danger –
Rising and falling, the plaything of the winds, steering through them by yielding to them –
That showed mastery of the air, more than any gymnastics in gentle thermals ever could.
Calling the lightning to herself as it leapt from cloud to cloud, letting it run over her skin and arc up into the thunderheads above, every scale, every spine outlined in white fire –
And a single momentary lapse of concentration would let the lightning flow through her instead of over her impervious skin, paralyzing her or even killing her.
Casting lightnings of her own, from wingtip to wingtip, or from wingtip to cloud –
Most dragons could arc while on the ground; only the ones with skill hard-won from years of practice could arc and fly. That Alara could even arc to another point was a measure of her skill, skill that had won her a most desirable mate after the last Dance.
If she had possessed lips, she would have licked them at the memory of Reolahaii, shaman of Waviina’s Lair. Long, lithe, lean – in color a dusky gold beneath the rainbow iridescence of his scales – a mind as swift as the lightning and a wit as sharp as his claws; in short, he was a combination Alara found irresistible. He was the FireRunner now, for both their Lairs, until the little one was born and she could resume her full duties. Double duty – twice the danger, for Running in so many Thunder Dances, but twice the thrill as well. And, unless circumstances threw them together again, it was unlikely they would meet except at Dances, much less become permanent mates. Neither his Lair nor hers would be willing to do without their shaman. The duties of the shaman were too time-consuming for either of them to make the three-day flight between the two Lairs very often. She permitted herself a moment of self-pity. A shaman’s life was not her own.
But Alara was not of the temper to wallow in self-pity for long. Duties, yes, she mused, but pleasures as well. Best of all was being the FireRunner –
There was nothing like it; choosing the fiercest of the weather patterns, forcing the lightning to hold back until the breaking point –
Then calling it, a hundred killer bolts at once, and streaking down out of the sky with the fire a spine’s length away from her tail, diving, falling like a stone out of the heavens and down, into a narrow cleft just wide enough for her to drop through it, lined on all sides with carefully placed jewels, gems that the lightning would tune and charge …
Gems winking, a rainbow of stars set in the walls, the rock itself a breath away from her wings, the air actually splitting with her passage, and the fires of heaven chasing her down into the earth – while the gems in her wake blazed until the cleft behind was alight with a hundred colors of glory –
Until at the last minute she would break through into the cavern beneath, spread her wings with a thunder of her own, and snap-roll out of the way as the last of the lightning discharged itself into the floor of the cavern, fusing the rock and sand at the contact point, and stray discharges crackled over her as she landed …
She started to sigh; then, when she couldn’t, recalled her form and purpose for being here. She was supposed to be contemplating Fire. Earth-fire. She didn’t think lightning counted.
She stretched her earth-senses again, sending them resolutely downward. She hoped she was doing it right. She wasn’t a shaman when she carried Keman. And all Father Dragon would tell her when she had left on this pilgrimage was: ‘Do what you feel is right.’ She still felt more than a little disgruntled by his apparent lack of cooperation. She knew it was part of a shaman’s work to give no direct answers, but she thought it was carrying things a bit too far to play the same game with another shaman!
And she could almost hear Father Dragon saying ‘Oh, no it isn’t …’
There were times when this business of being contrary got on her nerves, and she was the one being contrary!
But that was what she was supposed to do. She was supposed to keep the Kin awake; supposed to see that they didn’t become too complacent and look for easy answers. Or frivolous ones …
Easy answers and complacency were very much a danger among the Kin. Ever since they had come to this world, there had been very little to challenge them.
Alara herself had been born here, but she had memorized every tale and image Father Dragon had imparted to the younger shamans. Home was a place no one wanted to return to, a world of savage predators fully a match for a grown, canny dragon; of ice storms that blew up in a heartbeat and left the hapless dragon caught in them to freeze to death within moments of shelter; of ruthless competition for food. Their shape-shifting abilities had been forged of necessity, hammered into shape by competition, and honed by hunger and fear. Life was brutal, ruthless, and all too often, short. Then, one day, one of the Kin discovered something odd in the depths of a cavern he was exploring with an eye to making it a Lair.
One of the entrances off the main cavern gave off, not into a side cave, but into another world. And such a world! A place of green, growing forests, long, lazy summers, an abundance of food – and nothing, seemingly, large or savage enough to threaten them.
And yet not all of the Kin chose to escape through that Gate, after Shonsealaroni had stabilized it with one of his precious hoard-gems. Some stubbornly insisted that Home was better. In the end, perhaps half the Kin passed through – and the moment Shonsea took away his gem, the Gate collapsed.
By then, however, the Kin had learned how to create Gates of their own. Some of them had taken a liking to the place. Though accident and murder were the common shorteners of life among the Kin, if violent death could be avoided, a dragon lived a very long time indeed. In the new world, which they named ‘Peace,’ they discovered how long, and that the one common bane to the long-lived is boredom.
That was when some of the Kin took to world-hopping, seeking challenges and amusements.
There was certainly enough to keep them occupied here! Once Father Dragon discovered the elves and their slaves …
The first Gate had probably been a construct of the elves or something like them, or of a mage ill taught. Father Dragon suspected that it was, indeed, these elves, in an attempt ill directed to bridge the worlds, that bridged instead Home and Peace.
For when the Kin found the elvenkind, they learned that the elves themselves were alien to this place, and had built themselves a Gate to take them from a place in which their lives were imperiled to a place where they would be the masters. It was somewhat ironic that the Kin had been gifted with a Gate and thought only of escape, where the elves who had constructed it thought only of conquest. Father Dragon, who had studied the elvenkind the longest of any dragon, speculated that the peril the elves had found themselves in was a peril caused by their own actions. Alara had never yet seen nor heard anything to disprove that, and many things seemed in accord with that theory. The elvenkind occasionally spoke in Council of Clan Wars, the destruction of vast stretches of land, of strife by magic ‘until the rocks ran like water,’ and the overwhelming need to prevent another such conflict. There were no evidences of any warfare on a scale that vast here; conflict between Clans or individuals was kept within acceptable bounds.
So perhaps they warred until their own home-world was destroyed. Or perhaps they were the losers in a conflict that would permit the survival of no one but the winners. Another reason to keep our existence from them …
Only the humans were native; whatever level of culture they had achieved before
