Dragon Dawn (Dinosaurian Time Travel) (2 page)

Chapter 2

Time bears all things away, even our minds.

~Virgil,
Ecloges

Fifteen years later, in Moozrab’s Royal City.

Tasha. Earth. Harry. NASA. Kris
.

Sometimes, at the oddest moments, the unintelligible words of a strange language filled the head of Dawann-dracon. Some words were even pronounced with a blunt “s” rather than a proper hiss. Never in her life had she heard anyone utter such sounds.

Puzzled, she looked around her bed-nest chamber, then into her hand mirror, and studied her reflection. A lovely face, pale green with finely wrought features, stared back. Feathery black lashes framed her green eyes, while long feathers cascaded off her head, black with a rainbow sheen. She had been told she was the fairest saurian in the Solar System, yet she found herself out of sorts, for the image in the mirror brought no satisfaction. Waves of uncertainty coursed through her.

Tasha. Earth. Harry. NASA. Kris
. 

What is happening to me?
she thought.
Why do I seem to remember the words of a foreign tongue? Or is it merely gibberish? Am I losing my mind to madness?
   

Last week, she recalled awakening in her bed-nest, her head tucked beneath her arm, warm and safe, yet feeling strangely discomfited, like a lost soul staring out of alien eyes. Since then, her mind had been possessed by unfamiliar speech and fleeting images, some so bizarre they seemed impossible to comprehend. 

Dawann closed her eyes and let her imagination roam. Like her quick, episodic dreams, a mystifying vision flittered through her brain. She took a breath and concentrated on the image. What had she just seen? 

Then, quite unexpectedly, she knew. Eyes closed against the world, she saw a face unlike any she had envisioned or even imagined: intelligent hazel eyes stared out of tanned flesh, the pupils round, large – and so different from her own vertically slit ones – the features tightly sculpted with a square jaw and a prominent nose, the head covered with thick, yellow hair. 

Hair?
Her heart beat wildly as she visualized the small, furred rat-mammals, the preferred food of the worker drones and other slaves. Mammals were the only things that possessed hair, weren’t they? How could the face of her imagination have hair on the top of its head? How? It wasn’t natural. In fact, in the world of the saurians, she knew it would be viewed as a terrifying apparition. 

Dawann sat still as she fought down the feeling of dread, but, to her amazement, her imagination blazed forth in the next moment. She watched as the creature’s face took on varied facial expressions. First, the brow furrowed, and then the lips pursed. Finally, with amazement, she watched as it leaned forward and bared its teeth to her. 

Oh, what could it mean? Bared teeth? It was the darkest of images, the stuff of deepest nightmares.

And yet, on impulse, Dawann imagined herself baring her own teeth to the creature and this took her by surprise. In response, the mammal’s toothy expression expanded until it seemed to fill its face. Was it making a friendly gesture? Suddenly, she felt warmth toward it, as if it were one of her own kind, as if it were special. Indeed, unbelievably, she realized this strange being had once been very important to her. 

A question, full-blown and all consuming, surged to mind.  Had she loved this human – yes, the word was
human
– in another place and time?

Her eyes opened. Fears forgotten, she pondered the faint echoes of another universe. 

Another universe? But how could that be? The greatest thinkers in the Solar System believed there was no life beyond the temporal existence. You were conceived, you lived, and you died. Life was therefore very precious. Even though scientists had extended life to an average span of two hundred years, it was at the whim of the Goddess how long you lived. 

There was no other existence, though. Only the here, the now.

Yet Dawann had lived somewhere else once, hadn’t she? On the blue-water planet, on Shurrr.
No, it was called
Earth
then
. Her mind roiled, brimming with impossible thoughts.
Earth and Shurrr are the same place, but how?

She swallowed, suddenly afraid, yet not willing to suppress her outlandish thinking. Somehow she had been born as a human on Earth. And in that other existence she had traveled by spaceship to a neighboring world, a place called...
Mars
.

She looked out the window, seeing the ruddy sands of Moozrab, the glowing hills beyond the palace walls, this saurian colony called Missloo.
Holy Mother She-Goddess, this is
Mars
. We call it Moozrab, but it’s
Mars. 

She trembled, her feelings an unsettling mixture of fear and astonishment. When was her other life? How had everything changed?
What was she remembering?

Dawann abruptly recalled something more from that previous existence; she’d known and loved someone named...

Gus
.
Yes
. She knew with certainty the human in her vision, the one with yellow hair, was a male named Gus.

She glanced around, eyes wide. Nothing made sense any more, absolutely nothing.

She leapt to her feet and dashed across her bedchamber. Without looking back, she withdrew from the room, quickly closing the door behind her.

Gus. Gus. Gus
.

Gus!
 

As she ran down the long corridor, toward the Great Hall of Statues, the name echoed in her mind. The clatter of her toe claws against the polished stone floor shattered the silence, but she did not stop. Entering the hall, her gaze swiftly passed over statues of marble, gold, silver-gilt, and jade. 

She moved on, streaking past renditions of the Keeper and his favorite courtiers, including a new sculpture of her by the acclaimed artist, Eni-dracon. At any other time, she would have paused to admire her statue, for it was a beautiful work, carved from the finest Shurrrian jade, its translucent color perfectly matching her skin tone.

But she didn’t care about it now. She wanted to find only one piece – and one piece alone.

Her limbs ground to a halt before the statue of the Mother and Child. By the brilliant, cutting-edge artist, Cree-dracon, the sculpture had been carved from green-tinged marble, the fine tracings of muscle, arteries, and sinew giving it the appearance of living tissue. 

Dawann searched the Great Hall. Confident she was alone, she studied the lifelike statue.  The feathers on the mother’s head were superbly rendered, as was the downy covering on the baby’s skin. The mother was bent over, her lips lovingly pressed against the hatchling’s tiny mouth. For the saurian race, it was a daring rendition of a startling idea; that a mother would actually care for and nurture her child.

Dawann stared at the statue, at the beauty and wonder of it. She closed her eyes and hugged herself, imagining a downy hatchling in her arms. Now, she regurgitated into its little mouth. And then, she watched it swallow the food.

She paused, reeling, for a feeling of utter emptiness overwhelmed her. She wanted to hold and feed a child – her own child – more than anything in the world.

Touching herself on the belly, she looked down at her chest, suddenly possessed by the vision of an infant suckling at her swollen, pink breast.

Stunned, Dawann reached up and felt her flat chest. She extended her arm and stared at her naked, green, snakelike skin. Breasts? Pink skin? In the name of the She-Goddess, what was she thinking? What did her visions mean?

But Dawn had possessed two soft, rounded breasts on her chest, hadn’t she? 

Dawn
?
Dawann-dracon stood rooted, not even daring to breathe, as a distant voice rose in her thoughts. Dawn. So there it was, the name of her twin soul. She had once been someone called Dawn.

“Dawn? Dawann?” she whispered. The similarity between her name and that of her vision startled her, made her feel more fearful than ever. 

Turning, she stared at a full-length mirror hanging on the wall. Slowly, with tentative steps, she inched toward the looking glass. Uncontrollably shivering, she dropped her gaze as she halted before it, her eyes tightly shut, afraid of what she might see.

Inexplicably, Dawann sensed the presence of someone else, a watcher, and she forced herself to look up. But there was nothing unusual in the reflection, nothing strange. Swallowing, she couldn’t shake the feeling someone was there, yet her mind railed against it and she turned to go. Suddenly, she heard something faint, like the soft tinkling of Shurrrian shells on a wind chime. She whirled around just as the mirror shimmered and cracked, shattering into a thousand fragments. 

Dawann leapt away, but to her surprise no shards of glass fell, her side of the mirror still intact, the floor spotless. Incredible as it seemed, the mirror appeared to have broken from the inside, the pieces falling back into the looking glass, revealing another world. 

Staring back from the depths, an unfeathered biped had replaced her own reflection, a creature with distinctively mammalian features, including dark brown hair on its head and five fingers on each hand. 

Dawn? Human Dawn?
The nictating membranes rolled over Dawann’s irises, and she feared she would lose consciousness. She breathed deeply and forced her eyes to clear. The vision of Human Dawn had vanished, the mirror now whole, and her saurian reflection stood there, as it had always been.

Hissing aloud, Dawann wheeled about and stumbled blindly, frantically, out of the hall. 

She raced down the corridor. For the barest moment, she wanted to escape this universe. Her world was now upside down. Reality turned inside out. What had happened? Was she actually losing her mind? 

Dear Goddess
, she prayed,
please, help me, save me
––

Without warning, she ran headlong into someone tall and strong, the shock of contact forcing her to focus her gaze once more. The Keeper. The Exalted One. The most dreaded and mighty Lord of the Solar System.

“What is it, my pet?” The Keeper’s hawklike face expressed concern as he held Dawann at arm’s length. He was naked except for an imperial sash of blue silk, which exactly matched his eyes. The muscles of his body were hard, his genital pouch bulging, proof of his power – and interest in her.

Dawann looked around. Dozens of bejeweled, perfumed, and naked saurian courtiers and heavily muscled bodyguard drones stood behind him. Most wore blue contacts over their irises, a new style which Dawann had resisted adopting. The gossips at court had already spread their poison, noting she did this at her own peril, not realizing the Keeper had told her in private he loved her green eyes. 

“Dawann?” the Keeper asked.

He sniffed the air, and she knew from his intense stare her body still wafted the scent of fear. His eyes narrowed as he studied Dawann’s face, then he dismissed his followers with a sharp hiss and a flick of his powerful tail. 

“Leave us now,” he demanded.

They obeyed without a word. Bowing, they backed away and then to a saurian they whirled about and rushed off. Only the Keeper’s senior bodyguard, a towering, fang-jawed, dragon-green mutant named Slaven-varool, remained behind. 

Dawann waited in breathless silence, watching as the fiercesome Slaven fingered the hilt of his laser knife. 

“Go to my chambers,” the Keeper ordered Slaven. His tone was now more even-tempered, yet his great tail trembled as if he had the urge to whip someone.

Slaven cast a brief, icy glare at Dawann. “As you wish, my lord,” he said as he backed out of his presence, then turned and left.

The Keeper waited until the last of Slaven’s footfalls had died. “What is it, Dawann?” he asked, staring into her eyes. This time, he lowered his head to her neck and lightly touched his teeth to her skin.

Dawann’s stomach knotted, for the Keeper’s gesture was filled with implicit meaning. Immediately, she let herself go limp in his arms, showing complete submission to his will. 

“My throat is at your mercy,” she said.

Into her earhole, he whispered, “What did you see?”

“I...” Before she could get the thought out, her brain rebelled, and her mouth clamped shut.
No
, she told herself.
You must not say anything to him
.

His head reared back, his bronze skin deepening in a show of anger. “Tell me.”  

Dawann forced herself to calm. She concentrated on the Keeper’s head feathers. Shiny as polished copper blades, they had recently been dressed with fragrant bango oil. She inhaled the sweet scent and lied, “I saw a Shurrr rat, my lord. By the statues. It merely startled me. They are so filthy.”

His baleful expression cleared, replaced by a look of disgust. “A Shurrr rat? In the Great Hall?”

“Yes. I overreacted, my lord. The rat must have escaped from the kitchens. The drones are sometimes careless.”

“I see.” He released his grip and stroked his chin.