Calabash dropped to its haunches and Emuel rolled from the creature’s back, tumbling to the ground, rudely awakened as he came up hard against a boulder.
“Can you not give me more warning next time?” the eunuch said, brushing the dust from his clothes.
But Calabash didn’t respond. Instead, it sat stock still, staring at the horizon.
It was then that Emuel realised just how quiet it was. He couldn’t hear the usual hisses and groans of the following herd. He turned to see that the other dragons were mimicking their leader: sitting back on their haunches, wings folded against their flanks, silently watching the horizon as though waiting for something.
Dragons.
There was no other word for them. Emuel had been able to deny the evidence before him when the creatures had been no bigger than ponies, but they had grown at an alarming rate over the last few days, until he finally had to admit that he was indeed surrounded by the creatures of legend.
In all the stories of dragons he had encountered, they were always either on the verge of extinction or the last of their kind, ensconced in some mountain eyrie, occasionally venturing forth to terrify the populace of a village and devour their livestock. Emuel knew that some magical catastrophe had done for Twilight’s dragons, but he had no real idea as to the nature of the apocalypse. Was this world, he wondered, the true home of the dragons? Had they never been native to Twilight in the first place? Emuel reflected what a privilege it was to be amongst such creatures.
Calabash shifted and gave a soft bark, and Emuel looked up to see a deep azure band edging over the mountains. Several days earlier they had left the last of the desert behind; the terrain they now found themselves in was no less forbidding or lifeless, yet something was now breathing life into the ragged peaks, washing them in a colour that reminded Emuel of dusk on Twilight. There was a tingling sensation in his arms, as the tattoos there started moving. The flowers inked amongst the elven runics slowly opened, lines of script in a language Emuel didn’t recognise snaking out from amongst the black petals. Where they wrote their story onto his flesh, it burned.
Calabash sang. It began with a deep, repetitive rhythm, like a heartbeat. At first it was just Calabash’s voice, but as the mountains took on the colour of the huge disk rising over them, the rest of the dragons added their own voices to the song. Some took the base rhythm and kept it going — the thuds and clicks resonating deep within their throats — while others wove delicate melodies into the music, the harmonies seeming to rise not just from the dragons, but the very earth itself.
As one, with a sound like a great whipcrack, the dragons snapped their wings open. They were swaying to the song now, their eyes alight with the twilight glow. Their feet began to move, lightly at first — the soft padding of their claws on the ground barely audible — but soon they weren’t just swaying, they were dancing, pounding out the rhythm of the music into the dusty earth.
Emuel wept, as he hadn’t since the death of his parents. Hot tears rolled down his cheeks and his chest hitched. He could barely breathe, but he didn’t care, because it felt so wonderful; the song had released something in him.
He cried for the way he had been used. He cried for the loss of his manhood, and all that had been denied him with that one vile act. He cried with joy that he, not much more than a boy from Drakengrat, had been gifted with such sights as were revealed to him now. He cried for a faith that had been shattered, and which he had rebuilt himself, painfully and slowly, on his own terms. He cried for the loss of his friends, and the thought that he would never see them again. He cried for the destruction of the Llothriall and the realisation that he would no more guide that majestic vessel through the storm.
But most of all he cried because, looming large over the arid mountains, looking down on him, was the face of his god.
As Kerberos cleared the range, Emuel went to stand beside Calabash. The ground shook under the force of the dragons’ dance and he stumbled, but Calabash nudged him back on his feet with the tip of its snout, without losing its rhythm. Emuel laughed and began to move in time with Calabash, delighting in the music rolling from the creature as it led the song.
The ancient texts, the stories, the songs, the plays — not one of them had ever talked about this; this act of sheer creativity, of beauty, of pure, unmediated joy. In the legends, dragons were killers, jealous recluses guarding hoards of treasure that they couldn’t possibly ever spend. Like most things he had been taught, Emuel was coming to realise the legends were wrong.
“What are you?” he cried.
Calabash’s voice changed, the clicks and deep thumps coming from its chest now giving way to something more breathy, less frantic. Each new element added to the song’s power. Emuel found himself swaying in time with the dragon, matching its movements exactly, like a snake caught by the gaze of a charmer. Calabash’s wings slowly flapped, fanning Emuel with a cool breeze that dusted the last of the desert from him. When the dragon brought its head low, Emuel leaned forward to look deep into its eyes, and it was then that Calabash let the song tell the dragons’ story.
Deep within the heart of Kerberos, beyond the storms that give voice to its wrath, lies a place of absolute silence, quieter than death, yet it is here that creation begins.
They are tiny at first, no bigger than a thought, because that is what they are; a god’s will. But soon they flicker into true being, a heartbeat clothed in flesh. They hang in the darkness, tiny pulsing lights strung like stars throughout the deity’s firmament. Even now they are calling to one another, the song growing in strength as cells divide and consciousness awakes.
Though these creatures are part of the deity itself, Kerberos marvels at the life within it, at the complexity of thought that develops as the creatures sing themselves into being.
When they are fully formed, the god begins to gather certain minerals from its atmosphere, weaving these around each dragon foetus, until they are encased in rock impervious to all but the mightiest of forces.
It is time to let its children go. Beneath Kerberos’s gaze a whole new world turns, one that has not yet heard the song of its creation. And so, the god sends its children out into the void. Hundreds upon hundreds of eggs hurtle out into space, the vast azure sphere of Kerberos quickly spiralling away from them, only for the larger planet below to gather them into its embrace. With a quick succession of terrific bangs, they hit the upper atmosphere, but it is not this that awakens the dragons, but the heat of the flames that engulfs each egg as it falls, incubating them, completing the life begun by Kerberos.
They seed the earth, the impacts cracking the shells, allowing the dragons to break out and crawl forth. They sing for their brethren, letting the music that filled them in the womb of their god reach out to others of their kind, until they are gathered as one family, waiting for the time when Kerberos will rise over this dead earth and reveal to them His will.
So engrossed was he in Calabash’s story that Emuel didn’t at first notice when the song came to an end. The dragons had settled down and were gazing up at Kerberos. The azure sphere was so close that Emuel could see the lightning storms flickering within the god. All was silent as the dragons waited to hear the voice of their creator. The tattoos still writhed on Emuel’s flesh, as though dancing to some unheard music.
There was a pulse of energy, a pure sheet of lightning momentarily engulfing Kerberos, washing them all in a brilliant radiance that had Emuel closing his eyes and shielding his face. Calabash raised its head and howled, the eerie ululation echoed and repeated across the herd. Emuel staggered as Calabash prodded him with the tip of his snout. For a moment his heart sank as he thought that the dragon was trying to push him away, but then he understood. Calabash was gesturing for him to climb onto its back. Emuel had already ridden the dragon a few times, and the experience had been terrifying; once he was settled, he made sure to press his legs firmly against the creature’s flanks, grabbing onto the bony protrusions that grew from the back of Calabash’s neck.
Emuel’s stomach turned over as the creature lurched forward, but he managed to stay seated. He looked back to see the herd following, the ground they had anointed now churned beneath their feet. Their advance was slow at first but soon they gathered momentum, the scenery rushing by in a blur as they raced into the mountains.
Foothills flashed past at breakneck speed, the dragons easily negotiating the rise and fall of the land as they climbed ever higher. When they had set off, Calabash had led the herd, but now others raced past the dragon and its rider, all respect for their leader forgotten in their urgent desire to reach their goal. Emuel was jerked around on the dragon’s back, though he managed to maintain his hold, even with hands that were beginning to ache from the effort of hanging on. In what seemed like no time at all, they had left the foothills and were beginning to climb the mountain range itself. Calabash didn’t once slow as it threw itself through ravines, crawled along the edges of precipices and curled its way around jagged peaks. For much of the journey Emuel closed his eyes, but when he did open them, once, he found himself staring up at dozens of dragons negotiating the ceiling of a hollow in a cliff face above him. Or were he and Calabash on the ceiling, and the other beasts on the floor? Emuel quickly shut his eyes again.
After several hours the rolling motion of Calabash’s back slowed, and Emuel looked around to find that they were now high amongst the peaks. There was almost no further for the dragons to climb. It was bitterly cold, the air so thin that Emuel’s chest laboured with each breath. He pulled his cloak tighter around himself as the dragons passed through a shallow valley and onto a plateau. All that lay above them now was the wide open sky.
The dragons came to rest here and stood for a time, silently contemplating the sky, before? as one? unfurling their wings. Emuel wondered then why the dragons hadn’t simply flown to this place far above the world. In fact, now he came to consider it, he had never seen the dragons use their wings for flight.
Calabash staggered to the left, momentarily unbalanced, and Emuel realised then that the dragons had never before flown. They were like newly-hatched chicks, ready to test their wings for the first time by throwing themselves from the nest.
The eunuch found that he no longer wanted to be on Calabash’s back, but before he could dismount, the dragon was on the move. Emuel considered throwing himself to the ground, but it was flowing so quickly beneath him that the moment he hit, he’d break every bone in his body. So he clung on, tears streaming from his eyes, as he watched the edge of the plateau rushing towards them.
Ahead, the first wave of dragons threw themselves into the air and dropped from sight. Emuel sent up a prayer, putting himself into his god’s hands, and he was still whispering the benediction when Calabash’s feet left the ground and the sky took them.
They fell.
Emuel clung on tight as the wind howled about them. All around them dragons were hurtling towards the earth. One, with scales the colour of a cornfield, collided with a spur of rock, shattered stone following the senseless dragon down, its useless wings entangled around it. Emuel cried out as he saw more dragons broken on the side of the mountain, unable to bring their wings to bear in time. Calabash hit a pocket of warm air that lifted them for a moment, holding them seemingly motionless as dragons continued to rain down around them, but with a crack and a sudden drop in pressure they were soon falling as quickly as before.
“Fly!” Emuel shouted. “Damn it, fly!”
Not that he expected his encouragement to do any good. However, almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth, Calabash banked to the right and began to spiral down in a controlled descent. Other dragons were now also gaining the use of their wings, rising on updrafts, or gliding towards the plain below. They began to spread out, breaking into groups of two or three as they dispersed along all points of the compass, calling to one another as they went, their cries gradually becoming fainter and fainter.
Calabash pumped its wings and turned towards the west, Emuel easily shifting his weight with the dragon, becoming used to the feel of the creature beneath him. A flock of dragons ahead of them were now little more than dark specks against the setting sun. Emuel watched them wink out one by one. A moment later, two dragons flew in to flank Calabash. One had scales the colour of sunflowers, the other was a silvery grey with eyes as bright as diamonds. They called to Calabash and the dragon nodded to acknowledge their presence, before turning to look back at Emuel.
The eunuch patted his mount’s flank and settled himself more comfortably upon the gently rolling back. Twilight seemed so far away now, yet Emuel found that he no longer missed it. This place — this world of dragons and burgeoning potential — was his home now.