The Waters of Nyra- Volume I Read online

  “NO!” the other cried.

  Thaydra withdrew, her claws hot. And wet. Why wet? She squinted in the darkness, struggling to see under the last star in the sky. Sun Fire’s entire back was scalded, covered with swollen, raw, and blackened flesh. The blistered skin seemed to move. It was moving, with little currents of blood running down to the earth. The membranes of her wings were nearly vanished, burned away, leaving curling scraps of flesh on bone.

  “It’s alright,” said Thaydra stupidly. Again, she tried not to think. To think was to find truth, Fuhorn said.

  But none of this can be true. This isn’t my life.

  “Please, don’t…” Sun Fire began. Her lips scarily moved. But she was calm, her voice still and controlled like the Reservoir on a windless day. “Just take…” she trailed off. Sun Fire squirmed, as if to rid a small discomfort. She wriggled, her brow crumpling with frustration. She wanted something.

  “What is it?” Thaydra asked. The fragile droplets of Thaydra’s vigor were evaporating into thin air, where not even the sincerest tears would replenish them. She stood helpless, unable to reverse the time.

  “I need Blaze,” murmured Sun Fire.

  Thaydra began muttering, words blurring together, Sun Fire coming in and out of focus. She felt faint. “Not on the same night,” she cried, speaking more to herself than her companion. “You can’t. Too much just happened. No more can happen.”

  “You can,” said Sun Fire.

  Thaydra hyperventilated. “Sun Fire, my darling Sun Fire, I can’t tough it out. I could never … do it without you. Not anything, ever. I need you.”

  Sun Fire somehow spoke with the clarity of full life.

  “Then you’ll see my eyes in his each day. And Blaze’s fangs, and his grandfather’s wings, and the rest of them. My little Blaze and your little Shadow: the first to be free. Because you made it so. You are an Agring, and you’ll make it so.”

  Sun Fire jolted. Her pupils thinned. She let out a long breath, the terminal kind. Thaydra moved closer. But then her friend spoke again.

  “I think I’m ….” Sun Fire blinked rapidly, her irises falling moon-like to her lower lids. Then those moons found the sky. “It won’t be bad, Thaydra. It will be…” She glazed and looked through Thaydra, fixated upon an image that no mortal could see. “…ours.”

  Sun Fire’s breath gently ceased, and her butterfly-yellow eyes reflected the gray night, forever silent. All was peace but for a desolate shudder from Thaydra, nestling beside her lost best friend. Nothing was left. Nothing was gained. A million platitudes whipped through Thaydra’s recollections, preaching how everything could change at the turn of a wave.

  We weren’t ready.

  Her mind misted over. She found herself in a great fog that she was neither eager nor curious to escape. Smog leisurely drifted over itself in this hollow place, uncovering one haze after another, all the same shade with the same comatose mystery. She watched it drift by.

  A color loomed beyond the haze. She squinted, vaguely interested. It was important. The real world came into focus once more. She saw Sun Fire’s awful, gorgeous body. But it was not Sun Fire that Thaydra had spotted. It was a light pink oval. Thaydra leaned forward and grasped the oval, wedging her claws beneath Sun Fire’s belly. From there she pulled out something round, spotted, and strangely familiar.

  “Little Blaze!” she exclaimed, looking around for her own egg. “Little Shadow!” It was a pace to her left, just where she had dropped it moments ago. She pulled it close, hugging it next to Sun Fire’s.

  I’ll free you, she promised. I will.

  Another roar erupted, this time ahead of her. The Sperk had landed, barreling in her direction, lethal intent in the spray of dust and stone scattering behind him. His eyes were whole. Not pierced. He was a mere bound away when another Sperk came from nowhere, crashing him to ground and pinning him as best she could.

  “Darkmoon, stop,” the second Sperk said. He struggled beneath her, trunk-like limbs slashing and ripping the soil as if it were water. Other Sperks landed, pinning him further, grabbing his snapping jaws. Thaydra trembled, a sole Agring in a monstrous crowd of blue behemoths. The air filled with murmurs, all heated, all anxious, all igniting the chills prickling in her bowels. They watched Thaydra, and she knew her end would be slow and horrid. But an end it would be.

  “Stay sound!” said the Sperk atop Darkmoon. “We can’t have her destroyed.”

  “Destroyed!” screamed Darkmoon, somewhere between a wail and a hiss.

  “We’ve lost three already,” said the other. She moved away from Darkmoon as more Sperks held him down. She looked angriest of all, but when Thaydra looked closely, she saw the other’s eyes filled with tears.

  “Thaydra cannot be killed,” she declared. “I know it’s criminal.” Her voice bled with sorrow as she turned back to Darkmoon. “It’s criminal, the loss of Royalwing. My sister, your mate. I know. But we’ve lost too many of them tonight.” She spat the last words like venom. “We can’t afford to lose Thaydra. Or the eggs.”

  Darkmoon’s nostrils flared, snorting as if to expel his insanity. Breath by breath he calmed, growing quiet. He glared at Thaydra. She looked back unblinking, their silence broken by steady thumps of blood upon the grass, dripping from four fresh wounds on his face.

  Finally, he spoke, in a voice so cavernous that the ground might have crumbled beneath them. “Thaydra Nammock, you bring the world to ashes.”

  Teeth clasped her neck. With the eggs bobbing upon her chest, now so void of hope and heart, Thaydra was dragged back to the Northern Coast just as the last star vanished and the rain finally fell.

  Part I

  Reservoir

  Chapter 1: Closed Wings

  Nyra, STOP!”

  The little red draggling ignored her brother’s shouts. They were faint as it was. Muffled behind wafts of sea brine and her own peppery breath, the calls seemed to come from across the ocean. She wished it so. Despite the white noise, he bothered her concentration. And she needed that above anything now. Concentration. However fleeting it would be.

  Fleeing along the jagged cliff top, she plastered her wings to her flanks, hoping to accelerate. But her footfalls forbade it, growing heavier with each stride. Her brother grew louder, so much so that she imagined even the deaf trees could hear him.

  “You’re being… ouch!” Blaze sprinted in hot pursuit, tripping over a rock hidden in the long grass. There was a brief silence as he regained himself, popping up like a frightened bird. “You’re acting impetuous! Why are you always impetuous?”

  Blood boiling, it took all of Nyra’s resolve to not look back. Instead she pictured his slate-gray face, hooked into the familiar grimace of a righteous sibling. Nyra felt a similar expression stiffening her jaws, but of the wrongful kind.

  “You’re impetuous!” Nyra panted, having no idea what the word meant, only that it was the latest slander in Blaze’s verbiage. He picked up words like chiggers in spring.

  Vanilla flowers nodded ahead, serene and lovely. Lifting her seven-spiked tail, she walloped the ground mid-stride, sending up a flurry of ivory petals. She was rewarded with Blaze’s cough. Still the patter of his feet did not dwindle, nor did his loquaciousness.

  “At least I’m not malevolent,” he spat grittily.

  That one she knew. Cruel. Spiteful. “At least I don’t fumble about like a dying fish!” she retorted, wishing she’d come up with a cleverer word for ‘fumble.’

  Blaze made an exasperated sound as he bobbed into her peripheral vision. “You know what you did. And he’ll catch us. Running only makes it worse.”

  A sting of dread trilled up her vertebrae. Lost in the sizzle of quarrel, she had nearly forgotten; it was not Blaze alone who chased her. Daring a look back, Nyra saw her brother in full, the black stripe between his wings arcing up and down with every bound. It reached all the way to his spiked tail, pearly and dangerous despite its small size. But not a one was as dangerous as the colossal beast to wh
ich they pointed. Upon thunderous strides, a terrible creature honed in so fast that Nyra shut her eyes, snapping her head forward again and wishing she dreamt.

  “We’ll be caught, anyway. I’m going to stop,” Blaze piped.

  Nyra’s eyes opened. “You can’t stop! You don’t have to stop. Just keep running.” She spoke on exhales.

  “I’m going to stop,” Blaze repeated.

  Nyra’s panic mounted, squashing out whatever revulsion she had toward her brother. If he gave up, she’d be alone with her small words and massive delinquency: a dreadful combination when wriggling out of trouble.

  “No, just keep going. It’s fine!” she said.

  Too late. Blaze jerked out of site in a great wumph. A blue blur thwacked Nyra’s back legs and she skidded several lengths in a painful tumble. She tripped head over wing and thumped snout first to the ground, disappearing beneath the yellow grass.

  It was quiet. Silence at last.

  The bad kind.

  Nyra sat up and coughed, shaking off. Her nose throbbed. Wetness dribbled down her lower lip and a twinge taunted her left fang. As a cloud of dust settled at her feet, she sighed. Her nose was about to be rubbed in something far more unpleasant than dirt.

  It was hardly her first time being chased down. Only last month she had reenacted fire breathing techniques. She’d failed, not even tasting smoke in her mouth. But while mimicking a throat rattle for her cousin a guard ambled by, and after a very short chase Nyra received a stern lecture. Worse yet, her mother was reprimanded for bad parenting, and rebuked Nyra with more fury than the guard itself. Nyra had spent the next several nights imprisoned in her own den.

  She turned around, head lowered submissively. An act. Shame, she found, could sometimes clip a tirade to bearable size. Blaze was on the ground, looking passively upward at his capturer, his tiny body pressed beneath giant talons. He appeared docile, but when Nyra looked carefully, he quivered.

  “Little Thaydra,” said a voice deep and dreadful.

  Nyra’s legs locked. In careful increments, her focus crept up the towering speaker. At three times her height, the beast’s head spiraled upon a sinewy neck calloused with midnight colored scales. On his back protruded ebony wings large enough to bat a stag dead in a single swoop. Beyond flicked a serpentine tail, unadorned, but it could whip faster than a sneeze. Every bit of him was bulky. Bulky hindquarters. Bulky limbs. Reassembled chunks of night sky mashed into a breathing behemoth.

  Slowly, she mouthed the name. Darkmoon.

  “Heredity prevails again, I see,” he crooned, an ominous purr rumbling the air. Nyra shuddered in sync to a terrible rhythm in her bones. His was one in few voices that could freeze her youthful joints. His was the voice that spoke over all, one so chilling it glowed a frightful blue in her head, hissing the word ‘Sperk.’ For this was not just some peeved guard pulled away from his otherwise mundane duties. This was the Sperk Dragon, the one who stood upon the pillar of timeless fears.

  Darkmoon smacked his jaws. Each of his teeth danced like fire needles in the sunlight.

  “I believe this is your second infringement in the last month,” he said.

  Nyra said nothing. Staring into those almond eyes, she felt both curiosity and hatred. Though she feared this large creature, she did not understand what he was or who he was. Not exactly. Darkmoon was simply ‘the enemy,’ just as it had been instilled upon the Agring Dragons since the enslavement. Agring parents relayed tales of his cruelty, and Nyra, like all the other younglings, was inclined to accept them without hesitation. Yet while armed with so many answers to so many silly questions, she could never grasp why the Alpha Sperk made her both inquisitive and terrified.

  He lowered his enormous head down two Agring heights, coming so close that Nyra could see the four faded scars tarnishing his muzzle. Neither creature blinked or spoke for several seconds. A silent anticipation rested between them, fragile as a wet flower petal. Nyra was too paralyzed for words.

  Darkmoon was not.

  “I could very well scold you, Little Thaydra, and deliver the arid threats from which you’ve previously suffered. I could inform your mother, whose disciplinarianism only seems to match her aerodynamics. But words evade you, and even Sperks grow lethargic.”

  Glaring. He always glared. He always used big words. Bigger words than Blaze, and more frequently. Each made his voice deeper, his claws longer. Nyra waited for him to blink. He leaned forward, tightening the talon-cage incarcerating Blaze. The draggling squeaked. Gravel and grass cracked under Darkmoon’s other feet, his bark-like scales grinding together.

  His blunt forehead loomed a whisper from Nyra’s slender red one. “Instead, I shall take away, Agring. In receiving words, you’ve not wavered. And as your mother knows well, there is no greater sorrow than loss.”

  Nyra knew what he addressed. That is, it could have been many things.

  “If you wish to grow into a Fisher, Young Thaydra, you will think first before lifting your wings.” For a second he broke his stare and looked up and down her small body. “You’ve yet a year before flight.”

  Blaze whimpered. Darkmoon looked downward, cocking his head as if he’d forgotten the other draggling. He pressed the gray Agring within an inch of breath.

  “Until then, seal your wings,” he growled to Nyra, lifting his claws away from Blaze. The draggling remained flat, as though the talons had never left. His eyes were round as suns.

  With a crack of his whip-tail, Darkmoon turned his immense frame westward, and strode off in the riverbed’s direction—to the Sperk Burrows. As he marched off, a splendid ferocity bubbled in the red draggling’s heart.

  “My name’s Nyra,” she shouted. The words had scarcely escaped when she chomped her tongue in regret. Impetuous! she thought, remembering the definition. Rash, thoughtless, impulsive. She was these things after all. But a small part of her, maybe even a large part, needed to hear how the Alpha Sperk would respond.

  Darkmoon stopped, appearing black against the crimson heavens. But no darkness hindered the venomous glow of his neon yellow stare.

  “There are few things to distinguish amongst a pitiable race.”

  Then the Sperk Dragon was gone, leaving behind evening bird calls and the tiny sobs of Blaze.

  Being in trouble was a most terrible thing. Skin prickled, organs squished. A procession of revolting sensations tore in places never acknowledged, grotesque, still ever private.

  But being wrong was much, much worse.

  “You see? You see?” Blaze spat, his sobs shaken away by growls. “I said you were too close. And I’d know, Mum says I have more common sense.”

  “Blaze, but you still—” Nyra interjected.

  “You don’t think, you just do. You’re impetuous. You always do whatever you want—”

  “But you went with me!” she shrieked.

  “Shush,” said Blaze, flattening his ears. He looked warily along the grassy plains before rounding upon her once more. “It doesn’t matter that I went with you to the cliffs. I knew I wouldn’t do anything forbidden, like flapping. I’ve better control. Remember me saying you’re imp—”

  “Stop saying impetuous!”

  “I was going to say impulsive,” he snorted. “But no matter. You just want the last word. Fine, you can have it.”

  “You’re the one who always has to have the last word!”

  Blaze smirked. Nyra seethed.

  Walking home, the waning sun warmed her right shoulder and illuminated the hills of rolling grass. Some lengths away was a patchwork of holes, housing her entire herd—the Agring Warren. A few younglings lingered outside, enjoying the final snippets of daylight while nearby parents talked amongst themselves. Other grownups fell from the sky with fresh fish.

  What had she done, anyway? Other than get too close to the edge. Flapping, it had to do with flapping. Had she opened her wings? No, it couldn’t be that. Like any good little Agring, she habitually kept them bound, in the same way one knew when to blink o
r how to control their urination. Yes, when you have to hold it, she thought, and a smile almost escaped her scowling face. Blaze shouldn’t be one to talk about impulse. She reflected on a damp spot in their den last spring, Blaze in hysterics, Mother soothing out condolences, all blurred under the heaves of Nyra’s raucous laughter.

  She had not spread her wings. But then how had Darkmoon and Blaze fallen victim to the same misconception? Maybe it was dark. She shook her head, flustered. No, it was still plenty bright, and from where Darkmoon was standing the dragglings would have shown radiantly in the dying day. So why were both the Sperk and her brother mistaken?

  “Because you did spread your wings,” Blaze said.

  Nyra jolted from thought. “Huh?”

  “You were thinking out loud again,” he explained. Nyra groaned. She often whispered out loud or silently made violent facial expressions. Each whisper punched holes in the private space of her mind, allowing everyone to peek inside.

  Blaze continued. “When we got to the edge, you flapped your wings.” He was sympathetic now. One of his many virtues, according to Mother, was his readiness to forgive. To Nyra, it was weakness.

  “Well, you didn’t really flap them, you just opened up quickly. You leaned forward a little and got scared.” He paused. “I almost did it too, when I saw you bend over. Without thinking. Say I had to grab your tail? If you started to fall? I’d need my wings to balance.”

  Nyra grunted.

  Blaze swung up an emphatic paw. “Well, it’s instinctive! All the twelve-year-olds get to do it. That’ll be us next year.” At twelve, Agrings began their fishing servitude. Hunting to feed the Sperks was exhausting and happened every day. Only in extreme sickness and during off-days were the Agrings permitted to rest, or on the rare occasion an antelope herd passed by, taking ill-fated refuge at the Reservoir. On such days, the Sperks would hunt for themselves. But these passings were few and far between, for the scent of a Sperk was enough to drive the thirstiest creatures away. So morning after morning, evening after evening, the Agrings would catch hundreds of fish to satisfy their enslavers, left with nothing but their tired bodies and the burden that they must next feed themselves.