She rubbed her neck against the ground again and bared her teeth once more. Hunt. Hungry.
'You want to eat. Yes, you must be hungry. Oh, but there aren't any alchemists here. You have to drink the water they make for you. You'll get sick otherwise. We'll have to go back.'
Hunt. Hungry. She made the gestures again. She was starting to get frustrated, and the Little One's thoughts were confusing her. She couldn't make any sense of them.
'I can't climb on your back, Snow. There's no harness. I can't reach.' The Little One walked to her left foreclaws and tried to open them. She didn't understand what he wanted to do, then she caught a picture from his mind, of flying through the air at night, and she was carrying him.
Yes. The way they'd come here. Carefully she raised herself onto her back legs and held out her foreclaws. The Little One nodded and made noises, and in his thoughts she saw that she'd understood him. He climbed into her claws, and she gently closed them around him.
'Hunt!' he said.
Hunt. That was something she understood.
24
A Memory of Flames
They hunted. She ate. The Little One ate too, and then they climbed into the sky together again. The Little One wanted to go somewhere, but it didn't know which way to go, so she flew again as the fancy took her, into a wilderness of crags and broken stone and boulders the size of castles. She tried to hunt there too, but the land was barren and empty. When night fell, she found a place to land and went to sleep. The dreams came again, as distant as ever.
The next day they flew back out among the valleys and rivers. It rained. She liked that, liked the feel of it. The Little One started telling her which way to go. She understood its thoughts: Left, straight, right, up, down. She knew the noises too, but when they were racing through the air, the noises were all lost in the wind, and she had to pluck the thoughts out of the Little One's head. She began to wonder whether this Little One was somehow broken. The other Little Ones that sat on her back had thoughts that were much clearer.
'We're lost,' said the Little One. She didn't understand, but she could see in his thoughts that he was anxious. He was always anxious. Mostly she blocked him out.
They looked for dragons but they didn't find any. The next day was the same. And the next. But at night, when she slept, something was beginning to change. The dreams were coming closer. She didn't notice it at first, but after a few days a strange understanding came to her. She wanted the dreams. More than anything else, she wanted them. They were important. More important than food or shelter or even than the Little One. She didn't know why; they simply were. With that one revelation came another. They would come to her as long as she stayed here, away from the others, alone.
The day after that she chose her own way to fly. Instinct drove her towards ever higher places. The Little One was even more upset than usual. It shouted at her. It was angry with her, and that made her feel very bad. She was supposed to do what the Little Ones wanted, and this Little One was the most special Little One of them all, the one who'd been with her since she'd first opened her eyes.
That night the dreams were even closer. She could almost smell them, almost touch them. They were filled with fire and ash and burning flesh. In the morning, when she woke up, she left the Little One behind and went to hunt alone. She felt its anguish and despair as it watched her fly away. It was still there when she came back. It felt joy to see her return and made lots of noises that she didn't understand. When she slept again, the dreams finally let her touch them.
She was a tiny part of something vast. She couldn't see or hear, but she could feel the thoughts of hundreds of dragons, bright and sharp and clear. She could feel other beings too, huge and powerful. Far beneath them she felt a hum of lesser thoughts. Little Ones, she realised with surprise, but that didn't make any sense, because the Little Ones seemed so dull and dim next to the other dragons, and the truth she knew was the other way around.
She tried to grasp the dream, to unravel it, but it fluttered away only for another to come in its place.
She was flying. The air around her was thick with dragons, and on the back of each was a single rider clad in silver. She wheeled and dived and saw that the ground far below was alive. It was crawling, heaving, moving as far as she could see with Little Ones. Thousands upon thousands. Millions upon millions.
Arrows. She closed her eyes and felt them batter against her scales.
She flew over their heads as she would skim over a forest. Little Ones wrapped up in their crude skins of metal. Spears and axes rattled off her scales. She opened her mouth and let the fire burst out of her, filling the world with screams, filling her heart with joy. Everywhere other dragons were doing the same. She could feel the power from the man of silver on her back, driving her on, urging her to kill, kill…
The Little Ones were so many. She burned them by the hundred and they died, and the dead were swallowed up by the horde as though they'd never existed.
And then the dead rising back to life, burned and broken, turning on the living, grasping and clawing. The silver creature on her back was making it so. He laughed, and so did she.
And then something happened, and the silver creature on her back wasn't there any more, and her wings wouldn't fly, and she couldn't move or think, as though a giant claw had seized her mind and was slowly crushing her.
She remembered crashing into the ground, scattering Little Ones around her, as the claws in her mind sank deeper, and then she remembered nothing.
No. Not nothing. She was an egg again. She was a tiny part of something vast. She couldn't see or hear, but she could still feel the thoughts of hundreds of dragons, bright and sharp and clear.
She woke up. Most of the sky was still dark, although the first glimmers of dawn were peeking through between the mountains. The dreams were still there in her head, hundreds of them. They didn't feel like dreams now; they felt like memories. But that couldn't be right. There weren't even a hundred other dragons in her nesting place, never mind a thousand. They didn't feel the same either. The dragons in her dreams had thoughts that shone like cut diamond. The dragons of her nesting place were simple and dull.
She'd never flown far from her nesting place. She knew that. She hadn't been to the places she was remembering. She'd never felt the presence of one of these silver men whose minds burned like the sun. As for flying over a sea of Little Ones, burning them…
Above all the rest, that memory stayed in her mind. She'd enjoyed it. More than that; it was the most exhilarating thing she'd ever done.
But she hadn't done it. She couldn't have done it. They were dreams, not memories, and they couldn't be real. She struggled to make sense of it, but it was far too difficult, and she was already hungry again. She got hungry a lot out here in the mountains. There was plenty to eat, though, if you knew where to look.
She launched herself into the sky as soon as the sun was up, leaving the Little One behind again. She felt his sadness as she went. He didn't like to be left on his own. She didn't understand that. In her nesting place there were always other dragons nearby, and Little Ones too. Even at night in the dark she felt the presence of their thoughts. She'd never been as alone as she was here, and yet she'd never felt so strangely wonderful.
Without the Little One to slow her, she roamed far on her hunts. She looked for river valleys and then followed them, soaring high in the sky, watching and waiting for prey to emerge from the forests to drink. Sometimes it would be a bear, sometimes a few deer, sometimes a herd of snappers. She had to be careful because the animals were never far from the edge of the forest, and once they got among the trees they were as good as lost. So she'd watch them for a while until she was sure they were coming out to drink, and then she'd tuck in her wings and dive. If she could, she'd seize them with her claws and bite off their heads. If they saw her coming and ran, she'd lash at them with her tail, wrapping it around them or sending them flying through the air to pounce on while they were still stunned. If she had to, she'd burn them. They tasted better raw, though.