Draekora

  Recognising the dragon, Alex banished her blade and reached out to grab onto him. She wrapped her legs around his shoulder blades just over his wing joints and her arms tight around his neck, holding on for dear life as he gave a mighty push upwards, stopping their free-fall and heaving them back up into the air.

  Hold on, Alex, she heard clearly in her mind, the dragon’s familiar voice sounding so close that she jerked in surprise, almost losing her grip on him.

  “You’re in my head now?” she all but screeched as he flew them straight up and over the waterfalls of the Golden Cliffs and the forests beyond.

  I’ll explain everything in a minute, he told her, his words no longer broken but instead forming complete sentences. I promise.

  Alex was about a second away from hyperventilating as they soared over the Silverwood, her near-death experience and encounter with Aven wreaking havoc on her adrenaline levels. She forced herself to count backwards from twenty, attempting to focus only on the numbers and nothing else. Then she did it again. When she was nearing the end of her third countdown, the dragon slowly crested an arc, turning on his wing until they gradually spiralled to the ground and landed smoothly.

  Ha! How awesome was that! His triumphant voice cheered in her mind. I think I’m going to be great at this bonding thing—you didn’t even jostle. Go me.

  Quite sure she was having a stroke, Alex unclenched her limbs and slid bonelessly to the ground where she collapsed to her knees, her wobbly legs unable to hold her up. She noticed they were back in the Silverwood somewhere, but bizarrely, there was no snow. None. Zip. Nada. In fact, judging by the heat of the sun overhead, wherever they were, it wasn’t even winter.

  In a trembling voice, she again asked, “What is going on here?”

  You don’t look so good, the dragon said, leaning his huge face closer until he was barely a handbreadth away. Had she not been frozen in shock, she definitely would have scurried backwards when his hot breath tickled her eyelashes. Should I find you some water or something?

  Alex shook her head. Then she shook it again. “How can you—I don’t—” She had too many questions and didn’t know where to begin, so she settled on asking, “How can I hear you in my mind? And so clearly?”

  The dragon sat back on his haunches and said, out loud this time, “I’m Xiraxus.”

  Alex blinked. “Xiraxus?”

  “You can call me Xira,” he offered.

  “Zeera?” Alex repeated his pronunciation.

  Xiraxus bobbed his head. “You’re Alex. You wield the Sword of the Stars.”

  “I—What?”

  “The Sword of the Stars,” Xiraxus repeated. “The Bringer of Light. The Blade of Glory. The Weapon of the Ages.”

  Alex looked blankly at the dragon. “Let’s ignore A’enara for the moment and go back to you being a talking dragon who can speak in my mind.”

  Xiraxus let out an annoyed snort. “Draekon,” he said. “Not dragon. Draekon.”

  Making a mental note, Alex said, “Fine, a draekon who can speak in my mind. And that would be because…?”

  If it was at all possible, Xiraxus actually looked guilty. His big body squirmed and his blue eyes looked away from her, reminding her of a puppy who was aware it had done something wrong. “I may have… panicked slightly.”

  Alex moved from her knees to cross her legs underneath her, not ready to test her shaky limbs just yet. “Panicked? Yeah, I got that with all your incomprehensible ‘abrassa closing, Golden One come’ mutterings. What was all that?”

  “The abrassa is the Void Between,” Xiraxus told her. With his words, a picture forced itself into her mind of the ink shimmering into the sky; darkness they had flown straight into.

  Alex gasped. “Did you do that?” she asked, referring to the invasive image she certainly hadn’t conjured on her own.

  Xiraxus nodded and said, “Unbound mortals can’t survive travelling through the abrassa. But I was scared. The Golden One was nearly upon us. You were kind to me. You saved me. I couldn’t let him hurt you. But I didn’t have time to drop you off anywhere else.”

  “So you took me with you through the abrassa,” Alex deduced.

  He nodded again. “Your heart nearly stopped halfway through the Void. I had to enact vaeliana with you. It was the only way for you to survive. But even with the bond, I lost hold of you when we came out this end. The Zeltora found you on the outskirts of the Great City and they took you back to the palace before I could get to you.”

  Alex frowned and repeated, “‘When we came out this end’—what does that mean?”

  “The Golden One pulled me through the abrassa,” Xiraxus said. “He pulled me from here. From… before.”

  Alex just stared at him. “You’re going to have to start making more sense.” But even as she said it, her heart began picking up speed again, because deep down she already knew what he was implying. Unless she’d entered a parallel universe—which was not impossible given what she’d experienced in Medora so far, but it was still unlikely—there was only one way Kyia and Roka would have peacefully been in the same room as Aven. There was only one explanation for why Kyia allowed Aven to pull her close, why Aven called Roka ‘brother’ in such a fond voice, why none of them had recognised her—why none of them but Roka even understood her language.

  “Xira, this abrassa thing… this ‘Void Between’… What is it between, exactly?”

  Fidgeting slightly, the draekon said, “Space. Worlds.” He huffed out a gust of air and admitted, “Time.”

  Time.

  Flipping heck.

  Alex closed her eyes tight. “This has got to be a nightmare. Any minute now I’m going to wake up.”

  “The bond between us allows me to understand your language so we can freely communicate,” Xira said, unaware that she was on the verge of a breakdown and couldn’t handle much more. “You’ll also be able to translate all of the dialects I know, which is why you understood Meyarin.”

  This is madness, Alex thought, rubbing her temples.

  “I know you nearly as well as you know yourself,” Xira went on. “I know your thoughts and how you think. So I believe it will help if you consider the abrassa to be like a black hole. It’s a tear in the space-time continuum. The Golden One—the future Aven Dalmarta—found a way to open it and pull me through to your time, which is forbidden. We’re not supposed to mess with time.” Xira’s nostrils flared nervously. “Mother says bad things happen when you mess with time.”

  Alex tried to keep a grip on her budding horror as he confirmed what she feared was true. “You’re saying we’re in the past? That’s why everything was messed up back at the palace—why Aven wasn’t on a murderous rampage and none of them knew me?”

  Xiraxus bobbed his head again. “Yes. The abrassa brought us both back to my time.”

  Alex wasn’t sure if she wanted to throw up or pass out. In a weak voice she said, “You know, on the list of weird things that have happened to me—and believe me, it’s not a short list—this tops the chart.” Her vision started to go fuzzy so she forced herself to inhale a deep, calming breath. “Okay, so I’m in the past. But this isn’t a problem because you can just take me back home using your abrassa thing again. Stranger things have happened, right?” She quickly amended, “To someone else—stranger things have surely happened to someone else.”

  Yeah, doubtful.

  She shook off her thoughts and stood to her feet, pleased to discover they were only a little unsteady underneath her. “After you fly me back to my time, I say we act like none of this ever happened for the sake of both our sanities. Agreed?”

  “Uh…” he said, shifting nervously. “There’s one problem.”

  Alex felt certain she wasn’t going to like what he was about to say. But she didn’t get a chance to hear it before a bellowing cry came from overhead, echoing throughout the forest.

  “Uh-oh,” Xiraxus whispered, hunching his body with his tail between his legs.

  “What was
that?” Alex demanded.

  “Zaronia.” Xira curled even tighter into a ball. “My mother.”

  That was all the warning Alex received before a mass the size of a small house fell out of the sky and landed with an earth-shaking thud in the clearing. Alex had thought Xiraxus was huge, but compared to the deep purple draekon before her, he looked like a kitten beside a lion.

  “Xiraxus, what have you done?” the purple draekon—Zaronia—all but shouted in a clicking, scratching, rumbling language that Alex effortlessly understood.

  “I’m sorry, Mother, I had to,” Xiraxus replied in a whimper. “Alex saved my life.”

  The purple draekon stilled and repeated in a deathly quiet voice, “Alex? You know its name?”

  Without waiting for a response, Zaronia stretched her massive neck forward until her hulking face neared Alex.

  Oh my gosh, she’s going to swallow me whole, Alex thought, frozen to the spot.

  Zaronia jerked with shock, reared back and turned startled eyes from Alex to Xiraxus. “You bonded with her,” she said aloud in the common tongue, with something like fear threading through her surprised words. “I can hear her mind—I can see the evidence on her skin—You bonded with a mortal! What were you thinking?”

  “Mother, I had to,” Xiraxus said again, sounding everything like a petulant teenager. “She would have died in the abrassa otherwise. We travelled too far back for her to survive the time jump on her own.”

  Zaronia’s fiery eyes widened even further at that. She released a furious sounding growl. “You brought her through the abrassa?”

  “I panicked!” Xiraxus said, jumping to his feet and causing the ground to tremble under Alex. “The Golden One—he pulled me through to her time. He was going to hurt me. But she saved me. I couldn’t let him capture her, but I didn’t have time to move her to safety and make it back through the Void. So I… brought her with me.”

  Alex had to clap her hands over her ears when Zaronia roared so loudly that the trees all around them shook down to their roots.

  Turning on her massive hind legs, Zaronia stomped away from them, only to spin once more and pace back. Three times she did this, huffing with ill-disguised rage.

  “Mother—” Xiraxus tried, but he was cut off abruptly when Zaronia snapped her frighteningly large teeth at him.

  Suddenly the purple draekon was in front of Alex again—one moment she was pacing, the next she was stationary and way too close for comfort.

  “I can’t think with the air so thick down here,” Zaronia said. “The girl must come back with us. I’ll decide what to do with her—what to do with both of you—once we return.”

  “Um, sorry to interrupt,” Alex said, speaking up for the first time. Her voice was as shaky as the rest of her, but she felt it imperative to put forth her opinion. “It’s just, I have to get back to my, uh, time. It’s certainly been… memorable meeting you both, but I’m hoping Xiraxus won’t mind opening up that abrassa thing again and sending me home.” When both draekons looked at her without so much as blinking, she added, “Any minute now works for me.”

  Zaronia turned to Xiraxus. “You didn’t tell her?”

  “I was going to,” he said in a small voice. “I hadn’t made it that far before you got here.”

  The purple draekon released what sounded very much like a weary sigh as she turned back to Alex. Like her son, Zaronia’s eyes were a brilliant blue colour that began to glow with an inner light, a sight so hypnotic that Alex was lulled to drowsiness.

  “Sleep, mortal,” Zaronia commanded in an oddly soothing voice. “When you wake, you shall have answers.”

  And without giving her body permission to do so, regardless of where she was or the fact that she was alone in the woods—and in a different time period—with two massive, mythical carnivores, Alex’s eyes drifted shut, her legs gave way and she fell into a sweet, blissfully dreamless sleep.

  Eleven

  Mortal, it’s time to awaken.

  “Mortal!”

  Alex’s eyes snapped open to see a reptilian face the size of a small car barely inches from her own. Incapable of thinking let alone controlling her reaction, she screamed so loudly, so shrilly, that it hurt even her own ears. It certainly surprised the hulking beast who jerked backwards in alarm.

  Alex scampered away but her retreat was halted when she bumped into a jagged rock wall. She sat pressed up against it, panting in terror, while her mind slowly began to clear enough for her to remember that, at least so far, the creature in front of her hadn’t eaten her. It was therefore possible that she just might not be in as much danger as she had believed upon her shocked awakening.

  “Zaronia?” Alex said. “What…” She trailed off, not wanting to offend the massive draekon by shouting, ‘Does the phrase ‘personal space’ mean anything to you?’ Instead, she said, “You, uh, gave me a fright there. Sorry for screaming in your face.”

  “It’s been a long time since my kind has been so near a human,” Zaronia said. “I forgot how fearful your race can be. It is I who must apologise—I didn’t mean to startle you.” The draekon tilted her head slightly. “Please, come with me.”

  Alex used the rock wall to push up on her wobbly legs, noting somewhere in the back of her mind that it looked like they were in a cave. As she began following Zaronia through a large channel hewn into the rock, she noticed the intermittent torches of the rainbow-flamed myraes lighting their path.

  “Are we underground?” Alex asked, somewhat stupidly since she had already deduced they were at least in some kind of cavern.

  Zaronia, surprisingly, let out a rumbling chuckle. “I suppose you could say that. However, I doubt you will in a moment.”

  Raising her eyebrows at the draekon’s vague answer, Alex continued onwards in silence until a stronger brightness at the end of the tunnel came into view, the sunlight flooding the darkness.

  “No human has ever stood upon our lands before,” Zaronia said, moving her shadowing bulk out of the way. “Welcome, young mortal, to Draekora.”

  Eyes wide and mouth gaping, Alex barely heard the draekon’s words, so consumed was she by the sight in front of her.

  “We’re, um—” She cleared her throat. “We’re definitely not underground, are we?”

  Way to state the obvious, Alex thought, looking out over the cluster of islands floating above the clouds. It was like… It was like… Alex didn’t know what it was like. She had nothing to compare it to. No visual imagery to her recollection could match the impossibility of the view.

  At least a dozen islands were spread out as far as her eyes could see, suspended mid-air as if by invisible strings. One or two were barely the size of football fields, but others were large enough to hold entire mountain ranges. A few even had smoking volcanoes, with molten lava trickling steadily down the sides.

  The floating mass to Alex’s left contained a dense jungle that hugged a large lake filled with the clearest blue-green water she had ever seen; water that tumbled over the edges of the land and straight into the thick cloud cover below. The island to her right was covered in snow and icy glaciers, while another further on from that was overcome by desert, with cracked earth and rugged sand dunes.

  There was no rhyme or reason to the nature of the islands, but they were, without a doubt, the most magical, fantastical sight Alex had ever seen—and she’d seen a number of amazing things since her arrival in Medora.

  “How are they floating?” Alex wondered aloud, unable to muster much volume in her awe.

  “The Draekoran Isles are largely made out of a lightweight metamorphic rock not native to this world,” Zaronia answered. “When we arrived here long ago, we brought a fraction of our lands with us. The natural gravitational pull of Medora’s atmospheric pressure enables our home to remain above the clouds, exactly where we draekons belong. As you can see, up here we are free to be ourselves.”

  Alex could see that. Because it wasn’t just the islands that captivated her. It was also the m
ultitude of draekons inhabiting them.

  The magnificent creatures were everywhere. Some were soaring lazily through the skies, some were bathing in the lakes and waterfalls splashed across the islands, some were napping in the sunshine—draekons of all sizes and colours filled her vision.

  “Does the rest of Medora know you’re up here?” Alex asked, amazed that such a place could exist.

  “The Meyarins are aware of our existence, though few have the privilege of ever seeing Draekora for themselves,” Zaronia said. “We tend to value our privacy. However, we do allow them to partake in the collection of the Ter’a Ora Vorren—the Pool of Tears—twice a year to replenish their supplies.”

  Before Alex could ask what supplies the Meyarins could possibly need from the Draekorans, let alone from something called the ‘Pool of Tears’, a shadow emerged from beneath the cave’s edge, causing Alex to skitter backwards.

  With a muted thump, Xiraxus landed on the outcropping of the cavern tunnel, his tail aloft and helping him keep his balance on the precarious ledge.

  “Alex!” he greeted, sounding overjoyed to see her. “I came as soon as I felt you were awake.”

  Knowing the only explanation for his stalkerish statement was the bond that was supposedly now between them, Alex asked, “Any chance you want to explain this bond that keeps getting mentioned? Kyia—one of the Meyarins—also said something about me ‘shining with the binding of a draekon’, or something like that. What are you all talking about?”

  “All will be answered soon,” Zaronia said, outstretching her wings and prompting Alex to duck lest she wanted to lose an eye. Then the great purple draekon launched herself off the edge of the cavern and into the sky.

  “Come on,” Xiraxus told Alex, circling carefully on the cavern edge until his side faced her. “Everything will be explained at the Kyvalon. Everyone’s waiting for us there.”

  Alex raised her eyebrows, wondering who ‘everyone’ was and what ‘Kyvalon’ meant. Her inner translator appeared to be letting her down on the word’s interpretation.