see."

"O King, I am sorry it has taken all these years to offer this revelation. However, it is a truth I myself have only recently discovered – hard as that may be for you, or any of us and myself most of all, to understand."

As she spoke, Allory found herself slowly able to regather her being into a mode in which she was able to embody again as a Faerie-shaped flotilla of white-azure sparkles. Her tiny wings glistened with an influx of ariavanae; her antennae tingled with the presence of it coalescing in her being. Magic was extraordinarily powerful in this great hall, the Majestias Argentium, said to lie above a well of magic that connected the heart of the Suylas Deepwoods to Middlesun in her Centresky. Indeed, the silver veins in its stately columns and threaded through the gorgeous artworks which were remmiki-etched upon the domed ceiling came alive in concert with her gathering scintillance. The filigree screens masking the walls between the columns spangled with glorious light, for the afternoon was bright without, yet her growing joy seemed to draw it indoors. The jade and silver marbled floor waxed brilliant with radiance.

Even Her Luminance the Queen took on the very meaning of her title. Queen Shenmory glanced at her arms and legs in wonder. Indeed, she outshone any silver ingot any treasury had ever claimed, and her husfae could easily claim the same. Matched in glory, they were the King and Queen of all Faedom indeed, and their almost bashful admiration of one another caused the first chuckle to squeak from her throat, quickly quashed as many antennae shook in affront.

Allory swallowed hard. "I know you fear I'm being inappropriate once more, but please … please understand that what I am about to do, I do for good reason and not out of madness or malign purpose. I wish to dance here, in this sacred hall, for the sake of Jandazari's soul. I wish to share my joy in his life. I beg your patience with me, dear friends."

The King nodded, but said, "His family should choose."

Turning in the air, she said, "Jazyluki and Yennary, may I request the honour of dancing for your son?"

Jazyluki appeared unable to speak. Yennary gave a shudder, but it was she who whispered, "I have always believed in you, General Allory. What more can a mother lose?"

All hope, even the will to live? That was the truth etched upon her expression.

Allory's sparkles wilted.

Yet, she wished with her inmost sap for a different fate for this family. A way of proving to them that what they thought was immutable, was only a wink of difference away. This was what Soul Blossom made possible. This was what she knew – somehow, from a time that was long after this one, that knowledge could be brought back to the past where it belonged.

Please, please let this be …

Vocalising a tender, melancholy tune, Allory schooled her ethereal body to dance over and around the unmoving form of her friend. Even though he lay shrouded in the traditional three layers of white burial Faesilk, the horrific damage could still be deduced from the lumpen lay of his limbs and the absence of wings, entirely consumed in the conflagration. Her heart broke to think of the agony he must have known at the end. The anguish that flagellated his family now. If only … if only she wasn't the smallest and she could heal all the world, she would. She'd try to. The first step would be to create that place where the Wraith could no longer befoul the souls of the fallen.

Then … she did not know. Not even in the present, whenever that was.

She swooped over the Fae's prone form to kiss his forehead lightly. To her surprise, it was tears that flowed first, but perhaps tears different to any ever seen before beneath Centresky, for they manifested as droplets of scintillance that fell upon his white-clad form in a cascade of mournful, tinkling rain. She sobbed wildly, like the tropical rainstorms of the Russet Jungles. Her yearning for a different fate could not be measured. Long minutes passed before an indescribable inkling of ecstasy ignited the sap of her soul. Merriment burst forth as she exploded into free, euphoric, unbridled dance, for her soul's untrammelled joy in what she knew was to come could never be contained. High-pitched laughter rebounded off the great stone columns, walls and ceiling, shaking free the scintillance lingering there until it teemed as thick and gelid as aloe juice in the air, overflowing the capacity of a soul to understand its significance.

As for the onlookers, she would not and could not regard them. She sensed their shock, their repugnance at her actions, and it was rightly so. This unbridled celebration must disgust many; it was anathema, save that they did not know what was about to transpire.

Her sparkless stirred, quivering as if caught in a breeze.

Here … it … came!

A sound like the rushing of a mighty, unseen and unfelt wind filled the hall. Suddenly, all the glittering ambient scintillance appeared to remember what it was about, that it ought to be busy with serious work rather than playing with the Elemental Scintillant who imbued it with shape and hope and purpose, and the light rushed together and imploded in Jandazari's body in a flash brighter than the brightest daylight.

Stillness settled upon the Majestias Argentium.

Fathomless silence.

A cavernous, yawning hush that teetered on the verimost cusp of fate's dawning.

Then, with a sharp, shuddering inhalation, the body swathed in the burial cloth sat up, calling, "Would someone pass the nectar? I'm hungry – say, who cocooned me in these blankets?"

His mother collapsed in a dead faint.