“You dragons of the Plains – you and all your nest and your allies will fly to me! You will save the humans here and you will destroy every metal dragon you can find!” I demanded of them, and in the strange magical sense of the Stone Crown I could feel my commands rushing out ahead of me, racing over the mountains and the Plains faster than any arrow or breath of wind. In fact, I didn’t think that the command traveled at all. Not in any real way. It just connected, immediately, with those other dragon hearts that had been scouring the edge of the Plains and the Masaka, making sure that I would not dare return.
I could feel the frustration and the anger of these wild and free dragons to be thus commanded by the very Stone Crown that they hated the most. But I could also feel how helpless each and every one of them was to disobey. As one organism, they all turned and raced across the few leagues that separated us, their minds torn between disagreement, but also committed to the task that I had set them—
You will do MY bidding, I demanded of them, feeling the cold and cruel power of the Stone Crown filling me, threatening to obliterate every other thought and memory that I had thought that I held dear.
“The dragons! The dragons are here!” I heard the distant, wavering, and scared voices of the human defenders below me as the Lady Red, her brood, and her allies did not hesitate to throw themselves heedlessly into the battle. I knew that some of those dragons would die – and did not even know whether I cared right then in that moment.
“No.” a voice said. But it wasn’t my voice. It wasn’t Ymmen’s voice. It wasn’t Inyene, either.
“What?” I screamed in blind fury as everywhere around me there was the fire and clash of natural dragons fighting their metal copies. “Who DARES defy the Queen of the Stone Crown!?” I yelled into the air—
But it was too much. The power of the Stone Crown was engulfing me, flowing through me, and a terrible darkness was also rising up through my mind just like the first time that I had used it. It obscured and hid every thought and part of me that had ever been Narissea of the Souda – and, even in my madness I suddenly knew fear.
Was this it? Had I finally gone too far? I thought as the blank blackness completely overwhelmed my every thought. Had I given my soul so totally to the Stone Crown that there was to be no ‘me’ left at all…? I floundered in this eternal night closing around me. What have I done? Have I doomed my warband and the rest of the Daza to the Lady Red’s wrath?
Chapter 10
Deserted
“Come. Come to me, child of destiny, child of time. Come. This is not your place. This is not how you fight. Come. Come to me—”
“Hgnh – what!?” I coughed and spluttered as the eerie dream-words faded from my battle-soaked mind. I felt like I was struggling up from a deep dive in the lake nearby my village home, with the feel of cloying water threatening to hold me down unless I fought and floundered—
“Come to me…” the voice said again in my mind, and I reached for it in just the same way that I reached for Ymmen—
But it wasn’t Ymmen, was it? I knew that as instantly and as naturally as if recognizing a friend from a stranger across a crowded hut. This voice felt like a dragon voice, but it was not the steady, bonfire-heat of my dragon-friend.
Who was angry with me, I knew, feeling the edge of Ymmen’s mind where mine nested against it, as if huddling for warmth. Ymmen’s disappointment radiated towards me, building a wall between us that threatened to break my heart.
It’s because I used the Stone Crown, isn’t it? I thought – but Ymmen gave no answer. He had already made perfectly clear how he felt about the Crown, and, what was worse was that I agreed with him. It was an abomination, an insult to all dragon-kind.
But I had to use it, didn’t I? If I hadn’t summoned the Lady Red, her brood, and her allies with the power of the Crown then we would all be dead!
And the Lady Red would never have freely decided just to fight WITH us, would she? I thought, before realizing (with no little shame) that I had never even considered the option of simply asking the wild dragons to help.
I had been too angry, and scared, when the Lady Red first turned up. Was it the horrible poison of the Stone Crown already working on me that I had never thought to beg for the Lady Red’s aid? Or was it my own pride, I thought guiltily…
With the mystery of the dream-dragon voice in my head still fresh, I opened my eyes to see that I was once more inside a tent (this waking up in a new tent was becoming a habit!) where it was quiet and shadowed. I could no longer hear the dream-voice anymore, and I wondered if it really had been just that – a dream of a dragon, cooked up by my sleeping and anxious mind. Indeed, I was not even so sure I was awake now, so strange, so quiet did my surroundings seem.
But there was the sigh of the Soussa winds outside the tent. I knew them just as instinctively as I knew Ymmen – the way that they whistled and keened, but not in accusation, but in a call to arms.
But there were no people. My heart suddenly hammered. I had been so sleepy and confused that it had taken me a little while to realize what was so off about the sounds around me. There was the wind. There was the rustle and scratch of the tent.
“But I can’t hear any ponies,” I whispered. Or the more commonplace sounds of a camp being broken, or of breakfasts being sizzled and cooked, of low, tired and grumbling voices of Red Hounds getting up and starting their day.
The battle! All of the more particular memories of that horror flooded into me like the first winds of autumn. There had been all of those mechanical dragons – so many of them! And there had been Inyene and her gigantic, constructed steed. And her foul green poison orb; and her bolts of burning curse-purple magic… But – did the Lady Red and her brood come to my command? The fear clutched at me. What if the Stone Crown hadn’t worked, for some reason? Who – or what—had been that voice that had said No? Had that stopped my command from saving my people?
The terrifying, and very real, possibility that all of my people had been vanquished rose in me, propelling me from my simple blanket-bed, not bothering to even put my sandals on or gather my cloak as I stumbled to the tent flap and threw myself past it—
What?
The Masaka Mountains rose all around, and there was the wide dirt of the Pass before me. The cliff walls of the Pass soared high on both sides of the tent, and if I looked up, I could see the deeper grays of the Masaka clouds far up there. The High Frosts, I remembered what Ymmen had told me.
But where was everybody? For the Pass stretched out long in front of me, with the air hazing into mists as the walls seemed to narrow and close. But there were no signs of bodies or people or dragons or battle at all.
“Huh?” I stumbled around the tent to look back the other way to see the distant battle-site of yesterday or last night or whenever it had been before I had fallen to strange, dragon-tinged dreams. Somehow, we had moved much further into the Pass than the toppled and burnt watch towers of Torvald. I could see the distant blackened smudges of smoke and humped shapes back there that must be the downed bodies of Inyene’s mechanical dragons. But there was no sign of Lady Red and her other dragons – and also no sign of a large encampment of Daza hunters and Red Hound mercenaries, or even Ymmen, my dragon, my heart.