Dragon Aster Trilogy Read online

  7: CALM BEFORE THE STORM

  Cirrus continued to wave the golden fairy pendant from its silver chain back and forth by his index claw. It had become a careful art of discipline for him to so much as hold the delicate jewelry, for he had only to forget about it momentarily to risk crushing it with his size. But he wouldn’t break it or lock it away as he should have. No, it was not something he could ever let go of.

  His eyes began to grow heavy as he had been hypnotizing himself to sleep without realizing it. Between being asleep and awake, he could see the thin, silver strings weaving through the air, ground and trees behind him, like of a finely crafted spider web that stretched for eternity. But none of the Thread connected to what had formed the craftsmanship of the pendant in his hand. He couldn’t help but lose hope that he might ever find his best friend’s killer. Or the other end to the Threads of the pendant that might have the answers he sought.

  With their King still missing, Time felt as if it had frozen the Torian Continent, even as it remained a constant warmth to hide such. It was three hundred years after the Last War and all his kind wanted was the power and edge to end the conflict. The one key that would seal the Fate of the other Continent with a similar Prophecy. The clue he had in his hand, but his mother’s pendant would not lead him to it, as if it too feared for the future. We won’t be fighting like this forever, his thoughts whispered to renew a promise to Nafury’s memory.

  “There will always be another war, and when there isn’t, there will always be my father to make one. There’s no escaping it.”

  Cirrus was startled out of the trance as the pendant suddenly twisted. It sent all his senses rushing to it in fear that it would drop. Every once in a while the gold fairy would give him a Dream, as if to hint the direction he should fly next. But the closer he tried to get to it, the further the Threads pulled away. Then he would wake up, remembering only a small fraction of what he had seen. Perhaps his Ancient was not enough to decipher a Dream, outside of the need to craft him into a creature of warfare. Perhaps he was just a Nightmare who didn’t truly Dream at all, or have any capacity to understand one.

  But he had seen the Caelestis once before. It was a brief glance, but she was real. Maybe the answers were in not waking up.

  The only Dreams that did not leave him on waking were the ones within it of his mother. Sometimes he would hear her voice, like a gentle chime of song that would call his mind to a moment with complete calmness. She had spoken to him before he was born and even named him. But he would never see her, because he had killed her before opening his eyes to the world for the first time.

  Cirrus turned his light blue eyes to the trees as his senses picked up on the Keol winds changing. His own aeri energies began to wane from his never-ending contemplation. The ground smelled like a burning storm when the life energies of the phelan passed under Aster. They travelled over the hot ashes, smoke and fires with the ease that he could soar through the clouds in the sky. Only as he looked up at the stars and the moon, with the Soph Aur having settled within the safety of Toria hours ago for the night, there were no clouds. Just his Dreams of them that he would never see or touch for real.

  The Texts that had survived the first Aster from the memories of the Ancients and Eminor spoke of the Fay. Powerful spirits that could manipulate Fate and all the Threads between life and death.

  For Cirrus, it meant an even greater possibility. Nafury’s mother, Serena, had prophesied that her son would be the one to lead the Asterian Caelestis, Asil, back to Aster and end the war. The war was coming and at some point between now and the future, was this Fay to stop it.

  The necklaces were a symbol of the friendship that bound Serena and his mother to each other when they were alive. Now it remained as such on being passed to himself and Nafury. When they were alive, Alexia and Nafury’s mother were both powerful Seers. Their humanity may have made their bodies more fragile, but their spirits and foresight were unmatched.

  Cirrus remembered the fits Nafury used to have when the Prince was still a child, when he would beg Serena for the necklace. He had taunted him on too many occasions on how his matching one was magical, and that in turn eventually led to Serena scolding him as if he were not thirteen years older than her son. But he had never managed to get her truly angry at him, even when he tried to provoke her.

  He had always wanted to ask her why she never reprimanded him as he deserved, but for that answer, it didn’t take a mirror. There was only one reason he could think of, and that was how he looked too much like his mother, Alexia. He had killed her best friend, yet she never hated him for it. He deserved to be hated for all of it and now he was left forever-wondering to why he had been spared.

  Cirrus believed from the moment they had found Nafury’s body in Mer City that his friend had found the Caelestis, and he had been killed for it. If there was the possibility that Asil was still alive, it wouldn’t matter to him what Threads she was caught in, he would find her. It was the only thing, the only wish left that he could give either of them. Whether the dead heard answered prayers or not.

  He looked back at the pendant as another memory returned to him. How would taking her from Earth make anything easier?

  “This is her world. Aster, not Earth. That and she would only have to take one look at you to believe all of our kind are beautiful, and want to stay forever.”

  The pendant twisted again, and the dark pupil in Cirrus’ light blue eyes grew wider. He had never considered himself beautiful. The daorans were beautiful; both in and out of their somned forms. Their dragon bodies were layered in hornless, unscratched, glass-like scales. They would change color to match the energy of their vibrant souls. The dragoons had no such beauty; for if their bodies did change in a similar way, then it was well-hidden under the thicker armor of their scales and horns that stayed the color of their Sylvan hair.

  Cirrus wasn’t so much as a color; for his white scales could just as easily be a part of the white, lifeless sand he lay on. If his soul held any color at all, he would need a deep-enough scar on his body to find it.

  He brought his tail around to his eyes and sat up, before looking closely at it and all its scars. Some were from the raids on the Falls camps. Some were from the phelan he had chased from the Torian Continent. Deep as many of them were, only the red color of his blood could be seen pulsing through his thinnest skin. His soul may have been locked inside him for years before, but he didn’t have white or red hair. He had his mother’s blond hair. So he settled on the conclusion that he wasn’t soulless. Not yet.

  Cirrus closed his eyes as he held the gold fairy in his claws, looking for the calmer Threads of love. He needed to remember it—all of it. It was the only emotion that kept him from turning into the sand under him that had long been separated from a greater form and forgotten. The feelings of love that would always remain within his thoughts. Even if Nafury would never make new memories with him in this life.

  It was the start to the answers he wanted, as he could feel his Ancient stir from its sixth sense on feeling something. He let his Ancient show him its sight to what it sensed. A familiar, golden Thread appeared to glow brighter as it sewed its way through the rest of the world’s Animus Threads.

  Cirrus gently set his claws on it as he had many times, never finding the remaining memories that his friend had locked away from reach with his death. But what he didn’t expect was something to respond to the touch, as it caught his soul within him in turn with a warning that his Ancient would make him unsomn. He had touched the life Threads of someone very much alive. What are you trying to show me, Aragmoth?

  The aeri energy within himself began to rise as he reached out with his psi. It sounded like a heartbeat. On the other end wasn’t a spirit or a dying memory—it was a living soul.

  He pulled his senses away from the Animus Thread and looked north. It was the same direction the phelan had shifted the winds of the Keol in. They risked their own lives by potentially stumbling on a patrol
further inland. But that would be the least of their worries now.

  He spread his wings in a rush of sand and let his emotions lift him into the sky, before folding its wind with his aeri to allow him to travel through it even faster.

  Nafury had wanted the Caelestis for peace and absolution. If there was a way to bring such a peace, he would do what he could to ensure it. If only to keep in hand the path given to him, so he might reach the answers to his kind’s true destiny.

  For lying on a bed of flowers, he had at long last found his fairy.

  8: FIELD RUSH

  Sybl woke up to the fragrance of flowers and the uprising snow that came with them. She was still trapped in the dream and running, falling and trying to reason her way out of it wasn’t working.

  She reached out to where the demon had left the mask, as its carved-out smile grinned back at her. Sybl picked it up and put it face-down back on the flowers.

  If wishes into dreams didn’t melt, neither would the nightmare release her back to reality.

  She rolled over to her back and looked up at the moon that glowed down on her. Both it and the stars seemed closer, as if tempting her to reach out and pull them down. For a moment, it looked like a bright blue star had hastily rushed through them.

  As if to remind her that she couldn’t fly a harsh breeze passed over her body, but it didn’t die down. It lifted her necklace up from her neck, and she looked at it before catching it in hand as she sat up. It had the effect of stopping the wind as her tangled brown hair fell all at once. The pollen-snow seemed to even pause in its rising, stopping entirely in place. The only explanation to any of it was a gentle smell of lavender around her.

  Sybl let go of the necklace, and the breeze started again. The field remained utterly still. Something watched her from nearby, as the hairs on her arms stood up. Her instincts told her that it wasn’t something that could fit into the mask.

  She touched her necklace, and the harsh breeze stopped again. “Okay show yourself already!”

  Something moved in the field, and she wasn’t sure what it was in the darkness it blended into. The ground shook, and she began to fear the worst as she glanced back at the canyon, remembering the things that had attacked her. Now she had unwittingly gotten their attention again.

  Getting to her feet, Sybl made a break for the trees as the ground continued to shake. Only something huge could be climbing out of the chasm this time. But before she could reach the trees, a heavier darkness passed over the grass. It landed in her path and moved to match her when she tried to change it.

  Sybl looked back as the monster had reached the top of the canyon, as a giant foot appeared and set down on the edge. It was similar to the winged cougar—only it looked more like a lion. The ground was shaking because it was the size of a house.

  The massive winged-cat set its green eyes like a watchtower her way and kept her in a frozen spotlight. It spread its wings upward like a peacock would into a galaxy of colors. Its semi-transparent feathers used the light of the moon to turn the field into its chosen shade by the moment. But the display wasn’t to impress anyone but the reaper of death. The shadow of the monument’s feathers revealed that between the black hole and the house-sized cat, was an even bigger monster of a dragon.

  Sybl only caught half the features of it in her eyes before she decided to take her chances with the black hole and ran across it.

  The feathers of the cat tightened and closed its display of colors, before unleashing a torrent of feathers that poured down as arrows. Before death could reach her, the dragon did first. He pulled her under him, and used his wings like thick shields to guard them during the onslaught. When the last feather fell, he made a spin so fast he had gone straight through her. His tail collided into the wolf-like creature that had emerged from the dark portal, and sent the black monster in a fierce tumble across the field.

  Sybl was already cowered into a duck, as the creature got back to its feet and let out an infuriated growl of fangs like those of a sabertooth tiger. This can’t be happening. She looked in her terrified fear as the ground shook again and the winged cat folded its wings up like lightning antennas. Now what? The cat began to walk over to them for a more direct strike.

  The dragon vanished again.

  “We need to get off this field.”

  “YOU THINK?” Sybl shouted back at the new voice in her head as the wolf began to calculate its next strike as it circled around her.

  “I need you to run for the trees in five.”

  She wasn’t given another option as the countdown started in her head with his voice and she stood up and made a break for it. The black monster came straight for her, but the dragon caught its flank in his claws and held it back, before they both exchanged glancing snaps of teeth and claws. The dragon was only slightly phased out of his invisibility, even amidst an all-out brawl that put the wolf at a serious disadvantage.

  The wings of the cat began to ripple upwards again, before they came down on the dragon and wolf like the snap from a whip of lightning, sending the two of them scattering to avoid the strike.

  Sybl reached the trees, but when she looked back, several more of the surreal black monsters appeared. In the least, it was enough to make the winged lion take to the air in retreat. Why the dragon didn’t take to the air to do the same, she didn’t know.

  The wolves set their full attention on the dragon then, before colliding with him in a rolling and spinning flurry of teeth and claws.

  “Keep running!”

  She could only listen to him, and hope that he would get himself off of the field with his own wings with her out of the way.

  9: PRISONED

  Cirrus regained consciousness as he felt Lintrance’s psi trying to get his attention.

  His older cousin looked down at him with his orange eyes, as the aeri light from the hallways of the dungeon was blocked out by his tall shadow.

  Cirrus tried to move, but his body refused him with numbness, as it had yet to realize that he was still alive and still needed feeling. “Where is she?”

  “Where is who?”

  “There was a girl—you have to send the High Guard out to find her!” Cirrus shouted at him as he tried to move again, managing only to turn his head and bring his arm to his side. He had been tied down in chains.

  “Easy there, you’re in no condition to go anywhere, not after you went berserk on us and forced me to do this. If that hadn’t been Jasper’s Pack that you angered, I’d be burying you right now.”

  Images of the fight surged painfully through his head as it felt like he was still being thrashed about in the middle of a battle.

  “You remember anything?”

  “I have to find her. Let me out of these chains!”

  Lintrance stepped back instead, as if to try and size his claim up.

  Cirrus pulled at the chains again, as his anger helped bring back all of his other feelings. But that wouldn’t get him out of this. He couldn’t stop thinking about her and whether she was alive. If he lost her now to the phelan, then it would have all been for nothing. His promise. Their last hope. He had to calm down.

  His Ancient found the concentration to find the tightly-bound air particles in his chains, and expanded them. His binds shattered and he sprung to his feet and ran out of the cell.

  “Cirrus!”

  “Debate crazy with me later!” Cirrus rushed past others in the Dragon Caverns and he didn’t stop until he reached the wind tunnels. He somned and dipped into the smaller chasm, then twisted through the tunnels and tight turns until he reached the larger Chasm outside. Flying higher, Cirrus headed for where he had left Sybl.

  “Hold up! I’m coming with you!”

  “Then keep up,” Cirrus shouted back at Lintrance, as the dark green dragon emerged from the tunnels in pursuit.

  10: SAVED

  Sybl didn’t know how long she had walked for, all she knew was that she was exhausted and thirsty. When she reached a small pond, her luck wit
h finding water had also found the demon cat.

  The surreal cougar stood there, waving back and forth on his two legs as the rattles on the sides of his mask shook. He stretched his brown wings and used them to keep his balance.

  “Have you had time to think about helping me?”

  Sybl was more interested in what he was carrying, as he dangled her running shoe back and forth in his claws like a lure. She looked down at her bare foot, not so much as remembering having ever lost it. Walking closer to the water she sat down on the sand and pondered her five bare toes. He could have only taken it recently, as her foot was still somewhat clean. Either way, the cat was becoming a nuisance of a magician to add to all her current problems.

  At least he wasn’t the size of a house.

  As if he sensed her thoughts on him, he spread his wings out at his sides longer like extra arms, and floated at high speed across the water, stopping his mask but a breath from her face.