Allory Fae and the Dragon's Whiskers

IMMEDIATELY, A ROARING WAS heard in the distance that sounded like all the storms of a thousand years rolled together and unleashed at once. The Quellsteel Pixies glanced about in clear confusion, but also drew themselves up in great wedges of dark menace, alert to whatever danger approached. They sparkled with renewed power. Her companions drew together also, the Elves and Felidragons arranging themselves in linked flotillas, facing the direction of the bedlam.

Allory realised belatedly that it was the sound of water pouring into the cavern. Unimaginable volumes of water. Yet – not as she expected. Gravity played unusual tricks in this place.

Silly her, thinking that water poured downward.

A white frothing jet came storming across the chamber, shovelling plant matter left and right, up and down as it hosed toward them in a wave fit to engulf Durc Durhelm's fortress a hundred times over. Riding that blast, she saw creatures she recognised at once from her visions – the minions of that mighty oceanic beast, the eater of Faroon young and despoiler of their souls. Their black tentacles whipped about like rubbery ropes, thrashing the water afresh in ravenous hunt for fresh victims.

"It's the Kera-du-Kerakarool!" she shouted.

"Frrr-hssst! The cracker-what?" Yaarah spat, struggling to make himself heard above the din.

"An ocean monster! The Kera-du-Kerakarool!" In this elemental form her voice rang clearly enough, somehow piercing the reverberating thunder like the ringing of bells.

Julfyria heard. Crashing several syllables toward Zzuriel, her mighty head surged and her neck ruff flared, making her suddenly look three times as wide and menacing. She exhaled a steady stream of icy air toward the incoming water, freezing the droplets and the minion creatures instantly. The waving tentacles stilled, the crimson-shot eyes standing immobilised in expressions of frenzied loathing. At her command, the Quellsteel Pixies surged in around her wave of frost-breath like the infolding petals of a flower, waving their swords as they attacked the immobilised enemy creatures, hacking off tentacles and piercing their eyes with precise strokes. Butchery by any other name!

This once-peaceful jungle creature approved.

Yet Julfyria's head rose once more, her senses clearly measuring the din and commotion as the briny water continued to jet forth.

Something was coming.

Changing.

She snowflaked toward Zzuriel.

The Diamond Fae cried at once, "She's ordering us to get moving. To head for the city of Ahm-Ulira, which is not far from Ahm-Shira. She says she'll hold the enemy – the beast, she calls it – here for as long as she can."

Sabline hissed, "Can we help?"

Two quick snowflakes later, Zzuriel shook her head firmly. "This is a battle prophesied since the dawning of Spheris itself. Julfyria and the Kera-du-Kerakarool –" she stumbled over the unfamiliar name "– are mortal enemies. The Pixies will show us a way. A breathing tunnel. It'll take us almost directly up beneath Ahm-Ulira."

Yaarah mewled, "But how does our Allory –"

"Move, kitty!" Sabline roared.

The Golden Purrmaine did not appreciate that! He had the temerity to take an open-clawed swipe at his mate, who dodged with a malignant snarl of her own.

In her rush to speak to Zzuriel, Allory mobbed the Diamond Fae and found herself gathered about her friend like bees swarming on a jungle bough. "Zzuriel, tell her that the creature's power is drawn from millennia of feasting on the souls of the Faroon."

Why was that important? She did not know.

Before she could speak or draw the immense Builder Dragon's attention, however, a giant Pixie approached them at the head of at least a thousand of her dark Pixie-kind and introduced herself as Immorandixi, daughter of Inshandixi. The resemblance was clear. So was her size! Even larger than her mother, Allory decided, and possessed of undeniable oodles of that same motherly-savage-warrior air – however that worked – which these Quellsteel Pixies excelled at.

The Scintillant boldly popped over to sparkle-dust her new friend's cheek. She just knew they were going to be friends. That meant kisses. Plenty of sparkly kisses, whether wanted or not.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Immorandixi touched the spot with a gruff laugh. I honour this gift, o Allory Fae. Now, follow me with all haste.

Another male Pixie swung in behind Immorandixi, saying, Those who travel with Pixies are friends of ours, she means to say. What kind of Pixies are you, little friends? Where do you hail from? I sense that true-fusting love comes dusting your mingled pixel-trails most fetchingly!

Chenixipi said, "What's he saying, Allory? What language do they speak?"

Garobixi put in, "My dust tingles at their speech, as if in expectation of understanding, if that makes any sense at all."

"Rarely," his partner put in cheekily.

"Dust my derriere! Could it be the mythical Proto-Pixonese language posited by Parapixi the Perspicacious?"

"How dust-fusting perspicacious of you!" Chenixipi agreed at once, her hairstyle instantly forming a tall green hand that patted Garobixi atop his head.

For once, the confident young Pixie acted a touch abashed in the presence of these huge kin-Pixies. To Allory's surprise, the male Pixie's gesture toward her Healers' Reach friends had their pixels giggling and swirling disobediently beneath their behinds. Pixie dust really was the most peculiar substance. Quite, quite scandalous.

Almost as scandalous as some people who thought they could get away with kissing a Crown Prince. Her regard brightened upon the Argent Fae. When he wasn't being a royal jerksap, he really was rather tolerable. Allory supposed that if one subtracted a few of her whiny, whingey little-me moments, she could also be regarded as approaching bearable. Sigh. She'd just call him Handsome-nori from now on. Yummy nectar!

Helped that he appeared to fancy her sparkles.

It could not last, could it? Already, she sensed the colossal storms of fate sweeping them away, burying her in turmoil and mayhem. Was this it? The crucible of time toward which the Wraith had laboured and plotted, molested and murdered, all these untold ages of her world?

This was not fear speaking. The time for fear was long past, fallen pollen, dust in her trail. Instead, to Allory's immense surprise, her sparkly self drew up like a clenched fist, taut with anger.

Soul Blossom needed her.

Meantime, Immorandixi worked by gestures to suggest that the Dark Elves each ride with a Pixie. That instinctual affinity Allory felt she had detected right away appeared to work in full force – the dark Pixies and the Dark Elves perhaps, in sharing an elemental class or quality, appeared to have little need of a shared language to understand one another's purposes or actions. The Pixie force arranged themselves into a flying wedge with their new companions in the centre and set out in a direction that Yaarah described to her in spherical coordinates that blazed way over her little blue head. All she understood was that it was very different to the direction from which they had entered the caverns. Zzuriel flitted out toward the Janghorash to speak with her but the great Dragoness did not appear to notice, preoccupied as she was with the advent of her ancient foe.

Suddenly, a stilling in the tremendous rushing of water alerted everyone. The spray cut off. The only immediate sound was the bright ringing of the Pixies' quellsteel blades as they continued to hack the frozen and semi-frozen sea creatures into tiny pieces.

Then, a vast bellow shook every plant in the cavern, "I AM KERA-DU-KERAKOOL, YOUR GOD!"

Julfyria's thunder belled out in response, a sound somehow sweeter yet no less terrible. It must be some rebuttal about that creature being no god to her or her Pixies, Allory imagined, shivering as she recalled the unbearable mental power of this creature which had enslaved the Faroon for untold centuries.

Way in the distance, through the path the spray had cleared through the foliage, she saw a number of colossal, oily black tentacles squeezing out from a crack in the basal stone. The creature squeezed and bulged grotesquely as it forced its way through the narrow aperture – now dozens of tentacles, each as thick as a jungle giant's tree trunk, now a well-remembered, colony-sized white eye, shot with cracks of flaming crimson, almost folded upon itself as the incensed beast crushed itself in its frenzy to engage in battle.

Did it have no bones? The realisation shook her. Were not all creatures subject to the boneyard she carried, bound to its power one way or another? Could that be its secret power?

"BOW BEFORE YOUR MASTER, WORMS!"

Here it came.

The power of its mind! Even Julfyria stiffened as if stunned or traumatised. Allory felt jammed together as if she were a flotilla of pixels having taken fright, but before she knew it, a faint yet achingly poignant song lifted from her sparkle-being. Negation. Restoration. Healing! The music rippled out through all her scintillance which yet lived upon the Pixies and the Janghorash, causing them to vibrate and sing in sympathy.

At once the white Dragoness uncoiled with a sibilant scraping sound and rose, pursing her lips to expel a frigid gale that attacked the creature. She swept past Zzuriel as if she did not exist. The Fae began to turn as if humiliated, before Allory saw her brace her shoulders and swing about with clear purpose.

She shot a high-speed snowflake of communication at Julfyria.

No response came as the Builder Dragon dashed whole lakes of ice upon the Kera-du-Kerakarool. Beast of a thousand tentacles it might be, but dozens cracked due to its squirming paroxysms – it was snapping off its own limbs due to the freezing! Allory had no doubt they would regrow. Its body was still emerging from that crack like ghastly black pus squeezed from an abscess. What millennia-magnified madness drove a beast like that? The behemoths thundered at one another, and the very foundations of the world quaked at their quarrelling.

"Zzuriel, come on!" Varzune screamed.

She swung away, every ounce of her sap proclaiming defeat.

As the Dragoness accelerated into her attack, Allory saw a trailing white talon flick upward. A vast snowflake whipped out and swatted Zzuriel squarely in the behind. The girlfae yelped as frost spangled all about her, a rainbow-infused explosion of wintry colours briefly wreathing and inundating her body before it all appeared to suck inward in a blink and make itself right at home inside her.

Ice to ice. A symbiosis of winteriness.

What was that?

With an anxious final glance over her shoulder, Zzuriel flitted after the fast-departing Pixie force.