Allory Fae and the Dragon's Whiskers

Past

Is not past

Nor does the present

Present as

Future

THE WIND HOWLED. ALL around her was rushing bodies and blurred stone and now, change upon rapid change. The temperature rose. New smells, damp and loam and woodsy scents filled the air. Ahm-Ulira was coming up all too fast and they had no way to slow down other than injuring the Quellsteel Pixies by having them scrape against the walls.

Yaarah thought it unnecessary and naturally, he had a plan he had probably considered from fifty-three different angles. "Stick together! Once we're out of the tunnel and reach a wider space, the wind will abate immediately!" he yelled.

Allory nodded. The gale caused her serami to flap violently against her arms. She felt that. It seemed her body had become more solid again in the last few hours, perhaps reacting to the change in conditions?

"Ten seconds!"

Ahead, she saw greenish light at the end of the tunnel. Black Pixies poured out like a fountain, splitting off to the sides to leave space for their fellows still riding the gale. She glimpsed a wooden ceiling high above, an airy arboreal hall, and then suddenly the gale buffeted and tumbled her about as she shot free, and she rode the blast with a soft gurgle of satisfaction.

Topside at last. A jungle-dweller could breathe this air, so much sweeter than the cool, clammy, claustrophobic depths.

Golden bodies swooped through mass of Pixies – Felidragons! Golden Purrmaine Felidragons, to be precise, each as gleaming as the next, their inordinately long whiskers seeming to taste the violently swirling airs with an eerie sixth- or seventh-sense capability.

Dragons like Yaarah.

Allory began to wave when a shock struck her so deeply, the motion arrested as if she had slapped against a wall.

Dragons exactly like Yaarah.

Each and every one of them was wearing his face. His exact likeness.

Terror speared deep into her belly. Doubt. Realisation. Spinning, she shrieked, "Yaa – Yaarah!"

"Here!" "Here, Allory Fae!" "To me!"

Voices … golden fur … fangs and wings swirled about her like leaves in a gale … she leaped and leaped again, trying desperately to home in on the sense of her friend, but the rush of Felidragon bodies was too confusing. Some quality of the shifting, winking light and movement bamboozled her senses. She saw Ashueli smoke by during one panicked leap, but it was with a strangely warped element to her usual elegant tendrils of smoke.

"Allor –" the Elf disappeared.

"Yaarah, please …"

"Over here, Allory Fae!" rasped an oh-so-familiar voice.

She sprang for its safety.

The golden body curved with lithe grace, reaching toward her with both forepaws. Smoke curled between them. Smoke that resolved into a glob of glutinous black sap that shot forward with preternatural speed, slapping lightly against her stomach. The attacking thing unfurled eight spiderlike limbs that wrapped around her like an unwelcome hug. Screaming in fright, she fought the trap but found herself forced to swing after the rogue Felidragon, linked to it by a fuzzy, almost hairy-seeming tendril of magic. Her Elemental magic did not even stutter. It failed utterly.

Trapped! How?

Worse, as that golden paw whipped her away, despite that she was fighting for all she was worth and screaming her little lungs out, she saw dozens of identical Scintillants – illusions, she realised belatedly – flitting hither and thither, adding to the mayhem.

The Golden Purrmaine jerked its paw suddenly, slinging her forward into the path of another Yaarah. One who held a wide-mouthed crystal bottle at the ready.

"You'll never – ouch!"

Her left ear whanged the rim on the way in. A second later, the beast jammed some kind of stopper into place, forcing her to dive inside or have her legs broken.

What was it with these creatures and bottles?

Allory spun about again, her feet flailing and hands slipping upon the slick crystalline surface. All joking aside, she hated Fae bottles and this one came with magic that somehow sapped her ability to fight back or sneak out of it or … anything, really. The echoes she sensed were not unlike the magic with which she had been attacked during the meeting of Scintillants, where Jandazari had given his life to protect hers. It was terrifying to learn of a tainted form of magic that could affect her Elemental form like this.

Yet, how would they even have known she was an Elemental? That implied knowledge she doubted the enemy could possibly have sniffed out. Who knew? Who could have given her away? Did a traitor lurk among their team?

Whatever the case, mere seconds passed before she saw through the vision-tricking oblong crystals of the jar another change in the light as her Golden Purrmaine captor made his escape, just one unidentifiable individual in a knot of ten or a dozen of his fellows. They moved like a school of crazed fish, screening one another and disguising the one who carried her. Illusions expired and popped back to life all around. Jars and Dragons and Scintillants. None of it was real. Black Pixies tore the air to shreds as they hunted for her. All to no avail.

The greens and browns of an elegant Deepwoods city flashed by. Spun about, she caught a wink of that characteristic gold in every direction. Golden Purrmaines were pretending to flee to every point of the compass, at least twenty different knots of the beasts, and she could only grit her little teeth in frustration at the impressively smooth execution of their plan.

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So, the longstanding treachery of Yaarah's kind was laid bare.

He was truly the exception.

"And exceptional," Allory found herself saying, moving between investigating the sides of the bottle and the strange, hairy vest she now wore. "My sweet Furball. Put those whiskers to use, Yaarah! I need rescuing. Again."

Sighing between clenched teeth, she rued the fact that her best wishes could not change her fate, unlike the shy genius of Fakori Fae. Allory found no give in the octagonal-sided bottle, as its crystal facets proved too hard or resistant to her every attempt to break or even scratch them, the lid was jammed on far too tight for her strength to loosen it, and the weird binding thread would not be removed either. It stretched a little before snapping back into place. She even tried her unravelling skills on it without making the slightest headway.

The large bottle – a specimen jar, to be exact – was about twenty inches deep, plenty roomy enough for a Scintillant runt but Zzuriel or Queen Istrazuki, for certain, would not have had enough headroom. Clenching her little fists, she gave the lid one last thump for good measure. No good.

Varzune and his 'bottled girlfae' comment. Ah, she remembered that with a wry smile!

All she could do was watch in mounting frustration as the Felidragons zoomed through a city that, even seen through the light-bending facets of jar, was wondrous indeed, a marvel of towering emerald-green trees, tinkling waterfalls and flower gardens standing hundreds of feet tall and wide. She saw Fae everywhere, colours and kinds she had not imagined, but her eye was drawn to their demeanour as her captor winged swiftly on through the greenery. These were refugees. Faces were wan, clothing torn, small bundles of precious belongings clutched in scrawny arms. Many appeared wounded.

Tugging at her antennae in grief, she peered at scene after scene – here were Elves, an entire forest glade filled with unmoving bodies lying side-by-side … the Wraith comes … and tiny yellow Faelings squalled in their parents' arms in eerie silence, their hollow cheekbones etched by horrors she could only imagine … for the Wraith's servants consume all, tearing through cities like storms … more bodies, a haphazard pile of limbs slumped in final repose, bereft of any spark of life … and the ceaseless march of his armies shakes the boughs …

Yet today, the visions only flickered briefly, juxtaposing flashes of ancient devastation with these new travails, before leaving her firmly fixed in the present.

At last, the flight of Dragons slipped by cunning ways through a veil of greenery and in amongst what appeared to be the twisting roots of the bole of a tree vaster than any she had seen before. The folds in its bark could have hidden Henzaroseflash with ease.

Flattening his body, the Felidragon ahead squeezed into a crack between the roots and burrowed downward, following a wooded tunnel almost too dark to see within, save for her own natural light. The twists and turns through this gnarled gulley or perhaps a watercourse carved between the roots seemed familiar to the Felidragons, for they navigated several complex branches and knots with ease before pausing to deactivate what she took for magical traps or wards set upon a trapdoor indistinguishable from the tree heartwood that surrounded them with its ultra-slow pulsation of life. Her antennae prickled even within the jar. She sensed strong wards, very similar to the type that her Scintillant kin had once set upon their most secret and sacred councils.

Tendrils of memory caressed her mind with ghastly intimacy, shivers from the past transferred to the present. Familiarity. Revulsion. Shady medical procedures. Illicit research activities. Had her own people contributed to the means behind her entrapment?

Immediately as the trapdoor sprang open, the Felidragons crowded inside, passing through a colonnade of huge, twisting roots that led into a surprisingly large space, a cavern set somewhere within the trunk or base of an enormous tree, Allory imagined. Sunbeams thick with golden dust particles poured from above, irradiating an area that had once perhaps been an arena serving as a meeting place. The floor was comprised of four generously curved, stepped layers well-suited to creatures the size of Felidragons. These areas were covered in a mad scientist's miscellany of paraphernalia ranging from towering machines sporting multiple arms and lenses to dusty racks holding great metal-bound tomes of knowledge.

However, her attention was not arrested by the dozens of Golden Purrmaine Felidragons that swarmed about the place, most fixated on the tiny Scintillant peering out of the flask, but others rushing into connecting tunnels on errands of the utmost urgency.

Two Raptors dominated the space. Creatures she knew and feared.

The first was the hulking form of Monsteron Realm-Waster, his lethal, scorpion-like tail curved high into the air – being given a respectful distance by all the Felidragons, she noticed – and his entire body quivering with a disquieting urgency or passion she could not immediately place. The way the sunlight burnished his razor-sharp scales made him look like a mountainous heap of improbably mobile onyx daggers.

Across from him stood the smaller but no less lethal Long Nose, called Obliteron, the mysterious Raptor who had tracked them from Marakusia to the Deepwoods to here. He was even creepier in appearance than she remembered. Something about his gnarled limbs and wings and oddly misshapen body was simply … off. Allory was not a creature to judge by physical appearance or deformity. What runt would? The sense of wrongness went deeper than that, she realised. Was it a malformation in his magic? An antennae-prickling dissonance in the song of his being? Whatever the case, she sensed that Monsteron, shifting slightly from paw to paw, was acting equally unsettled.

Allies or not? Could she play one against the other?

Golden paws placed her bottle on a hastily cleared worktable near the centre of this chamber. The small clink seemed to penetrate her ears to reverberate inside her skull, pulling a swirl of past memories to the fore, a sense of dislocation, of floating rootless through time and space.

Fading. Falling. With one hand, Allory rubbed the dust-born butterfly beside her temple while she found herself sagging against the crystal. Nausea made a hot mess of her stomach.

"Isss being thissss ssssspecial onessss?" Monsteron hissed viciously. "Iss being you tellsss sssso much about, youssss little pipsssssqueakssss?"

A Golden Purrmaine began to gabble, "Aye, this one, great –"

The lethal barb of his tail lashed through the sunbeams, causing the glorious light to flicker inside her prison. The Felidragon's mouth clicked closed. Wisely.

Allory lurched to one knee. "Eep!"

"For thisss one, the Giantsss march? For thisss one, yousss waitssss?"

Obliteron hissed, "Yeeeesssss –"

Monsteron crashed over him, "FOOOOOOOL!! I KNOWSSS THISSS ONE!"

His sudden thunder shook the chamber. Dozens of Felidragons sprang backward, yet they somehow arrested the motion and, with an eerily synchronised ripple of movement, turned back toward her with expectation writ upon every bewhiskered, furry face. Their features were changing from Yaarah's likeness, she noticed. Sliding. Reforming. Regaining their individuality.

The ruse was complete. No need for disguise anymore.

"Brotherssss," Obliteron wheedled, reaching out in a flash to steady the flask with his claws, "thisss isss the she, I tellssss true! The Nossse … it never liesss!"

"LIIIAAAARRRSSSS!!"

"It isssss –"

"FOOOOOOOL!!"

The Long Nose recoiled, cowering as if reacting to the kind of slap she imagined Monsteron could deliver, a blow of such exquisite force it could brutalise a creature's soul out of its very body.

The air trembled with menace as the two Raptors scowled so furiously at each other, Allory was surprised that the air between them didn't burst into flames.

Then, a much older Golden Purrmaine stepped forward, adjusting his sliver spectacles upon his hoary, white-dusted muzzle with one paw as he peered into an archaic tome, clearly looking up a reference. He wheezed, "Brothers, brothers, calm yourselves."

Both Raptors hissed and spat upon the chamber's floor, one with fire, the other a greenish poison.

Unperturbed, the Felidragon sidled forward again, peering at her over the rims of his spectacles as if preparing to examine every detail of her every particle. The gleam in his eyes was positively evil. "If all is as you claim, I believe we will resolve the matter of the Raptor eggs most expeditiously." Clearing his throat, he said, "Allory Fae?"

"Who's asking?"

Somehow, she channelled the Allory of yore, one who had courage today's Allory could barely imagine. Her voice was flat, calm, professional.

Touching a particular line on the huge ledger with the tip of his fore-talon, he purred, "General … Allory Fae?"

She froze.