Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology (32 page)

“
Ascultă-ne, vorbește-ne, ajută-ne
,” Ana's voice said, in incantation.

She whispered, so quietly only I could hear.
Speak to us, help us
. There was no response and the yawning void in my soul rose. For a moment I wished the dragon would descend on us then, and erase us body and spirit.

Then the tingle began in my hands, and in the black void inside my mind a light pricked. I saw …

I saw myself, rising on the back of a dragon. No, a Dragon. No … it was both. It was Kodály as I saw her in my mind, as only I could see her, alive and breathing and swimming through the air, a creature of light and fire. Under my hands and through my forehead I felt her come alive, as alive as if I were in the saddle, and more alive, because I could see in my mind what to do and how to do it, and feel in my heart a yearning beyond anything that had ever been.

It came to me that Ana was no longer there. I was terrified to open my eyes, afraid this vision would fade if I tried to subject it to normal sight, but if I was going to get in the air on Kodály I'd have to look where I was going.

My eyes opened, and there was Ana, strapping herself into her saddle. “Come on,” she said, as if we were going for an afternoon ride. “She's dying to get airborne.” Ana's smile was dazzling. My fear left me. I could still feel Kodály in my chest, pulling on me. I wanted this as badly as she did.

Two running steps put my right foot in the stirrup and I swung myself over her back, my hands flying over the console, locking in my legs, clipping the cube back in place, and I realized that Kodály was doing these things before my fingers registered the commands. All I had to do was think it, and it happened, and the same was true for her; she told me to lean forward, all the way down, for her launching leap, and I did. I felt Ana's hands grip my waist. She heard it too.
 

Kodály gave a great leap, almost straight up, snout first into the deepening blue. My goggles were small help; the rush of wind almost tore my helmet from my head, and made talking impossible. But I didn't need to talk. I could hear Kodály as if she were myself, and I felt inexpressible joy from Ana, all bound together. We rose swiftly, Kodály's wings buzzing, and the sun strengthened against her belly as we arrowed almost vertically into the sky.

I could not see the dragon. It goes without saying I couldn't hear it. It could be anywhere.

I should have been afraid. Any moment the dragon could come from above, below, from any point on the sphere and rip into us, Kodály's delicate skin and ultralight bones crumpling under the onslaught, and down we would go. Instead I exulted. I had never been alive. I would never again be content, an ant on the ground, my head in the dirt.

 
I felt Kodály in my cells, as much myself as I was. She was flying, I was flying.

More, though. Someone else was with me, a warm, wild presence, utterly unlike mine or Kodály's, but somehow a blend of us both. I knew it was Ana.
This is what it is to be whole
, I thought.
I never knew.

The three of us mounted above the mountains and hovered there. We reached out, looking at the village, damaged but still not terribly, as if the dragon were reluctant to punish, but felt compelled. The dragon himself had vanished.

A basic, elementary error, to neglect to look above me.

He dove, a green and amber missile, just off Kodály's left wing, spinning us, and the drag of the aerodynamic wash hurled us down. My stomach lurched as we plummeted, towed along, Kodály fighting to regain control as we reached out to the dragon, frantic to make some connection.

He screamed, trilling his heartbreak, and we called and called again and still he did not hear us. He dived at the village, another attack imminent, and all three of us shouted as one, aloud, in our minds, with our hearts, in every way we had.

“We're sorry. We did not know. Forgive us.”

The dragon's dive leveled out above the treetops, and it rolled over on its back and gazed upward at us.
 

And then the pain. The anger. The fury and lust for revenge, the righteousness, the unquestioning need to eliminate the threat. We felt the dragon's rage and it shocked the wind from our chests. An inferno of hatred engulfed us and forced a choked cry from our throats. Loneliness. Agony. The breaking of a mighty heart. We lost lift and plummeted again toward the earth.

Against this tide of misery we sent understanding. Companionship. Peace.

We broadcast awe at his magnificence, pain at his bereavement, beseeching for his mercy. It was no tongue man can speak, simply the joining of one creature to another, mind to mind and soul to soul.
 

 
For millennia, humans had written and sung legends about the dragon, a creature of empathy, of supernatural power. We had no idea.

It still was not enough. We could feel the dragon readying the scorching flame, searching for a new target, but Kodály refused to give up. In the console, the cube began to play. Re-enacting the day, images and sound scrolled through our minds, through the dragon's mind, fused as we were; I couldn't find a reason for this. How could the recording of his dead mate's body not make things worse?

But I had forgotten. At the end, as I prayed and gave honor to the dead, the scene unleashed a shattering grief as the dragon saw and felt our sadness and our deep respect.

Had any one of us attempted this on our own, without the support of the others, we could only have been overwhelmed by the psychic power of the dragon, crushed by his boundless suffering, driven mad by it. But we were not alone, and the three of us, sisters, joined as one, were enough. We could stand the tide of pain, embrace it, and send back in its place soothing calm.

At first I thought it would still be too little, as the dragon considered the town, but then we felt his agony crest and recede. He had heard us. The fiery snout came up and sniffed the wind, and fury decayed into mere wretchedness.

The dragon screeched his understanding, rose to eye us in wonder—we felt it from him like the rays of the rising sun—then wheeled twice around the smoldering village and flew off, mighty wings carrying him over the peaks to the west, into the setting sun.

* * *

The corps was not ready for what I reported. I kept most of the details to myself, but in every important respect, Ana's report and mine coincided exactly. Imre was the first to reject it out of hand, and send me for evaluation.

“Sorry, and all that. But what you've reported is impossible,” he said.

“You watched the recording?” I said, knowing he would have, and that he would have seen nothing. What had really happened was not on any cube.

“I did. There's nothing there to see, except that you flew against a dragon. You're lucky to be alive, but you're also clearly insane.”

That was that. I needed the rest, anyway, after the ordeal. And getting away to central HQ in Vienna was relaxing. I kept feeling the pull, though, from Kodály and from Ana.

Based on her excellent work, I recommended her for a promotion to the Dragonflies. When I returned to full duty, she came to see me, riding her Sorescu, out of Bistrica. She was still so green, so reckless, but she embraced me with abandon and flew with me the same way.

“She's not awake, not like Kodály,” Ana said, when she was sure no one else was listening.

“She will be,” I said, my forehead pressed to Sorescu's head. “When you need her.”

We fly together often, Ana and Sorescu, Kodály and I.
 

We go looking for dragons.

About Cj Lehi

Christopher Jones (alias Cj Lehi) is known mainly for short stories, having published a collection of his own (
And the Kitchen Sink
), fifteen solo stories on Patreon (patreon.com/cjlehi), as well as with Solstice Shadows Publishing and this lovely anthology with Incandescent Phoenix. Not limited to fiction, Cj has published dozens of technical articles in newspapers and magazines (mainly on mortgage finance), and his nonfiction book
Mastering the Six Channels of Marketing
was an Amazon Top 25 book in Advertising. Cj resides in Lehi, UT, with his wife Jeanette, their eight children, two cats, and a stray hummingbird.

The Witch's Son

by Diane Dubas

The city always made Nico nervous. Too many people, too many strange smells, too much
colour
. He preferred his pod by the seaside; he preferred that his customers come to him. But it wasn't a customer who had summoned him, not tonight.
 

Nico made his way through the main streets lined with immaculate buildings, where sun filtered through coloured stained glass and made rainbows on the sidewalk. There was so much green here, so much
life
. He couldn't say for sure what it was that put him off so much. It had to do with the infrastructure, somehow. Buildings were still made of concrete and metal, even if they were lined with plant life and breathable to the world. They still weren't natural.
 

He made a sharp turn down an alleyway devoid of light, a sliver through time when alleyways were always devoid of light, and therefore life. The walls of these buildings were dying from the lack of sun, even despite obvious attempts to bring them back. Nico dragged his fingers along the wall, dried vines and dead leaves catching on his skin. The city was no place for a witch.

The alley made way for more twisting, tight corridors between and behind buildings and the deeper Nico went, the more claustrophobic he became. His breathing hitched and caught as he was forced to slip sideways down a narrow passageway.

“Jupiter's rancid breath,” he muttered as his satchel caught on an overgrown vine.

He paused to yank it away and kept moving. There was nothing to fear. He knew this, but still his heart pounded and his senses went into overdrive. He could feel the warmth of magic, unbidden and swirling under his skin. He'd have to ramble off a few charms just to calm himself before he made it to the Red Door. He couldn't go in
there
jacked up on magic, who knew what would happen?

By the time he reached the Door, he was sweating beneath his jacket and irritated to the high hills of Mars. Whispering under his breath, he muttered charms to release some of his pent up magic. He scowled when half of the vines on the wall he was leaning against not only came to life, but were blooming radiant night flowers, each a deep purple.

“You're a two bit wiz, Nic,” he mumbled to himself, disgusted at his own fear.

He drew in a deep breath and raised his hand to knock on the door, massive and red, as advertised. Three sharp raps, a thirty second pause, then seven light raps, as instructed. And then he waited. And waited. He rolled his eyes and yanked his communicator off the arm of his jacket, scrolling through his messages until he found the summons. Three sharp raps, a thirty second pause, then seven light raps. He hadn't missed anything. The date was correct. The location was correct. His irritation was abject.

Muttering curses, he snapped his fingers and amplified the knocks.

“
ALL RIGHT
.”

The words were a wall of sound that sent a wave of vibration through Nico's body, every cell bouncing inside his skin. It was exactly the sort of scare tactic she had used when he was little—only instead of scaring him, it increased his irritation.

“You could at least answer the damn door,” he hissed to no one.

There was movement in his pocket, a warm, pointed scurrying. Nico raised his hand to cover it.

“It's all right,” he murmured. “She's just being mean again.” Nico paused as the door opened and squinted at the shard of bright white light that escaped into the alleyway. “Unnecessarily.”

The woman at the door was not one he would have recognized if he had passed her on the street. She had billowing red-gold hair that dangled past the small of her back and her face was unlined. He wouldn't have known her at all except for her mismatched eyes—the grey eye that matched his own, and the other, black as pitch.

“Nothing I do is unnecessary,” she said, her voice like a tinkling bell.

Nico rolled his eyes and dropped his hand. No need to call her attention to his pint-sized companion; she'd just take all the credit and leave nothing for him. He pushed past the beautiful, unfamiliar woman.

“Is that any way to greet your mother?” she said, her voice as light and airy as if she were speaking to a lover.

Nico shot her a sideways glance and wry frown. “Hello, mother,” he said flatly. “You can drop the act.”

The witch sidled up beside him and rested her chin on his shoulder, again as though their relationship were something other than it was. Nico hated it when she played these little games. Appearance spells were her specialty, that and conning whichever hapless member of high society had played into her hands. The Red Door was synonymous of all things forbidden: sex, drugs, magic, and petroleum. Are you a duke with a penchant for diesel engines? The Red Door is your place. A countess with a kink for motor oil? The witch behind the Red Door is there for you.
 

It was only once Nico had made it past the entranceway that he realised they weren't alone.
 

“Nicomedes, behave,” the witch hissed in his ear, quiet and fast and in her own voice.

She swished past him, a bevy of satin skirts and billowing hair. For a split second, he saw her as she was, hobbled and much older, a grizzled shell of a woman held together by magic and spite. He'd never understood his mother and why she insisted on living the way she did; she had to get something out of all her malice.
 

Nico followed her into a sitting room. On one side of the den, tucked in a corner, was a man sniffing a bowl of gasoline. The faint odour turned Nico's stomach and he willed himself to think of the scent of sea spray on the wind. He longed for home.
 

In the centre of the room, a small group of well-dressed people passed a smoking roll of paper around, heavy grey smoke tendrils reaching toward the ceiling. A woman laughed, a high-pitched, jarring sound that sent Nico's spine rigid with distaste. He glared at the back of his mother's head and scowled. Oh, what company she kept. Perhaps his problem was not so much with the city and rather with the one who bade him come to it.